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H-1B Cap Reached Today; Didn't Get In? Too Bad
First time accepted submitter Dawn Kawamoto writes "Employers stampeding into the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service to get their H-1B petitions filed before the cap is reached are getting the door slammed in their face today. The cap was hit in near record time of 5 days, compared to the 10 weeks it took last year to have more than enough petitions to fulfill the combined cap of 85,000 statutory and advanced degree H-1B petitions. While U.S. tech workers scream that they're losing out on jobs as H-1B workers are hired, employers are countering that the talent pool is lacking and they need to increase the cap. Of course, Congress is wrangling in on this one as to whether it's time to raise the bar."
talent pool is lacking = we don't want to pay
They should get to this issue sometime around the year 2347
> While U.S. tech workers scream that they're losing out on jobs as H-1B workers are hired
No *competent* tech worker is screaming that. Seriously. If you are in tech and unemployed right now, it is nobody's fault but your own; everyone is hiring like a madman right now.
While U.S. tech workers scream that they're losing out on jobs as H-1B workers are hired, employers are countering that the talent pool is lacking and they need to increase the cap.
US tech workers have to compete with the tech elite of the world. It is then quite obvious that most of US workers are not competitive on their skills alone, not even counting salary and benefits and other expectations (like a somewhat limited work week.)
The US employers at the same time are expecting to hire the best and brightest *of the world* - and I cannot fault them for trying. Naturally, those 85,000 are not all that is available on the world labor market; India and China are large places, and their people are not corrupted yet with ideas that everyone owes them a fine living.
Add to the problem the duality of the salary. A salary that barely feeds a US worker is a windfall in the 3rd world. Work in the USA for up to 6 years, come back, open a business on all that money, and you are set for life. This is how Mexicans operate, for example.
So both sides in this dispute are correct, in their own way. The US tech worker is forced to compete with the best of the best of the whole world, and he cannot win that competition unless he is aided by his own brilliance (it does happen!) or unique skills, or requirements of citizenship (for classified work.) In nearly every other case a foreign coder is a better match for the employer.
If you scroll through the government's visa data, you notice something surprising. The biggest employer of foreign tech workers is not Microsoft â" not by a long shot. Nor is it Google, Facebook or any other name-brand tech company. The biggest users of H-1Bs are consulting companies, or as Ron Hira calls them, "offshore-outsourcing firms."
For the past decade, he's been studying how consulting firms use temporary work visas to help American companies cut costs. He says they use the visas to supply cheaper workers here, but also to smooth the transfer of American jobs to information-technology centers overseas. "What these firms have done is exploit the loopholes in the H-1B program to bring in on-site workers to learn the jobs [of] the Americans to then ship it back offshore," he says. "And also to bring in on-site workers who are cheaper on the H-1B and undercut American workers right here."
The biggest user of H-1B last year was Cognizant, a firm based in New Jersey. The company got 9,000 new visas. Following close behind were Infosys, Wipro and Tata â'â' all Indian firms.
Have you read my blog lately?
The 10 largest users of H1B are off-shoring contract-houses. Last year, those 10 off-shoring companies claimed 40,000 of the 85,000 available H1B visas.
The way it works is that they low-bid on some project, bring in their people on H1B get them trained up and then send them back home to work on the same project.
Citation: Who's Hiring H-1B Visa Workers? It's Not Who You Might Think
All the PR about H1B says that we have a skills-shortage here, but if that is true, then H1B is contributing to the skills shortage rather than fixing it. Most of what is wrong with H1B could be fixed if the politicians actions matched their rhetoric - instead of being an unofficial dual-purpose immigration visa that typically expires just months before the immigrant clears all the paperwork for an green-card, make it a fast-track immigrant only visa - everybody on an H1B is guaranteed a green-card within just one year of residency. That way instead of being a brain-drain out of the US, we would be sucking in the (supposedly) higher-qualified foreign candidates to become permanent contributing members of US society.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Jobs report today said no jobs being created.
Yet we are hiring many h1b's.
Meanwhile, many of our 30 year olds are suicidal over a combination of unforgivable debt and no jobs.
Quite a disconnect.
