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MS Moves R&D To Canada Due To Immigration Problem
telso writes "Microsoft will be opening a new software development center in Vancouver because of difficulties getting workers into the US. The company said the center will 'allow the company to continue to recruit and retain highly skilled people affected by the immigration issues in the US' It seems possible that shrinking immigration quotas have affected America's tax and knowledge base."
(And I hate that phrase.)
There is no shortage of programmers or software engineers in the U.S.; there is a shortage of people who are interested in being paid next to nothing.
It also seems possible that MS is just trying to shrink how much they have to pay engineers...
It seems possible that shrinking immigration quotas are has affected America's tax and knowledge base.
Starting with you.
In this global environment either you welcome others or you have to move your operations...
MS moves R&D to Canada to enhance low saleries and gain advanced brainwashing techniques for new serfs.
I told you that stricter immigration laws don't work and are against the free market. I told you that companies would just offshore their work, but you didn't listen.
Congratulations, now you have no immigrants(like you wanted) but also no jobs.
Outsourcing, eh?
"No freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms." -- Thomas Jefferson
The government knows they're keeping smart people out, (even though the doors are still open for cheap labor,) because they want to equalize the economies between the US, Mexico, and Canada.
Economic inequality was the major stumbling block for the creation of the European Union. It's no different for the creation of the American one.
I live in Vancouver and I've been desperately trying to find work in the software development field around here since I graduated in 2003 from a CS program. The article is lax on details... but does anyone know where I can send my resume?
The more and more I read, it looks like the software developer is the new steel worker. Sure, you need a four year education, but you as a worker are replaceable commodity. You'll be having to move to Canada, India, or the Czech Republic to get a decent paying job, or deal with substandard wages and an abusive work schedule that your unionized buddies don't have to put up with.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Has no one told them the Canadian dollar is now almost at par with the United States dollar and may infact surpass it by the end of the year.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Microsoft just *had* to throw in the comment about
immigration. Microsoft continues to attack programmers
in the U.S. by attempting to drive down salaries via
the H1B scam.
If it was truly a problem for Microsoft, they would
not be opening new centers in Bellevue and Boston, would they?
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
who gallantly come to the defense of the H-1B program. I'm sure they have an unbiased view of things.
If Google opens its R&D center nearby and lures some programmers from MS, we'll see chairs flying over the border into Canada.
Well, what did we all think would happen when H1B visas became an "issue"? In today's economy, if we can't bring them here, we'll go there.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I read this as Microsoft does not want to take the time, money or effort to get people cleared by Homeland Security. So they can get people from Indian and China to work with temporay visas in canada easier.
I call H1-BS.
I wonder if the democrat controlled congress has anything to do with this? I know Microsoft and others are constantly lobbying to import more slaves^H^H^H^H^H^H H1-B visa workers to get around paying the wages necessary for skilled domestic labor.
It seems possible that shrinking immigration quotas are has affected America's tax and knowledge base.
And with America's schools turning out such fine writers as the submitter, it should be obvious this is the case.
.sig: Now legally binding!
Many years ago when I realized that American programmers were way over priced than their Chinese counterparts, I decided to move my company's development center to Beijing. Everything has paid off nicely. I get a much higher margin selling enterprise solutions to various companies. I have no problem recruiting because the supply of programmers is abundant. The reality is in order for American companies to survive and be competitive, they need to look elsewhere for capable workforce. I did and am much happier. With stiff competition from companies like Google, Microsoft is doing the right thing by leaving the US for a better high tech workforce.
as long as we got people to pick our lettuce, the immigration laws are fine.
The company said the centre will 'allow the company to continue to recruit and retain highly skilled people affected by the immigration issues in the U.S.'
Translation: We don't want to pay American employees what they're worth, so we're going somewhere else.
It's their right to do so, but....
I was on a congressionally funded study of some specialized skills of which the government believed there was a shortage. We had a distinguished economist on the committee and his first comment was, "There is no shortage. Employers (the government, in this case) always perceive a shortage because they want to pay their employees less."
There are more than enough qualified engineers in the US to work for the tech firms. They're just not willing to compete on the salaries. When Bill Gates says, "we need more visas for the best and the brightest,' he means he wants to pay less for talent.
First of all, "Ballmer throwing chairs" is an overused meme on Slashdot3 2432,00.htm
Second, Ballmer never threw chairs at all. That is an urban legend.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,392
So mods please mod this and any other posts stating Ballmer throws chairs as Troll or Flamebait.
Is there a knowledge base article number for that work around? I'd like to see which systems are affected.
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed H
Do it the same way you retain a CEO- pay them what they're worth. For closed source software, that means cutting royalty checks for code contributed.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Calling Canada, and Vancouver of all places, backwater, is very insulting. Vancouver is near the top in the Mercer quality of life ratings for cities on Earth; the highest US city is not even in the top 20 (and it's Hawaii, not even continental US). http://www.mercerhr.com/referencecontent.jhtml?idC ontent=1128060#top50all And if you're going to critique Mercer, you better be able to back it up because their research is considered the standard given how widely used their services are.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
Skilled programmers need to sneak in across the border, steal (or make up) a social security number, and then get hired by Microsoft for $3/hour. They'll probably get free drivers licenses too, and can walk into any emergency room for free health care.
Take a hint from the mexican orange-pickers!
As a Canadian, also a resident of BC, I hope that both our federal and provincial governments will tell M$ to hire CANADIAN CITIZENS first, and pay them wage^H^H^H^Hsalaries that are at least at par with those in similar industries in this area.
I'm pretty sure that there are a lot of qualified Canadians who would be interested in this move by M$.
I remember when a local company, Boise Cascade, was blaming environmentalists for their inability to find wood to cut. This was announced on page one of the Idaho Statesman newspaper. On page 6 was an article about them selling sections of timberland to Georgia Pacific.
In short, it was politically motivated bullcrap. The corporate culture takes another swipe at the American working class, while they game the system.
Best regards.
Not only do we get more terrorists coming to Canada (check out the CSIS reports), but now they will dilute the IT wages further. These immigrants will be poor migrant dataworkers (worst than tomatoe picking Mexicans) in a decade and North America will be screwed. I can see the day when the best software comes from a country like Germany, just like their cars. Damn blockheads, I starting to see their way of thinking maybe is the best way!
Give us the tax/law breaks we need or we'll hire less people in Redmond and the state/US will earn less tax.
Having some flexibility just over the fence gives MS a lot of options to get heavy handed.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
"There is no shortage of programmers or software engineers in the U.S."
Yeah! *going for my next certification*
It could also be that they want to attract skilled Canadian programmers who are not interested in becoming Americans.
Ian Ameline
I don't see how this move will help Microsoft to recruit and retain quality programmers. There are plenty of quality programmers in the U.S. Look at the great code linux programmers produce on a daily basis. They're obviously not paying enough to recruit these programmers. I say, spend some of those cash reserves to buy better programmers. Otherwise, the quality of their software will continue to decline.
Unspoken but I bet part of the problem is that with the DHS and the TSA and their combined incompetence and evil, foreign workers from certain areas of the world are just having too much trouble coming into the country and staying in.
This smacks of blaming the chickens for being raided by the fox. What H1-B visas and other means of not hiring American citizens has done is essentially subsidize corporate training costs by doing away with the need to train entry level American workers. By using H1-B visas and other means to avoid having to hire and train entry-level citizens, corporations find themselves in a position of having trouble finding technical expertise willing to work for minimum wage because no one could get that expertise without any jobs on which to get them. Their shortsightedness has caught up with them.
Don't believe the propaganda, either. They are not having trouble finding technical expertise. They are having trouble finding people who will accept minimum wage for it. This would be one thing if their profit margins were tightly squeezed, but that Microsoft is complaining about this is rich indeed given the profit margins they already enjoy. If corporations in the U.S. want a robust and affordable labor pool, they should stop hiring foreign workers immediately, create good technology training programs, and start hiring American citizens for entry level technical positions. To assist them, the federal government should stop promulgating immigration policies that work against its own citizens and competitiveness.
they are just opening another Research/Software Development center.
"Other centres exist in North Carolina, Ireland, Denmark and Israel, while full research-and-development locations exist in the U.K., India, China and California's Silicon Valley."
It's really not that big a deal. Microsoft probably can't hire enough people in the US, and opening development centers in other countries make sense. Not that great a story....
That's OK by me! If they don't want to keep their operations in this country, fine. They don't want to pay a living wage, abide by our laws, rules, and culture, or just be a good citizen in general, then I say good riddance! Go screw some other country with your indentured servants building crap products.
What we want here are companies that are PROUD of how well they pay their employees, not curse them as an expense to be minimized, a resource to be plundered.
I mean, seriously, are has affected? What kind of editor lets that through? Sheesh...
Is there a cause-and-effect relationship between (a) microsoft's unrelenting push to hire inexpensive offshore/H1B coders over the last several years and (b) the missed schedules, dropped features, and lack of market acceptance of vista?
Microsoft is having a very hard time recruiting for new positions, and new positions are opening up more quickly than they can fill them. Go look at http://members.microsoft.com/careers/search/defaul t.aspx. They have 3034 job openings in the US alone. You cannot argue that they are offshoring jobs, or trying to get workers for cheaper wages. They are just trying to get workers. They pay at the high end of the tech industry, and they are very picky about who they hire.
Didn't know that. Thought the whole company was marketing.
I'm not sure how this is going to work because there is a back log of immigration applications going back years due to 9/11 and immigration strikes. Currently for some parts of the work the wait is up to 36 months to get Canadian landed immigrant papers. The back log may be less in British Columbia, but this is not certain. The only way this is feasible is that there is a special process and concessions for IT workers going to work for companies like Microsoft.
Wait... Microsoft is forcing Apple to move to Canada? How does that work?
The brain drain that MSFT is experiencing is due to those with talent going to Google.
I think you forget about patent policies - I know I am a talented software engineer (he said modestly), but I *will not work* in a country with software patents like the Corporate Reich of America.
is in order. First of all, this gives hope that even as a geek, I'll have a chance.
Secondly, there's no shortage of excellent marijuana in Vancouver. After hours and hours of working for Microsoft, nothing will make you feel better than a few bong hits of BC bud. I think being really high makes Vista worth having. It's slow, you're slow. The nifty visuals are "trippy" and while it's paging out to disk, you can munch.
[http://it-tastes-so-good.blogspot.com] Are you hungry?
Assuming this is about Indian oursourcing through Canada (which is exactly what is happening in my industry, aerospace), there is opportunity here. Hook up with someone you know in Canada, get them to hire and the workers, and you provide the American interface to your American customers. Provide contract services.
It's called the global delivery model. OK, you wouldn't be a coder anymore, you'd be an agent, but at least you would get to wear a Rolex.Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
Getting rid of US jobs to cut cost is nothing new. That ipod, phone, whatever is made in China. Those shoes are made in Phillipines. Why the hell should companies keep engineering jobs in US if they can get the job done elsewhere?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Don't you wish there was a -5 Bullshit mod for whole articles.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
I am with Linus on this one.
Please - as a Vancouver resident who already thinks there are way too many people coming here, I beg you to allow outsiders to continue thinking of us as a backwater. Too bad the fracking 2010 Winter Olympics are gonna make it that much harder.
The whole point of being a CEO is that you can loot the company for your bonus, cook the books, slash R&D, outsource/downsize a few workers and then move on to the next company with glowing credits you obtained by making the last company's quarterly report show a short-term profit at the expense it's future.
You're part of a coverup. NASA is actively working on a launch system that involves:
1) chair-shaped space probes
2) laser projection of the word "Google" on planetary bodies
3) Steve Ballmer
Microsoft wants to hire the top 5% most capable coders at the bottom 5% of the wage scale. It's called greed and exploitation. I'd work for next to nothing, but they won't even hire me.
I hear that grass is legal in Vancouver, they have coffee-shop (grass-shop?) where you are allowed to smoke and I hear there is at least one where you can buy stuff.
Given the state of development and software in general at MS. It couldn't get worse if some of MS employees felt for it I guess. It could only get better.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
If immigration issues are affecting our knowledge base shouldn't we be trying to fix whatever problems at home are preventing us from producing our own intelligent labor force?
Or is the real issue that immigrants work cheaper, not necessarily better, in which case American workers are just too greedy and unrealistic to employ?
Either way, is letting more immigrants past the border really the solution to the problem?
Ask yourself, why are they moving to Canada and not India/China if low wages is all they are after?
Could they be moving to Canada because:
-it has a very similar social, economic, and political environment to the US which makes it good for business
-Canada has 'open borders' for highly skilled and educated foreigners (yes, even Americans)
-Canada has very strong labor laws protecting the immigrants: they have the same rights as the natives, can switch employers, won't be deported (in fact, "ratting out" a bad employer can them a permanent visa, as happened to a bunch of welders recently)
-Canada believes in cultivating the best and the brightest, no matter where they were born
Face it, Canada is a mini-US, but with a more reasonable immigration policy. Canada is now the fastest growing economy in the entire G8 (the only one at over 3%), the Canadian dollar, the GDP, and the worker wealth.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
http://www.kpmg.ca/en/services/tax/tnf/tnfc0723.ht ml
Canada's Federal and Provincial R&D Programs -- 2007 Round-Up
British Columbia
B.C.'s 2007 budget included the following changes regarding the province's R&D tax credit:
General extension of the B.C. R&D tax credit -- The B.C. R&D tax credit will be available for an extra five years until September 1, 2014 (extended from September 1, 2009).
Partnerships -- The B.C. R&D tax credit will be available to partnerships for eligible R&D expenditures incurred after February 20, 2007.
