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Tech Looks To Obama To Save Them From 'Just Sort of OK' US Workers
theodp writes Following up on news that the White House met with big biz on immigration earlier this month, Bloomberg sat down with Joe Green, the head of Mark Zuckerberg's Fwd.US PAC, to discuss possible executive actions President Obama might take on high tech immigration (video) in September. "Hey, Joe," asked interviewer Alix Steel. "All we keep hearing about this earnings season though from big tech is how they're actually cutting jobs. If you look at Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, why do the tech companies then need more tech visas?" Green explained why tech may not want to settle for laid-off U.S. talent when the world is its oyster. "The difference between someone who's truly great and just sort of okay is really huge," Green said. "Culture in tech is a very meritocratic culture," he added. "The vast, vast majority of tech engineers that I talked to who are from the United States are very supportive of bringing in people from other countries because they want to work with the very best."
They aren't interested in building up or maintaining US employees; they want to have foreign countries foot the bill for the training of their workers so they can sit around and reap the benefits of advanced training without laying out money to make it happen--and further, they want these employees dependent upon their employment with the company to remain in the country, rather than being able to move about at will.
Indentured workforce, in other words.
This isn't a tech report, it's political propaganda. There's plenty of awesome U.S. techs to do the jobs that are out of them, just as good as the imports, they just want U.S. wages.
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"The vast, vast majority of tech engineers that I talked to who are from the United States are very supportive of bringing in people from other countries because they want to work with the very best."
I've worked in tech (SE) for 15+ years now, and I don't know of a single colleague that would agree with the sentiment expressed in that quote.
Business lobbying for what what will be best for them. News at 11.... Hopefully, voters make this an issue.
"The difference between someone who's truly great and just sort of okay is really huge"
Especially when you want to keep that person tied to the company for the duration of their visa and pay them less than someone with a non-visa.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
We're too cheap to hire a less experienced person and train them to do their job properly.
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Of course they want to hire the "very best", where "bestness" is measured by how little money they are willing to work for.
I don't disagree that there are some really smart people around the world who want to work for Google, but really valuable people don't need special programs to come over to work. The existing system is already set up to admit them. This is a smoke screen to hide the true purpose of the program: finding more people who don't know the value of their skills, preferably ones without many existing relationships that are easier to overwork.
I read the internet for the articles.
Let's be honest here: no it isn't.
Tech skills are hard to objectively verify. Technical results are hard to objectively verify. We collectively proxy that by having lots of tests, competitions, selection, and other heuristics. But that's not a symptom of us respecting skill more than other jobs(maybe more than other specific office jobs, but not more than lawyers, doctors, manufacturing technicians, similar things), it's a symptom of it being really hard to tell.
These companies are looking to take shortcuts. And some are looking for excuses to cut salaries. That's it.
It's about cheapest workers, not better ones.
There's no lack of talent in the US, except from Java mills, and those are easily weeded out.
Is this article a troll? If it is then I give it 10/10, gr8 b8 m8, and all that shit, because it makes me want to punch someone. In the face. Repeatedly. I've never heard such total bullshit in my entire life. So, what, I'm supposed to sit back and accept an attitude of 'fuck U.S. workers, they all suck, we'll hire from overseas because they're better'? Bull-fucking-shit. Know what I think? I think they like getting anyone they can that will work cheaper, that's what. I work with engineers, I live in the same house as an engineer, and they all tell me how it really is: They'd rather hire younger workers from overseas, regardless of their lack of experience and education, because they can get them dirt cheap, and to hell with quality.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
If its anything like the UK, the foreign workers won't all be the very best. I've worked with some top rate foreign workers on visas, but most of them are of an "OK" standard. Almost the same with native British workers, I've worked with some who are the very best, but most are "OK". The one difference is I have seen a couple of really bad native British workers who shouldn't be in the job. I've never seen a foreign worker that bad - presumably they fail to get out of their country.
> Proof that US slashdotters techies are just sort of OK at best since they don't want high skills immigration. Low skills immigration is fine since it doesn't compete directly with their jobs though.
What immigration?
H1Bs are an indentured servitude program.
It was a stark realization the first time found out that the imported PhDs in my shop were making less than I was. I was in a much better position to negotiate for better salary despite having less education and a more generic specialty.
I had the legal standing to tell my employer to "take this job and shove it".
I happily took advantage of the situation but never forgot the injustice of it.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
"The vast, vast majority of tech engineers that I talked to who are from the United States are very supportive of bringing in people from other countries because they want to work with the very best."
Show me ONE.
Just fucking ONE.
He or she must have a pulse,
be conscience,
have an IQ over 30,
full citizenship,
NOT A POLITICIAN,
NOT A CEO,
NOW SHOW ME ONE.
Donald Trump, on a crusade to make Nixon look respectable
So this tool just shit on U.S. workers and claims that people who are essentially nothing but ITT Tech graduates from a third world country are superior.
They are cheaper, more subservient, less likely to push for raises, and are perfectly happy work 60-80 our weeks.
I'm sure he has illegals mowing his lawn too. I wonder if Google Car can be programed to run someone down.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
as long as there is a high min wage + OT pay for them.
As some places use them as cheap workers chained to the job.
also if they want to use them as the best then they should be locked to that job with just about no time to find an other (h1bs have to get out as soon as there job is over) if they get fired or layed off.
Here is a study that was done a long time ago (1985). Skip down to section 5. It states that the most productive engineers were given 78 sqft of dedicated floor space, thought of there environment as quiet, private, and could silence or divert calls, were not interrupted, and thought they were appreciated. Skill had nothing to do with whether the engineer could finish the project they were assigned. http://teaching.davearnold.ca/...
Maybe tech companies need to develop culture that encourages good engineers rather than hiring foreign workers.
So that means that tech workers from abroad are better than tech workers here? Well, that must then mean that schools abroad are better than schools in the US because, hey, where would they get their knowledge from. And that of course must mean that we'd also find much better managers in India and Pakistan than we can find here, for obviously the same reason.
I fail to see a lot of H1B visa applications for CEOs, though? I really, really wonder what could possibly be the reason. I'd really want to work for a great CEO for a change, I can tell ya. I mean, when we all want to work with superior colleges, I can only assume that we would all just outright LOVE to work for a superior CEO!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
no, its the fact that they work for 1/10th the salary
Then your company is breaking the law and you should report them. Companies are required to pay above the prevailing wage for the position and region. We paid both of our H1B workers well above average for our staff and when they worked out sponsored their green cards (and boy is that process a cluster!), we're the kind of employer that the program was actually designed for, we were looking for extremely rare talent sets and had advertised the positions for months before looking abroad. I have to say that I have much bigger problems with the screwups in the green card program than I do with the H1B system, permanently bringing smart people from abroad raises the GDP of the US and brings diversity to the country.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Mod this one up! The idea that we need to import tech workers because US tech workers aren't good enough isn't just wrong. It's blatantly un-American. "Oh yes, we're laying off all these high skilled workers, but what we REALLY need is more skilled workers from other countries. Our American college graduates just can't compete anymore with Bangladeshis (at least they can't compete on price, o ho ho)!"
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
They are cheaper, more subservient, less likely to push for raises, and are perfectly happy work 60-80 hour weeks [while getting paid for 35 - AC].
That's what he meant by "truly great."
To the employer that is a huge form of merit that can easily outweigh others!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
As a tech worker myself, I don't see why foreign workers would be inherently worse. I mean I've seen some people, very much home grown, who seem to have such a poor grasp of how things work that I wonder how on earth they even have a job.
Were those PhDs smarter, better, and more productive than you?
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Companies are required to pay above the prevailing wage for the position and region.
First of all, the "prevailing wage" is already artificially lowered because of the presence of H1B's. But, even so, it doesn't matter because there are a million ways around this law anyway. Want to get around having to pay your Indian software engineer the prevailing wage for a software engineer? No problem! Just hire him as a "Junior Programmer."
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Facebook's Wealth Demands Unlimited Slaves
I bet it was intentional, you know the Zuck loves to mock people right in front of their faces.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I guarantee you that "the vast, vast majority of tech engineers" would not assume that "other countries" automatically meant "the very best". The general consensus in my neck of the woods is that engineers of foreign origin are about on par with our native engineers. The consensus I've seen in pop culture is that the foreign engineers are generally much worse. I can only imagine the question that would lead to the response above:
Q: If faced with a choice between a top foreign engineer or a mediocre American one, which would you hire?
A: The foreign one. I'd want to work with the very best.
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
So why can't *I* do the same thing with a lawyer, notary, accountant? You telling me *there* I have to use a local person? 2+2=4 in China too.
Oh that's different.
Mostly random stuff.
Be careful AC. You're treading too close to racism. Any argument that "we need to do X because Y people are superior to Z" is very easily struck down in public policy.
