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Microsoft Calls For $5B Investment In U.S. Education
Dupple sends this quote from ComputerWorld:
"Congress should invest $5 billion in the country's education system — particularly in math, science and technology education — over the next 10 years and pay for it with increased fees on high-skill immigration, a Microsoft executive said. The U.S. needs to push more resources into science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education because technology companies are running into huge shortages of workers, said Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel and executive vice president. With most U.S. industries relying heavily on IT systems, other companies will soon start to see those worker shortages as well, unless the country focuses more on STEM education, he said during a speech at the Brookings Institution Thursday.'We need to do something new,' he said. 'We need to try something different.'"
You know, normally I defend Bill Gates and MS, just because I feel *someone* should stand up against all the reflexive MS-bashing around here. But on this, I've got to call a spade a spade (and a scumbag ploy a scumbag ploy) and point out that this whole "it's for education" stageshow is nothing more than a cynical attempt on MS's part to get more H1-B visas (i.e. slavery licenses) so they can import cheap high-skilled labor rather than raise their salaries to hire U.S. workers. MS is basically pitching the idea of the government letting them buy a presumably unlimited number of H1-B visas (and even permanent green cards now too), and trying to cloak it with a bunch of "this will help the kids" education horseshit.
The whole H1-B visa program needs to be severely curtailed, NOT expanded. The idea of H1-B visas started out as a reasonable sounding idea. When we have critical shortages, we can give special visa exemptions for foreign workers. But, in practice in recent years, it's become nothing more than a way for big corps to skirt the free labor market and artificially suppress wages for skilled labor. You advertise a job at a ridiculously low wage, or with ridiculous requirements, and when no American worker responds or qualifies (because American programmers and engineers won't work for $30,000 a year and don't have 20+ years Java development experience), you run crying to Congress and the Labor Dept. that you need more H1-B visas to fill the "critical shortages of qualified workers." So then you can import foreigners willing to work for cheap, rather than raise wages to get American workers (who ARE out there, and ARE willing to work--just not for peanuts). And, to top it all off, you can cleverly skirt the "prevailing wage" provisions of the H1-B program by artificially keeping wages low, or defining the job so narrowly that there is no field to compare it to. Corporations for the win!
And, sadly, the whole scam has been backed (and consistently expanded) by both Republican and Democrats in this country--not surprisingly, since they're both just corporate subsidiaries at this point. And while people have been warning about abuses in the program for years, their complaints are consistently lost in the rain of cash the big corps are dumping on Washington before every election.
In short, fuck you Microsoft. You're not fooling me (and hopefully not anyone else).
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
How the fuck did you create a 410 word post time stamped at the same exact time that the article was posted? I detect some tomfoolery here.
Grandparent is a subscriber, so he can see the article before it goes green and gets sent out to the unwashed masses.
because technology companies are running into huge shortages of workers,
No, that is not the issue. The issue is you, the employers, do not want to hire people above a certain age, people who might need a bit of training to get them up to speed or people you will have to pay what their skills are worth.
There are tons of people in the IT field, not just programming, who are either stuck where they're at or unemployed because of your deliberate actions to not hire them. Telling someone to upgrade their skills, which they do at their own expense, then be told, "Well, it's not EXACTLY what we're looking for", then whining you can't find anyone is the direct result of your actions.
You cannot expect every person you hire to have the EXACT experience you want, especially when you refuse to provide training. If all you want are experienced people but don't train anyone, then eventually you will run short/out of experienced people because no one was trained to replace them.
Start hiring people who are close to what you need, regardless of age, train them in the way YOU want them to be, and you your supposed shortage will magically disappear.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Indeed. Start paying engineers more than MBAs, and the problem will fix itself.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Given that those who are doing the hiring are likely MBAs themselves, you're not going to see that happen.
Slashdot seems to have its fair share of the sort of 'high skill STEM/IT/Tech' types that Mr. William H. Gates III is referring to a shortage of, so, I ask:
Is this a 'shortage' as in "Yup, damn headhunters won't stop calling and I'm turning down fairly attractive offers just for not being very attractive on a routine basis." or a 'shortage' as in "Cry, cry, we want CCNAs with a decade of experience to be begging when we offer them 30k/yr!"?
