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VP Biden Briefs US Governors On H-1B Visas, IT, and Coding
theodp writes: Back in 2012, Computerworld blasted Vice President Joe Biden for his ignorance of the H-1B temporary work visa program. But Joe's got his H-1B story and he's sticking to it, characterizing the visa program earlier this month in a speech to the National Governors Association as "apprenticeships" of sorts that companies provide to foreign workers to expand the Information Technology industry only after proving there are no qualified Americans to fill the jobs. Biden said he also learned from his talks with tech's top CEOs that 200,000 of the jobs that companies provide each year to highly-skilled H-1B visa holders could in fact be done by Americans with no more than a two-year community college degree.
they can't find people who will work 60-80+ hours for very low pay and the will to be in a place where they can't quit and will be big suck ups not to get fired.
It's not about skills it about this
On average, applications for H-1B workers in computer occupations were for wages $13,000 LESS then what USC get.
$13000 less and they get 60+ work weeks out of them as well.
Biden said he also learned from his talks with tech's top CEOs that 200,000 of the jobs that companies provide each year to highly-skilled H-1B visa holders could in fact be done by Americans with no more than a two-year community college degree
So perhaps he can reconcile those two concepts and explain why we allow H1Bs when we have MILLIONS of unemployed college grads?
Mr. Biden, I have a word of advice for you - CEOs lie. And not just a little, but as their primary (and sometimes only) qualification. You might not want to go around repeating the crap they spew to try to sway you to do their bidding. It just, y'know, make you look like a little like a Special Olympics winner, if you get my meaning.
Some places want them to fill lower-level rolls and low pay as it's much cheaper and they locked into the job.
Now maybe if there was say very high H-1b min wage say 100K + COL and forced OT pay (so they can't get the work 2-3 people out of 1 h-1b) that would get rid of a lot of the abuse of the system.
Joe Biden is a bit of a buffoon, but that thing about firing a shotgun through a front door is taken out of context. He was referring to someone's question about hypothetical end of days where target ID rules likely aren't such a big deal.
Biden did actually advocated firing a warning shot through a window, which is illegal and presumably not during the end of days. Not very clever, Uncle Joe.
It's kind of like the Al Gore Internet stuff. I am not Al's biggest fan, but the guy never said anything about inventing the Internet. Al Gore was instrumental in getting the Federal Government to begin using the networks, particularly for check processing. He saved the taxpayers quite a bit of money by doing this. Gore was one of the first elected officials to really get what the Internet was going to do for society.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
The jobs could in fact be done by Americans with no degrees at all. This cultural indoctrination that you must have a degree must end. I've been programming for 30 years as a profession and I have never had a degree, and I'll never submit to the immoral status quo by getting one. I have both the theory, the experience, and the necessary practical skills under my belt, and all without a single degree.
Joe Biden knows less about coding than my daughter.
He knows less about coding than my Grandma who just now figured out this touch tone dialing thingy... (Forget the cell phone and that pesky "send" button..)
Hell, he probably knows less about coding than he knows about guns...
That's not saying much... Biden generally knows nothing (or perhaps cannot remember anything) about guns or any other subject he goes into public to talk about. He's an old guy who has lied for a living so long he knows no other way, and now he's loosing what was left of his mind and is struggling to keep his story straight enough to get though the current speech without contradicting himself twice in the same paragraph.
I'll say this, Biden is the one major reason I'd never support impeachment of Obama and why I pray he stays alive well past 2016. Biden is off his rocker and off the rails and he cannot remember from one moment to the next what he's said. We are better off with the current president than Biden, maybe not much, but enough I'm not willing to risk Biden.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Well hell, if the need H1B for an apprentice (i.e. entry level with low skills), that goes to show the true intent.
Success in life in not measured by how well you know coding. Especially when you can hire someone who does know the stuff. It's unfortunate that politicians have little clue about things they talk about, but since I'm not American I quite enjoy these public blunders.
Biden said he also learned from his talks with tech's top CEOs that 200,000 of the jobs that companies provide each year to highly-skilled H-1B visa holders could in fact be done by Americans with no more than a two-year community college degree.
How are they highly skilled if they could be replaced by 2 year community college degree holders? If any this just shows how much companies are abusing H1B's to get cheap foreign workers when they could be encouraging high school students to get these mythical 2 year community college degrees that are in such high demand.
I am with you there. Our best employees are the ones that have not been through the debt claiming process of getting a degree. I personally find that the guys we have that went are way too comment happy. 8 lines of comment for a well named variable. The Cisco techs that we have comment access lists for port 80 traffic as "web server". IF you didn't post AC, I would love to talk more.