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
As others here have already posted, I call BULLSHIT of this quote by Joe Green. This is nothing more than political propaganda. I worked in the computer industry over 35 years for DEC, EDS, HP, Loral Aerospace, and others. My roles ranged from component repair at customer location (soldering iron & oscilloscope), customer service manager, system engineering project manager, database admin, sales support, system admin, and virtualization work. As also stated by an early poster, I don't know of a single colleague that would agree with the sentiment expressed in the Joe Green quote. I worked with many software people holding visas. Many are very competent and motivated. Others not so much. If Mr Green thinks the 'best' are outside the United States, then perhaps Facebook, Zuckerberg, and Mr Green should relocate to become permanent expatriates.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...
Pretty sure the job description for junior programmer that the DOL uses doesn't qualify for an H1B slot...
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
The vast, vast majority of tech engineers that I talked to who are from the United States are very supportive of bringing in people from other countries because they want to work with the very best."
That is some grade-A 200 proof certified bullshit. I am involved in a multi-national project team where we support a company in the UK who is outsourcing a good deal of their work to India. We get raked over the coals all the time for how expensive our consulting rates are in comparison to the Indian company. Yet we regularly have situations where a single one of our mid-level software engineers (Good people, $75K salary, 4 year degree from public US university, but not the "very very best") can accomplish in one week what took a team of 10 engineers in India 2 - 3 months.
Send me bright, hard working American programmers. We don't need all these mythical offshore tech workers.
Gets you exactly what you want to hear!
"The vast, vast majority of tech engineers that I talked to who are from the United States are very supportive of bringing in people from other countries because they want to work with the very best."
Anyone who has worked in the IT field long enough knows this truth -- there are rockstar, mediocre and just plain awful tech workers in both the foreign and domestic camps. However, other than people complaining in general about how awful people they have to work with are, I've never heard anyone say anything like "All US engineers/programmers/IT guys are universally bad and so my company should hire foreign workers so I get to work with the best of the best." (I've seen a lot of people who *think* they're the best of the best and aren't. I'm pretty good and would *never* give myself the label "rockstar" like some of these idiots do.)
The central argument against something like this isn't "I want my job protected at all costs against competition." It's the fact that large employers are working to reduce the baseline salary for everyone regardless of talent level. It sounds like the "vast, vast majority of tech engineers" interviewed for this aren't really workers -- they're probably startup founders given the lobbying org this guy works for (fwd.us). The guy who came up with Snapchat probably isn't coding anymore -- he's busy trying to convince people that Snapchat is worth 44 billion dollars.
I've worked in a few different companies, and been on lots of projects (I'm in IT services.) I've seen lots of perspectives. I was on the systems integration team for a very large offshored dev project to replace a critical system that basically had to be thrown out, taken back in house and reworked. I've also seen situations where offshore coding and H-1B holders end up doing decent work. The same goes for the US as well...I've been very fortunate to work with a few people who *really* knew their stuff in the little niche I work in. They're few and far between, and very expensive, but worth it. There's also horror stories...I remember one guy who basically BS'd his manager for over 3 years that he was administering a systems management application, but in reality he was doing the absolute bare minimum to keep it from falling over (and yes, I wound up having to clean up the mess.) I've dealt with systems guys who have absolutely no concept of troubleshooting, and just lack a grasp of the basics. Everyone starts out that way, but there are some people (domestic AND foreign) who don't put the effort into getting better. This is why arguments like this are so hard to completely refute, but on the other hand are mostly BS.
I think companies need to get back to investing in their employees and keeping them around for a while to see a return on that investment. If they did that, employees would be more loyal and employers wouldn't feel like (a) training money is "wasted" and (b) they need to hire a ready-made rockstar with every single skillset they could possibly need. Job descriptions are crazy -- they want everything, when in reality a good systems engineer can jump between hardware, software, operating systems, etc. pretty easily given enough time to learn the basics.
Not superior, just cheaper. The guy is right when he states that, in tech, "The difference between someone who's truly great and just sort of okay is really huge". It stands to reason that you'd pay a hell of a lot more to the truly great compared to the good, and that the good still earn quite a bit more than the sort of ok. Funny how that never seemed to happen, though, except in a few companies I've seen (where you also had management reeling in horror at the fact that some techies made more than them). I bet there's plenty of talent to go around in the US, but top performers command top pay or they'll up and leave. Foreign workers are a cheaper and less mobile work force.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
And the program is only supposed to be for filling jobs that CANNOT OTHERWISE BE FILLED. It's supposed to bring in geniuses and highly skilled technical workers, not fill the cubicle mazes with bodies.
What the H1B program really needs are some quantifiable metrics, i.e.
= You can only bring in H1B people for jobs where the qualified US applicant pool is smaller than X. (Only allow for highly specialized jobs)
= A person on an H1B visa must be paid at least the average regional salary for their job position (remove the lower wage incentive)
= The job which the H1B person is being hired for must require a 4 year college degree and the candidate must have received said degree from a recognized
institution.
I also support a tax on these workers, to be paid by the employer in addition to normal wages and taxes, that would directly fund educating/retraining American workers to fill tech jobs that are open. Note, this is a fair tax because only companies that want to use H1B visas would be burdened--it's totally their choice.
"As a tech worker myself, I don't see why foreign workers would be inherently worse."
They are not, *inherently* worse. Not by a long shot. Some of them are very, very good.
The problem is that they are being selected, not on the basis of technical skills, but on the basis of lower costs and more subservience. Companies prefer, not just foreign workers, but H1B workers specifically - because they are powerless and easier to abuse.
Just a look at the 'products' these so-called tech companies are churning out should be enough to give lie to the idea that they have any interest at all in technical excellence. They do not. They want cheap code-monkeys that will crank out utter crap as directed with no back talk, no wage pressures, and no looking for a better job to worry about.
"I mean I've seen some people, very much home grown, who seem to have such a poor grasp of how things work that I wonder how on earth they even have a job."
Sure. But we dont have any kind of monopoly on those people. Outsource to save money and you are likely to get the south asian equivalent - all the same problems, plus communication and cultural difficulties on top of it.
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...Like this idea. Let the immigrants come and do the work. Hell they can have the nightmare that has become the technical industry. I quit my job over a year ago, just because of how ridiculous doing work for a technical job has become.
Inherently built into the supporting factor(s) of the tech industry, is the eventual collapse of workers that want to work. Using the same business practices that are practiced today, the overseas folks that are going to be taking these jobs will eventually need to be replaced as well. And then what? The problem's not the workers, it's the work and those that design the work. By the way, those folks will not be replaced.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
They don't want 'talent' they want dirt cheap. If they could figure out a way to make everyone an unpaid intern which was only 1% as productive as GOOD talent they'd do that. Everyone needs to pull their heads out of their asses on this. Companies HATE you. They HATE having to pay you. And bringing in a few thousand H1B's is a political ploy to avoid getting slammed for sending the OTHER 3 million jobs to Asia. In ten years there won't be any tech jobs in the US. Wake the fuck up.
Most of our foreign (European) contractors are better developers (and all round co-workers) than the home grown US developers, unpopular thing to say but there it is. Add to that they are better educated in general than the US devs and US developers have the highest sense of self-entitlement and things start to look clear. I am a senior sysadmin and I prefer to deal with the foreign devs and select them for projects as they are not obsessed with position and work place politics, they just get it done.
That's easy to believe. I feel the same way.
Yet sometimes I hear people bitching about immigrants in other contexts. If they're agricultural workers instead of tech workers, somehow they're undesirable. That doesn't make any sense to me at all. It makes so little sense to me, that I think it's just plain stupid.
But that's just, like, my opinion, man. We don't open the borders. Every election we nearly unanimously scream that we want highly restricted immigration consisting of very few people, and the thought of making any moves toward meritocracy makes us so incredibly angry and resentful, that we go out of our minds with blind rage.
So, tech workers and tech industry customers (i.e. most of America), if this is how you really feel, then you need to live with the consequences. You can't say justice, fairness, and efficiency are important, yet also things you totally don't care about. Make up your fucking mind. If you speak about programmers from India in a fundamentally different way than farmers from Chihuahua, maybe you are the problem, psycho.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Green is a big fat liar. "The Best" account for less than 10k a year - across all disciplines. Cut all other visas then give these people green cards then citizenship.
75% of STEM workers leave the field due to substandard conditions. There isn't a recruiting problem, there is a retention problem.
I don't like unions, but this is one case where the lack of unions is hurting US tech workers. There is no lobbing group to call out companies on this kind of BS. You would need a very large well funded organization to even think of going up against the tech giants in the political arena. Maybe you could call attention to it on something like change.org, but I don't think it would be very effective without some lobbing money behind it. Anyone have any ideas that would actually work, because whining about isn't accomplishing anything as we've seen for many years now.
