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Issa Bill Would Kill A Big H-1B Loophole (computerworld.com)
ErichTheRed writes: This isn't perfect, but it is the first attempt I've seen at removing the "body shop" loophole in the H-1B visa system. A bill has been introduced in Congress that would raise the minimum wage for an H-1B holder from $60K to $100K, and place limits on the body shop companies that employ mostly H-1B holders in a pass-through arrangement. Whether it's enough to stop the direct replacement of workers, or whether it will just accelerate offshoring, remains to be seen. But, I think removing the most blatant and most abused loopholes in the rules is a good start. "The high-skilled visa program is critical to ensuring American companies can attract and retain the world's best talent," said Issa in a statement. "Unfortunately, in recent years, this important program has become abused and exploited as a loophole for companies to replace American workers with cheaper labor from overseas."
I can only hope that our voices are STARTING to be heard and taken seriously.
I can't compete with an h1b. I have more experience, I know silicon valley quite well, I have good contacts and can get things done; but I'm 'an expensive american' because I have US healthcare to pay and US rents to pay, etc. and I'm not willing to have 5 other room mates and live-for-work just to stay employed.
we need a break from this heat wave. many of us who need work cannot get it. companies stopped caring about us and refuse to even consider us. we badly need relief from this or we'll find more of us slipping into the poorest underclass and that's just an absurdity. intelligent and capable thinkers and builders unable to get work because our corp overlords sold us all out.
I'll believe in the relief when I see it. so far, though, its killing many of us. in some ways, almost literally (I may lose my home soon, that's how bad it can get).
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
This should be a no-brainer.
I'll be shocked if it even makes it to a vote.
(captcha: divisive)
first post!
Government protection for mine!
I have not read issa, but i suspect that it is a trap. Big issue the general public wants, wrapped around some onerous provision for even deeper anal penetration by thier real constituents, monied interests, and corporations. Perhaps even carte blanc for a tla or two.
That seems to have been the major play the past 30 years. Anyone read it yet?
As the child of legal immigrants, I have to say that while I applaud this move, I really hope that we can get some common-sense immigration reform. In the meantime, the president and the executive branch should do their jobs and enforce the laws that congress has passed.
it's already much, much cheaper to hire over seas. Adding the expense of bringing someone over on an H1-B doesn't help. If companies didn't have a reason to use the H1-B program then they wouldn't.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The shop I work at is about 50% US workforce and about 50% off-shore. If this goes through, our shop will turn into a 0% US workforce and 100% off-shore...
Karma: Bad
The government already does cost-of-living adjustments for government employees. How hard is that to apply to H1-B? Here in Detroit, $60K probably isn't a bad minimum for H1-B workers, but it's crazy low in the San Francisco Bay. Why not tie the minimum to the region?
We need green cards to be given out for techs, while killing off the H1B.
Hopefully, this will be addressed in the next CONgress, or perhaps in the lame duck.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It's a nice try - but it'll NEVER pass much less get signed by Oblahblah! Too much BIG $$$ in politics! Politicians ONLY listen to $$$!
The Truth is a Virus!!!
Here is my experience interning with a big American dotcon whose name starts with letter G 5 years ago: Truckloads of Russian speaking product people with minimal technical literacy and only basic knowledge of English supervising B visa temp "consultants," who themselves supervised offshore sweatshops. My work there was to be a "technical interpreter" while I was originally told that I will work as a "developer mentee." I got an impression that most of "developers" in American "Big IT" are just glorified product and project managers overseeing overseas coding sweatshops. The very few who did code, were basically gluing big chunks of code prepared for them overseas and working with high level SDK libs.
Your example is a perfect example for unintended consequences of each and every government's decision.
I can give one more example. There may be some bona-fide less desirable locations with low wages, that do have difficulty attracting qualified personel. This will be a burden for some organization in the midland of America trying to hire a skilled worker.
That being said, every law will have consequences, the outcomes that the politicians would not want to think about it. Here are the few: the limit of $100K does not appear to be indexed to inflation. Which means that in a decade the new limit of $100K will become what is now $50K.