I think it's time to put a tariff on offshored/outsourced jobs- including h1b's.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
If there's a shortage of H-1B visas (meaning there are times you can't obtain one no matter how much you're willing to pay), they should be put up for auction and sold to the highest bidder so everyone who wants one badly enough can get one. It's irresponsible of the government not to look for ways to reduce our tax burden.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
This is only a rough draft but in the right hands has the potential to solve the H1-B 'issues' AND help the unemployment numbers.
The businesses that are snatching up the visas claim that there is not enough local talent to fill the positions while opponents claim that the lower wages paid the visa holders undercuts any chance of locals filling any of those open positions.
First, require that H1-B visa holders are paid based on some industry standard adjusted for the region where visa holder is employed.
Second, require that prior to hiring an H1-B visa worker, the company that holds the visa must hire a local candidate, pay them at the very least minimum wage with medical benefits and then train that person to do the job they lost out to the visa worker within say a 12-18 month period.
These two rules would remove ANY financial benefit to using the H1-B program, has the potential of easing unemployment, gives people needed training and could even help with the move to off-shoring IT work which seems to be the goal of some of the 'consulting' companies that bring on gobs of H1-B workers.
Do you think this is feasible?
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law - Aleister Crowley
The H1-b program is supposed to attract highly skilled workers. Instead it is used for lowering the cost of workers or for outsourcing firms to train some of their foreign workers to, well, improve their outsourcing offerings.
It is rather simple to improve it.
First of all, allow their dependents to work. A good highly skilled professional that won't have a hard time finding a job in the country of his choosing won't elect to go to a country where he has to go through all these hoops and end up a 2nd class citizen with a spouse that is not allowed to work unless they go through the same lengthy (you apply on the April window to get a visa on October) and expensive process.
Secondly, limit the apps per company based on something like white US/H1-b worker ratio they already have. I don't know if this has changed recently, but I remember up to a few years ago some big outsourcing companies were snagging all the positions.
Thirdly, prioritize the applications based on qualifications. Accept first the ones who have a graduate degree from an accredited US university, followed by the ones with a US undergrad degree. The US is far ahead in education in many fields. Try to get foreigners who take advantage of it to stay.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
(You will notice how I am not only a xenophobic racist in the above exclamation, but I am inarticulate if not down right illiterate. This merely goes to show that people of my race/gender/age (white/male/old) not only must, as an urgent economic necessity, be displaced by importing hundreds of thousands if not millions from abroad, but that we deserve to be displaced.)
Seastead this.
And who uses the "consulting companies"? Your local company. They use these "consulting companies" for their IT needs.
And in the meantime they bitch and moan about the lack of local talent.
Listen folks: business people are two faced liars. Anyone who defends them is the same.
So every company has a semi-random assortment of software and languages already in use.
They don't want to have someone they need to train a little bit, no they want someone with 3 - 5 years minimum on every single bit of tech they have.
Out of a thousand potential employees there's only going to be a few that hit the magic combination of experiences you want, and dozens who will lie about it.
Oh screw that, if we go global and add a few billion people to the mix we can hit 10x the number of "perfect matches" and lower the salary some more. So what if there's good workers right around the corner who could pick up our system nice and quick, if they want jobs they'll have to move to Australia or something.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
One of the issues that always comes up when talking about H-1B is that employers say they can't satisfy their needs with the talent already available. So, how about adding the requirement that any H-1B applications require the company post a "Help Wanted" ad in a national database for three months before the application is approved. Let's see why companies don't like citizen talent. Let's see how citizens can fill those jobs.
Just scrolling through the +5 comments, I see a ton of xenophobia...
Can't find an entry level IT job? Where are you? Arkansas? Here in silicon valley, we're experiencing another surge in hiring. I'm pretty low on the skillset, so whenever I get myself back into IT, I consider the economy to be doing well. Case in point... Company I work for. We've been losing a ton of local talent to google who's been on a hiring binge. When a small shop like ours (120 or so employees) can afford to pay great salaries, but we lose out to name brands like google, we have to turn to H1B.
And for the H1B worker, life isn't all cherries and apple pie. Case in point, this big ass march from immigration voice.
http://imgur.com/YKxR6NG
See the white guy with pelican case in tow? That's me.
