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Bill Gates Speaks Out Against Immigration Policies
Jeian writes "None other than Bill Gates has spoken out against tighter immigration policies in the US. According to Gates, the US is losing skilled immigrants to other countries that are easier to immigrate to. Among his comments: "I personally witness the ill effects of these policies on an almost daily basis at Microsoft.""
Translation- I made billions in this industry, but if you try to work your way up from intern in my company to my level I'll fire you and replace you with somebody who spent 1/10th your cost growing up and getting an education, regardless of skill, because it's better for my bottom line.
With attitudes like this among our upper class, can anybody blame high school kids for not going into computer science?
Every programmer out there who lived through the depression in our industry of 2001-2005 is asking "Where was Bill with these jobs then?", and unfortunately the answer is Bangalore.
I suggest that to change this image, for every H-1b Microsoft hires, Bill Gates donates a $60,000 scholarship to an American high school student to study computer science, or a $50,000 scholarship to an unemployed American programmer to update their skillset and get a higher degree. Then maybe we'll believe what he says on this topic. Until then, he's just lobbying for the Cheap Labor crowd, which includes his own business.
My problem, I guess, is that I just can't bring myself to trust these folks any longer. They'll go for cheap over quality any day of the week- even when it means a 7 year delay in the next operating system only to have a bunch of GUI bells and whistles and no real new fixes or functionality.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Bill Gates's public statements on immigration are about as credible as his public statements on Google's business plan. The man has a history of boldly lying when it suits his business interests. Why would anyone seriously consider his claims on this topic?
Why would he care where people immigrate to, as long as they work for Microsoft? Of course, outsourcing laws themselves need to be tightened. If nothing else, outsourced employees are not paying US income taxes and are neither protected by or obligated to any US laws. It's only fair to at least impose duties to cover their use of US public infrastructure that local companies pay for in taxes. Also if, say, Chinese government has any issues with MS software, corporate executables should be extradited to serve time in Chinese re-education camps, or whatever punishment is deemed appropriate by the local government. One should be required to follow SOME country's laws completely.
But raise the quota in a controlled fashion so we aren't flooded by H1Bs over the next couple years.
I've always said, I'd rather compete against the guy down the hall making an American wage, than someone in India, China, or Vietnam making 20 percent of what I'm making. Even if I can outperform that guy 5 to 1, it's hard to convince upper management of that. And yes, America has always benefited from the influx of restless talent from foreign shores. Our colleges need them, our startups need them, our Fortune 1000 companies need them. Now is not the time to encourage a brain drain going the other way.
I'm perplexed at Bill's thinking here. He apparently doesn't think US students are getting enough math and science or are going into that field. So his solution is to bring over endentured servents for a fraction of a US worker's salary to make up for the slack.
What's a smart college bound kid going to do? Go into math and science when he's competing against people that will always work for a lot less than he wants to make, or go into law and become an ambluance chasing attorney?
And to top it off: Bill wants a technical solution to this company's incomptence in hiring people and getting into markets. Bill your stock price is flat not due to that you don't have the best C++ coder that knows how to make recursive data structures, it is because your business model is outdated and you don't have anything exciting in the pipeline.
Course this is rational behavior for someone who can't continue to run his business: say "look our problem is X and if only you let me do Y I would still be making money in the stock market"
http://www.creativeclass.org/_flight_articles.shtm l
Richard Florida, author of "The Rise of the Creative Class" has written another book "The Flight of the Creative Class". The books are the result of his research on why some cities prosper better than others. He points out a couple of things: 1 - Some people are better for the economy than others. 2 - The people we need to drive the economy won't follow jobs to places they hate living. One of the reasons our economy has been so good is because we have been able to attract the best scientists, doctors and entrepreneurs from the rest of the world. If we drive these people away, it's our loss and we will suffer.
On a slightly different topic, I note that farmers in Colorado can't get the labor they need because of the tighter border control. Cutting our nose off to spite our face is truly clueless. We need these people.
