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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."
Another linkfest anti-education diatribe by Theodp. How much is theodp paying to get this garbage posted here?
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...
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.
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).
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.
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*)
The positions name should be "Divine Ruler". That would return Microsoft to the good old days when Gates ruled by divine right, whatever Microsoft decreed inevitably became the standard, and Linus was some obscure guy in a research position. A newly anointed leader is all that's required.
Why is Snark Required?
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.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
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!
>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
It's a huge shortage of competent STEM workers. I get a slew of resumes every week from unqualified STEM workers who should damned well stay unemployed.
How do you know they are incompetent? Did you interview them? Or are you just going by the fact that they didn't meet your job requirements which specify expert level competency in three dozen different skillsets, some of which are on software written and used only at your company, and others of which require 10 years of programming in 5 year old languages? You see, most STEM workers in the U.S., would answer truthfully, but headhunting agencies in India will gladly lie to you about having all of those requirements, including the impossible ones.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.