As others already mentioned, some jobs a highly telecommutable. IT, accounting, calling centers are frequent examples, but there are many more. Because of never ending increases in taxes (local property taxes), workers demand 2-3% annual raise, annually compounding corporate costs. Basically, because of the increasing taxation and now mandatory health tax increase (wait for 2017 enrollment period), more companies will be looking for ways to cut the costs and will outsource the jobs.
Even president Trump with his promises will not be quick to help.
Finally, US will become less desirable destination to study. Which is a good thing, of course, because it will help to prick current US study cost bubble, as less foreigners (paying full price) will come to study to the USA.
All in all, increase is probably a good thing. However the blowback will be very different from what people expect.
Just make two simple reforms:
*) H1B visas convert to Green Cards after two years.
*) Limit them to no more than 5% of the workforce for any work site.
WTF difference will this make?
If companies don't bring cheap labor HERE, then they will hire cheap labor IN PLACE, i.e. just keep them all in Bangalore and open up an office there. And when the Bangalorians wise up and figure out they can make more $, then companies will go to the next and possibly the last place on Earth for cheap labor: Africa.
Follow the money, people. Or in this case, follow the cheap labor.
ANd no, these offshoring corporations are not going to "learn a lesson", or "feel the pain" and suddenly confess their sins, wring their hands, apologize, and bring the jobs back. Once a job is gone, it is gone for good.
LOL @ vword: "buzzards"
What Germany needs is common-sense gun control, an assault-style weapons ban and for the 2nd amendment to be repealed. Get the guns off the streets. Tell those conservative repukianz Germans that they don't need their metal dicks to feel safe. White men in Germany should be pretty ashamed of their gun culture.
Our government doesn't even enforce our current laws on H1B, what good would new ones do? A few months ago I got a "form letter" denial for a support job I applied for, didn't even get an interview. I had worked with this team for about three years, I knew their applications, escalation lists, support teams, ticketing system; in some ways I probably was more qualified than some of their current staff members. I was told by their management that they had zero actual control over HR's initial acceptance / cut system as all of the HR people are in another state thousands of miles away; HR (by unofficial policy) wouldn't take any local suggestions for who would be interviewed...the "process" didn't work like that. "The process" had HR giving them a list of pre-approved candidates, then HR would allow the local staff to interview them, and then HR would take it from there. After I got my form letter of rejection, I found an LCA for my job had been filed within a few days of my application. Using various H1B "job sites" in conjunction with the Department of Labor's LCA system, I found dozens of jobs in my area that never had any advertising on any job board, nor had any recruiters been contacted. These jobs went straight to H1B, they didn't even bother looking for a US citizen.
Most frustratingly, there is no one to really complain to, no regulatory agency that will listen. Even when the law is broken...until it gets to the level of a Congressional hearing nothing is done. Even then, nothing happened to Disney, or SEC, or any of the other giant corps. A few donations to re-election campaigns via shadowy 501s and the issue is dropped every time. Sometimes I think the only solution is to destroy the staffing corps pushing this, and by that I mean literally set fire to the US locations of companies like Tata and Infosys.
It's odd that the richest person in congress would put forth this proposal. It's true that he has a democrat joining in the bill, but what's in it for him? There must be something evil hidden in the text that we haven't discovered yet.
...omphaloskepsis often...
This comment won't address the low-cost labor question. It will cover the on-vs-off shore question.
About 12 months ago, we benchmarked the Silicon Valley vs Bangalore salaries that we have across a 200 person organization.
- Architect Level engineers had a fully loaded cost about 1/2 of the US engineers.
- Mid-career enginers were about 1/3
- Junior engineers were about 1/5 the cost.
General salary increases in Bangalore are about 10%, US (and most western countries) is about 3%. Cost of living in Bangalore is generally a lot lower than Silicon Valley. The upshot is that senior engineers have a considerably better deal in Bangalore than Silicon Valley. In about 5 years, a senior engineer would have very different motivations for entering the H1-B game to get to the US. It's likely better for Silicon Valley to in-shore to a cheaper US geography (if there are sufficient skilled engineers).