You can't expect business owners to be against a system that allows them to import what they perceive to be better-quality workers. It's not a popular stance, but I truly believe we're sowing the seeds of our own techie demise. Why?
1. Our educational system is getting progressively worse. Students do not come out of most American schools with a good grasp of math and science. IN developing countries like China and India, they're turning out well-educated workers all the time. We don't force students to study, and there's no consequence for failure. Worse yet, should you not graduate from college, you're stuck in a low-level service job for the rest of your life. Large companies won't even look at candidates with no degree anymore. (I've noticed this first-hand...there are way more underqualified college graduates in the corporate world than there were 10 years ago.)
2. We feel entitled to way more than we're actually worth. It really makes me angry when I see people with mediocre skills making the same or more than me, just because they're good negotiators and can game the system. Also, have you seen what entry-level students are demanding to be paid just out of school? News flash: even if you live in New York City, asking for $55K for an entry-level job is way out of line with reality. One of the reasons the outsourced and immigrant labor pool is attractive is cost. New grads in other countries don't demand insane salaries or complain because the work is difficult.
3. Right or wrong, American tech workers are often considered lazy and painted as having a bad attitude. Giving your life over to your job is stupid, but complaining every time you have to put in an extra hour or two is going to accelerate the trend offshore.
4. Our costs are way out of proportion with the rest of the world. If people would learn to use credit responsibly, live within their means and reduce their consumption, they wouldn't need 5-6% raises every year, or hop jobs every year for a 10% raise.
Gates may be using this to his advantage, but I can't say I disagree totally! You have two labor pools. One is addicted to flashy cars and gadgets, and costs an average of $80K a year per person. The other is smarter, happy to be working, and costs much less. If you were running Slashdot Software, Inc., which would you pick?
The border is simply an imaginary line enforced with real guns. Nations are cages. Borders divide people.
I imagine a day when any person can freely travel across the planet (not unlike freely travelling in your own country).
Why is it that corporations (money) has the freedom to travel anywhere they want, yet ordinary people aren't.
You want free trade? Then I want the right to sell my labour anywhere i choose.
It's alright for tech workers and engineers to have their wages depressed by opening up the borders meanwhile the MBAs, lawyers, physicians and such are under no such threat. If you're going to open up the floodgates at least make it equal opportunity.
I think a lot of the people here are looking at this from the wrong angle. He doesn't specifically target ONLY programmers, or ONLY network technicians. It seems his general idea is that most people coming into this country with very high skills in different fields posess the knowledge and intelligence to be a real great asset to the country, but are turned down because they are immigrants.
This same talk has recently been appearing in Canadian news papers, where a lot of scientists, doctors, lawyers, and IT people come to Canada or the U.S. in hopes of offering their knowledge to these two countries, but instead end up working at coffee shops, driving taxi's, or working cleaning jobs and night doing general jobs. If I`m not mistaken, this is what Bill Gates is trying to say.
Regardless of what his intentions are, I think what I`m talking about here is a legitimate issue which should be looked at, without worrying who is trying to get this idea across.
Me being an immigrant myself, I can tell you that is indeed a problem, with my father going throught different levels of school and universities in Poland, but ending up being a machine maintenance worker for some plant.
And why? Because he simply doesn't have the benefit of fluently speaking english, and Canada not recognizing his skills at all, which I think is a shame for both the country and my family, since we could both benefit from placing these people in the fields where they would be a lot more usefull.
The magical number is: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Which do we really need here in the US? Do we really want highly skilled immigrants to fill highly skilled jobs, or do we want cheap labor that will do the jobs no one else wants to do? Are kids who grew up here complaining about losing construction/landscaping and migrant farm jobs to immigration?
We are all just people.
