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Obama Says Offshoring Fears Are Unwarranted
alphadogg writes "The perception that Indian call centers and back office operations cost US jobs is an old stereotype that ignores today's reality that two-way trade between the US and India is helping create jobs and raise the standard of living in both countries, US President Barack Obama told a gathering of business executives in Mumbai on Saturday. President Obama's remarks come after some moves in the US that had Indian outsourcers worried that the US may get protectionist in the wake of job losses in the country. The state of Ohio, for example, banned earlier this year the expenditure of public funds for offshore purposes. US exports to India have quadrupled in recent years, and currently support tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs in the US, he said in a speech that was also streamed live. In addition, there are jobs supported by exports to India of agriculture products, travel and education services. President Obama, who is in India on a three-day visit, said that more than 20 deals worth about $10 billion were announced on the first day of his visit."
The H1-b fraud is what kills it for most Americans that stumble upon offshoring's negative qualities.
You don't go to India for US jobs, especially when you're millions of US jobs in the hole.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
The reality is that those jobs are already in India and aren't coming back.
(Yes, I'm aware of the less than a handful of companies that reversed outsourcing of their call centers after constant complaints from customers about not being able to understand a word out of "Kevin" from Bangalore's mouth. Outsourcing firms are much better with the English these days.)
My admittedly limited understanding of this is that of course it costs us jobs, because it's very expensive to hire US employees compared to the costs of hiring employees in most other countries in the world. (The transaction costs of all of the employee rights and rules and regulations are massive. It's helpful to live in a society with some of them, but there's a massive cost. Think of how massive and absurd so much of HR is.) So between that and the standard of living, labor is cheaper elsewhere. Which means that companies make more money by producing products or services elsewhere. Which both drives prices of products and services down. This in turn raises the standard of living by making products and services less expensive. But the beneficial effects are spread across the entire economy, while the losses are concentrated and massive to the people who lose their jobs.
Economists say the widespread effects are a net gain. I don't know if I believe them--because I haven't done the math, and I've known a lot of economists who aren't very empirical.
At the same time, our gini coefficient (i.e. the divide between the rich and the poor) is increasing, which is probably a bigger problem.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
The state of Ohio, for example, banned earlier this year the expenditure of public funds for offshore purposes.
One of the many things that was possible with Governor Strickland, and not Head Banker-elect Kasich.
The only shame is that Kasich got elected as Head Banker, instead of the state retaining Governor Strickland. Now we get a Wall Street banker that compares himself to an East Coast thug. By how he's talking to the media, he's not going to step aside; the Head Banker's simply going to exact revenge.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Harley Davidson is building an assembly plant in India to assemble American parts. Why not ship the entire (pre-built) motorcycle to India? Well, because India has tariffs that essentially double the price
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
"Create job abd raise the standard of living in both countries".
This statement is only true if you count the rich getting richer in the US. I fail to see how losing your middle class income job to outsourcing raises your stadard of living.
If I live in a more developed country, why the fuck should I tolerate this? Being a sovereign nation means having the ability to regulate trade up to and including stopping it completely. Since, as you freely admit, foreign trade is utterly screwing us over, that sounds like a pretty good idea right now.
His job will not likely be outsourced to India for quite some time.
Obama should gather a little bit of data on the tech sector. IBM alone has hired 80,000 people in India in the last 8 years. Meanwhile, my colleagues and I have not had raises in the last 5 years. We aren't a group of chump manufacturing people putting tops on bottoms either. We develop a lot of the firmware in the high end systems, and do high level hardware design. We've been told no back fills in the US. The only new people are in cheaper regions.
I'm sure our friends at HP, Oracle, Dell, etc are up to the same nonsense.
Is President Obama taking into account MY personal costs when I require internet tech support and have to use my cell phone minutes? Not to mention the difficulties of the language barrier when you can hardly understand what they're saying due to their thick accents that further complicates matters and takes up yet more of my valuable time? Does he understand that they can hardly understand me either, so we go back & forth repeating ourselves trying to resolve the issue, taking up yet more time and costing ME more money?? I think not.
What he said about India could have well applied to China more, as the US exports more products to China than to India. But he, and the other politicians, did not say the same things to China. The only reason being that China is now the main competitor and so we have to demonize it and please countries like India and Vietnam, exactly like how we pleased China 30 years ago -- opened up our market without asked for the equivalent level of opening up, established relation with Mao's regime which was a million times more suppressive than the current one, and kicked out Taiwan from th UN, in order to fight against the then biggest competitor -- the Soviet Union. The problem with this strategy is that while we may constraint one competitor, we are creating another new major one for ourselves down the road. And we the common people pay the costs. History repeats itself again and again.
The canonical article on this topic, by the founder of HowStuffWorks:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
That is $ 10 Billion coming in to the US - by exporting products (33 planes from Boeing, 414 Jet Engines from GE, etc.) to India. RTFA ... oh, wait, this is Slashdot.
The US trade deficit with India is already over $7B this year through August; heading to top $10B this year. That will be among the highest annual deficits, though Bush/Cheney got deficits as high as $12B+. August 2009 saw the only monthly trade surplus with India in well over 20 years, $34 million; the rest of the months total to something like a quarter $TRILLION more spent on India than India spent on the US. It's obvious that the parallel growth in the US and India leaves the US with less money from our jobs and more money in India for its jobs.
Of course, the corporate profits on all those jobs are not counted in trade stats. The real competition isn't between US labor vs Indian labor. It's between labor in either country, and the corporate owners who run the system, keeping the profits among themselves and their banker partners.