Let's say you're here from India on H1B and you have a family emergency. You have to go home. So many H1B's are scared to go home, because when they try to return more often than not, they're denied re-entry into the country. I haven't met a single H1B that wouldn't LOVE to be a US citizen, but instead we give them a non-citizen status as an H1B that gives them basically no rights as a US citizen.
I think we should just trash H1B altogether, and allow anyone of decent education (BA or BS) come live here, become a citizen, and pay taxes.
As slashdotters, we shouldn't hate on the H1B people. They are not the problem. It's our policy, the very creation of H1B to sidestep proper citizenship that is.
Maybe it's time to clarify what kind of a site Slashdot is? It claims to be "News for Nerds" but there are a lot of nerds who have H-1B visas, or live outside the US.
This article's title is just plain nasty. There is room for debate on these issues, and I personally think the numbers of H-1B visas are excessive (or better put, the requirements for getting one are too lenient), but the idea that people applying for H-1B's are to be despised is very offputting to potential users of this site. Unless, of course, Slashdot isn't really for these people in which case you should be more explicit about that.
On the issue of H-1B's themselves, it is necessary to separate out generic issues of free trade, from issues that are specific to trade in human labor. Any valuable commidity will benefit country that imports it. If there were a ban on importing rare earth metals to the US, and suddently this was lifted, it would benefit companies that utilize these metals (and ultimately consumers) and harm producers of rare earth metals. However the net benefit would be positive, this is standard economic theory. Now I imagine that when the ban is lifted, the rare earth producers would say "there is no shortage of rare earth metals, people just aren't willing to pay a fair price. If people paid more, we could mine previously uneconomic deposits, etc.". This would be a mistaken interpretation, again because economic theory says that the welfare of society is maximized under free trade.
Now this theory breaks down when it applies to people, but only because of externalities. That is, people who come to the US on H-1B visas may have a negative influence on the US apart from their impact on the labor force. Some of these are simply because a person in the US temporarily will be less engaged with the community and civil society. Also many Americans prefer that the US retain its cultural and ethinc composition, and so these people may be negatively affected.
So there are many valid arguments against H-1B visas, although most of the economic arguments are wrong. I think the criteria should be stricter so that only the people who add the most value to the economy can get one. This way, the US would get the maximum benefit for the minimum number of people. A masters degree should be a minimum.
Anyway that is my view on H-1B visas but can we please keep personal animosity towards people on H-1B's out of it?
If the shortage is so terrible why aren't we seeing tons of stories talking about exploding pay rates and people hopping from company to company because of ridiculous job offers? Oh that's right, it's because there is no shortage of talent, just an unwillingness for them to pay the market rate.
Here's one perspective re this issue.
Who's Hiring H-1B Visa Workers? It's Not Who You Might Think
An effective "democracy" creates the illusion the people have a say in their government.
. If you interview anything like how you type, I'm not at all surprised that you're frustrated.
Yeah, because a Slashdot rant is indicative of how one is in real life.
Unbelievable.
Nice, ad hominem, btw. Kudos for the moderation points.
I once worked for some folks years ago. While they were being sued for 20 million dollars, they wondered why their employees kept their mouth shut about their problems. They were sued for tens of millions by their customers and eventually prosecuted by the SEC because anyone who said anything negative were accused of having a "bad attitude".
Something for you to think about.
My mother tells me that I am sooo handsome, intelligent, and just wonderful. She asks, "Why are you still single at 47?!"
I tell her, "Mom. There just isn't any adequate women for me!"
She says," You're 5'7", 200 lbs, with enough hair on your head. What's the issue!"
I say,"Mom. There isn't any 5' 10" blond haired, 25 year old, MDs with PhD in Particle Physics, with big tits, who love giving blow jobs on the first date, and great legs out there! Women are so pathetic these days!!"
My mother agrees with me!
I'm also an IT hiring manager BTW.
CS is not IT and stuff like subnetting is tech / trades school
If you are an unemployed techy type ... well, let's just say you'd better start picking alternative countries.
Any bets whether they'll remember to turn out the lights as they leave?