Every time I hear someone complain about the "desperate shortage of skilled programmers" I want to punch him in the face. To see how false this is, all one needs do is look at the extremely low percentage of recent comp-sci grads who can find work as programmers. The majority of them have to work in some semi-technical job such as tech support, or in some cases can't find jobs in the computer field at all. When I graduated, it took me 8 months to find a job, meanwhile the entire time so-called experts were claiming a desperate shortage of programmers and demanding an increase in the H-1B quota. The problem is that employers too often have ridiculously specific requirements. Ten years ago, a typical job ad would say something like "C++ programmer needed, with 2 years experience". Today, a typical ad requires "6 years Java experience in a commercial environment, 3 years J2EE web-based development, Swing, JSP, Servlets, EJB, XML, DOM/SAX, advanced knowledge of application servers (primarily Weblogic and WebSphere), Advanced knowledge of database connectivity and integration. (Oracle, DB2 and SQL Server). And when they can't find someone with /exactly/ the skills they're looking for, they complain about a labor shortage. They don't realize that a skilled C++ programmer could become productive in C# in a very short amount of time, because these are transferable skills. That would be like Chevy refusing to hire a skilled Ford mechanic. It just doesn't happen in any other field but ours. And if they absolutely /have/ to have someone who meets those exact requirements, then they could find him if they offered a high enough salary.
yup - and that's the free market, competition and capitalism at work for you.
I'm just not sure what it is you're suggesting as a better alternative. Removing all barriers would undoubtedly improve the profitability of US businesses. Perhaps that's what you are advocating.
ok
The job market for software people in 2001-2005 was little different from the job market in 1991-1995. What changed was that people entering the market during the boom thought the boom was normal.
I was part of interviews in 2004...trying to hire a software developer. A majority of "software developers" who applied couldn't write a goddamn recursive function in the language of their choice. 2001-2005 was not a "depression". It was the market returning to normal after a period where any warm body got three competing offers.
The cake is a pie
The problem I have is the sub-culture that follows the MSFT style businesses don't really have a need for true science. I mean god, look at thedailywtf.com for examples of how "programmers" just don't get what the hell they are doing. Quick, dirty, and with a lot of buttons. That's the sort of software people come to expect, with absolutely no focus on what goes on behind the scenes.
We have a business culture where most of the people who program [or claim to design software] for a living couldn't explain, say, how a merge sort works. Worse yet, they couldn't easily find a description, learn it, and explain it. The net result being applications which fail in the field (hint: bugs in any other engineer discipline == killing people), consume far too many resources, and don't meet all of the user requirements to start with.
Take a good hard look at things like Vista, or heck even OpenOffice (for a good OSS target). Bloatware to the extreme, the result of rampant divergent design processes without care to optimization or proper resource management.
Why could I point and click applications with Win 3.11 and 4MB of ram, but now Vista requires a min of 1GB of ram, and a processor that is 200 times faster? Heck, you can run a decently tuned BSD or Linux distro with only 128MB of ram easily (with X, Gnome, etc). Why did a full featured word processor with spell/grammar checking fit nicely on an 80MB HD in the 80s and now Word takes a half gigabyte? etc...
As a whole, most end user applications are just not engineered to be engineered. They're quickly assembled and shoved out the door. Which pretty much annoys the fuck out of any true blue software engineer [who wants to take pride in what they are doing]. Net result, only uneducated non-engineers will want to work on the software because they don't know better [and/or don't care]. It'd be like running an art school where you only showcase musical performances that are off beat and out of tune. No serious musician would want to study there.
I don't think comp.sci is dying, I just think most hardcore scientists are not really caring to work for the likes of MSFT, they'd rather work for smaller companies where their input is actually valued and their contributions while commercial, are not solely aesthetic.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
If Microsoft wanted, it could announce that it is going to start their engineers at $200K/year and it would get more than enough qualified applicants. Or, it could hire marginally qualified applicants and train them in the technologies it wants. In fact, were Microsoft to start paying that rate, it would not take long before the market were flooded with qualified engineers. More people would switch to Computer Science and more universities would open up comp. sci departments.
