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Cutting H-1Bs Could Mean More Competition From China and India, Says GoDaddy CEO (cnbc.com)
Silicon Valley companies continue to express their concerns about the restrictions on H-1B visa program. The H-1B visa program -- which enables U.S. companies to hire foreign workers -- has become a political lightning rod but remains essential for American companies to hire the technical talent they need to compete on a global scale, said GoDaddy CEO Blake Irving. From his interview on CNBC: "We do not produce enough technically qualified candidates in this country," he said. "You can't take an 18-month training program and produce a machine-learning scientist." Irving was particularly concerned about overseas competition. The American university system is good at training foreign workers for tech jobs, and it is essential that the U.S. government allows them to stay in the country to fulfill U.S. jobs, he said. Otherwise, we train workers from countries like China and India and then send them back to those countries to set up tech ecosystems that compete with Silicon Valley.
Competition is generally regarded as a good thing. When these people stay in the USA, they generally depress wages and send all the money they earn back to their home countries anyway, which does the rest of the US economy no good at all. Really I'm not sure we should even have any sort of H1-B program at all.
Maybe the University could just train the American kids instead.... I know... I'm throwing up in my mouth as I type it.
Just hire locals you cheap-ass CEOs. You'll get more adept, better labor for it and it pays for itself in having a more agile company.
> "You can't take an 18-month training program and produce a machine-learning scientist."
That's fine - if you're looking for machine-learning scientists.
Unfortunately, the majority of the recipients of these H1B's are low paid scab labor, imported to cut labor costs.
Raising the cost of H1B's should take care of that loophole while still allowing GoDaddy to import their "machine-learning scientists".
If it's coming from GoDaddy, it can safely be ignored. Fucking shitty company.
The Trump administration is considering reprioritizing H-1B visas. Right now, such visas are given out based on a lottery around April 1, which is utterly irrational and chaotic; it causes outsourcing firms to flood the visa application process with numerous fake applications, instead of the visas going to US companies that actually need those workers. Under the new rules, H-1B visas would be given to the highest paid workers and with precedence to people graduating from US universities. No matter what you think about the absolute number of H-1B visas, that's a good change to the immigration program.
If, in addition, the US reduces the number of work visas, that would result in more foreign competition, unless made up for elsewhere. But Trump has generally advocated a merit-based immigration system, which may mean more skilled immigrants (as opposed to H-1B visa holders) and less unskilled labor and family-based immigration. Again, that seems like a win-win.
Of course, we'll have to see what he actually does. The Orange One is a bit unpredictable and tends to act rashly.
He should talk to all the developers from Disney who were replaced with H1B workers and forced to train them.
Instead of restricting the number of h1b's, it would be simpler if we just taxed them. It could be a flat fee like 20k/year per h1b or it could be a percentage like 20% of payroll. Either way, it would allow companies to hire as many h1b candidates as they need but still give them an incentive to hire local talent first. The number one complain everyone has with h1b is that h1b employees are willing to work for less but if you added a yearly surcharge to the h1b then that argument becomes void because it would then be cheaper to hire local talent than h1b. You could even go to 50% or 100% if you needed to but to me a surcharge makes more sense than a hiring cap. A 50% surcharge would make local talent at 149k cheaper to hire than a h1b at 100k which would completely get rid of the complain that the only reason companies hire h1b is to save money not because the talent isn't available.
I can't hire System Engineers for $9 hour so obviously the problem is that there aren't enough System Engineers here.
If you want the equivalent of a College B.S. in machine learning 18 months of intense training is more than you'd actually get during your 4 years at college. possibly even more than a masters. If you are looking for PhD level, then 18 months maybe isn't there entirely. But over the next year or two of work experience, in a job emphasizing research in AI with a good mentor, would definitely produce pHD level graduates. I know this because I've seen it done at my company, producing major leaders through this process.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
We the elists CEOs who like fucking over US programmers are going seriously take it in the ass if we eliminate H1B visa's! We may be forced to close and live on the same crap income we planned for our programmers! Whaaaaahh.. my pussy hurts! Make it stop!