Like ALL of them? B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Make US collgle free or much lower cost. Plan B is loans with a income based repayment plan with a low MAX interest rate. Say X% over an amount that is a somewhat over min wage. and make you so that if you get a good paying job you can pay if off quicker and pay less over all. But if you say best you can get is a job in food service or even a good but not as high paying good like a costco or some other place that is better pay then a place like BK or bestbuy you pay little to none on your loan and after 10-15 years you don't have to deal with it any more.
Banks with put the presser on the schools to lower costs and tech needed skills / dump joke degrees if people who get them there best job is Starbucks and the bank loses a 60-80K+ loan.
Here it companies are fighting over new employees. It's almost impossible to find qualified people.
Please, send them over!
Privacy is terrorism.
Most of what is wrong with H1B could be fixed if the politicians actions matched their rhetoric ...
Most of what is wrong with everything the government touches could be fixed if the politicians actions matched their rhetoric.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Tech / IT needs some kind of apprenticeship system with real skills and not just college book skills.
There's even more fraud in the L1 program than the H1B. All you need is a phony business card that says "Manager" on it.
The University of Cincinnati Engineering College and several other Engineering Colleges have, for the last century, used the Co-Op model. In this system, students alternate school terms with work at companies. It is generally paid, and is in the student's area of study. It is fairly common in Engineering schools, especially in the Midwest USA.
What's the best way to find a job in the US as an Australian Citizen and using the E-3 visa?
The E-3 visa is like H1-B but better and has a seperate 10.5k cap and is only available to Australian Citizens.
I find many employers don't know what an E-3 visa is (as they only do H1-B) and don't bother, nevermind the fact that getting an Aussie on E-3 visa is much easier and cheaper (its free, in fact) compared to the hassle of H1-B...
Any tips, information, etc, would be greatly appreciated.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
Note: I did not say unionize. Doctors are organized though the AMA. Lawyers are organized.
Of course big companies are going to screw the techies, why they shouldn't they? They have all the power, and techies are busy back-stabbing each other.
Fact: most H1Bs are entry level.
So the government is cutting back and cutting back on education funding. Then American companies complain they can't find enough Americans to do the work, at a time when there is still massive unemployment. So naturally they have to import workers from over-seas to take those jobs that Americans can't seem to fill.. Doesn't this just make you PROUD to be an American?!
Don't know if you've noticed or not, but the cost of a college education becoming more and more outside the ability of middle class people to afford. With the government cutting back education funding because they can't raise revenues with businesses complaining about taxation, you can't seem to find Americans who can do the work. There's a direct correlation between the lack of domestic workers and the lack of education funding.
I couldn't begin to afford a college education today if I were of that age.
"I can't find a job that pays me more than $50k a year."
Seriously? There's a guy out there willing to do the same work you do but for less. Of course I would try to hire that guy; I'd be stupid not to. That's how the market works.
I am a high school senior. I'm going to a pretty good university next year in a CS honors program. Would I like to come out four years later and land a $100k job? Sure. Does that mean I feel entitled to a $100k job? Of course not. My parents were H1 immigrants who have since gotten Green cards. My mom has a BS in EE and 15+ years of job experience. She makes around $50k. We're not rich, but we live decently. Why some people seem to think that they are entitled to making X amount more than market prices and then whine when they don't get it baffles me.
Exactly. Bingo. Nail on the head. If most "tech industry" people who are railing against H-1B visa's are CS majors, then it is no wonder they can't find a job.
Not many employers are actually looking for CS majors. They don't need or want somebody to do research on the next big thing or somebody to have on their payroll to create tech ideas when the function of that business isn't technology related. What they want is that when they have a specific business need, they have somebody on the payroll who can implement and maintain that business need. When we need a bigger compute cluster with a larger SAN and perhaps to expand our network, a CS major is a poor choice for that job because of what you just told me. He can't subnet so he has no business touching their information infrastructure.
Most businesses who have a technology need are NOT in the business of the theoretical realm, so it's only natural that they won't hire people to do that.
http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.html
That's why you're losing your job to foreigners.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
I have been in your boat my friend and this is not an attempt at a flamebait.
I accepted near poverty wages as no one would talk to me when I demanded $20 an hour! Then I lowered to $18/hr. Got 1 interview. Lowered it to $15/hr got 6 interviews! Then putting my head to shame I went as low as $13/hr. Bang! Got hired!
