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.

Comments

Tech employee here

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah I'm nervous. I'm nervous about foreigners taking good tech jobs. Hopefully Trump can put an end to it.

Re:Tech employee here

[sudden.zero]

Exactly, me too! Tim Cook is only worried about not being able to hire as many H1-B workers as he needs. Jump off a bridge Cook!

Re:Tech employee here

[__aaclcg7560]

I'm not. The IT industry industry will have a 1M+ shortage of skilled IT workers by 2030, when all the baby boomers are retired, foreign workers have gone home, and young people are going into healthcare for the money. We're already seeing that for the construction trades.

Re:Tech employee here

[DontBeAMoran]

And do you know why there's going to be a shortage? Because young people don't want to go into IT, because IT jobs are being paid low wages to foreign workers.

Re:Tech employee here

[sunking2]

IT wages are what they should be. The days of getting crazy money because you have rudimentary computer skills are over. However, if we're going to pay low wages, they might as well go to Americans.

Re:Tech employee here

[Major Blud]

So does Apple have "heart" and give 100% covered health care to it's employees too? Because although the health plan is good, it's not covered completely:
https://www.glassdoor.com/Bene...

Sounds like Tim wants the Senate to do something he isn't willing to do himself.

Re:Tech employee here

[__aaclcg7560]

Construction is booming and will continue to do so until banks run a foul in real estate again.

How long will the boom last without workers?

http://www.forconstructionpros.com/latest-news/news/20865090/25-states-and-dc-lose-construction-jobs-in-may-amid-skilled-worker-shortage

Re:Tech employee here

[GLMDesigns]

What makes this a factor of capitalism?

Socialists wouldn't do the same? Oh, Rights. Forgot. Governments always act in the best interest of the governed. Got that. My Bad.

Re:Tech employee here

[cayenne8]

Yeah...I"m of the thought that most immigrant tech workers are NOT here as illegal aliens, and are not in imminent in danger of being deported.

Re:Tech employee here

[cayenne8]

How long will the boom last without workers?

Well, if you didn't have so many illegal aliens working for lower wages and, often, being paid under the table....you'd have Americans working in construction again, I hear this from friends that want to do that work, but can't afford to any longer due to the illegals suppressing wages.

Construction jobs are not jobs that American's don't want...as is often brought up.

They want them, but at reasonable true market driven wages like they used to be.

Re:Tech employee here

[phantomfive]

Wow. What I get from that is people really have understanding of how to rate insurance and health care. No wonder the healthcare debate is so messed up.

Re: Tech employee here

[dougdonovan]

i do remember trump saying hire americans...us citizens.

Re:Tech employee here

[sunking2]

That's like saying the guy flipping burgers at McDonalds should be making more because he has a pivotal role. The reality is most IT labor is fairly low skill. Obviously not all, the real problem is that anyone who touches a computer calls themselves IT and thinks they are highly skilled and 20 years ago they could get away with demanding a high wage. IT organizations now are a big mess and half of those employed are getting more than they deserve wage wise. Sorry to burst the IT bubble.

Re:Tech employee here

[Fire_Wraith]

Socialists* would pay lower wages for entirely different reasons - because they think that nobody deserves the kind of salaries that accurately priced IT workers are receiving. Let's be clear though, I'm talking about actual "nationalize all the companies" socialists, not "socialists" as defined by the U.S. right-wing media, which simply means "anyone that isn't a rabid ultraconservative".

100$ Really the answer is to be found somewhere in between 100% socialism and unrestricted laissez-faire capitalism, both of which are wildly problematic, and have caused numerous problems anywhere they've been fully implemented. Giving all the power to the corporations is just as bad as giving all the power to the government. Both have their place, and both need to be kept in check.

Re:Tech employee here

[ganjadude]

only a dime a dozen? sure ill take 12, you can go work in the coal mines for me

Re:Tech employee here

[Anonymous Coward]

You are right, but only if IT was truly a 9-5 job.

It's a 24/7/365 job...if something breaks, it's on you to fix it, NOW. That is worth a bit more.

Re:Tech employee here

[pnutjam]

You know, a McDonalds won't be around long without a burger flipper. There is plenty of room for that wage to grow before it becomes financially better to not run the McDonalds.

Labor is vastly undervalued in America.

Re:Tech employee here

[HornWumpus]

Carl's Jr already doesn't employ _any_ burger flippers. Conveyor grills are cheap.

Low skill labor is overpaid already.

Re:Tech employee here

[XxtraLarGe]

Yeah...I"m of the thought that most immigrant tech workers are NOT here as illegal aliens, and are not in imminent in danger of being deported.