Most H1-B holders are also in the green-card process which skews things quite a bit. For those that aren't current, there is about a 5-8 year wait. When you are in that situation you need to be careful about transferring roles. However, most of the H1-B's that I have worked with are *NOT* underpaid, and are generally quite skilled. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but I haven't seen a grand conspiracy within the large companies I've been in. The engineer screening, interview and offer process is definitely not biased to "cheap labor".
China has already priced itself out of the market as a low cost engineering center (unfortunately the West trained them well enough when they were cheap that now they can generally compete on engineering prowess with the rest of the world).
Make it direct pay as well so there can't be kick backs from staffing firms where on paper the works are being paid a lot more then they are really getting.
Do-nothing Darrell Issa is NOW concerned about H1B abuse, because people in his district (a high-tech hotbed North of San Diego) have been having their jobs overtaken by imported, lower-cost workers...conveniently, just before his performance is questioned by challengers for his Seat in the House of Representatives.
He could've done this anytime in the past two (or four) years, but, no-o-o. He waits until he can make it a CAMPAIGN ISSUE to help his faltering reputation. His Democratic challenger is now approaching parity in polling, so, pull out the project he SHOULD have been working on for the past several years in office. But, schemer that he is, he's held it in reserve until it could save his butt...and he hopes you forget about all the butts of working who've lost their jobs because of his passive attitude toward constituents in prior years!
$100K per year application fee. If you really can't find americans who are trainable, you'll pay that much.
Step 1) create 150k new job opportunities for American citizens by reducing the number of H1Bs by 150k.
Step 2) auction off the remaining H1B slots so companies who truly need exceptional skills can get them, but at a market price
This is long overdue. I left software development 15 years ago when it became clear I couldn't compete with H-1B on salary. I have no regrets about the decision, but it would have been different if the playing field had been level.
Few H1-B employees are actually employed by the companies who directly benefit from their labor. Instead they work for staffing companies that take a rather large portion of the H1-B employees salaries. What I see happening here is the amount these staffing companies take increasing greatly, and the inevitable end-game of the agencies becoming wholly owned subsidiaries of the companies that have the most H1-B staff. In other words the economics still remain heavily slanted in favor of hiring boatloads of entry level H1-B staff.
Emigrate
Cooperate
Former means finding a country that would want you and is better (there ARE a few out there, esp as far as healthcare goes. But culture clash might be an issue.)
By the latter I mean band together with your silicon valley unemployed brethren and start up your own company. It doesn't have to be a 'silicon valley' company trying to VC its way to stardom. It could be a contract firm to subcontract under other SV companies to provide services. If you guys can individually 'take a hit' as far as takehome pay goes, there is no reason you can't get a corporate health care plan and other benefits going to ensure you all have an acceptable quality of life. If you get ambitious and have a group of people you can truly trust (with equal stock shares per employee, and enough employee loyalty to ensure they will be sold back rather than sold off...) you could do other things like invest in real estate and company cars for commuting to work, using them as tax writeoffs against the business and manipulating the big corp benefits for all your collective little people.
The only reason I am not doing this myself is all my little people are too busy scrambling for their corporate master's pocket change, and I actually have a better thing going working independently outside of the tech field (gave up on it around 5 years ago, as well as the replacement career, since the opportunities in both seemed to consider you easily replacable.) I don't make as much as I could have, and if the economy keeps going the way it is, I am going to be FUBAR, but the potential is there for others to compete if only they are willing to cooperate.
Agree completely, but then they location-shop before body-shopping.
Problem I have is small companies and other fields. I am in architectural empngineering, and there really are limited grads. We were willing to sponsor one person over the past decade, but the salary would destroy it. (He had one year of "internship" and would be starting around $65k in Los Angeles.). Worth it in the greater good, but a challenge none the less.
get rid of the tied to the job part and force OT pay for H1B's
In "Silicon Valley" executive like Zuk get Sucks 4 Fucks by the H-1B slaves.
