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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.
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
Don't bother. It sounds to me like they are opening this up in Canada because it's easier to get low-cost employees from India or China into Canada than it is to get them into the US. I don't get the impression that they're doing this because it's hard to get Canadians into the US, especially since it isn't.
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.
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.
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.
It could also be that they want to attract skilled Canadian programmers who are not interested in becoming Americans.
Ian Ameline
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....
The question is. . . Will the Canadians put up with it?
Or will they insist that Microsoft hire qualified Canadian programmers first (as the US gubermint refuses to do)?
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.
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.
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
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
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It provides a better or less expensive products for the consumer.
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It provides a lucrative job for the immigrant.
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It increases company profits, which does the shareholders good.
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The increase in profits means an increase in taxes paid,
a definite public good.
Seems to do a least some good. What's more, a profitable company grows, increasing demand for more employees including non-immigrants. In other words, a job given to an immigrant does not necessary mean a job lost to a non-immigrant.Major rule of economics: Very few things are a zero-sum game.
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.
I meant green cards, my bad.
That's not a minor mistake: H1Bs are temporary visas, green cards are immigrant visas. Green cards can't lead to salary depression for American workers because people hired on green cards are American workers, with all the same labor rights and mobility. So, your diatribe makes even less sense for green cards. Either you just don't know what you're talking about, or you're deliberately misrepresenting the facts to push your political agenda.
I have an education thank you and my salary is 3x the nation average. So stop being a little dick.
So, you are making $130k/year and you're still whining that you're not being paid enough. And because you're not satisfied with your already big salary, you're willing to bad-mouth companies, keep highly skilled and productive people out of the US, and make the US less competitive.
With people like you around, it's no wonder if the US loses the software industry to China and India, just like we lost the auto industry, steel, TVs, and VCRs to overseas.
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
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.
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"
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.