--
make install -not war
It is getting to the point where outsourcing will start costing US companies money. In my current employment situation, we outsource the management of the network infrastructure to AT&T. They manage the firewalls, load balancers and switches. However everything is managed from Singapore. Whenever I need to discuss network design decisions or changes with a real Cisco certified engineer, I have to do it on Singapore time. They don't have any engineers in America anymore. All of their project managers seem to be in India. They must be a getting a great discount, because my PM doesn't know jack. Every time I need a question answered, he has to ask someone else.
Anyone who has dealt with AT&T knows that getting change orders processed is a complete PITA. When you add a 12 hour time difference on top of it, it is amazing that anything gets done at all.
Our solution is that we are going to hire a network engineer here in America. AT&T can bugger off. We are an American company. We are hosting our servers in an American data center on US soil. Our vendor should have people who can work with us during our regular business hours. I'm all for having people on the other side of the world who can do things during a midnight (local time) maintenance window. I'm not all for having to wait until 9pm to have a conference call to discuss things. I'm even more put off by dealing with people who barely speak my language and don't have the technical competence to keep up.
The question is what happens if you had to hold the H1-b/etc. candidate to the same standards(and qualifications) as the US one? If firms like Patni can't prove that the foreign candidate can meet the same (impossible) standards, they haven't proven that a US citizen can't do it.
Of course, that might mean that the qualifications get skewed to include language proficiencies and such things that US citizens obviously can't do. That could be addressed by having them act in good-faith towards the citizen, and hire them. Then give the hired person a bit more power by allowing them to report attempts to circumvent (e.g. their projects are designed to fail).
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Yes, thats the actual US unemployment rate when you take into account those who gave up looking. And in return for outsourcing jobs he cites $10B in export deals. Really? That's 1/8 of AAPL's yearly revenue. That's 1/60 of what the Fed just printed to buy Treasury bonds.
Sure you can ask those questions. You'll just look stupid, because the answers are in the fucking article.
Logically if there is a future when robots do all our jobs, you'd be better off in the countries which treat their jobless well.
How long do you think the robots will 'treat their jobless well'?
The primary source of this entire argument that outsourcing everything to India or China is good for America is Larry Summers. Mr Summers served as Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, where he orchestrated NAFTA and the continued opening of the US market to China with the exact same arguments as now. During the Bush years, he served as the president of Harvard, where he supervised a massive drop in the endowment and massive annoyance to everybody who had to work with him, until he was booted out over some foolish remarks about the capabilities of women in science. And more recently under Obama, he served as the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, which I'm positive is where Obama got the ideas that he's spewing here.
He's been wrong throughout his entire career, but because his mistakes make a small group of people very rich, he manages to get more and more power. Compare that to someone like Paul Krugman, who regularly gets his forecasts correct but is ignored because his policy responses would involve giving ordinary people a helping hand.
I am officially gone from
they deserve jobs India can do for a cheaper price?
You lost me at "tax and spend". We should get past bumper-sticker assertions, especially when they're not even right. I guess "tax less but spend more" isn't as catchy, but it seems to work for the Republicans.
My comments are my own, and do not represent the views of my employer, my spouse, my children, or my cats.
You know, Arafat would say one thing in English, and then
another in Arabic.
The linked article quotes him speaking against outsourcing,
and then he goes to India and speaks favorably of it. He's not
using a different language; but it's the same idea.
I believe we have a word for this in English: it's called 'lying'.
The rest of the world is evolving rapidly into highly educated, highly industrialized, highly technological countries that resemble the west - in certain parts and certain ways, anyway. The more similar their productivity is, the more similar standards of living they can demand but for a long time a series of favorable conditions and network effects have kept the US in a solid lead. The balance is shifting, but to say that it actually flows from one country to the other is fairly misleading. You could halt trade but it wouldn't halt these countries from modernizing, and they would also retaliate.
The US currently has a very negative trade balance, meaning it imports far more than it exports. If it were to close the borders, the US would hurt the most. Medium to long term that could mean opportunity for domestic industry, but the short term would be a substantial drop in the standard of living as many goods become expensive or even unavailable. There was a time when a trade boycott with the US would be dire but today if you can maintain trade with the EU, Japan, China, India, Taiwan, Russia and so on most countries would do fine. Alternate suppliers of almost everything now exist outside the US.
In short, the US is no longer in a position where they would have anything to gain from going protectionist. They'd be their own little isolated market of 300 million people while the world market - even subtracting the billions that are too poor to really participate - is much larger and would simply outpace the US. That's the nastier parts of the free market, once you've let it loose you might in the end become the victim of it, having to adjust your wages and standard of living to fight for jobs just like everyone else. But if there's one country that has no right to complain, it would be the US...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
"for I am the great and powerful OB!"
Outsourcing jobs to India means more jobs for better pay at home - just like War creates Peace and Freedom makes Slavery and Ignorance breeds Strength.
Women never really faint, Villains always blink their eyes, Children are the only ones who blush and Life is just to Die.
http://www.studentsfororwell.org/
Why, anybody can have a brain. That's a very mediocre commodity. Every pusillanimous creature that crawls on the Earth or slinks through slimy seas has a brain. Back where I come from, we have universities, seats of great learning, where men go to become great thinkers. And when they come out, they think deep thoughts and with no more brains than you have. But they have one thing you haven't got: a diploma.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
He is what he is, another tax-and-spend Democrat ....
