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How the 'Tech Worker Visa' Is Remaking IT In America
theodp writes "Back in 2008, the Department of Homeland Security enacted a controversial 'emergency' rule to allow foreign students earning tech-related degrees in the US to work for American employers for 29 months after graduation without a work visa. The program would allow US companies to recruit and retain the 'best' science and tech students educated at the top US universities, explained Microsoft. But two-and-a-half years later, it turns out the top US universities are getting schooled by less-renowned institutions. Computerworld reports the DHS program is dominated by little-known, for-profit Stratford University, whose 727 approved requests for post-graduate Optional Practical Training (OPT) STEM extensions tops all schools and is more than twice the combined total of the entire Ivy League — Brown (26), Columbia (105), Cornell (90), Dartmouth (18), Harvard (27), Princeton (16), Penn (50), and Yale (9). In second place, with 533 approved requests, is the University of Bridgeport. In another twist, the program's employers include IT outsourcing and offshoring 'body shops' like Kelly Services, whose entities snagged about 50 approvals, more than twice the combined total of tech stalwarts Google (15), Amazon.com (2), Yahoo (2), and Facebook (3)."
Clearly the private, for profit schools produce more competitive students.
"Back in 2008, the Department of Homeland Security enacted a controversial 'emergency' rule to allow foreign students earning tech-related degrees in the U.S. to work for American employers for 29 months after graduation without a work visa.
While citizens who could use the training and work, are given the short shaft, thanks to various loopholes in need of closure. They have the skills, it's time we made companies actually recognize that.
Think about it before you throw your exception to the rule about a specific thing not being found.
The program would allow U.S. companies to recruit and retain the 'best' science and tech students
Bullshit. We have all the people we need, we just aren't willing to engage in fraud. Businesses however, are.
But two-and-a-half years later, it turns out the top U.S. universities are getting schooled by less-renowned institutions. Computerworld reports the DHS program is dominated by little-known, for-profit Stratford University, whose 727 approved requests for post-graduate Optional Practical Training (OPT) STEM extensions tops all schools and is more than twice the combined total of the entire Ivy League -- Brown (26), Columbia (105), Cornell (90), Dartmouth (18), Harvard (27), Princeton (16), Penn (50), and Yale (9). In second place, with 533 approved requests, is the University of Bridgeport. In another twist, the program's employers include IT outsourcing and offshoring 'body shops' like Kelly Services, whose entities snagged about 50 approvals, more than twice the combined total of tech stalwarts Google (15), Amazon.com (2), Yahoo (2), and Facebook (3)."
This might be the real story. Either the fraud's moved over to those universities, or the fraud shops got seriously blindsided.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Wow, that's an astonishingly piss-poor data viewer from the summary. Slow, buggy, and shows clear signs that the people responsible had no idea how to normalize data (WTF are there not only fields with a 'null' employer name, but also with 'none'? Intel's in there with at LEAST two different capitalizations as well...)
This reminds me of the Stephen Colbert + Mexican farm workers demonstrating how even when offered US workers didnt take the farming jobs. It is not that Americans dont have the skills - it is just that the ones with the skills didnt want to do the back breaking work for the pay offered.
IT consulting is a legitimate need. You may not think so - but most companies dont want a hoard of IT employees. Most of them want a few dozen when starting on some boring implementation (Say Oracle ERP.. or SAP), and once done - they want these dozens to leave. They dont want to train them - they want consultants who can come do the job and then leave. Google etc. do cool stuff and get the best - unfortunately such jobs are few - most IT jobs are now boring jobs which involve pedestrian work.
Most americans want to join Deloitte and Accenture and become 'Functional Consultants' not coders - or they want jobs where they can code something interesting - and at a good wage. They get paid a starting salary of 60K-70K to be analysts who neither program, nor know the applications. All the boring coding is done by Kelly services or other 'body shop' consultants who are here on H1B or F1-Opt, and they get paid around $40-50K. These jobs which involve travelling 4-5 days a week, coding something in PLSQL or JAVA or even just testing are not usually taken by Americans because most americans CS grads want a 'programming cool stuff' job without any travel.
Give these indians and chinese H1Bs.. or watch the coding completely move offshore. Virtualization and companies like oDesk have already provided enuff technology to make coding offshore completely viable. Then - the result will be what happend with manufacturing - nothing here at home! You cant expect to get paid 2x-4x for similar skills and productivity.
As long as mexicans are required to pluck fruits in Cali... you can be sure there will be indians here to do testing and boring IT coding. And just like a Stanford degree doesnt help much in plucking fruits - ditto with basic dirty IT jobs - you need warm bodies ... not ultra innovative geniuses to do the job!
We get to eat better prepared hamburgers!
The contractor that Serrano trained at IBM was from China, but Serrano didn't know her immigration status. And despite having to train her replacement, ...
I had to do the same thing at another company and he was the one who asked me what the '*' by variables mean and "what's a pointer?"
That's why when I hear some big shot at Intel, IBM or any other big corp says that they are hiring overseas because 'they can't find qualified Americans", I have to go off and mumble "Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. ... "
Just tell the fucking truth. They want cheaper labor. That's why as Indian salaries go up, they move to other countries.
Nope. It's corporate America. How do you tell when a PR person is lying? Their lips move.
Of course the economists will say this is good for the entire economy. Really? Then why have real wages been stagnant for over a decade - for everyone?
Go up the food chain? How can we when even the upper food chain jobs are leaving. Except of course upper management. But that will change. Some foreign based company without the obscene upper management pay of IBM or Intel is going to come in and eat their lunches - you'll see.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
Reading comprehension alert:
Why "But"? The truth of the second sentence doesn't negate the truth of the first sentence. MS never said that would be the only result of the program.
... probably aren't high on the recruiting list for IT and technology professionals. MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, U.C. Berkeley, Stanford, ... several state universities, and on down are where the action is for engineering and computer science. So clearly there are more "tech" jobs in the specialties where these schools are hiring, likely those requiring less education. The problem with this data is that it has no basis for comparison to how the visa program is actually changing anything.
I had tried to recruit some talented MSEE grads for some time back in 2007 and found, frustratingly, that most were here in student visas and the pool of H1-B visas were much smaller. We couldn't count on obtaining an H1-B and had to turn down a few very talented people. And, no, at the time we did not find as many U.S. citizens available.
A better data point would be to show the percentage of student visa holders that have remained the in U.S. with this program.
And if anyone wants to complain about these programs taking jobs from U.S. citizens, then it should start by reducing the number of student visas on offer. Once someone is well trained by our schools it's insane to not let them stay and add to our GDP.
I'm willing to bet that 1/3 of the program that IS in Ivy League schools is more than worth the other 2/3s leeching off the program; people of that caliber don't grow on trees. Not one of the IT monkeys whining in this thread would qualify for the jobs that need these people.
or blacks. Besides, we have rights -- whereas cheap immigrant labor doesn't.
This sorta reminds me of Los Alamos preferentially hiring male foreign scientists while treating American female PhD's no better than prostitutes...and then wondering why all their "nucular" secrets go walkabout time and time again.
How about we eliminate H1-B and L-1 visas and start hiring Americans again?
The economy is going down the tubes because greedy corporations aren't willing to pay a living wage. They don't even want to hire Americans, because the indentured servitude of the H1-B visa is too attractive to them. This is the primary reason why the middle class is shrinking: there aren't that many good jobs left (unless you're an ivy-league child of the rich, in which case "daddy" or one of his friends will make room for you somewhere).
Between the end of WWII and the start of this outsourcing nonsense, spending by the middle class was the engine that drove our economy. Now that the middle class is in rapid decline, corporations are trying to expand third-world markets to preserve their profits. So Congress is writing love letters to India and China by doing things like expanding foreign-worker visa programs.
