Microsoft Resurrects the Title of President

theodp writes: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella promoted General Counsel Brad Smith to president and chief legal officer Friday, the first time Microsoft has had a company-wide president since 2002. Smith has been Microsoft's point person on convincing Congress of America's tech-worker shortage, an assertion that is disputed by others. At a 2012 forum on STEM education and immigration reform, Smith discussed "producing a crisis" to galvanize action on Microsoft's National Talent Strategy, which calls for increasing the number of H-1B visas to ostensibly make up for U.S. children's lack of CS-savvy. Coincidentally, a real national K-12 CS and tech immigration crisis emerged shortly thereafter, thanks to the efforts of new deep-pocketed nonprofit organizations like Code.org (headed by Smith's next-door neighbor) and Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us PAC. Smith is a Code.org Board member and a FWD.us 'Major Contributor'. "We took this idea of connecting immigration to education last fall," Smith explained to the Daily Princetonian in 2013, "and when I started in September, we were the only ones talking about it. To have the White House endorse it, to have it embodied in the Senate Bill, to have people in both houses of Congress supporting it means that potentially this is a magic moment for some important steps for education reform as well." While crying crisis wolf to further its agenda has worked well for Microsoft, a Federal judge recently overturned 'emergency' tech immigration changes enacted by Homeland Security in 2008, saying that "the 17-month duration of the STEM extension appears to have been adopted directly from the unanimous suggestions by Microsoft."

Comments

Oh no

[Anonymous Coward]

Another linkfest anti-education diatribe by Theodp. How much is theodp paying to get this garbage posted here?

Whatever it takes to get more H1B's in

[Anonymous Coward]

End protectionism now. Creating artificial labor shortages when there are tons of people willing to do the work is as bad as artificial subsidies on goods and commodities.

Re:Whatever it takes to get more H1B's in

[Fire_Wraith]

H-1Bs aren't a "free labor market" though. They're a distortion and an end run around the system, bringing in semi-indentured workers who are largely tied to one job, and unable to freely compete. Supposedly, they're only brought in at a much higher rate of pay than the going rate. In practice, most of them are brought in at the absolute minimum, working for Consulting firms that then contract out for work, so the H-1B isn't "replacing" a US worker at the consulting firm, but the Consulting firm sure as hell is contracting out to replace job duties formerly held by US workers. See the recent bits with Disney and SoCal Edison, for instance.

I'd much rather have skilled people just being sponsored for green cards, and then allowed to compete. But guess what - Microsoft and Facebook and all these companies aren't actually interested in that, they want H-1Bs. Gee, wonder why that could be.

Re:Whatever it takes to get more H1B's in

[tompaulco]

It's kind of odd that we have this huge shortage of STEM workers, while at the same time, we have tens of thousands of unemployed STEM workers and more getting laid off every day. If only there was some way of using unemployed STEM workers to cure the shortage of STEM workers. But I guess you can't cram a square peg into a square hole.

A timely story by theodp

[Anonymous Coward]

But, the summary sounds just a wee bit similar to

this one.

And this one.

Oh, and there's this one.

Not to mention this one.

Maybe you missed this one?

Or how about this one?

Because Theodp doesn't have any sort of agenda, does he?

Nahhh...

Re:When you promote a lawyer to President ...

[Z00L00K]

That's quite interesting and also explains the changes we have seen lately - transition from a company providing a necessity to a company that spies on the users.