"technology companies are running into huge shortages of workers"
I've heard this shortage of workers again and again so much it is a bankrupted statement. I've heard back in 1980s about shortage of engineers, only to have engineers laid off in early 1990s. then again shortage of engineers in 1990s, only to have layoffs in early 2000s.
Perhaps there is a shortage of people with good skill mix of hardware and software skills. But from what I see, this has been discouraged. Going into engineering is fine with most people as long as you transition into management two or three years later, otherwise you are perceived as a loser. If you are not a millionaire by the time you are 30, you are perceived as a loser. Many engineers got interests in taking apart stuff (usually not much luck putting them back together) when they were children. Or the youngster hacking into computers or do phone phreaking (now regarded as terrorist activities). And young people experiment with chemistry kits (you old timers from 20th century remember they use to have these available). Many hands-on shop classes have been eliminated. Plus anything techie that is being built is done outside USA (i.e. iPhone, and I'm not sure if you can hack this thing either). Then having do all this plus considerable time with tech courses to what, getting employed in a diminishing industry? Of course if you are a super star then you will always have it great. But if it is like you either have to be really good or you will be scraping by (no in between i.e. middle class), then most people are going to do something else.
That's my Gripe Of The Month.
mfwright@batnet.com
There is absolutely no shortage of qualified workers. There is shortage of corporate responsibility.
With corporations already shed responsibility for retirement and education they are now trying to shed responsibility for on-job job-specific training.
As a veteran of a tech sector, I had to escape into consulting/regulation side exactly because of this phenomena.
You are expected to upgrade/maintain your qualifications without any kind of time/money allowance from the employer, but then most corporations would not promote from within, so you are stuck at the same wage level. Then when you finally leave to get your promotion they expect to hire someone with exact qualifications you had, never mind the fact that you left because they didn't pay you enough.
Culture of promoting from within and investing in on-job training has to come back. You can't expect to perpetually suppress wages, not invest into your workers and have people willing to do it. Eventually people figure out this is bad field to work in and jump the ship.
...they've forgotten how it actually works.
If you can't find people to hire, you're not offering enough money. If designing widgets or software had an advantageous salary (relative to marketing or finance), people would go into this field.
If you have decent people but they need to work with a new technology, train them. Even if they just have potential or are pretty green, train them. I can't remember when this changed, but at some point companies just stopped training and decided that they would only hire pre-trained people or worse yet, support a gladiatorial culture where workers are expected to train themselves or get replaced with 20 year olds who "already know it".
You have to change the sclerotic culture of business so that it's not a class of financial engineers and marketers who are treated as an aristocracy while engineers and more general labor are treated as plebs. I had a telling conversation with my wife, a senior marketing executive, about this. She basically came out and said that engineers were only worth so much money, period, and if they couldn't be had for that figure then they needed to be imported. But sales and marketing executives have no such cap, and they need to be paid whatever it takes to hire the right person. And she works for a company where there would be no product without engineers!!
Maybe read the article?
Why do all these so-called capitalists suddenly forget the laws of supply and demand when it comes to workers - if you _pay_ them more the supply will increase - remember the nursing shortage? the problem was none of the hopsitals wanted to pay the nurses what the market called for - these assholes just want an oversuplly of cheap, skilled labor - I hate these fuckers.
I'm a fairly high-level architect at Microsoft. I have interviewed a metric F-load of people, many of which are international candidates. If we could hire all domestic, we would, because the paperwork is way easier. But the most important thing is, the actual salary that we pay people (and all the paperwork and such) actually rarely figures into the hire / no-hire decision. For us, it's all about that person's skills and what they bring to the team.
I would be very, very happy to see the cost of H1Bs go way up, in order to fund tech education. Companies WILL pay the money. And the best part about that is, it doesn't give any company a competitive advantage over any other company -- it's a level playing-field. Often when I hear companies gripe about some change in laws, I use that to judge whether the griping is legitimate or not -- does a change in law favor one company (or one kind of company) more than other? But in this case, no, it doesn't. All tech companies that need to hire will face the same labor market.