This in turn is eliminating any desire for young people to study science or technology. Why should they, when all those jobs have moved overseas or are being handed out to visa holders? The kids are going to study law or business, things they can use in a third world economy (i.e. the future America).
The corporations are run by idiots who think the executive levels are the only important parts of the corporation to keep in the U.S. They are going to find out the hard way that they should have kept their tech staff on board, when India Inc. and China realize that they can manufacture their own executives TOO. All they have to do is drop-kick American corporations out of the country, and replace them with home-grown alternatives. This will happen within a decade, I think.
By then, there won't be ANY Americans bothering to study STEM subjects in our schools -- it'll be nothing but foreign kids, who will go right back where they came from when they graduate. We Americans are already a minority in graduate programs here. And it'll simply be too late. The professors are all foreign. The kids are all foreign. When they all go home, we won't have anything left at all.
It's all so pathetic. Rich people are so petty and stingy they're destroying their own future to make a little extra bread in the present. If they weren't destroying our future as well, I'd wish them bon voyage, but as it is they're taking the whole country down the tubes.
The only ones among us who will still know anything are hobbyists and small-scale manufacturers and hackers. And we aren't going to be inclined to try and help the corporations when they finally realize they need us.
Thus spake the master programmer:
"When the program is being tested, it is too late to make design changes." (Tao)
Going to an Ivy League school doesn't necessarily mean you're smarter; it just means your parents have a lot of money.
It's amazing how Slashdot's usual libertarian attitude to just about everything develops a strong protectionist bent as soon as American tech jobs are on the line.
Dude. Nuclear stuff would be top secret - meaning foreign scientists wouldn't be allowed to work on them.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
how about starting by moving the manufacturing sector back to the USA, it will definitely create millions of more jobs (compared to a very few thousand in IT) leading to a flourishing middle class and turn the economy around like a miracle... when was the last time you saw something made in u.s.a.?
Like the old saying goes - penny wise pound foolish, there are bigger things we should be worrying about..
International students with full scholarships are smarter.
Ivy League schools are not technical schools. I can't think of a single one of them which has a computer science or engineering program worth mentioning. Hell I don't think they even have much in the way of a general science program. We all presume that the Ivy league is awesome, but if you're not going for some sort of liberal arts degree you're pissing your money away.
So I suppose that those of us who busted our butts to get into an Ivy only were admitted not because we worked hard but because mommy and daddy had plenty of money?
Fuck off.
I find it hard to believe that there are not enough smart domestic students who could use a scholarship.
That's true, but the idle rich tend to not take technical courses... It's a safe bet that Ivy League CS are smarter (on average).
But that's tangential; even if intelligence were the same, the training is totally different. These private mills are turning out day laborers (of whatever intelligence) and, as the original poster pointed out, not a whole lot of them.
Still, that there is more demand (in raw numbers) for code monkeys than theoretical computer scientists in the DHS (which I can imagine is a true bastion of intellectualism...) shouldn't be particularly surprising to anyone. It follows immediately that a program for generating the former would be more successful.
If one were from Mars, it would seem a little bit strange that the US is running a welfare program (DHS) whose principal recipients are private companies and foreigners, but for anyone living here it ought not be surprising.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Dude. Nuclear stuff would be top secret - meaning foreign scientists wouldn't be allowed to work on them.
Uh, dude, nuclear weapons were largely developed by foreign scientists in America.
Going to an Ivy League school doesn't necessarily mean you're smarter; it just means your parents have a lot of money.
Except that's lot of people at Ivy league schools are students there on scholarships. I wasn't one of those. I went to Yale, and both my parents were Yale grads. I like to think I'm smart, but being from a high income bracket with legacy obviously helped a lot. But many if not most students didn't fall into that sort of category. For example, I knew one person who was the first female in her family to go to college ever and the first one in three generations not to have a teen pregnancy. She got to Yale by being very smart and working really hard.
Or it means you had high enough performance numbers (GPA, tests, etc) to make them take notice of you. Granted, you meed a way to get enough loans/grants/whatever to pay for what you're getting.
You're making an assumption that an international student is more likely to have a full scholarship. Most of the international students in my CS graduating class were from rich families who simply paid extra to have their children educated in the US.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
It's amazing how Slashdot's usual libertarian attitude to just about everything develops a strong protectionist bent as soon as American tech jobs are on the line.
If American firms said, "We're going overseas for cheaper labor." I could accept that. But when they say they are going overseas because US workers aren't good enough, that's just a down right lie and shitty of them and I'll remember - Intel and IBM.
I understand that there are billions of people on Earth and all of them are just as capable as Americans and as a result, all labor is now a commodity. I accept that. Nothing can be done either and even if there were, I wouldn't want it to be done because that outcome would be worse - I know enough about economics to know that much (See what happened in the 30s when tariffs were enacted ).
And it's really frustrating when you try to get more education and training to move to another line of work (resulting many times in a shitload of school debt), you have trouble because of age or every other out of work IT guy is jumping at the opportunity (I think there's going to be a HUGE glut of nurses in a few years for one), and you see more go overseas - but you're told the same trite line "you just need to retrain and get education" - it's not working anymore. The economy isn't growing fast enough to employ all the new college grads let alone the millions out of work.
Shit's not good.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
This system pisses me off greatly (and I am an American citizen, born in the US; but I have seen many good colleagues end up deported under this idiotic legislation). If a student from another country comes to the US to do their PhD, they will - on average in the hard sciences - be here for 4-7 years doing work for an American lab. That time they are doing important research, in our country, in English. Then when they finish, we give them an agonizingly short amount of time to get a work visa or leave. I am being far too kind to call this shortsighted on our part. If there was any law I could change in this country today, it would be this one. Students who come to the US for doctoral research should be, in my opinion, short-tracked for citizenship.
And it is even worse if that student wants to visit their birth country while studying here or immediately after finishing. I know someone from an Eastern European country who did her PhD here and was told if she went back to see her family after finishing she would not be allowed back into the US for 6-9 months minimum. She has spoken English since she was about 3 years old. Why should we punish her for doing her research (and contributing to American science) here?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
What decade are you talking about? 1940?
No, but your chances of being able to afford it would've been significantly less. Good for you that you were motivated to bust your butt to get in. But for every Ivy League student, there are a hundred other students who are just as smart who are attending other schools because they couldn't afford the tuition.
What I object to is the implication (as embodied in the post I responded to) that Ivy Leaguers are somehow automatically better than everyone else.
My company (a giant company that purveys giant software to giant customers) and my customers have a never-ending thirst for technical candidates who can speak and write good English, in a way that someone who barely passed TOEFL would not be able to handle.
The question is not about how "those damn foreigners" are taking jobs away from "us". It's about how we can re-tool ourselves to consistently stay ahead and take advantage of our own unique abilities.
Think about it, a good programmer isn't just writing code, he or she is also writing specs, writing documentation, and presenting the same. With good communication skills borne of many additional years communicating in English, a domestic candidate has a natural advantage over a foreign candidate. Plus, as people advance in their career and become either engineering managers or architects, what do you think they do more of? Communicating or solo coding?
The irony is that what I see happen a lot is that the foreign colleague is far more eager to take on what might seem as a less desirable job. Nobody really likes to write 50 pages of specs today, even if they know that it's the specs and the author by-line on those specs that will get spread throughout the organization and live on for years, whereas code only gets unburied from source control where there's a bug. A person's brilliance is demonstrated in their English, less so in their C or Java. Somehow, even though everyone sees this, many people willingly give away this opportunity to a few who are eager for it. And it seems that those who should have a natural advantage, inexplicably, more often give away their edge to those who are less suited, but are hungrier and more eager.
The University of Bridgeport is pretty much run by the Unification Church and its leader, Sun Myung Moon. For years now they have heavily recruited international members of the church to come to the United States and attend the University.
The Unification Church uses the University as a means of extending their empire further into the United States and the extended visa program works exceptionally well for this. I'm not one to say if this is a good or bad thing.