No matter the issue, Trump doesn't understand anything other ratings and popularity. He gets a certain segment of the population riled up with really simple ideas 1) we're bringing jobs back 2) every problem you have is the fault of this group of people 3) if the jobs don't come back, it the fault of another group of people
He sets the stage for other people to fight it out and get attention for himself. He has absolutely no interest in solving problems, no ability to understand what his actions do, and no empathy for the people he affects.
This shit will continue.
I work with dozens of H1B visa holders. I scoured the lands of the US for 1.5 years to fill a vacant position and I couldn't find anyone in the US to do it. I work in NIH funded research and needed a programmer at $45k/yr. I was fine with a new college grad, and I still couldn't find anyone. Eventually I get an email from someone in Turkey, and we hired her. She's amazing. However if this shit with the H1B's goes through, we can't pay her and she'll have to go back. I won't be able to fill the position. We'll have to let go 6 employees whom we can't replace. If just this H4E spousal visa shit happens, then my employee's husband will have to leave. The spouses of 3 of our employees would have to leave.
Why can't we find the right people here? I honestly don't know. I went to every college in the area and said "If you have taken a programming class, I want you. I'll pay you. I'll train you in the languages we use" and no responses. Why??
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
is very, very nice. It's on Lake Washington in a new building between Kirkland and Bellevue which are both booming tech cities. I have a couple of friends that work there, and they now only hire low-cost Indians. I had two interns that were making $10 per hour that are now full-time employees there making $12 after they graduated from Univ of Washington. They're hiring incompetent, low-cost people that can't do the job. Of course they want to keep that pipeline of cheap idiots open.
And most of those 60K plus workers are machine learning people earning less than 130K/year? The program cuts won't hurt those guys. They WILL hurt the guys coming in at 60K (the minimum) who are replacing the 45-50 year old programmers earning 100-140K, that they are replacing at less than half the cost, that said 45-50 workers have to TRAIN to do their job
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
How will American kids even have the chops to enter university with Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education ?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
... it's probably a good thing.
I went to the US for my Master's in a top-25 state uni. I was good, so I didn't even have to pay after the first semester (research assistanship). I worked with an H1b for 3 years (at a competitive rate), but when I was close to renewal, we'd have to file on the first day and hope we were not late competing with all the outsourcing companies bringing free labor, then my wife who was also finishing her degree would have to get a separate H1b, because H1b's don't allow your dependents to work, so both would have to be timed perfectly... and if any of our employers ran out of business etc, we'd have to scramble to get another to continue our visa... at which point I said, yeah, right, screw that, let's go back to Europe, which is what several of my classmates eventually did...
So, why provide world-leading education and then send them away? Forget about setting arbitrary wage minimums - that doesn't even make sense given how much wages are dependent on location in the US. Give people who have post-grad studies in good US universities a way to stay without weird restrictions like being tied to a job, or dependents who can't work etc, instead of sending them away and instead importing low-cost unskilled labor.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
This sounds like the Trudeau position: "If you kill your enemies, they win." Clearly we must further depress American wages and put more Americans out of work in order for the American worker to prosper.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
If only to be the epitome of the problem.
Let make this analogous to the the poor farmers in the US who "can't find anyone to work those jobs".
"
I work with dozens of Illegal immigrants. I scoured the lands of the US for 1.5 years to fill a vacant position and I couldn't find anyone in the US to do it. I work in Apple Picking and needed a picker at $5k/yr. I was fine with a kid dropped out of high school, and I still couldn't find anyone. Eventually I get an email from someone in Mexico, and we hired her. She's amazing. However if this shit with the Illegals goes through, we can't pay her (a living wage) and she'll have to go back. I won't be able to fill the position. We'll have to let go 6 employees whom we can't replace (or marginally raise prices as everyone else will helping to boost a cyclical economy).
Why can't we find the right people here? I honestly don't know (I do but I want to address my unwillingness to pay the market price for talent). I went to every college in the area and said "If you have taken a programming class, I want you. I'll pay you (as little as I possibly can, maybe call you an intern and not at all). I'll train you in the languages we use" and no responses. Why??
"
"We do not produce enough technically qualified candidates in this country"
"Forced to train H1B replacement"
Pick one.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
"We do not produce enough technically qualified candidates in this country," he said. "You can't take an 18-month training program and produce a machine-learning scientist."
