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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."
Same here. I would much more expect they made a deal with the canadians to boycott the Open Document format if they agreed to build a Billmart in vancouver. Either that or it's related to lobbyists somehow.
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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.
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.
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.
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!
Exactly. I have two friends that have had incidents relating to American laws to protect american workers.
One WAS working in the 'states, but his visa ran out. The company was unable to renew his work visa because he hadn't completed his CSC degree. He HAD been working for this company for 3 years and getting anyone else up to speed would take a LONG time as he was lead developer for a large system. The argument given was that there are americans that are better qualified for the role, i.e. people with degrees who are American citizens that would love the job (which is questionable as the pay wasn't amazing). He did have >10 years programming experience, but that obviously isn't equivalent to someone with a "degree".
The other friend was an artist for gaming companies (he worked at Canadian rockstar for a while and more recently has been art lead at other companies in Canada). He was told straight out by american interviewers, "Great portfolio, wish we could hire you, but you have no degree and we have to hire an American that is "better" qualified."
"If you are going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
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!
Then throw in the pervasive anti-American sentiment that continues to grow all around the world, and well, we Canadians don't look so bad anymore. We're far from perfect, we still have dirty dirty politicians and high tax rates, but to many people we're seen as a much lesser evil than our southern neighbors. I'm going to get flamed for this, but you guys need to start working to clear your name. Maybe a decade ago, the USA was a land of riches, I even contemplated relocating for a development job... then Dubya showed up and changed everything around. Not since Truman has there been a worse hated US president around the world. People are afraid of the USA. We see how badly their own citizens are treated, I can't even imagine how bad it is for immigrants.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I have looked into Canadian Immigration, as a foreign student there, and it can be difficult for unskilled/lower skill labourers to get in, for the people MS would want to recruit, it would not be a problem. You need 67 points on a 100 point scale. A college degree gets you about 20, a job offer 15, knowledge of English 16, being 21-35 gets you 10. That's 61, take some French classes and you're in.
This sig has not been evaluated by the FDA. It is not designed to diagnose, treat, prevent, or cure any disease.
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.
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
Extending the trend to it's ultimate ...
You have one "american" employee leading an "american" company with 100,000 employees from every other country on earth.
The products which cost pennies to produce- are nonetheless priced at "full retail" in the american market while being sold for much lower prices profitably in other countries. And of course those products are either gimmicked ("indonesian only" $25 windows) or have laws making it illegal to reimport them to the US (My blood pressure pills-- 10 cents in india, $5 here-- illegal to import and sell for 50 cents).
The one "american" only pays taxes on realized profits and income. The rest is funny money stored in various ways. Net result to American- nothing really. Net result to the company- enormous.
Should I buy that companies products? Not if I can help it.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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."
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.
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"
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.
For a nice story about taxes paid by American corporations, click here.
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.
Ha Ha Ha Hah Heh Heh Ho Ho... You're so funny. Have you actually, ever seen lower prices because of exporting labor? Oh, and before you try... You must match the quality that you could get before the big glut of exporting... Have you seen the wafer thin shirts at the Gap these days? Won't last one spin in the dryer.
It provides a lucrative job for the immigrant.
So you're standing in line to open the borders with Mexico? That would help an immigrant. Why do I need to give up my job to help an immigrant? Is their country of origin sending the US cash to make up the differences? Are they funding social security? Setting up a downsizing fund for all the displaced people?
The increase in profits means an increase in taxes paid, a definite public good.
Yep, increases in tax revenue for Canadians for people paying sales taxes here. That certainly helps our community.
-- God I hope you people never ever use any public services... But at the same time, I hope you get sick just as your job gets outsourced real soon now. Or better yet, I hope you get married and have children, so you can realize that it takes more than your personal might to live in this world.
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.