You are not worth $70,000 a year. If you were you would not have typed this and would be working right? So you went to school and had no jump? Welcome to the fucking real world my friend where 40% do not get jobs in their field.
So work 2 jobs. Go wait tables? Go sell shit at Best Buy when you are not making $13 an hour. Money with degrees only make $13/hr or $26,000 a year starting out?! No you did not misread that. Sorry buddy but, without experience no one is going to talk to you.
Go work, get your references, join a temp agency so you can maximize the amount of references you obtain so you can make that $70,000 some day. My brother makes $130,000 a year and has an MBA. How much did he make as a young kid fresh out of school at the same company? Only $50,000 as a systems analysis excel jockey. He had to earn that.
Whining about Indians and H1b1s folks will not change the situation. You have to be worth that $70,000 in an ROI and out of school you wont get that. It takes years. Sorry slashdotters but that is the hard truth and why the corps are really whining about qualified workers. Not wages, but for $70,000 a year you should as hell have many years experience.
So get to work gaining them. Other slashdotters reading this who make $70,0000 will repeat what I am saying.
http://saveie6.com/
But when it's turn for the invisible hand to slap the kind of people who usually post here, the comments have a much different tone and the proposals push in another direction.
How did that Google guy say? Perhaps we'd better start running, for the robots have already started.
Bay Area
Serious Money
130k++
one of these does not belong
> Then putting my head to shame I went as low as $13/hr. Bang! Got hired!
Dude, I was making $13 an hour 12 years ago doing fucking data entry!
You're right about not being worth $70k a year these days. It's a brutal market, an employer's market. The wages are in a race to the bottom. The only debate here is the reason why - and I can tell you it's NOT because of anything domestic IT workers did!
It beats working at McDonalds. There is no time to debate if you are down on your luck. Only time to work and many making $13/hr is the new norm. You are right it is not 12 years ago. 12 years ago was not the norm either remember? It does not take a genius to type shit in a computer. That can be done for minimum wage.
So we have one extreme down today and 12 years ago we had the opposite extreme, where the real value should be in the middle if logic serves. I think it is the economy, health care costs, taxes, lawyers being sue happy, and H1B1 are a tiny part of it. No one wants to be poor but if your competition is happy to live at that wage you need to match it.
It is true employers can not find qualified people who are experts and the wages keep going up for that. So if you start low in time it will go up much faster than 12 years ago.
http://saveie6.com/
Not even enough jobs for Americans. Now if only our government would stop the flow of illegals from Mexico.
Are we seriously expected to employ the world? Make something in your country.
You forgot a very important part of the equation. Preferred vendor’s lists to keep out talented independent small shops. You, Jane Blow, cannot work on a project unless your pimp represents you to the client. You might be the sexist girl doing the hottest shit in town, but if you want to preform, you got to pay Guido.
Anyone with a comp sci degree that doesn't know about subnetting isn't interested in computers.
http://www.khanacademy.org/
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
As long as there are people willing to work for less pay and under worse conditions that you, they will have a job and you won't. That is exactly what the corporations who run this country want. They have been systematically turning the US into a 3rd-world country with the ultimate goal of getting a working wage here down to a level that is comparable to a working wage in China, India, or Viet Nam. Once you've been stripped of pay (there's still along way to go), benefits (how does your healthcare compare to other countries?), and security (that was the first thing that went), they'll get rid of OSHA.
My advice? Either start your own business or suck it up- the ride down has only just begun.
We don't need any more foreign nationals for any reason, including H-1B. We have too many people out of work, and the conditions which prevailed in this country when we needed immigrants no longer exist. Potential immigrants need to focus on solving the problems in their own country, including unemployment, and quit trying to migrate to a fairy tail kingdom where all their problems will be solved.
just lies. There's plenty of Qualified Americans. I can't compete with India. They come here alone, work, and can support their whole family by sending a fraction of their wages back. Meanwhile my kid's school cloths will run $600+ this year and that's if I send her to Walmart and have her pick out the cheap stuff. Triple that if I shop somewhere she wont' get bullied for.
