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CS Prof Decries America's 'Internal Brain Drain'
walterbyrd writes "Dr. Norman Matloff of the University of California-Davis computer science department argues that US citizens are avoiding 'Science Technology Engineering Math' (STEM) careers, because US citizens see those fields as being ruined by massive offshoring and inshoring. 'Despite widely publicized claims that foreign tech workers and scientists represent exceptional ability and are thus vital to American innovation, Matloff called that argument merely "a good sound byte for lobbyists" supporting industry proposals for higher visa caps. The data (PDF), on the other hand, indicate that those admitted are no more able, productive, or innovative than America's homegrown talent, he said.'"
If it were all about talent, with 95% of the worlds population being from outside the US, we'd see more CEO's dumped for off shore replacements. Its about the money.
I hear plenty of arguments from friends as to how "college is completely unnecessary". Yeah, have fun working at McDonalds for the next 60 years. Better to have problems finding a job than to have no skills at all.
Maybe if they would actually hire STEM people it would help. Ive been looking for a job for 6 months with a MS in Applied Math (signal processing / computational math) and a 3.65 GPA (not super impressive, but I give out my transcript anyway). Nowadays in America, you get MBA's and Finance majors getting all the high paying jobs, and an MBA is a notoriously easy degree to get. I know several people that laugh about how easy it was to get their MBA, because all they did was get drunk, skip class, and screw hookers all the time.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
The laws of supply and demand still operate: If you want great STEM workers, then you need to pay for them. If you aren't getting as many as you'd like, increase the amount you're willing to pay them, or improve working conditions, until you get them.
That said, the reason that many US employers prefer foreign labor over US labor have nothing to do with the costs, and everything to do with foreign labor having less ability to go find another job when they get mistreated.
I am officially gone from
Lobbyists have a motive,"To get people to do what they want", then they'll make up the words that sound as reasonably sounding to a regular Joe to make it sound like it is in his best interest. No matter how awful the thing someone wants to do, I'm sure they can always make a bullshit reason why it is in everyone's best interest. It doesn't matter they have a,"sound byte", they can do this stuff in their sleep.
God spoke to me.
Now, if you could just start a multi-billion dollar company and put your words into action.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
I'm interested in Science and Technology. I'm fascinated and obsessed by it. But I left the programming field 6 years ago when I started losing projects to outsourcers charge 1/10th what I could charge.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
See http://www.justsharethis.net/indian-ceos-list-in-big-u-s-companies/
And there are a bunch of immigrants in executive level roles in Yahoo, Google and Microsoft etc.
This space for rent.
foreign geniuses come to study here, our colleges are well-respected, and are interested in setting up shops after college that could employ 100-300 americans in 5-10 years. but because of rabid anti-immigrant american hysteria, they are deluged with harrowing residency/ citizenship requirements that are intended to turn away seasonal farm workers, and are forced to go home, where those companies of the future grow instead
frankly, protectionism is moronic. even when packaged in the stilted round about way this stupid story packages it
go ahead and man the borders and prevent the poor immigrants if it makes you happy. but if you force the geniuses to go home after studying college in the usa, you are throwing away hundreds of thousands of jobs in the companies of the future
we are a nation of immigrants. we always have been, unless you are native american. so enough with the protectionist stupidity. no matter how lamely you package the failed ideology, its still a failed way of thinking that ultimately only hurts the usa
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I see this all the time. The bright kids today are going into law or the financial industry, because that's where all the money is. Why bother working your ass off in school studying hard subjects that involve math, when you can party your way through school, get a law degree or something in financial mumbo-jumbo, and make 3 times as much working for Merril Lynch? Not to mention not worrying about having your job shipped to India or China.
In any sane society this kind of imbalance would be corrected by the rulers. However in our current society the lawyers and the financial industry owns - oops I mean make "campaign contributions" and "lobbies" - the government, so they have all the power.
I can't really see anything good in the future for a society where a parasitic class, which produces nothing of value, is given such an overwhelming priority over the productive classes.
The federal government began an active campaign of destroying the citizen tech workers in the start of the 21st century, after huge economic downturn in 2001 and citizens had huge need for IT jobs. H1B has been system for destroying IT job market for U.S. techs since sept 11, even while noise made about dropping "caps", that was only a third of visas granted if "exempt" categories included. Caps were raised in 2000 to 195,000 from 115,000 and then "dropped" to 65,000 in 2004 BUT "exempt" categories used to pump up total granted number (reapplication, research, etc.)
Total H1B's granted:
2000: 355,000
2001: 331,206
2002: 370,490
2003: 360,498
2004: 387,147 (cap dropped to 65,000 BUT exempt categories pumped up)
2005: 407,917
Result: many IT people completely driven out of the IT industry, while in 2002, for example, 9 out of 10 new IT jobs taken by H1B holders.
There is ongoing huge problem with H1B workers being farmed out to other companies illegally, and visa holders illegally staying on to work elsewhere.
Dr. Matloff's assertion is utter crap! US students aren't pursuing "STEM" careers because one needs to pay a fortune in college tuition to make a mediocre salary. Why bother? Also, nerdy "STEM" careers aren't cool/trendy/whatever.
US culture doesn't value "STEM" careers. Why should US citizens go against their own culture?
Same here. I left the US in 2005 to go to Asia where all the jobs are while my Indian buddies stayed in the US and did my old job for half what I was getting paid. Teachers make more than programmers these days.
Typical conservative POV:
1. American exceptionalism
2. American exceptionalism redux -- we're so freakin' awesome, God's chosen people etc
3. Strong on national defense
4. Self-reliance
5. Sloppy kisses for capitalism
6. Strong support for the average folk (working people who work for their money)
7. Everything that's wrong with this country starts and ends with liberals and they're the ones trying to tear it apart from the inside because the black filth of communism is pumping through their veins
Well, the reality is that America's not all that special. We're being torn apart from the inside in end-stage capitalism where we cease to exploit internal markets and are now cannibalizing ourselves to support the credit binge.
I would tend to think that a strong national defense begins with a strong national economy. We wouldn't need to be engaging in all these wars in the middle east if we didn't need their oil. Viable alternative power like solar and wind would do more to secure our nation than fleets of F-22's.
I understand why that sort of thing isn't happening. I just don't understand why these people are too blind to see it. Gay marriage is a threat to the American family? Fuck, no! Two parents having to work 60 hours a week to put food on the table is destroying the American family. Pay enough so that one job-holder can support a full-time parent who stays at home and you'll make one hell of a start towards saving the family. And how about some goddamn affordable health care? No, we can't have health care but we can ban abortion and that's being pro-life. Wait, what?
I just can't understand how myopic people are. It's like those seniors marching at the townhall meetings carrying signs saying "Government: hands off my medicare!"
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Because the people smart enough for it see it as a bad career. Why slave to make 80-100k a year with a Masters degree when you could be making 250-300k as a lawyer....
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
I know that current policy communications massively favors the short, low-content, high-impact format known as "sound bite"... but really, compressing your message to 8 bits is just too much. You can't even get much (acoustic) noise out of one measly octet, let alone anything resembling spin, hype, or fearmongery.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
It's not all about top-notch brains. It's also about many not-so-clever brains at lesser salary. This was the reason why US companies hired foreign labor, and this is the reason why thanks to the H1B caps, companies are happy to go east to other countries.
Most CEOs (especially American CEOs) don't care about how well it will be for the company 10 years down the line. They care about the next quarter.
More and more jobs are global now in computer science. If there is a programming job, it can be had anywhere in this world, not just in America.
Plus, isn't America so well off thanks to migrants? Who invented your rockets and your bombs near in the past as 50 years ago? Who makes your microprocessors? Suddenly, you want to stop immigration and be protectionist?
This professor needs to stop dining and think a little.
OTOH, there's the big problem of Indian companies gobbling up H1B slots like it was property.. but that's a different problem. There's also the problem of poor quality labour --- programmers who can't code, thanks to sneaky HRs and those who undercut salary, fire the good programmers and hire the cheap ones. It looks good this quarter, but they'll soon find out. Again, this has nothing to do with migration.
Here, we have Biotech, Commerce students recruited into the CS industry. "Don't worry we'll train you in 4 weeks."
Why? Because we can sell this to the western company whose CEO is more than eager to pick up this plate because it's cheaper.
Imagine if a CS worker were hired in an airline as a pilot (Don't worry we'll train you in 4 weeks), or *shudder* as a surgeon. Quality programming is harder and needs more experience than all this.
In the end, the Indian programmers who actually studied CS and are good at what they do get a bad name on Slashdot and elsewhere, cause they're a part of the lot.
Banu
As far as I can tell brains are being drained well before anyone starts considering career choices. The sciences are losing, they have been for a good long time. US culture is being groomed away from hard work. We're about being "social" and "amused." I suspect too much focus for too long has been given to providing for a "better life for our children" that the value of maximum effort, and striving has been lost on the last two, probably three generations. Our predecessors have largely achieved their goals of eliminating backbreaking physical labor but no one bothered to keep the momentum of effort moving into the intellectual realm as we've transitioned away from manual labor. Asia knows that it must out think, out innovate to compete with the west and they've been relentless in their pursuit. Time is running out for the western world. Already it may be too late.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
^This. I am a geek. My wife is a geek. We make ridiculously good money being geeks. Our college age kids, in spite of our joy of playing with pcs, programming, etc., never, ever wanted to study programming, or even any other science. My kids are English and PoliSci majors. I have no idea why. To each his own, I guess. They are lucky, I suppose, to have that choice and the brains to take advantage of the opportunity. Oh, well.
Sorry I don't see how more STEM students in the U.S. could possibly drive down salary more then thousands of offshored people working for a fraction of the salary as someone in the US. Jut look at U.S. Lawyers to see that over abundance of students doesn't mean lower salaries if they are all in the U.S..
I think the real problem is, Americans aren't interested in Science and Technology careers that lead them to a lifetime of poverty for themselves and their families.
It's about the money. The rest is BS media hyped fantasy. When I can use my brain to become a doctor, lawyer, or financier or any high paying skill which can't be outsourced, why would I bother pursuing a career where my skills can, and inevitably will, be outsourced?
Anybody?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Correction: all people are generally uninterested in science and technology. Americans are no worse than the rest of the world. In those countries in Asia where most of those H1Bs come from people are not interested either; they are interested in passing the test and getting the job. Tech jobs pay more than sweatshops, there is a tradition for test taking (especially in China), and their parents make them. Once they pass the test and get the job, they stop caring and become just like everybody else.
Most of the anecdotal yap I hear in England would be about top people leaving here to go make money in the US. It can't all be outward. Where are these people ending up? Does anyone have a story about an Indian leaving their call centre and making it big in the US?
(Parody)
Eat a child today! After all, he'll die of starvation out in Africa, so end his misery!
(/Parody)
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Wow! I could not have said it better. A good sound byte by the lobbyists with lots of cash.
'Despite widely publicized claims that foreign tech workers and scientists represent exceptional ability and are thus vital to American innovation, Matloff called that argument merely "a good sound byte for lobbyists'
I hate to say this, but it's true -- sure, there are a few scholastic stars that come out of the USA education system, but the majority of students aren't being pushed (or pushing) themselves to excel. In fact, many do a little as possible to just barely cruise through high school, those that apply themselves and work hard are often teased and goaded for working hard -- and I'm not just talking about the traditional geeks, but that guy on the track team is also called out for sutyding too hard and missing out on the after-school party with the boys.
There's no stigma to not doing well in high school -- or even dropping out. Parents hold much of this responsibility - sure, public schools are lacking, but the drive to succeed in school comes from home. Many parents can't even be bothered to see that their elementary school students complete required homework - and they'll make excuses for it "Oh, that takes too much time, Sally needs time to play" -- for an hour long assignment that was assigned a week ago. Of course, when a parent doesn't have a high school education it's hard for him/her to see the value of a good education, and harder still to help instill good study habits when they don't know what a good study habit is.
In contrast, school in Japan (to use one example) is highly competitive - students know that if they don't do well in high school they aren't going to get into their college of choice (which means a high paying job), and may not even get into a college at all are are relegated to trade school. This pressure starts early in their school life - by 7th or 8th grade a student better be on a college track or he/she is not going to make it. The school hours are long, with Saturday schooldays not being unheard of. Parents in turn push their children to do well in school.
I'm not saying that the Japanese culture is better, but I am saying that it produces better students. If a culture pushes 80% of its kids to excel at school, they are going to produce many more scientists and engineers than one that pushes 10% of its kids to excel, even if it only has 1/3 the population. And that's just one country -- if the USA is importing some of the best and brightest students in the world, then those imports are going to make up a significant portion of USA talent.
and you would be closer. Yeah its not fun but many of use do cross forty regularly. Then after a few years these who do their best to not cross forty bitch that they aren't getting anywhere or getting good money and think its unfair I do. Nothing anyone can do can convince them of what the difference was because they don't want to hear it.
ESPN, NCAA, and Dancing with the Stars, are areas where most excel, ask them about yesterday's meeting and they would know less that what happened three weeks ago on American Idol
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Economics in a global age isn't about dividing up the current pie, it is about making new pies. Just like those that worked in manufacturing for years, we all have to continually adapt. The mindset that is killing America is that wealth is somehow "traded" and is static. The truth is that wealth has to be continually generated by innovators. "Programming" as a skill is more replaceable now than ever because it is much more accessible. Science & Tech workers need to be innovators and business leaders these days.
He said "Americans", not east/west coast liberal elite book reading types!
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Do you have citations for your numbers? Seem to be inflated by a lot at first look unless you're double counting extensions, company transfers etc. .
This space for rent.
Interesting enough though, that was a MBA decision. Save money for short term gains, get big bonuses, but at what cost? How many outsourcing horror stories are there?
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
Economics in a global age isn't about dividing up the current pie, it is about making new pies by farming out the baking to the country with the lowest labor costs.
FTFY.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Probably because many IT types would rather burn themselves alive than be a lawyer.
The difference is that it would reach a natural equilibrium. A lot of the workers coming in from other parts of the world are being shipped in specifically because they can afford to work for less than what a citizen could. Which is a really substantial problem, you can only afford to lower your wage expectations so far before you're looking at bankruptcy.
Plus, it's a lot harder to manage the education system if you don't know how much demand theirs going to be for a given occupation in the future. It's hard enough without having to predict how many people are going to be brought in to depress wages.
"The data" is a BAD 150+ slide presentation which might be tolerable as a lecture background, but it is certainly nothing close to being as readable as is. Perhaps a link to an actual Paper? ;)
At least the article filename is interesting "an-internal-bra.html"...
Anyway, my personal experience at a US top-30 CS grad school can add a data point: The CS undergrads were mostly US students. Of those, even the best ones most often did not go on to grad school, since they could find a good and well-paying job without the grad school hassle. That left around 5 US students in our grad program along with several dozen Asian students and quite a few other of assorted ethnicity. From this I got the feeling (which agrees with what other people from the CS field either in academia or the workplace tell me) that there is a demand for CS workers, so US citizens get absorbed easily, and there is also a demand for highly skilled CS workers for which US citizens that go into the trouble of getting the extra skills are too few to fill it, thus foreigners are hired, who are probably not smarter than the good US students that could go to grad school but did not.
I don't know if this translates to other science fields though...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Our public education system does a terrible job at showing how math is relevant. I know I'm in the turned off crowd. Even having taken math all the way through AP Calculus in high school, I never had a teacher that could show me the relevance of trig or calculus. 9th grade geometry was about the most relevant thing I had as a teenager.
So here is something I always ask when people complain about H1B workers. You are going to compete against people from India/China/etc. no matter what you do. But would you rather have them in the US, where they have to compete against you while having the same cost of living as you, or while living in their home country where the cost of living is a fraction of that in the US?
Even better, a lot H1Bs go back home after a few years. However, during their time in the US they paid into the social security fund, a benefit they will never be able to claim. Unfair to them, but great for US citizens.
People couldn't type. We realized: Death would eventually take care of this.
Uh yeah, so things have changed since the economic downturn and there is a growing body of evidence that suggests a Law degree is about as valuable as a BS in the Arts. Unless you can graduate in the top 10% of your class and are at a prestigious university, you will not be hired as a lawyer these days.
Law firms folded like stacks of cards during the economic downturn but these institutions of higher learning have continued to sell the idea that getting a JD will make you big bucks right out of school. There are even reports of major law programs manipulating their employment numbers by hiring former students to be over-educated paper clerk.
So after three years of law school you're saddled with 150k debt and no means of paying it back....sound investment!
If you want a return on investment, go get an MBA :P
Blog source so take it for what it's worth,
"sheek"?!?
I think you mean "chic". (It's French.)
"It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word." -- Andrew Jackson
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
That's a bit of hyperbole. In Austin, TX, with a healthy tech community, a dev right out of college makes around $60k a year, depending on the industry. A teacher right out of college makes around $30k, and only gets to $60k after a decade or so.
Bill Nye or back in the day Mr Wizard http://www.mrwizardstudios.com/
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
> US citizens see those fields as being ruined by massive offshoring and inshoring.
Another cause I have been researching -- increasing income concentration. While the common perception is that the high end of the software engineering pay scale is in the "rich" category, and hence are beneficiaries of increasing income concentration, the data speaks otherwise.
I have extracted the income data from the IRS-SOI going back to 1950. The increasing concentration since the mid-to-late 1970s (it started prior to Reagan -- initially caused by the falling dollar and the failure to adjust the tax brackets) has gone almost exclusively to the top 0.5%, and even there is skewed heavily upward. This has not only affected software engineers, but also entrepreneurs, small to medium enterprise executives, starting to mid-level investment bankers, and a whole host of others who fit the traditional perception of those who benefit from concentration.
The result, of course, is that anyone who has a sufficiently strong, broad skill set (like understanding engineering and business) has a significant financial motive to go to a fortune 500 and climb the corporate ladder. This is great for the Fortune 500s, as it increases the internal competition for promotion. It has, however, been harmful to smaller enterprises and high skill labor (like software engineers).
