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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."
As someone who has benefited from the STEM extension, it is strange that they are targeting this, instead of fixing the H1b issue.
I got my doctoral degree in STEM, and did not get my H1b in the lottery system the first time. If I was forced to leave, the US would have spent nearly half a million dollars on my education, and got one year of tax (not counting my research work, which is freely available to anyone) in return.
Like most people making use of the STEM extension, I am being paid as much or more than my US co-workers. This isn't a "consulting" gig where I am forced to work for my company at sub-standard wages under pain of getting kicked out of the US - STEM graduates have been educated in renowned US universities, and I had four job offers by the time I graduated.
I think there should be a different H1b tracks for people who are hired "internally" i.e. the person is already in the US, and was educated here (people who currently benefit from the 17-month STEM extension), and the other type of H1b that I hear exists (where a company brings in people from overseas purely to do a job).
After all that bluster about security and privacy, ten years of "Trustworthy Computing" and Scott Charney poised to head to some White House role as the voice of Microsoft, it's all fallen apart. Scott's sidelined, TwC effectively disbanded and it's security and privacy groups laid off or rolled into the Windows group, and all the new hot noise and hubub is about sending Brad to grow the army of sheltered Satya-style bro-grammers to churn out even more shit code. So much for the idea of BETTER products; We'll just brace for MORE of the same minimally-tested, designed-by-assumption, cloud-based/bing-telemetry-sucking, insecure dreck. Woohoo.
The H1B debate is irrelevant; when the direction and mission of the enterprise is so fundamentally disorganized, orthagonal to real-world business use cases, and requires dismantling national labor legal structures, the "need" for more tech workers to get there is a nonsequitur. Microsoft is looking at Google in 2015, with the same curious lack of understanding as IBM looked at Microsoft in the 1990's -- not understanding the landscape itself had changed, and vigourosly agitating for more mainframe system programmers. More H1Bs would make the same difference to Microsoft now as IBM then.
I think not...(*poof*)
When you promote a lawyer to President, you are no longer a tech company. What you are saying is that technology is not longer your highest priority.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!