As for qualified Americans, I've seen what the H1-Bs do. They're ever loving code monkeys. You will never, ever, ever trick me into believing there's a shortage of VB programmers. What you've got a shortage of is people you can abuse that can take the abuse and bang out your crap.
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And so are you. And so is EVERY American. Stop thinking that way. When you do, they win. They being the 1%.
br> You're worth a decent wage. You're entitle to food, shelter and Health care. You EARNED a good life just by being BORN. Pull you're head out of your rear and stop beating up on yourself just because your daddy wasn't board rich. Bill Gates, Mark Zuck, Dick Cheney. Every last one had wealthy parents and connections. Not a damn one of them got anywhere near a boot strap. Lies, all lies.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The math works out in favor of the H-1B candidate, even if you assume identical salaries. There are high fixed costs to acquiring and bringing up to speed a new employee. Employee tenure averages about 2 years, because the fastest way to advance in tech is to jump ship to a company with a better offer.
An H-1B visaholder finds it much harder to do that, and is stuck for 3-6 years, or even longer if they're trying to get a green card (while you can sometimes change H-1B sponsors, doing so restarts the green card process). Which means less turnover and much lower fixed costs.
Furthermore, the employer can offer much less in the way of raises and possibilities for advancement -- which feeds the cycle of his non-indentured employees jumping ship.
>>> The only advantage these people had that they were born in a good place and nothing else
Is this not enough? You know a country is for its own citizens in the first place, not for everyone in the world.
You're going to have to hire Americans and pay them more than Starbux employees!
Maybe next year you can reel in a few H1-B's on the CHEAP! But you gotta be FASTER!
If there's a shortage of H-1B visas (meaning there are times you can't obtain one no matter how much you're willing to pay), they should be put up for auction and sold to the highest bidder so everyone who wants one badly enough can get one. It's irresponsible of the government not to look for ways to reduce our tax burden.
When you say Ebay, I think you mean checking the domestic workforce.. and "bidding out the job" to the qualified applicant. Unfortunately, that's not an option because the purpose to H1B visas is to drop wages, not bid them up.
http://www.accountkiller.com/en/delete-slashdot-account Stop visiting Slashdot.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/02/15/top-10-users-of-h-1b-guest-worker-program-are-offshore-outsourcing-firms/ (Thanks for your comments, BTW, 14erCleaner!)
Whenever one bothers to study individual cases (first I studied regarding tech was the replacement of Palm developers with H-1Bs from India) is that non-vetted personnel invariably replace highly vetted American personnel. End of story.
I have at least three friends who are in their forties and early fifties and in the same boat as you. Back when all the manufacturing jobs were leaving the country, all of them had the arrogance to say "those are useless jobs. If someone in China can do them, let them. We need to focus on the high tech jobs, not on ones assembling toasters".
Then with the relentless push of free trade by the idiots running our country, the departing jobs became more and more high skilled. The cheap labor conservatives kept chanting the mantra that globalization would somehow replace all the boring jobs with exciting new super-duper ones.
Fast forward a decade or so. Today, one of my friends who used to be a C++ programmer makes wood furniture rather than jump though a new hoop every year and learn the newest "Ruby on rails with a twist of Hadoop and NOSQL" trend that will become useless information in five years. One has a master's in CS and 20 years of experience and works on a helpdesk. And in the last five years, to every single employer that has told me "there's no one skilled for this position", I have asked "would you be able to find someone if you paid triple the salary you are offering?". And of course they don't want to think about that or answer it.
It comes down to arrogance, plain and simple. Programmers wanted to be considered professionals like doctors and lawyers, so they never supported unionization. But they completely overestimated the amount of training it takes to become a programmer or similar tech guy, when compared to a nephrologist or civil engineer. The people whose jobs are being eaten by the H-1B visas need to start getting front and center in this discussion. Every time a CEO says "no talent available", there needs to be about 50 people with signs outside the venue calling him a greedy fuck, and condemning cheap labor conservatism. That is the only way things will change. Posting here does nothing, because the general public believes that there just aren't enough programmers in the US to write the code.
Support microSD: in a post 9/11 world, it is unwise to carry your data on media that you cannot comfortably swallow.
and ban forced room and board that can end costing you much then renting on your own.
Now reduce the cap.