The complaints of a shortage of US engineers are not entirely unfounded, but it is our tax policy and the resulting shifts in income distribution -- not greater engineering skill in foreign countries -- that is causing it. Our talent can easily see where the money is and there is a direct impact on career path. For those from less advantaged countries, the engineer/entrepreneur payscale looks great, despite the fact that within our country it (along with everyone below the engineer/entrepreneur level, though I might argue that below P30 there is another factor at work -- but I digress) it has been relatively inhibited for the past 35 years or so.
Just another piece of the puzzle. Check out IRS-SOI -- great data to play with.
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Without law, you have Mafia economics, settling conflict with guns. Without investment advice, how do you get money for your good idea?
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
And that is the problem. On some level, people replaced passion with monetary incentive. Now don't get me wrong -- I understand all too well the importance of incentives.
However, the greatest works in the arts and the sciences were the result of passionate people working on something because they felt a calling, not because they are worried about making a few grand more.
And I say this as someone who has been contemplating going back to school for a PhD because at the end of the day, I'm tired of the rat race. I had the chance to do it when I was younger, but I had my blinders on, and only cared about short term happiness (as measured by money, no less). Today, after having been through the grind, I just know that it's not worth it to give up your passions for short-term compromise because you will never be truly happy.
The data, on the other hand, indicate that those admitted are no more able, productive, or innovative than America's homegrown talent, he said.
He's missing one big benefit to bringing in foreign workers: they're cheaper. Compare someone educated in India over someone educated in the United States. The quality of the education might be the same, they may be just as skilled and know the exact same information. But, the American candidate may have anywhere from $30,000-100,000 in debt from his education, while the candidate from India may owe the equivalent of $10,000-15,000. The American candidate is going to demand a much higher salary so that he can both make enough money to both pay rent/bills and pay off his loans. The candidate from India will be more willing to work for a lower salary both because he owes less and comes from a place where money goes a lot further.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Though clearly he's right, because racism and nationalism are always the answer.
The truth is America isn't producing enough qualified programmers. The alternative to off-shoring? Is not having things made. Attracting more programmers has nothing to do with protecting them from foreign competition. It would require better work conditions (and I don't mean free soda and bags of chips), a clearer path into the field (let's be honest: a CS degree does not prepare one to code and spending 4 years on a signaling mechanism sucks) and a less hostile, defensive atmosphere. It's hard to find quality people overseas too; the problem isn't that we're letting to many skilled people in, it's that no one wants these jobs. "If you are smart enough to do the work, you're smart enough not to work here."
People like Code For America are doing something about these problems; this guy isn't. Trying to impose more barriers to trade is not useful. Not to mention that we have the internet now; not letting programmers into the US only drives whole projects off-shore and keeps immigrants from contributing to our vibrant, diverse entrepreneurial culture. Which, it turns out, was in large part built by immigrants in the first place. If you want more Americans hired, you should increase the ease of immigration, not make it harder; it would bring more entrepreneurs to our country, who in turn would employ more Americans. Some of them would become Americans themselves, thus strengthening our nation and increasing the number of skilled American programmers, which I think was the original point.
Because 80-100k a year is good pay unless you live in places like NYC, San Francisco etc., and there is such a glut of lawyers, that many of them make less than I do as a Training manager. My wife switched from Law to Computer Science for exactly this reason. 100k to do something I actually like, or 250k selling my soul? Hmmm....
You can get a business/management degree from practically anywhere, then get employed with a pretty good salary for some chain store or franchise for good money. Not to offend those with those degrees, but the classes are also easier which means you have the time to work a job to help support yourself through school. When I was under the engineering department in college, I learned that the hours necessary for studying/homework were too much to work a job to pay my bills. The department's head adviser even told me that no one had graduated otherwise.
The alternative is to get into a technical program that will probably be at a bigger (read: more expensive) college with a $300/semester engineering fee where you're going to need a sponsor to finance your education and living expenses (be that a parent or spouse).
Just my personal experience, but I'd call this a financial issue.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I think this describes a lot of whats going on:
"About 21 percent of Silicon Valley’s Class A office space is vacant, as is 20 percent of low-rise so-called flex or research and development space for offices or manufacturing, CB Richard Ellis said."
-- http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aRGUhtl3yHIM
"Unemployment in the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metro area that includes Silicon Valley was 11.8 percent in November, down from the August record of 12.1 percent, according to California’s Employment Development Department."
-- ibid
(Source is from 2010, but I don't think it has changed that much.)
I do hobby and open source stuff, a project here and there when they pay up front. After 20 years of doing some high falutin tech on systems transacting millions of dollars of business per day and gigabytes of data, I have gone back to school for a business degree.
Teachers get a large fraction of their pay in the form of health care and pension benefits, so you need to include total lifetime compensation in that calculation.
Just look at 1) what kind of people are getting paid the most: executives at investment banks/insurance groups; and 2) what job they do: screwing up everyone's life while getting away with hundreds of millions severance package untaxed. Now you get the idea.
The going rate for a decent programmer is pretty high up there. I don't know where people come up with this shit about programming and IT being low paid in the US. Sure, we're not making engineer money, but, you know... we're not engineers. Somebody actually pays me tens of thousands of dollars a year to do what I do for fun. That's a pretty good deal. Maybe you can make more money in China or overseas doing that work, but its not like I'll ever be struggling to put food on the table.
If I can just reach out with my words and touch a butthole, just one, it will all be worth it.
The problem is Americans are interested in money and fame. Being a coder isn't sexy. Being a business man selling technology, music, houses, etc. is.
Americans don't want to work to build something, they want to own it.
These problems are observable in the cultural values that are reflected in US media.
The summary seems to indicate that the statements "foreign tech workers and scientists represent exceptional ability and are thus vital to American innovation" and "those admitted are no more able, productive, or innovative than America's homegrown talent" are in contradiction. This is not the case. American companies can be the most successful in the world by accumulating as much brainpower as possible. This is done by hiring both Americans AND foreigners. I.e, hire the best people for the job, giving advantage to those who will work for less. America and the West are going to have to sooner or later get over the fact that in a global economy, you can't get employment favoritism simply because you live in a certain country that you happen to think is "better" than other countries. You need to have higher productivity than those you are competing against, and unfortunately, higher American living costs might put you out of luck.
Your numbers seem to be WAY off as there is a cap of 65,000 new visas every year. The only way those numbers make sense if if you are counting extensions, transfers etc. I would love to see your source. Also, the 65,000 is not just IT workers. It includes nurses, physical therapist,accountants etc. For an economy the size of US, I question how much of an impact 65,000 new professionals can have on the labor market. Also, Linus came to US on an H1B. Seems like a fair trade. As long as 1% of those 65K are of his caliber, I think we as a nation come out ahead.
Ditto here. Well, almost---
Though my daughter has a Biology degree, she doesn't want to work in a lab job and doesn't want to go back to school for a MS or PhD. In the mean time 99% of the jobs for someone with a bachelors degree are working in a lab. So she babysits and does a lot of volunteer work at museums, etc., hoping the volunteer work will eventually turn into a paying job. But I think she's kidding herself about what those jobs will actually pay, if and when she finally lands one.
Despite the fact that my son is an obsessive gamer and has tinkered with building his own Windows gaming rigs he's just not interested in programming. He took a CS101 course in his second year and was good up to the introduction of recursion -- about halfway though the class -- at which point he realized that finishing the class would require some heavy duty thinking. (He managed a passing grade.) Now he's back to a PoliSci major and Bio minor and has been studying Chinese since high school. He says he wants a job in the State Department, but he thinks I'm kidding when I tell him the State Department doesn't hire very many uni/college grads that only managed a C average.
I'm not convinced that either one of them will be able to maintain the lifestyle they had growing up with my wife's and my incomes.
Is there seems to be an unwillingness to do any type of employee development.
I've seen job ads that require umteen years of experience in X, Y and Z. It's the old chicken and egg problem - how do you get the real world experience if no one is willing to hire you? This is a problem many college graduates or people looking to move up/change the directions of their careers.
I know, I know, some of you are going to ask, "Why invest time and money to train people, they are just going to leave?" How about making a less hostile work environment and paying fair market rates (or going out and paying a little more than that)? This even applies to your more senior people - many of them will be willing to jump ship if their voice isn't heard or aren't being challenged, or not being paid enough. Also, this is a very naive approach as many jobs in a lot of places fall under at-will employment. Manangement expects 100% loyalty, but wants the flexibility to fire under-performers and lay people off when revenues/profits are down. Therefore, the "they'll just quit ayways" is just a cop out for bad behaviour.
Lastly. I've seen/interviewed for positions that want BS degrees, prefer MS degrees, but basically amount to help desk positions. Then the employer is hostile to your salary range, and your long term career goals (i.e. possibility of moving into progect management or development or systems/network admin). Of course, they then complain about not finding qualified people - Duh, most people with the qualifications you'd like are either not going to apply (why work a help desk?), going to treat it as a foot in the door or going to want to be paid comiserate with experience.
There are people out there who have the education/experience and are willing to learn. However, it makes my blood boil when people claim there is an IT/Engineer/Science/Math worker shortage.
Agreed 100%. We live in a society where adjectives like "educated" and "intellectual" are used as epithets rather than compliments.
The long-term prognosis for such a society is grim, to say the least.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
We're told from a young age we can do whatever, just be happy.
The middle class thinks it's rich, so they take out home equity loans and send their children to liberal arts colleges to study.
They don't want to study science because it's a tough market, but I'm willing to bet there is a glut of journalism majors in this country.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
And a dev right out of college in Austin, TX gets the same (and sometimes better) benefits with their private employers.
The only consideration is that teachers get three months off a year, but that's still not $60k a year if they worked full time.
The article is overwhelmingly shortsighed. Some of the people(just Indians, forget about Europeans who contributed so much) who would have been not been able to do what they did:
Don't forget a bunch of companies that have Indian CEOs and have had them as CEO and founders. Hotmail founder was India born...
Co-Founder of Sun.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinod_Khosla
Motorola CEO: http://www.businessinsider.com/2008/8/motorola-cellphone-ceo-sanjay-jha
Father of Pentium chip: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinod_Dham
A small incomplete list from Wiki:
Ajit Hutheesing : Founder, Chairman and CEO of International Capital Partners Inc
Ali Pabrai : Entrepreneur
Amar Bose : Founder of Bose Corporation
Sashi Reddi : Founder CEO, AppLabs (World's #1 Software Testing company)
Arjun Gupta : Silicon Valley venture capitalist
Ashwin Navin : Co-Founder and President of BitTorrent, Inc.
Bharat Desai : Founder of Syntel
Gagan Palrecha : Entrepreneur
Gurbaksh Chahal : Internet Entrepreneurs
Mukesh Chatter : Businessman
Lakireddy Bali Reddy : Landlord, restaurant owner,owns more than 1000 apartments in California
M.R. Rangaswami : Founder of Sand Hill Group and Corporate Eco Forum
Murugan Pal : Founder and CTO of SpikeSource
Narendra Patni: Founder of Patni Computer Systems
Naveen Jain : Founder of InfoSpace and Intelius
Pradeep Sindhu : Co-Founder and CTO of Juniper Networks
Preetish Nijhawan : Co-Founder of Akamai Technologies.
Ram Shriram : Co-Founder of Junglee.com and board member at Google
Rohini Srihari : Founder of Cymfony and Janya
Sameer Parekh : Founder of C2Net
Sanjiv Sidhu : Founder of i2 Technologies
Somen Banerjee: Founder of Chippendales
Suhas Patil: Founder of Cirrus Logic
Vivek Ranadive : Founder, Chairman and CEO of TIBCO Software
Vinod Gupta : Founder and Chairman of InfoUSA Inc.
Vinod Khosla : Co-founder of Sun Microsystems, Venture Capitalist
Ajay Bhatt : Co-Inventor of the USB. Chief Client Platform Architect at Intel
Ajit Varki : Physician-scientist
Amit Singhal : Google Fellow, the designation the company reserves for its elite master engineers in the area of "ranking algorithm".
Anil Dash : Blogger and technologist
Raj Reddy : Founder of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, winner of the Turing Award.
Arun Netravali : Scientist. Former President of Bell Labs. Former CTO of Lucent. A pioneer of digital technology including HDTV and MPEG4.
Arvind Rajaraman : Theoretical physicist and string theorist
Satya N. Atluri : Aerospace and mechanics
C. Kumar N. Patel : Developed the carbon dioxide laser, used as a cutting tool in surgery and industry.
Khem Shahani : Microbiologist who conducted pioneer research on probiotics, he discovered the DDS-1 strain of Lactobacillus acidophilus
Deepak Pandya : Neuroanatomist
Arjun Makhijani : Electrical and nuclear engineer who is President of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research
George Sudarshan : Physicist, author - first to propose the existence of Tachyon
Kalpana Chawla : Female NASA Space Shuttle astronaut, and space shuttle mission specialist
Krishna Bharat : Principal Scientist at Google - Famous for creating Google News.
Jogesh Pati : Theoretical physicist at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Krishan Sabnani : Engineer and Senior Vice President of the Networking Research Laboratory at Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs in New Jersey
Mahadev Satyanarayanan : Computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Pioneered research in mobile and pervasive computing
Mani Lal Bhaumik : Contributor excimer laser technology.
Narinder Singh Kapany : Engineer, called the "Father of Fiber Optics".
Noshir Gowadia : Design engineer
Om Malik : Technology journalist and blogger
Pramod Khargonek
This. (sorry) I was doing pretty well performing programming and consultant work myself until the same thing happened to me. I even found RFPs out there that stated explicitly "Do not bother to apply if you are American". WTF? This despite the fact that these idiots look at nothing but the hourly rate, and when they get burned by the fact that most of those guys are 1/10th as productive, and also end up doing significant re-work because they didn't understand the requirements as well as I can.
I do still have some loyal customers, including a couple that came back when they realized that I was giving them a better value than the cheap-as-crap-found-them-on-the-web foreigners.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
1) McDonalds is not the only choice for those without a college education - far from it.
2) A huge, and growing, percentage of college graduates are working at jobs that do not require a college degrees. A college degree is no guarantee of a worthwhile career - far from it.
3) Costco is paying $19 an hour. That is way more than a lot of college graduates earn, even if they do have a job that requires a college education.
4) People who are highly skilled in trades such as welding, plumbing, heavy equipment, and so on, very often have jobs that are secure and well paid. In California, over 15 years ago, Golden Gate bus drivers were earning $80K a year. Letter carriers also earn very high salaries, and have very secure careers.
5) Except for health care, and maybe a few other career fields; a foreign degree is just as good as a US degree. So I hope you enjoy training your H-1B replacement, or having your job offshored. Yeah, that degree was sure worth it.
enough with the protectionist stupidity
Humans:
-Immigration takes months to process
-Subject to death: this implies basic needs like food, water, and safety
-Can be ruined by a lawsuit (not enough money to fight it, will have to settle, go to prison, etc.)
[Large] Corporations:
-Ability to transfer wealth in milliseconds across the globe
-Immortality: The same executives that crash a company into the ground are paid handsomely for it and start another one
-Enough money to fight court battles indefinitely, above the law
It's class warfare. Protectionism is needed as long as these vast inequalities between corporations and people exist. Let me know when the United States starts invoking the corporate death penalty and revokes corporate charters from lawbreaking executives.
Growing up, I dreamed of doing nothing but programming/coding.
Now? Not so much. I still program in my spare time or the rare instances my work requires it, but I never went to school for it.
My uncle is in that field, and the older I got the more he struggled for a decent job. I don't talk to him as often as I'd like, so I honestly don't have a clue what he does now.
So yes, thanks company XYZ for shipping your jobs overseas, but hey, you saved that $1, so what do you care.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
It's all a matter of what you want to do in life as to whether it's relevant. For any sort of engineering or science work it's extremely relevant. I've found a teenager's view of what's relevant is based on what helps them right that second and since they don't do much other than go to school try to pick up girls then yea, nothing's relevant to getting you a date Friday night other then maybe your weightlifting or humanities class.
If you're honestly interested in engineering type stuff and you're teachers weren't able to explain how the ability to calculate force on different sections of a structure using trig, or how being able to take the derivative of an objects position in respect to time in order to find instantaneous velocity might possibly be useful then your teachers were just dumb or lazy.
Unfortunately 6 years ago was about the peak of this experimentation. I know people who have managed those types of teams and most of them ultimately failed. The language barrier and time difference make it difficult to manage an outsourced team effectively and achieve the desired results. Many companies that tried this have moved back to local talent. Testing, on the other hand, has been seen to be fairly effective when outsourced. The time difference is actually a benefit in that case. Programmers here write code by day and ship it off. Then Indian testers test the code and product when it is night here. Then programmers here arrive in the morning with their code tested.
Out of high school, there's no doubt that the US has been lagging these last few years. Going in a different direction though, I remember when I started grad school, and I was worried that I wouldn't be able to compete against the "best and brightest" that were being sent from all over the world to my (well-regarded internationally) university. I figured out within the first week of classes that my fears were unfounded. Let's just say that there is such a thing as a stupid question, and there were a few different international students asking lots of them.
More or less what I discovered was that they were just as dumb and just as smart as the American students were. There were high achievers and low achievers. People who picked up things quickly, and people who just didn't understand no matter how much you explained things to them. Honestly, if I had to explain it in one sentence, I'd say that I came to the realization that they were normal people, just like everyone else. It was a rather humanizing moment, and it made working with them a lot easier, since I no longer put them on a pedestal, expecting them to know more or be more skilled than I was.
I say ship them back. I see your point and can agree with it to an extent. Here is one; why bring them over in the first place? Let company A outsource to india/china/etc. After many delays, language barriers, garbage coding practices, and having to wait 24 hours for a reply to a simple question, company A will come back to the US and outsource work to a company in North Dakota with low costs of operations and immediate response to questions. The only game to play here is the time zone game.