" I don't see why foreign workers would be inherently worse."
AS one that has had to work with some great guys I can tell you that communicating took 3-5X longer. Sorry but some accents are so thick that we had to waste so much time it was not funny, we finally gave up on meetings and went to text based communication.
Hamir is a fantastic guy, but I can not understand him, and he had trouble understanding me.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
they're bringing in low wage entry level tech drones from india.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
It is skilled labor, and yes there is a major difference between the best and the average, but almost no one cares.
There will be continued downward price pressure as the size of the work force increases, and the US will become a management layer like in every other industry that we once dominated. The few remaining programmers in the US will be very highly specialized workers.
No amount of protectionism is going to change that reality, not letting them in doesn't give the jobs to Americans, it just sends them overseas entirely. At least some portion of the money being injected into H1Bs is being recirculated in the local economy. Of course this shill is just trying to depress American wages, it has nothing to do with finding the best or brightest, besides we have genius visas for that. If we try to put up artificial barriers to this process more aggressive economies will simply take the jobs away. If you feel that your wage and job is threatened by H1B influx, its time to either climb the skill ladder or make a move into a different industry.
All they want H1B visa's will be granted, each one hired must be paid at least 50% higher than the national median or local median, whichever is higher, for that job.
If they REALLY need higher skilled workers, make the fuckers pay for them.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Lots of geniuses FAIL. They fail spectacularly.
To be truly successful, you need to be a genius and be lucky.
I don't care how smart you are, you need the luck - if for no other reason than being born in the right country, not having a debilitating disease, and not having family that desperately needs your help. Because sometimes good luck is simply not having bad luck.
But that's beside the point. Lots of genius just had the wrong timing. There was this guy - a real genius. he came up with a great idea to help kids tie their shoes. But someone else came out with Velcro shoes that year. If he had his idea one year earlier, he would have made a couple of million and the Velcro guy would end up selling the idea to the Kid's Shoe King, instead of becoming the Kid's Shoe King.
Genius is not that rare, and the difference between the best and the second best guy is for all purposes irrelevant. Other things matter more than creativity and intelligence.
Timing, luck, and hard work matter just as much as genius.
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And how, prey tell, do you determine who is and is not employed, and who is and is not a US Citizen here on Slashdot?
... that none of the things you listed are "the latest technologies".
That being said, I'll tell you what most of us here on Slashdot do know, regardless of if we are employed or a US citizen
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
This isn't a tech report, it's political propaganda. There's plenty of awesome U.S. techs to do the jobs that are out of them, just as good as the imports, they just want U.S. wages.
That last bit is the flaw in your argument. You mistakenly think there is such a thing as "US wages". The talent pool is global and what matters is your productivity versus your price. If you demand more in wages you had better be significantly more productive and able to prove it. Your economic value to any company is based solely on productivity per dollar spent. If an overseas worker can do the work needed and is willing to do it for less money then you had better find a way to increase your value either by improving productivity or decreasing your price.
Pretending that your citizenship is any kind of meaningful protection against economic reality is just foolish. I understand that the reality of H1B visas and the rest is a harsh reality but its a reality that isn't going to change. Even if you did away with H1B visas altogether they are merely the symptom of the bigger problem which is wage disparity for a given talent level. US workers are highly paid relative to their talent compared with IT workers elsewhere and the economic consequence of that is that companies will seek lower labor costs wherever possible. This is true for ALL labor intensive industries. Get rid of H1B visas and I guarantee you will see some other equally odious tactic to reduce labor costs take its place. The only thing that will preserve high US IT wages is to develop structural economic advantages to hiring US IT workers. On a price/performance basis you need to make US IT workers the best in the world. Any solution that does not address that fact is doomed to fail.
The difference between a company which is truly great and just sort of okay is really huge. Most of our large tech companies are just sort of okay and think they have to hire cheaper workers from other countries, and get special US government favors in order to turn a profit or to stay in business. I wish we could get truly great US companies.
He's right, I have said that. Of course, I always follow it with "but only if they have unrestricted visas that give them the same freedom I have to shop the market and work for whomever they want", and I suspect everyone he's talked to (presuming he isn't making it up) have said something similar.
Because when the best of the best make $200k a year, it kicks the wind of out the whiners who complain about the the average programmer salary. But when they work for $80k and they can't switch jobs, that depresses my salary, and that is precisely why lying fuckwits like Joe Green and Mark Zuckerberg want to bring them here.
"We want A workers at C prices."
Table-ized A.I.
I worked for a small company where the two guys writing the communications protocols were ESL, one was Hispanic, the other was Russian. They basically couldn't understand each other in English. Amusing that it was comm protocols in particular.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
A person on an H1B visa must be paid at least the average regional salary for their job position (remove the lower wage incentive)
You realize that this is already a requirement of getting an H1B visa, right?
The job which the H1B person is being hired for must require a 4 year college degree and the candidate must have received said degree from a recognized institution.
The 4 year part is not a requirement, but having exceptional qualifications is already a requirement.
I also support a tax on these workers, to be paid by the employer in addition to normal wages and taxes, that would directly fund educating/retraining American workers to fill tech jobs that are open. Note, this is a fair tax because only companies that want to use H1B visas would be burdened--it's totally their choice.
While not direct, this is already effectively the case. When an employer needs to bring in an H1B worker they end up shelling out huge amounts for lawyers fees, moving expenses etc. It is not a cheap option to hire H1B workers. Quite the opposite in fact.
People that are so desperate to continue to put in long hours that they need recommendations on a recliner to work in?
Karma: Poor (Mostly affected by lame karma-joke sigs)
"The vast, vast majority of tech engineers that I talked to who are from the United States are very supportive of bringing in people from other countries because they want to work with the very best."
Ah, so any American engineer who disagrees with you obviously doesn't want to work with the very best, and since most of them are going to disagree with you, they prove your point that they're all mediocre.
too bad management isn't a meritocratic culture
Of course they want to hire the "very best", where "bestness" is measured by how little money they are willing to work for.
ALL companies want to hire the maximum performance for the minimum price. What else were you expecting? If someone else can do the job and demands less money to do it why wouldn't the company hire them instead of you? Labor is judged solely on productivity versus price at the end of the day. You can maximize that equation by increasing productivity or decreasing price but either way the question is what will maximize that ratio. Where the workers are from is irrelevant in the equation beyond how it affects their price or performance.
I understand the frustration with the H1B program and agree it is a real problem but it is a symptom, not the core problem. The core problem is that US wages versus performance are not obviously superior. Even if you get rid of the program the fundamental economic problem will remain because IT is a labor intensive industry. Companies will ALWAYS seek the optimal price/performance ratio regardless of industry.
To be honest, meritocracy itself isn't a very good way to run a business. It's the equivalent of sticking one's fingers in their ear and pretending that systemic and confirmation biases don't exist. I mean, just the word "meritocracy" - what does that even mean? "Rule by those who deserve to rule?!" It's a meaningless statement. In tech, this often just means favoring those who conform to the stereotype of an expert-level developer; e.g. (in order of importance) male, computer-literate, upper-middle-class, white; specifically with the goal of reducing the inclusiveness of the project more than actually improving the health of the development community.
Of course, this isn't what Zuck means when they say "meritocracy". What they mean is "better wage slaves", not "whiter developers" - in fact, white developers are waaay too expensive for them nowadays.
It's about cheapest workers, not better ones.
Not quite. It's about the cheapest workers that can still get the job done. Companies are in business to maximize profit and you do that by maximizing the performance of the labor per dollar spent. You can hire fewer but more productive workers or cheaper but less productive workers. If you cannot discern the difference in productivity (which can be difficult sometimes) then the cheaper guy will win almost every time. You will note that country of origin plays no direct role in that equation.
Why are only employees hired on merit and not executives? Because employees are hired by managers who at least have some experience judging fitness for the job. Executives, on the other hand, are hired by board members and shareholders who have absolutely NO experience hiring effective executives.
Corporations are like little countries and their management structure is like government. In an effective government, laws get made by people who have incentive to benefit the tax base. In a democracy this is the citizens who want a better life (and a better life leads to paying more taxes). In an autocracy this is the leaders who either act out of genuine patriotism or who get to skim some of the taxes for their own private treasury.
In a publicly traded corporation, policies are set by a completely different set of people whose only incentive is how much money they can squeeze out of the corporation. This is more like a colony than a country. Colonies have a tendency to remain poor and unjust because the rulers - who live far away and often aren't even be the same race as the citizens - just want as much tax revenue as they can get, as fast as they can get it, with as little work on their part as possible. America and India are both doing much better as countries than colonies. So why must our employers act as colonies of their wealthy investors?