First I think H-1B visa program should be renamed to: WTIC Non-Imigrant Visa (WTIC stands for Wipro, Tata, Infosys and Cognizant).
Renaming visa program to WTIC will save a LOT of time and effort to people like me (13+ years experience, expert in many software development areas) but
unfortunately from very small country.
Being expert from small country is disability in the process of searching for WTIC visa because of following:
1. You are not going to work for salary of 50k/year in WTIC
2. You are not Indian, WTIC visa are meant to be for Indian people
3. I had two great offers (110k/y) from Bloomberg and from Amazon(prime), but unfortunately too late, WTIC visas are taken in first few days by...WTIC, more luck after ONE year.
No company looking to fulfill some position would wait for whole year, there will be two options:
- Employ an US citizen (good option) or
- Employ a WTIC person (much probable option) because every time in larger enterprises on some positions are sitting "smart" low level managers with "bright ideas" how to bring more profit to stock holders by cutting costs (of salaries) by at least 30% by employing rookies from WTIC .
While in theory H-1B looks nice, in reality, small US company with few employees looking for real expert from anywhere (even from other country) ready to pay a competitive salary, simply doesn't have energy, effort and willingness to compete with WTIC body shops for WTIC visas.
I know WTIC are service companies, companies not delivering IT products (software, hardware etc...), but as far as I can see, from services, they are only delivering unemployment of US citizens and delivering US dollars in India, directly to WTIC stockholders.
To summarize: WTIC means "less jobs for US citizens and more US dollars out-flowing to India to WTIC stock holders"
If you oppose the scab H-1B increase, get OFF this board and call your senators and house member, call Durbin, Sanders, and Grassley and tell them NO MORE SCAB H-1Bs.
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year numbers issued through consular offices
2005: 124,099
2006: 135,421
2007: 154,053
2008: 129,464
2009: 110,367
2010: 117,409
2011: 129,134
All this blather about 65K or 85K is sand and dust thrown in your faces... especially considering that even a 65K cap would be abou 64K too many to bring in only the genuinely "best" or "brightest", "highly-skilled" rather than the reality that over 100K additional new H-1B visas are given out each year to cheap, young, pliant foreign labor with flexible ethics and with no standards for skill level.
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yah, sure, but, e.g. MSFT and Ill-Begotten Monstrosities, employ thousands in Red China to do things that used to be done in the USA. One of IBM's biggest divisions is "Global Services". They also both contract with other cross-border bodyshoppers.
And let us not forget the tens of thousands of L visas and J visas and F visas with OPT and CPT.
Then there's the professional ethics issue. The 3 firms you mention have done such shoddy work in the past, engaged in so many scams, the they should have to pay a sizable premium/strong to get people to deign to work with them.
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You are correct. It would have been ridiculous to expect that "most" would be interested in doing so.
OTOH, from 1970 to 2010, 6,107,360 US citizens earned STEM degrees and some 12M learned STEM skills by all means. From 2000 to 2010, 3,006,100 US citizens earned STEM degrees.
According to congressional testimony from Michael Teitelbaum, and research reports by Hal Salzman and B. Lindsay Lowell (repeated research done separately and together), we've been turning out about 3 times as many capable, degreed, US citizen STEM professionals as have landed STEM jobs over the last couple decades.
Thus it is interesting that though there was an 400K excess of STEM workers in India in 1990 (per Gurcharan Das) which generated a sequence of international lobbying by their government and business executives since, there has been not a peep about the millions of surplussed US citizen STEM workers, though their existence is documented in the government statistics if you know where to dig, and in a few obscure research reports posted but not ballyhooed in the media.
Remove the H-1B, limit the L (to 6 months and e.g. 10K per year). Apply some standards to O visas (instead of giving them out the sleazy porn "actresses").
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Yah, sure. He's required to pay the "prevailing wage", which is considerably below the actual local market compensation when intelligence, degrees, certificates, experience, the specific job, etc., are taken into account.
US DoL uses 4 levels for determining the "prevailing wage", and the vast majority of H-1B recipients are, miracle of miracles, classified in the bottom, newbies, apprentices, inexperienced, generally unable to solve problems on their own. And the pay more or less matches that evaluation, not the much bandied about claims in the media that H-1B recipients are "the best and brightest" or "highly-skilled".