I'll take that over the "borrow and spend" Republicans any day. Cash and carry. It's not good - but it's a little better.
And people wonder why I "throw my vote away" on Libertarians.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
He is what he is, another tax-and-spend Democrat with delusions of grandeur like all the rest of the Washington crowd, and we're getting precisely the leadership for which we cast our votes. I did my research, and had a pretty good idea how he was going to turn out, and alas, I was not wrong.
You sure did your research. For the past 30 years every Republican president has increased the debt while every Democrat has decreased it. Damn those tax and spending Democrats and their lowering of the national debt. Here's a clue: stop repeating unfounded talking points.
He is in India. So he talks nice to India. WOW! Welcome to politics 101.
I am sure he will say the opposite when he is somewhere else. That is what politicians do.
A president is still a politician. Do not think he is above any other politician, even if you might want or expect it.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
You are correct. Some lawyers build their careers off the ability to create a job description that no American can meet. Usually the company knows the person they want to hire and so the lawyer writes a generic sounding job description but is really targeted. There are rules against this, but hey, who's checking?
That was not clear. Here's a description. It's pretty despicable how corporations bend-over backwards to disqualify Americans, just so they hire cheaper imported workers:
"Immigration attorneys from Cohen & Grigsby explains how they assist employers in running classified ads with the goal of NOT finding any qualified applicants, and the steps they go through to disqualify even the most qualified Americans in order to secure green cards for H-1b workers. Microsoft, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, and thousands of other companies are running fake ads in Sunday newspapers across the country each week."
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Just make it so that if the H1B visa holder pays a reasonable fee, say, a prorated $20,000, they can leave the job and get another, keeping the visa. Then companies will have to pay US market rates for people.
But frankly, they should be convertible to a green card (permanent resident), we want to steal all the smart people from other countries, not train them for a few years, then send them home.
Plato seems wrong to me today
> Oh... and considering that-- how the hell does a college justify charging $20k a year for a degree which is only going to pay $60 to $70k?
Perhaps we should consider outsourcing college. I'm pretty sure tuition at the University of Mumbai is significantly cheaper than here, and the cost of living is but a fraction of any area around a US university campus. If you wanted to take it further, you could expat and then come back on H-1B.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
You didn't say shit for two paragraphs. "Tax and spend Democrat?" You left a little Limbaugh vomit dripping from your cheek. Might want to hit that with some sanitizer.
Wow. Just wow. I didn't make a single positive statement about Bush in my comment, actually was rather derogatory, and you accuse me of ... what? Dude, I don't particularly like Obama, I didn't particularly like George Bush, and you really need to keep a civil tongue in your mouth. I'm entitled to my opinion as much as you are (unfortunately) entitled to yours. Here's a friendly piece of advice: you might want to stop reading now, just as I stopped reading your missive after you chose to be unpleasant (which, as it happens, is not the way to have your views given serious consideration by those with whom you might disagree.)
Still with me? Okay, well, you were warned.
Since you opened the door to namecalling, insults and general fucktardiness, let's really get into the spirit of this: you're an asshole. You know it, and I know it. True, I'm not being civil either, but since you're obviously not interested in civil discourse, why should I bother? I might as well enjoy myself as much as you obviously did. Yes, my friend, I am attacking you, not your commentary, nor any facts you may or may not have presented because, honestly, I didn't get past the first line of flowing semi-liquid excrement. I had no reason to, since anything you said is obviously crap, and even if it's not, why should I waste time giving you a serious reply? Ad hominem for the win, dirtbag!
So, let's recap, Mr. or Mrs. Copponex. Go fuck yourself . Fuck yourself with a big rubber dick. Really, if there's a disgrace in this thread, you just defined it, you witless jerkoff. Have a nice fucking day. Oh, and don't forget to kick yourself in the ass on the way out. I hope you choke to death on that nice steak you're having for dinner. Nope, no Heimlich for stupid motherfuckers like you: as Larry Niven once said, think if it as evolution in action. Average human intelligence just went up by a fraction of a percent.
There, I feel MUCH better now. Was it as good for you as it was for me?
"Are we learning yet?"
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Explain to me the effective differences in terms of actual fiscal policy between modern Democrats and Republicans.
When the GOP demonizes "tax and spend" as the other party's problem, they mean "spend on domestic social programs" and deliberately exclude US military spending. I think that's a pretty accurate summary, actually.
When you include US military spending as part of "spend", you will find that the GOP is worse on "tax and spend" than the Dems. They started a war that costs the US $1B a day, that has lasted 8 years, and provided no way to pay for it. That is a more egregious "tax and spend" program than any social program the Dems have initiated, "Obamacare" included.
If the GOP proposes a balanced budget that included the military budget and preserving Social Security, they'd be worth listening too. I expect that if they fail to produce an actual budget like that, they will again be voted out in 2012.
OTOH, if they do produce such a budget, Christ, I'll vote for them myself.
--
$tar -xvf
You lost me at "tax and spend". We should get past bumper-sticker assertions, especially when they're not even right. I guess "tax less but spend more" isn't as catchy, but it seems to work for the Republicans.
Fine. How about "borrow and spend"? Because that's what he's doing. Is that an improvement over "tax and spend"? The reality is he's doing both.
"He" who? George Bush? George H. W. Bush? Ronald Reagan? Each of these Presidents tripled, doubled, and quadrupled the national debt while in office, and each pretended to run on a platform of fiscal responsibility. The only one who hasn't in the past thirty years is Clinton and, to be fair, that really only happened because he got lucky with the economy.
