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Senator Who Calls STEM Shortage a Hoax Appointed To Head Immigration
dcblogs (1096431) writes The Senate's two top Republican critics of temporary worker immigration, specifically the H-1B and L-1 visas, now hold the two most important immigration posts in the Senate. They are Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who heads the Senate's Judiciary Committee, and his committee underling, Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), who was appointed by Grassley on Thursday to head the immigration subcommittee. Sessions was appointed one week after accusing the tech industry of perpetuating a "hoax" by claiming there is a shortage of qualified U.S. tech workers. "The tech industry's promotion of expanded temporary visas — such as the H-1B — and green cards is driven by its desire for cheap, young and immobile labor," wrote Sessions, in a memo he sent last week to fellow lawmakers. Sessions, late Thursday, issued a statement about his new role as immigration subcommittee chairman, and said the committee "will give voice to those whose voice has been shut out," and that includes "the voice of the American IT workers who are being replaced with guest workers."
No, common sense is appointing someone with an unbiased view in either direction, not someone walking into the job with a preconceived position.
It's perfectly reasonable to have a position on a subject and still posses common sense.
It's obvious to pretty much everyone that a fleet of off-shore or H1B programmers bill cheaper to your customer than supplying them with actual citizens who can do the same job.
That's common sense.
No, they just wanted more money. Once the lobbyists line the pockets of those two, they will tell everyone they have come into possession of 'new facts' and change their stance to allow more off shoring and Indian and Chinese workers in.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Having an unbiased view? In the realm of POLITICS?! If that is your criterion then nobody in politics should ever get appointed to anything, ever. They're politicians, not judges. It's not their job to be unbiased. In fact their job is completely the opposite, to be biased in favor of those who elected them. I wish it weren't the case, but it is.
The only way to find someone who has no 'preconceived position' is to find someone who knows nothing about the topic. Anyone who looks deeply at the topic is going to see that H1Bs are underpaid, and that to hire one, you might need to interview fifty different people (and find legitimate-sounding reasons they couldn't do the job) who respond to your fake job posting.
That is the reality of the situation. The tech industry does want "cheap, young and immobile labor." Saying that does not make you biased.
Whether or not there is a shortage depends on your point of view. It's a supply and demand situation. We have the supply, but there will never be enough supply for the people who want to hire programmers at $2 an hour. If there are fewer programmers, salaries will rise until companies who can't afford them drop out, and the demand matches the supply.
There can never be an absolute shortage of programmers, there can only be a shortage of programmers willing to work for a certain salary.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The only way to find someone who has no 'preconceived position' is to find someone who knows nothing about the topic.
Not really true. Plenty of people know nothing about biology and yet have plenty of preconceived notions about evolutionary theory. The only people without preconceived notions would be newborns.
Definitely agree on this one topic. We need to quit outsourcing our jobs overseas and importing temporary labor. Especially when there are people graduating in these degrees locally. I've noticed a serious trend over the last 10 years at my corporation where they use either contractors overseas, or just hire local contractors. And of course all the local contractors are super cheap foreign labor with H1-B visas. They have NO desire to make quality products because they don't plan on working for their contract long (because they know they are essentially working for experience as opposed to salary). All they want is a few years of experience and then bolt for better pay.
However, the corporation i work for will just sub them out and hire more contractors at bargain base prices and moving forward. Overall, American workers are getting screwed. our customers are getting a shitty product, corporations are loving the super cheap labor, and foreigners are getting experience that they can take back to their homeland, which long term does not help America way ahead of other countries in these fields.
It's perfectly reasonable to have a position on a subject and still posses common sense.
It's not however reasonable to think a politician will posses common sense.
(And without the advantages of being part of the Borg Collective.)
http://venturebeat.com/2015/01...
Pay particular attention to the chart showing -layoffs- across the IT sector!
This is good for Canada which is concerned about the 'brain drain' and would welcome U.S. companies thinking of setting up shop in Canada to take advantage of the cheaper labour.
The carrot works best when the donkey doesn't eat it, just as it held in front of it's muzzle and this in conjunction with the fear of the stick keeps the donkey ie the masses in check. Don't fall for the promises only congratulate actions. The reality is for decades the general public has only been getting promises whilst the corporations got all the action and that is regardless of which party was in charge and working in collusion with the other party whilst pretending not to.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I admire your intellectual honesty.
Many of us are - we take in new information and change our opinions. I used to be a Libertarian
(note the capital 'L' as in Harry Browne Libertarian) but as I learned more and more about economics, history(especially economic history), the complete randomness of life and economy, travels around the World and my own financial ups and downs, I have changed my views.