H1Bs are a waste of time. I have three of them here in my department and none of them can think their way out of a wet paper sack with neon signs written in their own language pointing to the exit. Is there talent that the US should bring over...yes! Most, probably 95-98% should be shipped back to ratville and asked never to return. If the H1B is not a genius, goto 1:
Just my two cents on H1Bs.
"The laws of science be a harsh mistress." --Bender
Programming is a challange and a desirable skill but...
Programming is not directly a science and mathematical field. There is almost NO barriers to entry for becoming a good programmer. Anyone with the time and desire can do it. Many of the specific tools of the trade are free or very low cost, almost everyone has a computer and access to the those tools, there is no certification, trade group, pier review, qualification, internship, residency, or jouneyman time required. There is also very little importance in the physical location of the person either. It helps to be local but since there is no physical product being worked on, you can be anywhere in the world with internet access and a computer and do your work.
I fully agree that the US has the ability to fill these jobs but with the above stated, it is very easy to justify finding the cheapest source for your programming needs which often times is a worker living outside of the very expensive Silicon Valley area.
Back in the day, there was need to be cutting edge and to "invent" ways to do things with software. The demand for highly skilled programmers doing innovative things was high and the supply of those people were low. As time goes on, there is less and less invention required and more plugging and chugging and retooling existing methods. Those things do not bring in the big bucks.
Sorry to bust anyones bubble but this is the truth. you can ignore it and deny it but that's not going to change the trend of what is happening.
Not that the developers in India are any better. The developers in India are by in large crap. So are most American developers, and developers in any country you care to look for them. There just aren't enough good developers on Earth (much less great ones), and they're spread out in various places, surrounded by mediocre to bad talent.
The whole H1B program is half-assed, although the people who are afraid H1Bs take jobs away from Americans when they come here are mistaken. That doesn't happen until we send them back home. Competent programmers are net producers of jobs, not net consumers. That's why startups often locate in San Jose. They go were recruiting competency is easiest. Competent developers create new jobs; great ones create new industries.
The fact we kick out H1B workers after a few years is a tacit admission that the program doesn't for the most part bring to America skills and talent that America desperately needs. The program as structured is a technology transfer program that provides short term off-shoring windfalls for people at the top of the corporate feeding chain. If the program was designed to do what it is sold as doing, it would bring far fewer people in then keep them here as long as possible.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The overwhelming number of H1Bs, are ordinary people, doing ordinary jobs. Jobs that could, and should, be done by US workers. By "overwhelming" I would estimate well over 99%.
We already have the O-1 visa for truly exceptional. The O-1 visa has no limits. So why do we need the H1B for these so-called geniuses?
I don't see salary being the biggest deterrent. Companies just don't want to train entry level workers anymore. They rather just hire someone overseas with some experience.
If there is a clear path for students to transition from school to a stable career, you would see a big increase in enrollment, but US businesses are more focused on short term gains instead of investing in the future American workforce.
So yeah, I'm one of those "They TOOK UR JUUBS" guys. Unlike the stereotype, I'm not asian, I'm not from a poor background, I speak english w/o an accent and I don't associate in cultural ghettos like most minorities.
In my experience I've met quite a few people that are in the same boat. A lot of the times they are sorely lacking the skills that they're supposed to have to qualify under the H1-B program. There are two reasons why they're brought in then: cost and nepotism.
I've seen many different companies preferring to hire people of the same region as the manager. I heard it's often one big family coming to the US, but I chalked that off ass a bit too racist for me.
The H1-B program is designed to supplement american talent. People for instance that have the same qualifications but can bridge cultural/language gaps, for instance (that's meeee). The problem is there's no way to check if the qualifications are met or not. It's taken as face value. I can go to whothefuckknowswhere Institute of Technology and still qualify, even though my program was the equivalent to a Bachelor of Arts in Winword in american standards - as long as I have "official" documentation to claim this status.
With that said, here's the question that lingers. If there were no H1-B holders, would people see tech jobs as more attractive? I don't know, working stupid hours under inept management, ridiculous unpaid on-call hours and the pressure that you get don't seem all that attractive, independent of whether you consider job availability or jack thereof. The (wrong) assumption is that if it wasn't for H1-B holders, STEM jobs would pay more. Guess I can't prove my claims, but I'll hold on to my truthiness.
On a related note, it's fucked up how impossible it is to get a stupid green card if you're not willing to cheat the system. I've been living here for around 9 years now on a variety of different visas. L-2, F-1 and now H1-B. This is more than I have lived in my country of origin (well, if you discount the years that I was just a burden to my parents), and yet I can't stay... /rant
This professor hit the nail on the head, what American would want to work in technology after this video from US attorneys explaining how NOT to hire Americans for IT jobs? Here's the full video. And how much jail time did these attorneys get for sending millions of jobs overseas? None.
This is why I left CS. Videos like this and the job market full of fake job ads with fake software you MUST know how to use in order to be hired because companies have to run XX# of job ads in order to get H-1B visas to hire foreign workers. Couldn't find an IT American that knows Windows 10.3 and Microsoft Office Turbo Edition? Then here's your H1B visa's, hire some foreign programmers.
I went back to school and now I'm in the medical field, hopefully they don't start giving visas out to doctors.... aw crap
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Sure a few of them make that kind of money, and a few geeks become Accenture partners and CIOs and make that kind of money as well. But the average lawyer doesn't actually make that much.
http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Attorney_%2F_Lawyer/Salary/by_Practice_Area
And those numbers don't seem too far off from my personal experience either. I know a bunch of lawyers, and I make more than most of them. And I'm not even the highest paid geek I know either.
And I don't have a advanced degree either, so no MS or JD to pay for either, that counts as well.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
"Americans just aren't interested in Science and Technology whatsoever."
How was this marked Insightful on Slashdot?
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
...likely being confused by words with x's like "influx" and trying to play along to make themselves feel less like a fucking retard
So that's why there's so much kerfuffle around the XXX TLD...
Man, do I wish I had mod points today. You make a very interesting point compared to the random predictable noise in the rest of this comment thread...
That's a bit of hyperbole. In Austin, TX, with a healthy tech community, a dev right out of college makes around $60k a year, depending on the industry. A teacher right out of college makes around $30k, and only gets to $60k after a decade or so.
In "a decade or so" the dev is unemployable due to ageism thus $0 and the teacher is making $60k....
First decade the dev is ahead, second decade they're even, more than 3 decades and the teacher makes more lifetime income.
Moral of the story, if you plan to retire in 5 years be a dev, if you plan to retire at age 70, be a teacher...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Another myth repeated so often that is now regarded as truth. Only a small successful minority of lawyers make anywhere near those incomes. As you noticed, there is an overproduction of lawyers and most are not raking in huge sums of money.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
I'm finishing up an electrical engineering degree in Sweden. Most of the engineering programs in this country are dominated by Chinese and Pakistani students. In some programs, there are ZERO Swedes enrolled. The view among young Swedes seems to be that, if they're going to pursue a difficult course of studies, then it may as well be something that they get well compensated for. Engineers are not particularly well compensated and thus many view it as a course of studies that demands a lot of hard work, i.e. many math and physics courses, and very little reward.
"It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word." -- Andrew Jackson
Couldn't that quote be construed as the same mentality of most people today that can't spell? "u can undirstand me no matter how i tipe"
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
We have one of the best university systems in the world. We train many Americans and foreign students in numerous fields. So why, when those same foreign students want to stay in America to help our economy, we kick them out. By restricting highly-skilled foreign workers from working in America, we are giving up the opportunity for them to help our own economy and start new businesses that will create many jobs.
Admittedly, I'm in canada, but I suspect the perception here is about the same.
I'm my current grad programme in CS, we have about 120 grad students, (about 60 MSc about 60 PhD), of whom around 75% are foreign - non first world, so I'm not counting US, EU students as 'foreign' for this purpose, since we all face the same problem. The vast majority of our undergrads are domestic students, while the vast majority of grads are foreign. The undergrads can walk out of here and get jobs that easily run 40-50k and usually a lot more than that. Grad student: 20k.
The foreign grad students have significantly changed the bar for academic excellence. We take the best and brightest from other places, and that means to succeed in grad school you have to be at their level. When foreign students were 10, 15% of the class it wasn't an issue. But now 8/10 of the people in my classes are going to be from the top 5% of wherever they're from, which means to have marks competitive with theirs you pretty much have to be top 5% here. So yes, our grads are just as good, because by swamping ourselves with foreign students we've raised the bar of excellence. I'm not sure that's good or bad. So then why do we need foreign talent? Because foreign talent has raised the bar, and now can only be filled with foreigners.
There are of course a lot of other issues. If you can learn to do math in-spite of the education system, you can do fine in STEM classes, but you probably won't actually learn to do it properly from the education system. Which makes it both hard, and scary to risk STEM as a career. It's also a lot of work, with a lot of debt, that may not pay off.
Professor Matloff is specifically opposed to 'flooding the market' with foreign STEM workers. That's missing a few basic problems of economics. First and foremost, those people already exist. If they come here they may keep salaries flat or drive them down, but if they stay home in India or China they would cost substantially less, and in the end make outsourcing even more viable. Bringing them here keeps the global costs of STEM work up, and rewards the best and brightest from their home countries with a chance at much more financially productive life (a good incentive to get your people to work). A simple look at http://www.payscale.com/best-colleges/degrees.asp will tell you pretty quickly that STEM pays well, possibly even too much (compare petroleum engineer mid career to well... anything else. IMO petroleum engineering is not substantially harder to do than chemical engineering, yet it pays 50% more). It's not like we have suddenly driven the price of STEM below that of Drama degrees, the difference between the starting salary of drama and civil eng is about 8k, but and engineering degree only costs about 2k more than a drama degree (around here anyway), so if anything there is room there for some salary depreciation and STEM would still be the best paying place to be.
IMO what we need is an education system that actually teaches people something about how all this technology stuff they want and use works in high school, so they can choose to pursue that in detail when they get to university. Right now we have first years who don't know what electricity, the internet, a CPU, HTML, or quantum mechanics are. If I have to explain the difference between a CPU and the whole computer to a comp sci student is, they're in serious trouble (and yet some of that crowd can write doubly linked lists when they get here). We have kids who's understanding of electricity is 'some magically thing that is carried over wires and comes out of the wall'. How do you seriously expect them to be interested in designing new batteries or helping to develop new energy technology and so on if they don't even know what electricity is when they start in engineering degrees? That ignorance of basic science, and ignorance of basic technology principles (what is cryptography?) should not be things we teach only to that select few (around here about 15% of our un
Yeah, teachers don't spend any time to plan classes, mark tests/assignments, keep up with their field, assist students outside of class time, etc.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Welcome to the concept of capitalism!
Welcome to the concept of capitalism!
All the customer support is in India, now all the IT, research and programming is too. At some point all these highly qualified Indians are going to get together and realise they can cut the expensive USA out of the loop entirely and develop and sell products at a fraction of the cost.
So westerners are all technological dunces, and all the "best and brightest" tech minds come from India, right? I mean, that is what the lobbyists want us to believe, right?
Let's examine the evidence, shall we?
Of the following iconic tech companies, how many come from India? Apple, Cisco, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Yahoo, Google, eBay, Amazon, Facebook, Intel, Dell, HP, and I could go on. Other than staffing companies, what great tech companies were formed in India?
Care to count the number of Nobel prizes that have come from the USA, as opposed to India? As I understand it, there are high schools in the USA that have produced more Nobel prize winners than the entire nation of India. Certainly there are several US colleges that have produced more Nobel prize winners than the entire nation of India.
How many ground breaking tech breakthroughs have come from India in the last 200 years? Computers? Radio? TV? Radar? Nuclear power? Heavier than air flight? Light bulbs? Movies? Phonograph? Anything?
So where is the evidence that Indians are all the "best and brightest" and Americans are all stupid? Do you realise about 50% of Indians are illiterate, and that India has the worst slums in the world? And yet we need Indians because they are great tech geniuses and entrepreneurs.
Teachers in Milwaukee (just happened to make the news with all that WI kerfluffle) make an average of about $100k total comp - that's about $60k salary and $40k benefits. That benefit comp is vastly higher than anything in the private sector because it includes an extremely generous pension plan.
Right now many public workers are getting much more valuable benefit packages (thanks to pension plans) than anybody with a 401k, public or private, is likely to see. Be wary of any discussion that only mentions pay - these pension plans are amazing.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I actually had a teacher tell me that I'd likely never use what they were teaching me (this was also, Calculus), but he'd teach me if I really wanted to learn it. In HS, I was immersed in learning Computers (this was 1992-1996) and knew Math was important... but I still remember him telling me that.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Same where I'm from (Silicon Valley).
And just because there's an abundance of software engineers here doesn't mean that there's an abundance of good software engineers. A solid CS major should have no trouble finding work here, with a 5.8+ figure* salary.
* I use (log10(salary) + 1) to calculate the number of figures in a salary...let me know if there's a better way.
here, ignorant 13 year old, educate yourself:
sergey brin employs how many americans? (russian immigrant who founded google, for the ignorant, like you)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Brin
jerry yang employs how many americans? (taiwanese immigrant who founded yahoo, for the ignorant, like you)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Yang_(entrepreneur)
pierre omidyar employs how many americans? (iranian born in france who founded ebay, for the ignorant, like you)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Omidyar
etc., etc.
those are just off the top of my head
educate yourself, then open your ignorant mouth. the world is full of enough morons as it is
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Yeah, teachers don't spend any time to plan classes, mark tests/assignments, keep up with their field, assist students outside of class time, etc.
Yeah, and programmers never spend any time learning new tools, learning new languages, and brushing up on their skills. Oh, except they clock in every weekday and many weekends.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
If those in-shored jobs pay enough for people to abandon their homeland and family it must pay quite good, isn't it? Could it be that the problem is entitlement attitudes of native-born Americans?
P.S. I'm one of those in-shored quite some time ago. I do not know of anyone in-shored along with me (out of several dozens by single company) who now does not earn in top 3% of income distribution.
The country with the currently-lower labor costs will buy more pies as their wages rise. It's a race to the top.
Americans are people, Indians are people, and there's no evil if a job goes to an Indian instead of an American. Of course, I'd like to see jobs stay in America, but that's my selfish greed talking, not any kind of moral high ground.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Agreed 100%. We live in a society where adjectives like "educated" and "intellectual" are used as epithets rather than compliments.
Probably because the 'best and brightest' were responsible for most of America's great political disasters of the 20th century. It wasn't the kids who slacked off at school and got jobs stacking shelves who pushed America into the Vietnam War, for example.
Or maybe we should ship you back to "hate-town".
Life is about being a Phoenix!
i would rather deport to the middle of the ocean, rather than send one immigrant home
my loyalty is to america, the principles for which this great country stands, not america "i was born here so i'm entitled just because i breathe air"
i'll take 10,000 poor "brown people not speaking English" than one "american" like you in this country, any day
because in my book, i don't really consider you to be my countryman. because you've abandoned the principles that make this country great. you're not an american, according to me
so fuck you, you useless fuck
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Most teachers don't get three months off a year - they need to use that time to take classes (required to keep their certs), and do prep work for the next year.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
In America, we make new pies (i.e. increase our GDP) so that the wealthiest .001 percent can have more pie, NOT so that you, Mr. Peasant, can have any pie. You can eat cowflops, or whatever it is you peasants eat. Pie is for the rich.
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph
This shows just how little of the "new pies" the working man has gotten over the last thirty years. In fact, not only has the bottom twenty percent not gotten ANY of the new pie, they have had some of their original pie stolen as well.
Your argument that wealth is not static and traded only apples if the new wealth is distributed equitably. If all of the newly created wealth goes to the top .001 percent, then does it even matter to the rest of us that new wealth was created? No, because, even though we created all of that wealth, we get none of it. The rich do not create wealth, they steal it.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I'm not saying math is not relevant. I'm saying a kid has no way to find relevance if teachers are doing a bad job at teaching the relevance of math. Sure I was able to plug the right values in and solve for x, but so what? What does solving for x do for me?
And yes, I'm saying that teachers fail us in this regard. If you want to say that makes them dumb or lazy, sure, but I think it's more a symptom of the greater problem...our overall curriculum.
There are several problems intertwined here. Motivated U.S. students are as good as those anywhere. However, they must overcome the following problems:
The combination of these factors makes STEM degrees less attractive than they ought to be...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
That's why I use a mail forwarding service in India and a Skype number with a +91 country code. As a bonus, I don't have to proofread my resume, people are delighted by my ability to speak and understand English without a foreign accent, and I can pretend it's 2AM when people call me.
-Dave Snyder aka "Sanjay Mohapatra"
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
"This guy is a top scientist, dummkopf."
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
Damn lack of mod points...
Support SETI@home
The people "writing the recipe" are the ultra rich owning class elites, who take all the profits. They then reinvest those profits overseas, where they can make a higher rate of return. Adam Smith, in Wealth of Nations, said that the interests of the worker and the land owner coincide with that of society in general, so that by pursuing their own ends, they help society. However, the stock owner's interests are directly opposite to that of society. When society does well, the laborer gets better pay and the landowner gets more rent, but the stock owner gets LESS of a dividend or increase in stock price. Only when society is failing do stock holders make out like bandits. When society is doing well, most stocks will not perform at better than 6%. The ultra wealthy are destroying society because that benefits them. They are no longer "Americans," they are part of a global elite, and it really does not matter to them if the country goes down the toilet. They have absolutely no loyalty to America.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
What the hell are you smoking?
Teachers don't make anywhere near that, even when you adjust with their benefits:
"In May 2009, preschool teachers in Wisconsin earned an average salary of $23,460, elementary school teachers earned $51,240, and secondary school teachers earned $49,400. (2) Education and experience level also make a difference in teacher salaries: secondary school teachers in the 90th wage percentile earned $69,550, while the entry-level teacher salary is generally in the $30,000s. (3)"
http://www.teacher-world.com/teacher-salary/wisconsin.html
That's not factoring in their retirement, which from an older WI gov site looked to be around 6-12% (hard to gather as the PDF wasn't talking about that).