Raising the "Bar" to $100k does nothing for pervs like Timmy Cook (Apple) and Zuck (FB) and a thousand others perverts.
Sad But True, It's U.
H1-Bs are supposed to be highly skilled. I live in the Detroit Metro area. 60k is what you pay a fresh college grad with a STEM degree, even in Detroit.
. . . IT and private industry that misuses the H1B system. In Monterey, CA there’s a school called Defense Language Institute (run by Uncle Sam himself) that employs a boatload of H1B visa holders and they are being treated very poorly in both pay and work conditions. That is, our own government is breaking the law with regards to H1B visa holders, so please don't expect them to fix it. Apples to Apples, the DLI worker works twice as much for half the pay compared to other colleges in the immediate area. God forbid one of their H1B visa holders gets uppity, they'll be summarily shipped back the very next day at the worker's expense. Monterey is a really expensive place too, and I have witnessed 50+ year old professors working 60 hours week year round living in poverty. Yikes!!!
I believe that in order to make it a lasting reform is to make the minimum for foreign wworkers a percentage above the local standard industry wage. This would ensure they actually TRY to find a local professional instead of saying they did and replace all the employees with cheaper foreign labor.
65k is princely in other parts of the country. Is the cost of the loss of in person business meetings so high, that the value of a telecommuting architect is totally lost?
Your applicant does not need to be local. Just easily able to collaborate. It may seem strange, but there really is high speed internet, and people interested in becoming architects in the flyover land parts of the country, where costs of living are much lower, who would be willing to work for a much smaller wage than could be offered with a straight face anywhere on the coasts. People here routinely live on 30k a year. Dwell on that.
The major obstacle these days is the office politics. The "need" for people to stand at attention when called into a room, and waste an hour or more listening to a poorly made powerpoint presentation about keeping the break room clean, or whatever other office politics shit has necesstated such a meeting. I work in aerospace. Most of my contacts are communicated with via email. They could be anywhere. As long as they respond promptly, and reliably, they could very well be on the moon, and I could still get my work done.
There is no compelling reason for white collar work in the age of instant digital communication to be shackled to a specific location. That includes architectural firms. They can send you lovely proposals digitally. They don't need to be there in person, unless you value grandstanding in the boardroom over actual architectural ability. If thats the case, hire salesmen, not architects. They specialize in selling iceboxes to eskimos.
Your inability to find somebody to work at below 60k/yr at entry level in your area just means you need to consider telecommuting, or branch offices. It does not mean you need to jam foriegn workers into the local labor pool, and drive up local costs of living even higher, just so that they can fill a seat in person.
The government should create a job board, and if a company wants to hire an H1B worker, require them to list the job on the board for 120 days or until the job is filled domestically, and require interviews of qualified applicants as long as the job s not yet filled domestically. If they still bring in a foreign worker, require a specific explanation what the foreign worker has that was lacking in all the domestic applicants, and send a copy to each of the domestic applicants and the DOL.
We need young talent with 40 years experience in Java, wait make that 40 years experience in everything, including our in house software. Wait, no one qualified? We're legally able to out source now! I'm cool with being shafted and being unable to work despite being qualified. Just don't flood the job boards with impossible to fulfill jobs... Its almost like they want liars to be hired.
I see that you don't want well qualified developers coming to United States, paying taxes and consuming goods and services that you produce. What do you think is going to happen then, logically speaking? Better start learning Chinese if you still want to code.
architectural Engineering. A starting electrical engineer with a Masters is around $60-65k in Los Angeles, more in Bay Area. Junior staff cannot be effective remotely; they do not work independently for a few years, and when they hit that mark they need to be helping to mentor the next generation.
Senior engineers can be remotely with only limited loss in productivity, and mid-level can safely be remote a day or two per week. We do have a remote office, as well as one full-time remote employee. It works very well for some things, but going for a job survey on a day's notice is a little hard when you are a thousand miles away.