The problem is not a shortage of American high-tech labor; it's a shortage of cheap American high-tech labor. Gates' concern is not that he can't find engineers in the U.S.; it's that it's cheaper for him to hire engineers elsewhere.
I suggest that the reason that fewer people are going into Computer Science is that they see how software companies treat their engineers. How many software engineers lost their jobs between 2001 and 2004? If the market for good engineers were as tight as Bill Gates suggests, those people should have been gobbled up in an instant. Heck, companies would have been hiring them, knowing that they'd be needed eventually.
Instead of arguing, whether immigrants are useful or detrimental overall, the right argument is based on Human Rights. I simply don't understand, how an American (except, perhaps, the Native Americans) can sleep at night rejecting the right to move to this country to someone else.
The same right his/her ancestors took for granted...
Oh, a common defense goes, my ancestors arrived legally. BS. If today's laws were the same as they were before and during the Ellis Island era, all of today's immigrants would've been legal too.
"Oh, but they are criminals," — goes another. No they are not — the only offense, most of them have committed is only violating the laws against immigration. The circular argument boils down to:
Frankly, I hold the following truth Self-Evident:
The need to keep out (real) criminals et al. is of no more consequence to the above statement, than the ban on yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater is to the Freedom of Speech.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I'm surprised that people have not mentioned this topic. With the scope of projects being larger now than ever before, skills such as ability to communicate well and the ability to work well with difficult co-workers are grossly important. You can teach someone a new computer language in weeks or even days, but how long does it take to train someone how to be socially adept in the USA?
What people get paid has to accord with the value they produce, you can't just pull a salary out of the air. Programming jobs already pay pretty well, even for $200K I can't believe there are many physicians who have any programming skills who would leave the practice of medicine for that.
The other cost/benefit is for the purchaser of IT. If I have an IT project that'll save me $1 million and it costs $500K, I'll do it, but if it costs $2 million obviously I won't. You can't just arbitrarily raise IT prices, if laptops were $10,000 how many do you think would sell?
I'm no fan of Microsoft, but it's plain to me that the USA benefits from every skilled immigrant who comes here. I can't believe some of these posters are in the IT workforce at all, where the hell are they working where they aren't dealing every day with Indians and Chinese and Russians and other immigrants? We wouldn't have an IT industry at all without them.
In group behavior: 'because they're evil/morons/sheep/crazy' is not 'insightful' it's 'oversimplified'
You seem to have confused the word "wrong", as in "morally offensive", with the words "bad for me".
You say that if wealth were spread more evenly around the world and people got jobs they deserved, that would be a wrong thing. Is that "wrong" as in morally offensive, or "wrong", as in bad for you, personally? Because you have noticed that where you are born has a lot to do with how much you make, but you seem to think that is a good thing. Aristocrats used to feel the same way about what family you were born into, instead of which country.
Remember that people in other countries are people too. Many of the Founders were Englishmen, who would have to apply for work permits to make a living here these days. What do you think that does to their RPMs?
NT
You are still debating the utilitarian argument, which is wrong... Your argument is wrong in itself too, of course — nobody owes you a living, no matter how much you invested in yourself. But that's irrelevant to my original point: Freedom of Migration is just as unalienable as all other means of Pursuing Happiness.
Which part of the "Right, which your own ancestors took for granted" was so hard for you to understand?
Unless you are a pure Native American, your own Irish/Jewish/Italian/German/Dutch/etc. [great-...-]grand-parents chose to come here instead of fixing "their own damn countries". But today's Mexican/Chinese/Ukrainian/Guatemalan/Vietnamese/et c. can not?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
First of all Americans are the hardest working people in the world. And every year we are increasing the hours in the average work week.
So I would agrue that Americans do have that drive, although not under the threat of ending up as a house cleaner. Americans are instead motivated by money, profit, and most of all materialism. Americans are some of the hardest working people in the world, espically compared to Europe and such places where they just stop in the middle of the day for nap time, or take 2 months off in the summer... And its not because we care about ending up with a shitty job. Even well off Americans will work hard because we want more money so we can buy more *stuff*. Or there are a lot of people out there who just want to have more than the other guys, or people who just like seeing big green numbers on the bottom line.