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
"The vast, vast majority of tech engineers that I talked to who are from the United States are very supportive of bringing in people from other countries because they want to work with the very best." Replace tech engineers with chemists or biochemists and that is absolutely not true.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Exactly - truly great for this quarter's share price. Maybe the next couple of quarters. Beyond that I don't care as I'll be vested and can cash out.
You're looking for quotes? See my journal.
"no, its the fact that they work for 1/10th the salary"
That's just because there are ten times as many Chinese+Indians than Americans.
Therefore there are also ten times as many 'good ones' over there.
Maybe tech firms should hold on to some those dividends paid to shareholders and use them to train their employees if the employees are just "sort of ok." Or, maybe the government should say for every foreign worker you higher, you need to pay 20% of gross wages and benefits into a fund that will be used to train those "sort of ok" workers. That way, the short-term solution of hiring foreign workers leads to a long term domestic solution. It also keeps companies from having a windfall profit from the practice.
While not direct, this is already effectively the case. When an employer needs to bring in an H1B worker they end up shelling out huge amounts for lawyers fees, moving expenses etc. It is not a cheap option to hire H1B workers. Quite the opposite in fact.
Nope, the company uses one of the big Indian firms who bring in H1B in mass. They contract the H1B and pay 50% to 75% of the standard contract wage, the contracting company then kicks back 50% of it to the company hiring the contractor and pays the contractor $10 an hr. They also use various methods to keep the contract price down like classifying the contractor as a "Systems Admin" but then working them as a programmer. This is done because (in my area) the prevailing wage of a system admin is $57,000 a year compared to the prevailing wage of a programmer which is $100,000 a year.
I have also noticed that the Indian contractors will put in 80 to 90+ hours a week while only reporting 40 as the contracting firm promises to make it up to them once they get home. I actually had an Indian counterpart tell me this once.
Here's an example of how one company apparently applies that "no American available" policy:
What to Do When My US Company Won't Hire Americans?
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Even if the accent isn't a problem, sometimes cultural biases can make communication rough. I once spent a two hour long meeting going in circles with someone who'd lived in the US for a decade now and spoke nearly flawless English, but who entirely failed to grasp the concept of what we were supposed to be discussing. We needed X, he assumed we needed Y, and it was only at the end that we finally convinced him to give us the X we'd asked for in the beginning.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Then your company is breaking the law and you should report them. Companies are required to pay above the prevailing wage for the position and region. We paid both of our H1B workers well above average for our staff and when they worked out sponsored their green cards (and boy is that process a cluster!), we're the kind of employer that the program was actually designed for, we were looking for extremely rare talent sets and had advertised the positions for months before looking abroad. I have to say that I have much bigger problems with the screwups in the green card program than I do with the H1B system, permanently bringing smart people from abroad raises the GDP of the US and brings diversity to the country.
It's actually possible to both "pay above the prevailing wage for the position and region" and seriously underpay H1B workers at the same time. All you have to do is define the job in the right way to drive down the "prevailing wage" for it and then hire someone into the job but have their duties be different. Congratulations on being the exception to the rule. My employer, who I deliberately refuse to name, is actually pretty good, but we hire a lot more H1B workers than Americans for certain jobs and it's not logical to conclude that they are "better" than Americans. Cheaper? Yes. I also briefly dated an H1B worker at another company. I'm pretty sure she makes $20,000 to $30,000 less than an American would at her job, but her company is really small so they somehow get away with it, maybe by defining her job differently than what her actual duties are.
Apparently you company has a soul. Sadly, that is not the norm.
My first reaction to the summary (because, let's face it, I didn't read the article) was that "If you want better workers TRAIN THEM!" But why invest in your workforce when they can leave? Visa "hostages" are stuck with you.
I refuse to sign
There's also the fact that a lot of foreign applicants completely fabricate their credentials, with the full buy-in from the institutions that churned out their degrees. So while there will be some applicants who graduated from top tier schools, there will also be a lot who graduated from the equivalent of DeVry who have fantastic resumes that are full of BS. And you won't find that out until long after you've hired him.
I wonder if this practice is also influencing the "requirements bloating" that happens in HR departments. Fake resumes get turned in that have all these fabulous sounding things, so they plop them into the job requirements - if some resumes have them, that means some applicants should have them too! Next thing you know they want someone with 10 years experience with Ruby on Rails.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Obama has been suckling the nipple of the tech giants for a long time. Payback is hell.
Conservative, mod down for violating
the require college degree can be used to get rid of US workers / make so weed you a to X degree that the H1B has an a US worker is unlikely to have. X being one that can be one from an non us UIN and or not even an CS / tech one.
Also IT jobs do not need college degree any ways.
Also add forced OT pay for 60+ hours a week (if the OT is over 50% of the year) and X2 OT at 70-80+ (removes the lock to job (can't say no to ot) and get the work of 2 out of one)
YES. I'm not free to work anywhere I want on the planet yet these companies are free to set up shop anywhere?
You are free to work wherever you want. Plenty of US citizens work outside the US. I have at times in my career. They are called expatriates and it's quite normal. If the opportunity for you is in China or France then go there and stop whining about it. Maximizing your own income may require you to look outside the town where you grew up and also may require some actual sacrifice on your part.
The "prevailing wage" argument is complete BS, and everyone knows it. It is a self referencing statistic. Of course you can't pay people less than you pay them.
'The vast, vast majority of tech engineers that I talked to who are from the United States are very supportive of bringing in people from other countries...'
Name them.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
I agree. Even if what TFA says is true (it is not) then the US companies would be competing with companies around the world for those people. And their own governments.
Not to mention the ones who start their own companies and work for themselves.
Which would mean that those awesome programmers would have all the bargaining power. They wouldn't be accepting H-1B wages.
Statistically, there cannot be enough of "the best" to feed the stated demand for "the best".
But it makes sense if you substitute "cheaper" for "the best".
And that is reflected in the quality of the code being produced.
We have a visa for 'top' 'extraordinary' workers. It is the O visa. Funny there are no caps for it...
H1B is being abused and they know it. It was meant for 1-2 month gigs and they leave. Instead its turned into 6 year stints. Nearly 500k people are h1b at this time. A 6 year job is a job not a short term contract work. You can produce front to end a decent software product in 2 years. If it takes longer you are probably doing something very wrong.
There are give or take about 140 million jobs in the US. Of those 1.5-3 million depending on how you count it are IT jobs. Or about 1 out of 5 IT jobs are filled by an H1B worker.
Wages in a sellers market should go up. However, they are flat to no growth. Because companies are using the h1b to depress wages by reducing mobility.
I make it a point to show h1b workers that they are truly getting fucked over. I am currently on 15 who have up and quit and moved on to get better pay.
Many do not realize they are getting fucked over. As the standard they are coming from is so much lower. I show them how they could have *even* more and their greed kicks in every time. I also make sure they push hard on HR to get that green card. They then realize HR does not work for them either. I make it expensive to keep an H1B. Funny thing is I accidentally lucked into this at my first job as I saw a friend being screwed over being passed up for 3 raises.
The solution I would propose is that for every H1B, a local must be hired for the same position to shadow the H1B as a training program. The law should require that the H1B and the local worker can only work at the same times, and that only one of them can produce anything for the company that gets use in a tangible way. The local worker and H1B would need to be paid the exact same wage.
Given that the claim is that H1Bs for needed and intended to fill positions where there are no available qualified local workers, this would solve that problem by requiring local workers to be trained, and eventually removing the need for the H1B. It would remove the practice of hiring cheap foreign workers as a cost savings measure, and it would still allow the importing of highly skilled labor when it really was necessary.
Hey Zuck! There is a whole army of non-US Ivy league MBA's who will be more than happy to produce the same BS as Joe Green for a fraction of the cost. Don't you want to work with the "Best"? Doesn't Joe Green want you to?
Average Intelligence is a Scary Thing
What? You don't have 42 years as a J2EE programmer working prototype-driven structures?
i need to gargle with some bleach after reading that smelly, facetious crap
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
. . . when we all know of dozens and dozens of times these foreign visa scab workers have never been vetted and end up being responsible (that is, their corporate dipshit bosses bear the ultimate responsibility) for crap problems which arise accordingly. Plus there have been numerous studies supporting this. Sorry, charlie, your b.s. ain't flying this time. It's 2014, do you know where your economy is?
Hope and Change!
One of the more popular requests among business and family groups is a change in the way green cards are counted that would essentially free up some 800,000 additional visas the first year, advocates say.
As a manager at a company that does to hire the best and the brightest, I can say that people calling for more H1-B visas are full of s#!t.
The biggest users of H-1Bs are consulting companies, or as Ron Hira calls them, "offshore-outsourcing firms."
"The top 10 recipients in [the] last fiscal year were all offshore-outsourcers. And they got 40,000 of the 85,000 visas — which is astonishing," he says.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/allte...