Sapere aude!
...where the meaning of "full scholarship" can be quite flexible indeed.
Because of globalization and the Internet, some intellectual labor is becoming commoditized the way unskilled labor was 80-100 years ago (when the clothing mills started shuttering across the northern US) and skilled factory labor was in the '70s and '80s, because of smart competition from the Far East and elsewhere.
Some intellectual labor, but not all. The part that is becoming commoditized is the stuff that an average American college graduate could learn to do by taking a six week training course, along with basic familiarity with computers, the Internet, phones, etc.
To survive with a good career we need to individually raise our games above the commodity level, or find a different line of work (law perhaps).
We have a choice. We can go the route of labor unions in the US, who succeeded in propping up jobs for their membership for a couple decades, before the whole structure collapsed into bankruptcy and massive plant closings. Or we could choose to adapt as individuals, lobbying the US administration and Congress occasionally for modest things such as not allowing US corporations to take tax breaks for creating American jobs that they're not creating, but also not expecting the US government to protect our domestic industry by shutting out well-educated foreigners who are willing to work for much less than we are.
Otherwise we'll repeat the same sad experience of the AFL-CIO, Teamsters, UAW and the like.
I find it hard to believe that there are not enough smart domestic students who could use a scholarship.
I don't. Not after seeing the people that come in to interview for job openings.
Look, kids, it's just like /.'s view of musicians and the RIAA: the world doesn't owe you a living working in IT just because you want it. I hire the best I can get and if some non-American is better than you, I'm going to get them a visa and hire him/her without batting an eyelash.
In case you missed it: http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1877992&cid=34301616
A hundred? I doubt it. It's not only about being smart. My experience with many Ivy leaguers is that they are not only smart, but also extremely motivated. That is why they are so rare- you might have a 1% chance to be either, but .01% to be both.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
I'm more interested in why U.S. citizens are consistently found unqualified. And why, in that scenario, we watch as citizens go jobless and even legal visa holders get those jobs.
Where I'm working, the workforce is changing from fairly well split between U.S. citizens and Indian nationals to a three way mix between citizens, Indians, and Asians. I'm not sure how that is happening. I also see various silos of technical work in many regions, on every continent except Africa and Antarctica. Every continent. Oh, with the notable exception of Europe, where it seems we do precious little development work. Hmm...
If I had to guess, I think current work allocations are favoring nations where the workers get little protection (Australia, for example has some interesting laws, while Chile doesn't) or the workers have already done the onshore shuffle and rotated back 'home'. Oh, and I dare not start asking about the visa status of some of these workers. It's a sensitive subject. Many will just get up and walk away.
It's frustrating to see what is clearly basic, everyday work going to visa holders when you know someone who is truly overqualified, but couldn't get past the first interview. As far as I can tell, pay is not the issue.
But I'm hypersensitive to this. I may be wrong about a lot if what I think, but I'm not yet convinced.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
You mean smart people from relatively poor families are choosing to send their kids to schools that cost less than the families combined income for the year or more?
Thats fookin news to me. Only reason why I would attend a ivy league is to make connections, open doors, and play with expensive toys, and land a trust fund baby as a gf.
I would be nervous going to any now because most of the projects that get you a good job are collabrative and if you are stuck with some rich kid that is just along for the ride.. Well that would suck
While foreign IT workers come cheap, I don't think that is the biggest draw.
They are deportable indentured servants, who are dependent on their sponsoring companies for their right to pursue a visa and remain in the US. Companies like employees who will put up with anything, and not complain. I doubt that they have the same labor rights as citizens, and even where they do, are they going to try to enforce them against their sponsor? And how would they go about enforcing any rights they actually have after they've lost their right to live and work in the US?
Importing labor doesn't just import a worker, it imports entirely new labor rules.
But more importantly, don't think of a corporation and treat it like it is one entity with integrated goals.
Sub contracting firms provide one big advantage - huge opportunities for kickbacks and corruption. If your company hires individual citizens, it's unlikely that kickbacks are paid, and they're certainly difficult to concentrate. Sure, friends, family, and former coworkers get hired, but that is more an issue of limiting risk through trust and knowledge. But if you subcontract a dozen positions to a head shop, the relationship with the headshop is now associated with a continuing revenue stream that is worth a good chunk of change, and those who make the decisions about the relationship with the head shop have concentrated power over that revenue stream.
So if you're a crook and in a position of power to make the decision, do you want to hire a bunch of random citizens, or do you want to have a relationship with a head shop where a fat revenue stream is entirely dependent on your decisions of which head shop to choose?
the DHS program is dominated by little-known, for-profit Stratford University, whose 727 approved requests for post-graduate Optional Practical Training (OPT) STEM extensions tops all schools and is more than twice the combined total of the entire Ivy League — Brown (26), Columbia (105), Cornell (90), Dartmouth (18), Harvard (27), Princeton (16), Penn (50), and Yale (9). In second place, with 533 approved requests, is the University of Bridgeport.
The post-graduate Optional Practical Training (OPT) STEM extension (17 month) is applied by the e-verified employer and not by the school where the international student graduates from. You can read more about opt here.
US companies like other companies in the world are greedy and do not care about people, that's true.
If they are better than me, than so be it, hire them.
But if I am equal to or better than them and an American citizen and you throw me to the curb and snatch him up like a pedophile at an Amusement Park cause he will work for dog crap while I am trying to actually make a decent living, you can go fuck yourself.
I have seen plenty of decent jobs where the employer is only willing to hire foreigners cause of the pay issue. It is kinda messed up to go to an American company only to see half the people barely speak English and it doesn't even have to be at the highly skilled jobs either, except at the lower end of the pole they don't even go for the visas, they just flat out hire illegals and if they can't get them they go for convicted felons cause they know they have them over a barrel.
Sorry man, you can try and make excuses and sugarcoat it but the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of the people admitted under this program are not here due to their skill or lack of qualified labor and everything to do with keeping their wages low and removing as much control from the workers as possible. You have a better chance of sifting through raw bit-torrent trafic for a legal download than you do sifting through the stack of Visas for a worker who honestly got the job due to his qualifications and not his pay scale.
It's not the ones who are the best who are the problem. Maybe 1% of the H-1Bs are among the best. The other 99% are code monkeys who went to the local equivalent of a tech school, know barely enough Java or whatever to get by, and have resumes "enhanced" by agencies who specialize in such things (because their qualifications are foreign, they are unlikely to be verified by a US company). This has all sorts of bad effects, including cutting off the bottom rungs of the ladder for American grads. Why hire an unproven new grad from a non-top-10 school when for the same price or cheaper, you can get an H-1B with "5 years experience" in anything you like?
troll.
The reason why top universities don't use the STEM extension is because it's been trivially easy to get a H1B these past few years. Thanks to the recession, fewer companies are actually hiring and thus the H1B quota, previously exhausted in a day, is now actually reasonable. Of course, there are still employers like Kelly Services looking for cheap labor and these will use the STEM extension instead of going through the expense and trouble of applying a H1B for their Stratford University graduate.
When the economy recovers and hiring is back up to previous levels, the H1B quota will disappear quickly and you'll find many more STEM extensions being used for top graduates.
nope. mid-1990's to the present.
Yup. and BTW "nuclear stuff" does not require a TS, it requires a Q clearance for which naturalized citizens are also eligible, even if they maintain dual citizenship with their country of birth.
Leave him alone, he's probably one of those types who thinks we need to eliminate the DoE.
What are you talking about? I used to work at LANL, and if anything, it's the opposite - there are more chances and opportunities for women than there are for men. Of course, the disparity in the numbers comes from the fact that there *is* a fundamental disparity in the number of men and women in science and engineering to begin with, but that's not LANL's fault.