Right now Obama is running up the debt because that's what you do in a recession. Now, will he turn around in two years or so and put the brakes on spending? Maybe he'll try, but I doubt the "fiscally responsible" Republicans will let him, unless the Tea Partiers break ranks and actually let taxes rise and spending fall like they were elected to.
The fact that Obama thinks that millions of previously American jobs that have been outsourced to India is somehow good shows just how out of touch Obama is with regular America. America needs jobs, and those jobs used to provide careers to Americans. What happened to the Democrat party defending American jobs?
Mr Obama, please get back in tough with the needs to of the American people. Didn't your parties recent thrashing in the election send a message that you need to listen to?
Actually, Obama is right. Yes, its counter-intuitive, but if you actually study economics, it makes perfect sense. The gist of it is that if a job gets offshored to a country that can do the same job for cheaper, Americans benefit by having access to that cheaper product or service (there may or may not be a reduction in quality, but for many things this may not be an issue. I hate offshore call-centers though.) You may think: who gives a shit if I have cheaper goods if I'm out of a job!? Well, fair enough, losing a job is a shitty thing, and if you have to get a lower paying job, you won't be directly better off, but overall, America is better off for it. Look at the chair you're sitting on, the desk your computer is at, the clothes you're wearing. Most likely, many of those things were not made in the US, and you probably benefitted greatly from it. I recently went to a Renaissance Faire around here and bought a traditional Renaissance Style outfit. It was all handmade, right here in america, by small local vendors. It also cost me $300. It was high quality, but very expensive. Day to day, I don't need that kind of quality. At the moment I'm wearing a pair of $5 pajama pants from Target. There would be no $5 pants if everything were made in the US.
What I'm getting at is that offshoring lowers the *cost of living*, by giving regular people access to nicer goods at lower prices, which in turn means that even if you get a job as a janitor, you're certainly living a better life than even the rich people from 100 years ago. If you walk into Target today, all that stuff, clean and nice and made for middle america, is because of offshoring. You don't *need* to make as much money with offshoring because everything is dirt cheap now.
That said, losing your job will *not* make your life better, obviously. In general, losing jobs is a crappy side effect. But losing jobs is kind of a one time thing. Many people may have lost manufacturing jobs in the 80's when things started to be made elsewhere, but in the current generation of kids, there won't be a huge number of them who will lose a factory job, because they won't be trying to *get* a factory job. They'll be trying to get some other job that the US is more capable of. They'll get an engineering job or something that is more likely to stay here. Or they will be a happy janitor because even janitors have a good life nowadays. But it doesn't make sense for us to make things that someone else could make for cheaper - that is an inefficient use of our economy, and it causes bloat and wastes money. If someone else is better at doing something, we should let them do it. That's called specialization, and pretending it doesn't make sense it hurting our economy.
Globalization helps us all overall. It has lowered the standard of living accross the world for generations. Losing your job is really shitty, but the answer is not to just move backward and resist globalization. What we *should* do is find some way to keep globalizing without hurting individuals in the US, but I haven't heard of a good solution to that yet. No american should be left behind, but we also can't make our economy less efficient by trying to protect everyone.
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
If I live in a more developed country, why the fuck should I tolerate this? Being a sovereign nation means having the ability to regulate trade up to and including stopping it completely. Since, as you freely admit, foreign trade is utterly screwing us over, that sounds like a pretty good idea right now.
Because if you had to post on Slashdot using only domestically developed CPUs on domestic motherboards with domestic memory chips running domestic software communicating over domestic networking systems, speaking domestically developed languages and sharing domestically developed ideas, and so on and so forth, you'd be roasting wild squirrel over a cave fire and grunting.
Human beings advance together or not at all.
That doesn't get rid of the fraud, killing the entire program and regulations will.
What you suggest only leads to more disposable & desperate workers.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
That still doesn't fix the lack of jobs for US citizens. It only encourages more fraud, and the $20k becomes a hostage ransom.
The only solutions that work are ones that put US citizens first and foremost, even at the expense of business.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
You're just making the qualifications overkill so you can create a "lack of qualified workers" out of thin air.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
IBM is not the issue, they are an existing business, whatever their deal is with US gov't, they'll make it through, don't you worry about them.
Worry about start ups, worry about capital. US lost its way.
People most definitely did not come to USA for rules and regulations and taxes.
Let me repeat it: rules and regulations and taxes are definitely not the reason for people to come to the US.
The reason to go to USA was always ability to be an entrepreneur, to start your own business and make it better for yourself. It wasn't about getting gov't handouts either, it also wasn't about sponsoring gov't terrorism and wars. It wasn't about empire building. It wasn't about crashing the currency by first creating the Fed, then getting off the gold standard and setting interest rates to 0% while printing trillions.
Enjoy your remaining time of still being able to buy something with those pieces of paper, the time is running out.
How do I know the time is running out? Because now the US Fed has finally become the lender of last resort to US gov't. 600 Billion they'll print over 7 months is about equal to the amount the US gov't is aiming at borrowing by June of 2011, that is NOT a coincidence. What it is, is that the Fed and US gov't now see that US bond is on its last legs, nobody wants to buy and keep financing US debt. The Fed will completely monetize the debt.
Monetizing the debt - this should scare the living crap out of anybody who wants to do business in the country, well, unless they are THE gov't. Monetizing the debt, the way Zimbabwe did it, Argentina did it, Weimar Germany did it, the way USSR did it.