Here is the break-down of my reports.
15 - born in the USA.
3- naturalized citizens when I hired them.
2- from Egypt on L1 visas (we have an office in Cairo)
2- from Korea that had green cards when I hired them
1- from China that was a grad student that we supported. F1 students visa changed to H1B by obtaining a sponsorship position with an H1B sponsor company.
1- from India that was a grad student we supported. F1 students visa changed to H1B by obtaining a sponsorship position with an H1B sponsor company.
It is fairly easy to convert F1 visa for a student that has completed graduate school in the USA to an H1B, and as far as I can tell there is no limit.
(I am not an immigration lawyer, nor do I play one on TV.)
If tried to hire highly qualified individuals from outside the US and was told that I would not be able to get them H1B visas because they were all taken (by the body shoppers). These people had PhDs from prestigious Universities and years of relevant experience. They made the unfortunate mistake of not attending a US
graduate school.
So the solution is quite simple. Stop giving H1B visas to "consulting companies".
more cowbell
Ugh. I'm so sick of all this nationalist bullshit. Why are we so afraid of the global economy? People should be free to move between different countries and seek employment at will. Ultimately, it's better for the world if we break down these artificial barriers.
. . US workers should focus on making bombs and various incendiaries to implement blowback against all the criminal corporations out there: GE, AT&T, Chase, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Blackstone Group, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, KKR, TPG, etc., etc., etc. Time to bring back the days of the McNamara brothers, Emma Goldman, Alexander Birkman ---- in other words, time to go Old School!
H1B is being abused and they know it. It was meant for 1-2 month gigs and they leave. Instead its turned into 6 year stints
Almost true. While you are correct that the H1-B visa in itself is limited to a 6 year maximum stay, the visa can be renewed indefinitely if the holder is the beneficiary of an approved I-140 petition in the 5th year. This means that any H1-B holder can stay on that H1-B for a long time as long as they find someone willing to sponsor their greencard, and they have about 4 years -in the US- to find them.
Reason for this is that there is disconnect between the amount of H1-B visas (which are not limited per country) and amount of greencards (which are limited per country). We all know which country I'm talking about: the folks from India, however you may feel about their presence, are hitting this the most: For each EB category (EB1, EB2, EB3 in general), there are 265 greencards available per month. That's a little over 9500 per year. On the other side is the number of H1-B (and L-1) visa that get allocated to workers chargeable to India. Just for H1-B, that number comes close to 170,000 just for FY2012 (source). Then there are the L1 visa holders, which are uncapped.
So, you end up having ~10k greencards, vs ~200k influx, just for India alone. This means that there is a huge waiting list for people with approved I-140s, but not eligible to file for AOS. What are you going to do with them? Sent them back? Politics chose to let them stay by renewing their H1-B every 1 to 3 years, even after the 6th year.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
Good point, now please allow me to describe the "meritocratic" Amerikan process I came into contact with at Microsoft in the 1990s as a tech support contractor (was a highly skilled programmer once upon a time, but due to advanced age I found myself working down the jobs structure): they gave us an preliminary tech knowledge test to ascertain if we qualified, but of course, refused to tell us our scores [I qualified, and later find out I was only of two who had actually passed said test --- always be hyper suspicious when they refuse to tell you your score].
Next, we go through several weeks training, where they assure us that only those who pass the test finals will set on a rack to answer clients tech problems --- only two of us (older and more experienced) actually pass the Operations exam and the Networking exam, yet everyone goes to work the next week.
Yes this was only tech support for MS Windows 95, but that is how they, MS, and the rest of the industry rolls --- absolutely zero meritocratic processes, although MS and a few others are obsessive about hiring Ivy League types.
Seriously, H1B allows a company to LOCK IN SOMEBODY at a low rate. Basically, they are a slave here.
Likewise, more than 50% of our legal visas go to Mexico, and little of it is for those that can help America.
We need to solve the illegal issue AND CHANCE THE IMMIGRATION LAWS. Get rid of H1/2 B. It is a NIGHTMARE. And quit making visa be based on nations or who they know here. Instead, make the green card be based on what the person can do here (i.e. PhDs or expertise in needed areas). However, with a green card, it means that these ppl can move around to better jobs.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
How many technical interviews have you done, as an interviewer, in your life?
I have done about 220. Evaluating technical skills is dramatically easier than evaluating many other types of skill, in particular, it's a lot easier than evaluating skills in management, marketing, customer service .... anything with a large component of soft, people skills. You can ask a technical person to achieve a very specific, tightly scoped technical task during an interview and if you know the question well quickly get a feel for how good they really are. I wouldn't want a hiring decision to be made based on just one interview, but in the hands of a good interview it still yields valuable data. For someone without specific technical skills you end up having to rely on much vaguer and more gamaeble questions like "Tell me about a time you overcame a problem of type ", the answers to which are both hard to verify and easily manipulated by people who want to make themselves look good.
I'm afraid I must agree with the original statement. The difference between someone who is merely OK and is great, well, that's huge. Someone who is merely OK will come in to work each day and will (probably) resolve the bugs or implement the features you set them. They will probably not come up with a solution that puts you ahead of the pack. They may waste large amounts of time on trivial things or produce something that sucks because they are only familiar with technology X but that's a poor fit for problem Y. Their technical judgement may be flaky - in the worst case you will have to spend a lot of time double checking what they're doing, yet they will start demanding more responsibility because they've stuck around for a while. The very best will teach you algorithms and techniques you never knew about. They'll come up with the unique feature that makes you stand out from the competition. They'll be fun to work with and help you recruit other great people. The difference is not to be sneered at.
The only economic reason they'd hire an American over an H1B is if the American is willing to let his kids starve and be downright abused for $10 an hour after spending his whole life studying his craft.
You outsourcing shills are downright retarded. It should be criminal. US IT workers shouldn't have to live like utter slaves, work 80 hour weeks and need food stamps just because some barely qualified H1B will do it for $10/hr. We are not disposable blue collar idiots. We are white collar professionals and we just want the same damn respect accountants, other dept managers, other educated employees and even secretaries get within the same organization. We are often abused just about everywhere companies get away with it. We're also treated with copious amounts of paranoia and mistrust.
How would you feel if hospitals outsourced all their surgical labor to Mexican H1B's getting paid $19,000/yr and still gave you the same $2,000 bill for giving your kid antibiotic eardrops after a 5 minute visit?
Americans can't compete on price. Point blank. It costs too much to BE an American and LIVE in America. We can't tolerate spending our entire lives (and a lot of personal money) dedicated to being the skilled folks we are only to be forced to compete at a hair above minimum wage. Get a grip.
And you think unionization killed US manufacturing? No. Outsourcing did. And as good as we are at pissing off the rest of the world, being a society of unemployed skilled workers, management, minimum wage employees and lawyers will kill us if the world cuts us off.
Because different countries have different economic, social, and legal systems in place. We have no say in how other economies work, so we have to have barriers that prevent damaging leakage. It is the same reason that you don't share your bank account with everyone.
I like your idea as it is an interesting difference to my opinion in that if the H1Bs are so critical to a company that all H1B holders should be the individuals in the company with the highest total compensation (including benefits, retirement packages, relocation packages, company provided vehicles/drivers, etc). This holds true given the premise (probably false) that this is a particularly rare skill set that they couldn't find anyone in the US to do the job and couldn't train someone into the position in time since it is so critical. For cases where this is truly a critical unique skill set that is needed to complete a project or task this shouldn't be much of a problem, yes I do realize that such cases will exist, since huge companies that import vast quantities of H1Bs can eat the cost since we hear that CEO compensation isn't a problem, and tiny companies there more than likely isn't a huge spread in compensation.
Either way making your change or mine would do wonders for showing how critical these people actually are to the company instead of being a method to save some money. It needs to be clear that H1Bs are a more expensive route. Also why don't we see any H1Bs in management since it seems finding highly qualified competent management is truly a rare thing?
Time to offend someone
"The vast, vast majority of tech engineers that I talked to who are from the United States are very supportive of bringing in people from other countries because they want to work with the very best."
Let's see, I'll bet it went something like this:
"if it meant you could keep your job, would you want to work with the very best engineers that I'd like to hire from foreign countries?"
"Does that mean I can keep my job if you hire foreign engineers?"
"I'm looking for a yes/no answer here."
" uh...yes"
Refer to http://www.epi.org/publication... for the truth about the "best and brightest" BS.
If those foreign engineers they are going to hire are the best one would reasonably expect them to be paid as if they are the best. Does the data on salaries of current and past H1B visa workers indicate that they are being paid like they are the best?
There is only one way out of this mess. Become financially independent before age 50. Do not let yourself become enslaved by debt. Reject materialism, and seek out providers of the lowest cost products and services.For more details, read some of the articles on http://mrmoneymustache.com. This guy was an engineer, and
through will power and determination saved enough money to not be subject to the whims of employers.
the shitbags who think they're degree
Quality!