And besides, salaries at organizations like LANL are pretty fixed depending on your education, level etc. So, if you're qualified, you get X. Nothing to do with if you're an immigrant or not (your security clearance may depend on your current/past immigrant status, limiting what you work on - but that's besides the point).
You're an idiot. In case you missed it...
Or it means you had high enough performance numbers (GPA, tests, etc) to make them take notice of you. Granted, you meed a way to get enough loans/grants/whatever to pay for what you're getting.
Ivy League schools are cheap to attend compared to non-Ivy private schools, and most or all of them no longer require students to pick up any loans. More than half of the students at my Ivy were on financial aid and they replaced all loans with grants years ago. One of my choices was between a state school at $8k/year and my Ivy at $2k/year.
For all those people who say that H1-Bs are taking up "American Jobs", does anyone have statistics as to how many jobs these guys take? I don't think there is a single qualified and skilled American who is unemployed in sectors where H1Bs are applicable. Contrary to popular misconception, H1Bs aren't cheap either...Go and check out with any HR reps who hire H1Bs. People who think they are cheap and take up American jobs should go and do some research, instead of believing in stupid rants and feeding off on popular misconceptions
Oh shit, more creationist Moonies. I'll saying it, this is a bad thing.
Think global, act loco
So, let me see if I got this right: you're -against- allowing educated college graduates to stay in the US and perhaps immigrate because they're merely generic graduates not ivy league graduates?
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
"nuclear weapons were largely developed by foreign scientists in America."
Meaning people like Enrico Fermi.
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
All this "citizens vs. foreign workers" is total political bullshit. Now, I don't know how it is in construction or agriculture sectors, but I know very well how it is in the high-tech and IT. I am a resident alien, who came in the US on a work visa, and I work for a small high-tech company. There is a *constant* shortage of good people. *Nobody* in their sane mind would refuse a qualified US citizen just to hire an alien and pay tons on money to lawyers and go through insane bureaucracy - immigrants are hired because there's no other choice, people are needed *now*. I'd be glad to hire somebody who could do my work as well as I do *today* - but all people I know that are good are employed - and if they decide to leave, they have 3-4 outstanding offers. Thus, we have to import - and it is not really cheaper than hiring local. You have to pay the lawyers to prepare all the documents, you have to pay the relocation costs. The salary would be roughly the same - actually, the law mandates it, but even if it didn't - if you severely underpay somebody, he would just go to another company as soon as he discovers it, as many companies need good people, and you would just have wasted all the money above and training, etc. for nothing.
So it may be that foreign workers are slightly cheaper, but it's not the reason there's interest in them. The reason is broader market. If you want cheap, you don't bring anybody to the US - you set up shop somewhere in China or Eastern Europe, where US citizens can't compete and where salaries are 1/3 of that they are in the US. And the difference is that the worker in the US pays US taxes, while foreign one pays nothing to the US. So protesting foreign workers coming in the US is protesting more US people being employed and more tax revenue being collected. If it makes sense to you, you must be working for the government.
This sorta reminds me of Los Alamos preferentially hiring male foreign scientists while treating American female PhD's no better than prostitutes...and then wondering why all their "nucular" secrets go walkabout time and time again.
Are you implying that a.) the particular very smart foreigners that the Department of Energy hires after rigorous background checks are traitors-in-waiting, eager to dispense with the country's nuclear information, b.) women Ph.Ds sell their nuclear secrets to foreign powers because they are disgruntled at work, or c.) both? And do you seriously mean that women Ph.Ds at Los Alamos or LLNL are treated as though they exchange money for sex? Or that they are treated like secretaries? Or they are treated like security risks? Or ... what exactly?
"95% of all Slashdot
Going to an Ivy League school doesn't necessarily mean you're smarter; it just means your parents have a lot of money.
As a EECS graduate who studied at Princeton, I hate to hear statements like that. What little money my parents had, they saved for my college education. Princeton was full of poor, smart kids, at the time I was there (early eighties).
Were there rich dumb kids there? Hell, yeah, I'm looking at you, Angela Janklow and Jennifer Marron!
I worked my ass off to get top grades in high school and on the SATs. I live and work in Europe, but when I do assignments in the US, there seems to be some inverse predudice, "Oh, he must be a dumb, rich kid." And that prejudice disappears when they folks see the quality of my work.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Sorry, I used to work there too, as a postdoc, and it was made *very* clear to me that there was NO woman who had a permanent job there in a technical position was not either married to, formerly married to or otherwise romantically connected to some senior male BSD there (in fact, when I pressed my "faculty mentor" to name *ONE* that was *NOT* he was TOTALLY contemptuous and was like, "oh, yeah, there's ONE, but she's a *NUN*").
The rule there is "put out, or get out." Yah, there are plenty of opportunities there -- for WHORES. Sexual harassment is *RIFE* there -- try asking around about Sterling Colgate, who was like *proud* of the fact that he kept naked pictures of *all* of his ex-wives under glass on his office desk.
Yes, the salaries are fixed wrt to academic age (years since PhD) and since I was three years out, one of the guys I worked with was utterly outraged that I made more than him, he being only a year out of graduate school.
However, because most of the postdocs at CNLS were funded by other departments, the administrator, Frankie Whatshername, used to regularly "forget" to have the money transferred for the female PhD's salaries -- and then tell them that their grants had "run out." So you'd spend a week trying to figure out what the heck happened, and guess what -- if Frankie had neglected to put the request through and you just happened to not get paid, well, rules you know: can't be fixed retroactively. While she strutted around in her fricking skin-tight latex outfits and big hair and barely-an-associates-degree-in-secretarial-work.
So the women PhDs there wound up getting paid less -- a LOT less -- since she would pull this shit like every other month or so.
Oh look at the statistics. What secrets have been compromised by American nationals?
Now look at how many have been compromised by non-nationals.
And no, when I was there, as a postdoc, I could not find ONE woman PhD with a permanent job there who was not romantically connected in some way to a senior scientist -- either married to, the ex-wife of, or the mistress of. I finally pressed my faculty advisor to name ONE, and he could not, except for one, whom he dismissed (contemptuously) as "A Nun."
I thought the place was disgusting. Mid-90's, CNLS.
A lot of us didn't have the opportunity to dream of going to such schools due to not being able to afford it. You have to make a hell of a lot of money to afford to go to those schools, or pray for financial aid. Sure there's beginning to be a thing about not leaving graduates with debts, but for a lot of people it's not something that we're realistically able to expect.
In my experience, admittedly not at an ivy league or even private school, scholarships are horribly biased upon who you are and what you're wanting to do. Unfortunately, it matters a lot what your color is and what groups you're affiliated with. It shouldn't matter, but it does, and there's no good way of predicting what sorts of scholarships are going to be available.
But, at the end of the day, I went to a state school here for a fraction of what the Ivy League cost, and the only thing they've got that I don't is connections. Is that really the same thing as a quality education? Of course not, but a quality education doesn't get you much if you don't have the connections to get the interview.
I doubt it, in my experience, motivation isn't just a matter of ones own interest. It takes a bit of arrogance to expect something to come of it. Ever wonder why equally motivated folks living in the Ghetto don't get into the Ivy League with similar regularity? It's not because they're all morons or because they're lazy, it's because they don't have the luxury of applying their efforts to something as abstract as going to Harvard.
I think that's a point that a lot of the upper class and other folks that go to those schools fail to grasp. It's a luxury that a lot of folks don't have to spend that much time with nose stuck in a book doing homework.
Some of us had to settle for an equally good education at a state school that we could both get into and afford because we were too busy picking up the slack for our parents as kids.
And even I getting the degree at all have to acknowledge having it easier than some others, that didn't live to see 22 let alone 18 for their high school diploma.
"nuclear weapons were largely developed by foreign scientists in America."
Meaning people like Enrico Fermi.
Not to mention Leó Szilárd, Edward Teller (Hungary); Hans Bethe, Albert Einstein (Germany).