We can find plenty of people, at salaries we are quite comfortable with. It is important to understand the cost of bringing one employee on board through the first few months of work though. It is rarely less than $50k, and often double or triple that for senior staff.
As for flyover country, grew up there, went to school there, always happy to hire from there. Not especially interested in hiring people living there that can only be productive for 65% of tasks though, even if it is at a 50% salary discount. Too many additional costs that direct salary don't reflect.
I seem to recall reading here about a study finding that ~90% of H1-B visas were given to people taking low-skilled entry-level positions. Are they really being paid $60k/year for that? Either entry-level IT positions pay way better than I remember, or something else is going on here.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Those who claim the US benefits by draining the best and the brightest from around the world are doing two things wrong:
1) They bad liars. Everyone knows they just want cheap labor. Just cut the noise already and accept the fact that they may have to send some mangers overseas.
2) Even if they happen to get someone particularly gifted to leave their native land and work cheap in the US, they're ignoring the negative impact this has on those -- usually developing -- economies which need their best and brightest in order to grow their economies to become importers of US goods and services.
Seastead this.
It sounds like your rates in your high cost areas are not congruent with the actual costs of operating your business.
Since you are doing surveys for new building constructions, and other essential civil engineering services for the locality you service-- remind your local civic authorities that lowballing you will result in their deadlines not being met, because you cannot keep the staff required to service their needs in a timely manner on the rates they are demanding. Your competitors will likewise be unable to meet these demands placed upon you, because the demands are unreasonable.
Costs for certification and services rendered need to reflect the actual costs (including labor) of those services, otherwise business is not sustainable.
I feel like lots of people here are seeing only one face of the H1B program. I got hired as an H1B and I am permanent resident now. Though I entered the US on a J1 program. When I entered the US, I did not even want to stay, then life being life, I decided too. I work for a university and there are not many qualified applicants.
It is very unlikely that you would someone that is skilled and permanent resident or us citizen for a professor position. They pretty much just do not exists. There are some, but not many and definitely way less than opened position.
I can understand that there may be issues in the H1B program. But there are legitimate use of it as well.
The H-1B program has made the situation in the tech sector so toxic for US citizens that even top new grads with high GPA's aren't getting called for interviews. And its been this way since the 2000-2002 implosion of the sector. Entire CS classes for years have gone unemployed or underemployed. Yes, there are people who make a lot of noise over a few tech companies in the SV who hire younger people and pay well (ie: Google, Facebook, etc.), but the applicant to hire ratio at those employers is in excess of 2000:1. In other words, great for the lucky lottery winners, but really crappy for the rest of us who have had our careers destroyed by H-1B's.
The worst part of the H-1B/OPT program is that a lot of great talent doesn't even get the chance to be noticed. Because we're sitting on the unemployment lines instead of going into the workforce and showing off our skills. As engineers, how do we even come up with solutions to domain programs if we're not being exposed to the domain? Maybe I can invent a better widget or improve a process somewhere, but because we've been essentially locked out by the employers using H-1B visas instead of actually bothering to pick up the phone and call us up, the economy suffers a huge loss.
I am an assembly guy foremost, then for my study decades ago I took up pascal, then later during my research fortran. I was hired also in a private firm for fortran. 6 month ago I was asked if I could switch to Java. You know how long it took me up to get the basic ? a few day. There are some subtlety it took me weeks , or maybe even month, to took on, but for the major part I was already doing production read code by the end of the first month.
A new language is not that hard to learn when you already know a few from similar standard (in my case OOP) and understand how computer and types works. Sure there are stuff you have to learn like type conversion, buffers, but the most important paradigm like inheritance and extension, if you already know one such language, you are basically only learning a new syntax. The most important stuff, like how to transform a requirement into something algorithmic or implementable, does not change as much between languages as one would think. Respect the layer paradigm (gui layer/business layer/provider-low level layer) and you will be fine.
A typical engineering starting salary historically has been around 1/3rd of the cost of local housing. Can you buy housing in LA for $200k?
