Slashdot Mirror
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."
Another linkfest anti-education diatribe by Theodp. How much is theodp paying to get this garbage posted here?
alrighty then. since Resurrects is in the terminology.... then religion is acceptable in discussion. yep, prior art.
I'm detecting a certain sameness to the stuff that theodp has been posting. Anyone else notice it?
FTMD....Marketing is the first to know and the first to go when it hits the fan.
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.
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...
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).
Our new scapegoat.
Funny you should suggest this. From Microsoft "Bait and Switch" Could Mean a Huge Increase in Foreign Tech Workers: "The company proposed a novel workaround: If the federal government would raise the H1-B cap by 20,000 additional visas and make available an equal number of additional green cards, Microsoft said it would be willing to pay nearly four times the usual fees, handing over $10,000 per H-1B visa and $15,000 per green card. It called its proposal the National Talent Strategy because the additional revenue-more than $500 million annually-would be used to fund STEM education programs around the country...With the coalition in its corner, Microsoft approached a bipartisan group of senators to craft what would become the Immigration Innovation, or "I-Squared" Act. And that's where the alleged "lobbying malpractice" came in. The act, as promised, would boost the caps on visas and green cards and use the fees to pay for STEM education. But in a crucial difference that has angered some of Microsoft's would-be allies, the bill would nearly quintuple the number of available visas-raising the cap to 300,000-and charge companies far less for them: as little as $1,825 apiece. Microsoft, which helped draft the bill, appeared pleased with the end result. "Today's introduction in the Senate of the bipartisan Immigration Innovation Act is a major step forward," Brad Smith, the company's general counsel and executive vice president said in a January press release issued by Compete America, a coalition of tech companies such as Microsoft and outsourcing firms such as Deloitte. "Microsoft strongly supports this legislation and urges Congress to send broader immigration reform that includes these solutions to the President's desk this year."
Smith has been Microsoft's point person on convincing Congress of America's tech-worker shortage, an assertion that is disputed by others
It's an assertion that's been proven to be utter horseshit. FTFY, BTW.
I think I speak for many of us when I say, "Who gives a shit?"
So they renamed or reshuffled some titles for the goobers at the top, so fucking what?
If they hadn't put out a press release that slashdot promptly regurgitated, I'd have never known anything had happened.
"Stuff that matters" indeed.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Even if there is some bias, at least those submissions are relevant to technology. We should be thankful that they're at least about software and the software industry. There's a Slashdot imitation site, called SoylentNews, which has a particular user (gewg_) who repeatedly submits extremely biased, far-left submissions. These often link to sketchy articles and sites that even fellow lefties think are way too questionable, and not to be taken seriously. Even worse, most of these submissions have absolutely nothing to do with science or technology or computing or software or hardware or mathematics or anything useful like that. They're typically 100% political in nature, and they're often about some police officers somewhere who had to reasonably defend themselves from attacks perpetrated by violent criminals. For whatever reason, the editors over there end up promoting those shitty, disreputable submissions to the front page of the SoylentNews site. At least we haven't seen anything as bad as that happen here. I'll take these possibly-biased submissions that are at least on-topic any day over those awful ones at SoylentNews that are about some petty and irrelevant political matter.
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*)
I don't, but the reason I don't agree is because they're proposing a Manichean view, whereas the actual reality is far more nuanced than that. The tech moguls don't want a truly free market, but nor do they want the current one either. Instead, they want the "best" of both worlds.
What do I mean? Well, they want the ability to pay lower wages, if not third world wages, without actually having to move their operations lock stock and barrel to India or wherever else, and thus having to pay either in the short or long term for the other costs that would incur. In short, they want to have their cake and eat it too, and make the rest of us foot the bill, effectively.
So, no, I disagree that a fully free labor market is the exact opposite, because that completely ignores the fact that there are other things that a country like the US provides, and you can't completely divorce the labor market from that. I absolutely do believe that we should allow for immigration of the best and brightest - but that's not cheap, and what these companies really care about is getting access to the cheapest possible worker, over whom they have the largest possible control.
Even if they offload the job to another country, the inconvenience of it is not worth the price. A country I was talking to recently is paying a company in India the equivalent of $75k per year for a developer. In the U.S. depending where you are, you can get a developer for less than that. After you add in benefits, it certainly exceeds that amount, but there is the hidden cost of having to deal with someone halfway around the world, who works different hours, speaks a different language, has a different culture and work ethic, is difficult to ascertain or vet their skill set, cannot be easily held accountable for project milestones, or work completion, difficult to control or manage overtime or immediate response scenarios, etc, etc.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
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!
And they want to sell their products in captive markets protected by the government making importing the products from elsewhere where they sell it cheaper (or even give it away free in some cases) illegal.
They'll stop when they've pumped the wealth out of the richer companies and no one can afford to pay any more.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Do they offer B1H's over there?
Table-ized A.I.
Surprisingly, I didn't hear anything. What was it that you heard? Are you sure it was Microsoft and not Amazon (i'm talking about last month when Amazon was in news for workers alleged they mistreated them)?
it's ALL about USA POLITICS, mostly immigration politics.
usa immagration policies ARE NOT TECH NEWS. and extremely boring for someone who has no interest in moving to USA. like, wtf, is this news for nerds or news for "I wanna move to USA from Calcutta" ? da fuq?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
It's a pity that people haven't reacted to Win 10 with the same intensity as they did to the announcement of the required always-on connectivity to use the new Xbox. Maybe that way they'd get scared and release a decent Windows OS again.
Maybe the fact that Xbox has a ver close replacement (Ps4 runs most of the same games) had something to do with that backtrack. In contrast, with Windows there exists no almost equivalent replacement and by what I mean a OS that runs the same software. Older Windows versions count to a degree because they will be abandoned shortly, and Wine and ReactOS aren't still compatible enough