"I know a guy" isn't really a basis for any serious debate. I'd be interested in knowing the demographics of Ivy League students compared to the general population.
Yah, the glory days.
Now you have people like THIS
http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2010/09/former_los_alamos_physicist_ch.html
and THIS
http://pogoblog.typepad.com/pogo/2007/07/oak-ridge-emplo.html
I have worked in Technical Sales and Services for Software/IT for the past six years. I go into LOTS of IT software development shops to hawk my wares and services. Back in the 90's (when I got my last raise), there were a few Indian nationals working in software development and they were good at what they did. Fast forward to 2010: From government agencies, to embedded shops, to cloud, to insurance, and everywhere in between, if there is code to be slung, its probably a foreign guy doing it - I see it every day, everywhere I go (except defense). The percentages are huge (some places its 90%+).
They are good people and I'd say that they are generally pretty good at what they do. Maybe not always the superstars I was first introduced to in the 1990's but they work harder, work longer hours, and are (probably) cheaper. They are why I haven't had a raise since 1998 and why I went into sales/services (the only way to make more money and stay technical).
I don't know how this is done in the hand fulls of numbers stated above but I DO KNOW the numbers are huge when it comes to coders. I know experienced US citizens that want work and can't find it (except maybe at Home Depot) yet new foreign workers are turning up all the time in these places. It ain't right.
That much said, half of the white American males I run into in these same places spend way too much time talking sports while the Indian guy in the next cube is gettin shit done.
Nothing new - the Manhattan Project had plenty of spies.
If you offer $100k to your farmhands, you have to sell your goods at a price which allows you to recover that cost. So you raise the wages you're paying by increasing your sale price, and all that results in is a bucket load of inflation, assuming you've convinced all your competitors to raise their prices, or you fail to sell anything because you're undercut by someone paying their farmhands less.
A bucket load of inflation is good for nothing since the people queued up for the $100k jobs would find them suddenly worth the same as $30k jobs were before the inflation. And the "someone paying less" is what has got us into the state we are today. Competition and capitalism at work.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
I just scored a job recently yet again with insane pay, insane benefits, crazy cool co-workers. I could care less about visa body shops I would never work for one so it is not a concern. In fact I hang up on any recruiter contract or company with a foreign name and or accent. I specifically seek employers that want candidates with a proven reliable track record of success and are willing to pay for top notch talent.
Ninety percent of the hiring pool in the IT job market right now is mediocre at best, you can either stay in that group and get bumped by a foreign worker or work and stay in the top 10%, your choice. Just remember when you are applying for that dream job you could be competing against me so you had better be a master at systems, administration, databases, programming, design, security and architecture with a resume to back it up.
Why in the hell would you be working for someone who has not given you a raise since 1998?. My last company announced a wage freeze I was gone in less than a week. Employment is a mutual business partnership between me and a company. When a company cannot meet it's financial obligations for my work then I find a different partner without those issues.
The Manhattan Project ended decades ago. Oh, and in your list of eminent foreign born scientists who developed nuclear weapons, you left off
Lise Meitner.
The incidents in the last decade all feature men, many of foreign birth. The fact is, that the DOE simultaneously claims that it "has to" recruit foreign scientists (even mediocre ones) to fill out the ranks at the national labs, while failing to address the outrageous gender discrimination that would literally double their native born talent pool if they treated us as anything other than potential cheap entertainment for their narcissistic senior Oppenheimer wannabes.
I couldn't stand it. I went back to Harvard. Their loss.
Very interesting ... it sounds similar to (but far more extreme than) some work situations I have been involved with myself in the past. I'm very curious - why do you think this was? Was it that the women couldn't get a permanent job if they weren't sleeping with someone, or that the women working in the field had a rarefied enough social stratum that they inevitably ended up dating someone they worked with? Or some of both?
"95% of all Slashdot
It's gutting engineering and science in general, not just IT.
Probably just being used for the cash flow. The nifty thing, from these for-profit "tech universities" point of view, is that now all the student loans are guaranteed by the government (meaning the taxpayers) so their profits are assured even if the student is a complete loser... and they cater to losers in the first place (you pretty much can't get turned down, so long as your loan goes through). BTW this is straight from a friend who works as a recruiter at one of these "tech universities". Interestingly, the tuition is about four times higher than the equivalent courses would cost at the nearby state university.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
If you don't realize that what businesses go for, as far as labor, is the cheapest they can find... always.
My workplace seeks the best qualified candidates, and we've hired many foreign nationals as well as US nationals. I've never seen a hiring decision come down to price, on either side. A reasonable company will research provide a competitive salary for a position so that they won't lose the employee later to a higher bidder (a waste of time and effort).
It is far more expensive to hire a "cheap" person who does not measure up and waste time/effort or see projects fail. But you also don't hire an over qualified person because they will eventually leave to a higher bidder who can use all of their talents.
I'm sure there stupid companies out there. I would suggest avoiding working for them, because they will fail.
And yes, I'm an executive.
I go to a community college, they've been able to keep the cost of tuition the same for the past 5 years, there have been no layoffs, getting a degree from them is actually highly regarded in the area. They also accept pretty much anyone with a GED or better. Why to people pay to go to private tech schools again?
I worked my butt off and I got into all three Ivy League schools I applied to, but I didn't get a good enough scholarship to be able to afford going to any of them. I did get a very large scholarship to go to a lesser known school, which is where I went due directly to the financial issues. While I was never "poor" growing up, my parents and I certainly couldn't afford the $30,000+ a year over scholarship awards that it would have cost to go to the Ivy schools.
That said, I have no idea how my life would be if I hadn't gone where I did... I, for the most part, enjoy my job, which is something a lot of people do not get to say. While I would probably be making a lot more money, would already own a house, etc., etc., I am pretty content with how things turned out so far.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
The US immigration system is absolutely ridiculous. I'm doing a Ph.D. at one of the "big name" schools and getting financial aid totaling around $200000 over the course of my degree. After I graduate there are essentially two options:
1. Go to academia in either the US or Europe
2. Go work for a tech company in Europe.
The problem is that most companies want you to have a permanent work permit before they will hire you. This is especially true for smaller companies that don't have the lawyers that going through the process of getting a work permit requires. As I'm looking for an industry research job, I've simply decided to pack an leave. Thanks to all the suckers who ended up paying for my degree though!
We don't need a large population with high intelligence and skills to have explosive productivity. You need just a few Wright Brothers' bike shops updated to the modern era. We've replaced those Yeomen during the last half of the twentieth century and it would be relatively easy to get them back were it not for the maldistribution of capital.
With an NPV of US citizenship of approximately $225k, 40 years of immigration liberalization against the will of the majority diluting that value with 48M immigrants to date and Reagan tax cuts approximately $300G/year for the last 30 years and a risk free interest rate of about 3%, there has been a total value of $35T transferred from the middle and upper middle class to the wealthy, their managerial elites and immigrant bioweaponry during the years of boomer fertility.
Clearly these immigrants are from cultures that are a lot more adapted to centralization of wealth and power in corrupt elites, so they not only fit right in with the manifest direction of the US in the last half of the 20th century:
More insideously, these immigrants are better adapted to such a pathological environment so they actively encourage the trend.
Now, let me ask you one question:
If that much wealth has been stolen by the upper class, why should we expect the economy to have a consumer base at all?
The principle victims of this were the mid to late boomers, as early boomers (Bush, Gore, Clinton, etc.) got to ride the demographic wave providing them real estate appreciation and managerial upward mobility. There are also the children of the boomers who were victims. Assuming a 1.6 total fertility rate among the boomer females, we have approximately 125M citizen creditors due that $35T for the breach of the social contract commencing with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. If paid down over a period about as long as it took to run up that social debt, each citizen creditor is due an annuity of $13,000 or about $1100/month.