This $100,000 lie is crap thrown out by political opponents trying to make teachers be the next welfare queens. It's a lie.
Given that foreign competitors already take away a large fraction of new tech opportunities via off-shoring, you propose we should encourage them to come here, get H1Bs, and then *also* take away on-shore tech opportunities? We should design the H1B program to better eliminate both off *and* on-shore tech jobs?
What sense does that make?
Do you mean capitalism, the lending of capital for profit; or do you mean the free market? They are not at all the same thing.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I've long been a dabbler in all fields and a master of none. My passions range across such a wide variety I could never include them all in a conventional degree. Because of that when it came time to enter the 'real world' I had to pick the lesser of evils among things I'd like. Money was a factor of that, though back then (90's era tech bubble) IT could make you a millionaire or so the popular wisdom said. So guess which field I chose?
Of course the bubble burst before I ever got to share in any real money (which is the way fades work), but changing fields is a pain. So you keep doing it anyways... I don't think Academia is all that better off right now though, so personally I'm not looking to continue my education or work in academia.
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
Heh, wife and I are both geeks making decent money pounding keyboards but funny thing is, she's a PolySci major and I'm BFA. Turns out we're just really good and seeing where screw ups occur in complex systems and figuring out root causes of issues. Daughter wants to be an artist who makes stuff involving robots. COOL!
I drank what? -- Socrates
Yeah, teachers don't spend any time to plan classes, mark tests/assignments, keep up with their field, assist students outside of class time, etc.
Well none of mine ever did any planning (or if they did, they were remarkably shambolic at it), keep up with their field? nope (how much "keeping up" does history, foreign languages, high-school maths, english or high-school science take - except for evolution vs. creationism, none at all) and as for assisting the kids out of hours - that's crazy talk. If you stood at the staffroom door at leaving time, you'd have been killed in the stampede.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
only in America is working over 40 hours a badge of honor. The Germans seem to be doing pretty well with their 30 hour work weeks and their 2 months paid vacation every year. We Americans often confuse competence with numbers of hours worked.
Agree wholeheartedly. Somehow managers (MBA's) have sold workers on the idea that they are just another commodity/expense, rather than human beings. Therefore, for a worker to advance or seem valuable, they should work for less, or work extra for free, etc.
I'ts as if the workers believe they are owners, but without the ownership.
I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it. -- Groucho Marx
The truth is that this is all about the hard capitalist reality. But if it is important for the USA to retain at least some technical capability, we need find a way to bring wages down in the near term. To do that we need to find a way to reduce systemic costs for workers so that they can accept lower wages. For example
(Note the conundrum, soft forms of socialism like in China and Germany is the best way to compete in a capitalist world.)
But, with lower wages for the workers, you'll have to shift the tax burden to corporations and individuals that profit from lower wages for workers, which, of course, is impossible in the USA. So, there's nothing that can be done. American workers will continue to migrate to those jobs that pay well.
I sincerely hope that Mr. Jackson was joking. While correct spelling is not absolutely necessary for communication to occur, it certainly speeds up communication and helps prevent misunderstanding. As it was, I had to pause and think for a while to figure out what was meant by "sheek".
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
This. Exactly this.The problem is, that the value of our work is so low compared to the value of the goods we want to buy. I have no idea how to fix this, though, because people and corporations both suck.
Shiny. Let's be bad guys.
One factor is that legal work, editing and tax preparation are all being outsourced these days.
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
1. Teachers don't make that much money, anywhere. Small exception would be The Defense Department Dependents Schools (DoDDs) overseas, because they make regular teacher pay ($30-$45k), PLUS they get housing allowances, depending on where they live. In England, we were matching our salaries with our housing allowance, for example.
2. You think public workers IN WISCONSIN are in a good position for benefits? Do you watch the news?
3. 401k with matching contributions from an employer over 20 years is far more appealing than x% pension from government coffers.
4. The pension plans for DoDDs teachers is a joke (but offset by the awesomeness of the housing allowances every year). I think I would have cleared around $1200 a month had I stayed in it for 20 years. My 401k, on the other hand, is already over $40k after 3 years of 2% contributions (with matching employer funds).
The single biggest problem is not education for 'STEM'. It is the careers people choose.
Think of it this way.
Think back to your high school class... the last time you were in a reasonable cross-section of society. What percentage are really talented... let's be super generous and say the top 15%
Ideally... you want a distribution like this.
85-100% (doctors, lawyers, engineers...)
75-85% (nurses, teachers, tech admin, business grads)
75 (admin jobs, service sector...)
What we have due to a variety of circumstances is that this ideal is being thrown out of whack. Some jobs are competing globally. Others are protected at home or paid by the government.
So what happens is those who can be engineers become lawyers or financial people. Others 'work below' their ability and get jobs in the 75-85% range. This forces those displaced people in the 75% range... and this pushes those people out of the job market... and that leaves a large number of skilled positions unfilled.
This is almost universally true across the western world. Shortage of high-end talent, but with high unemployment. They keep trying to address it from the educational perspective. But it won't solve it... not unless you can get the 75 of your society to be capable of doing high end work... and that's not happening.
I always say that a society rises and falls by how it values its engineers. Not that there's anything particularly holy about engineers. We are just a good measure of the work distribution in society. It is hard work and needs among the best in society. If your top people are not entering it because it is easier to get a job in a bureaucracy or protected profession... your private sector wealth generation will eventually collapse.
As that work moves to other societies (india/china) then those societies rise.
The cases you list are interesting, but they say very little (almost nothing) about what happens "in general". What you're doing, listing a number of foreign born people who made good in the US, is known as a casuistic approach. E.g. you look at a small number of cherry-picked cases.
Now that's not a bad approach when you want to get a feel for what *can* happen, but the sample you present here is *totally* un-representative for the total population of forein-born engineers. Meaning that it does not allow you to reach any useful conclusions about the population of foreign-born engineers at all.
If you want to draw conclusions about that population, you need to take a representative sample of that population (or even a census) and study that.
Now that's what the author of the original presentation supposedly (I didn't check his sampling method) did. For people who don't have his dataset (i.e. his readers) he summarised his data using a linear regression model, the coefficients of which are on page 73 of his presentation, and which I have copied for you.
The model is like:
Salary = const. + coefficient_age x age + coef_age_x_age x age x age + coef_MS x I_MS + coef_PHD x I_PHD + coef_highCOL x I_highCOL + coef_origF1nonlC x I_origF1nonlC + coef_origF1chn x I_origF1chn + coef_origF1ind x I_origF1ind
If we trust the author to handle the mechanics of datacollection and model estimation correctly, this means that he took a representative dataset of wages and explanatory variables like age, degree obtained, location, indications of foreignership, and indications of coming from China or India, and he has checked that there are no other variables in his dataset that have a significant explanatory value (e.g school where graduated).
The model coefficients he presents are:
factor beta, marg. err.
const. -2640 +/- 18429
age 3369 +/- 865
age x age -33 +/- 10
MS 9948 +/- 2177
PhD 22667 +/- 4509
highCOL 8692 +/- 1917
origF1nonIC 4479 +/- 3847
origF1chn -6190 +/- 5632
origF1ind -978 +/- 5571
non-ICs paid > avg., about 0.5 MS eect Chinese paid
This sums up several aspects of the data as the author notes. In my comments below I have taken the liberty of translating some of the factors (i.e. whether or not you're foreign, Chinese, Indian), into years of career development for easier comparison.
(1) in general, salary level increases with age, but being too old has a negative effect (the term for age squared is negative)
(2) people with PhD's reliably get into jobs where they earn substantially more than those with MS degrees.
(3) in general, foreign-born engineers earn a salary comparable to that of US borns 2 years their junior
(4) but not if you're Chinese, then your salary is likely to lag that of your peers by 3 years.
(5) if you're Indian, your salary lags that of US borns by about 1/2 year
This is how his dataset looks.
In particular, all other things being equal, Chinese and Indians really do work for lower pay than native engineers or other foreigners (e.g. Europeans). No doubt about that. And that holds for the total population he surveyed (which ought to be the total population of foreign-born engineers in CS and EE).
This squarely supports the thesis that US companies are using F1B visa simply as a negotiating tool to lower people's salaries, in view of the fact that engineers salaries have flat-lined over the past 10 or so years (meaning there can't be a serious shortage). Ok?
This is true for any working professional.
I quote (the OP):
The 80-100k a year is more than sufficient incentive for shelter and food -- leaving something you enjoy for 250k is greed.
Yes, I am well aware of patronage; however, it is hard to imagine Sartre do something other than write, or Ramanujan do something other than math, patronages or not. And in fact, follow their passions they did, tribulations of life notwithstanding.
Now, I'm not saying that we should all accept hardships as a necessary evil in following our hearts. However, when you look at the dotcom boom for example, it was the result of people who did not give two hoots about technology jumping on the "IT" and dotcom bandwagon, people who had no business being there. The ones who really enjoyed technology stayed behind -- there is something to be said for doing something that happens you happy. *shrug*
Are these the same "brilliant" Japanese students who built a nuke plant that is melting down and are too fucking proud to accept outside help?
It's a little early to declare Fukishima as an engineering disaster - the plant survived the shaking from a 9.0 quake when it was designed to withstand a 7.9 quake. I haven't seen any reference to what size Tsunami it was designed to withstand. It will be interesting to find out what the tsunami spec was (if any) and how both the earthquake and tsunami specs were determined.
Engineers don't control funding - engineers are happy to design to any safety spec, but more safety comes at a cost, and neither government nor industry have unlimited funds. If society demanded absolute safety, cars would look like tanks, be restricted to 5mph, and would have built-in life support to keep occupants alive just in case the car drives into a lake. Oh, and would cost $200,000, but might save 40,000 lives/year.
You don't need to look overseas to see nuclear dangers - California has 2 coastal plans designed to withstand a 7.0 and 7.5 quake, and a 7.5 or greater quake is very likely to strike in the next 30 years. Oh, and in one of the plants the seismic supports were installed backwards, and in the other plant one of the reactor vessels were installed backwards -- and those *are* engineering mistakes.
Being highly competitive is discriminatory and racist. American education excels at what it is designed for: making people feel good about themselves.
Be wary of idiots who do not know what they are talking about.
Milwaukee teachers pay into their pension plans as well as their medical. Instead of higher salaries, compensation went into their benefits. Teachers do not start off making $60k. Starting salary is $25K. So it will take several decades for them to make $60k. FYI their pension is fully funded.
A moron like you can start making $60k. Over your career you will make more than a teacher.
And don't forget you total compensation is somewhere near $100k. Ask your employer. That's 401K contributions, health insurance, sick days, vacation days, holidays, bonuses, etc. Add it all up and your total compensation will equal if not rival the teachers. Why does the teachers look better? Because they have a pension. If you had a pension, you wouldn't be complaining.
There is no agism there are people that get stuck with skills that are not in demand and are unwilling to learn new things
I think the real problem is, Americans aren't interested in Science and Technology careers that lead them to a lifetime of poverty for themselves and their families.
Science and Technology careers lead to a lifetime of poverty?
Let's compare stats. Here we have have an undergraduate business program, hyped as being in the top 20 undergraduate business programs:
http://dyson.cornell.edu/undergrad/careers.php#placement
Here we have an undergraduate engineering program, also hyped as being highly ranked, at the same university, for the same year:
Computer Science: http://www.engineering.cornell.edu/resources/career_services/students/statistics/upload/pgcs09.pdf
Electrical Engineering: http://www.engineering.cornell.edu/resources/career_services/students/statistics/upload/pgece09.pdf
Take a look at the 8-year reports for the different engineering majors:
http://www.engineering.cornell.edu/resources/career_services/students/statistics/postgrad_reports.cfm
Undergrad CS majors are making 50% more than the undergrad business majors, and their 8 year trend is upward, not downward.
I started University in 1995, and graduated in 2000. It terms of timing it could not have been worse.
I have always been into computers, and all though high school was involved with them. When I went to University it seemed to be the natural thing to do. Also looking backwards it seemed to be a highly sought after career in many big corporations and universities. On top of that, the future seemed really bright, with lots of innovation, and people that were capable making money in heaps... However we all know how that ends... The Dot Com Bubble.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble
Basically in 2000 the entire bottom fell out. Now on top of that over the next 10 years you export just about every entry level job to India. Not exactly a rosy picture. Had I known what I do now, I would never have gone into CS. Sure I may have still taken a bunch of courses, out of personal interest, but I would have likely leaned more towards some other science with the intent to use computers as a useful tool that I was interested in. As it is, I graduated CS, and I work in government in CS (sort of), and it isn't so bad, but life didn't exactly turn out how I thought it might when I was in school in the late 90's.
While it is higher the fact is the average employee making $60K their employer has to shell out $30-35K more for that employee.
that 40% isn't all benefits but things like unemployment taxes for the state, etc. yes 401k contributions are there as well, but that is maybe $5k(and more likely less) out of that $40k.
Just because you earn $60k doens't mean your company stops paying at $60k EVERY employer has to pay taxes on the fact that they HIRED you. those taxes cost companies 20-35% more than the salary of the given employee. It is why CEO's take small salaries and huge bonuses, because it saves the company money(and they are greedy too)
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I say ship them back. I see your point and can agree with it to an extent. Here is one; why bring them over in the first place? Let company A outsource to india/china/etc. After many delays, language barriers, garbage coding practices, and having to wait 24 hours for a reply to a simple question, company A will come back to the US and outsource work to a company in North Dakota with low costs of operations and immediate response to questions. The only game to play here is the time zone game.
H1Bs are a waste of time. I have three of them here in my department and none of them can think their way out of a wet paper sack with neon signs written in their own language pointing to the exit. Is there talent that the US should bring over...yes! Most, probably 95-98% should be shipped back to ratville and asked never to return. If the H1B is not a genius, goto 1:
Just my two cents on H1Bs.
I see your anecdote and I raise you. My company hires H1Bs (I'm one of them) because we used to hire developers fresh out of US colleges who would take 3 days to do something a European graduate could do in half a day. As for "ratville", that speaks volumes about the quality of US education if you're a product of that system.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Nah. Settling conflict with guns is for the low rung of the ladder. I think organized crime has found it to be much more profitable and safer to influence the political system, just like the businessmen---but I repeat myself.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
- Mark Twain, a Biography
I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it. -- Groucho Marx
I think there is fairly strong correlation between sucking at something and complaining about people taking away jobs.
I believe the researcher's point was that we don't need as many H1B workers because they clearly are not the creme de la creme as based on his analysis of the wages they are paid and other data, and the aim of the H1B program was to bring in highly skilled and specialized workers who could not be found here (in the US). The data he presents suggests that employers are using the H1B program more as a means of getting cheap labor than as a means to get the best and brightest with the rarest skill sets.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
Totally agree and I'd like to add that outsourcing will eventually reach a point of saturation. It's already getting there. There are only so many people who can do these tech jobs, especially at the higher level. A lot of visas are going to European or Asian people who expect to get paid just as much. The problem is lack of skills in this area, not lack of jobs. Or perhaps it has something to do with unwillingness to relocate.
Read my short stories - You won't regret it.
First, do you believe that American citizens are beholden to contribute to the well being of India? Why?
Second, when the article says that the bottom 60% of Americans have 65% of their net worth tied up in their homes, how can you possibly read that as "Americans have mortgaged their homes to the hilt?" If that were that case, Americans would have NO net worth tied up in their homes. You do know what "net worth" means, right? Most Americans do not want to "participate in the culture of excess," they want to be able to eat, house themselves, heat their homes in the winter, and buy necessary medicine, all at the same time. Is that excess?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I love foreign genius. I'd love another Elon Musk to come to the USA and set up shop.
The reality is different. The IT campus for my company has 750 workers. 310 have come from India within the last 7 years. They are smart, diligent workers with good educations. Many of them have Masters degrees in comp sci or EE. The company has put them to work testing business systems and maintaining Websites. They are essentially indentured servants until they get their Green Cards, which is now a 5-10 year process if you are from India or China. None of them are geniuses and none of them are trying to start the Next Big Thing. They are focused on keeping their jobs so that they don't get shipped home.
This. One of my best friends is a lawyer. He makes a bit less than I do, has a crushing load of student debt (still), and it took him 3 years to really find a job (he had a few short term gigs in there, but it took him 3 years to find a permanent "real" job). On top of all of that, he's doing completely uninteresting work in real estate law, while I spend most of my days playing with big iron HPC systems.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Jobs lost at Location A are jobs gained at Location B. Once Location B loses its competitiveness, the jobs will goes to Location C. Progressively, the economic advantage of Locations A, B & C will all converge at a point of peaceful coexistence. As an outsider unaffected by outsourcing one way or another, I can only arrive at the conclusion that this is a good thing. It spreads the wealth, knowledge and other economic benefits from the richer to the poorer countries until an equilibrium is reached. Ideally, in 50 years time, we will have progressed from our presently petty national and racial boundaries to international unions such as the EU. Isn't all this just another facet of the "free market" that all western countries hunger for?
but i wonder why you think that's the only topic that can be talked about
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
we want to make 5 years of employment in the usa mandatory after schooling as a condition for coming here in the first place. 4,000-5,000 of those students won't amount to anything impressive, but 4 or 5 of them will create 40,000-50,000 american jobs. the problem with your "entrepreneurial" visa idea is that you are assuming there exists some sort of criteria for identifying who can actually be a successful entrepreneur. no, there is no such criteria. you can't identify whose idea will work and whose won't. so bring them all, and keep them all
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
A law degree is possibly the worst choice you could have made the last 3 years.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
He was both right and wrong. Wrong in the sense that *you* do use what he taught you. Right in sense that of the people in that room, you're probably one of 2 or 3 that do. "Probably" is the key word. As long as 51% of the people in his class don't use calculus (an extremely likely event) he made a correct statement. Does that mean we should stop teaching calculus to most students? Difficult to say, and there have been very long Slashdot threads arguing back and forth on the matter. It remains true that that most people who take introductory calculus, especially in high school, will probably never use it.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Black hat couple?