Stop challenging the narrative! Trump is an evil, bigoted, racist, homophobic Islamophobe who wants to kill everyone who isn't a straight white evangelical! Anyone who doesn't agree is an evil, bigoted, racist, homophobic Islamophobe who wants to kill everyone who isn't a straight white evangelical!

Re:Tech employee here

[sycodon]

How about getting paid crazy wages to ensure that sorry asses like you get your pay check ever week?

Without IT, most businesses would come to a screeching halt. Managers that treat It like their janitorial staff have already paid the price.

Re:Tech employee here

[sycodon]

I expect you know exactly Jack Shit about IT.

Re:Tech employee here

[fluffernutter]

If IT wages are as they should be then there must not really be an issue for these companies to get skilled workers. Since the only way in the market to get more/better workers is to raise wages.

Re:Tech employee here

[__aaclcg7560]

You are right, but only if IT was truly a 9-5 job.

Depends on where you are in the food chain. My current government IT is 7-3 to avoid the crazy Silicon Valley commute. I'm also not allowed to work more than 40 hours per week. I haven't done overtime in 10+ years.

Re:Tech employee here

[ShanghaiBill]

You know, a McDonalds won't be around long without a burger flipper.

But the burger flipper can be easily replaced by someone willing to accept a similar wage.

There is plenty of room for that wage to grow before it becomes financially better to not run the McDonalds.

It doesn't need to grow much to price burgers out of the market, and people will eat something else that requires less labor. Or the McDonalds franchisee will switch to an automatic grilling machine. Or hire fewer but more productive people.

Go to a Walmart and look at the people working there. My local store has one worker in a wheelchair, and a few that look and act like they have Down's Syndrome. Raising wages won't help these people, because if wages go up, Walmart will be able to hire different people, and their current workers will be priced out of the market.

Re:Tech employee here

[fluffernutter]

I don't care if I get lower wages, as long as everyone is lower across the board and the economy levels out so that I can afford more things with the money I get.

Re:Tech employee here

[ferro lad]

You mean "indentured servants" rather than H1B visa holders.

Re:Tech employee here

[WillAffleckUW]

This.

Look, anyone with a computer science degree has probably learned between six and forty computing languages and mastered them in his or her lifetime.

Stop bringing in foreign experts - who rarely are - and start investing in our own human capital.

Reminds me of the days, two years after Java was released, where job postings asked for five years of Java programming experience.

Oh, and start actually hiring women. They can code. And, no, they don't want to be your work girlfriend. It's a job.

Re:Tech employee here

[Hognoxious]

That's a good thing, so long as government contracts are for citizens only, right?

Re:Tech employee here

[kaur]

European here.
Healthcare is a public service, not a corporate one.
Cook should pay salaries and taxes, and the gov't should do the rest.

The idea that Americans consider healthcare an employer's responsibility is simply awkward from our point of view.

Re:Tech employee here

[I'm New Around Here]

Oh, and start actually hiring women. They can code. And, no, they don't want to be your work girlfriend. It's a job.

As Barbie proves.

Re:Tech employee here

[Archangel Michael]

You do care, you just care in the wrong places. You think your worth is dependent upon others, when it is tied to you and your skills and ability alone. You're willing to make trades for everyone else (on their behalf) without understanding, some of us do not want to be limited by your view of your worth.

No thank you.

Re:Tech employee here

[fluffernutter]

You have a very simplified view of worth. A person with no skills can inherit money. A person with skills may not be able to afford an education that will get the attention of top paying companies. A person may be highly skilled but unable to market themselves effectively or find a place that values all of their skills. Heck their earning potential may be limited simply by geography and family responsibilities. There is a very low correlation to how skilled a person is and how much they earn.

Re:Tech employee here

[GLMDesigns]

I was also talking about Venezuelan / USSR socialism.

Lower wages are not a function of capitalism.

Re:Tech employee here

[chip_0]

Foreigner tech employee here. Can you please explain how Trump can prevent me from taking the good tech jobs, when most of the best jobs are in companies spread around the globe, or in cool startups which allow flexibility in location?

Re:Tech employee here

[Major Blud]

Cook should pay salaries and taxes, and the gov't should do the rest.

Considering he isn't doing the taxes part, I'd say he's trying to avoid ALL responsibility.

Re:Tech employee here

[lgw]

Conscription was never an element.

So what happens if not enough people want to be doctors? Wait times grow arbitrarily. (This is also a problem in the US for some specialties, but it illustrates my point).

You need a system for rationing the available care-providing resources. You need a system for deciding how much to fund care and research. A market-based system couples these, giving an optimal answer. The current US system is the worst of both worlds, because health insurance is procured by companies, not by consumers. No market signal, and some people aren't covered. The only worse idea is the O-care exchanges.

Re:Tech employee here

[no1nose]

Agreed. I hate that companies can legally bring in workers to take our jobs at a fraction of our pay.