And dont forget its not just the current immigrants who are driven. Today's Americans are the products of immigrants 100 year ago who were driven, or even the Puritans 300 years ago (with their Puritan work ethic..idle hands lead to sin etc etc), and the work ethic they had has definatly been passed down to some extent.
In fact, I would argue that the motivation for Americans is greater than the immigrants'. A lot of people here would not be content to live in say South America and employ 2 servants and work 9-5 and live confortably. Americans want fancy cars, fancy TVs, a big bank account, and a big house. And there are a lot of Americans who will work their ass off to get what they want, and if they cant work enough they will take on massive debt, while at the same time if they cut their hours down and lived modestly within their means they would be very confortable. Materialism is one of the most powerful forces in this world.
Disclosure: I am an American college student majoring in Computer Science. America has been lucky that for years we have attracted the best and brightest from all over the world and for many different industries. Over the past 30 years America has developed a distinct competitive advantage in the design and production of high-skilled products - particularly computer technology. Emerging economies are learning about the lucrative nature of the computer software, internet services, and in some cases computer hardware industries. Currently, the vast majority of major companies in these industries and promising startups are found only in America. However, this superiority may come to an end sooner than we think, and it's not because Silicon Valley is becoming less innovative. It's because American children are losing interest in science, math and engineering. Across the world, in China and India, more and more college students are entering these fields whereas in America students are rapidly leaving. We need to continue to maintain our leadership in technology as it is a core part of our national interest - both economically and perhaps even in a national security viewpoint. To do this, we have to continue to be the #1 destination for the best and brightest all over the world. Microsoft, Google, Apple and the like don't want to hire foreign workers because they can pay them less - they simply want great talent and in my experience do not discriminate based on nationality. An end to this artificial limit on H1B visas will allow the next great tech company to be born and grown here - helping our economy. As an American, I want our nation to continue to lead the world in technology. To do that, we must have the people who lead, the best and brightest from all over the world, lead here.
Picking fruit and digging ditches isn't hard work. It's machine's work. We designed and engineer machines to do these tasks. The fact that a human can also do these tasks instead of doing something else is pointless. That's the problem with people thinking we need illegal immigration. We don't. We need automation. We need advanced engineering and innovation. The technology is rapidely approaching that even cars can drive themselves, i'm pretty sure they could pick fruit and dig ditches.
"pushing papers" is a lot more stressful than you think. When your entire mind has to be devoted to a task and you have the stress of several bosses, things are a lot different then if you can just do something that doesn't require a lot of stress.
You need to get out more. If they were anywhere near being able to machine-pick the fruit that is now hand-picked, they would do it. It's not doable, or at least not doable cheaper. Even if you could build a $1,000,000 machine to paint houses, it doesn't make much sense when you could spent 1/10th of the price on 100 years worth of human-done paint jobs.
Stressful work != Hard work
You take a person and you let them do hard physical work for a year. I'm talking about the kind of work that you know will leave you a broken husk once you're in your 60s. Then you give them a year of stressful paper pushing. Then you let them choose what they want to do the rest of their life. Care to wager?
So this means that the raise in immigrant quota is meant to get the mexican housemaids required by indian IT workers. If Gates reads this, the american geeks will be in trouble :-/
Is that supposed to be a joke? Call me when USA guarantees cheap health care, decent vacation time and working hours policies, personal safety and privacy.
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
I take it that you're an American, that has never been to a foreign country other than Canada and a handful of Western European countries?
I suggest that you try traveling to countries like Brazil, Mexico and China, and I don't mean Copacabana and Cancun. Talk with Campesinos, Minibus drivers and other people that work hours just as long as Americans, but spend those hours in factories, fields and hot and steamy buses, as opposed to air conditioned offices.
