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Immigration Attorneys: Industry Pushes Foreign Labor, Claiming 'US Students Can't Hack It In Tech' (breitbart.com)
geek writes: According to Caroline May from Breitbart News, "The tech industry is seeking to bolster its argument for more white-collar foreign tech workers with the insulting claim that the education system is insufficiently preparing Americans for tech fields, according to pro-American worker attorneys with the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI). [In an op-ed published at The Daily Caller, IRLI attorneys John Miano and Ian Smith take the tech industry to task for its strategy to promote the H-1B visa program -- alleging a labor shortage of apt American tech workers while importing thousands of foreign workers on H1-B visas from countries with lower educational results than the U.S.]" John Miano and Ian Smith write via The Daily Caller: "But if the H-1B program really is meant to correct the failings of our education system, as BigTech's new messaging-push implies, why is it importing so many people from India? According to results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a global standardized math and science assessment sponsored by the OECD, India scored almost dead last among the 74 countries tested. The results were apparently so embarrassing, the country pulled out of the program all together. Not surprisingly then, there isn't a single Indian university that appears within the top 250 spots of the World University Rankings Survey. And unlike American bachelor's degrees, obtaining a bachelor's in India takes only three years of study."
If I would have known that I could obtain a bachelors degree in only 3 years... oh wait, I already did that by doing 18-21 credit hours a semester instead of the usual 12, otherwise known as benefitting from the fact that credits per dollar in that range reduced the cost of my education. Silly me for caring about my education's cost instead of viewing it as a time to goof off.
Thirty four characters live here.
I happen to know that even getting accepted for a BA at the IIT requires passing one of the hardest university entry exam on the planet. Sure, for MA and PhD, the IIT is crap, but the BA graduates are among the best available, simply because they are the best from a large pool of applicants (and the rest be damned...). That said, while there are a few US universities that can compete on BA level, they do not produce enough graduates, and hence the importing.
Side note: A few years ago when I was doing my PhD, we did a nice little experiment when we found a floor-plan of an CS institute at Berkeley: We tried to identify which PhD students were American and which were not. We ended up with something like 1 in 10 US and 1 in 10 unsure. The rest were from abroad. So my take is the insult here is not by the people saying the truth about the US education system, the insult is to those going through that defective system.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
WE need unions also why train your h1-b replacement if we can't hack it.
Simply, about age 35 I was "too old" and was pretty well done in the tech industry. I wasn't even able to get back into the interviews. This was right after Y2K (see, I am old) and there really was a glut of IT workers looking for jobs.
I saw the writing on the wall when I looked around for old men and didn't see many. I went back to school and now I teach at a middle school. If I really believed the jobs were there, I honestly believe that I could go back to school and be up to speed an a semester or two. However, I know that the jobs are not there. I know plenty of 50 year old ex-IT workers.
The reality is that the lack of willingness to hire is the problem. The workers have been pushed out; but can quickly "retool" of the demand existed. However, stop and think, if we weren't so fixated on pushing people out of the tech industry, about how much expertise we would have grown. That is potential, and, frankly, education investment that this country has wasted.
Those of you thinking, "I am so awesome that it can't happen to me," consider the number of older IT guys that are driving cabs and delivering pizzas.
The reason for hiring them, at least in Silicon Valley, is not to pay a bargain basement wage, but to enable US companies to hire the best and brightest in the world. It's got nothing to do with a shortage of US workers. [...] Now, if US employers were forced to hire based on immigration status - citizens first, then green card holders, then it would be a distinct advantage to be a citizen. It'd also probably result in US employers not having the smartest people in the world working for them.
So let me see if I get your point.
The important issue in your mind is that US employers get the smartest people in the world.
And this is a more important issue than US citizens having a job.
Additionally, why shouldn't there be an advantage to being a citizen?
(I'm all for helping people in other nations, and note that we've brought a lot of people out of poverty... but do we have to bring our own population into poverty to promote that goal?)
and 60-80 hours a week with no OT pay
I had a boss try to tell me once that "If you work over 40 hours you are salary, if you work under 40 hours you are hourly". I looked at him and said "That is illegal" to which he responded, "No it's not, look it up!" I went and looked it up and it was illegal and went back to him and he said "oh I was just kidding!"
This is the type of sociopathic shit that we are dealing with here.
Part of the issue is your HR department.
Most HR departments now days demand a bachelor degree or better, just to be able to say hello. This is because the bachellor's degree is the new high school diploma, as far as the hiring process is concerned. HR drones will say that the bachelor's degree tells them the following things: 1) You know how to read and write, and can do math at a passing level. 2) you can finish what you started.
Rather than actually use what the customary 90 day probation is actually for, or doing some kind of job skills assessment, they reach straight for the degree, and refuse to listen to reason otherwise.
Nevermind that the best IT talent is often self trained, on the cheap, and typically lacks a degree.
When you refuse to look where the talent is, is it any mystery why you dont find the talent you claim to be looking for?
Fix HR. Then you will find talent.
You are right in that I have no idea what percentage of unions are rotten. I can only tell you that all of my experiences have been pretty poor. My wife's hospital had a strike. These are nurses, not iron workers. Tires were slashed, threats of violence were made, etc. The scabs were better nurses, by most accounts. The nurses were already the highest paid in the metro area. The hospital was (and is) bleeding money due to its role in a poor area. The only reason the strike was "resolved" is because the bought politicians leaned on the hospital.
My friend runs a small iron working shop - just him and a few long-time employees with benefits. He's had rocks through his window and his equipment is regularly vandalized.
Locally, the iron workers union burned down a church that was under construction by non-union labor.
Attempts to reform public schools are repeatedly thwarted by public teachers unions. Attempts to get rid of morally objectionable public pensions fail across the board at the hand of public unions.
In NYC, the grossly-overpaid TWU went on strike illegally in a city that is 95% dependent on transit.
Have you ever been written up for a bullshit "grievance" by dozens of cliquey union members because you said something unpleasant to one of the other members? That's fun to be on the receiving end of.
I'm sorry, I do recognize the historical importance of unions, and I do think workers need to be organized. I just don't think the current thing we call a "union" is terribly beneficial to society. Its mostly a semi-governmental bureaucracy at this stage. I'm glad it served you well, but I have not had nice interactions.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Shilling? Nobody pays me to post here. I post as AC so that the paid moderator shills cannot silence me.
There may be more overall wealth than there was in the boomers era, but that does not make it sustainable. It is not.
What I argue is exactly what the billionaires do not want known. That the current "american dream" is unsustainable, and by far the majority of people will never achieve it anyway. The billionaires want you to believe you can, that is what their system is built on.
An economic system that requires infinite growth, with fixed resources, will by definition, self destruct. Without practical interstellar travel, it is doomed to fail. They know it, but they do not want you to know it.
You have it completely backwards.
But hey, let validation of the actual shills (the paid moderators here) lead you to believe you are correct. When actually, you, and the audience of slashdot, is being manipulated, and always has been, to believe in an unsustainable economic system.