"Hi Honey! Rough day at work. Held a megacorporation hostage for some sensitive info, it took FOREVER to get the data off of their box and I barely made the ransom call before quittin' time. What did you do today?"
"I made a new decentralized botnet client. I only deployed it today through a malicious ad script and it's already a good size."
"Well that's great! So...you up for a little...port scanning after dinner?"
"Sure, but it might take a lot of...knocking to get the ports open ;)"
"How about port 9? >:)"
"Denied. Maximum packet length exceeded."
"Aww :("
"Wouldn't you prefer some deep...packet inspection? ;)"
"Awright! :D"
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
"The data show that for every H-1B position requested, U.S. technology
companies increase their employment by 5 workers."
Or maybe companies that are facing high-growth hire more workers, including H-1B's
BWAHAHAHA *snort*
Your experience in Austin is totally irrelevent, because the economy hit the shitter in '08, and has been there ever since.
As a CS grad who graduated in '09, the job fair had one group wanting CS people who didn't already have an internship:
The Army recruiter for active duty. He wasn't even going to hand you a MOS relative to your study... you got your degree, and he handed you a contract with 11X for your MOS.
Hell, after graduating, the drama and english majors got jobs before I did, mainly because they ended up as teachers.
Guess what positions the CS guys got? Code bangers where they had to do 10,000 lines a day to compete with the India guys overseas or get whacked, or low-level IT jobs working craptastic hours keeping Windows boxes online. The guys with their spray tans, and popped collars who went to business school? They are doing their 9-5 work and driving their Lexuses home while the CS grads are bouncing from gig to gig like down and out musicians waiting for their break in life. Those were the lucky ones. A lot of CS grads ended up at Spherion doing Dell tech support for $8/hour plus trying to fight for parking at the Round Rock facility.
My mistake was getting several positions lined up, which due to the economy either went away in hiring freezes, or the companies went under.
So, if I were to recommend something to someone looking for a major, go ENGINEERING. Go EE, CE, ChemE, Petrol-E. If you REALLY like CS, get internships. Internships are the only way, barring having contacts, a trust fund, or a well heeled family to have a chance of anything past Dell laptop support for a future.
People who say Austin is a haven for CS people likely never tried looking for work after '08. Especially devs who are a fungible resource because one can hit Tata (a core Indian offshoring firm) up for code blocks that are guaranteed bug-free and 1/10 the price of having devs on staff. IT people are barely better off, provided you are lucky enough to get something that isn't sitting on a tech support line answering "my cupholder broke" calls.
Our public education system does a terrible job at showing how math is relevant.
Fuck relevancy. The reason you study math is for its inherent logical beauty. If you don't see that, you don't get logic and you're going to be a crappy scientist / engineer / programmer anyway. If you want "relevancy" go into one of the arts or social sciences.
That is all.
Combine this with the education system in most states being a complete disaster and you the cycle is complete.
- California (as an example) refuses to expand the community college system to offer basic 4 year degrees. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, the state college system had nominal fees barely above community college levels and so anyone could get a degree for a fairly low amount of money. Now, the prices have skyrocketed to where it's not worth getting a degree unless you are sure that there is a payoff. $5000+ a quarter at UC schools prices any college education out of the realm of the average worker or the under-employed who is looking for a second career to potentially train into. Also, they have limited acceptance to local residents(foreigners are still accepted from anywhere of course), which means you are stuck with one of 2 or 3 possible choices. Which are full for the next 2-3 years as I speak.
Fully half of the UC and Cal State system is clogged with idiots getting degrees in worthless stuff like political science, ethnic studies, and religion. People who want real degrees can't get in because of the sheer number of useless degrees still offered that only lead to either teaching the same if you are lucky enough, or a job answering phones since it's useless in the workplace now. If you look at India(as an example), there's virtually no wasted space. All of the schools offer a few basic degrees and little filler. Even if you could get in past the waiting list into one of your local schools, the programs are all full.
To add insult to injury, colleges in many other countries are affordable or are nearly free. For those stuck here in the U.S., even the cheapest options are impossible to afford while the rest of the world essentially floods in and displaces our workers with ones that paid almost nothing for their degrees.
Your only option then is private schools. But at $20K+ a year, that's impossible short of a scholarship. Re-training is impossible unless you have money already. Catch-22.
- The employers also feel that they can demand ever-increasing skills at ever-decreasing wages, pretty much because they can get away with it. Why not if all of these fortune 100 companies can do it? There's always some worker from overseas who can do the job for $30K a year. Or some starving ex-employee in their 50s who will work for intern wages. It's now affecting computer fields as well, where jobs have split into two fields - high end database and critical programmers and everyone else who is just a wage-slave in a cubicle or at a workbench. Jobs that used to pay 40-60K a year are now being offered for $12 an hour. With no benefits, 401K, or perks.
Fact: You can make more money and get better benefits working for In-and-Out Burger than from most jobs these days that require a BS degree. If you have a Masters, you're still in good shape, but that also is quickly eroding.
The only way to solve it it to slam the doors shut, kick out the temporary visa workers, and force companies to hire only U.S. workers(or those few with permanent visas of course). Note - most OTHER nations do this sort of thing already and help protect their industry.
... I'm serious all this talk about work is not SOUND ANALYSIS it is more typical american faith based moralizing. The fact that your post got modded insightful is disturbing enough and just lends credence to the stereotype of ignorance of many americans. Lets have more real scientific analysis and less moral blathering.
I got a better historical hypothesis : Capitalism over the long term creates unsustainable societies, given that most people in the world are average. Average jobs keep being destroyed by technological displacement or moved to cheaper countries, thereby having available jobs and their livable wage pushed downward so that only a smaller percentage of the population can do 'economically competitive' work. Over time work at a livable wage that is available gets further out of reach for the common man. Partially due to technological disruption and societies ability to do more with less most people end up doing jobs that produce nothing (finance/service sector) or busywork like expanding university into an education 'industry' to keep people employed/money moving around.
Just because people are employed and money is shuffling does not mean they are doing things that are intelligent or that have long term value for the world at all. What actually is going on in 'the economy' matters much more then just having people create needless work.
This is the problem with anecdotal analysis, it doesn't do serious analysis it blusters its way to the conclusion it wants.
Of course wealth is traded. Product X sells for $500.
Where that $500 goes is completely traded.
How much goes to the store. Of that store amount how much goes to rent, to utilities, to employees in the store.
How much goes the distributor. Of that amount how much gets spent on transportation costs? Does that money go to the truck drivers, the warehouse guys, or does it go to gas and truck prices...
If you had $500 constant everyone needs to take out of each other's pie.
The problem that I see is that the people with H1B's are stuck, so as a homegrown, I have to compete with someone who cant shop around for a better job. Now that guy might be working well below his skillset for some mid grade job, but I have to compete with his skills, and his inability to ask for a proper wage. He can't switch jobs in a reasonable fashion unless he's can prove he's a total rockstar, and then he's still underpaid.
From a corporate view there is no reason to raise wages if you can still get indentured servants instead of employees.
My take is that I don't mind competing with foreign nationals, as long as they are free to compete for a wage. Sure, they'll take some of the better paying jobs, but we'll be getting competent people rising to the top.
Tech wages can never rise while a significant chunk of tech workers are unable to negotiate for better wages.
The problem with your argument is that those who are in the bottom twenty percent are not the same people who were in the bottom twenty percent thirty years ago. Most of the people who were in the bottom twenty percent thirty years ago have long since moved up. So, those who were in the bottom twenty percent thirty years ago have indeed gotten some of the new pie.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
H1Bs are a waste of time. I have three of them here in my department and none of them can think their way out of a wet paper sack with neon signs written in their own language pointing to the exit.
Then. Why. Did. You. Hire. Them?
Seriously, what's the point of blaming the feds or H1Bs for your own incompetent hiring practices? Hire the best people for the jobs, H1B or not, and stop worrying about how many brown people the US is allowing into our fair land.
You must be around 20 years old, and the ignorant pieces of shit that modded you insightful must be even younger. Ageism exists in IT, perhaps especially in programming. There are people who have up-to-date skills and knowledge, plus 30+ years of experience to draw on, and they can't get interviews, much less offers. Meanwhile, H1B's fresh out of the pathetic excuse for what India calls a college are handed jobs just for breathing.
And no, I am not particularly old (under 35), and I have not suffered from Ageism. I have, however, seen many others of my father's generation who have.
Ahhhh...someone who ascribes to the theory that anyone can program. Yes, this is true, just like anyone can cook, as long as they know how to follow a recipe.
But here is the rub...anyone can cook, just not everyone is able to eat it. You still have to find people who can come up with new and original recipes if you are looking for something different. And this is something not everyone can do.
Or should I use the painting analogy? Anyone can paint. My three-year-old self was more than able to splat finger paints on a piece of paper that might be reasonably construed as a house, but aside from my mother, no one would call it artwork comparable to any of the great masters, let alone an undergraduate student in his third year of art school. And others do things like trace someone else's art and call it theirs, or use a stencil or decoupage instead of creating their own original art. I've seen this too, both in art and in programming.
And while you may be able to distill one portion or another of this talent and bottle it up into a curriculum that you can teach, a lot of the ability to see a problem and conceive a powerful and efficient solution (or any solution at all) that doesn't exist in a formula is not a skill that can be taught, but raw talent that must be trained. You will find that great programmers approach solutions to problems much the same way a mathematician is able to solve problems in complex systems.
Not every problem in the world has been solved. And people will continue to conceive new problems looking for solutions every day. Identifying the problem is only the beginning...coming up with a solution is where the real genius lies. And if you go out there looking for the lowest bidder, more often than not, you will get what you pay for. Trust me, I have fixed more than my share of code coming out of India or China.
Having worked as the network admin for a school for years I can tell you that teachers are required by law to have current class plans for K-12. Some teachers also do help students after class, though it's not required... Also typically a teacher must continue their education into the masters level when possible even PhD in a number of cases, teachers are required to continue increasing their level of education all the time. Added to things like grading homework, which unless they do it during their planning time, is done at home on their time.
Now that's not to say teachers can't be lazy SOB's who don't really do anything, but no one is making you work 60 hours+ a week and then requiring you to continue your college education path on the side while paying you just ~$35k/year. That is a reasonable starting wage.
For where I worked starting wage was typically closer to 30k then 35k. In fact I made as much as the highest paid teacher and that was no 60k+ let me tell you... The ones who made money where the directors. If you had 'director' in your title you made over 70k without exception. However some of those directors were teachers once, in fact men are usually pushed out of classrooms and into directorships as their career path in education. Women however are allowed to remain teachers indefinitely.
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
You sir really have no idea what it's like in Austin or as an UTCS graduate. I literally have to beat the recruiters off now with my formal education and experience.
I might not make as much money as you, but I never had to masturbate a recruiter either.
First, do you believe that American citizens are beholden to contribute to the well being of India? Why?
No, I and I have no idea how you could interpret anything I wrote in the previous post to mean such a thing. My statement regarding the wages of the bottom 90% of American workers is simply that rich is a relative term.
Second, when the article says that the bottom 60% of Americans have 65% of their net worth tied up in their homes, how can you possibly read that as "Americans have mortgaged their homes to the hilt?" If that were that case, Americans would have NO net worth tied up in their homes. You do know what "net worth" means, right? Most Americans do not want to "participate in the culture of excess," they want to be able to eat, house themselves, heat their homes in the winter, and buy necessary medicine, all at the same time. Is that excess?
Net worth is simply Assets-Liabilities. If your 65% of your net worth is tied up in your home, it means could either mean 65% of your assets are represented by your actual house, or 65% of your liabilities is tied up in mortgage payments. Either way, it is not good financial practice to have that much of your net worth tied up in an asset that is not easily convertible to cash.
As for the assertion that most Americans do not wish to participate in the culture of excess:
LCD sales in decline for 2010 compared to double-digit growth for previous two years
Auto sales in America on considerable upturn
Spending on American travel - note especially travel expenditure as a function of household income - it remained remarkably consistent regardless of income.
To me that doesn't read as simply wanting to "eat, house themselves, heat homes in the winter, and buy necessary medicine"...but then I'm just a simple Canadian yokel.
Additionally - I am not advocating for the demise of the American worker - I am saying their needs to be a fundamental shift in consumer attitudes, and there also needs to be a fundamental shift in the way corporate capitalism is viewed and regulated in America (and around the world). However the importance of the corporation and the overvaluation of the CEOs won't change until consumer culture changes.
Admittedly, this just shows that whoever was handling the interview process and hiring was hiring poorly. It shows nothing about the actual quality of US vs. European vs. Indian graduates.
I've seen many a company in my years where the interview for IT positions was conducted by someone who could barely turn on a computer let alone conduct an appropriate interview for a position involving day to day work on computers of any kind. But when they end up with a "college graduate" who couldn't keep up with normal work? Well perhaps they should have had a professional conduct the interview.
With the entire world thinking that whatever geeks do to make programs is trivial, should be faster and according to most of the other posts in this thread, is way too expensive for most contractors, maybe you could give teachers the benefit of a doubt, that maybe their job is more than you think it is.
Also, my mom teaches elementary school, and I know for a fact, there is a hideous amount of keeping-up, planning and assisting kids out of hours to do.
Yes, they are the same people (or their direct descendants) who were there before. There is more social mobility in France than in the US. On average, it takes five generations for a poor family to become middle class. On average, children of the wealthy stay wealthy, children of the middle class stay middle class (or slip to poor) and children of the poor stay that way. The American Dream of a true meritocracy is a lie. You are like the prisoner Brian meets in the Roman Prison, in Life of Brian, who lauds the Romans while hanging upside down from his feet. A fair day's pay for a fair day's work, indeed.
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/04/b1579981.html
http://www.economist.com/node/15908469?story_id=15908469
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
In 2007, the bottom 60% of Americans had 65% of their net worth tied up in their homes.
I'm sorry if I have little sympathy for those who mortgaged their homes to the hilt in an effort to keep up ridiculous lifestyles. I understand the sociological pressures that are placed on the average American due to advertising and socialization - but all it takes to break the cycle of debt is to do some simple math, that is - "I make x amount of dollars and thus i should not spend more than y in order to provide for my family." Yes it would be nice to drive a Bugatti and live in a big house, but the reality of the situation is that when you can't afford that, you shouldn't buy it. The culture of excess is ridiculous - the belief that everyone can participate in it, even more so.
Who said anything about any of what you just said? The article is saying that since the bottom 60% of Americans have all their wealth invested in their homes, and the value of that just dropped, then they no longer have as much wealth as they used to. But, the top earners have 10% of their wealth invested in their homes, and the rest in investments that are recovering much more nicely (Thanks Bush and Obama!). This was nothing more than an explanation that things have probably gotten worse since the chart was made.
Typical fully loaded cost for a software developer is 20-25% over salary (payroll taxes are only 7-8%). Fixed benefit pension plas are a sweet deal (for those who get them - not so much for those stuck paying for them). A fully loaded cost that's 66% over salary is extreme.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Expenses are a relative term, too, or do you think that things cost the same in India as they do in America?
You DO realize that most people don't have the income to have both a house and savings? What world do you live in where most people can own a home AND have savings? Oh, Canada, right. Well bully for you. Here in America, it doesn't work that way. If 65% of your liabilities are tied up in mortgage, then 65% of your assets can't be there as well! That would equal 0% of your net worth in your home.
I never claimed the rich do not spend to excess. That link you point to does not separate out the purchases of the ultra wealthy from those of the rest of us. Therefore, you can not use it as proof that the average person spends to excess. But go on and keep blaming the victims here, I'm sure it helps you sleep easier at night.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
So that site says $54k vs my "about $60k" for Milwaukee. Always good to have another significant digit. But again, that's salary,
My entry level salary as a programmer was $18k (yes, in America). Just sayin. But my only point was that you need to compare total packages, not just salary. Especially if you're working for a startup and get crappy benefits.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
What does compete mean. The US for many years had a high tariff economy and low trade and American workers enjoyed a high standard of living. Free trade is a net benefit to the economy. But if congress going to ensure that free trade only benefits the rich, it can go overboard.
People are going to those advanced degrees because people won't give them a chance in an entry level position. H.R. says they aren't qualified.
Then, when they get the advanced degree, a lot of them are *still* willing to do entry level positions and work their way up. H.R. won't hire them. They say they are overqualified.
There is NO middle ground. This is exactly what happened to me. I was willing to come in low and work up even with an advanced degree. I was willing to move on my own dime. Nothing... H.R. simply trashed the resume because I had an advanced degree. Human Resources is nothing but a bunch of people playing games and if they don't think they have qualified people these people need to talk to their H.R. directors and find out what is *really* going on.
It can never be a race to the top if the goal is infinite productivity at zero cost.
"False hope is why we'll never run out of natural resources!" - Lewis Black
Cite evidence please, as I have NOT observed this piece of economic dogma in action. If you start poor, you end poor, in the overwhelming number of cases. If you disagree, you probably haven't been poor.
Paranoia is a Survival Trait!
...Dr. Norman Matloff didn't think it was a problem that many US tech students couldn't find jobs...
:|
..it only became a problem when students wised up and stopped entering/paying for tech college degrees,,,, since they already knew their chances of finding a job.
It's very difficult to address this subject at all without sounding like "those damn foreigners are stealing our jobs!!!",,, but if US universities knew which side their bread was buttered on, they'd have come out against US companies offshoring a long time ago.
[-end-]
> The data, on the other hand, indicate that those admitted are no more able, productive, or innovative than America's homegrown talent, he said.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
In any discussion about H1Bs, somebody posts a comment like this. I am very sceptical that there is any truth to these article.
Okay, let's see the actual ad, post a link please. If there is no ad, then why not? Even if the ad was taken down, it should be cached.
Does your ad include a salary range? If not, why not? How do we know that you are actually offering the salary that you claim?
that no one wants these jobs. "If you are smart enough to do the work, you're smart enough not to work here."