If I spent as much retraining US workers as I did hiring those skillsets I've filled with H1B's, I'd have fired at least half for not doing a fucking thing after failing to learn in whatever training they wasted money on.
If you spent more time retraining workers.... then you'd fire half of them?
"failing to learn in"?
because I've looked for 10 months for all three of them before giving in an attempting the bullshit to find someone willing to work with the appropriate skillset.
. . . I'm pretty sure that "an" is supposed to be "and". So.... you gave in... and then attempted.... to find someone with the skillset?
Maybe that "an" is superfluous. Maybe you spent 10 months before giving up and accepting you failed to find anyone with the skillset.
Have you considered training yourself in English?
One of the big flaws in corporate America is the idea that a couple day's "training" where they sit you in front of a salesman and some slides will actually impart anything of value. "Job Training" takes years of working with a mentor showing you the ropes the entire way with both of you doing meaningful work. It's not something you get a cert for after a week. At least, you know, for the sort of knowledge work that I'm tasked with. Certs and that sort of training are good for, say, introducing a new tool when nobody in the office has any experience with it.
But hey, let me guess, you need someone to be an expert with a laundry list of niche technologies and you're only going to pay $40K in shitsville, Iowa. Good luck with that.
In his defence, he must have learned LISP a very long time ago, since it became Lisp some time before 1980s.
Ezekiel 23:20
"Green explained why tech may not want to settle for laid-off U.S. talent when the world is its oyster."
Yes. Keep those US workers unemployed and replace them with cheaper foreign workers.
Something just seems wrong about this. Especially when I'm sure many of the unemployed US workers could fulfill some roles just fine.
Outsourcing has already killed enough jobs in America.
Now the foreign talent is coming here and doing the same work at cheaper prices.
There is nothing contradictory between the two, so there is no reason that the both systems couldn't be implemented.
I doubt that your field is so specialized that there exists no American who could do any of the three jobs, but maybe you have other things working against you like:
A shit work environment
A shit location that no one wants to live in
Shit compensation
Made up shit job requirements (looking at you 10+ years Java experience in 2000, or 5+ years experience with Win2k3 in '04)
So maybe the answer is to improve one or more of the above until someone actually wants to work for your company. Then again you are AC so for all I know you are Sergey Brin shilling for you next quarterly report to increase shareholder value.
Time to offend someone
"The difference between someone who's truly great and just sort of okay is really huge,"
Now, I will run it through my bullshit translator, aaaaand...
"The difference between someone who's willing to work for less money because they live in a poor country and someone who wants a competitive wage is really huge,"
I'm pretty sure that doesn't make any sense. How, exactly, will allowing foreign nationals to move to the United States and seek employment cause harm?
Ultimately, these arguments usually come down to something like this: if people from less developed nations move into the United States and seek employment, the increased supply of labor will reduce the average cost of labor within the country and increase the burden on our public services. This is bad for the people who already live in the United States, so those people should stay in their less-developed nation, where they will have a lower quality of life but they won't reduce our own quality of life.
In other words, it's nationalist bullshit that places greater importance on the quality of life for U.S. citizens, simply because they were born in this nation and those other people weren't born in this nation. We're willing to let people outside of our borders starve to death, as long as it means that we won't suffer even the most marginal decline in our own quality of life. It's selfish, and the entire process of thought relies on an "us vs. them" mentality which places a lower value on the life of someone who lives outside the arbitrary borders of this country. Ultimately, allowing people to move more freely between countries will foster a greater emphasis on the importance of global welfare, instead of taking this "us vs. them" mentality that places the utmost importance on the welfare of our own citizens and is indifferent to the suffering of the global population.
I might add that a huge portion of this country used to arbitrarily belong to Mexico, but we conquered that territory in the Mexican-American War, taking over huge sections of territory that weren't even part of the initial dispute over the exact location of the Texan border. Now, in the modern era, immigrants traveling to the United States from Mexico is a huge cause for concern in the U.S., with people concerned that they're going to "take our jerbs", when in reality, those people are just trying to migrate into territory that originally belonged to their nation in the first place, before we took it by force of arms.
Furthermore, all of this anxiety that immigrants are going to ruin our economy is essentially unfounded in the first place, and is repeated ad nauseam by people with little understanding of economics who are making policy arguments that are based on ideologies that have been spoon-fed to them, about issues that they don't know anything about. The National Economic Council, the Domestic Policy Council, the President's Council of Economic Advisers, and the Office of Management and Budget published a joint report in 2013 which explains why immigration reform will ultimately strengthen the economy.
The only economic reason they'd hire an American over an H1B is if the American is willing to let his kids starve and be downright abused for $10 an hour after spending his whole life studying his craft.
If you spend your life studying something that allows you to be replaced for $10/hour then you are frankly retarded. Nobody owes you a comfortable living. You need to earn it and part of that is having the foresight to see what might be valuable to employers.
US IT workers shouldn't have to live like utter slaves, work 80 hour weeks and need food stamps just because some barely qualified H1B will do it for $10/hr. We are not disposable blue collar idiots.
Who is suggesting that you do? If you provide enough value for the wages you command then you should be able to live very nicely. But if your job can be done by someone willing to work for $10 per hour then you better reconsider just how valuable what you do actually is. Furthermore, just because someone does a "blue collar" job doesn't mean they are an idiot. Stop looking down your nose at people who don't work in an air conditioned office typing on a computer. You think you are too good to get your hands dirty? Are you really that arrogant?
Americans can't compete on price. Point blank.
Americans ARE competing on price at all times and the movement of certain types of jobs proves that fact. You could not be more wrong. Anyone who thinks price doesn't factor in is delusional. That includes competing for wages. You can ask for whatever you want but that doesn't guarantee the market will bear your asking price.
Furthermore the per-capita US income is in the top 5 in the world. How sustainable do you think that is? I suggest you learn about regression toward the mean. There are 5 people in China for every 1 in the US. Do you think Americans are smarter or harder working or more deserving? Do you think Americans are somehow special so they don't have to compete with the other 95% of the world? Grow up. The US has had a good run since WWII but that doesn't guarantee it will stay on top without a lot of hard work and sometimes some belt tightening too. Some jobs are going to move to where they make more economic sense. If you want to keep high paying jobs in the US then there is a lot of hard work to do. Better get busy because the rest of the world isn't going to wait for your lazy ass.
And you think unionization killed US manufacturing?
Nothing has killed US manufacturing. I work in manufacturing in the US and have for most of the last 20 years. I run a manufacturing company. The US manufactures over $3 Trillion in goods each year. The US manufacturing sector alone would be among the 10 largest economies in the world by GDP. Manufacturing in the US is alive and well and anyone who says otherwise has no idea what they are talking about. The number of jobs in US manufacturing has fallen just like it did in agriculture a hundred years ago but that is not by itself a bad thing. Would you prefer that 50%+ of the nation's workers be employed on farms like they were 150 years ago? What has changed is that the US predominately manufactures capital intensive rather than labor intensive goods.
These are the same companies that as part of setting up shop, extorted millions of dollars in tax exemptions out of the cities and states in which they operate their businesses, thereby depriving the public education system of the revenues needed to help their students achieve at the level the companies "require." They created this problem, and it's wholly disingenuous to claim that the only viable solution is to look outside of the country for talent. I'm not exactly a proponent of Big Government, but if President Obama is the only one who can make this point to them, and get them to wake up to the ethics of their situation, then he should absolutely clamp down on tech-driven immigration.
What you say is partially true.
Companies are not interested in making over someone who isn't a good employee into one. It's the same reason you don't buy burnt out light bulbs, and remanufacture them into working light bulbs yourself, when there are perfectly good light bulbs sitting on the next shelf.
The idea that companies should provide vocational training to potential employees because the educational system has failed to provide them with the ability to be an asset to a potential employer is wrong headed. It is not the responsibility of the employer to make a person employable, it is the responsibility of the person to make themselves employable.
IF we were talking about blue collar manufacturing jobs, or sales/cashier/hamburger jobs, then yeah, apprenticeships and on the job training make sense; in technical areas, it doesn't make sense, any more than it would ti hire someone at a hospital, and on-the-job train them until they were a doctor.
True and I wasn't trying to imply there was. I just hadn't thought about yours a possible solution. I think the next time I write my elected officials on the subject I will offer both, especially since one of my Senators was responsible for the introduction of legislation that would have automatically bumped up the number of H1Bs if the cap was met up to some ridiculous amount.
Time to offend someone
While I agree with an overwhelming majority of your expressed sentiment, I take issue with one little part.
I was under the impression that ITTT really was a good school now. Are you just talking smack because you're tired of working with Indians, or am I wrong in my belief?