Compensation of H-1B grantees has been studied quite a bit. Vandrevala of Tata claimed that they're paid 25% to 35% below local US compensation. One study concluded that they're paid about 12% below US compensation. A study of the best of the best H-1Bs sponsored for green cards concluded that this tiny sub-set were paid 1.0001 times the local median (i.e. one ten-thousandth more) as I recall, rather than the 2 to 3 times median that would be expected for someone exceptionally bright, knowledgeable, creative, etc.
There have been at least another half dozen such studies which reached similar conclusions.
An especially interesting series of articles in the Portland Maine papers disclosed that it was common practice to declare that H-1B workers would be living and working in low cost of living/low pay locales, and keeping a mail drop or closet office for mail forwarding, paying them at the level appropriate for the mail drop's location, and having them work in expensive/high pay locations like Manhattan and Washington DC, instead. There was some token effort to discourage such scams after the series was publicized, but whether it has continued I know not.
The point is that "prevailing wage" is a legalistic term of art which seems to mean one thing (what the words would mean as defined in Merriam-Webster's dictionaries, for instance) while meaning something completely different in practice. In this case, combined with difficulties of transferring from one sponsor to another (especially if the first sponsor is also sponsoring a green card application) keeps the guest-worker stuck with less mobility and less compensation and less ability to seek better working conditions, which is why the turn-coat IEEE and ACM are stabbing US STEM workers in the back by supporting replacement of or addition to H-1B visas with even more excessive numbers of green cards.
The H-1B at least has the advantage of being a "temporary" visas, even if the term is awfully long -- 3 years initially, up to 3 years on renewal, and then year-by-year extensions after that only informally (not absolutely) limited to 2 or 3... while green cards would drive an ever increasing explosion of immigration and over-population and over-crowding.
I'd expect somebody in the computer field to tinker around with machines
And herein lies the problem: CS is not "in the computer field", it is a branch of mathematics. The confusion stems from the unfortunate naming we use (in other languages it is more appropriately called something like "Computational Science" or "Informatics").
Or, in the words of Michael R. Fellows, "Computer science is not about machines, in the same way that astronomy is not about telescopes. There is an essential unity of mathematics and computer science".
A computer is a tool that a CS may use, not the subject of the field.
That said, most CS undergrads set out to become programmers, "software developers" or suchlike. They may use the knowledge from the CS program but their focus will often be the computers, not the math. Therefore, to be well-rounded professionals in their field of work, they will need knowledge and experience from several areas of study -- both abstract and concrete.
it's not like IRQs are windows 98 specific and are never used anymore.
They are pretty much specific to the PC-compatible architecture.
But that aside, such hardware-related topics are the domain of "Computer Engineering" field, a branch of EE.
I am pretty sure that Donald Knuth, arguably the most influential "Computer Scientist" alive, has no idea about IRQs.
I might not expect a biologist to be able to milk a cow, but they should at least have an idea where the milk comes from.
That is because the source of milk is general knowledge known by every child over the age of 3.
Heinlein's "Time Enough for Love" notwithstanding, math and science are getting more and more specialized. A molecular biologist, for example, doesn't even need to know what a cow is.
But even if your analogy was valid, I bet that your "CS guy" knew what an interrupt is, but was not familiar with the specific implementation of the cascaded 8259A PICs used in the PC/AT architecture at the time.
One of the problems I see, is that the management types hiring the H1B people assume they are getting people at the same skill level, but statistically, the skill level is much worse, particularly from India. There were some studies on the quality of education awhile back, so I won't go into too much detail. But many of the H1B people lie or greatly exaggerate their eduction which in many cases is not provable. The management types are just happy their payouts are less, in reality they are getting garbage products and robbing jobs from truly qualified workers that could produce a quality product. (statistically, not always). The other problem besides ignorance from the accountant types hiring the H1B's thinking they are getting a deal, is that people seem to be more and more ok with putting out crap products. The days of true quality seem to be going away. Now it is just, get it out quick and fast and cheap. Innovation is just a buzz word no one wants to pay for any longer (for many companies, there are a couple still trying to compete doing it right)