I doubt that. Maybe it is "on one wants these jobs at that price". So raise the price. We have no doubling the cost of gasoline when we need to, double the price of programming.
Trying to impose more barriers to trade ... Not to mention that we have the internet now; not letting programmers into the US only drives whole projects off-shore
I don't think you understand how tariffs work. Once the project is offshore then what? You can't use it without paying a large tariff on the transactions.
If you want more Americans hired, you should increase the ease of immigration, not make it harder; it would bring more entrepreneurs to our country, who in turn would employ more Americans.
This is silly. Adding to the labor pool depresses wages. There is nothing magic about labor as contrasted with any other good, increase the supply you decrease the price.
You complain about the lack of economic mobility, while favoring the types of government policy that cause that lack.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
So are those new pies which are made do they sit there doing nothing or do they actually go to work creating value for the whole? (and yes you may call me a socialist if I can call you a fascist) Explain to me how complex financial instruments (derivatives on commodities futures for example) actually focus capital to be used by innovation in any way whatsoever? And while you say now that Science and Tech workers need to be innovators and business leaders, that might be a great sound bite and all to appease all you Ayn Rand fans, but in reality people who are truly like that bristle at the thought of working themselves to death for someone else (VC's, CEO's, stockholders etc.) to a) take the credit b) steal the idea and c) take the money Not to mention that for every business leader to be successful there have to be a ready supply of people who are a) too scared b) lazy c)sane enough to not want to venture out on their own for x number of years with no safety net whatsoever to speculate that their idea is the one that hits the jackpot. What we need is a clear understanding that innovation and true cutting edge technology takes development time (more than you think always) and for those who are leaders to increase their understanding of the technology that they are leading. Frankly we need less "leadership" and more people willing to roll their sleeves up and get the work done in the trenches, just the opposite.
you are in a twisty maze of different passages.
of course things don't cost the same in India as they do in America - note that India's rate of inflation is rising, which as I said, is associated with rising wages. The rise in wages will cause them to be less competitive, allowing jobs to shift back to the American economy (which some posters have already discussed as occurring when the value provided by lower wages did not offset the cost of paying more to American IT workers).
The 65% is either one or the other, not both. Regardless, having that much of your net worth tied up in your house is never a good idea.
You certainly can have savings and pay off your mortgage - it requires less spending on things like LCD TVs, new cars and vacations. I'm not sure which link you're referring to but I will refer you to the last link where spending on travel remains consistent as a function of income. I don't make much at the moment - I'm back to school and living off savings - so I don't take vacations. That's part of the opportunity cost of upgrading my education - not spending now so that I will have greater ability to earn (and presumably spend) later.
I'm not blaming anyone, simply making observations.
In contrast, school in Japan (to use one example) is highly competitive - students know that if they don't do well in high school they aren't going to get into their college of choice (which means a high paying job), and may not even get into a college at all are are relegated to trade school. This pressure starts early in their school life - by 7th or 8th grade a student better be on a college track or he/she is not going to make it. The school hours are long, with Saturday schooldays not being unheard of. Parents in turn push their children to do well in school.
And then they go out into a forest and hang themselves.
Comment of the year
Bitten by your own analogy- I am sure that there are plenty of great cooks out there with no formal training.
love is just extroverted narcissism
As others have said, few lawyers make that much and people who are very good in tech can make a killing as well (consulting, being sniped by the right company, bonuses to not be sniped by that company, etc.). That's without even going into management which pays even more.
Also, salary is irrelevant in many ways. If you have to work 80 hours and have no life while under constant stress than what could is the money to you? And btw, if that describes your job in tech than I recommend being more selective next time you look for a job.
No, you do that. I favor government policy that counters the outrageous power the ultra rich have over politics. The answer to regulatory capture is not fewer regulations, it is less regulatory capture. One good way to keep money out of politics is to take it away from the ultra rich. Let's have a 90% marginal tax rate on a billion dollar income. Adam Smith noted that free markets require regulations in order to stay free, and I agree. A "free market" with no regulations will become the playground of the rich, and completely unfree, in very short order. The government is not the only extra-market force at work in the world.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The answer to regulatory capture is not fewer regulations, it is less regulatory capture.
Please give me one case where, over the long haul, regulations increased and regulatory capture did not do so as well.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Cases in agreement:
1) one of my junior relatives (female) had planned to get her degree in engineering. After one term of actual college engineering classes she decided that she hated engineering. I think she went into psychology instead.
2) back in 2004 I was back in school taking some CS classes. Something close to 70% of all the grad students were foreign, and about 40% of those were female. These students were above all pragmatists, who knew that their future standard of living depended on making the sacrifices. There was not a single US born female grad student in CS - I asked the head of the department.
Oddly enough, more than half of the math faculty were female, and perhaps 1/3 of the CS faculty. But again, I did not see any female grad students in math - but I did not ask about that department so I don't know for sure.
IMHO the K-12 educational system in the US not only suppresses bright students in general, it also is very effective at communicating the teachers' own dislike and blockage against math and other 'hard' disciplines (that blockage was proven in studies as far back as the 1970s.) The mental discipline that is required to think analytically is of negative value during the K-12 experience - or at least it used to be. I'd love to be proved wrong as far as the present day.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Sure it can if the result is infinite productivity at zero cost. A world with free replicators is not a world where no one can have the things they need. Ultimately the goal is that people get what they need, and some of what they want - people working at some job is a means to that end.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Why slave to make 80-100k a year with a Masters degree when you could be making 250-300k as a lawyer....
Bad example. The market is glutted with law school grads; most freshly-minted JD's I know are waiting tables, or at best doing doc review or serving as a research gofer. And the sad thing is, they have six-figure loans to pay back. Plus, routine legal work is increasingly being off-shored or automated as well.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
It's also a completely invalid question for survey purposes. It's a leading question, encouraging the responder to answer in the way desired to skew the survey. "Did the tremendous theft of money by Wall Street players from poor people encourage you to stop paying your house payment?"
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
I never met superior foreign engineering students in my M.E. degree. Not one. I met a lot of talent from across the globe but the class leaders weren't from China, India, Pakistan, Korea, etc. They actually were most often from students who had a parent that was already an engineer and thus they had a huge head start on the rest of the class, whether in Thermodynamics, Heat Transfer, Machine Design, etc. Most of those students were Americans because their parent worked at Boeing, Northrup, Lockhead, etc. Ultimately, the talent was spread out and the top students tended to team together to ensure they were the class leaders, regardless of cultural differences.
If you know that prices are not the same, why would you consider a straight comparison of income fair? "Will cause" is not "has caused."
Regardless, having that much of your net worth tied up in your house is never a good idea.
Dude, you are a fucking idiot, or an asshole, or the clueless scion of an ultra rich family. Who can afford to own a house while having an equal or greater amount of wealth in more liquid assets? Who even thinks that is a good idea? You misunderstand basic finance. Having recently inherited a house and the proceeds of a large life insurance policy, I sought advice from professionals. Even though I already know quite a bit, and have a credit rating of 812. I had $100,000 in cash from the insurance, and $50,000 in equity on a $188,000 house. What do you think these professionals advised me to do? Put most of the money into the house, save enough for a six month to a year cushion. That puts my monthly house, tax and insurance payments at $730 total, so I can save a huge amount of my income. I KNOW for a FACT that you don't know what the hell you are talking about, so I will thank you to shut the hell up before you confuse someone who doesn't realize how idiotic your advice is.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Be wary of idiots who do not know what they are talking about.
But eliminating those would remove about 95% of everything on Slashdot! ... including mine... :D
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Managers are given huge leeway in negotiating salaries for new hires, including signing bonuses, relocation, stock options, etc. New hires represent a huge gamble, so the return on that investment is really hard to assure.
Managers are given very little leeway in giving out salary increases, cash bonuses, stock options, etc. (unless you are at the top, funny enough). Existing employees are a known commodity, those bonuses are based on much better understood performance.
So long as the dogma in HR/management that permeates corporate USA continues to fail to reward proven the winners in their own ranks less than they can be rewarded for jumping ship we will continue to have loyalty problems, which inevitably drives the vicious cycle of companies not hiring for the long term (i.e. the harsh experience hurdle new grads face), and employees feeling the need to job surf just to get the raises and bonuses they feel they deserve.
England. France. Germany. There's three, now you show me one case where regulatory capture increased in a society that limits the influence of wealth over politics. If your wealthiest individual can not afford the bribes necessary to effect regulatory capture, it will not happen. Another factor is our first past the post voting system. In parliamentary systems, and Condorcet type systems, no vote is really "wasted" and so people do not have to pick the lesser of two evils.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I know of at least one teacher (indirectly related to me) who used the same lesson plans for essentially his entire career - over 20 years. It seemed to work for him. He taught bonehead math.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
It's not just the money, but the the number of skills. New computer degree graduates are facing an uphill battle to get jobs with no experience and unless they lie they are going to not get work. So this knowledge is passed on to high school students who decide to go for a degree that can get a foot in the door immediately after graduation.
Wish I had mod points!! :D
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
I am closing in on 50 and looking to get into a director position in IT (currently a manager)
This situation terrifies me since I could be let go and have to compete for another programming job against a bunch of newbies who overcompensate for their lack of experience by hyping the uniqueness of their skill sets. Unfortunately, HR drones fall for the same buzz word bingo in job postings and always demand the language du jour instead of looking for somebody with a track record of learning new languages and being able to apply consistent good programming practices
It leads me to the desire to build a management bunker around myself, staff it with loyalists and slow any risky new development because it might expose me to rif if the scheme fails
We all know that this will lead to IT stagnation and make my employer less competitive, but it seems to be the way the game is played
and yes, it is a damn shame
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Funny thing, that sounds just like the complaints of the unions in Detroit when the car companies were opening 'greenfield' plants in North Carolina, Georgia, etc. This is just the global version of the same thing. Pertinent question. Walmart has created more 'middle class' jobs (by world standards) than any other institution in history, bringing entire nations into the global economy. Something over 10 million families have gone from living on dirt and sticks to have real income. Do you advocate forcing all those people back into subsistence farming?
That's the real issue. What we are experiencing now is simply a more efficient global economy, which is going through a transition to where wage scales will be more or less equivalent for people all over the world. As a case in point, the Chinese government is already worried about 'low wage' jobs getting moved to SE Asia and Africa. As wage differentials gradually stabilize, the demand for jobs here will increase. I have been receiving occasional 'in-sourcing' recruiting emails for a couple of years - Indian companies that are looking for Americans to work here, for them there.
The sad fact is that in a level world, American workers at all levels will have to compete without any artificial barriers. What is wrong with that?
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Haha - funny thing. As of five years ago (last time I read anything about it) the average systems administrator made more ($65K) than the average lawyer ($59K).
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/matloff.html
Just a word to the wise - keep up the marketing side of the biz. I did consulting for quite a while, but was never good at drumming up new work. I had a couple of very big, very good clients but after a while their parent company took them in another direction (different tech) and they couldn't use me any more. As a result, my income suffered badly after a couple of good years. Also, make sure you have at least a one-year cushion for those lean times.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Interestingly enough as a kid I was teased, made fun of, insulted and shunned for being smart. It ended up strengthening my resolve because I had such contempt for these people. They literally screwed around all the time, were disrespectful unjustifiably, many got pregnant or impregnated someone, and many simply drank/smoked/chewed too much. And thought THEY were cool? I just dropped totally out of the social structure in high school and did my own thing. It paid off in a way, as I am an almost graduated grad student and I don't miss a single one of them.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
And Americans are US citizens, while Indians* are not. The US government should be looking out for its citizens, not Indian citizens; that's what the Indian government is for.
* apart from migrants who've naturalized, which is no what what this article is about
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
After reading this prescient book from 1995:
http://www.vdare.com/alien_nation/
it started to dawn on me that nearly all the socioeconomic problems we in the U.S. face today* can be traced to the failings of the 1965 immigration reform. We shouldn't even have special niche programs like H1B; we should be putting those who really do have in-demand skills and qualifications at the front of the line for normal immigration visas and encouraging them to become citizens, but instead because of quirks of the 1965 reform unskilled Latin Americans will _always_ be at the head of the line--for the sole reason that they were "first out of the gate" to immigrate in large numbers post-1965--unless the law is amended. And good luck with that since so many are already here that they're a powerful special-interest lobby.
*: increasing economic stratification (rich getting richer, poor getting poorer, middle class shrinking), decline in inflation-adjusted wages (an average worker in the 70s had more buying power than an average worker today), high unemployment in the African-American community, etc., all trace back convincingly to post-1965 mass immigration, and the book _Alien Nation_ details the evidence. Even the recent housing bubble which set off the banking crisis and current recession has our immigration-driven population explosion and cheap immigrant construction labor as a significant component (though the book obviously doesn't detail this, having been published in 1995). In a few decades, native-born Americans will be about 25% of the U.S. population; will the culture of that day have anything in common with our own--will it descend from our culture and inherit its good points, or replace it and retain nothing of what we and our parents built? These are all interesting issues.
"It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word."--Andrew Jackson
I guess his administration didn't give a damn. Mine certainly did. Plans were required to be updated and turned in on a regular basis. In fact one of my many projects was an easy method for them to turn them in electronically to be filed (somehow email to a account a secretary can check was to hard compared to paper). Lots of teachers complain when given more work, but they really are required to do alot. Heck the school will abuse anyone for as much extra time without pay they can. I complained they were requiring me to use my personal cell phone for work, mainly SMS from the the servers on failures/outages, and they gave me a cell phone 2 years later with no SMS.... Heck the servers still send me SMS messages to this day (1.5 years after leaving).
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
That's exactly what I did. Thanks!
But seriously, kids don't just see "logical beauty" for what it's worth, they have to be taught it. Math isn't like a hot chick who is inherently hot, no teaching necessary. Math does nothing for most kids unless they are shown the "what's in it for me" factor.
That's a bit of hyperbole. In Austin, TX, with a healthy tech community, a dev right out of college makes around $60k a year, depending on the industry. A teacher right out of college makes around $30k, and only gets to $60k after a decade or so.
Yes and in 10 years he'll still be worth $60k on the open market. Because of the H1B laws, they have to offer jobs at some number considered "the market rate", which is a number that someone, somewhere, was offered for the job. Living in Austin and being in one of the larger employers in the area, I am sure of this. Sure that employer will bump his salary, but he can't leave.
Kids are making the smart choice, the consequences of which are obvious. I've gone on who knows how many interviews in the past year, same story: 100% of the time I get the job with a salary well below what I'm making now. I know what's going to happen by the end of the first hour of the 8-hour interview, and I know I've wasted my entire day before it's even started. The interviews are usually "easy" (i.e. to anyone with the appropriate experience), the interviewers are interested in you as a candidate and excited, but at the same time you hear the disbelief in their voice. Some break formation and ask about salary requirements (a no-no in many of these companies) probably for their own edification, once they hear the ask the disappointment is evident. We both know it's not going to happen, even though I may not be asking for a penny more than I actually make, and what any number of salary sites indicates is well within the boundary of a given position.
The last time the HR guy who called to make the "offer" barely seemed interested, after he read it out to me I asked what the decision date is and he was like "oh, whenever", he knew I wasn't going to accept it. He's offering exactly the mid-line for the given job and he's not going to offer a penny more, and further, it was never about hiring me, it was about justifying an H1.
My position is that if I cannot make more than what I'm making now, my career choice stops making sense and I need to exit entirely while I am still young enough to do so, and further I would encourage college kids to do the same. Engineering & Science is an exceedingly difficult profession to make a career out of if the pay isn't really good. Even ignoring labor issues, there are a number of problems with building a career out of it that anyone who has been at it a while would tell you about, and the only solution is both to work really hard during your day job, and then really hard at night learning new things, going to shows/conferences/courses to stay on top of new technology, etc. None of that is worthwhile if you can't at least make money at it, you may as well either retrain into something else, or do the MBA thing (and don't let your employer discourage you from the MBA, it is worth money no matter how ridiculous, that's why they discourage it).
I understand you have to LIKE it, no one is debating that. But I can't feed my family with LIKE, I can't pay my mortgage with LIKE, or put my kid through college with LIKE, or use LIKE to sustain me between extended periods of unemployment (which is a job hazard in engineering, regardless).
I used to bemoan the level of effort of students, until I realized that that's how it has always been, and likely always will be.
Most people just aren't scholars or engineers. The bright ones will always pursue knowledge--on their own, if necessary.
I don't think the Japanese emphasis on school produces more bright people, even if they are educated (which is good, to be sure). But until I met my first overeducated person, I didn't understand what that term meant! These days I'm not so concerned about it.
expandfairuse.org
More than half of STEM assistant professors in the US are foreign born (up from about one in ten, 40 years ago). Compare this to the general population of STEM workers, where only about 20 percent are foreign born. If we assume that professors are admitted to university faculties on the basis of sheer ability, this indicates that foreigners are actually *underrepresented* in the general H1B population.
All three experience significant regulatory capture. In Germany, if you need your roof repaired, you have to hire someone who served an apprenticeship with a master roof repairer, but, if it needs too much work, you can't hire a Master Roof Repairer, you have to hire a Master Roof Builder, which is a completely different profession. How do you think that happened if there is no regulatory capture.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
"No offence, but the Dakotas, are not exactly a tech hot-spot."
They were showing some metaphorical hot tech sparks a couple decades ago. Some of them relocated, but even they aren't what they were.
Route 128 (Digital Equipment Corp., Data General...), Minneapolis-St. Paul (a couple medical product firms, Control Data Corp., Unisys, and CDC spin-offs Cray, MPI, ICEM Inc., Citigroup), Dayton (NCR), the NC Research Triangle, Cincinnati (Milacron, SDRC, Wright/GE), Columbus, Cleveland (SOHIO super-computing center now part of BP), Kansas City (United, Sprint, Bendix/Allied Signal), St. Louis (lots of small engineering firms), Chicago, Rochester, Atlanta (remember GT STRUDL?, Scientific Atlanta, Marconi Avionics), Houston, Hampton, Indianapolis, Tampa, and a lot of other locations that were showing some tech promise in the 1980s are essentially dead, now.