The best interest of US is to create US jobs, but the US gov't has gone insane and senile, it is actively fighting anybody who is willing to save money in US holdings by killing their savings with inflation. US gov't IS THE REASON US HAS NO JOBS.
US gov't is killing US economy by killing US currency.
Sure, it was able to print and print forever since the Fed started, but the US has never being in this sort of peril as it is now since after the year 1921. In the year 1920 US has entered a severe recession. The gov't did the only correct thing: cut itself by over 70%. The recession was gone in 1 year. Then US had the 'roaring twenties' and then the Fed created another asset bubble in equities and caused another recession. That time though the US gov't decided to fight it by printing money and gov't projects. That got itself a colorful name - the Great Depression, which didn't end until the WWII, when USA was able to start selling weapons, then later the world was in ruin and US was not, so it quickly retooled its weapons factories and started actually producing civilian goods by employing all that cheap labor that came back from the war.
The US gov't is a luxury the US can no longer afford.
The US gov't is now not only a luxury, but it is a vampire sucking the last drops of blood from the dying corps, and you are telling that MY ways are in error?
Well, I am going to sleep, it's late night where I am and it's not the US.
You can't handle the truth.
It encourages companies to move U.S. jobs overseas. I have seen first hand the decisions being made due to this terrible law.
That makes no sense. The Tea Party supports free trade. If you're for free trade, why are you worried about them?
The tea party is populist and protectionism is almost always the populist agenda.
I looked around in google for a bit and I didn't find all that much about free trade from tea party associated politicians.
But I did find a number of articles along these lines:
http://money.cnn.com/2010/11/01/news/trade_tea_party.fortune/index.htm
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Hear Hear! I frankly don't care about the numbers, I care about what I'm seeing with my own two eyes. About half the people in my apt building aren't the same ones from a year ago NOT because the old tenants found a better place to live, but because they lost everything. Some may be lucky enough to sleep on someone else's couch, the rest are probably living in their cars.
Between the illegals and H1-Bs we've seen flooding the area there are pretty much NO jobs for Americans except McJobs, and unless you are living in your mom's basement you can't even feed yourself on one of those. When I was young a man with a good work ethic that couldn't afford to go to school or didn't have the aptitude for it could go into construction and feed his family. Now the local teens play a game called "Deer run" where you walk by a construction site and yell "Immigra!" and watch as the ENTIRE SITE turns into a ghosttown, with illegals running everywhere.
I personally had hoped to get my bachelors followed by my masters in either Comp Sci or maybe Information Security, but after going to job interviews in the state capital where it is obvious they've rigged the game for H1-Bs (requirements like 10 years experience, program in 2 languages, 4 certs required, for a $19k a year job? Obvious much?) convinced me there simply isn't a future long term in IT and the amount of debt I would have had to add at 40 simply would bury me. Basically the only "computer jobs" open to Americans I've seen are likewise Geek Squad McJobs. My friends in IT are going to interviews where there are 400+ guys applying for a single job, and most are so far in debt they will most likely die broke. Year before last the guy down the hall committed suicide simply because there was no way out of his student debt with the pathetic jobs being offered to Americans.
And THIS is the chilling effect seen by Americans from illegals and H1-Bs. My oldest is going to pre-med and at his school the IT dept is nearly 100% foreign, simply because no kid with eyes would want to pile on 60k+ worth of debt for a 20k a year job. Looking out my apt window at the tons of empty businesses and homes that have lain empty with for sale signs for over a year I personally think we are getting ripe for a revolution. You have HUGE teeming masses of unemployed Americans, growing ever larger by the day, and for most of them the American dream is long dead. I could very easily see a radical protectionist hardcore Joe Stalin type easily gaining power, because the people are fed up, they're frustrated, and they have NO future if they aren't in the top 3%. The few guys I know still in IT are looking for ways out as fast as they can, because more and more they are surrounded by Indians with degrees they paid a hell of a lot less than we did. This shit just can't keep up, something has got to change.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
When hiring is at will, they don't have to give you an excuse for not hiring you.
Unless you can prove discrimination, you'll just have to accept that US companies are bags of sleaze that will happily screw you over to save their own pockets.
Well, I will admit it is quite possible that I don't "get it", but as a senior engineer with decades of experience who has seen the program in operation firsthand, I think I'm qualified to make some observations.
I'll add one more. Engineers are not exactly made; nor are they born. Rather, they are made from people who are born to be engineers, and there's a certain window of opportunity for accomplishing that.
Please read this carefully, before you get bent out of shape about my "not getting it".
A *great* software engineer has the capacity to create *many* jobs around himself. Even a very good one can do this. The supply of people who, by the time they are about to enter college are prepared to become even a decent engineer is limited. Nor is this a problem we can fix with overnight with slogans or dramatic gestures like kicking all the foreign engineers out of the country, which is only going to accelerate offshoring.
If you want more American students to choose an engineering path, you've got to make sure there are domestic jobs for them when they expect to graduate. In order for there to be jobs for them, there must be a thriving domestic technology industry. In order for that to exist, you need to have plenty of talented engineers. It doesn't make a damn bit of difference where those engineers came from, but it makes a *hell* of a lot of difference where they're going to.
Now I understand the folks who want to eliminate or cut back the H1-b program because as it is structured now it's a swindle designed to make moving American jobs to low wage countries easy. But getting rid of the program isn't going to fix the damage done to the country's intellectual infrastructure. It'll make that damage worse.