I see how much chance has contributed to my successes and failures. I have worked my ass off many times and failed and other times, have sat on my ass and did quite well and of course, the other way around. To say that everything I have is 100% the result of my own effort is extremely naive and shortsighted.
I see how many opportunities that I had and have were handed to me by the sheer accident of birth has given me a leg up as well as some special people in my past who have aided me. For that I am grateful.
If you get what you pay for is "common sense" then "the more you pay the more you get" should be true as well, so if you pay $500 for a widget, and someone else pays $100 for the same widget, yours is provably better, since it cost more.
Common sense is wrong more than it's right. It's only good for making guesses about things you don't understand, and is worthless for evaluating things you understand.
Learn to love Alaska
"You get what you pay for when you understand what you're buying" is true more often than the simpler form you offered, which implies what you're buying is a known quantity. As many of us know, STEM talent is quite difficult to gauge effectively for most management teams.
What they have is a shortage of companies willing to pay the prevailing wage, benefits, etc.
Not really.
What you have is a handful of companies (Facebook, Google) paying absofuckinglutely outrageous salaries and benefits. Then you have no shortage of companies paying obscenely good salaries and benefits. Then you have the massive sprawl of the country, where no, you're not going to be buying a Tesla because you're a developer in Ass End Of, Kansas.
Somehow, that final item gets translated into, "DEY TOOK ER JERBS."
Bullshit.
Those jobs I lost paid $80K/yr. and were undercut by Indian sweat shops paying their people $20/hr. without overtime.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
> Common sense is wrong more than it's right.
This is inaccurate.
> It's only good for making guesses about things you don't understand, and is worthless for evaluating things you understand.
You are intentionally perverting the meaning. Conscious understanding is less used than common sense. You survive because of common sense, not despite it.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
One criterion for a shortage would be the point where actual technical progress is impeded. We are nowhere near that.
Another would be the point where reasonably structured companies start to drop out. We're nowhere near that either.
Without the H1-Bs, profits might be squeezed a bit, but in one of the most profitable industries we have, that's just a correction.
I predict that this senator will be swimming in campaign contributions from the tech industry in the future. And of course he'll see the light afterwards and understand how misguided he was as he was lacking crucial information about the desolate state of the US STEM sector and increased allotment of H1B visas is the only short-term solution to the industry's plight... But of course, long term solutions will be found. Certain industries have already shown that with depressed wages it is indeed cheaper to manufacture certain items in the US again. I am sure a similar solution can be found for the IT industry...
It's obvious to pretty much everyone that a fleet of off-shore or H1B programmers bill cheaper to your customer than supplying them with actual citizens who can do the same job.
Even the workers on H1B know the real reason for the H1B program.
After all, they're not idiots. They realize that the H1B program was designed to prevent them from leaving their original H1B sponsor, than staying in the country working for a different US-based employer, so this guarantees them that they have very little negotiating power when it comes to negotiating salary increases, or negotiating for better working conditions.
This works the same way indentured servitude used to work for immigrants two hundred years ago. Except now, there is no need to hold a financial note over one's head, in exchange to have paid for their trip, now the builtin limitations of the H1B visa fulfill that purpose instead.
I've been trying to hire a Senior-level EE for over a year. I have interviewed 2 candidates every week during that time, so basically 100 people.
These are people with 8-12 years experience as design engineers.
These are also people who can't tell me what the current in an inductor does when you put a DC voltage across it. It's one of my standard lead-in interview questions - some basic principles of EE that everyone working as an EE should know. I am shocked at how many people don't know it.
Usually, my interviews only go downhill from there. I will draw, for example, a very basic DC-DC or AC-DC converter and ask things like "what happens when this FET is turned on?" "What happens when it is turned off?" "What do the phase dots on this transformer symbol mean?" "What must you do to ensure this top-side FET is fully turned-on?"
These people can't figure it out. They can't reason their way through it. Most of them just end up guessing, and proving the point that there is, in fact, a dire shortage of QUALIFIED engineers in this country. These are all very simple questions that anyone working as a senior-level EE should know off the top of their head.
I think people are getting way too accustomed to having Google do their jobs for them, to be honest. "I don't have to know anything, I just have to know how to find a how-to online."
That's the specious logic corporations use to justify the exorbitant salaries of their CEOs despite numerous studies showing the person at the top has little to no impact on the performance of the company.
Then again, when corporations say they can't their workers more they are by default stating they don't want the best workers because they're not willing to pay the folks on the front line what they're worth.
Some reference material:
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Old Wives Tale means "common sense we now think is false". Common sense does work for being risk-averse without understanding. That's what's behind Leviticus. Homosexual sex (anal sex of any gender) is more likely to cause certain diseases, make it "illegal". Pigs are dirty animals full of disease, ban eating them. Though I have no idea why blended fibers was banned by the Bible.
