Slashdot Mirror
Tim Cook Told Trump Tech Employees Are 'Nervous' About Immigration (cnbc.com)
Behind the scenes at the White House tech CEO meeting, Apple CEO Tim Cook told President Donald Trump that technology employees are "nervous" about the administration's approach to immigration, CNBC reports, citing a source familiar with the exchange. From the report: The source said the president told the CEOs on Monday that the Senate's health-care bill needs "more heart." That would be a second known instance of the president criticizing the GOP plan in private meetings. To that, the source said, Cook replied that the immigration approach by the administration also "needs more heart." Cook cited the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which is under review by the Trump administration. He also said people in tech and their co-workers were nervous about their status, and added that it "would be great" if the president could "send them a signal." Here's what executives of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft said.
Yeah I'm nervous. I'm nervous about foreigners taking good tech jobs. Hopefully Trump can put an end to it.
...upper management is nervous about the administration's approach to immigration, maybe. Those of us on the ground are nervous about immigration in a different way, like some H1B replacement trainings.
Fuck you, Tim Cook. Eat the rich.
Trump hasn't done anything of substance to even mildly inconvenience the wealthy, and the H1-B program (which, let's face it, is what Timmy's talking about) is no different. He made a few pointless proclamations to great fan fare but he didn't even bother rescinding Obama's executive order letting their spouses work.
Trump's entire cabinet is comprised of billionaires and Goldman Sachs people. The swamp is not getting drained. Face it, we got Hilary's economics with the right wing's Health Care and social issues slants.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Are "Tech Employees" nervous or are just "H-1B Tech Employees" nervous while most of the rest are thinking they might be staring at an opportunity?
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Nervous about enforcing laws?
Nervous about actually vetting immigrants?
Nervous about letting immigrants from other countries have a fair chance at entry, instead of being at an inherent disadvantage because they do not have the privilege of physical proximity that illegal Mexican immigrants have?
To me it seem utterly crazy to be "nervous" about treating immigration as seriously as any other country on Earth does... you try just wandering into Canada and looking for work and see how well that works for you.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
When a university replaces their tech workers with H1B workers, it has gotten out of hand. These positions were not empty, they had competent people already that were being pushed out.
When I started out in IT (back sometime after the last Ice Age,) it was very possible to start out as a help desk person, and work your way up learning as you went. I know, because I started out with a non-CS degree and made the hops from help desk to desktop support to (essentially) a data center operator, then several levels of sysadmin and finally where I am now as a senior engineer/architect. The thing I'm worried about is that current generations will see no future in an IT career and choose not to pursue it. One of the contributing factors is the limited prospects for low-end IT jobs needed to get the skills you have to possess at the higher levels. If help desk work is offshored or a minimum wage job, fewer people will go into the field and gain the kind of OJT you only get in the trenches.
I absolutely don't hold myself out to be some super-genius, but I have noticed that there are a lot more "senior architect" level jobs being filled by people with a much lower skill and experience level than you would expect. This makes sense if there's a whole bunch of missing rungs in the career ladder -- a CS grad will BS his way into a higher level position than they normally would have because of this. This is where you get the architect-level people who just buy whatever's in the Gartner Magic Quadrant because they can't objectively evaluate vendor claims. I've had to work very hard to stay hands on in the company I work for, because the assumption is that once you reach my level all you do is hand-wave a few diagrams and buy million-dollar software tools to badly automate Function X. My boss knows this, but it's hard convincing those above our level that it's worth investing in the talent pool.
I'm one of those crazy people who really likes my job and loves learning and teaching newbies what I know. I also think companies would be fighting fewer fires if the labor market wasn't so distorted at the low end by the body shops and outsourcing companies.
The big problem is that the bulk of those visas have been used by companies that were clearly violating the intent of the law, by essentially enabling other companies to play a shell game. It works sort of like this:
Acme Inc. can't just replace its IT staff with H-1Bs. What it can do is replace its internal IT department with a contracted IT services group. Enter Wile E. Coyote Services, a company that hires H-1B workers, who bids on the contract. When WEC Services wins because it can bid cheaply due to using lower-paid H-1B workers, it takes over the IT work formerly done by American employees of Acme Inc - whose jobs are now being done by WEC's H-1Bs.
A salary floor might go a good way towards fixing some of the problem, though part of the problem isn't because the program is bad as is, so much as it's not being enforced. WEC is already skirting the requirements and is likely making dubious justifications for hiring those lower-paid staff in the first place. We need a Justice Department (and an Administration) that is willing to hit them with a giant boulder, because if the rules change but no one enforces them, it won't really matter in the end.
Low wages are always what they should be, but high prices are just the market self regulating. And God forbid you talk about poverty or (gasp) wealth inequality. Fetch me my fainting goats, I do believe I have a case of the vapours...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
There is no Labor shortages, especially when the labor participation rates are at 40 year lows. The demand doesn't want to pay for the supply. Pure and simple. So they change the supply curve by importing cheaper labor. This is and has been, always the case.
The fix for "skilled IT" labor is to require businesses to pay a huge tax (20% wage/salary/benefits) for H1B visas as well as increase the filing fee for every H1B visa that they request. I'm pretty sure that they will find qualified US employees without having to resort to H1B. Taxes (like this) are completely avoidable. We could use the taxes to lower taxes on workers or something actually useful to the common person.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
There's a reason for this: both parties are in on it. Democrats see them or their offspring more likely to vote Democrat; and businesses see them as cheap labor, and therefore (legally) bribe Republicans to look the other way. Thus, Republican representatives pretend to be appalled for their voting base, but have kept making excuses not to sign anything when the opportunity has arisen.
Trump is doing it wrong. Directly booting people out and breaking up families is both mean and bad politics. A law needs to go after businesses with some legal teeth against owners and hiring managers, along with an army of inspectors. Much fewer illegals would come if they couldn't get jobs. It would take longer to see results than direct boot-outs, but eventually has the same effect.
But, business will never go for that: they'll lobby and bribe to stop it, and they have deep pockets. Trump seems too pro-business to fight that fight, and so does the street-hunter thing instead. Bigly sad.
And Congress needs get off their butt and fund the hiring of more border guards. That's more effective than a wall. Tunnels and ladders will pop up. Again, both parties have made silly excuses not to fund guards in the past.
There are multiple entrenched special interests that collectively put up barriers (no pun int.) to real solutions.
Table-ized A.I.