Which Google Should Congress Believe?

theodp writes "In Congressional testimony last month, Google's VP of People Operations told the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration that, due to limits on the number of H-1B visas, Google is regularly unable to pursue highly qualified candidates. But as Google stock tumbled in after hours trading Wednesday, Google's CEO blamed disappointing profits on a hiring binge and promised Wall Street analysts that the company would keep a careful eye on headcount in the future. So which Google should Congress believe?"

Comments

The two are not mutually exclusive

[bartyboy]

The lack of qualified candidates doesn't mean that Google can't hire people with less/no talent.

For all we know they hired 10,000 janitors and have trouble finding programmers.

Re:The two are not mutually exclusive

[vfrex]

I was about to hit the trigger on the same title. The two are not mutually exclusive, and this article is flame bait.

Re:The two are not mutually exclusive

[Red Flayer]

For all we know they hired 10,000 janitors and have trouble finding programmers.

Or because of a lack of real talent to recruit, they had to hire 10,000 PoS programmers instead of 3000 good ones, hence high payroll and emplyee overhead expenses. Could be used as more fuel for their arguments to increase the H1B visa cap.

Re:The two are not mutually exclusive

[Jeremy_Bee]

Thirded, (not a word I know). This article should be removed, it's junk.

Re:The two are not mutually exclusive

[eln]

Maybe they're having trouble because the best programmers know they can get hired anywhere they want and don't have the patience to deal with Google's ridiculously long and convoluted hiring process.

Re:The two are not mutually exclusive

[PCM2]

Just as 9 women can't make a baby in 1 month, adding more people to a project rarely speeds it up and almost always slows it down.

Just remember, though -- while 9 women may not be able to make a baby in 1 month, they most certainly can make 9 babies in 9 months, while even the most talented woman would have a hard time producing more than 2.

Re:The two are not mutually exclusive

[Retric]

Yea, the article is junk but so is the H1B quota system. It seems like the simple solution is for the government to auction off H1B's.

If Google really want's someone they can offer 50k but they can probably get local talent for cheaper. My guess is H1B's would balance out to around 25K a pop and most Americans would be fine competing on that type of playing field.

Re:The two are not mutually exclusive

[eln]

Sure, but then you have all of the additional overhead costs associated with maintaining 9 babies instead of just one.

Re:The two are not mutually exclusive

[dup_account]

OMG! Finally someone has a bright idea on how to fix this! Please mod up as insightful.

Also, I think them getting in on this side of the H1B argument goes against their "do no evil" policy. I may not seem so microly, but macroly it hurts everyone except those 70 people they want to hire.

Re:The two are not mutually exclusive

[dup_account]

This is why our stock market driven economy is so messed up. Gee, they didn't make super numbers this quarter because they were building for the future....

I love this quote "Investors wanted less spending, more growth".... And I'd like someone to leave a pound of gold on my doorstep every day.... Hmm, ain't happening. I better punish Google stock for it.

Re:The two are not mutually exclusive

[Kadin2048]

Then either leave Silicon Valley -- there are plenty of lower-cost places in the U.S. with talented tech workers -- or pay more.

Just because some company wants to hire programmers at $35k a year, while staying in a high-cost area, doesn't mean they have some magical right to do it.

Re:The two are not mutually exclusive

[PCM2]

So what are you saying? I need to have sex with 9 women this month in order to optimize overall baby production?

Not exactly. The Mythical Man Month teaches us that when you're having woman problems, throwing more women at the problem is never the solution.

The formula is n(n-1)/2 ... that is, for each group of women n, the number of channels of communication in the group is equal to n times n-1 (where the 1 is you), divided by two.

Because of this, Fred Brooks recommends that you not engage any baby-producers until the overall system of women is well architected. Note that this process can take an incredibly long time. Another solution is to employ women with off-the-shelf babies, which often come with a third-party support contract.

Stupid question

[Verteiron]

Whichever one makes the larger campaign contribution.

Duh.

how about believing that this is a false dichotomy

[moderatorrater]

Seriously, just because Google says they hired too many people doesn't mean that they don't also believe there's a shortage of qualified people because of immigration. There are a lot of other jobs at Google that don't involve development, and their statement to wall street might make sense if you view it as, "yeah, we hired too many people, including under-qualified developers."

Qualifications

[Pyramid]

And by "qualifications", they mean, "willing to work for pennies"

Re:Qualifications

[moderatorrater]

Actually, by "qualifications" they mean "people who have Ph.D.s"; they're similar to what you were saying, I know, but the difference is there.

Re:Qualifications

[Pyramid]

No. I meant what I meant. Ph.D. or Devry graduate is irrelevant. Generally, most companies complaining they can't find qualified American candidates really mean, 'We can't find qualified native candidates for the paltry compesation we're offering". No wonder considering the cost of higher education these days.

I work at a huge company with plenty of H1B holders. The ratio of talented to useless slob H1B holders is roughly the same as "home grown" employees here. It's just that the H1B folks COST LESS.

Re:Qualifications

[TheRaven64]

Last I checked, PhDs were not affected by H1B caps (at least, not those from all countries of origin), since there were other visa programs available for those with advanced degrees.