All those Old Testament things were "common sense" coded into law. They were guesses and suggestions that weren't understood. Eat pigs, get sick was known, but germ theory was thousands of years away.
Common sense is fearing something without understanding. After all, run away to fight another day is common sense.
Learn to love Alaska
your common sense
You'll have to define "common sense" for me. My understanding of it is incompatible with your description of it. Common sense is a groupthink. It's a moron-level competent man standard. Everyone knows how to [whatever] it's common sense. It's not something You or I have, it's a form of the "reasonable man" standard used in court. Should you have known that running over your foot with a lawn mower was harmful? Yes? Then that's "common sense". Do "you" know that running over your foot with a lawnmower was harmful? That's personal knowledge, and unrelated to "common sense".
But for the expert, you don't just reboot before asking for help (the "common sense" answer), because you want to see the error messages and research them later if the reboot doesn't permanently fix the problem. So common sense is wrong, and actually harmful.
That *I* know to look at errors and investigate before rebooting doesn't mean that's part of my "common sense" part of being "common" is being shared by many people. When my sense doesn't agree with everyone else's, it's no longer "common".
Learn to love Alaska
That actually narrows down the voting options very little.
LOL that's precious. Meanwhile, the H-1B employees I know - my personal friends, people I hang out with and trust - describe a legal hellscape that's pretty much exactly indentured servitude. One of them managed to escape a bad situation by hooking up with a major corporation who could expedite the process to have the transfer done within a couple of months. That's two months of walking on eggshells so that they didn't get fired and deported. Another wasn't quite as lucky and had to ship out to the European branch of their new employer so that they can come back to America in a year or so, presuming everything is in order by then.
You're on crack if you think an H-1B isn't a recipe for suckishness. Regardless of what it hypothetically sounds like on paper, the situations I witnessed firsthand were terrible for the workers involved.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Let's be honest, companies go with SAP and their expensive consultants because the upper management falls for the sales pitch. They would still fall for the sales pitch if programmers cost $2 an hour. SAP rarely costs less (once once installation and customization is included) than a custom solution created by a good team of programmers.
They don't skimp on automation because of the cost of programmers. They skimp because that cost (however small) is up front and visible while the higher cost of not automating is hidden away and takes a million nearly invisible bites at the budget.
the American Competitiveness in the 21st Century Act permits H-1B portability, provided another employer is willing to sponsor the H-1B worker. claims that H-1Bs are indentured servitude are entirely baseless.
Yes, I know this, but how many H-1B employees do you know who have made the successful transition?
I know it happens, but it's an incredibly stressful event for the employee in question and there is actually no guarantee that it will succeed considering the temperamental nature of the INS and the unnecessarily small pool of companies willing to go through the trouble of sponsoring a worker already in the US.
I was personally involved in the sponsorship of one Indian employee who had gotten their doctorate from a top US Ivy school, and yet the INS still delayed the visa unnecessarily by an extra year. Thankfully, that person was living in India at the time and my company could afford to wait for the paperwork to finally settle, but imagine if that person had been already living in the US, or if my company had been less patient.
I guess one could try to say the same thing about employment in general. There is actually no guarantee of a job for anyone, even for US workers, but my point is that the constraints are completely different when you're under an existing H1B visa.
And my comparison with indentured servitude is still just as valid. After all, indentured servants in Colonial America were still free to find new employers, assuming those new employers bought out their original contract.
There are much larger issues than attitude plaguing the current generation this country.
You're missing the point. These companies don't want to import H1-B's so that they can fire a $120,000 a year US born programmer and replace him with a $100,000 foreign worker. That is chump change. The true intention, what saves them TONS of money, is using this system to suppress wages across ALL of their US programmers. This is a big part of why wages have been stagnant for 15 years now in STEM.
> Common sense is fearing something without understanding.
Continuing to try to redefine the concept to fit your beliefs, is disingenuous.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
You'll have to define "common sense" for me. My understanding of it is incompatible with your description of it. Common sense is a groupthink. It's a moron-level competent man standard.
But how far does it extend?
Everyone in the developed world thinks it's common sense to provide healthcare to all of one's citizens. Not the USA - That's commie talk.
Everyone in the developed world thinks it's common sense to restrict access to firearms. Not the USA - That's Theft of Freedom.
So sure, it's common sense not to run over your foot with a lawnmower, but anything more complicated than that...
Be a real shame if a recording of that were to leak.
oh, they BILL exactly the same amount. As in, the company their working for still charges the same amount as if they had American workers. They just get to pay the H1B's far less, so it's more profit for the contracting company itself.