The jobs could in fact be done by Americans with no degrees at all. This cultural indoctrination that you must have a degree must end ...
In my 30 years of programming experience I have rarely seen a job advertisement that did not say 4-year degree or equivalent, equivalent as in on the job experience, as your experience suggests.
... I've been programming for 30 years as a profession and I have never had a degree, and I'll never submit to the immoral status quo by getting one. I have both the theory, the experience, and the necessary practical skills under my belt, and all without a single degree.
Some of the best programmers I know never finished college. However they are **extremely** rare. They will read and figure out college level material over a broad set of topics on their own time on their own initiative, a broad set of topics comparable to those found in a typical degree program. However most of the self taught do not seem to be that self motivated, they may study some topics that are of interest to them but they will not have the broad understanding that the former or the formally trained typically have. Many of the formally trained are no more intelligent nor any more self motivated, but they had external motivations compelling them to study things that they had little interest in. The odd thing about many of the less interesting topics is that they often have unforeseen application to problems you eventually encounter and/or they are actually more important than you knew.
That said, there are also many in college who really have no interest in programming and are just there to get their "ticket punched", to get a piece of paper. They did not enter the program because of any inherent interest in programming and engineering, rather someone told them it was a good career path. Such individuals do not turn out to be the better programmers either. In contrast those with an inherent interest in programming often go far beyond the work required for class and use the incredible resources found at a university to study things that otherwise would have been beyond their resources.
So if a person has the time and resources to attend college they would do a great disservice to themselves to skip it due to some political position. You get out of college what you put in, and you will have access to resources and people you probably could not find anywhere else. And that includes likeminded peers. Its one thing to collaborate on code over the internet, its another thing to sit side by side staring at the same screen trying to puzzle something out and walking around campus bouncing ideas around. Plus there is also ready access to individuals studying other necessary disciplines. The density of useful knowledge and experience is quite high among fellow students at a university, its just a matter of finding people with genuine interests in their respective fields rather than the ticket punchers.
Hey, working 60+ hours per week is a bona fide occupational qualification for some jobs! These immigrants are just filling jobs that Americans don't want to do.
Another problem is that these companies tend to tailor H-1B job requirement statements to particular foreign candidates in such a way that essentially every US-based candidate who might see the posting would not qualify or would ignore it (for example, because of that pay disparity or the work week or other conditions listed in the job description).
The brother-in-law waited tables for four years to get his two-year degree.
Now he's maybe the third best waiter at the local Steak House and they take most of his tax refund each year as his annual student loan payment.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
They're not fluff. They're just not about getting a job, but about getting an education. If all you want is a degree, go to a technical school. You'll be happy. University is (or rather, should be) for people who want to learn and expand their knowledge, even in fields unrelated with what they hope to be doing once they graduate.
The "4 years places" you speak of so lowly may not have professors doing IT work, but they have highly knowledgeable researchers who have done stuff you wouldn't even be able to grasp for years, often decades. They're just not the people I'd ask about IT.
Our best employees are the ones that have not been through the debt claiming process of getting a degree
Biden is insisting that the H-1B program must go on because it provides a sort of "apprenticeships" to foreigners
Well, I was from China, but am an American and I can speak with the view of a foreigner (the one from China) and that of an American and I can tell you that if America does not stop giving "apprenticeships" to foreigners one day there will be no more jobs for Americans
The old way of giving "apprenticeships" for "foreigners" was the way I got mine - When I landed on the soil of the USA I was a young refugee without a full secondary school education
I had my "apprenticeships" inside America because I had no place to go and after I graduated from college (with no debt, since I worked 3 jobs on the side - sometimes more than 3 jobs - while studying) I worked at American technology companies where I got further training.
After that I started my own companies, sold some of them, and re-invested what I got into other startup and made even more
In other words, while America provided "apprenticeships" for me this former "apprentice" stayed put in America and started businesses in America and created many job opportunities for other Americans
On the other hand, the way H-1B visa program works is that it provides "apprenticeships" for foreigners, and they got back to their own country, taking their skills with them, start up their own businesses in their own countries, create job opportunities for their own people, not Americans
Who loses in this game ?
The Americans
Who win ? The foreigners
Folks, especially you Americans out there --- please top the politicians, no matter from which political party they came from, from destroying America from the inside out
What Biden is doing is to cut out the innards of America and give it to the foreigners
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Don't pick on Joe. His job is really just being there so no one tries to kill the President. As long as Joe is number two man no one would dare.
I'm for unlimited work visas. I'm afraid neither of Indians who want to live and work here nor Mexicans who want to live and work here. I see both as positive for this is the land of opportunity and freedom.