--
Like everything else in British Columbia, Aboriginal Canadians are subsidizing through their land and most importantly $$$ from resources on their land.
The government needs to ensure that it is more expensive to hire a foreign skilled worker than a local worker. This would ensure that immigrants are hired based on their skill and not to save money.
Unfortunately, the government fails to realize that the immigration policy doesn't consider outsourcing. The US is better off allowing the skilled worker to live in the US (spending their earnings and paying taxes) than having that work outsourced. It is very easy for an IT worker to live in Canada and telecommute. Protecting local workers is one thing, but a narrow sighted policy drains the US economy like a sieve.
Also, not everyone wants to immigrate. The government needs to grasp the concept of a working holiday. The UK, Canada, Australia etc offer these.
Thank you Microsoft, for adding to Canada's already growing economy. Unemployment is already low, but you guys really want to eliminate it!
Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what's right. --Isaac Asimov
Given that I posted at almost the same time as the post right before this and before most of the others I fail to see how this is redundant, except maybe to a chronologically challenged moderator.
"Good things don't end with eum, they end with mania or teria." - H. Simpson
I concur.
For years I spent all my time travelling to the US where I did more than my share of encouraging negative stereotypes of Canada: "yes, *of course* I ride dogsleds to my work igloo in July".
As Vancouverites, we really need to start putting the DTES on our tourism and recruiting ads otherwise I'll never be able to have a shoebox condo of my very own. It's getting bad enough trying to dodge those Paris Hilton wannabees (complete with small dog incapable of walking on its own) on my seawall walk to work.
If foreign workers are so crappy, wouldnt the industry leaders realize that they will eventually go down? I dont think its a black and white situation. I have met equal number of crappy american programmers and good foreign programmers. Looks like you dont have the balls to get a good paying job and want the american tag get you one.
The Mexican economy is continuing to grow while the one here tanks. Mexico is the economically weakest of the three countries they intend to unify (first), so a two-pronged approach is being used:
1. Boost the Mexican economy with out-sourcing and investments for building infrastructure.
2. Restrain growth of the United States's economy.
Of course there is no "shortage" in the US, but it is still a much more restricted market than the world, which means more cost to the company and eventually less R&D produced. I hope they hurt the US government as much as they can. I'm just sorry for the guys that won't find these job in the US because the gov forced MS to move... as for the one who shamelessly called for protectionism (often seen on /.) I hope they starve to death.
\u262D = \u5350
Somalia has excellent programmers. This is blatant discrimination against poor countries.
They had a dev center in Vancouver in the past, it was called Microsoft-WGC (Work Group Canada) and I worked there. They shut it down in 1996 in order to consolidate everyone to Redmond as it was too difficult to communicate they said. They had 100+ employees with at least 60-70% of that being Devs. I remember some bad feelings about how they handled the closesure of MS-WGC.
Ted
The backlog is for immigration. There is no backlog for work permits. Canada does not have artificial quotas for skilled workers
**Life is too short to be serious**
Psh, leave them alone. If they're incapable of realizing Vancouver is very similar to Seattle, and that the new R&D center would be something like a 2 hour drive away from MS HQ, then that's their problem. ;)
Having some flexibility just over the fence gives MS a lot of options to get heavy handed.
And force the US market to become more competitive? It that a really terrible thing? Yes MS will forever pay low wages as a matter of principal. Some companies just have a firm belief that wages should be kept down. It works for many of them. I don't agree with it, but don't consider the practice immoral. It generally makes for unhappy employees, but the employeers pay for that in increased turnover and shrinkage. Not that I advocate employee theft. I consider the employeers non innocent victims.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
I can see MS' point here. Things have just gotten worse for legal immigrants in last 1 or 2 years in US. Every step w.r.t visa issue will take months or years with no light at end of tunnel. For e.g., folks who are working currently can go out of status (for few weeks) since visa extension or renewal will take months. I am sure MS would use this site to keep its workers affected that way. I am a legal immigrant (H1 visa holder) and things have gotten horrible for tax paying, law abiding legal immigrants recently.
I for one suggest we charge large tariffs for any company that exists in whole or part outside the US. If it happens to keep M$ from selling their crapware within the US then all the better for the rest of us.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
How can you expect the USA to maintain our lead in computer science when the schools are woefully inadequate to the task of teaching our kids?
Last time I checked inside a school they were being taught Logo on an Apple ][!! I mean, that's just pathetic. We need to call Washington and tell President Reagan to modernize our educational system NOW! When my baby son enters school in 2012 I want him working on the very latest 64-bit processors and learning a language with words in it, by jove!
Perfectly Normal Industries
If it's in Canada, it'll be a centre, eh?
Hire people in to do code slave work, pay them less, and who cares what it costs the host nation? Multinational corporations are parasites, and it's not just Microsoft (but it's shit like this that makes me a Linux user).
Anti-Globalism
Pride goeth...
"Gastown is the historic centre of Vancouver. But after the 1920s, Gastown became a quiet backwater of deteriorating buildings. It wasn't until the 1960s that the public began to appreciate Gastown's distinctive architecture and role in the city's history, and undertook to revitalize the area.
Posted - 6/10/2007 1:01:27 AM: Having recently spent some time in London UK, coming back to Vancouver was a shocker. "Yes the air was cleaner and the people laid back here but woah, Vancouver felt like a rural back water."
Ocean Cement is one of the last tenants of its kind here; its lease on Granville Island expired in 1999. The occasional tugboat still makes its way in and out of False Creek with a load of sand for the city works yard, but otherwise this sheltered backwater is the playground of kayakers and canoeists...
Expo 86 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"It remains to date the biggest event in British Columbia history and is viewed by many as the transition of Vancouver from a sleepy provincial backwater to...
Vancouver Courier.com 'SOUL FOOD FOR FESTIVE SEASON'
Whether it's music, theatre or ballet, the city has no shortage of festive entertainment to temporarily ward off the winter blahs and infuse the soul with Christmas spirit. So bah, humbug to all the Eastern Canadian culture snobs who think Vancouver is a backwater."
Let me see if I've got this straight:
Your saying that Microsoft can't find employees because they don't pay enough because salaries are being held artificially low because of the flood of new employees from other countries.
Something not quite right about that argument. Seems to me that if the programming field was being flooded with immigrants, Microsoft would not have trouble finding employees.
America is regressing to a previous state where robber baron's rule the markets and control government policy. We've been there, done that, and don't want to go back!
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be-T J
"' It seems possible that shrinking immigration quotas are has affected America's tax and knowledge base." ...or are has affected the America's grammatical skillz.
Because it is our birthright to be paid, what we demand. And if some lowly Thai, Indian, Ecuadorian, or Ukrainian are willing to work for 50% of that (and send 10% to their parents back home), well, something must be wrong about them!
Keep them out of this country, I say!
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Dang, man - when you're relying on MS to come in and bail out your city with charity work by offering your family a 9-to-5, kitting the latest release of Vista (aka 'R & D'), 'backwater' is a nice way to describe where you be livin'. You think MS would consider the same thing in Las Vegas? No way. MS knows the streets are full of people ready to take minimum wage, or they wouldn't even consider. Now you get to look forward to hordes of smelly & uneducated Indians moving in besides. Ouch.
And how is it that Microsoft has such a beef with the quantity of skilled US workers? Is it because the Microsoft plague has decimated American engineering, which is deluged with Microsoft products and policies? Now that we've had the Idiot Machine cranking out herds of MSCEs and Visual 'Sick """"coders"""" for 20 years, it's time to move on and ruin another country.
Good riddance, Microsoft! Could you move the rest of your base out of the US while you're at it?
What you're describing is the processing time for new permanent residents to Canada. Its not necessary to become a permanent resident to live and work in Canada for a few years. In most cases, professionals can get work visas and permits that will let them work in Canada up to 3 years.
Also, the permanent resident application process is a federal program. The individual provinces can nominate people, but they don't process them themselves.
Ask yourself, why are they moving to Canada and not India/China if low wages is all they are after?
Are you trying to tell me they are interested in something other than the immigration laws they are complaining about, or that the driver for that is getting cheap labor? I don't really see it in your Candada is a great place and has better immigration laws spiel.
M$ has already opened shop in India. Opening an office in Canada while complaining about immigration is pure bullshit. The only advantage an office in Canada has for hiring foreign workers is that it's in a closer timezone. They want cheap labor close and under their thumb, nothing more.
M$ cares only about owning the code you write. When you are finished writing it, they are finished with you. US citizens, perma-temps and others previously doing this work will be shown the door.
The real reason they are going this way? Because it's almost game over for M$. A key piece of the M$ success story was their ability to pay workers in stock options based on perpetual growth. To do this, the options must gain value and M$ must always beat Wall Street expectations. Their growth leveled off a while ago and Vista is going to pull it into negative territory. They will no longer be able to offer people decent compensation and that will be it for them. They have also long been out of software to steal as people have avoided new Windows based software companies. Non free code has never really been competitive from a development perspective. Vista has demonstrated just how expensive and slow non free really is. Slave labor and foreign workers are temporary measures that won't save them from collapse.
Good riddance.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
They tu`k eer jeeebs!!!
Regards, the Microsoft R&D team
Sworn testimony.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Ask yourself, why are they moving to Canada and not India/China if low wages is all they are after?
[Several politically-correct suggestions, mostly based on the idea of non-Canadian workers in Canada, deleted.]
As someone who has been liaison with developers in India I can suggest other possibilities:
Canada has people who:
- Speak English understandably and understand us when we speak it.
- Are working in the same time zone rather than offset by a shift or more.
- Are working where administrators can easily visit.
- Have a work ethic.
- Have been known to deliver working code, rather than something you have to rework locally anyhow.
- Have a casteless society within the work force, drastically reducing barriers to communication between workers, the incidence of "drones" who expect the lower castes to do their work for them, and other pathologies (such as women who MUST leave at office closing time rather than being able to work overtime like the rest of high tech).
- Are much less likely to humor you until the project is almost due then quit (leaving you with no product) and start their own company (using local workers) to compete with you using your own IP (under local laws that won't be enforced against them).
- Yet still can be paid a lot less than workers in the US while enbding up with a comparable standard of living.
I COULD go on...
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
But to quote Mercer themselves "The Quality of Living index is based on several criteria used to judge whether an expatriate is entitled to a hardship allowance. A city with a high Quality of Living index is a safe and stable one, but it may be lacking the dynamic je ne sais quoi that makes people want to live in world-renowned cities such as Paris, Tokyo, London or New York."
Or to put it another way, this is a 'safe but boring index', as witnessed by Geneva, Auckland and Brussels (and Vancouver) ranking above the world-renowned ones they list.
When do you find time for lacrosse?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
So, I'm a young American employee at MS. Hired right out of college a year ago, with a much higher salary than I would have gotten from any other company that would have hired me.
Now, having said that, I work on a team that's only about 20-30% US-born citizens. The rest are a mix of Russian, Romanian, Chinese, Indian, and Mexican. But they're not your stereotypical wage slaves hired to save costs. They're bright, intelligent contributors. And my girlfriend, an Australian citizen in a different group, gets paid as much as I do and got even more out of her relocation benefits (apparently shipping across the Pacific isn't cheap).
So, why then does MS hire foreigners. Because (arguably, at least) MS isn't interested in the top 4X% of American developers, they're interested in the top X% of all developers. Since that subset isn't entirely American, they're very interested in immigration issues. Not to drive down wages, but to drive up hiree quality.
You can argue all the live-long day that Americans are the best in the industry (correct or not), but you can't reasonably state that *all* American developers are better than *all* non-American developers.
You might want to lighten up, just a c'hair. VAC wasn't calling you a 'dork'.
/. 'dork' logon to be authorized.
I'm pretty certain that was his signature and VAC is just waiting for his official
There is no shortage of programmers or software engineers in the U.S.; there is a shortage of people who are interested in being paid next to nothing.
There's also this false perception that somehow American programmers are inferior, because as everyone knows Americans are as a rule lazy, uneducated, and bad at anything even remotely related to math and technology. The constant denigration by the media eventually becomes imprinted on the executives and HR personnel.
What I'd love to see is for the INS to run a few stings; find out those tech jobs of which U.S. companies insist they can't find ANY U.S. citizens to fill, send a few fake resumes there, and see if they get callbacks. Any company that falsifies their H-1B application in this way should be barred for a year from getting ANY H-1Bs.
Keep in mind that "Software Professionals" have a separate Temporary Visa program here in Canada. I believe the Canadian rules are somewhat less strict than the H1-B/L-1A set. That said, I'm not sure who the target for recruitment is here: Canadians and/or temporary foreign workers.
Its amazon to read all these comments about how corporate america is selling us out and how its about finding the cheapest labor, yada yada yada. While I won't attempt to deny any of that, I would like to offer my perspective.
.NET shop. Their resumes stated that a comfortable with C#, windows services, windows sockkets, remoting, message queuing, WMI, and other various components of a typical mid-to-high end enterprise system. When asking basic questions they often can't even answer the thoeretical. When asked to write code, they can't remember what to do. When looking at code and asked to either improve it or troubleshoot it, they don't know what to do.
.NET, then we expect you to get the very most rudimentery service and client up and running. If you have 20 years writing TCP/IP software and 5 of it in C#, then we expect a very simple socket application. If you say on your resume that you have 6 years experience writing asynchronous things in C#, then write a few lines of code demonstrating it. But alas, these people can't.
Where I work, I am often tasked with interviewing senior level software developers and team lead candidates. Occasionally, an architect level position, also, but that is rare as our company has not a software architect, per se.