That wouldn't restore the entire consumer base immediately but it would allow for trickle up to start creating wealth in the quantity required to finance the government.
Its pretty obvious to me that the energy, environment and productivity problems could be solved except for the maldistribution of capital -- and that the de facto goal of continuing this situation is a die off that preserves the managerial elite that benefitted most from the breach of the social contract against those born subsequent to 1950.
The primary question before us is: How can the death burden be shifted to be more equitable?
Seastead this.
An AC points out,
=========
I go to a community college, they've been able to keep the cost of tuition the same for the past 5 years, there have been no layoffs, getting a degree from them is actually highly regarded in the area. They also accept pretty much anyone with a GED or better. Why to people pay to go to private tech schools again?
=========
Exactly... but notice from their TV ads the demographic the private "tech" schools are aiming at: losers who sit around watching afternoon TV every day, but dream about making big bucks for no effort. Do you really expect them to make good employees, even if they do manage to graduate? (And do you really expect them to pay back the loan, which for a 4 year "tech university" program is close to $50,000?? lousy cost/benefit ratio at that.)
Anyway, I think it makes an interesting connection -- that we're being flooded with "tech worker visas" and that these "technical universities" are becoming profitable enough to expand and even seek regular accreditation (which they need to get in on the free money, er, I mean gov't-guaranteed student loan program).
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
OK executive, do your foreign nationals get paid as much as your US nationals?
Yes or no? Don't equivocate.
the feminazism in your post does not help whatever legitimacy there may still be left in your 'suffrage' cause.
Going to an Ivy League school doesn't necessarily mean you're smarter; it just means your parents have a lot of money.
Or very little money.
We went to Disney in Florida a couple of years ago, and as an experiment, I tried to buy an American made product/toy for my daughter inside the parks. I just couldn't do it. Cheap seems to be the focus of corporate America.
You mean in your opinion foreign students shouldn't be given scholarships, since there are domestic students with similar potential that could use it? I don't really agree. AFAIK, in all schools that give scholarships to foreign students, financial need is transparent to the admission process. I.e., they admit the best, probably independently of nationality, then give scholarships as needed.
weinersmith
So you are putting as an example of why immigration is good the mass sheltering of war criminals of the worsed kind. Good one. THAT will convince the people. Nothing like a nazi camp doctor to get people thinking nicely of foreigners.
Oh and the use of nazi's for the space program worked so well, that the USSR was the first in space.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
How about the ticket? You are aware that Disney is an American company? So you bought an American product the moment you entered. How about the food? The drinks?
The rides themselves? The movies the rides are based on?
Sorry, but next time try a bit harder. For instance, go into an Apple store and try to buy a product build in the US. A lot harder. But you just have to buy non-Apple to get a piece of hardware not made in a dictatorship. But that would mean giving up the shiny. Oh and if you dislike Disney for outsourcing its toy production, don't buy Disney. There are still locally made toys. Even handmade ones. Cost a bit more but that shouldn't be a problem. Unless you are focused on cheap as well.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I think that's a point that a lot of the upper class and other folks that go to those schools fail to grasp. It's a luxury that a lot of folks don't have to spend that much time with nose stuck in a book doing homework.
This is the problem with the "merit-based" system we have to day - the well off are able to give their kids tons more opportunity to develop their "merit" compared to the not so well off. It starts at preschool, if not sooner - get the kids into the "right" (and expensive) preschool, make sure the kids spend all of their free time going from one extracurricular activity to another (all of which cost money and parental time to shuffle the kids around) then make sure they get into an expensive private high school and if needed, get them a tutor.
So the end result is that yes you get highly qualified kids going to the best colleges, but when the only way a kid can become so highly qualified is because their parents are wealthy enough to afford all the preparation you end up with exactly the same sort of social stratification that the merit system was intended to eliminate. Back in the early 1900s the wealthy were smart enough to realize that stratification was not good for the long term health of society and so the SATs were created. Nowadays, when rich kids average 400 points higher than poor kids, it's time for a change in the system. I don't know what that change is, but you don't need to be a baker to know that the bread is stale.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Most Americans want ... to become 'Functional Consultants'
You miss the mark completely about people wanting consultancy. Consultancy makes you disposable(in favor of the business), not flexible. People want stable work.
They're US citizens and they do deserve whatever they ask, not be driven down to Third World standards and wages. It is a shame that your enablers dont get tried for treason.
Virtualization and companies like ODesk...
Hell no, and perhaps with a law requires US-friendly operations and standards.
Otherwise, let US citizens lie as badly about their qualifications, with no consequence.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Sorry, I used to work there too, as a postdoc, and it was made *very* clear to me that there was NO woman who had a permanent job there in a technical position was not either married to, formerly married to or otherwise romantically connected to some senior male BSD there (in fact, when I pressed my "faculty mentor" to name *ONE* that was *NOT* he was TOTALLY contemptuous and was like, "oh, yeah, there's ONE, but she's a *NUN*").
So are you pissed at women trying to get into Los Alamos for being too stupid to compete with real scientists based on their competence? Or at Los Alamos for not hiring more useless bed warmers?
The rule there is "put out, or get out." Yah, there are plenty of opportunities there -- for WHORES. Sexual harassment is *RIFE* there -- try asking around about Sterling Colgate, who was like *proud* of the fact that he kept naked pictures of *all* of his ex-wives under glass on his office desk.
Yes, the salaries are fixed wrt to academic age (years since PhD) and since I was three years out, one of the guys I worked with was utterly outraged that I made more than him, he being only a year out of graduate school.
You stated before that *all* women at Los Alamos basically work as prostitutes. I can understand outrage of this guy that a whore (no matter experience) is paid more than him.
However, because most of the postdocs at CNLS were funded by other departments, the administrator, Frankie Whatshername, used to regularly "forget" to have the money transferred for the female PhD's salaries -- and then tell them that their grants had "run out." So you'd spend a week trying to figure out what the heck happened, and guess what -- if Frankie had neglected to put the request through and you just happened to not get paid, well, rules you know: can't be fixed retroactively. While she strutted around in her fricking skin-tight latex outfits and big hair and barely-an-associates-degree-in-secretarial-work.
So the women PhDs there wound up getting paid less -- a LOT less -- since she would pull this shit like every other month or so.
And you wonder why they don't want more women in positions of responsibility ...
This is speculation, but an Ivy League computer scientist might be more likely to stay in academia instead of entering the industrial workforce, than a graduate at a less renowned university.
This is self-selecting: An employer would look for skill-sets and a diploma, but not necessarily factor in the school's prestige (particularly when that would make the candidate more expensive). The students more likely to plan on becoming academics are more likely to apply to an Ivy League school.
Going to Caltech means you were admitted, and if I want to claim smart that's the name I would want on my degree. Caltech provides for all accepted students to their need.
...and Caltech isn't considered "Ivy League".
How about offering to do IT work for a local voluntary group / charity? Telling a future employer that you spend an evening a week helping a local charity will look good on your cv and once you've been helping at the local charity for a while and done the mundane jobs they'll probably give you more challenging jobs to take on as they learn to trust you, or you could take the initiative and offer to build them systems to manage their processes.
Alternatively you could do part time consultancy, start your own business and do a few hours a week.
Or get involved in an open source project and apply your skills there.
All these things will give you experience and look good on your cv.
None of them are likely to give you much money but they won't get in the way of you holding down a job in a shop or a bar or whatever brings the rent money in.
These are my suggestions for helping you get experience; if you want to get rich quick and you're asking how you can move into a high paid job immediately then I don't have any solutions. I do sympathise with you though about the problem of trying to persuade IT companies to take on university graduates with no skills.
Perhaps a further suggestion might be to try to persuade a local IT company to take you on as an unpaid intern for a month or three months, that might open up doors for you. You might make yourself so useful your line manager will be marching into his boss's office and telling them they need to keep hold of you and the big boss needs to find the money to hire you....