Re:Qualifications

[phantomfive]

I have to disagree completely on this point, at least in the programming industry. In our company, we are looking for good people; those who know how to self-manage and have strong programming skills, or at least the ability to grow into strong programming skills. If we are able to hire two people a month then we are really happy. We run into people who have these kinds of problems:

1. They are applying for a job they are clearly not qualified for. Maybe they studied system administration for two years at DeVry and then apply for a programming job.
2. They can't program at all. "Well, it looks like on your resume you have 6 years programming industry experience in java. Could you please write on the board a program to swap two variables? ............um.....yeah, something like that...." (I did not make that example up, she literally did not know how to swap two variables).
3. Once a month or so we run into a highly talented programmer who has been in the industry for a long time and really know what they are doing. These guys are always interesting to talk to so I love doing interviews with them because I always learn something new. Unfortunately they are looking for a short term consulting gig and we are looking for people to stay with us in the long term.

And this is all BEFORE we even talk about salaries. We are willing to pay enough, we just can't find the people. Furthermore, I don't know anyone who can't find a job. Recent college graduates might have a little trouble, but it's because they don't know how to look, not because there are not jobs. Try looking at smaller companies, they generally treat their employees better, have more potential, and are easier to get hired into than giants like google. If you are a good programmer and can't find a job, then let me know because first of all I won't believe you and second of all I want to hire you.

Outsourcing?

[Renaissance 2K]

I didn't realize IT companies weren't allowed to hire American workers.

Re:how about believing that this is a false dichot

[Otter]

While that's theoretically true, it's funny to see everyone here rushing to embrace the "American programmers are incompetent! We need more immigrants, now!" position if that's what it takes to defend Google's honor.

Re:how about believing that this is a false dichot

[djones101]

American programmers are qualified alright on average, but there aren't enough of them. Personally, I'd disagree with that statement. The lack is qualified programmers that live in the tech-rich areas of the country. I've met certified programmers who could make code practically sing, putting others in Silicon Valley to shame. The difference was they didn't want to live in LA, or Houston, or any other tech-rich area. They enjoyed their smaller cities where you don't fight a 2-hour backup in the morning for a 15-minute drive. The qualified programmers are out there, the companies just need to learn that they need to look beyond the silicon corridor and the outsourcing countries.

Cheap Labor Lobbyists

[Doc Ruby]

Of course both are the same Google - and its not talking out of both sides of its billion-dollar mouth. If Google could hire more H1B workers in its "hiring spree", then it would cost less, and therefore profits on the same (or even somewhat less) revenue would be higher.

Google, like other American corporations, wants to hire H1B "guest workers" because they're cheaper than citizens or fulltime residents. Guest workers subsidize their American work time by spending more time back home in their foreign country, which usually costs less to live in than the US. So they can ask for lower pay than their American competition, who have to live here full time. With our higher cost labor protections, environmental protections, and overall higher quality of life - for most everyone - with its higher cost.

So Google wants to build its brand and infrastructure on the vast, longterm American investment in the Internet and creating most of its indexed content. It wants to tap the PhDs that Americans have invested in producing to make a less-valuable foreigner workforce more productive. And it wants to charge American corporate customers the money with which it pays them, while pitching expensive equity to mostly American investors. All underwritten by foreigner labor, even though there are plenty of Americans available, though at a higher price.

I'm not surprised: that's business. It's also kinda evil.

Re:Cheap Labor Lobbyists

[Onan]

(Disclaimer: I do work for Google, and do occasionally provide input on the hiring of individual candidates, but I have no unusual insight into our nation-level hiring strategies. I'm not speaking for them in any official sense, just opining about what I've seen of the culture.)

Everything that I've see of Google's hiring practices indicates that their primary goal is acquiring the absolute best, most brilliant people possible. I'm sure at some point cost is a concern, but it's not a primary thing that drives the decision of whether to hire particular engineers.

Finding and hiring fantastic people is an astonishingly hard thing to do, and we invest substantial resources into doing it. We absolutely never have as many extremely-gifted candidates as we'd like, and probably never will. But every single hiring process discussion I've heard has been about "how can we find better candidates" or just "how can we find more candidates". I have definitely never heard anything even vaguely like "how can we find cheaper candidates".

If you posit that exceptionally talented engineers are equally distributed among all populations with access to at least a moderate level of technology, then probably about half of them in existence are non-American. (And even if you believe that they are unequally distributed, it's hard to dispute that at least some nontrivial number of them are non-American.) I believe that Google's interest is in getting access to that additional set of exceptionally talented engineers, not just getting more engineers of the same talent for less money.

There's no contradiction...

[curunir]

Google is being entirely consistent. In one case, they argued that there should be more H1-Bs so that they can hire more qualified people. The other, came in response to questions from analysts that wanted to know why Google's net profits only increased $204m (to $925) while gross profits rose $1.41b to $3.87b. Quick math will show that the gross grew by a much larger percentage than the net. Analysts have gotten so used to Google thoroughly beating expectations that when their net results only met expectations, they wanted an explanation. Google gave it to them, saying that they hired lots of people. Nowhere did they say that they hired too many people or that they shouldn't have hired those people.

The two messages can be combined to give the message that Google wants to hire even more people which will hurt their numbers in the near term but lead to a healthier and more profitable company in the future. There's nothing inconsistent about that message.

Believe Both

[PPH]

Google was unable to hire sufficient numbers of qualified (i.e. third world minimum wage) programmers. As a result, they were forced to employ overpaid local talent who spent most of their day posting snotty remarks on /.