Over the last 6 months I have interviewed approximately 15 candidates, and I was probly seeing about 1 candidate for about ever 150 resumes submitted. Some of these people had 5 years experience, some had as much as 18 years. We're a
I'm willing to grant that they are nervous, may not know everything, whatever. But overwhelmingingly, the fact is, these people say that can do x and y and in reality, after the stated 15 years experience, can even demonstrate the minimum competency required for the position. We are not rediculous expectations by any standard. But if you've been doing remoting for 7 years in
The typical response is: I just google it. That's fine, but someone who never wrote a line of code before can Google it, too. We need to know you can actually perform well in the duties you'll be assigned. Some people get up and walk out of the interviews stating they are too difficult. We finally hired a couple of these guys and they performed very lousy.
The bottom line is that, it is indeed difficult to find someone qualified for certain tasks. If we hire for a bit of a lower-level position such as typical ASP.NET stuff and maybe some middle-tier business rules tasks, its a bit easir to find people but it is still difficult to find someone that when hired, can perform very well until about 6 months into the task after which, they leave and go to another company making more money and more responsibilities (and we pay relative to the 50th-70th percentile of the local norm) and have a disreable culture.
In any case, just incase it was because I was doing the interviewing and they were nervous... I have recently interviewed for a software architect level position for a fortune 100 company requiring the ability to chug roughly 400 million transactions daily with an extreme degree of reliability, and I did fine in the interviews. I was able to answer and demonstrate all but 2 of the questions or tasks asked of me and received a job offer. I have only 10 years experience and no college degree (yet). I don't know whether I'm special, but I think my observation remains: finding someone qualified is difficult enough, but getting the company to offer what they are worth (rather, what they think they are worth) is even more difficult. Most places I've worked hasn't a problem rewarding people that prove themselves or that dazzle during interviews. But if you just barely get by in interview or just get hired because they are taking a chance while not sure of you, and ask for $100k, you're probly not going to get it.
On that note, I've hired people before that I wasn't too sure of but they showed potential, they wanted a rediculous amount of money and we offered what we thought t
Your arguments would also apply to Mexico. Yet MS moved to Canada. Why?
On most subjects Slashdot seems to largely adhere to the open competitive markets are efficient markets theory. Except when it comes to this subject, which is repeatedly posted as news every few weeks.
The fact is whether you are buying a toaster, calling support or getting a job its increasingly a global economy. One way or another you are competing with people from India, China and Canada.
Microsoft going to Canada to hire people can only be attributed to one thing. They feel they get a better deal there. And before we call them greedy or evil, we should consider that most of us do the same thing when buying a toaster, we look for the best quality at the lowest price.
The fact that the USA is a less attractive than Canada as a place to hire foreign workers won't be a surprise to many foreign workers who have worked in the USA. The procedures for foreign workers in USA are complex, slow and characterized by hostility from immigration officials at every stage. (I left USA after my H1B visa was extended for the last time and green card procedures were too expensive, restrictive and lengthy for my taste (I would point out that my time in USA was otherwise excellent and I love the place, the people and the culture)).
In today's world, the only sustainable way to increase your earnings is to make yourself more valuable. If you are asking Microsoft to pay you more than another similarly skilled candidate based on geography or nationality then you are just asking them to subsidize you.
cheers,
David
For whatever reason, the vast majority of Americans do not seem to particularly favor staying in school for grad school.
Americans generally have to get student loans at interest. College administrators generally reserve scholarship grants for "more needy" foreign students (often the children of the foreign power structure, Rolex, sports-car, and all.)
So Americans tend to drop out of the system as soon as they have accumulated enough sheepskin to start earning money and paying off the student loans, rather than hanging on for a couple more abbreviations to hang after their names and a LOT more debt to pay off.
Further, when picking a major they tend to avoid those fields which are in the news mainly in articles that include the word "outsourcing". That word has been attached to hi-tech for more than four years now. Thus a shortage of American grads with both four-year and higher degrees. B-(
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Have you ever been to Geneva? Or to Brussels? There is a reason why the EU officials have chosen these places; they have an extremely high standard of living. (And they are f*ckingly expensive.) If I could spend the money, I would live rather in Geneva than in London.
Joachim
People don't write Manifestos any more -- what's going on in this world? [Frank Zappa]
I can't wait for global warming.
Speak for yourself. I had to have the AC running all winter, except for a few weeks in February. If I didn't, the heat from my computers and monitors would melt my igloo. Then I'd be stuck outside in a puddle of water with warm beer, and rancid, soggy caribou meat. Not my idea of fun.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Problem is - check how many people in the CS PhD programs are actually Americans. We're not talking here about a mom-and-pop visual basic shop (where almost any entry level would probably do), but about a research lab.
Minimum wage? Are you freakin' serious? There's no such thing as minimum wage for researchers. In the industry, they're almost always very highly paid. Usually, that starts with 6 digits. And it doesn't change much if you go to Canada (in fact, the actual cost per employee might be even higher).
The Raven
What this shows is that the US$ needs to devalue by another 20% or so to be realistically priced.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
...that Canada has: less-costly education(I'd like to say free, but eh). More people go to higher education as far as I know.
Have fun unifying USA and Mexico's currency and economy, because I can tell you this: Canada certainly won't be coming to the unification party if your economy continues tanking even faster than your ability to define and execute sane foreign policy.
Do you honestly think we want to be hitched to the same post as you?
You blood profits/greed is great types always seem to conveniently forget about the other half of the people granting an incorporation charter to a company (BTW, you have no "right" to incorporate). Your company must also be of the public good. You may think it is a non story, but that shows where your sympathies lie, with the greed is great crowd.
Not hiring the people from within the nation you are incorporated in does not increase the general public good. It may temporarily increase the profits of your limited sub section of the population shareholders, but that's it. It's a short term get rich quick scam, and the main reason we now have a nation so burdened in debt that it amounts in the aggregate of half a million dollars per person, and it has all happened within the last 20 years of globalization, offshoring and moves like MS is now doing.
So keep it up, eventually you'll get what's coming to you, the US as some big fat mexico-like two class nation, and the destruction of the productive middle class so we can have a handful more billionaires and multimillionaires, while they bribe off you suckers with their worthless credit ponzi schemes that they *know* will never be any good long term, but keep you sucked into believing their globalist drivel.
I hope we start yanking the corporate charters of asshole companies like microsoft and other treasonous piratical companies. Haliburton should be near the top of that list as well. Freaking parasites at best.
At least ticks don't lie about where their loyalties are.
H-1B is perhaps the single most misused immigration program in history (next to perhaps the 1985 amnesty for illegal aliens). It is badly administered, many H-1B's are entry level workers (totally contrary to the spirit of the law).
But it is NOT a wage suppression mechanism. Because it CANNOT be one - every H-1B application needs a Department of Labor certification that states that the imported worker will be paid AT LEAST (and it is usually marginally more) as much as the corresponding domestic worker.
I am as mad about our failed immigration system as the rest of you folks, but I think we can dispense with the FUD.
a) I like globalization. ... in any country, not just mine.
h tm
b) I don't have any problem with competition, from anywhere, provided it is "fair". Fair has nothing to do with local wages.
c) I **do** have a problem with companies lying as a way to get immigration quotas increased.
d) I **do** have a problem with illegal aliens working
Here's a legal team training http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCbFEgFajGU corporate HR departments on techniques to hire cheaper, H-1b visa workers.
H-1b visa workers are paid 25% less than local workers, is that good or taking advantage of them? http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/7/prweb407549.
Illegal aliens harvesting the food we eat isn't any better.
I'm not a true IT worker, I'm a computer inclined Average Joe a few skills, which makes me at least honest compared to a lot of...ahem, experts.
I worked once at an engineering school, and was surprised at how low the skills were for some of the Indian students, one showed me his Master's thesis in Civil Engineering that looked like it was done for a trade school.
It's a regular story (and has been for years) that our schools aren't doing the job, Americans aren't interested in high-tech careers, and even for those who do they're discarded in a few years like an obsolete piece of equipment for off shored Indian workers.
If it was any other company I'd give credence to the claims that they can't get enough hi-tech workers in through immigration, but this is Microsoft, and $ reigns supreme.
So I've been wondering--are Indian workers that much of a bargain, cheap skills and cheap pay? Or are they simply cheap enough to offset the lack of skills? And finally, is all of this just a runaround to get out of that great bugaboo for American employees, paying benefits? Health care and retirement costs are cheaper in Canada, even more so for a hi-tech worker making over $100k. So is that it?
to encourage immigration and the American dream.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Mod this up +10 insightful. For the life of me, Bangalore English is a challenge to understand.
"There is nothing to do it. But to do it." -Floyd Pepper
Your arguments would also apply to Mexico.
Several of them would not. One is enough. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
oh please many pieces of MS software have wasted hours of my time, but that's just a plain lie. only top exec's get stock options. the fact is, MS is a great employer who pays employee's well and really looks after them.
only a total retard would think the end is near for MS, on the cash they have in the bank alone they could survive for years.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Heh, have fun. As a Canadian who also holds a US work visa (TN), dealing with customs officials is less than pleasant, both for getting the initial approval then to come over each time. Especially at Vancouver airport. Every time I come over for legitimate business (or even if I'm not travelling on the visa), they do some combination of intimidate, insult, threaten to revoke the visa, and in general make me feel like a criminal. I work for a big company (which generally has fewer visa issues than small ones), are undeniably covered under the terms of the visa, come only a few times a year for brief periods, and present myself in line with my role, but it still happens. It's not just me either, I know of many stories from friends and from co-workers of behaviour which can only be explained by sheer protectionism. If the country was to be judged by the behaviour of customs officials, I would want to stay away too. I have never met customs officials from any other country who are as rude and bullyish as the vast majority of airport US customs agent I have come across. Land crossing agents are usually better, but only if you are a tourist from Canada who is not dealing with any visa issues.
Canadian US$58,000 + black money US$1,000 for me + black money US$1,000 for you => CHEAP.
USian US$60,000 => EXPENSIVE.
If I want to find the best people in the world, why would I limit myself to 5% of the worlds population?
Geneva has all the international organisations (you can't throw a rock without hitting one), not the EU ones ;-)
I understand your toaster analogy.
However, the article didn't say they went to Canada for cheaper labor, but went to Canada because of "immigration issues."
MS was one of the early big IT companies to can workers and send their jobs overseas. Then, in an effort to gain sympathy, they said they are shipping more jobs over the boarder because there aren't enough Americans to do the job. This appears to be untrue.
Let's look further at your toaster analogy. Say a U.S. company had been found guilty of abusing its monopoly on toasters. Say they sent their jobs overseas to get cheaper workers, creating a number of unemployed/underemployed toaster workers in the US. Next, imagine them claiming that they were shipping more jobs out of the country because there were, "immigration problems." Nobody would believe them in that case either. Well, maybe the Executive Branch of our government would...
there is a shortage of people who are interested in being paid next to nothing.
Even if that were the case, so what? People from China and India are willing to work for less, they have the skills, so why shouldn't they get the jobs? It's been the same in many other industries; why should the US try to protect US programmers from global competition when garment, steel, and auto workers haven't been? And why would the effect of such protectionist policies be anything other than to cause industries to move out of the US even faster?
Of course, it's silly to think anyway that American engineers are getting job offers at Microsoft in large numbers and turning them down because $80k/year is not enough. Rather, Microsoft simply rejects most applicants because they don't have the skills that they need. You're right that there is no shortage of US programmers and software engineers, there simply is a shortage of US programmers and software engineers that are worth hiring.
It is the true meaning of the word
I suppose most of the world is observing the Biblical demand to love who you hate, then, because pervasive anti-American sentiment doesn't seem to have so much as caused a blip in the number of folks scrambling to immigrate to the US. ("US Immigration Boom Hits Record Levels", http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10440110/, Dec 12 2005 -- 12% of population now foreign born) I had this conversation with a Chinese researcher at my university once:
e n.php
*snip long rant about the Bush administration*
Me: Wow, sounds like you are less than happy with the US.
Him: I hate everything the government stands for.
Me: Maybe you could go home to protest it? Send a letter to the Congressman and tell him thats why you're taking your PhD home with you.
Him: Are you "#$"% nuts?
And yes, thats what most immigrants feel like. There are occasional frustrations with living in America -- complaining about incompetent bureacrats is a well-established tradition for everybody, regardless of place of birth. (And the INS and its successor agencies are probably among the worst in the federal government.) But would large numbers of folks give up the tremendous opportunities living in America has over those frustrations? As my Chinese-accented colleague put it, are you "#$"# nuts?
The number of citizenship applications, one easy barometer of "So, how many of you folks want to hitch the rest of your lives to the United States of America?", is up 60% in four years. That is more than double the number when Clinton left office and a Dark Shadow Fell Across The Land. http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/07/05/news/citiz
Also, I don't know if subtleties of domestic politics make it abroad that often, but while Dubya's Republican Party is often depicted as being anti-immigrant, and that might well be true for a large part of the party base (also true for a large portion of the Democratic base), Dubya is personally *extraordinarily* pro-immigration. He wanted comprehensive immigration reform, which would have included a mass legalization of illegal immigrants living in the US, to be his domestic legacy. It failed for a couple of reasons, including opposition from broad portions of the bases of both parties and absolutely incompetent political maneuvering. (I think that is distressingly common in the Bush administration, and I say this having voted for him twice.)
(Disclaimer: I'm actually an expat in Japan, but I feel like waving the flag a little bit this close to the Fourth of July. America should be justifiably proud of how it treats immigrants, in the main. The system has its fair share of issues, but its nothing intractable, and its so much better than Japan its not even funny.)