My suggestion for creating more jobs for American engineers: allow any foreigner who shows real promise to come over here, then make it attractive for the most successful ones to put down roots here. In fact, if an employer can't get at least half the H1bs he sponsors to become permanent residents, he should lose the privilege of sponsoring them.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
interviews where there are 400+ guys applying for a single job
I'm trying to hire a system designer and project leader in a medical device business. This requires technical experience, ability to do requirements/traceability and risk management in a heavily regulated industry. It is a very challenging role and a great leadership role in a very reputable company. Not exactly an IT or programming job but is definitely a senior technical role.
I have NO candidates in the funnel. The requirements for the job are the minimum and not anything crazy. However, I'm in Milwaukee Wisconsin...so is it a location thing? Where are my 100's of qualified candidates? Right now, H1 or not..I need candidates.
I would normally not mention something like this in an open forum but seemed appropriate. I'm not posting the exact job since I know that's a bit of an abuse. Wish I could though...seems like many good people on /.
I love the sound of distortion in the morning -- webcommando
No it doesn't but your worry DOES show the real problem the US has.
There is some believe working in the US that makes it value to top. The interesting jobs, the well paying jobs. But that is not what the economy, the boring local economy, runs on. It runs on truck drivers, factory workers, construction, repair. This is what keeps that majority of the population employed. Silicon Valley, Redmon, Wall Street do not.
Obama, and he is hardly the first, seems so pleased with 10 billion in orders. But how much of that money flows straight back out again because to produce those orders the US needs foreign goods? And those 10 billion are petty cash for the US. Meanwhile far more money is lost with outsourced call centers year in year out.
And no, outsourcing a call center will NOT cost the country a fortune, just a local community. A local community that can't then tax the local salaries and use those taxes to fund local education, local road maintenance etc etc. Outsourcing is not about a cripling injury that instantly kills the economy. This is a slow bleed that isn't stopped.
The call center goes, the local catering van can't break even anymore. The locals find far lower paying jobs and make ends meet by buying cheap Chinese imports instead of higher quality American goods. More and more American business got to cut costs to be able to meet the lower prices. They do so by outsourcing production to China and yet more Americans have just a bit less to spend.
It ain't complex to see, but if you believe in Wall Street as a religion then this can't be. This is not how the market, the magic fairy market, is supposed to work. Obama, and democrats and republicans with him, is saying "let them eat cake". The famous saying that started the revolution showing that the ruling elite didn't have a clue about what was really happening. It is after all not in Washington or Redmond or Wall Street that the job cuts are hurting the most. Oh, they might have a bad year, but not decade after decade in which a factory town turns into a ghost town. How many of the powers that be come from Detroit?
Yet the simple people, like the poster above think H1-b is the issue. Yeah right. The US has 300+ million citizens, and how many immigrants on these things? They are irrelevant. This is just the Redmond, Silicon Valley etc job. The get a lot of attention, but they don't keep the heartland working. Producing.
Scream at the immigrant worker while another factory is shipped lock stock and barrel abroad including every single job. SethStorm is like a frenchmen who reacts to "let them eat cake" with: "But I don't like cake."
But you don't have bread let alone cake.
IT has done this a lot. Thinking that they would be save from the export of jobs and then it turned out those dirty filthy foreigners could not just knock out cheap goods but cheap code. Boohoo, now our jobs are going...
Well, you didn't protest when every item in Walmart came from China, who is now supposed to care the next version of Windows comes from China?
And don't you worry, the decline will be so slow and the average American so attached to his large house and larger car that he will bend over backwards to keep up with payments rather then protest. Because if you strike or protest, you miss a payment and then that SUV is gone.
American citizens have managed to enslave themselves to Wall Street thoroughly. Willing slaves with guns. If you wrote this down in a book of fiction, nobody would believe it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
It's not all-or-nothing. We should tariff lopsided trade. For example, if we set the lopsided limit at 120%, then tariffs would be applied to all countries who sell more than 120% in the US than they buy from US.
That would encourage them to not play currency games and to spur open, domestic consumption.
But the problem is that Asia doesn't want to encourage consumption. They see excess consumption as "sinful", or at least harmful to their residents.
They pick jobs over stuff, while we in the US do the opposite. It's difficult to form a trade policy when they have a different idea of what the "rules" should be.
Table-ized A.I.
Correct, Obama is not the politician the American people hoped for, but he is what a pragmatist would expect. He could not get elected without owing several very powerful (wealthy) individuals and corporations no matter how much individuals gave to the campaign. He can not change a power structure that has developed and entrenched itself since 1776, at least not in two years. What he has done is concentrate on the one goal he had above all others, health care reform. This by itself raises the standard of living in the US for middle class Americans who make up the bulk of the source of both tax dollars and GDP. However, with the complexities of Washington and the perversely unyielding stance of the Republicans the White House has not achieved what the people who supported him expected Obama to achieve. Thus we had the backlash in the mid-terms. More of a throwing out of the incumbents over disappointment rather than enthusiasm for Grand Old Party candidates (in a two party system who else do you vote for when voting someone out?).