They said that they needed Temporary Foreign Workers and it would lead to full time jobs in Canada too.
And then the media got off their butts and figured out that it was really being used to provide cheap labour in Canadian restaurants instead of hiring local teens.
H1-B is a giant sucking sound of jobs being outsourced to India, and I don't mean native tribal lands here in North America.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
4 year degrees have a lot theory with big sides of fluff / filler classes.
While tech schools and community college have teachers who have been / still are working in a real work place doing IT work.
the 4 years places not so much.
Can't say for today, but my 4 year school I went through in 6 years (co-op programs spread things out); and near the end, most of my seminars were taught by either domain experts or people taking a sabbatical from their day job to teach what they had learned.
The theory courses were what has kept me employed since... there's a difference between a real CS degree (being able to do the math and work the concepts) and being a code jockey. The second has a much lower glass ceiling.
Free market - they are filling jobs locals don't want to do for the money being offered - apparently it's only a one way free market - surprise, surprise, surprise. Using the car analogy Unions provide for lanes travelling in the other direction, from the top down to the bottom. Want change unionise and kill the H-1Bs.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
There is an old Republican tactic where you run someone that seems more moderate as President to capture the swing voters but then you run an attack dog as Vice President to appeal to the extremists in your party and keep them voting.
Politics is theatre remember.
Something is a bit off.
If H-1B is for hiring foreign highly skilled worker -- people who have skills that just aren't available in the US workforce -- then how are they "apprentices"?
Isn't an apprentice someone who is learning the trade, not someone who is teaching it to the "master"?
Al Gore, March 8, 1999, interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, "I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
Al Gore, March 8, 1999, about 0.2 seconds later in the same interview "...I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth, environmental protection, improvements in our educational system." Wired magazine yanked that quote out of context and it has never been the same since.
You may want to look up the "High Performance Computing Act of 1991", also known as the "Gore Bill". That's the one which, among other things, funded the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation, without which we wouldn't have all of the nice toys we enjoy today.
Don't take my word for it. Why not ask Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, the computer science gurus who did get the Internet up and running? While they had been working on it for some time, the RFCs describing TCP and IP weren't published until 1981, and the "Flag Day" on which the old ARPANET switched to running on Internet Protocol was in 1983.
The internet was up and running before he ever got elected to any office
Al Gore was first elected to the US House of Representatives in 1976 and was pushing the ideas of high speed telecommunications in his first term. Unless you are counting the 57 computers on ARPANET at that time as "The Internet" it looks like you may want to revise that statement.
He kept the tax money flowing to the right rich people and the kept the campaign contributions flowing right back.
That's what tax money does. Taxes pay for things like civilized society, or in this case The Internet. And Al Gore was the guy who paid the bills for the people who created the Internet. He also paid the bills for the initial development of Internet Explorer and letting AOL users onto Usenet, so he does have a lot to make up for, but when he said that he was the man behind much of the US government's support of computing and telecommunication research which led to the modern Internet, he was right.
This cultural indoctrination that you must have a degree must end. I've been programming for 30 years as a profession and I have never had a degree
And I've worked with enough people who were so smart at 18 years old that they decided they didn't need to go to college that I've decided the requirement of a degree has some merit.
Some of these people really are great at syntax and terminology, and a few of them are actually good at coding certain things, but mostly, they do things the hard way, they organize their projects around data when it is process that better defines what they're trying to accomplish, the write overly complex solutions to simple problems, they saddle their employer with unnecessary technology, and there are certain classes of problems that they simply can not solve at all. For one, why do they think it's funny that they don't know math, and that a solution involving guessing, approximation and unreasonable process limitation is an acceptable alternative to algebra?
In short, they suck at problem solving. That's not a surprise since the first adult problem they faced, they took a shortcut.
Hey, working 60+ hours per week is a bona fide occupational qualification for some jobs!
No, no it is not. It means that one person is doing the work of two, and a so-called "job creator" is expecting them to pick up the tab for their greed. Of course, it's possible that this supposed job creator cannot afford to hire enough people to get the work done, in which case they should go out of business so that someone who can fill the need and pay a living wage can fill the gap, or so that potential customers find another, more cost-effective solution which can be implemented while paying a living wage.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
While your post is relevant and contains useful and accurate information, you have to remember who you're talking to here. Some people are impervious to facts that don't align with their ideology, so you can cite facts as much as you want, you're wasting your time. You might as well try to convince a brick wall to not just stand there.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
If the H-1B process increased the number of jobs in the USA and gave all of those displaced workers better jobs then you'd be right, but you're not. It's very much the opposite. Those jobs are lost and all of those people end up fighting for much lower paid work, and many times have to take minimum-wage jobs.