(P.P.S. On the general topic of the thread, to all Slashdotters who worry that the immigrants are forcing you into poverty: learn to compete. I got a degree in Japanese along with my IT skills, and now on either side of the Pacific for jobs which require a bilingual English/Japanese engineer I can compete quite favorably with folks making a tenth of my salary, because if they can't speak both languages than hiring ten of them still won't replace me. Languages are just one way you can make yourself something other than an interchangeable cog. Domain expertise, business skills, communication skills, a finance background, proficiency in obscure legacy technologies, jumping early onto new ships like the Ruby on Rails boomlet, etc, etc.)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
"And they're doing it all for a bigger profit margin.
I've seen several articles, both in the newspaper and on Slashdot, where Microsoft is talking about this mythical "shortage of tech people" and how we need to open the borders more so that they have enough people to hire. This is a smoke screen any discerning individual can see right through. This is pretty much the last thing they can do to lower the cost of production. They've reached the max market penetration and are simply trying to fight the cycle of products (well, in this case cycle of the company) that everyone learns about in management. If we give out more H1-B's that means there is cheaper labor, which means the programmers here make less money, which means Microsoft makes more money, which means their share price goes up." - by bdjacobson (1094909) on Thursday July 05, @08:52PM (#19761813)
You've hit it ON THE HEAD... & here is my ideas on WHY this is the case (per your points, because imo? The STOCKMARKET is the root of it all):
Since 90% of this nation's wealth is held by 10% of its population, literally (or near that figure)? Many of those folks (including me & mine) only hold onto around $10,000-$20,000 liquid ca$h typically, in formerly traditional forms of monetary security (banks for example, because the rate of return, is so low vs. other forms of investment)... the alternate, which typically can get you higher yields, one of them?
Legalized gambling, basically - the stock market (sure, "nothing ventured/nothing gained", but then again, nothing LOST either if you don't put your roll into play on the table, so-to-speak!)
Everyone wants to be instantly rich, & they do NOT have to be a "trust fund baby bazillionaire" either, but how many make it? Ask yourselves that??
That said: See, I know folks like this, personally (trust fund babies mostly)?
They "YELL & SCREAM" to their brokers & investment houses "MAKE ME MORE MONEY YESTERDAY OR YOU ARE FIRED!" etc. et al... there is NEVER ENOUGH for this type of person (they are not into "peace of mind" via accomplishment in the ones I know, but rather, showing off how thick their wallet is etc.)... sad stuff.
I, for one, never judged a man's worth by the width of his wallet... apparently, those "@ the top", from those I know & have "sampled" @ their very worst? Do...
How sad. Spoiled brats @ the helm of our nation (our President) who had Daddy buy him out of every shenanigan he ever pulled creates the example, alongside "Darth Cheney", imo the TRUE RINGMASTER... attitude reflects leadership people.
AND... Capt. America? IS TRULY DEAD!
APK
P.S.=> Thus, in turn? Mgt. when confronted by 'boards of directors' (usually the largest investors OR their human proxies)? Will do ANYTHING to make more coins/dead presidents... they too, are expendable assets (albeit, usually EXTREMELY well paid ones, some have annual salaries larger than many companies for example)... so, they do what they know - control the SINGLE EASIEST THING THERE IS FOR THEM: Downsize/fire folks, cutting off their "buying public" basically.
That all said, & aside?
Well, again - who the hell can afford the "latest/greatest" when they're in fear of their job (provided they still have a GOOD one that is), or is not "hoarding" their monies in case of a rainy day (and, it's POURING out there economically imo, especially in the town I live in, again, 12th worst in the nation)...
No small wonder these "big brains" @ the top are chasing other national markets (China, to name one) to exploit they also imo, as they have us... only imo? The people of that nation, with 5,000 years of recorded history ARE GOING TO OUTSMART THEM, & who pays for that predicted debacle??
Well, gee: The same ones paying for this INSANE WAR in IRAQ! Us... the U.S. Taxpaying constituency of this crooked lying goverment of ours... & believe you me: I get NO "JOLLIES" out of putting my nation down, but @ this point? I think I have to, and so does everyone else, or shit will never get straight again (if it ever can like it used to be here)...
And, sorry for my profanities, but this posting here? Got me riled up... it's important imo! apk
Microsoft is not having trouble finding "employees", it's having trouble finding "employees at the wage they want to pay".
No, Microsoft is having trouble finding employees that are worth hiring at any wage. Even without salary, an average employee costs Microsoft about $400k/year. If you can't generate that much new revenue, you aren't worth hiring even if you work for free.
That is very true. Look at this chart, MSFT has way underperformed compared to companies like AAPL and GOOG. And I've never seen as many new buyers going over to buying iBooks and iMacs as before.
At the intersection of computation and biology.
Basically for a company to get H1-b applicants, they have to interview American workers and give the American workers an equal shot at the position.
That's a nice fairy tale, but you're confusing H1B visas and green cards. There is no requirement to interview American workers for H1B visas; for H1B visas, a company can simply write a letter saying that they couldn't fill the position with an American worker.
The requirement to interview American workers exists only for green card applications. Green cards remove any hold the company may have over their workers, so they are the exact opposite of what a company would apply for if it wants to keep salaries low by hiring cheap immigrants. Companies are indeed trying to skirt that requirement, but that's not to keep salaries low, it's to avoid losing an employee that has likely been with the company for many years and is very valuable to them.
I just recently read this in the news.
Perhaps your inability to read and understand written materials has something to do with your inability to command a higher salary.
"...eventually the world will have it's entire quality of life pulled down slowly but surely."
Fixed that for you.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Given that we (I work for MS) just spent 2 billion expanding the Redmond campus, I think its clear that we continue to hire inside the US.
Then quit the WTO already, and do trade with Europe on the condition that other countries that front over there are not included. Work from there.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Mercer? The "Talking to Americans" guy? I'm not surprised he likes Canada.
So has everybody el$e, in case you've been in a hole for the past seven years.
You're quite the big Google fan, does it bother you at all that they complain about it as well? Not "pure bullshit" in their case, I suppose. And tell us twitter, how do you feel about the fact that IBM is probably the biggest H1-B and L1 visa sponsor in the United States? Does that not bother you? Or does your outrage only extend to "M$"?
Well, assuming for a second this is not hysterical tripe and actually true, please explain to Slashdot how that's different than any other software company? God, I'd love to see you rationalize that.
Exageration, FUD and misrepresentation of facts coupled with ignorance. How can you beat that? Microsoft hasn't been doing that for years - nice try though. Among all your "M$ is dying" hyperbole bullet points, this one takes the cake. "Slave labor", starting at $80K with full health and retirement benefits, indeed.
Don't you get tired of this pointless crap? Do you figure someone actually believes anything you say? Why don't you concentrate on criticizing Microsoft for the bad things they actually do instead of wracking your brain trying to come up with ever more exciting lies and redneck nickel hyperbole?
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Correction: Canada has a more stable cost of living. You don't need to earn 150k/year to live well up here, and nationwide health-care is an oft-quoted perk of being Canadian.
A developer earning 50-60k up here is considered middle-upper class. He can afford a house on his own, along with all the latest tech toys. Try that in Redmond... yeah right!
Except Microsoft is opening this up in Vancouver, the most expensive city in Canada to live in. Average house price: $750,000.
50-60k is most certainly not middle-upper class in the bigger cities in Canada. Not Vancouver, not Calgary, not Edmonton, not Toronto. Maybe Regina or Winnipeg.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
During the 3 hours when the sun will shine here, I emerge from my igloo to play the government required hour of hockey.
BZZZZZZTT!!!!
I call BS. Canadians don't play hockey. They play this thing called "curling", with these big metal things called "Curling Irons" - not to be confused with a US Curling Iron which, despite it's name, isn't used to curl iron, but is actually used to curl hair.
A Canadian "Curling Iron" is also not the same as a 30 Iron used in US golf.
And you call yourself a Canadian!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Man, some of the people here are so deliberately misinformed it's clear they've never been involved in a large software dev company. Their injured sense of entitlement seems to be overflowing into any good sense they might normally exercise.
I'm a senior engineer for a large, very well known software company (not MS). One of my duties is interviewing engineers. Lots of engineers. I see five or six candidates a week, in addition to phone interviews. Once we've found somebody -- anybody -- who meets our hiring requirements, we'll do whatever it takes to get them here. Living across the country? We'll relocate your household and find your spouse a job. Living in Canada? We'll get you a visa. Compensation is same in both cases, and due to the costs of acquiring the visa, H1-B workers actually cost the company a lot more. As a result, we prefer Americans, but as I said, we'll take anyone we can get.
We've got development centers in the UK, Africa, India, China, and several places in the US. These all cost us far more per person -- in facilities costs, training, legal costs -- than the US dev centers. We do this to try to attract people who don't want to relocate.
Those of you who think Microsoft is just trying to avoid paying you the billions you so obviously think you're worth, should go apply to the Redmond campus. If you're as good as you think you are, they'll fly you in for interviews. And if you pass those, then they'll talk about compensation. At that point, you can't really lose the offer, barring stupidity. The poster who said they'd use a difference in expected salary to disqualify a candidate in order to get an immigrant worker instead is, to give them the benefit of the doubt, blatantly mistaken.
Look, just do me a favor: If you think you're hot shit and want a six-figure job, make yourself a list of the top ten tech companies in the US. Then go to each of their job sites and submit your resume. My recruiters are waiting. Unless, like most of the posters here, you think that's "slaving away for minimum wage."
"Microsoft will be opening a new software development center in Vancouver because of difficulties getting workers into the US."
"Microsoft will be opening a new software development center in Vancouver because of difficulties getting low paid H1B workers in the US.
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
I don't think it's about hiring foreigners and paying them nothing; it's more about increasing competition in the labor pool, which will drive down the cost of labor. So they are hiring the BH-1 visa people at good salaries, but another 5-10 years of the competition of influx of HB-1 visa guys into the American-born labor pool will drive down salaries across the board. It's a long-term strategy.
When you're talking about maintaining a standard of living for the US population at large, and having your children better off or the same as you are, it's not about who's better. It's about maintaining control of the supply of labor. When labor is plentiful, it gets cheap. When it's not as plentiful, the workers benefit.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
I don't know why everyone needs to comment without looking at the leaked MS Salary documents:
a ry/MSCompGu.jpgr osoft-compensation.html)
http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/libr
(from http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2006/03/internal-mic
Fulltime out of university is level 59.
Though I can see that Microsoft's statement today does point a finger to immigration policies in the US but this is a little short sighted. I work in downtown Vancouver and know a few former Microsft employees through work I've done in IT and marketing environments downtown. What surprised me most when talking to these people is that they did not relocate to work at Microsoft.
Vancouver City is a small city, but the metropolitan area extends right to the US border. Microsoft isn't that far away on the other side. Until 2001 these people were able to pass through express lanes at the border with little hassle. Since new laws have come into play our trade agreements have come to mean less and the border has slowly closed. These days you do not hear of people working in the Vancouver-Seattle region as much as you hear stories about lovers on either side of the border being rejected for too many "suspicious" crossings. This is just sad, the two cities are separated only by suburbs and a small trench the width of your back alley.
Immigration policy has gone awry in the US but I think the border issue has been simmering on the back burner for much longer. I hope people start addressing both issues or both of our economies will be in the toilet soon.
is it ok with you that Linus Torvolds lives and works in the US?
Because their owners are benefiting from being in a safe, stable country where the government does not nationalize them and the people do not kidnap, torture, and murder them.
Yeah, they are moving to Canada! The horror of it! We all know what a dangerous, hostile place Canada is!
They are having legal trouble finding immigrants. They don't want to raise salaries.
Oh, right, because we all know that paying a bad programmer an extra $100k/year suddenly makes him a good programmer.
Face it, many people who put "programmer" on their resume aren't worth hiring even if they work for free; you'd be willing to pay them in order to keep away from the source code.
I told you, the immigration bill is death now, and I knew that this was going to happen. What some people don't understand is that in these days everytime a student graduate from college is competing on a global world, a global world made by US company's some people say "MS can't find programmers that are able to work for nothing" , but no one has even thought that maybe US workers are overpaid (maybe......) And this has nothing to do with the illegal immigration debate!!
Um, something like 75% of MS employees get stock awards.
The Vancouver airport is, I'll agree, one of the most harsh ones out there for going from Canada to the US.
Well, seeing as I already cannot afford a house here, I fail to see how it can get any worse. Plus, the Asian ESL students on Robson are the easiest girls to pick up in Western North America :)
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
This was expected like 5 years ago in a conflict with the state of WA. But BillG's father intervened and made them stay back.
There are very few indians here, whereas when I did my undergrad at USF in Tampa, Florida, it was packed full of them. The indians that are here certainly are neither smelly nor uneducated. No wonder you posted as an AC.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
But what's missing are *good* programmers willing to relocate to the Redmond area without a huge incentive.
Following MS's H1B and offshoring stories for about 6 years now, I notice a pattern. MS has a predetermined "profile" for the kind of people and mindset that they hire. They are strongly geared in to this profile such that they will pay a premium to get it. They figure if they are allowed to comb the entire world instead of just the US, then they are more likely to find their kind of people, and for less.
I remember when I was looking for a wedding ring for my wife, I had a specific design in mind and I was fairly determined to get it. I had to visit a lot of jewerly stores to find a match. It is not that there was a shortage of jewerly, but merely a shortage of choices that fit my preconcieved goal.
MS is picky and will lobby to expand their choices regardless of how it affects US citizens. Bill Gates was an excellent poker player, and knows how to manipulate Congress and public opinion to his will.
Table-ized A.I.