It seems that a new party needs to be created, Democrats being ineffectual even when owning both houses, and the Republicans denying any help to the people (failing to pass unemployment extensions as an example) and screaming small government and less spending while doing neither. The Tea Party seems to instinctively know this, however, judging by the members, they certainly did not seem to plan it in a planned,
sober or thoughtful way. America can use a third party but it will have to one that does not preach what seems to be thinly veiled anarchy (by the government, not the people) with a mind set bent on starting world war three. The TP are feeding off of the opportunity that the average American distrusts and fears the government. In Washington state the people voted down I-1098, which would have created a tax rate of 5 percent on annual income exceeding $200,000 for individuals and $400,000 for couples, and a 9 percent rate on income that tops $500,000 for individuals and $1 million for couples and cut the state portion of personal property taxes by 20 percent, about a 4 percent reduction in the annual overall property tax bill. Also, I-1098 also would have exempted an 118,000 businesses from the business-and-occupation tax on gross receipts. All of the money was to be spent on education (70%) and healthcare directly benefiting the poor and middel class. I-1098 lost with more than 65 percent of voters rejecting it, losing in every county. Obviously it was not only the people earning more than $200,000 that voted against it. My brother-in-law lives in Whatcom county Washington and I asked him why hew voted against the initiative. He said that if the state started to tax the rich they would not stop and soon he and everyone else would have to pay more income tax no matter how little they earned. He, like the majority, does not trust the government and the system in place is not working as anyone/everyone wants. But, it is stable and works to a degree that the standard of living in the USA has gone from thirteenth place in the United nations Human Development Index (HDI) list in 2009 to fourth (although in the Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index the USA places 12th) in 2010.
This leads us back to offshoring:
Since FDR reduced government controls of business in order to stimulate the economy in the thirties there has been less and less direct government control of the economy which, of course, led to the banking collapse of 2008-2009. This also caused more and more businesses to be able to move operations offshore or over border. Many large Manufacturing companies like GM increased profits (or be more competitive - depending on who you ask) by moving operations to Mexico. Oregon based Nike does not produce a single shoe in the US. Almost the entire US agricultural business is completely dependent on Mexican labor. IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and other IT firms have made large investments in India and other countries.
The American economy is no longer based
When hiring is at will, they don't have to give you an excuse for not hiring you.
Yes, but this is not hiring at will. They're documenting that they tried and failed to hire U.S. citizens, in order to meet the administrative requirements for hiring H1-Bs. If you can prove it's not bona fide employee search, then you can prove they're breaking the law.
It's not easy to prove, but something like that Cohen & Grigsby video, or similarly incriminating emails, could prove it.
Even when they are caught red-handed, I'm not sure what happens next. I don't think you can force the employer to hire you. I imagine the INS might be able to fine the employer (though not as much as the damages for downloading music). If it's fraud they might be able to send the employer to jail, but there's a very high evidence standard to convict someone of a crime.
They might be prosecuted by an honest federal attorney, and tried before an honest judge. Stranger things have happened.
Well, maybe not.
The ICE is busy deporting Mexican college students who have been in this country since they were 5 years old.
Of course, that might mean that the qualifications get skewed to include language proficiencies and such things that US citizens obviously can't do.
Horseshit. ENGLISH is the DEFAULT language of international business. Everything else is a regional pretender that is marginal at best.
You assume that governments will side with the people instead of smelling which way the wind blows and siding with the new Feudal Lords. I already pointed out to another poster that success of any counter-action from the non-robot-possessing class will depend on timing as the robots will introduce massive disparity of power, military and otherwise, between those who have them and those who do not, with the gap widening rapidly by the hour.
When you observe the accountability and the principled stances of modern governments, one can only deduce that there is no hope from that direction.
It is to laugh. People who feel the need to share do not become super rich! This is a self-selecting class of those who out-jerked all the other sociopaths. And if some rare one grows a conscience, his/her power will instantly diminish and his/her empire will be devoured by those who do not have such qualms.
You perhaps did not notice but all the "charity" of the super-rich is merely composed of narcissistic attempts at creating an "image" of themselves while at the same time abusing all the tax loopholes imaginable. Also the dick envy factor enters the picture and so while some buy a bigger yacht then all his "friends" have, every year, only to be out-dicked the next, so do some blow money on "charity" to show how much they "do not need" all these billions (while secretly trying to redeem them back in various ways).
At the last auction, the Federal treasury bonds ended up with negative interest. This is only going to pay off if there is significant inflation. (I don't understand this, but I'm assured that's what it means.)
To me this means that you should purchase real property on a fixed interest loan. If you can. Or get something fairly cheap for cash, if you can. And hope a facilities management company can keep it rented in in decent condition. Others say this means you should buy precious metals. The key is, you don't want to end up holding fiat currency. I'd suggest in investing in foreign currencies, but it looks like the kind of thing that's going to hit all countries at about the same time.
OTOH, I'm not an economist. I'm not practicing what I preach. I'm trusting my investments to a stock management company. Is this a good choice? Don't know. I'm already retired, and that makes a difference. And I suspect that within 20 years money as we know it will be obsolete. So will jobs, as we know them. Doesn't mean that there won't be things that serve the same functions, but the functions may well divide differently. E.g., what does a job mean when 80% of the people don't have one? Currently it's well over 10%...we don't know how much higher, because the government lies about the unemployment figures, and has been doing so for at least the last 50 years. They also lie about the inflation rate. I wouldn't be surprised to find that the unemployment rate was currently 20%, or even higher. And when the economy recovers, what jobs do you thing will be created for the people that recently lost their jobs to fill? Any? Companies would prefer to invest in hardware than in personnel, so if it can be automated in anything approaching the same cost as hiring people to do it, it will be automated, or redesigned away. (Consider the recent evolution of "self-checkout" counters at supermarkets.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
That's not a very good sample: 6 presidents (if you don't count Carter). We need a much bigger sample size. The problem is that parties shift. The Democrats of today are nothing like the Democrats of 60 years ago and the Republicans of today are nothing like the Republicans of 60 years ago. There are similarities but both parties have changed (arguably for the worse). In any case, picking the past 30 years is cherry picking data. Further, Congress is in charge of spending. I know that Presidents have a large sway over it but the President cannot pass a spending bill. If you want to give blame or credit for debt levels, more of it should go to Congress. If you look at the numbers that way, you get a different picture. Further, you have to look at if Presidents were of the same party as the majority party in Congress and how large that majority was. You also have to take into account the overall economy during administrations and Congresses. There was a sizable recession during the 80s (and 70s), which by itself can result in an increase in national debt in part because of decreased revenue.