Disclaimer: While I'm not Indian (although I am a European immigrant), I do live in one of the most Indian places in the United States (my town of ~100k is 28.3% Indian).
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
I spend a large portion of my day answering questions and fixing screw-ups by these "truly great" workers. I would take laid-off, older, experienced workers in a heartbeat.
It's a very typical practice to have insane requirements that just aren't practical for jobs you have no intention of locally sourcing. Spend 10 minutes on a major job board and you'll find them. It will be like 6+ years experience in a product that's only been out for 6 or 7 years. They'll want someone that's an expert on three or four unrelated things that it's just not likely someone WILL be an expert on all of them -- expert in Java, SAN and Networking with 8+ years project management experience. They will post someone with CCIE level experience and be asking for someone at a CCNA level salary.
I've noticed you'll find this behavior often in older public companies that have exhausted their market growth through saturation and have made every reasonable efficiency improvement they can make without hitting salaries and cutting workforce. This is the last step of the constant drive for greater profits to appease shareholders.
Being in one of these companies at this transition period is not particularly pleasant and there's a better than good chance you'll get axed either on the front-end as they find a way to outsource your job or on the back-end as they prep the company to look more attractive to a potential buyer or after an acquisition and your job is marked as duplicate because someone from the other company is working for less and will get saddled with your work load.
Sad to say, but you've hit the nail on the head. If someone can do the same amount of work for less, then that's a benefit to both the employer, as well as the customers of the business, because it means higher productivity, and ultimately lower prices.
That being said, there's a *huge* range in capability in the tech industry that simply isn't effectively accounted for by salary scales - there are literally some people who can do things twenty times as fast as someone else, but no company I've ever been in has a salary range that varies by that much, even considering junior programmers compared to senior consultant/specialists.
I'm sure that anyone in tech has had the general experience that the vast majority of the work funnels through a small minority of the workforce - the distribution of talent is hugely imbalanced, but the salary scales don't reflect that.
Would you buy a product in US while you get exactly the same product for half price from China? I am not advocating one way or the other but this is how the system is suppose to operate. Or I go one step further, this is all based on people's fundamental drive for greed (or you call it productivity?) - don't blame the "system".
Mandate that all foreign workers have to be paid the exact same salary that a domestic worker would be paid to do the same job for the same knowledge/experience level. Watch the requests for foreign workers disappear and lawsuits appear because the govt is stepping on the rights of slave hol...er... tech companies to hire workers.
You would be correct. I have read several articles about how you can play word games with titles and responsibilities. For example, posting a Job as a "programmer/analyst" role, you can get away with paying someone a programmer salary but have them do more analyst work. Also, there can be issues with how the government classifies these types of jobs.
Complete Fucking Bullshit.
Like it or not, we have system that DOES control who works here. They want an exception so they can hire cheaper people. Their arguments aren't based on technological superiority, but costs. They fire people and then whine that they have no one and need to import workers
If they want to hire people from outside the U.S, set up shop overseas. Don't bring the Third World here.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Yes, actually. For instance, Facebook is shit from a UI viewpoint. What moron designed that? It looks and feels like it was designed by some dorm room college student...oh, wait! It was! And they stuck with that!
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Because when it comes to jobs, we don't even have a national economy. We have a local one. By the time you get into your 30s, most people have zero interest in packing up everything and moving to another state to get a job, much less another country. That barrier isn't artificial. It's ingrained in human nature.
When it becomes too easy for people to move to another place and take jobs, the inherent result is age discrimination. People who are younger and more mobile come in and take jobs that were needed by people who are less mobile, when the mobile people could just as easily have taken or created jobs closer to home.
It would be different if the world's wages were somewhat balanced, because then the number of young people leaving the U.S. for jobs would be balanced by the number of people entering. However, this is not the case. The U.S. pays higher wages to compensate for a higher cost of living. Therefore, those young people moving into the U.S. and taking jobs from older folks constitute a real burden. And at least in our lifetimes, there will never be balanced wages worldwide. There will always be some new third-world country to exploit for cheap labor. And workers in those countries will always benefit from coming to the U.S., where wages are higher. So tearing down those artificial barriers to labor entering the U.S. will always cause serious harm to workers in the U.S.
Worse, tearing down those barriers does nothing to improve the world on the average, at least for the foreseeable future. Because there will always be cheap labor pools to exploit, raising the standard of living in one country will only continue up until the point where they start demanding more money. At that point, they'll just bring the educational standards of another country up to the point where they can start exploiting it, and leave folks in the first country homeless and starving. The only true way to raise the quality of life around the world is to ensure that no one anywhere is willing to work for less than a living wage. This is, of course, hard to do.
If you want to see a demonstration of why a lack of barriers is a bad thing, you need only look at the Silicon Valley with respect to the United States as a whole. There are no barriers to moving to California from other states with lower cost of living and lower average salaries, so lots of young people move here to make more money. The result is that age discrimination is rampant, the cost of living has skyrocketed, and there aren't enough jobs to keep people from losing their homes. And now you're talking about making the problem worse by making the entire world flood to the Silicon Valley.
As far as I'm concerned, if a company wants to hire workers outside the U.S., they should create a division in another country and hire those employees locally. This has several benefits over H1Bs. First, it is less likely to result in a reduction in jobs in the U.S., because separate business units tend to work on separate projects, and have separate staffing needs. Second, it does not drive up the cost of living in the U.S. by artificially inflating demand for housing. Third, it puts a lot more money into the economies of those other countries, because those workers are spending money in businesses near their homes, rather than here. That makes it much more effective at driving up the standard of living in those other countries than bringing workers here would.
Why don't companies do this? Because they don't want to drive up living standards in other countries. They just want cheap labor from those countries. If they drive up living standards in those other countries, then workers from those countries would eventually star
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I can see from reading this thread that there is a lot of righteous anger about this issue. The question is, what are you going to do about it?
Just mouthing off on slashdot is not doing something. You need to let your elected representatives know that this issue is important to you and that they should not toe the party line on immigration just because Green and Zuckerberg, and their ilk are laying down big bucks to the the parties and campaign funds.
Writing your congressman and calling his office are just baby steps. What you need to do is vote incumbents out of a job. Eric Cantor, then the House Majority Leader lost his primary to a guy who campaigned on a mere $50,000 because of Cantor's support for immigration "reform" (i.e., letting loose the flood gates). That sobered the House Republican leadership up real fast.
Tech people have for too long wasted their votes on trivial social issues, or have not voted at all. You need to find candidates, support them, and get out the vote to oppose Zuckerberg, et. al. That is the only thing that can save your hides.
Allow me to conclude with a short poem by the great German playwright and poet, Bertolt Brecht*.
The Solution
After the uprising of the 17th June, the Secretary of the Writer's Union,
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee,
Stating that the people had forfeited the confidence of the government;
And could win it back only by redoubled efforts.
Would it not be easier in that case, for the government
To dissolve the people, and elect another?
* You may know him best as the author of "The Three Penny Opera" from which the song "Mack the Knife" was taken.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Nobody is saying that immigrants are going to ruin our economy. H1B workers are not immigrants. They're foreign workers. They hold no right to become citizens or permanent residents. They're just pure imported labor. There's a big difference.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I do not agree.
I have been in the tech industry for 25+ years and most of the time foreign means cheap workers.
I would also point out out, how incredibly frustrating it is to design technology over language and cultural barriers. Especially for non trivial infrastructure work spanning continents.
I finally asked management to just send our US team abroad to work for a year, otherwise I was going to quit.
What would have taken 3 years was done in 8 months time to I would like to point out.
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
They're not worse. But they are also NOT better. I have seen H1B workers who have such a poor grasp of things that I wonder how they even managed to fill out their visa applications. Most of the imported workers that companies want are not highly skilled workers, instead they want IT workers. They don't want workers to design new products, they want workers who will support products. Entry and junior level positions.
At an earlier job, the company I was at outsourced a small project to an Indian company. That company turned out to be two cousins. One cousin spoke good English but did not seem understand technology (a manager/marketing type). The other cousin was a programmer but did not speak English. So communicating technical concepts was a disaster.
I'm pretty sure a rich white guy posted this.
The real path to male liberation
The grueling two year primary & fund raising system for electing top US leaders need improvement. The past several winners have been barely OK.
I've found that most people who can't understand accents tend to be poor communicators themselves.
Let me guess... you have a heavy accent?
Most H1B workers I have met would prefer to immigrate to this country and become permanent residents, but unfortunately an H1B visa was their only option.
""The vast, vast majority of tech engineers that I talked to who are from the United States are very supportive of bringing in people from other countries because they want to work with the very best."
....you're brain dead. I wouldn't believe anything coming out of this shill's mouth.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
We are not disposable blue collar idiots. We are white collar professionals and we just want the same damn respect accountants, other dept managers, other educated employees and even secretaries get within the same organization.