I get my entertainment in the sack, and in stuff I do. Relying on others for fun will always leave one lacking; make your own party wherever you go. I even do it in the back of the bus if I'm taking a long ride. Fun comes from within first.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
"Oh, right, because we all know that paying a bad programmer an extra $100k/year suddenly makes him a good programmer."
Oh, right, because we all know that paying a bad foreign programmer less suddenly makes him a good programmer.
In case you weren't joking: not Rick Mercer, but Mercer the large multinational HR company.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
My mother lives in Florida, and neither of us was born here. It is exactly because I'm not biased, having lived in Europe, other parts of Canada, and the US, that I can make a better comparison. As for my "volatile little johnson", why don't you come over here and see exactly how big it is!
Your problem is that you are a hater. I don't understand such people. You are not only hurting others, but yourself as well, with your negative attitude. Being positive and optimistic leads to a much better life.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
MS has been looking at Vancouver for a long while. It is a natural fit, being so close to and so similar to Seattle.
Back when the anti-trust trial was on, they were threatening to move their entire operation to Vancover to get away from the US government and avoid being broken up. I'm not sure if they would've went through with it or not though.
Is Linus willing to renounce his Finnish citizenship?
"If you are asking Microsoft to pay you more than another similarly skilled candidate based on geography or nationality then you are just asking them to subsidize you." No, you're asking an American Company to employee Americans. An American company that earns it's money in America and then goes on to say that the United States makes it hard to employ lower cost workers from other countries and then whines about it being unable to pay American workers less doesn't deserve a lot of sympathy. And when you parrot that 'Global Economy' propaganda you're merely helping to pass on that big lie. The American government needs to tighten the foreign workers visas because they are being used to kill off the jobs of higher paid American workers. And big companies have a tendency towards doing evil to their employees when government doesn't look out for the workers. Whether it's 19 Century Mining companies that would charge their employees a dollar a day for the use of the tools and pay them 90 cents or it's Microsoft outsourcing jobs from Americans so as to squeeze that last penny out for the shareholders.
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
I have no doubt at all the reason for MS coming to Canada. US customs block every temporary work visa they can, with no regard for how the american companies with their american employees will be hurt.
... we aren't talking landscaping and fruit picking, which you Americans insist on passing off to foreign workers when you could do it yourself.
... and be right there at the fax machine in the customs office at the moment an updated letter arrived from the client. If she was in the bathroom when it arrived, too bad, she would have been denied. What a stupid system! She eventually got in, after missing a connecting flight, and the USA company that needed her services, was able to carry on with their business of making money for their American shareholders.
... The USA company that needed her services just happened to be owned by a Canadian parent company. The dumbass customs officer would not investigate the facts, he could not comprehend the idea that the USA company was a real, USA registered company, with real assets, with real USA employees. He decided the USA company was an empty shell, and that it must really be the Canadian parent company that called her to work in the USA. The officer threatened to declare my wife's actions as being a fraud, which would have banned her for life from working in the USA. He refused entry to my wife.
... he didn't even understand that for any fraud to have been commited by my wife there would have to have been a criminal intent to deceive. At most there was a misunderstanding created by the American employees of the American company. Not fraud.
... did the asshat customs officer do a proper investigation and let her proceed? ... NO. He was off shift. A different officer gave her the work visa and let her enter the USA without any hesitation, without reviewing the incident with the first custom's officer, or even asking her anything that might have resolved the confusion. He probably wasn't even aware that there had been any incident. ... so we went from a brainless shit who was going to block my wife and put a group of American citizens out of their jobs, to a brainless shit who let her pass with no questions asked, who didn't even try to resolve the first shit's concerns. Now that's just awesome security! Tell me, Do you feel safe?
... my wife's boss was flying to south america for work, with some simple scientific field gear with her. She had a brief stop over in the USA where she never left the secured area of the airport, she just needed to go through customs (even though she was in limbo, not actually departing for a US destination), and then onw
It must be an utter nightmare for MS to bring in the smartest developers available around the world, enriching the intellectual capacity of the USA, helping an American company grow wealth for their American shareholders.
In an unrelated field, my wife, who is a Canadian with two science related bachelor's degrees and a professional registration has been blocked twice from entering the USA on temporary work visas by ignorant american customs officers.
And she was going to perform work needed by American companies that were not able to find qualified American professionals. High end specialized scientific work
The first time, the company she was going to consult for made a small mistake on their reference letter. She had to wait for several hours
The second instance
This fuckwad didn't have even the most basic understanding of the situation
Her client nearly lost her services, which would have delayed their project, which would have meant laying off American citizens from their jobs, and would have delayed or pre-empted millions of dollars of economic activity in a remote area of the USA where the jobs are desparately needed.
But many hours later, after missing her connecting flight, she did get through
There was another incident
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
Already companies have to pay the same or more as US programmers to get H1Bs and on top of that they have to pay for Lawyers fees, vis application fees and international relocation. This adds on about 25% to a yearly salary so even spread across 3 years its still 10% more. So H1Bs are already 10% more expensive so no company actually will hire H1Bs if it can get Americans at the same price. The problem seems to be that a vast majority of American programmers entered the industry during the boom and expect a lot more than what the work is worth to the companies . They think if there is a shortage the price will go up but they dont understand one fact - that unlike dcotors or lawyers the work of programmers can be done remotely so if there is a shortage salaries will rise only to a certain extent before the job is sent overseas. it is in the best interests of American programmers to have H1Bs work in the US so that the company does not outsource the entire group. At the same time outsourcing firms should not be given H1Bs. If they need people to come on site for short periods of time for client contact and knowledge transfer they can come on B1 business visas. H1Bs should be given to genuine American companies like Microsoft who face genuine shortages and are not able to recruit the people they need as all the visas are used up by outsourcing firms. In fact some firms have started the practice of just applying for H1Bs for all their employees who could conceivably travel to US the next year and quite a lot of these H1Bs never get used as project plans change but since the quota is used up companies like Microsoft are unable to recruit the people they really need. The outsourcing firms see the visa fees as a cost of business and even if the H1B is never used by using up the quota they ensure that US companies cant hire the people they need and are forced to outsource the work which leads to more revenue to the outsourcing firms.
**Life is too short to be serious**
Full-blown free-trade looks great on paper. However, there are more factors to measure by than just total GDP. GDP may be the easiest to model or measure, but it is not necessarily the most important for overall quality of life. Things such as stability and equality should also be weighed in, but economists often ignore it because it is more difficult to quantify.
Free-trade creates both more job churn (fields come and go faster), and risk economic bubbles, due to things like big trade imbalances (which we have a wopper of in the US).
Equality is another. Many researches have concluded that free-trade benefits the wealthy more than the the middle class. This may be why the middle class has been slipping of late compared to both the poor and the rich. It is socking it to the middle.
Raw free-trade is only the most logical if you use an oversimplified model that measures *only* GDP. Free-trade economics are making the logical fallacy that the most easiest to measure/model variable is also the most important. It is not necessarily. It sounds presumptuious to say so many economists are messing up, but it is true. They are screwing up their math, perhaps due to big-biz influence and bias.
Table-ized A.I.
Actually, it's because Canada is Microsoft's #3 exporter of staff, behind India and Japan (link) and an L visa is obtainable after a year.
Also, Microsoft DOES have R&D in China, India, Ireland, among other places, so opening one in Vancouver is incredibly overdue.
Sorry, I'm just nitpicking and I agree with your post, Mr. Lightning. This message isn't for you. However everybody else who posted trash about Microsoft opening an office in Canada because it's cheaper:
FUCK YOU
You assholes obviously haven't spent much time in Vancouver or Toronto in the last decade or Alberta in the last year. Stop posting shit about nonsense you have no fricking clue about. Have you guys actually sent your resumes to Microsoft? Geez. Sound like the neighbor's barking dogs.
Oz
Absolutely correct.
Also don't forgot that first world citizens from countries such as England, Germany and Japan need visas too. A lot of Americans on this forum are dumbing this issue down into a "slave labour" issue but I call BS on that.
There are many extremely bright people across the world and not letting them into America to train Americans just makes your country even dumber.
Good luck with that.
I would think there is more then price involved. How much would they have to pay you to work anywhere near Chernobyl? Personally I feel pretty much the same way when considering working anywhere is the USA.
Considering that our dollar is almost at par with the greenback, maybe the political and social environment was a deciding factor.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/jul0 7/07-05MSExpandVancouverPR.mspx/
Transmitting energy without a license.
This article is full of it. The reasons why Microsoft is doing it is for tax savings, e.g.:
"A sizable tax subsidy for R&D exists in every [Canadian] province, ranging from an effective subsidy rate of about 40 percent in Alberta to over 200 percent in Quebec."
In other words you get much more for your R&D dollars in Canada.
Your argument (I use that term loosely) is beside the point. Hiring outside companies in order to skirt US immigration laws like that does have a strange side effect of pissing off other people and companies (mainly the ones abiding by the laws obviously). If Microsoft wants to enjoy the benefits of being able to operate in the US market, it should have to abide by the laws JUST LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE. Can you give a single reason why microsoft
Every day, companies compete with Google for applicants and lose.
Past: If You are a great programmer | researcher | scientist && You are American Then Hire. Now : If You are a great programmer | researcher | scientist Then Hire. Lets be honest for a moment. It is the immigrants, or the willingness of smart immigrants to come to the US that makes our country great. Otherwise, we would be like the UK....we'll only have old stuff that we got when we were a colonial superpower to show for.
1. Canada's government isn't anywhere as corrupt as Mexico's.
2. There is a larger pool of skilled technical labor in Canada that speak both French and English.
3. Canada's a lot closer in climate and distance to Redmond, WA.
Those are just three good reasons.
to me, too, as a USA worker, not just as an employer!
Let's face it, drugs are cheaper (in spite of the fact that most of them are produced in USA). Taxes are lower (in spite of the fact that they damend near have socialized medicine, soimething all conservatives say will lead to higher taxes). And, best of all, they have no Patriot Act designed to trim rights of citizens while claiming to fight terrorists!
But (and this is a big but) I will not work for Microsoft if I move to Canada. Much better to start my own comapny, something elae that is easier and less penalized than in the good ol' USA!
As a Canadian working in the US for the "Evil Empire"...
NAFTA only gets you TN status, which is a temporary work authorization that only lasts a year. You can renew it, but after a while the USCIS starts to get very suspicious. Long term employemnt requires an H1-B, the same visa as everyone else in the world uses to come to the US to work. Furthermore none of those (TN, H1-B) allow your spouse to work while you're in the US, which makes it very awkward for married people. Yes, actually, there are geeks who are married.
I was fortunate to get my green card before 9/11, when everything changed. Many of my co-workers, both Canadian and from other countries, have been waiting for upwards of 5 years for any chance at a green card. You may not think it's a big deal, but for families trying to figure out how to make everyone happy it's a very stressful situation to be in.
I'll stay out of the whole "hire programmers in the US" debate, and simply say that on the salary scale Microsoft pays the same to workers regardless of where they come from. This is US law, and part of the process for bringing works into the US from other countries.
Neil
I know this is to late to count, but I live in Seattle and have friends that work for the evil empire. One friend of mine is Russian and was brought here with his furniture and cat. He is paid 102k per year and was put up in a very nice place while he was figuring out where he wanted to live.
I will say that he has a strong background in mathematics and had done some prior work that MS was very interested in. I think that is more likely what they are looking for, not cheap labor.
once more into the breach
actually, it's more the problem that people won't come to the US anymore because of
* hateful rhetoric against immigrants
* xenophobia
* a horrible health care system
It appears to me that Microsoft isn't "moving" R&D to Canada. The article says they are building a new center in Canada, but I don't see any mention of closing a US campus, which usually is part of a "move". So please, as much as I don't care for Microsoft either, let's be precise about the language used in the article summary.
After all, all American R&D could come up with was a big ass table.
--
Toro
It seems that what Microsoft needs is a H1b visa auction. That way they could get all 60K. The $$ generated by the auction could replace the training fee ($1000 ??). Not that throwing money at the problem would result in more workers qualified to work at Microsoft, but if there was some real money available for training more folks could be trained. With IT unemployment above 2% and an IT work force over 2,000,000 there should be 40,000 IT folks ready for new skills. Auctioning the h1b for 10-15K that might be a start at meeting the training costs. (Of course the training fee for IT h1bs would have to be earmarked for IT training.)
Of course Microsoft might find it more cost effective to do the training in house.
You know what we call people who only do the minimum, don't know?
Now, if you think that one hour of hockey is enough to express your Canuckiness, well ok...
Well said. Likewise people worldwide would go to the united states to make money because the amount they were able to make compensated for the hassles of having to live and work there. Now that the economy is so weak, and the immigration standards are much tighter, the US is going to notice less and less of these brilliant people (doctors and scientists, amongst others) finding their way in.
The truth about H1b Visa's http://youtube.com/watch?v=TCbFEgFajGU
The American immigration policy is buggered up. I know I have gone through many immigration systems in the world. The problem is that the American immigration policy favors unskilled labor. For example in Canada, or Europe if you are skilled you will get an immigration visa, no ands ifs or buts. What Canada, and Europe does not want are unskilled labor.
What immigration visa in the US is geared towards skilled people who can later on start a life in the country? Answer NONE. In Canada, UK, Germany, Switzerland, etc they all give you visas towards citizenship.
And please note that this qualified workers is a problem not only in the US, but EVERYWHERE! I know, my wife who is a manager for a software development team in Switzerland is dealing with the skilled labor shortage EVERYDAY...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
LOL... When I read your comment I could not help but smile. I have been an immigrant most of my life and I would have to say the American system is buggered. I have one American friend who says its nuts that a friend of his from the UK who is skilled, pays his taxes, believes in the law and is generally a good citizen had to leave because the H1B and green card process is so buggered. YET, he said the illegals come there by the boat load and they eventually all become citizens. In his view, "that ain't right."