My point is that it is way too simplistic (and technically wrong) to assign credit or blame to Presidents for debt levels. I know Presidents usually propose the budgets but Congress has complete control over them. The President is the easy target because he is only one person but we should really blame Congress, if for nothing more than not standing up to the President when they really should.
Inflated or for that matter deliberately impossible requirements. I've seen job ads that were packed with enough requirements that no one was likely to fulfill them, including one that demanded "experienced with FrameMaker 7.7". Adobe never issued a 7.7, they went from version 7.2 to 8. I called the shop to ask them about this.The recruiter insisted that 7.7 was absolutely necessary and mandatory and the client used it and specified it. Clearly this was a phony screening excuse in operation. I've also seen ads requiring 6 or 7 years of experience with Web technologies that have existed for only 2 years. All too often see such ads from Indian-run agencies so I expect there's a hidden agenda to bar all but the desired pre-selected candidates.
Make the penalty appropriate. The fine should be the salary and benefits valuation for the employee/H1-B in question. Also, as there is an allotment of H1-B visas per company, they should lose that visa and now be allowed to hire any more on visa for five years from the last infraction.
We should also do away with job shopping visas. There should NEVER be an immigrant visa system where someone is brought here to then find a job when the purpose was to fill a niche that cannot be filled locally.
I propose a different system:
H1-B visas should be for the best of the best from any another nation, where the person wants either experience or citizenship. If they can remain here for some period of time (2-5yrs, depending on visa), not commit any crime, pay all their taxes and establish themselves here, they should be granted citizenship or asked to leave if they refuse it, without the ability to return on a work visa for the same term as their original one.
Make it an express lane to get talented, law abiding people from other nations to fill the gaps in our ability and not job shoppers from India, Sri Lanka, Russia, China, Australia, England, or wherever.
6-7 years of experience in technologies that are only 2-3 years old.
10+ years of experience with operating systems that are less than 5 old.
Version-number-specific job requirements for a version of a software package that never shipped or never even existed (e.g. requiring experience on version 8.5 when the company skipped straight from 8.3.4 to 9.0).
Every goddamn "certification" known to mankind, including several not offered in the US or that are no longer issued.
All this, and more, can be found on the "job requirements" of any company claiming they "need H1-B's" because they "can't find qualified Americans." Microsoft makes a daily practice of it, for instance.
The power of the purse is the domain of Congress and more specifically the House of Representatives. This turns your Democratic spend thrift thesis on it's head (excluding G.W. Bush).
Finally, the last Congress (or president if you insist) to lower the national debt was Truman coming out of WWII. Your post is provably false on all levels.
http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/histdebt/histdebt_histo4.htm
"When the GOP demonizes "tax and spend" as the other party's problem, they mean "spend on domestic social programs" and deliberately exclude US military spending. I think that's a pretty accurate summary, actually."
I'll tend to agree there - most conservative feel that money spent on "defense" to be worth it and do not see it as something that should have caps. They see spending on social programs as propping up people who will not work for whatever reason.
"When you include US military spending as part of "spend", you will find that the GOP is worse on "tax and spend" than the Dems. They started a war that costs the US $1B a day"
And this is where the democrats lost - a billion a day is roughly 365 billion a year. We are looking at more than trillion new spending - MUCH more than a billion a day. You can include *everything* the Republicans have ever spent in the history of the us and almost not equal what we have (for one thing the Democrats accepted that spending on "defense" too). Running on anti-fiscal largess and the subsequent spending is one of the main things that killed the Democrats. That money also went to something that was truly unpopular so as far as "affect on the voters mind" double it. Many will put up with spending when they feel it is needed, spend on things that they feel aren't (regardless of if it is) let alone truly *unwanted* and you get even worse, further have a great deal of why you were elected to be a low spender and it is even worse. Thus the total rape of the so called "Blue Dog Democrat" who weren't as Blue Dog as what they ran as.
"If the GOP proposes a balanced budget that included the military budget and preserving Social Security, they'd be worth listening too."
To a liberal/leftist. To a conservative not so much. To a centrist I do not know - centrists are much harder to gauge as they tend to still be hard with their ideas, just have a mix of them. I rather guess that the "best" in terms of winning votes right now would be to exclude military spending, be more discrete in where we spend on it, fix social security (not really sure what this means though - *long* post there), scrap HCR and start over (even if it takes years to work out), and mostly try and move back from your party's extremes.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
I doubt you ever did consider trade amongst Spanish speaking nations, China with these nations, or Japan and Korea for instance. A lot of oil trade will be done in for instance Arabic or Russian. Maybe you should look abroad first, instead of thinking that because the USA does it's international business in English, the rest of the world does too. I wouldn't be surprised if the trade between non-english speaking countries would be much larger than the English speaking ones.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?