If you are not in the 1%, then you are one of the rest.
Some might get a bit more, some might get a bit less.
That's all there is to it.
New things are always on the horizon
I agree that foreign worker are not inherently worse. However most of my recent experience with off-shore and H1B workers have been from low-cost providers *cough*Infosys*cough*IBM*cough*Perficient*Cough* that are selected strictly on cost, to "save money". Since these are low cost providers placing people in a really cheap account, they have to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find workers at the lowest cost possible. Therefore, most of those particular workers are not very good and the code they write can be really strange and it usually doesn't work. Sometimes someone really good happens to come along, but they usually don't stay very long. I would guess they find a better paying gig fairly rapidly...
.... I wonder if Google Car can be programed to run someone down.
Of course it can, it's has a computer right? Runs software? Oh ya.
But just so you know, if a Google Car does run him down, they will be looking at you first (and probably me second).
See ya in jail!
Be seeing you...
You can ask a technical person to achieve a very specific, tightly scoped technical task during an interview and if you know the question well quickly get a feel for how good they really are.
Along with that, with techies it's a lot easier to weed out the bullshit and outright lies on their resumes. I wish I had a dime for every candidate that listed something obscure on their resume to puff it up, and then couldn't answer basic questions that anyone familiar with it should know.
"I see here you've got some extensive VMS system administration experience and show it as an area of expertise."
"Yes."
"That was a really cool OS - I liked how DEC implemented file versioning. Can you tell me how one would distinguish different versions of the same file?"
"Umm...it was a long time ago, I don't really remember...."
"Okay, can you give me one of the hardware platforms supported by VMS?"
"I'm pretty sure the system I worked on was a 486."
After 30 seconds you can tell the guy doesn't have a clue, and the entire resume is now suspect.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Down with all the barriers!
I should be able to choose which country I pay personal taxes in too, it is only fair that I also get to shop around for the best rates available. The US wants an over 65% effective tax when all is said and done? Screw that, Bahrain says I owe nothing.
The local pharmacy wants big money for a prescription? Some importing can fix that problem.
Cigarette prices in NYC getting you down? Time for some arbitrage.
Problem with my order of a 5 megawatt magnetron and 50,000 smoke detectors? A vacation to central Africa sounds about right, I doubt they have a problem with it.
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
I don't think so. I was born and raised in NY in an immigrant family, living among other immigrants. You get used to hearing English spoken by people in Italian, Russian, Chinese, West Indian accents. In fact it becomes normal. What about someone not raised in a NYC sort of situation? A place where my NYC accent is out of place? They might have a hard time, not because they are poor communicators but because they are not attuned to the different cadence and inflection of the speaker.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Unfortunately, they didn't vote the opposite.
Living overseas for the past decade and a half, a lot of times I've described my job as "English to English translation". It's amazing how many times meetings are conducted in English because it's the only language both sides have in common-- but it is native to neither of them, and they both leave the room thinking they understood what was said, when in fact, neither did.
In my experience what they seem to be saying is true... I do circuit design at a large CPU design company. In my design group, I'd estimate 75+% of our new hires are foreign born and on H1B or simliar and it has nothing to do with the money... Everyone we interview gets the same set of technical questions and must have at least an Master of Science in Electrical Engineering. We get very, very few US citizen applicants let alone qualified ones. Might as well take the cream of the crop. I graduated from Arizona State in 2010 with my MS in EE and in my graduate level circuit classes, it was literally me and like 1 or 2 other guys (men) who were US citizens. Everyone else was from India or China. With no US kids enrolling in these advanced courses, it's no wonder we can't find enough people...
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t14.htm
your sector might be a niche
H1Bs may or may not be good. Local workers may or may not be good.
The larger issue is the use of H1Bs by the various subcontracting pimps.
If Google or Msoft is directly sponsoring an H1B, they're doing their due diligence on who they're getting. It's arguable whether that is "good for the country" or not. It probably is.
But the majority of H1Bs are going to subcontracting pimps, and they aren't scouring the world for geniuses. The warm body orgs aren't hiring the best and brightest, they're pushing who they have in their systems, and under their thumbs. Who they have the paperwork on.
The decision that the true hiring org makes is which pimp to procure from, not which genius to hire. It's hugely corrupting to the businesses involved, as the slush fund generated by taking 25% off the top of dozens of salaries is huge, so that millions of dollars turn on which pimp gets hired. If you think that none of that slush manages to find it's way back into the pocket of the corporate decision makers who choose the pimp, you are deluded.
Corporations corrupted, shareholders robbed by middle management decision makers, citizens put out of work, labor laws evaded, disposable human cogs imported to the country, who often plan on leaving, and thereby are willing to take legal risks in a foreign land, knowing that they'll be getting out of dodge in a few years anyway.
What's not to like?
It's all about cheaper salaries. The truth is that the vast majority of US techies are far superior. But for big box companies with all their managers trying to justify their jobs they actually just want the equivalent of code monkeys and lots of bureaucracy. Americans are truly lazy; we actually want the systems to work and work well so that we can relax and think up new ways to make the system actually easier or more flexible. Code monkeys know the managers only care about numbers so they actually want to make buggy code with lots of simple fixes so as to create the illusion of doing something called work. Fix one error and create two more for next time; this makes your manager happy. These people can be just as smart/lazy/efficient as their American equivalents; they just understand their job is to make their managers look good.
What is happening is that the majority of H1B workers are being hired through labor agencies. They are indeed making a better living than they would back at home. The labor agency is rotating the workers though. There are working more than a 40 hours a week and they know better than to complain because the culture is such that whomever breaks the unwritten rules of silence can expect consequences from their fellow workers/friends at a later time. Your friends and family are punished as well. Think back to the early union days but the union thugs are there to make sure no one complains which would ruin it for the group as a whole.
I have no problem with having unlimited H1B workers so long as they are being paid slightly more than what comparable US workers would cost and are actually getting the benefits they earned according to our labor laws here. So theoretically the number of $100,000 H1B's should be unlimited.
And 90% of the problem would go away if you simply get rid of the agencies and made the tech companies hire directly. They know they are cheating the system and would fear class action suits. They use agencies to buffer their legal exposure.
... What are you going to do with them? Sent them back?
Yes.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
He's from New Jersey.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Also, a "basic income" might be part of the solution rather than or in addition to "make work" jobs.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
From: http://www.stevepavlina.com/bl... "Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan "Press On" has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race. (Calvin Coolidge)"
Of course, it has also been said: "Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. (Albert Einstein)"
Perhaps the difference lies in having some way of validating that you are making some progress through your persistence, even if infinitesimally?
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I have long said we need import tariffs/taxes on imported labor. We already do this for goods.
Yes.
I totally understand your sentiment. However, do remember that these folks already have an approved greencard petition and the only reason that they haven't received it yet is because they are waiting for their priority date to become current.
In theory, the employer has provided evidence to the Department of Labor and USCIS that they have done a reasonable effort to hire a local (citizen or permanent resident) for the job that the alien is performing. DOL and USCIS both approved a petition to grant the alien permanent residency (DOL does PERM, USCIS does I-140). They only thing that they're waiting for is the I-485. Does it still sound reasonable to deport them?
I say "in theory" because we all know that this process is being abused heavily by a subset of greencard-factories (the same ones that take 80% of H1-Bs...)
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
You do a lot of writing with very little reading. As I said: " It is the same reason that you don't share your bank account with everyone."
Now, if you really believe that arbitrary boarders are bullshit, I challenge you to post your bank account information and open up your finances to the rest of us. Otherwise, you are just a hypocrite that decided drawing an "arbitrary" line around your house is somehow better than drawing an "arbitrary" line around my country.
So this tool just shit on U.S. workers and claims that people who are essentially nothing but ITT Tech graduates from a third world country are superior.
They are cheaper, more subservient, less likely to push for raises, and are perfectly happy work 60-80 our weeks.
I'm sure he has illegals mowing his lawn too. I wonder if Google Car can be programed to run someone down.
Our Junior Colleges (CGEPs) produce graduates that can run around most Super-Tech developers. They get a proper grounding in math, systems architecture, programming (functional and with classes), documentation, networking and multiple 16 week experiences at doing a project with a software company. How do I know? I employed many of them, and it all worked out well. They are now the seniors in their respective departments and companies.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
That analogy doesn't work, at all. Immigration reform has nothing to do with the social construct of property ownership. I have no objections to the concept of property ownership. I just think that all of this anxiety about letting people into the country is completely illogical and rooted in irrational fear more than it is rooted in an actual understanding of economics and national policy.
Of course it does. In fact, your entire argument is complaining about property ownership at a national scale. You just can't see it because you think your shade of gray is better than other people's shade of gray.