;) After all all those skilled labor people from other countries might be liberals.... ;)
The problem with the American immigration system is that they have their priorities wrong. The American immigration system focuses on those that have family, unskilled or what have you. In contrast Canada favors skilled. Recently there was a study on immigration policies and they said systems like Canada are better for the country in the long run because skilled labor integrates better. Switzerland, Germany, UK, Australia all have skilled labor immigration programs and it works quite well for them.
Though you know I could be cynical about this... If the politicians don't want skilled labor maybe it is because they want to keep the voting population ignorant....
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
All the programmers I know in the valley say the same thing. Everyone is looking for good people.
If your experience is different, I'd like to know:
At least 2/3 of the candidates are utterly unqualified and don't seem to realize it. And again, my experience agrees with that of my friends at other companies. There are candidates with 10 years of C++ experience who can't write the simplest program on the whiteboard.
From my perspective, we greatly need the Indian and Chinese engineers; there simply aren't enough qualified Americans.
The anti-MS bent of the folks in this discussion is clouding their judgment. You can blame MS for a lot of things (which you already do :-)), but low wages are not one of them. I am an American citizen (naturalized), working at MS for the past 10 years. Originally came over on an H-1B visa. I've interviewed tons of people since then. The salary negotiation part happens only after we say "Hire", at which point HR gets involved (and I don't see what happens behind the covers). The bottomline is I hardly see any American-born candidates, and the number of American-born students in top CS programs in the country is very low as well (and dropping), particularly in grad schools. The candidates are eliminated at the phone screen and interview stages, not at the salary negotiation stage. And MS is certainly not saving any money by paying low salaries to immigrants - lots of rising stars tend to be immigrants, and they make a *lot* of money when you put together the salary, the stock awards, the bonuses. Not once in here have I seen discrimnation. And the demographic as well as the salary levels in MS are comparable (perhaps even better) than the rest of the industry. You may not like many MS business practices (which I will not comment on), but the company treats its employees well. It is really true that we're not able to find qualified candidates, long before any mention of money comes into the picture. If any slashdotters want to try this out, apply for a job, go through the interview and see what the offer is - whether you take the job or not because of personal beliefs is up to you. Maybe we'll even convert a few of you over to the dark side :-).
So has everybody el$e, in case you've been in a hole for the past seven years.
Fuck, Dell doesn't have an S in it. =/
I say bankrupt them.
What are they going to do, not make the drug at all?
Yeah, like a lack of profit stopped ugg from making the wheel.
Considering how many people die in America for being unable to afford drugs, the profit model is extremely harmful - indeed, it's a national security risk. Look what happened with the flu vaccine shortage last year.
Take profit out of pharmaceuticals. Necessity will always be the mother of invention. What idiot thinks that these CEOs would just rather go without medicine that'll later save their lives?
Besides... pharmaceuticals rely mostly on Government - via university research. Taxpayer funded research, thankyouverymuch.
This analogy was a very bad one.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Two points to make about this:
1. We should all stop posting resumes to company web sites. They just use these as a way to "prove" they looked and couldn't find qualified applicants. Every job and contract I've gotten in software engineering has been through people I already knew inside the company. In fact, go back to every company we posted a resume to and replace all the text with, "Resume details remove to prevent H1-B Visa job fraud. Contact me directly for details."
2. NEVER state the salary you are looking for. This is a game with employers. Instead, ask them what the salary range for the position is (they are legally required to give you this info if you ask). Then ask them where someone with your years of experience would fit inside that range. This way you force them to make the offer to you. Salary ranges are normally decided by recent surveys of salaries in that company's geographical location, not by how little they wish to pay an H1-B Visa indentured servant. Ask to see the salary survey, or the written salary range in the company's policy. Ask them how they arrive at these numbers if they seem too low. Try to keep this conversation as friendly, casual, and seemingly off-the-cuff as possible so that you are not marked as a bad apple before you get in the door.
DISCLAIMER: I am a former MSFTie and I held an R&D position, although not in MSR. This is all speculation on my part and not based on any tangible insider info...
Some thoughts:
0. This sounds more like a development lab than an expansion of MSR. More and more the company is expanding its research away from MSR and into product groups. See Live Labs or adCenter labs as good examples.
1. MSFT pays good money for top-tier programmers and developers- more salary and better benefits than you'll find just about anywhere. Add to this the cost of relocating international researchers and it's mind-boggling to think about how much money they throw at attracting talent.
2. Vancouver is a natural choice to locate a new facility- high quality of life, proximity to Redmond, and most importantly a relatively deep talent pool- *especially in game programming*. MSFT is one of the few kids on the block that can compete directly with EA for top talent and it makes sense to set up shop in their back yard. There's no indication that this will be a game studio but I'd put some money on that bet.
3. MSFT can spin this as an immigration issue all they want, as it suits their political agenda, but the truth is that there is a large, growing, highly educated segment of the talent pool that has no interest in moving to the US, at any price.
As an aside, it is a common belief amongst Canuck MSFTies that there are more University of Waterloo grads at MSFT than any other alma mater. I don't know the actual numbers but I'm more than willing to believe it based on my encounters there. It would cost the company a whole lot less to relocate their annual recruits from Waterloo and other Canadian schools to a Canadian development center. Pardon me, centre, eh?
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
Another hardship Microsoft has run into is convincing people to move to the united states. I've traveled a great deal in the last 30 years and been to the states twice. I simply can't see myself ever going again. I had an offer from Microsoft to visit, fully paid. And I was going to go, if I could get diplomatic passage. No way am I submitting myself to the public entrance requirements. I'm not going to put up with draconian policies just to see some nice offices. Canada on the other hand is one of my favourite counties. And I'm more than happy to go there. As is everyone I have ever spoken to about such things. Rail and whine against labor practices if you wish. Just know that its not the only factor. Land of the free. Yeah... keep telling yourself that.
Except for when the skilled labour tries to blow us up
You are not reading what he said. He made two statements, both of which can be true.
(1) There is no shortage of programmers or software engineers in the U.S.
(2) There is a shortage of people who are interested in being paid next to nothing.
---
Seems statement "1" is true...hundreds of thousands of P. & S.E. have been idled due to work being shipped overseas.
Statement (2) is also true -- in the U.S. (which is where we are talking about there being a "shortage", and where MS claims to have difficulty hiring).
So it isn't the case that "there is a shortage of programmers" (i.e. statement 1 is true). What is true, is that MS is finding a shortage of entry level people that can be paid some fraction of what "market conditions" demand of salary.
Obviously, P & S.E. are "trained" -- not just anyone one off the street can do the job. If anyone could, there would be plenty of low-paid applicants to do the job.
In the US, 4 years a respectable college can easily top 120, probably 200K. However, MS can hire foreign workers where a 4 year degree is significantly cheaper and in some countries, paid for by the government. By hiring foreign workers, MS can get around all the worker protections and rights that have been enacted for American workers over the past century. American workers "cost" too much because socially, they have too many protections and have obtained too many benefits. So -- move a factory to China where you can hire child or slave labor (oops, that's been closed down until after the 2008 Olympics)...guess you'll have to pay them $20 a week with no benefits. Darn!
It's a slap in the face of "labor" -- labor being anyone who is, and has to work for a living. Those who are rich enough and have investments that will appreciate with inflation or at least have enough that they won't be bothered by the dollar's shrinking value.
The US economic inequality index (Gini Coefficient) has increased almost 10 percentage points in the past decade (was 37% for period 1990-2000, is 46.6% now). Why? Because the middle class is losing their jobs while the upper class is increasingly being served by non-residents (outsourced work). The US has one of the worse figures of any Western nation**. Another graph, The L-Curve (pdf) shows it using stacks of 100-dollar bills spread out over the length of a football field. The length represents the population of the US -- how many people have nothing would be the "0" yard line. The 50-yard line is the middle of the US population. The stack of bills there is 1.6 inches high (~$40,000). At the 100-yard line are the top earners, with the highest having a stack of $100 bills 30 miles high. That represents the ratio of how much the richest people have vs. the entire US population. Note, the 90 and 95 yard line families have stacks 4 inches and 12 inches, respectively. Compare that to the top families' 30 mile high stacks.
One can claim it is MS's duty to their stockholders -- but it is going for short-term profits at the long term health of the economy and *customers* who have been able to pay for their success. If MS wants to sell in India -- one Indian engineer stated that MS would have to reduce their MS Windows price to fit the "Indian" prices. So instead of selling their top OS at 250-300, it was suggested they reduce their price down to around $20 (otherwise they'll get "zero" as their products are pirated). To make the same profits, they'll have to reduce their costs by 10-15X, so...when engineers in India or China start costing more than 1/10th to 1/15th the cost of a US engineer, MS will be selling the high price copies to a market that will shrink, incredibly (who's driven the adoption of the PC if it hasn't been software engineers, progr
A house a short commute from the MSFT campus in Redmond is definitely more affordable than a house a short commute from Vancouver (downtown Vancouver where many software companies are located).
The cheapest house (think small 80 year old tear down) in Vancouver is probably around $600,000 in the current market. The minimum household income required to own a house was recently quoted at around $115,000 I believe.
Most developers in Vancouver do not make six figures.
Big companies are always trying to reduce their costs and increase their profitability. Govt. must stop them from trying to do this. This is affecting local populations by reducing their wages and profit margins. In India, large companies like Walmart, Pepsi, Coke, Nike are trying to sell their goods here and reducing the profits and taking away jobs from India. I think it is the responsibility of govt. to stop companies from reducing their costs and growing their business. That way, people in all the countries will be happy.
Very few Americans have work , no one has any money to buy anything from this company or any other , the government gets little tax and the whole economy collapses.
Yes thats an extreme example but thats where this outsourcing approach ultimately leads. People are NOT just "resources" that can be picked up and dropped at will. They're all part of the feedback mechanism that keep the economy going - no job , no money. No money , no spending. No spending , no economy. Its time business started to appreciate that.
OK, then all your companies should be restricted to sell stuff only in the US market.
The amount of people around here that do not understand that we live in a globalized economy is frankly staggering....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I know this was a joke, but it was one with bad taste and one that the racist with laugh the most about sadly enough.
I'm a foreigner, don't know much about the immgration system in the use from first hand, but the "globalization problem" is not a trivial thing and let's not make it racistic.
Let's remember that regardless what you think of the laws, the people that do immigrate to a country almost exclusively do it to improve their lives and not to "use" the country!
This regardless if they are high-educated and looking for an opportunity or if they are from the third world an hoping to make a good life in the west!
As an added thought to my comment on Leabre's post above ("Re:Lack of Talent Indeed"), I think a great career switch for software developers in the US should be setting up an executive recruiting business. Find great candidates, help them prepare for interviews, maintain great standards, great integrity, and exceed your customer's expectations. The value of such a business will surely grow over time. Such a business is a worthy business full of meaning for yourself, for the candidates you assist, and for the businesses for which you provide candidates.
In Europe you don't need to be a citizen of your respective host country to enjoy pretty much all the rights that citizens enjoy (except voting, which is understandable).
In the US not being a citizen is a real handicap for varied reasons.
There is a point to be made about what is best for both host country and new arrivals, I have got the impression that people in the US embrace citizenship more for the convenience than for the love of their host country.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You seem more like a hindrance.
As somebody dealing in a day to day basis with Indian colleagues I can say I have never experienced those problems. But alas, I am Mexican, maybe I come to the table with a different attitude,
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
> Now, having said that, I work on a team that's only about 20-30% US-born citizens. The rest are a mix of Russian, Romanian, Chinese,
> Indian, and Mexican. But they're not your stereotypical wage slaves hired to save costs. They're bright, intelligent contributors.
Well, yeah, people aren't less intelligent just because they weren't born in the US. They just cost less to employ.
> You can argue all the live-long day that Americans are the best in the industry (correct or not), but you can't reasonably state
> that *all* American developers are better than *all* non-American developers.
All you can say is that Americans are more American than non-American.
I prefer to see, learn and do. Welcome to reality buddy, the ride is bumpy, the adaptable thrive.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Thousands of people highly skilled in other countries willing to work for less money are saying you are not worth as much as you think you are.
You can deal with reality or keep whining about the facts driving global markets.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Most USian /.ers simply do not appreciate how horrible it is to go to the US in any capacity nowadays.
Somebody commented that immigration is at all time high, but we do not have qualification about the type of immigrant. Low skilled labour will surely want to go to the US, but people for a research lab can pick and choose and I am sure many of them don't take kindly to be treated as a criminal on arrival to the land of the free and to be resented for "stealing" an US job. The mindless nationalism post 9/11 is also scary for many people that have experienced nationalism for the sake of it first hand.
Add to that the general anti-science environment in many places in the US and you have a recipe for scaring away many highly skilled people.
Canada in the other hand has a long tradition of welcoming high skilled workers and treats all visitors with a smile in the face.
I am going to Vancouver next year, and as a Mexican I don't even need a visa. Compare that to the US requirements and frankly it is a no brainer.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I don't know anything about low-salary workers, but high-salary workers suffer from the H1-B system. At least half a dozen of my friends (from London) have been offered jobs (by Microsoft, Google, Six Apart and Qwest) in the US using the H1-B system, and let me tell you, it's a slow and painful process to put yourself through, especially considering that you're already uprooting your entire life. One friend was even considering moving to Central America and commuting for a few weeks at a time because the H1-Bs had run out for the year.
yes, look at your car, clothes, appliances, electronics, furniture.... All made out of the USA to make a little more profit. Software has no entitlement. We all want stuff cheap but want to be paid well for our work. Corporate greed will bring down capitalism as we know it. If may even bring down the USA. When the music stops things are going to get real ugly.