Why, with all this "They'll work for cheaper" talk are most of the people in the top U.S. school's graduate programs, NOT American? I'm at Stanford right now, and most of my friends from MIT, Berkely, CMU, and here are non-americans.
Obviously there isn't pay involved (we all are getting paid the same amount). And there is no visa troubles (students are automatically granted a visa when accepted).
So, think about this when you start ranting about "stealing jobs from Americans because they work for less".
>>There is a sea change in the attitude of the next generation of Appus. ------- I just do not agree with this and this is not right. I am also an appu i.e. an Indian. I want to migrate to the US and that is my intention. Unlike many other Indians who keep saying that Lifestyle is better in India and never go back from the US - Hipocracy, I accept the fact that I intend to immigrate. Of course I do love my country. If one talks so much about attitude and better lifestyle in India, why dont you and brother go back to India, since oppurtunities are great there and you can afford maids? Accept it - US lifestyle is better in India. As a matter of fact over the years more and more people have migrated and there is no change in attitude. Make no mistake, qualitify of life is definitely better in US than India penny by penny The argument that 10RS will buy equalent stuff to a dollar is an invalid argument. Take the complete picture. In India, quality of life is shit for middle class earning crowd compared to the big wigs, politicians and stars in the film industry. Middle class Indians are taxed to death and no infrastructre like roads, water etc are built. India, has more money than any country in Asia put together. But the political system in corrupt and politicians eat all the money even in the 21st century, lead a royal life and leave the country to dogs without developing anything for the common man. In US too political system is not entirely perfect, they waste money on Iraq and other countries, but at least they first built a solid infrastrure for their own country unlike India. All the argument that next generations of Indians going back and not interested in US is a fake and invalid argument. Today Chennai, Banaglore, and every nook and corner all people want to migrate. 10 years ago, only people in the core natural science sector were migrating to US. Today, you can see people with different backgrounds, political science, law, nutrition etc etc etc come to the US. Why? If you dont do science and engineering in India, you will be a pauper and will not get any job. US still provides jobs ($50k per year at least) once you graduate from the US. My second Point. For all those Americans arguing against H1-Bs - Just all of you are insecure and dont believe in your ability. It is just plain ignorance. I read several people arguing against this. One person has written that Microsoft wants to make only money and "it does not give jobs for Americans who have spent 1000s of dollars in education, but gives jobs to people from India and other countries who spent nothing or meagre amount and enjoyed life and suddenly came here and made gazillion dollars" -- what are you talking about. People in developing countries struggle everyday to get quality education. Education is not free and subsidized for many people like in the US. Many parents struggle, take loans and educate their kids. After going through tough time it is still not free to come to the US. We did not just sit inside a plane and land inside US and start making money. 2 - 3 years of hard work paying US lots and lots of money for visa, immigration, admissions, GRE, Toefl and all bullshit. No federal grants, aid nothing and after all this struggle if we want a job - lack of H1B's - what crap and the Americans who argue about this are ignorant. American kids get all sorts of resources spoon fed - aid, scholarships, money etc etc , big cars to drive around and still many of them flunk in their education. They only to party and have sex. and they want heft paying jobs and whine against immigrant. Common prove your self. Its a competitive world. Dont sit and act like cry babies. With all the wealth if you cannot educate your self and get yourself a good job, you dont have to right to stop immigrants from getting a job. In short - I support bill gates argument (even though I am not a supporter of Microsoft business policies) and encourage increasing H1Bs!. Bring it On! :)
Clearly you have never been to France the country practically shuts down over the summer - well everywhere except the beaches!
Their thirty-five hour week isn't a critisism of course, more something for us Brits to aspire too! ;-)
Agreed. For all it's faults - of which there are many - this is still a "green and pleasant land". The fact that the main political parties are generally hard to tell apart indicates to me that we really don't have any significant problems, we like to pretend we do (the usual mantra, Schools, Hospitals etc), but really lets get a sense of perspective!
Be nice to people on the way up. You will meet them again on your way down!