While the second part of that statement may be true, the first is not for the vast, vast majority of H-1B positions.
Do we really not have enough people that know Java, for example? I call bullshit.
FFS, we invented Java, and to claim that the US doesn't have enough skilled Java programmers to fill the demand is just plain bullshit. This is all about getting workers below-scale and who are slavishly compliant because they don't want to be sent back to whatever jobless, 3rd-world shithole they came from.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Is anyone shocked that corporate-owned media is serving up stories and interviews with corporate bosses that favor corporate profits? Where are the interviews with workers who lost their jobs?
I'm still puzzled at why there isn't any anger from rank-and-file liberals at how the corporate interests infiltrated and took over the liberal movement to the point where every liberal newspaper is advocating policies that favor corporate profits, such as globalization and importing cheap labor. There was a brief backlash in the form of the Bernie movement, but the corporate liberals squashed that pretty quick in favor of their stooge Clinton.
"I work with dozens of H1B visa holders. I scoured the lands of the US for 1.5 years to fill a vacant position and I couldn't find anyone in the US to do it. I work in NIH funded research and needed a programmer at $45k/yr."
Ya, you were budgeted $45K/year. That's not enough to live on in most of the country, especially not with student loans that an education in the field requires. So basically, what you're saying is your failure to find a candidate had NOTHING to do with their abilities or skills. It simply was a matter of you not being willing to pay a reasonable salary. So you took advantage of someone from a second world country.
Congrats.....
10 to 1, you're also a registered Democrat or an Independent who voted for Hillary.
You live in a dream world. Those gifted but poor kids still won't be able to get the classes they need. Charter schools won't set up in poor areas because the potential administrators know they won't succeed.
The poor parents can't afford to gifted send their children to another district because they don't have the time and money. All that will happen is those poor kids will attend schools that are even more starved of resources because of the effects of vouchers.
The problem that Betsy DeVos wants to "solve" is that public schools don't teach religion and creationism.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
"We do not produce enough technically qualified candidates in this country,"
Complete Bullshit.
What they mean is..."We do not produce enough technically qualified candidates in this country that we can pay low wages and hold hostage with H1-B visas"
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Basically when accounting for inflation, salaries have been flat since the 70's.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
We do not produce enough technically qualified candidates in this country
Utter crap. Should I point this guy to the story about how Disney imported a bunch of H-1B workers... and then had their CURRENT EMPLOYEES train them? The H1-B either needs to be shuttered completely, or they need to require that the H-1B worker be paid 50% above the industry average. Take away the incentive to use them as cheap replacement labor.
According to ECON101, when demand outstrips supply, the price of a good goes up.
In this case, that means wages so I decided to take a look. According to the Federal Bureau of lagor statistics, STEM salaries grew at ~2% a year from 2013-2015 nationally. Meanwhile wages for "Computer Systems Design and Related Services" grew at ~2.3 a year. Inflation last year was 2.1% so if there is a STEM shortage, it must be very small.
In comparison if you are part of the ownership class, your NASDAQ index fund grew by 50%.
Anyone else have any good numbers to back up the anecdotes?
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
There are a lot of problems with flat salaries, but the biggest one is that the salaries of CEOs are not flat. I could accept your brush off if everyone was experiencing the same thing. Do CEOs not compete with other CEOs in the same way that all workers compete? Yet somehow everyone seems to be affected by this except for the highest echelon. We are all in the same economic system, yet the forces do not seem to apply to all players equally.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
A university (or trade school) is there because most people are not self-starters with the resources to individually arrange what they need to learn about a topic.
Also:
Vocational training is there for people to learn how to follow standard operating procedures.
Academic study is there for people to gain the understanding so that they can write the standard operating procedures.
Example - a bit over twenty years ago despite being utter crap at welding I could design weld joints in a difficult material that the experienced welders could not. It wasn't that they were crap at their job it was just that it was a situation that diverged a lot from anything they had welded before and they hadn't studied the theory.
However if they had that trade experience and had cracked open a few books to learn the theory they would have been much better at it than I - but that's getting beyond the initial training/education thing.