But you're still hiring the cheapest you can find. Given you have two candidates of equal qualifications (more or less; no one's exactly the same), you'll still hire the one who'll accept the least money.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
LOL, namecalling. Wow, that is so unique.
Where'd you get that one, from Glenn Beck?
Sorry, it's not "feminazism" to simply expect Title IX and Title VII -- the law of the land, in case you'd forgotten -- be enforced, any more than it is for women to expect to be able to vote (the meaning of "suffrage" since you're clearly unfamiliar with the meaning of the word).
Quite frankly, it was stupid of the US to leave Lise Meitner in Austria while bringing over Szilard, Teller, Bethe and (god help us) Fuchs. Sexism through and through -- there she was unwillingly and unhappily helping Hitler build the bomb in Austria and Sweden(finally paying after numerous UNPAID position) when all the US would have had to do was pay her transatlantic fare, give her a FAIR PAYCHECK and tell her that it's OK to be Jewish in America. DUH! But NOOOOO they just ASSUMED it was the MEN around her doing all that work. Jesus, you assholes never learn, do you?
This is such a stupid point to make. If you could have your driveway paved the EXACT same way with the EXACT same quality for $2500 or $3500 which would you pick?
I'm assuming you don't work for Kelly Services - or any similar kind of body shop.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Typical sexist response.
You're just illustrating the problem.
And sorry, I wouldn't PUT OUT, so I GOT OUT.
Fucking assholes.
I see a lot of people are saying the same thing, that we have all the people we need, no need for foreign workers. A single instance of a foreign worker who doesn't understand pointers is sufficient to try to convince that all of them are bad. But I guess you never had to actually hire people.
For programming and database mgmnt activities, out of all the resumes, most of the time the only relevant ones I receive are from foreign workers. I have interviewed a few natives, but they were completely inadequate. In greater new york region, everyone wants the big bucks. Maybe that is why fewer americans actually apply for the positions I hire for. Also body shoppers, the ones actually collecting resumes and forwarding it to us do not have many americans in them. This could be because americans look for full-time, whereas foreigners do not mind contract positions.
There are bad programmers within any body of programmers, be it natives or foreigners. Likewise there are good ones too.
It's so fucking basic. You don't screw the crew.
Where were these girls brought up?
"a rarefied enough social stratum that they inevitably ended up dating someone they worked with"
Jesus christ. Like it's So High-Tone to Fuck the Boss.
My father's company recently had to shut down their college internship program. The work the company does centers around defense industry research and testing. Starting about 4 years ago, they started having difficulty finding engineering students who qualified for their internship program, but not from a lack of candidates. The problem they have run into is that they deal with some very sensitive contracts, so the interns must pass a certain degree of security clearance. This is not usually a problem for students from this country, Canada, Britain, or most of Europe, but the Feds start to have problems when the only candidates applying for the positions are from China, Russia, Indonesia and Iran. So, since they could not find a qualified candidate who could pass even the most basic security clearance, they had to shut down the program or risk jeopardizing their federal contracts.
When the program coordinator started asking around to several of the universities involved to find out why there were no American-born candidates, the conclusion came down to pretty much to the same situation in every case. All of the candidates were in post-graduate studies, with the students' sponsoring governments paying the students' bills at about 2-3 times what an American student pays, so the universities were making business decisions to reserve their limited post-graduate slots for these students since they would get more per student, and get paid on time. It wasn't that there weren't American-born students, just none attending the universities that were a part of the program.
Why is this surprising when many rich Americans sent their kids to Ivy league schools - leaving the cheaper for-profit schools to fight for these foreign students who maybe can't afford the ivy league. Sounds like the schools (businesses) are just exploiting a niche for profit.
No, it's better if Science or Tech is what you want to learn.
Guess again.
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~sanders/214/other/news/030699china-nuke.html
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
"Leave him alone, he's probably one of those types who thinks we need to eliminate the DoE."
Why would we want to eliminate Club Cheney ?
Ohhh right....
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Top schools have need-based aid. If you are admitted you can afford to go there, though if your parents have a good but not great income they might be reluctant to pay. Choosing a school because of potential "connections" isn't a great idea because you never know if they will materialize, and at elite schools a lot of your classmates will continue to be idly rich and/or to study after graduation, and won't be of any use to someone looking for work.
Troll, a bad troll at that.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
So Indian Code Monkeys sling code just as good as American? Reading this discussion, it seems that generally the consensus is that Indian code monkeys suck at writing code.
Agreed -- they are one of the best. (My previous post was not meant as a knock against Caltech; in fact quite the opposite!)
I read this discussion differently. We're talking about people trained in American schools and therefore I'm assuming that when they graduate they are of the same caliber as anyone else who graduates from an American school.
I got lucky when I graduated in 2007 (an American) and got a job nearby in software development. There are plenty of jobs out there, but the "you need experience and we won't give it to you" attitude is still prevalent. My apartment complex sits beside a business park with a lot of IT jobs. Needless to say, my apartments are full of Indians who are here temporarily just to work in the IT jobs. It's similar to people saying that "all the immigrants are taking our jobs". In a sense, they are. If people are willing to work more cheaply doing the same thing, those are the people that are going to get hired. Racism still exists in the staffing industry. I also have a friend in staffing and he tells me about clients that will only hire black people, or Hispanic people, or white people for whatever reasons. Stereotypes suck and it hurts a lot of good people and makes the playing field uneven.
Check out my blog on blogging at http://www.andyd.org. I'll try to do more research and blog about this interesting topic.
The racism is pretty constant, though. The difference is that it's somehow acceptable to talk hate against brown people when "dey tuk ur yob!"
Reinstate fair competition in one simple step: require that any goods sold to US citizens, or on US soil, or transported by US registered corporations, must be created and processed in accordance with US health, environmental, and job safety laws.
Right now the jobs are leaving America because it's OK to treat foreigners poorly and destroy foreign environments, and it's not OK to do that here at home. Obviously in a free market production goes where costs are lower, as you rightly point out. But we raised those costs for humanitarian and practical reasons - why do we pretend those reasons don't apply to foreign humans? Why do we pretend it's practical to destroy foreign rivers and forests?
The current "solution" is to allow "guest workers" and treat them poorly - look at America's meat packing and slaughterhouse industries, where most workers are illegal Mexicans and all are treated like disposable, interchangeable units - "I say, Reginald, this beaner is used up, do get me another one!". This is the exact opposite of how to make America great again, it's importing the bad parts of other cultures instead of exporting what's good about ours, like sustainable environmental controls and respect for the dignity of workers.
We have fucking spy satellites. We can tell which ships are burning coal, which factories do not allow workers to leave the premises, which industries are burying used-up workers in lime pits behind the mill. Stop allowing domestic sale or shipping of any goods produced in ways that contravene our laws. THAT WILL BRING BACK THE REAL AMERICA. We don't have to stoop to the level of the worst, our titanic consumer market can pull the worst up to whatever level we want.
Just wanted to clarify that I am not trolling or flaming...
am from Asia(no not India)...and during early 80's and 90s all we had were..massing business delegations headed by high profile ministes visiting Asian countries touting 'Globalization and urging local governments to stop protecting the local industries or 'protectionism'....why..well so that western companies can come in, sell and thereby make handsome profits....now thats not bad..
now that some of the asian countries are growing and people have grown and started to compete at a global stage...western people it seems want less globalization and more 'protectionism'...which is very Odd indeed...
Having said that I fully synpathise with your view but you got to realize the market almost always evens out sooner or later...
as per some of the comments I have read....I dont thing many(not all) present the full picture...
those who imply companies like to get people on H1 visas obviously dont know the full background(sorry but true)...the true cost of getting a candidate on H1B is way more that recruiting a local candidate and thats apart from the legal hassles they face...now if they still go ahead with it, that shows they really did not get the right people...