Austin and Dallas, which struggled from the early 1980s through the 1990s to fan the sparks into flame, seem to be barely hanging on but with more net destruction than creation.
San Diego was showing a little promise, in the 1980s and late 1990s, in software, embedded software/hardware, biotech, web-weavers, but that was smashed by the cross-border bodyshopping and off-shoring. We've had certified geniuses struggling to hang on, teaching the guest-workers for several years, now.
Where is your proof of this? You do realize that anything asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence, right? Consider your opinion dismissed until you cite a valid source backing up your ludicrous claims.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
In the 1980s, the total cost to employ a person was about twice their pre-extortion salary. In this case that'd be $60K+$60K, for a total cost of $120K... thus giving yet another demonstration that one of the effects of bodyshopping, including cross-border bodyshopping, has been to drive down total compensation.
If you are a doctor or consultant or prostitute who is in demand, you raise your rates. You do the same work for more pay. You don't need to produce more, just produce better results.
There are two ways to increase profit; either produce more low profit widgets or services, or produce less widgets or services but a higher profit margin on each good or service sold.
Better results do scale because a better results increase something else. E.g. a healthier patient is more productive.
You're argument needs a bit of refinement. It is actually a complex issue, e.g. you can ask the question "what is a better result."
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
What this brainiac doesn't get is that the "reason" we aren't pursuing "STEM" career-paths in college, has nothing to do with "potentially" better applicants being shipped in. Instead it has everything to do with the fact that APPLICANTS ARE BEING SHIPPED IN, WHILE JOBS ARE BEING SHIPPED OUT!!!
More and more it seems that you cannot go to college without taking out student loans. If I am going to borrow up to $50,000.00 a year to go to college, I want to know two things: 1) Is this really the field I want to spend the next 20 years in (because it is likely that I will be paying those financial aid loans off for that long)?, and 2) Will there be employment in that field that will allow me a decent living (while paying my financial aid loans off) when I get out of school in 4 to 6 years?
With out-sourcing and inshoring moving up the corporate ladders, the likelyhood of finding such employment becomes more and more finite. With that knowledge in mind, unless you are a mathaholic, software whiz or total computer-freak, the option of borrowing up to 300k on training for a job-class that may soon be unavailable to you seems somewhat less than intelligent.
-Oz
The problem is that it is not a level playing field. The US has stricter environmental and safety regulations than places like China, and it is harder to bribe officials to look the other way. Since lowering our standards to equal those of the most backwards nation is clearly non-viable, the only solution I can see is to prohibit import into the country of any product not made in accordance to the environmental and safety regulations of the country. Yes, with globalization some leveling of wages is inevitable. But let's not pretend we currently have a "level playing field."
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I think the real problem is, The Amish just aren't interested in Science and Technology whatsoever.
FTFY
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery/38e2u3s23jer/2
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
It is vastly preferable to have a field of employment completely destroyed by foreign competition than it is to make endemic the principle of groupism against which the founding stock Americans have relatively poor evolutionary learning.
The solution isn't to limit immigration so much as it is to kick these companies (meaning their executives, boards and major stockholders) out of the US so they can go live in the shit they're importing to the US.
And don't let them back in when they come begging.
Yes, I realize that means most of the Fortune 500 gets kicked out of the US.
Seastead this.
Anyone with the time and desire can do it.
You mean like every single job in existence that doesn't rely on certain physical traits? Yes, people can learn. Shocking. It's just too bad that many of them don't have the mindset that allows for that.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Oh, I agree. I also think that we should establish the same policy regarding immigrants from each country based on their policy toward immigration by us. For example, from what I've read Mexico is quite difficult to immigrate into and get citizenship and are quite harsh on illegal immigrants. So why should we allow them to come here?
I will say that the progress on environment has been substantial in all those countries, due largely in part to the demands first of their customers here, and now their own people. It will take a while - last I read China uses five times as much energy per unit of productivity as we do, and emissions of mercury and other toxics by Chinese plants are showing up in the air here, today - but things are improving. Twenty years ago the Chinese establishment basically turned a deaf ear to issues of worker safety, environment, product safety, etc. Since then things seem to have changed a lot. It will take several generations, though, before the purely-pragmatic value system that supported rampant cheating on every axis will be completely purged.
It's worth noting that several countries (including the US) have successfully used overly strict environmental and product quality laws as unfair barriers to free trade.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
I have the same problem. I've (so far) got degrees in two different fields (CS and civil engineering), and can't decide whether to get a job in one of those or go back for a masters in CS, civil, city planning, or business administration.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
You can be passionate about something and still be paid well for doing it, and in fact, that's exactly how a lot of great scientific and artistic works are created.
Yes, but typically, someone who is doing it just for the money and has no passion for it probably won't do anything amazing.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
oh they would. you just dont know how professions go from high figure salaries to obscure salaries due to domestic oversupply.
americans think that world is that simple - as if wages are something that fly in the air, without any relation to anything else.
lawyers ? lawyers are an abomination. they can sue people for having eyebrows over their eyes and if they win, they can receive a share of a huge settlement. of course, wages never go down in that profession - because they are little different than glorified thugs - they assault you, and get your money. no different than why the income of a band of robbers always stayed much higher than a honest peasant in middle ages.
Read radical news here
And the dev had better become a manager or an owner by age 35, or a new graduate or H1B takes his place. When the market can print new employees, your usefulness is about a dozen years or so. The youth culture in IT doesn't help, either.
Well. I at least don't feel so alone anymore. Ten years ago I saw this coming and left the IT world. I've spent ten years trying to explain all this to my friends and family - now I don't have to. Everyone I used to know, the hotshots, are trying to find Java maintence positions and busing tables when they can't.
This could have been avoided if we had not flooded the market with H1Bs. The job shortage is artificial. We needed to take care of our country first, and not the corporate owners who wanted to become oh, so so so rich by getting rid of the well-paid IT staff. Same with all the other professions. We cannot compete with overpopulated nations on wages. And it should stop.
Cheap pies for whom? Not everybody - owners. They get rich. We become waiters. They can bring in airplanes of indentured servants from overpopulated countries that can't negotiate and can't quit, not if they don't want to be deported.
I can't state the case any more plainly. This isn't about cheap pie. This is about a few million rich people taking everyone else's god-damned pie.
What pies are they buying? Mercedes? Condos in France?
The idea is that an everyday person can buy a pie. Not just a few buying all the pies and distributing a few to the beggars off the balcony of their villa/gated community.
A country without a middle class is a corporate feudal state. The line of deterioration will continue until there isn't any damned pie left if you weren't to the manor born. And that was the idea from the start. The return of the Guilded Age.
That 31,900 is an average, not a median. And we don't live in India. We live here, where that 31,900 is taken by the rent and the car we have to own to reach the suburbs where the gated communities and the jobs are. The rest gets eaten by doctors and insurance companies.
Oddly enough, I can't find any new BMWs in my area for less than ten thousand dollars. I am also unable to secure gold coins at less than three hundred dollars per ounce. I feel that the US government should intervene in this market and force outside suppliers who are not protected by US law to supply me with the goods I need so I can resell gold and BMWs on the US market.
Maybe, just maybe, you should consider paying the prevailing wage for the skillsets you need to hire. Stop whining, accept the realities of the market, and compete! Personal responsibility for the win! Stop asking the government for a handout!
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
I'm a science education fanatic, and I am agreeing with you. Very few people need to know algebra->calc. We grind our kids' heads through excruciatingly complex lessons for a decade, and they bloody hate it. And they are right to - the years they've wasted could have been spent on a broad education in appreciating science, art and engineering. Math isn't necessary to understand most of it. And the pain they've learned will make them run at speed from anything resembling science for the rest of their lives. They associate invention and knowledge with boredom and frustration. Let those who like math go on to the higher courses. Let the other learn to work with their hands, and immerse themselves in history and politics, and so many other things. We need a country with a memory and political awareness, and we do not have that. We keep wandering into economic and military disasters because we are collectively stupid on those subjects.
there's no evil if a job goes to an Indian instead of an American.
Sure, fine, and if that company wants to only hire indians, they can go be an indian company. If they're in the US, they should be hiring americans preferentially, and the government needs to be working to protect local labor - it's not like many of us want to go over to india, and it's not like we could if we wanted.
I'd like to see jobs stay in America, but that's my selfish greed talking, not any kind of moral high ground.
And it's the CEO's selfish greed that's driving jobs offshore in the first place. self interest is not greed.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Overseas workers (and rural Midwest workers) are not, as a group, significantly more or less skilled or productive than their urban US counterparts. However, they don't have to be: just by being as good, they provide considerably more value, because the cost of labor is lower. This is where the real problem for urban US workers is: they aren't any better, yet they demand more, and that is why they cannot compete.
Or at least, that's how the corporate world sees it, and are they wrong? You can talk about ideology and economic-slash-political aesthetics, but how do you refute the math? Do this last, and you'll end offshoring. Otherwise, the businesses will continue pointing out that this is what they do to survive: they get the best value for their labor dollars, and that just isn't to be found in the urban US.
"Economics in a global age isn't about dividing up the current pie, it is about making new pies."
Remember that cross-border bodyshopping got its big boost after the B-school bozos had been ignoring our advice about date formats for a couple decades, and then went into a panic. They looked around and we refused to pull their cans out of the fire they'd made. But then they found a bunch of people in India, who'd been handicapped for decades using obsolete COBOL on obsolete computers, and this gave them the chance to stick with their obsolete ways a little longer instead of reforming. While we (the general plural US STEM worker) had gone from unstructured, to structured to object-oriented design and programming they'd stuck with ways and tools that were obsolete in the early 1970s.
But it gave them a foot in the door with the B-school bozos. And they were cheap, and very pliant, extremely willing to nod and go along with whatever insanity was proposed. So, the B-school bozos thought, "Hey! Having more of these yes-men would be great! And they're cheap!"
Meanwhile, we (the general plural US STEM worker) were learning our 10th or 14th programming language, and our 4th or 5th DBMS, on our 11th or 12th operating system, using the 4th or 5th methodological approach. But we were declared "unqualified". Go figure!
I love it - respond with some great ad hominems! Wait, I thought you said you couldn't own a house and have savings....
Many people (and I am neither rich nor clueless, but whatever) actually are able to pay off their house and then save considerable amounts of money.
Maybe I should clarify - you shouldn't have much of your net worth tied up in your house for extended periods of time. But whatever, keep listening to those professionals who didn't irresponsibly hand out mortgages to people who should have never gotten them. They would never do anything contrary to your best interests.
Yes, it is evil when an executive says there's a "talent shortage" when there is not one; when, on the contrary, there is a great deal of evidence that there's been a surplus for several decades (well, only in the sense that one could say there's either, because the markets have been distorted).
Yes, it is evil for a recruiter to say that an able and willing US citizen job candidate is "unqualified".
Yes, it is evil for a recruiter to generate false pretexts on which to declare an able and willing US citizen candidate to be "unqualified".
Yes, it is evil to demand, at below-market prices, a mathematician/ physicist/ engineer/ software developer, and then whine about it instead of ponying up to hire a mathematician, physicist, engineer, and software developer at market prices to do the work together.
Yes, it is evil to remove moderate and high quality products from retail shelves and replace them with over-priced cheap garbage, and fraudulently representing it as being as good as the higher-quality products that are no longer available to US consumers.
Yes, it is evil to try to deceive US citizen students into investing time and effort into preparation for a "life-long career" in a field which dumps people at age 30 or 35, when you've already publicly confessed that you're out to drive down compensation.
Be honest. Confess. Repent. Sin no more, neither by initiating force nor fraud.
If they relocate the worker from India, they should just as eagerly relocate the worker from Sopchoppy. If they give an internship to the student from Ghana, they should just as eagerly give internships to students from Chillicothe or Massapequa. If they fly in someone from IIT to an interview, they should be just as likely to fly someone in from Virginia Tech.
Even new immigrants like Sona Shah, suddenly have had employers and recruiters refuse to talk with them once they were naturalized. She had the good fortune to have the opportunity to demonstrate it to congressional staffers.
"The sad fact is that in a level world, American workers at all levels will have to compete without any artificial barriers. What is wrong with that?"
You are clueless, and I am engaging in ad hominems becaue you are clueless and absolutely insensitive to the financial plight of the average person, as well as being arrogant and claiming to know something about which you demonstrably know nothing, namely finances and economics. I have absolutely no respect for you, and will not pretend otherwise. You are obviously parroting back things you heard and vaguely remember, and have no real life experience with.
The average home price in America is around $160,000 right now.
The median family wealth in America is around $120,000 right now.
We are in a recession. While stocks (which 90% of people own next to none of, even including their 401ks) have rebounded, home prices have gone down.
YOU FUCKING FIGURE IT OUT, you insufferable turd.
I bank at a credit union. As they take NO profit, distributing any surplus back to members, I have no reason to believe they would steer me wrong. Asshole.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Right. Longitudinal studies show that, historically, individual US tax-victims move from income quintile to quintile through various parts of their life-times, and different members of the same family are in different income quintiles, and don't necessarily land in the same quintiles in corresponding phases of their life-times.
It's more rapid than you depict. Even over periods of just 10 years, many people tend to move to a neighboring income quintile, and slightly lower percentages move 2 quintiles or more. Some move up; others move down.
Let's see if I can trim this down to a copyright-allowable 200 words while recommending that you read the sources cited: "Among those whose incomes were in the bottom 20% in 1979, 86% were in some higher income bracket by 1988... 14% of 'the poor' were still in the bottom quintile a decade later... 15% had risen all the way to the top quintile by 1988, & 40% of 'the poor' of 1979 were now in the top 2 quintiles... only 2.8% of the population studied were continuously 'poor'." --- Thomas Sowell 1993 "What's News?" in _Is Reality Optional?_ pg 24
"Even those in the top quintile [top 20% of annual income] are not really wealthy. Their median household net worth is less than $150K." --- Thomas J. Stanley & William D. Danko 1996 _The Millionaire Next Door_ pp 2-3
"there are 39M people in the bottom 20% of households, but 64M people in the top 20% of households..." --- Thomas Sowell 2000 _Basic Economics_ pp134-136 (Top quintile households tend to have multiple earners, so the per capita income isn't quite so high.)
"A major study at the University of Michigan has followed... tens of thousands of (individuals) over a period of decades. Among individuals who are actively in the labor force, only 5% of those who were in the bottom 20% in income in 1975 were still there in 1991... 29% of those in the bottom quintile in 1975 had risen to the top quintile by 1991. More than half of those in the bottom quintile in 1975 had been in the top quintile at some point during those years." --- Thomas Sowell 2008 _Economic Facts & Fallacies_ pp145-146 and 2010 _Intellectuals & Society_ pg38 (citing W. Michael Cox & Richard Alm "By Our Own BootStraps: Economic Opportunity & the Dynamics of Income Distribution" Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas Annual Report 1995 pp8, 14)
That's not what concerns me. What concerns me is the hundreds of thousands of bright, creative, industrious, knowledgeable US citizen STEM workers who have always engaged in continuous learning who, before H-1B (and before the explosion of F, J, L, and E-3 visas), were in the top 3 quintiles who are now in the bottom quintile, with no means to dig themselves out, while the US federal and state governments are actively working against them.
Your argument is that with the arrival of essentially free energy, there'll be so much overflowing abundance that we'll all have more than we need.
The problem is that's been true since the invention of the iron plow, but there's still hunger in the world. Most famines aren't caused by blight or drought, but by politics. Aid workers routinely complain that their cargo shipments of food and supplies are confiscated and horded by the local authorities. This allows whoever's in charge locally to control who gets relief -- thereby securing their loyalty -- or to "deny aid and comfort to the rebels."
I think you're overlooking a basic tenet of human psychology. It's better to be a poor king over desperate subjects -- and therefore an asolute Lord and Master -- than to be a rich king among rich subjects -- and thus be relegated to a mere "First Among Equals." (Thanks, Thomas More).
I remember reading an article about a city doctor in the Third World who got himself demoted to the countryside. He arrived at a village shot through with diseases that all came back to the same cause -- not enough clean water. He learned the village used to have a system of canals that supplied plenty of clean water, but that the government had filled them all in during one of the many dam projects during the 60s. The village was supposed to have been tied into the new water network, but somehow that had never happened.
This doctor, who must have been bucking for sainthood, took something like three years and a shovel, and dug out the old canals by hand. Finally, with the next rainy season, the canals flooded, and for the first time in a generation, the village was overflowing with clean water. No babies would die for stupid reasons this year. Word of what the man had done shot through the area.
The bulldozers from the local authorities arrived almost immediately. It took them less than a day to fill the canals back in with mud. The doctor was summoned to a meeting with the local governor, and the doctor welcomed the chance to rail against the incompetence that had destroyed the work of three years.
He didn't get the chance. He arrived at the meeting and was placed under arrest. It was made extremely clear that it he picked up one more shovelful of dirt, he'd finish his career in prison. "If you need anything," he was told, "you come to us."
Let's suppose we finally get free energy, universal assemblers, Star Trek replicators -- what makes you think there's a chance in Hell that these tools will be allowed to actually threaten the status quo, short of armed and bloody revolution?
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
You know what? Screw that. It's a tangent. Congratulations on distracting me with irrelevancies. Even if, EVEN IF every single instance of regulation had been captured in the past, it would not mean that regulation is a bad idea. It would just mean that we need to find a way to stop regulatory capture, whatever it takes. No regulation means the strong prey upon the weak, and I will have no part of that.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Regulation means that only the wealthy and powerful can afford to do business. Regulation, always, increases the cost of doing business. This means that even without regulatory capture, regulation favors large business at the expense of small business and the individual. That means that even if you succeed in avoiding regulatory capture, regulation will tilt the playing field in favor of the rich and powerful.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
That's great, I bank at a credit union too (although in Canada credit unions are usually mandated to make a profit in order to provide services to customers). I would never advise anyone to play the stock market, but your numbers are way off. About 50% of households in the US own stocks.