I hate to say this, but you definately arent a developer.
I am sure if you were aware of how much the system in canada is already saturated and lower then in the states ( Ubisoft is in Montreal , want to know why?).
Now add in the lax immigration policies in canada, you have the india or chinese come in say sure I will work for less then minimum wage, as it is still 10 times higher then in my own country...
Now we are stuck with even fewer jobs for ourselves, and the wage still going lower instead of higher. I have to agree with the statement that it is all about getting paid less and less.
Microsoft is business before anything else. Gates didnt make his money throwing his money away.
He would regularly come to Montreal to buy out any new little company making huge progress cuz he knows the dollar here ( especially back then) was worth much less.
Anyways....if you have doubts there are multiple articles about how outsourcing offshore is rampant, this is because you have a same if not higher level of competition raising the bar over there to become the best damn programmer..... you come here, everyone has their programmer analyst or networking certification. Even my granmother!
Sometimes the location of an office or R&D center is determined by politics. The company picks a location where it can offer the creation of a new office (the carrot) in exchange for favorable legislation. Once the new facility is opened, they can "enforce" this new relationship by threatening cutbacks or closing (the stick).
My guess is that MS hired someone from the pharmaceutical industry who explained how to manipulate government. Notice how the states that have large pharmaceutical R&D centers are non-supportive of any kind of initiative to get better prices on drugs. Any legislation that is not in the best interest of the drug industry results in a sudden downsizing of R&D facilities in that state.
Maybe this whole thing is just using payroll dollars to manipulate government. Either they want to extend this type of "relationship" to Canada, or the real end game is to force the US (maybe the state of Washington) to offer something to bring it back to this side of the border.
But then again, this is Microsoft R&D. Maybe they need people who know a little bit about standards compliance, eh?
"O woe is the US! O woe is M$!"
This should be good for Canada. More potential jobs is good, and the more of our own educated programmers staying in the country, the better.
Many people doing interviewing (above the HR gatekeeper) are interested in:
1) Establishing their power. They're looking for poeple willing to be subservient.
2) In IT especially, establishing their "smarts". They ask the Mensa-type trivia questions because (A) they know the answers and (B) unless you do, too, you'll give some variant of the "wrong" answer which makes them look even "smarter" than they already are. That the questions have fuck all to do with the real world is all the better, as should you actually give a functionally correct answer they weren't expecting, they can easily brush it off as "not really relevant to the job, just a probing question."
I find its best when interviewing (if you want the job...) to defer to "bosses" on #1 and to co-workers on #2. Bosses WANT you to be smart (this means less supervision and better output). Co-workers are looking to minimize internal threats to their positions, so they want someone smart enough to not drag them down but dumb enough not to be a threat.
The problem is: you are trying to get 5, 10 or 15 years experience with 50-70% of the local normal salary. [sarcasm] I can't fathom why you only get liars and incompetents! [/sarcasm]
When you want top talent and/or qualifications, YOU PAY. Else, you get what you pay for.
I know what I am talking about, I am stuck at hiring people with 20%-under-norm salary and temporary status... and half of the people we get suck. But sometimes, we get good candidates... and all we have to retain them is warm, fuzzy "you're in the family" feelings. We are so notorious for our stingy paycheques that a candidate in the last recruiting round asked about the salary when we called him for the interview, and declined the invitation when we said the amount.
You're not old until regret takes the place of your dreams.
Because Ubisoft is a French company, and it prefered going to French Canada instead of Ontario or BC, which are basically just 2 extra states in the US?
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
Linus would not like Usa citizenship , Average salary in Canada is lower than average salary in Usa , they are also aiming this.
other pathologies (such as women who MUST leave at office closing time rather than being able to work overtime like the rest of high tech).
I put it to you that the real pathology here is the men that are unwilling to leave the workplace at the end of working time, and that it's not unique to India.
After having previously worked for Microsoft for a number of years (and no I never drank the kool-aid), and constantly visiting friends that work in the MSRD division, I call B.S. on the title of the posting. It is at best misleading. Microsoft has, for a number of years, employed interns and researchers from multiple international institutions. Since now there are growing restrictions with visas, and border travel between B.C. and Washington state, it seems to be that it might just be a wise business decision to create an ADDITIONAL facility in Canada; possibly to accommodate additional researchers from other countries as well.
** Share what you know, learn what you do not **
It looks like Microsoft has found another way to not hire Americans.
Why would an American want to waste his/her time, money, and effort, studying a discipline where he/she would have to compete with $5/hour offshore labor?
Face reality folks, the computer tech career field is a dead in the USA. Sure, there are still some $100K+ developers in Silicon Valley, or NYC: those are the guys with big targets painted on their backs. And the poor fools are too arrogant to even realize it.
When have you ever read about massive layoffs for lawyers or CEOs?
Well, yeah, people aren't less intelligent just because they weren't born in the US. They just cost less to employ. I can't speak for my teammates' salaries, but did you miss the part where my Australian girlfriend makes as much (in all honesty, about ~4-5% more for being there 9 months longer) as I do?
(IANAL)
We don't need anymore damn foreigner spy terrorist grovelers working in the US for slave wages. Those days are over! Either MS pays the prevailing wage, or it sets up shop in China and shrivels to insignificance.
Many moons ago Microsoft had a development group in Vancouver, the result of their acquisition of a local software company that made a very good email program, that evolved in to the pre-Outlook Microsoft Mail program. I was the first Microsoft hire, post-acquisition. This was back when a 486/66 was a serious computer, I felt privileged to have one on my desk, and even tried some early betas of Windows NT on it.
Organizationally, we were a little piece of Redmond that wasn't in Redmond. Our security cards opened doors there; the cards of the sales pukes a couple of floors down didn't work in Redmond.
Looking back: decent money, great equipment, lots of toys. Some good perks. Significant pressure not to have a life apart from one's work. The group was eventually assimilated in to Redmond, and for a variety of reasons, I didn't go.
FWIW: I'm not a Waterloo grad (UBC, UofT).
...laura
Not trying to point out the obvious, but customs people everywhere can suck.
I have been hosed getting into Canada from the US before.
One instance you stated there was a mistake on her forms. They still let her in, after oh no, SHE had to get proof and a CORRECT copy?
Oh my, those horrible bastards wanting her to have legal forms filled out correctly.
As for my last screw up to getting into Canada?
I showed up for planning meetings to decide whether or not and if we were, how to implement a shop floor system for a manufacturing facility outside of Ottawa.
I had my laptop with me, because, well that's what people do when they travel.
The customs official insisted on speaking French to me. (I went in the bilingual line because it was shorter) My piss poor high school French got enough by to ask him to speak English, and when he said no, I asked if I could get a different agent or go to the other line. He said no. Escorted me to a security room.
Where I was told to wait. I took out my phone to let my call some people, (wife to let her know I had landed, coworkers to let em know I might not make it into the plant today, etc)
IMMEDIATELY someone came in and told me I was NOT allowed to use my cell phone from this area. They informed me if I tried again, they would confiscate it.
1.5 hours later, someone came back in and told me I was not going to be allowed into Canada since I was coming to steal all jobs from all Canadians. (It was in French, so I am sure it was more like doing a job a Canadian should do, but I suck at French) I asked again if they could speak in English, since my French was very poor.
They left, came back in 30 minutes with a "translator"
The two first officers spoke only in French, the translator translated for me. I responded in English, then the two officers went right on in French. The "translator" never translated what I said. Finally after ~6 hours I was able to purchase a short term work visa, and get out of there. Unfortunately by then the rental car counters had closed. So I called a coworker to come pick me up.
Another time, flying up to Toronto, I got denied entry completely. (I was going up to discuss data and hardware security for once we announced a plant closing) I got a connecting flight to Buffalo, rented a car, and drove up to go to the meetings. (Shh, don't tell the authorities)
By the same token, I have traveled up there probably 25 other times and not had any problems. Never had a problem in Hungary, UK, Brazil, China, Mexico or Japan either.
Not trying to start anything, just pointing out that customs officials can be horrible anywhere. (Also that customs officials competence probably has about zero to do with this move. It's just giving R&D people another option for where they can live)
I am 31337 or something.
(IANAL)
The problem with the American immigration system is that they have their priorities wrong. The American immigration system focuses on those that have family, unskilled or what have you. In contrast Canada favors skilled. Recently there was a study on immigration policies and they said systems like Canada are better for the country in the long run because skilled labor integrates better. Switzerland, Germany, UK, Australia all have skilled labor immigration programs and it works quite well for them.
And to think that people call Americans selfish. One would think that countries that claim to be more liberal than the US would want to help the poor, unskilled refugees of the world, give them a relatively safe place to live and better opportunities than they had back home. I guess not, eh? I guess in your country, if you had a Statue of Liberty, the inscription on the base would read "Your huddled masses? Your wretched refuse, yearning to breathe free? FUCK 'EM!! We don't want 'em here! We've got ours, and screw anyone who hasn't gotten theirs yet!"
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
Tech companies are doing it to themselves. Why would any recent high school graduate major in Computer Science when they know they will probably end up being replaced by a foreign worker on the cheap or worse, not even hired? If I had to do it all over, I wouldn't.
It's a cycle that just keeps going and going until all our white-collar jobs will be outsourced and there will be no middle class left. We can thank our government for that.
I can go on and on about this but I have neither the time nor the inclination.
Chaney in '08. It could happen people.
This city is like 75% immigrants.
Karma: Non-Heinous
High tech workers in British Columbia qualify for an exemption from normal labour laws. These are the regulations that don't apply to them:
- Employees are not to work more than five consecutive hours without a 30-minute meal break.
- Split shifts must be completed within 12 hours.
- Minimum daily pay.
- Employees must have 32 consecutive hours free from work each week.
- Overtime pay.
- Employees are entitled to either a paid holiday or extra pay when they work on a statutory holiday.
In other words, no overtime, no paid stat. holidays off, no lunches, and no upper limit on hours per week!Why was this done? The government granted these exemptions because the industry whined that having these rules in place were making us uncompetitive, and companies wouldn't want to come here. No mention was made that Canadian employees wouldn't want to work under these conditions, either. But hey, there's always desperate workers from other countries who'd be pleased to work mandatory 80 hour weeks!
Actually we look for the lowest price at a merely acceptable quality level. This is the root of many of our problems. This goes for both product purchases and employment.
You appear to have a completely delusional grasp of the situation -- not surprising as you are, after all, a Canook. First, you are ascribing behavior to Americans in general what is really the behavior (both traitorous and fraudulent) of the transnational corporations - which neither recognize American citizenship nor American soveriegnty. Also, you suggest that M$ is importing the smartest developers available. Oh yeah! When will such actions translate to their software development, dood??? Can't answer that one, I'll bet.
You treat America as if it is still a country, instead of a wholly-owned fascist subsidiary of Transnational Corporate Global.
FYI, every day around or over 1 billion people use products I had a hand in developing. I, and many others like myself, are fortunate if we can obtain jobs as laborers (in many cases working beside illegals who frequently walk off the job in severe weather). You appear as delusional as most Americans - which usually stems from wallowing in delusion (watching too much TV and movies/vides and not enough reading and thinking).
NAFTA was supposed to incorporate the easy access of all North Americans (Canadians, Americans, Mexicans) between the three countries - guess that wasn't the real reason for it after all, huh? I, for one, am not upset if we have fewer Canadians in America. All the ones I've met in IT and at M$ are neocon/neofeudalists and Bush supporters. Nutjobs one and all....
Dude what's your problem? Did I say Americans were selfish? Did I say say that American's were bad? NO, I said "American immigration system"
Did I say that other countries did not take in refugees? BTW This is exactly the boneheadedness that I see with some Americans. Have you bothered to look at the stats in other countries? Did you happen to know that Europe takes in huge numbers of African, and former Yugoslavian refugees?
But this is a p****g contest and futile because it avoids YET AGAIN the real problem of immigration and how to deal with it. It is the making of an emotional issue that should be carried out using rational thinking. BTW I am not a Republican, but I thought Bush was doing a good thing with the immigration issue.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
The start-up I currently work for is finding it near impossible to find "native" US workers to fill it's engineering reqs. It's not about the salary either, because we offer above average pay. There just aren't enough mid to entry level American software engineers available on the market. Maybe it's different in other parts of the country (we're outside of Boston, MA), but the number of available positions here is definitely larger than the talent pool.
There's a simple reason for that.
They want to put a hole in the condom and force you to marry them so they can stay.
Not really. The government is pretty loose on immigration from Japan and South Korea.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
You stereotype me ... and then in the very next sentance explain that my error is in stereotyping Americans.
... Now you know why I do stereotype Americans, if in fact you understood the above sentance.
... you expose that you think Microsoft is a software company. No. They, like every other publicly owned company are a for profit business that must generate wealth for their shareholders. Their goal is to make profits, pay stock dividends, increase shareholder value. It doesn't matter if they do this with crappy software, the point is the profit, and we all know they make incredible profits so they are obviously doing a lot of things right with those highly educated people they hire.
... except of course your laws that are supposed to protect the rights of people, which you no longer apply to even your own citizens.
... If you really were once a developer of products used by 1 in 6 people of the world ... but are now lucky to get work as a labourer.
... which the USA proceeded to do over and over again. In the case of Softwood Lumber, the USA lost ... and refused to respect 6 international trade rulings, which proved that Canada never dumped lumber on the US market. But screwing your best neighbour is the American way isn't it?