H1B is not slavery. The majority of H1B workers are young and single, usually a few years out of college. H1B gives them an opportunity to come to the states and 1) gain really valuable experience, 2) make a decent amount of money. Most of the H1B workers I meet are Indian, Chinese, or Russian. They make very good money. Good money in US terms, and *fantastic* money by the cost-of-living of where they came from. If they don't like their work conditions, they can leave. Just like any other job on the planet. If they do, they still made a ton of money, and still have a gig with American Mega-Awesome Corp or whatever on their resume. That's hardly slavery.
I would seriously love to see more American candidates. But where *are* they?? Most of the candidates from domestic CS programs are, frankly, very weak candidates. There are exceptions, but they are exceptions. (For example, the Brown CS program is excellent, and produces a steady stream of first-class CS students.) Most of the American candidates I interview know a little web programming, and maybe some Java, but are extremely weak on machine architecture, assembly programming, networking, performance analysis, and problem-solving abilities.
Except they KNOW the money won't actually improve education. They will basically just buy more visas.
The real problem is that US students are competing with India and China students... Their population EACH is four times the US. If a similar "top 10%" of talent is equal to our students, there are 8 foreign students for 1 American competing for jobs. It's a numbers game.
The second problem is that American schools refuse to teach students the "job skills" portion of CS degrees. The game has always been that you get out of school and have to work really cheap... That was nice for companies that were hiring for a 10 year plan. In the new scheme, the foreign kids are coming from schools focused on producing programmers with years of real experience.
Lastly, there really aren't THAT many jobs in the high end STEM fields. Biology and chemistry are filled with PHd hopefuls doing most of the day-to-day work... At half pay. But there's no jobs when they actually GET the PHd. Engineering just plain isn't building anything... The old guys can barely keep their jobs. Computer Sciences don't really employ that many people. For a company like Apple or Microsoft with 100k workers, way less than half are actually programming... Most are service or sales jobs. So unless you really want to live on the east or west coast, there really isn't a return on investment for going with an insanely hard CS program. For the most part, jobs are supporting manufacturing or sales activities... The Financial and Siftware jobs are really the 10% tip of the iceberg.
Education should be a right, not a privilege, of living in an advanced society. Kids shouldn't get thrown out and left without an education because they didn't fit in or were holding back other kids; they need to be trained to live in modern society, even if their stupid parents aren't doing their parts.
The answer is to have tiered education, the way the Germans do it. Kids that are troublemakers get put in special classes with other dolts, which are run by teachers trained to deal with them. They're not going to learn at the level of the smart kids, who are elsewhere in their own classes, but they'll learn something, even if it's discipline. The problem our country largely has is "mainstreaming": we want to treat everyone like equals, when they simply aren't. Parents get all pissed off when little Johnny gets held back a grade or put in a "special" class, so for decades we've been trying to stick all kids together in the same class, even when they don't learn at the same rate and some are troublemakers and need special attention. Get rid of mainstreaming and many of your problems will disappear.
I'm a software developer at Microsoft. I'm also a foreigner, working on an L-1 visa (and know a bunch of people working on H-1B).
First of all, I can confirm that indeed there's no discernible difference in the way I'm treated (promoted, paid, not asked to work overtime etc) because of my visa. The compensation, when you account for all the bonuses, is above market average. And Microsoft sponsors my green card application right away - which wouldn't even make sense if they wanted to keep me in my present status. So that "slave worker" argument that you've replied to is clear BS.
On the other hand, regarding this:
H1B is not slavery ... If they don't like their work conditions, they can leave. Just like any other job on the planet.
The problem is that if you leave on H-1B, your visa also terminates effective immediately (unless you're in late stages of green card application). Technically, you're required to vacate the country immediately. Many people overstay in practice while looking for another job, but that's a violation.
Now, yes, you could try finding another company that's willing to sponsor a new H-1B application for you, and secure a job position there before leaving. This is not particularly easy, however, and certainly puts H-1B workers in a disadvantaged position compared to local workers, which in turn means that they have less leverage against any potential abuses by employeer, be it low compensation, overtime, or something else (since they always have that threat of being kicked them out right there and then hanging over their heads).
Now, Microsoft doesn't use this potential to abuse its H-1B employees, which is definitely a good thing. But, in general, the potential for such abuse is inherent in the system, and there has been plenty of evidence of other companies abusing it that way.