A better indicator of houses vs family wealth is to look at it by regions, especially since there is such a disparity in America.
Houses: http://www.realestateabc.com/outlook/overall.htm
Median household income: http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/income_wealth/cb10-144.html#tablea
Note that the disparity in housing prices is much greater than the disparity in income. The average home price is greater than the average household's income - but if you SAVE carefully and don't make unnecessary purchases like LCD TVs and new cars, you can pay off your mortgage quickly, own your house and then save more of your money. You do know why home prices have gone down right?
I might not know anything, but I'm not in debt, and that apparently pisses you off. Sorry about that. I know that while my family doesn't get to have vacations right now, we don't want for much, and we live within our means - not on credit. I'll take you up on any economics question you want to throw my way.
Teachers have the option to work only 9 months out of the year.
Sand's overrated... it's just tiny little rocks.
THIS. Mod him up, moddies.
Sand's overrated... it's just tiny little rocks.
That is not necessary. We don't need a lot of excellent students. We only a few excellent students: there isn't enough demand for a lot of them. And there are plenty of excellent American students who are interested in their field of study and do very well in it. They are certainly more than enough to satisfy America's requirements. So much so that most who get a Ph.D. end up disappointed and "underemployed".
Great! And the Japanese who don't make the cut are very, very disillusioned with life. In Japan, like the U.S., there is an excess of individuals with excellent academic credentials, who compose an underclass of overeducated but poor Ph.D.s.
Math is not relevant - not for US workers. The tech stuff is all being offshored, and inshored, to death.
There are still a few good jobs left, but not for long. STEM jobs are dead end. We all know it.
Giving every person who has an F visa, once he finishes a degree (or master's degree or even doctor's degree) a green card, would only add to the surplus... and continue to drive down compensation and employment opportunities for able and willing US citizens, something that's supposed to be prohibited in the current law.
Of course, if, instead of handing out hundreds of thousands of F visas each year to nearly everyone who applies, we conducted proper background investigations on every one, and then picked the truly "best and brightest" 10K, scattered among our 4K universities (just think of all the money US tax-victims would save by repurposing the many "outer erewhon student cultural centers" on every campus), and then from those who completed their degrees picked the top 50-100 of those for 10-month guest-work visas, and then gave a green card to the best 1 or 2 of those each year, that wouldn't be a problem. Those would be reasonable numbers.
The problem is on the front-end with those excessive student visas, and then with the 19 or so different kinds of guest-work visas, each one of which is excessive, and then that excess comes flowing into the green card (permanent residency) application process, which feeds in turn into excessive applications for citizenship.
IOW, we need to greatly reduce the numbers of student visas, reduce the numbers and time limits of OPT, generally reduce the numbers of refugee visas most of the time, greatly reduce the priority given to "family reunification" in the visa system, seriously reduce the numbers and shorten the time-limits of guest-work visas, reduce the numbers of green cards, eliminate the stupid diversity lottery visas, all to get the whole visa system down to reasonable proportions that can be conscientiously managed, greatly reduce visa over-stays, and stop worsening US job markets and exacerbating the existing problems from over-population and over-crowding.
they are no more productive than I am, but they get paid a fraction of what I get paid, hence their desirability
I am 32 year old with 12 years experience in IT my friends are anywhere from 35 to 47 none has being out of a job for more then 2 month, reason being they are really good at what they do and adapt well to changing landscape.
In other news, "my recruiter lied to me!" If you htink you have it bad, talk to anyone who's ever served in the military.
There's no evil when a job moves from a richer to a poorer country. If I'm in the richer country I may be pissed, but that's just me being greedy and selfish.
Yes, it is evil to remove moderate and high quality products from retail shelves and replace them with over-priced cheap garbage, and fraudulently representing it as being as good as the higher-quality products that are no longer available to US consumers
Did you know, this was the exact complaint many were making during the industrial revolution? Amazing the number of Luddites on /. these days.
Yes, it is evil to try to deceive US citizen students into investing time and effort into preparation for a "life-long career" in a field which dumps people at age 30 or 35, when you've already publicly confessed that you're out to drive down compensation.
Here we agree. US education is the next bubble that needs to pop - every time we raise federal tutition assistance the universities raise tuitions by the sameamount, and those not getting a chech from the government get screwed.
Yes, universities lie just like any other business, but they're in a position of trust, and these days the lie costs many students a decade worth of debt.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Yes, it is more accessible. However, I believe many people simply don't have the mindset required to undertake the training.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
We need to change the way we regulate businesses, perhaps implementing subsidies to help them navigate the regulation process on a level playing field. There is no reason that proper regulations can't be set and enforced without favoring the rich. We have regulations against murder, murder can be profitable, and yet somehow we haven't had murderers capture most, if any, police forces.
Even without regulations at all, the playing field is automatically tilted towards the rich. This is a bad thing. Money can capture more than just regulations, look up "deep capture." Without regulations, money will dominate all areas of society and we will have two classes, the ultra rich, and the serfs. The ultra rich are the primary drivers behind deregulation: if regulation is such a boon to the rich, why are they all against it?
The ultra rich will attempt to dominate and control any institution or group that they feel has any power over them. Without government to stop them, they will succeed. Based on my debates with you in the past, I can only conclude this is the outcome you desire. To me, it seems you worship power and hierarchy, and given the opportunity you would do just as the ultra rich do now. You don't want them stopped because you want to be them.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Once initiation of force and fraud are condoned, all reliability and agreements and contracts are null and meaningless. Anyone can be cheated and his goods or work taken without recourse. Incentives to be productive are greatly reduced.
Unfortunately, what we have is a lot of initiation of force and fraud. We have governments carrying out extortions on some and subsidizing some (often including those extorted; and then there are the VAT kick-backs to some). We have frauds like this "talent shortage" horse-hockey, and the "prevailing wage" fraud, and the "qualified"/ "unqualified"/ "disqualified" fraud, and the "willing" (to work at below market compensation and reduced conditions) fraud, and the "best and brightest" fraud, and the bodyshopping/ temp/ contingent/ consulting/ contract fraud (misrepresenting compensation, especially likely life-time total earnings to be the same as they would be for real employment when they are actually much less).
Off-shoring comes in multiple varieties, too. It can be intra-firm or it can be off-shore out-sourcing.
Some people call the use/abuse of guest-work visas to be "in-shoring", while others reserve the term for moving work that had been off-shored back to a domestic out-sourcing operation, or entirely back in-house. I tend to stay away from that term because I see no way to eliminate the ambiguity.
Some use the term "near-shoring" for off-shoring, e.g. from the USA to Canada or Mexico.
There are people with the skills to do worthwhile work all around the USA eager to be relocated. Before H-1B, the employers were able and willing to relocate that talent to where they wanted them... sometimes repeatedly. Before H-1B, employes were able and willing to invest in new-hire and retained employee training. Now, employers are able but unwilling to train or relocate US citizens even just a few hundred miles.
The numbers of H-1B and L-1 visas going to people born in India and Red China are much higher than those born in the UK and Europe. OTOH, it may well be a higher or lower percentage of the population of India or Red China applying for these visas than the percentages for people in the UK and Europe. Or it may be just that the over-populations of India and Red China are so much higher that it results in very excessive numbers of visa applicants.
Meanwhile, people are leaving both Ireland and Detroit in search of a way to make a living. I just read several articles to the effect that the population within the Detroit city limits is below what it was in 1910. (And the city poobahs of Detroit and Youngstown are very proud of their programs to demolish abandoned homes while taxes and regulation discourage new construction.)
Degrees http://www.kermitrose.com/jgoEduStats.html (from US DoEducation's National Center for Education Statistics annual Digest of Education Statistics)
Employment/Unemployment in a selection of industries http://www.kermitrose.com/jgoIndustries.html (from BLS)
Employment/Unemployment in a sampling of occupations http://www.kermitrose.com/jgoOccupation.html (from BLS, and NACE press releases)
I've worked with people from Germany and Poland who were educated abroad and I had no problem with that. I've also worked with people from VietNam, Thailand, Guatemala, Poland, India, England, Italy, Iran, South Korea, Republic of China, Red China, Malaysia, France, Republic of Congo, Jamaica, Somalia at one time or another who had been educated or were being educated in the USA and, with very few exceptions, had no problem with that or them. I enjoy picking up scraps of languages and information about different cultures and history and economics.
My objections are to
There are a few under-achievers, from families with cultures which do not value academic achievement, or who have been given incentives by the government not to value academic achievement, but the majority of students are being pushed or pushing themselves to excell.
"U.S. engineers... [are] more creative, excelled in problem solving, risk taking, networking and [have] strong analytical skills..."
http://www.kermitrose.com/econ200707.html#20070702
"Dozens of employers asked to compare American engineers to their much-vaunted colleagues from India and [Red China] agreed that 'in education, training, quality of work, you name it, in every which way, Americans are better'. Even the best schools in those countries 'don't hold a candle to our best schools.', he continues. Newly hired American university graduates 'become productive within 30 days or so. If you hire a graduate of an Indian university, it takes between 3 and 6 months for them to become productive.'"
http://www.kermitrose.com/econ200801.html#20080104
"Dynamic" US engineers vs. "transactional" foreign engineers.
http://www.kermitrose.com/econ200512.html#20051213
http://www.kermitrose.com/econ200512.html#20051227
http://www.kermitrose.com/econ200601.html#20060110
"the mean literacy test score for U.S. adults (272) was 2 points above the mean for all adults in the 20 country survey (270)... Larger, statistically significant, literacy gaps between us and them unfold when you separate immigrant from native-born test takers, as is done in 17 high income countries surveyed by ETS. U.S. natives scored 8 points above the average native of the 17 high income countries. U.S. immigrants scored 16 points below the average immigrant in the 17 countries." --- Edwin S. Rubenstein 2005-12-22 _V Dare_ "The stupid American? Think again"
http://www.vdare.com/rubenstein/051222_nd.htm
"I've mentioned the TIMSS test, for instance, which showed that if [Colorado, Connecticut, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska North Dakota, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, Wisconsin and Wyoming] -- none of which has a substantial under-class -- had been treated as separate nations, each of them would have been out-scored only by Singapore (professor David Berliner, 'Our Schools Versus Theirs', Washington Post, 2001 January 28)... This [both the TIMSS and PISA tests] once again shows, tragically, that the U.S.A. is not doing enough to bring up the educational performance of its under-class. But if one takes the white score as 'main-stream', the U.S.A. would rank 7th out of 27, instead of 18th."
http://www.kermitrose.com/econ200603.html#20060317
http://courses.ed.asu.edu/berliner/readings/timssroped.html
"while our average test scores are mediocre, the U.S.A. is a leader with respect to the gap between our best and worst performers. Our best and brightest are equal to, or better than, those of other advanced countries. Our worst rank, well, among the worst anywhere. For several reasons, immigrants exert more of a downward test score drag here than in other advanced countries. First, they account for a larger share of the population. Only 7 of the 27 OECD countries have larger foreign born population shares than the U.S.A. Second -- and more importantly -- our immigrants do poorly on standardized tests compared to the immigrant populations of other advanced countries. The U.S.A. ranked 18th out of the 20
Even former cross-border bodyshopper Vivek Wadhwa admitted that "by every measure" US engineers are better, and the reason the guest-workers are used and abused is that they're cheap:
"U.S. engineers... [are] more creative, excelled in problem solving, risk taking, networking and [have] strong analytical skills..."
http://www.kermitrose.com/econ200707.html#20070702
"Dozens of employers asked to compare American engineers to their much-vaunted colleagues from India and [Red China] agreed that 'in education, training, quality of work, you name it, in every which way, Americans are better'. Even the best schools in those countries 'don't hold a candle to our best schools.', he continues. Newly hired American university graduates 'become productive within 30 days or so. If you hire a graduate of an Indian university, it takes between 3 and 6 months for them to become productive.'"
http://www.kermitrose.com/econ200801.html#20080104
"Dynamic" US engineers vs. "transactional" foreign engineers.
http://www.kermitrose.com/econ200512.html#20051213
http://www.kermitrose.com/econ200512.html#20051227
http://www.kermitrose.com/econ200601.html#20060110
"The United States is still pumping out tremendous numbers of new Ph.D.s in the sciences -- more, in fact, than our economy can presently absorb, as there is a well-reported dearth of jobs for newly-minted science Ph.D.s. The same is true in engineering: According to a recent National Science Foundation report, the number of engineers graduating from U.S. schools will continue to grow into the foreseeable future, out-stripping the number of available jobs..." --- 2005 Summer _New Atlantis_ "How We Measure Up"
2009-01-08: Cheap Science
Studies carried out from the 1990s through 2010 by researchers from Columbia U, Computing Research Association (CRA), Duke U, Georgetown U, Harvard U, National Research Council of the NAS, RAND Corporation, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rutgers U, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Stanford U, SUNY Buffalo, UC Davis, UPenn Wharton School, Urban Institute, and US Dept. of Education Office of Education Research & Improvement have reported that the USA has continually been producing more US citizen STEM (science, tech, engineering, math) workers than we've been employing in these fields.
In testimony to the House Science and Technology Committee, Harold Salzman reported that we've been producing as many as 3 times the numbers of STEM workers as we've been employing in these fields.
"Unemployment rates are available and plotted in Figure 6 for chemists, recent mathematics PhDs, and recent biomedical PhDs and MDs. Although not fully comparable in population or time period, these 3 rates, when compared to the overall U.S. unemployment rate, suggest a general increase or leveling in the 1990s, while the general unemployment rate was falling substantially. Rising unemployment in one sector, while the overall economy is doing well, is a strong indicator of developing surpluses of workers, not shortages. Hence, neither earnings patterns nor unemployment patterns indicate an S&E shortage in the data we are able to find." --- William P. Butz, Gabrielle A. Bloom, Mihal E. Gross, Terrene K. Kelly, Aaron Kofner, Helga E. Rippen 2002-11-12 "Is There a Shortage of Scientists and Engineers? How Would We Know?" _RAND Science and Technology Issue Paper_
2009-10-28: "U.S. colleges and universities are graduating as many scientists and engineers as ever, according to a study released on Oct. 28 by a group of academics..."
2010-06-14 Beryl Lieff Benderly _Miller-McCune_ http://www.miller-mccune.com/science/the-real-science-gap-16191/ The Real Science Gap Is a Shortage of Employment Opportunities
* 2010-12-24: "AT&T is getting about 50K applications a month, or around 30 for each person it hires on average, Mr. Smith says." (James R. Hagerty & Joe Light _Wall Street Journal_ "Job ads rising as economy warms up")
* 2010-12-24: Johns Hopkins Hospital and Health System receives 10K applications per month (Eileen Ambrose _Baltimore Sun_/_Grand Forks Herald_)
* 2011-02-03: Google received 75K job applications last week.
http://www.kermitrose.com/econ01NoShortage.html more corroboration and citations.
When John Deere was considering off-shoring, they set up a separate facility, connected via satellite links, on their property, manned by guest-workers, so they could test the set-up. They couldn't have done that without the ready supply of guest-workers.
Guest-workers and foreign students also ease knowledge transfer. They learn US academic state of the art and research methods, and even production methods, and take them back with them. Of course, other guest-workers and green card grantees also take defense secrets with them from time to time, while others (who went from F to H-1B to green card to naturalization without being spotted) have been known to try to bomb NY, NY, and they've added to the numbers of illegal aliens in the USA.
http://www.kermitrose.com/econ09FacilitatingOffShoring.html more on how visas facilitate off-shoring
I've got a few better ideas... just off the top of my head:
Eliminate (or at least greatly reduce) the socialism, the initiated force and fraud.
Stop giving away US intellectual property and national security secrets.
Charge the full reasonable costs for running a background investigation on every visa applicant (and incremental investigations on those applying for change of status).
Charge the full reasonable costs for education while verbally (non-coercively) persuading people of the merits of being charitable (i.e. making scholarship donations).
Encourage spying on and hacking of governments and government officials who have declared their enmity for the USA and its citizens by offering small rewards for information which enhances US security (e.g. reveals measures and counter-measures they are taking to give them an advantage or reduce the US advantage in defense) and encourages those government officials to respect individual rights (e.g. outing instances of initiation of force and fraud).
Charge the full reasonable costs for inspecting in-coming cargoes for safety and honesty in labeling and respect for intellectual property rights.
Stop creating artificial incentives in the tax and education and transportation and regulatory systems to encourage bodyshopping (both domestic and across borders) and otherwise harm the productive.
Stop subsidies for agriculture and VAT kick-backs.
Lower privacy violation by government by eliminating income extortion and replacing it with taxes on the states in proportion to population (i.e. repeal the 16th amendment, and, for safety against federal abuses and favoritism amongst states, repeal the 17th amendment), get the federal government out of education and 90% of transportation (those inter-state navigable waterways), and put a reasonable hard cap on import tariffs at below 10% (while allowing up to 100% penalties in cases where reciprocity has been violated).
Eliminate the unconstitutional systemic cost-increasing Socialist Insecurity abomination, Medicare, Medicaid and National Socialist Health Care Perversion/Obamacare/PPACA/HCERA, which discourage employing people.
And give out only so many visas as can be reasonably managed, i.e. as will allow ensuring that 99.99% of visa grantees leave by the time their visas expire.
"reduce systemic costs... (socialized) college Socialized medicine (socialized transportation socialized housing)"
Hi there ! I know what you need to increase your self-esteem. I heard that you could get any degree you might need. Give them a call: Inside USA . : 1 - 8 4 5 - 7 0 9 - 8 0 4 4 Outside USA.: + 1 - 8 4 5 - 7 0 9 - 8 0 4 4 Just leave your name and phone # (with your country code) and they will get back to you ASAP. I m sure that ordering a diploma is a great idea, isn t it? -- I wonder how many people fall for this and what do they get.