Sounds to me like your $65k offer is totally inadequate. Which is why you should be denied visa sponsorship until capacity in your industry is constrained enough that salaries can be brought up to at least professional levels.
Who ever said, "The high-skilled visa program is critical to ensuring American companies can attract and retain the world's best talent" is a god damn lair. Its about money. Public record shows it.
There's no fallacy of appeal to authority here, for two reasons. The fallacy of appeal to authority would be citing Michael Jordan's opinions on DNA editing, or Kaku's style preferences. It has the form:
Proposition A must be true because person B says it is, and person B is authoritative in some field (but not the field in question).
GP says "for more details", listen to Kaku's explanation in the video. There's no claim that Kaku must be right because Kaku is Kaku. Rather, Kaku explains and supports his position. The reader is encouraged to listen to Kaku's arguments, not assume that Kaku is always right.
Secondly, the H1B program was *designed* to allow world-class people, top scientists and the like, to work in the US. Michio Kaku is a top scientist working in the US. Therefore he can be expected to have legitimate insight into the potential effects of losing his Nobel-winning colleagues to other countries. On the topic of eliminating the H1B program rather than fixing it, and therefore losing top scientists, Kaku does in fact have knowledge and experience that most of us don't have.
Everyone needs to boycott H1b companies.
Put the list of known companies that use H1B's here. I'll make sure they get added to the boycotth1b.com web site.
There are two separate issues here: visas for academics, and visas for tech workers (i.e. computer programmers).
I am a physics postdoc, and I agree 100% with Michio Kaku. For academia in the fields of math/science/engineering, the US absolutely needs visa programs like H1B. Without them, all US universities will immediately go down the tubes. I have visited many universities across the US. In the physics departments, American citizens are the minority. It is mostly Europeans, followed by Chinese/Japanese, followed by Indian/Pakistani/Americans/Canadians.
This is not because of some desire to hire the cheapest possible labour. This is because the most-qualified and most-talented people are from abroad. Why? Because the USA K-12 educational system is horrible. My father learned rigorous calculus, via epsilon-delta proofs, in high school in Germany. Today in USA and Canada, that stuff is taught in first-year undergraduate classes at a top-tier university, and in third-year undergraduate classes at a typical university.
Perhaps a good solution would be to split up the H1B visa into two different types of visas: one for academics, and one for tech workers/computer programmers. That way, you could solve the problems of outsourcing in Silicon Valley without screwing over academia.
They amount to de facto indentured servitude which the US constitution bans.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Do you know why US citizens are a minority? Please do not confuse cause with effect! Cause #1 US citizens are Minority: Pay is shait. Reason for #1 is that there is no need to have higher pay if we can get indentured servitude. Cause #2 US Citizens are a Minority: Admission for all academic programs FAVORS foreigners... for Reason #2 is that International students pay DOUBLE the fucking price, and they are willing to do so because their respective countries are shit and they will pay any price to GTFO of there. Cause #3 US citizens are a Minority: Academic programs are seen as more desirable by foreigners and less desirable by US citizens. Reason for #3 is that PhD's are almost GUARANTEED H1B status (No lottery), and US citizens can make DOUBLE getting an MBA instead.
So please eliminate all reasons and watch the paneling swing the other way.
At least when it comes to protecting your incomes from competition.
When it comes to allowing in immigrants from south and central America which affect the blue collars in the country I bet many of you are for open borders..
sounds pretty hypocritical to me
This is a joke posting right?
"It is very unlikely that you would someone that is skilled and permanent resident or us citizen for a professor position. They pretty much just do not exists. There are some, but not many and definitely way less than opened position."
-- unlikely that you would someone --? No idea what this means.
-- pretty much do not exists --
-- definitely way less than opened position --
I'm sorry if english is your second language, hope good write skill not for job universities.
Geniuses can already get into this country on L visas which have no quota. H1B is designed for average skilled employees.