In my experience I have seen developers working for a project for 19-20 years, not upgrade their technical knowhow and then crib when they get fired....just one example not to suggest every one is same...but still this is not fair in todays market.
Last but not the least..I am always intrigued by the way people in America complain about immigrants when most of them are immigrants themselves...
am sure the locals when you or your grandparents came along showed great compassion and I think you should do the same...
and yes compete of course , but on a level playing field and then justify yourselves...
Just my two cents....
Are these the jobs that we keep hearing that Americans won't do? /sarcasm
Sorry, I'm just tired of hearing that excuse from people who don't want aliens to get their citizenship/work-visas the right way. And for the record, my grandparents did it, and so did my wife, it's not that hard.
Just another day in Paradise
OK executive, do your foreign nationals get paid as much as your US nationals?
Yes or no? Don't equivocate.
I'm not the original poster, but I've been involved in many hiring decisions. In every case we have picked out the candidate we wanted, and then figured out the details of the offer. That's not to say that someone can't price themselves out of the position, but the distinction between one candidate that wants 85K and one that wants 90K won't affect our hiring decision.
And foreign nationals do get paid as much as US nationals.
My workplace seeks the best qualified candidates, and we've hired many foreign nationals as well as US nationals. I've never seen a hiring decision come down to price, on either side.
The hiring decisions never come down to price because generally the price is decided ahead of time. Yes you will hire the best qualified candidate, but you will hire the best qualified candidate that is willing to accept the salary you're offering. Anything that artificially increases the labor supply will necessarily decrease wages over all. I don't necessarily disagree with this program, but you're just lying.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
Typical sexist response.
You're just illustrating the problem.
Oh noes! Someone dared to disagree with female! Quick, inform PC police immediately!
And sorry, I wouldn't PUT OUT, so I GOT OUT.
Fucking assholes.
Good for you. If you were too weak academically to compete with Los Alamos personnel and did not want to put out, then getting out was best option for everybody.
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In the meantime solid American born IT workers that I know all over the country struggle to find work. I guess it's cause they can't live on $25k a year, but the kids out of collage can.
Why can't the American's compete on salaries with others? H1Bs get very decent wages. So why do American's think they are entitled to higher wages?
I work for a subsidiary of a large American corporation (cough....GE...cough). My department has had a consistent problem training and retaining the revolving door of TCS (Tata Consulting) and other (mostly Indian) contract workers. The maddening thing is that we're funneled by GE into dealing with these agencies because "we have no headcount" and therefore are not allowed to hire permanent employees often at salaries that American staff would be quite happy with. I came to find out that we're paying $100-110k on an annualized basis for very junior level programmers. We're talking 25 year olds...many straight out of college. Of that, TCS is probably pocketing 30-40% (or perhaps more). Instead of getting these inexperienced folks and handing wads of cash to Tata, I could pay say $100k to an American programmer with a few years of actual/verifiable work experience in our field. The employee would be happy, I'd be tickled to not have to retrain someone for that spot annually, etc. I don't know what loophole in accounting makes this "cheaper" for the US corporation since we lose a LOT of productivity due to the constant revolving door, poor employee integration/communication/etc.
The current system is clearly broken. I think I'm in agreement that a good solution would be to require that H1-B employees be paid a premium over local staff. That way, they're available if you really need them, but there's incentive to source locally first.
Yah, sure, "well skilled", "best and brightest" like Faisal Shahzad, who attended SE U in Lakeland? He shouldn't even have gotten an F visa, and ditto with all but a few hundred of the rest of each year's applicants. If you're going to claim you're "best" or "brightest" you'd better measure up to some reasonable standard.
Dear OP (and everyone else posting protectionist pieces on /.);
Sounds like you're having a hard time putting up with the fact that your company is hiring Indians and Chinese with equivalent IT skills as yours.
"Shouldn't let 'em go to school in the US! Protectionism FTW!"
Fine. They'll just go to Beijing U or Mumbai U instead. The US schools will lose their full-tuition payments, have to raise in-state fees and reduce financial aid. Then they'll still be hired to work in the US after they graduate.
"Shouldn't give 'em visas! Protectionism FTW!"
Fine. They'll just work for an Indian or Chinese company and rely on outsourced work from, say, IBM. Your company will go under and you'll take a job with IBM.
"Shouldn't let 'em outsource! Protectionism FTW!"
Fine. IBM will go under as the comparative advantage for corporate iron shifts in favor of India and China. You'll get fired and take a job in movie post-production, a field the US still has a comparative advantage in. Unfortunately you hate your new job, since all the creative types are getting ahead of you.
"Shouldn't sell 'em movies overseas! Protectionism FTW!"
So you want your new company to go under. If we block movie exports, India and China won't find anything they want to buy from us. As a result, they won't want to sell us anything to get the dollars to buy it with. Unfortunately, there's financial services, agriculture, and a bunch of other stuff that the US still has a comparative advantage in.
Basically, there are only three ways that you can avoid having to put up with the existance of India and China:
1. Block all imports and exports via massive tariffs. "Autarchy FTW!"
2. Have everyone in the US live and work and be productive in exactly the same ways as the Chinese. If you work the same number of hours, think the same way, eat the same food, and do everything else in the exact same fashion and in the same numbers, somehow acquiring the same pool of natural resources, and having the same shipping distance to Mexico and Europe, then the so-called Terms of Trade will be the same, there won't be any comparative advantages, and no one will find it profitable to trade anything.
3. Stop producing and consuming anything in the US. "Everyone just go to bed and pull the blanket over their heads!"
Unfortunately, 1950s America is no longer with us, and you actually have to put up with India and China being on the map. Grr, I know.
Not because you are wrong, but because you are so correct. We are software engineers, developers, networking specialists and system administrators. We know the businesses we work for far better than the fat lazy salary guzzling managers we are abused by. We understand politics with no trouble since we spend most of our lives doing our best to avoid the politics of our respective offices.
There is more than enough talent here to force those attacking the middle class to step back and listen. Instead of whining about getting screwed out of the just compensation we have earned, why aren't any of you proposing a way to fight back?
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
This is a fundamental problem: society versus individual.
Shall I be the man whose conformist behavior is rewarded by the team?
Or shall I defy convention, wield my ego as a business model, and attempt to impose my will on the group?
-kgj
I don't have much in the way of demographic data to give you but will note that the Ivyy League schools have some of the most generous need-based scholarships. For example, Yale, Harvard, Princeton and Brown all have need-blind admission. I suspect that the income of families who send their kids to Yale or the other highly ranked schools is on average higher than that of the general population. But this isn't do to an issue of need as much as three other issues: 1) Higher income individuals are likely to perform better on relevant tests (more likely to be able to afford SAT tutoring, the children are more likely to be smarter since they had better nutrition and health-care at a young age.) 2) Lower income people likely go to high schools that have less capable college counseling 3) Connected to 2, many people aren't going to bother applying to those schools, since they aren't aware of the options that exist specifically to help low income individuals.
...because you didn't prove that you couldn't hire a citizen. Or that you willfully committed fraud in doing so.
Yes, we are. We don't believe in Third World conditions or wages either.
However, you may have benefited from a fellow traveller that helped take a US job and made it yours, by fraud.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
At some point, not protecting our domestic industries will damn us all. You aren't helping your case by trying to paint the "durrr, unions are evil!" brush.
Shutting those people out is not a option of first resort, but a last resort. We have the people, we just need the ability to put the screws to resistant employers.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Nice to see a lot of undermining of the US, and support for fraud, just because they didn't find a US citizen willing to be a slave.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
...to get to that level "required".
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
The only skill they don't have is the ability to put up with slavery.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Kind of hard to do things when you have a hairline majority. Filibusters, unwilling representatives, and all that.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Sooner: nutrition.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.