... but 10 times more jobs were created in other industries because of NAFTA. Our Federal finances have been in SURPLUS for 10 years! Our Federal debt is DECREASING!, Our economy has boomed over the last 10 years, like no other time in our history!
... China just has to drop the slightest hint that they may drop some of the massive American debt they've financed, and your economy takes another crazy step backwards and your dollar drops a couple more percent! Just look at the price of gold in US dollars, in the last 5 years it's gone from $250 / ounce to $650 an ounce ... purely due to the devaluation of your dollar! Hardly at all from supply and demand of the actual resource! If it wasn't so tragic, the way the USA has messed up it's finances would be freakin hilarious! You've totally squandered the benefits that NAFTA gave you.
...
Then
I dont treat America the way you indicate, in fact i'm shocked America even has border guards! Why have guards when you have no respect for your own borders and treat the world as if your laws apply everywhere?
I'm not at all delusional, I can see very clearly that you screwed up big time somewhere and have some major regrets that you can't deal with
Wow, it must really sting for you to have thrown out such an advantage. I can see why you are bitter.
When NAFTA was being formulated, I was very much against it. The USA refused to cover important Canadian export resources, leaving Canada wide open to be screwed on Salmon and soft wood lumber, and many other things
But, today, I can see that NAFTA has actually been a large benefit to Canada despite all the ways the USA has used it to screw us over. Sure, JUST LIKE YOU, we lost entire sectors of our economy, especially manufacturing to Mexico
Meanwhile look at your economy. Look at your federal finances!
And finally, to shred apart the last point in your pathetic story
I've been exposing the problems with the president YOU gave yourselves for years, as well as the american people abandoning their responsibility to defend their constitutional rights, and your judges that ignore their job and allow unconstitutional laws such as the Patriot Act to stand. Hell as a good observant Canadian, I'm a better American than you are!
Ju
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
Well I guess I do have some sympathy for your problems getting into canada when you chose the french side. Although those Canadian border guards did suck, they probably weren't even armed.
...
... despite Mandarin, Cantonese, Japonese, and East Indian languages being far more prominent here.
I would have taken a different approach and said nothing to the customs officers except for "I know that I have the right to be served in English or French, and I chose English". However, if it happened while flying into Quebec, say to drive from Gatineau into Ottawa, all bets are off. The Canadian Constitution does not fully apply in Quebec. They literally have language police that enforce laws regarding the prominence of french and suppression of English in many situations. But hey, thats their rules and your choice to enter their jurisdiction. When in Rome
Out on the west coast, i was forced to take high school french for university entrance
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
"Just because you found a couple of idiots willing to mod you up doesn't mean you made a coherent point." - by The One and Only (691315) * on Friday July 06, @09:39PM (#19775793)
I found nobody, they found my post here, first of all. Secondly, apparently I did make a coherent point, because I was modded up to +4, & apparently you & others modded it down to +2 only (no big deal, either way, but the point's there - idiots exist, because someone did mod my post down, but it's still in the positive range... unlike your posts here on this point).
LOL, man, you make NO sense, & you can "argue with the numbers" ok?? Try +4 init. moderation, & now @ +2 moderation anyhow, regardless of your modding it down (most likely you I suspect).
"You're complaining about being poor, but you bought a sports car?" - by The One and Only (691315) * on Friday July 06, @09:39PM (#19775793)
OH man... lol, this ought to prove to you that you do have problems with reading comprehension (if anything does OR can).
QUESTION: Where exactly did I say I was poor? Show me please, show us all, ok?
"You're complaining about not being well-paid due to living in a poor city, but you're not clever enough to move?" - by The One and Only (691315) * on Friday July 06, @09:39PM (#19775793)
I'm complaining about outsourcing of jobs, because in the long run (see my previous posts) this is only hurting EVERYONE in this nation, including employers (the more folks you get out of work, the higher the corporate taxbase goes (until they go "offshore") in case you did not know, when people move from one area to another, & sell off their homes in order to do so).
Plus, face it: When corporations fire people in downsizing ontop of outsourcing? You get a "hole" in the buyer's community & their ability to purchase goods above & beyond "needs" like rent/mortgages/taxes/food... that's harming these companies in the long haul as well, no doubt about it.
"And then, after having already given me two obvious examples of ways you could have made things better for yourself (not wasted money on a sports car, and moved to a less impoverished city), you expect the government to help you out?" - by The One and Only (691315) * on Friday July 06, @09:39PM (#19775793)
First of all: My last ride's engine gave out, I had NO choice, & needed a car (the car gets great reviews & has the best warranty coverage in the business, & is decent on gas as well + hauls A$$, & I love it... this is NO WASTE TO ME @ all, & better imo, than any SUV by far on several grounds (those things ARE 'gas hogs', bigtime).
Secondly: Do you think I can just "up & take off", just like that? I do travel largely for a living in this field, contracting around the nation, but it's not that easy to just relocate (I shouldn't HAVE to, because this nation functioned just fine decades before all of this outsourcing/downsizing madness happened, & folks had GREAT JOBS LOCALLY, in most ALL cities here, nationwide - this is NOT the case today, & I hold government responsible for not "corralling" business' in this regard!)
Apparently, you don't have anything holding YOU down, like family/friends/properties... put yourself in others' shoes for once, & do not generalize your existence situation & expect everyone else has the EXACT SAME ONE.
"What, do you want the Republicans to buy you a fucking helicopter, or all the high-octane gasoline you want?" - by The One and Only (691315) * on Friday July 06, @09:39PM (#19775793)
No, I just want them to stop this lunatic war we pay for, & we don't even get cheaper gas prices from it. I want outsourcing stopped, for all of the reasons I noted above as well in this post, & others in this thread (& yes, apparently others DO agree with me, hence my being modded up (unlike yourself)).
"Although, before trying to do any of that, you should work a little on your English. No
While you are correct on some things, others pertaining to economics, you are - as is predicatable - woefully wrong. But then, you Canooks, Brits and New Zealanders are a bunch of righteous, ignomonious pips. You can't help yourselves, and you Canooks are simply the descendants of America's first draft-dodgers (from the War of the Revolution, you Brit suck up!). While it is OK for others in the Americas to criticize America, Canooks have simply never, ever earned the right to do so (although I am in agreement with your overall cricitisms) as you are consistently too stupid, too ignorant and still are stuck in the mired nationalistic thinking. Please re-read my first post, nimrod.....
Wow.
... coming from an AMERICAN?!? That has got to be the biggest joke written in slashdot this year!
... maybe this is why there's so little reason, and so much war-mongering on your side of the border. All the people that could see through your government's lies came up here!
... In such an extreme way that when some american women spoke their opinion, as is their right, it started a national uprising! ... The Dixie Chicks have long since been proven correct. They were able to stick it out.
... We had our own beach to invade on D-Day. I bet you didn't know that! one of the toughest to invade, and we took it faster than you took any of your beaches! How about Italy? It was Canada that Freed a good chunk of Italy! How about Holland? It was Canada that Freed Holland! How about the thousands of Canadian merchant marines that dies bringing supplies to europe to keep the Allied war effort going?
... its the US that has the most self righteous, stupid, ignorant, and patheticly nationalistic 'thinkers'.
... CANADA! First! Our rescue teams! LONG BEFORE YOUR OWN FORCES WENT ANYWHERE NEAR HELPING THOSE PEOPLE WHO NEEDED IT MOST! We only cared that people needed help, we didn't ignore them for being black! Your country has 10x our population, a far bigger economy, a far stronger military ... but it was CANADA that saved those victims on your soil!
... it wasn't just Americans that died that day.
... YOU DID by training and funding him in the 80's to fight your battles against the Soviets. And he is slowly bankrupting the USA with the war, using the same technique that he used against the soviets that led to the end of the cold war and collapse of the USSR.
I'd like to officially present to you the slashdot award for MOST IGNORANT DUMB FUCK OF THE WORLD.
The mere thought that Canadians are mired in nationalistic thinking
Yes, we have taken many of your draft dodgers over our history
We have every right to criticize America! You screw up everything you touch! You create most of your enemies by trampling around the world like its your own backyard! You've stripped away the most basic rights of your people that your ancesters fought for independance for! You abandon your own people after major hurricanes! Some of you fools want to eliminate science in schools and teach religion in it's place!
YOU put 'supporting our president' above all logic, all reason, and all evidence before invading Iraq!
Learn some world history. Learn about WWI and Vimy Ridge. Learn about what Canada did in WWII
Learn about more than just the US point of view. You have no clue!
6 Billion people agree
Tell me who it was that got into New Orlean's lower 9th ward to save thousands of hurricane victims?
WE knew there was no justifiable reason to invade Iraq, while you ran in listening to Bush's easily disproven lies! We knew that as bad as Hussein was, Iraq was already contained and relatively stable, Hussein kept Al Qeada out to protect his own power, and that disturbing things would kill far more innocent civilians than Hussein ever did! Tell me, how many millions of innocent civilians has the US killed in it's loosing war? How many millions of Iraqi's that didn't care about the US before now want to see you dead because of how you've ruined their lives? How many new enemies have you created for yourselves here?
WE DO support the war in Afghanistan, the REAL source of the power behind 911! WE are the forces in Afghanistan that are stepping out away from the safe areas to clear out Al Qeada while other countries sit in safety.
WE lost 42 Canadians in 911
WE, like you, have also lost more armed forces lives fighting Al Qeada than we lost in 911, 66 as of two days ago.
WE DON'T support nuclear military dictatorships! (your best friends, Pakistan)
WE DIDN'T CREATE Osama Bin Laden
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
It's impossible to both contribute and moderate in the same discussion--although my criticism of your initial post clearly did influence later down-moderations. (Haven't you ever noticed that political rants automatically get modded up by whoever agrees with them, regardless of whether they're sensible or coherently written?) In any case, keep making excuses for yourself--I don't care about your family anyway, but you're the one screwing them over, not the Republicans, and if you ever decide to man up and take responsibility for your own life you'll realize that.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
"In any case, keep making excuses for yourself--I don't care about your family anyway, but you're the one screwing them over, not the Republicans" -
... & who the "F" are you to judge me? Are you the Lord Almighty?? No, I know not...
Funny how you avoided my question from my last post, eh? Too easy... learn to READ, before you shoot your mouth off next time, ok?? Do yourself a favor, get that "hooked on phonics", alright???
The republican party is "for the working man", right? Funny, you don't contest what Ronand Reagan the republican did to the Air Traffic Controllers Union, OR how the gov't. could (and SHOULD) step in regarding outsourcings of US jobs either.
(Clue - without working class folks having the disposable income to purchase products they used to, constantly?? You get, WHAT YOU GET, in an eroded large segment of the buying public in the working stiff class not having disposable income @ the levels NEEDED for companies themselves to move their product & inventories... OR, is the US auto makers having troubles NOT indicative of this, for example?)
The economic situation today out there, no questions asked, overall for this nation (despite the b.s. on the almighty TOOB)? Is NOT GOOD!
Argue with the numbers, the REAL NUMBERS, & tell me differently!
See, I have been all over this nation since 1994 up to today & I did my observations (large metros always do well, because folks need infrastructure support, but large metro housing COSTS HUGE, especially larger cities such as NY City &/or Atlanta Ga. (I lived in both working for around 6-7 years total time over the past decade now)... however, smaller cities? Not so good...
I have seen the plant closings, businesses folding left & right, all over this nation... & rising prices on everything (mainly utilities & gasoline, when we ought to be paying LESS after this IRAQ debacle! If you're going to beat someone up?? Might as well rob them too, the spoils of war & all that, imo @ least! We're the ones paying for it, so... where is OUR "ROI" as citizenry of this nation?)
I see jobs disappearing, GOOD jobs, being outsourced (the topic of this discussion basically)...
All while we pay for this war based on LIES, outright lies (no WMD's found, etc.).
"and if you ever decide to man up and take responsibility for your own life you'll realize that" - by The One and Only (691315) * on Saturday July 07, @07:46PM (#19784093)
LOL, listen: I do pretty ok in this life, though I make less than I used to for the same work, even being far more experienced than I was, 9-10 years ago. This is a direct results of outsourcing, as well as my fellow IS/IT/MIS folks being put out of jobs... this only hurts ALL of us, in the long run, no questions asked (monies I used to spend, or others in my field, are no longer there keeping Peter alive, who buys from Paul, ad-infinitum (the economic process itself)).
I am fortunate: I actually STILL have work, but I know many guys in this field, from my city (and, they're pretty damn good too) that just bit it, for a HUGE financial firm... who outsourced their jobs to India!
I wouldn't want to be they, telling their kid "Hey son/daughter - that education I was saving for you for? Sorry... it's all gone now!" ala "Rain on the Scarecrow, Blood on the Plow" by John Cougar Mellencamp.
Above all - Why don't you take your own advice above, & mine from earlier, & get "hooked on phonics" & learn to answer questions others put to you (instead of avoiding them, it only makes you look foolish & evasive)!
APK
Getting good programmers does not help if their software still sucks. Have you ever tried Windows Mobile? It crashes more often than Windows 3.11 did. Blech.
strike
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
You're not listening - I take no issue with what you say - but America is not nationalistic as it is being run and controlled by transnational corporate interests....that's the reality, dood, and I have glimpsed reality.....(I do recommend better reading comprehension program for Canooks, though).
That is soooo true.... ; (
Pot, kettle, black.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Yes, please, recommend some good reading for me ... I'm sure there's plenty of books in your school system you could have me read. ... oh wait, i forgot, your 'Every child left behind' program has eliminated reading from your kid's curriculum, making any remaining books a waste of space in your schools.
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"