H-1Bs are NOT supposed to be highly skilled. That is not the purpose of the visa. H-1Bs are supposed to have a specialized skill, but not necessarily be highly skilled. We already have an "expert" visa for highly skilled individuals, the O-1 visa, and there is no cap.
Since the Reagan era, annual limits have been set by the govt... but amazingly, they have always ignored the limit, typically by 40% or more each year. This crap will not stop until the Govt. nails big businesses genitals to the wall, unlike now where the businesses are doing the nailing! A year or so ago, in an open conversation with our Govt. representative, I asked about his opinion on H1B visas, he openly admitted that he had no idea what an H1B visa was. After the meeting, he asked me for my contact information so he could get back to me. The fuck never called, emailed, or wrote a letter back to me, I guess his genitals are hurting too badly to do so.
Life is in a state of dynamic equilibrium, it both blows and sucks
I've lost count of the number of times I've gotten letters from HR after discussing raises detailing (in words, not actual $ values) how my pay is so much more than what shows up in my bank account. There's the paid vacation time, how much they pay toward my insurance, sick days, other benefits I have absolutely no use for (but I'm sure someone convinced the company that for $X, they could claim it was worth $Y).
Unless this bill says the H-1Bs are to get $100K (before taxes) in actual spendable money without counting any benefits toward that amount, it's just going to end up in a whole lot of gym memberships (as an example) in other states (to prevent actual use) "worth" $20K/year costing the companies $500/year.
If they can pull this off, there may be some minor uptick in outsourcing, but there are still a lot of very insecure, untrusting, upper-level managers who want there to be a person they can physically get in the face of when they want to exert a sense of control. I note the continued resistance in businesses to institute telecommuting practices.
listen to Kaku's explanation in the video.
This country (and apparently everyone else's) has a terrible aliteracy problem. There's hardly any illiteracy, but the last I read, only something like 3% of Americans read a book last year.
I for one do NOT want to see a talking head. A video that actually uses the video to demonstrate something is fine, but I can read five times as fast as you can talk and get a hell of a lot more out of it.
Free Martian Whores!
USA is already bankrupt by a lot of trillions. Soon Americans will be starving on their porches while their women are prostitutes.
Ask the former Soviet Union if this happens. You could also watch Argentina and Venezuela news.
Two instant solutions:
1) Remove H1B program and replace it with green cards. Most of H1B employees get green cards eventually anyway. If visa holders don't depend on company like they currently do, if they can change jobs at will, they have no reason to accept sub-par offers. One may do an investigation for what money green-card lottery winners work. I really doubt that they work for pennies H1B employees get.
2) As there is more demand than allowed visas, there is some kind of lottery. Instead of lottery, give visas to companies that plan to pay the highest salaries.
No sig today.
We're seeing someone with limited Engwish skilz get pufesor position! That's exactly what we need to know. The people doing the hiring under this corrupt government program would sell their mother or their soul for just one more dollar in their pocket. Big Thanks to our wonderful federal government for enabling them to do so.
No, not competition. Elimination. Huge difference. I am also not for illegal immigration from South America which also depresses the overall wage rate for American citizens.
Sorry to hijack a story to go on a tangent, but this may be one read by people I'd like to query:
I'd be very interested to know how older (35+) IT workers (ops & dev) in the UK are feeling at the moment, eg:
* My long experience gives me more confidence in my employability
* I've kept up with trends, so I'm OK
* My experience counts against me (eg "you know C", "you know UNIX", so you must be past it)
* My age counts against me
* There are no jobs going for my skillset
* I'm doing fine, thanks!
* Jobs I can do standing on my head don't pay enough
* Where I choose to live (family or other ties) are scarce/don't pay enough.
* I'd move for a job
Please give some additional details if you reply. (yes, I do employ!)
H1B was originally intended for extra-ordinary professionals like Albert Einstein and Linus Torvalds and NOT for http://sammyboy.com/showthread...
Casteism
*) Impose tax on income, not profits for companies that hire H1B
Casteism
Decent sized company.
What ? 300k ? 800k ?