Re:Tech employee here

[no1nose]

Agreed. The only reason labor is so cheap in other countries is due to lack of safety standards and the low standards of living for the workers.

Re:Tech employee here

[no1nose]

Walmart description checks out. Made me lol - out loud in my quiet office.

Re:Tech employee here

[no1nose]

This. And aren't women cheaper to employ then men? /sarcasm :)

Re:Tech employee here

[fightinfilipino]

Conscription was never an element.

So what happens if not enough people want to be doctors? Wait times grow arbitrarily. (This is also a problem in the US for some specialties, but it illustrates my point).

You need a system for rationing the available care-providing resources. You need a system for deciding how much to fund care and research. A market-based system couples these, giving an optimal answer. The current US system is the worst of both worlds, because health insurance is procured by companies, not by consumers. No market signal, and some people aren't covered. The only worse idea is the O-care exchanges.

the market is terrible for this. it results in gougers like Martin Shkreli. or the deplorables running EpiPen. capitalism demands making an immediate profit in the short term with no care for the long term - the absolute opposite of what health care should be about.

Re:Tech employee here

[AHuxley]

Re "shortage of skilled IT workers"
Why are US universities not covering that? Or why is vocational education not providing a path way into been an IT worker?
Its more failure of educators and employees.
Foreign workers do not help bring more new US workers into the sector. All they do is drive wages, standards and quality down.

Re:Tech employee here

[AHuxley]

Why would a young person read and study to get into tech?
Even if they are poor? For the same amount of study they can get into law, medicine, or become a veterinarian.
Thats standing and pride in their own family, local community. The ability to get a better wage and later set their own hours.
US computer work has to return to an engineering profession. With a real wage and standing in the wider community.
Get a security clearance, get some university work, sell what people outside the USA can never offer.
All foreign works do is drive down costs.
A US company then has to risk its products and reputation to workers who are loyal to their own nation, cult, faith, cash or other needs.

Re:Tech employee here

[Camel Pilot]

Lower wages are not a function of capitalism.

Yeah go check out the wage gap and working conditions in the golden gilded age.... a time of pure unbridled capitalism. A wide earning gap between rich and working poor, horrendous working and safety conditions, 10 hour work days x 6 days week. Political influence was available for the taking by those who were able to pay.

Re:Tech employee here

[rogoshen1]

capitalism has existed for a few hundred years (the dutch were selling stocks in the 17th century for example) -- yet those examples you cited are symptoms of something that's only really been happening fairly recently.

i'd be more apt blame modern business's absolute lack of civic responsibility, MBA programs, and of course globalism.

Bear in mind guys like ford and vanderbilt basically built this country; sure they were greedy fucking cunts, but society as a whole benefited from that greed. It wasn't until MBA's started getting shat out, that the race-to-the-bottom mentality that we are plagued by today took over.

But that's not a problem with capitalism per se, more like a society which above all cherishes instant gratification (and rewards it).

Re: Tech employee here

[andymadigan]

If you're a techie and you're against immigration you've got some odd bedfellows. Most of the other anti-immigration people either fear technology because it eliminates blue collar jobs, or else they dislike nerds because "nerds are weird".

Re:Tech employee here

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah I'm nervous. I'm nervous about foreigners taking good tech jobs. Hopefully Trump can put an end to it.

"In 2016, there were over 230,000 applicants for the H-1B."

"The current population of the United States of America is 326,394,797 as of Tuesday, June 20, 2017, based on the latest United Nations estimates."

maybe lowering higher education costs there would be enough cheap qualified workers in the US to wash away the H-1B boogeyman

This is stupid. Who cares what the current population of the U.S is?
There are about 6.7 Million tech workers.
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/tech-industry-employment-soars-past-6-7-million-led-by-it-services/

There are about 900,000 H1-B holders in the US
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/05/business/h-1b-visa-tech-cheers-for-foreign-workers.html?_r=0

So almost 13.5% of tech workers are here on an H1-B. That's a very significant number.

Re:Tech employee here

[Reverend Green]

Damn straight! Those filthy low skill plebs should go die in the street like dogs, and be thankful for it.

Re:Tech employee here

[Reverend Green]

A factor of capitalism? Son, exploitation of workers is the heart of capitalism. If you don't alienate the product of another man's labor, you're never going to have very impressive "profits".

Re:Tech employee here

[Reverend Green]

The Soviet Union, for all it's many and well-documented flaws, achieved for the average citizen a huge increase in standard of living compared with the system it replaced.

Re:Tech employee here

[Reverend Green]

Actually they earn more money for the same role, and bring much higher risk to the company. But thanks for playing anyways!

Re:Tech employee here

[Reverend Green]

Nope. The Italians, Irish, and Germans you mention were all new citizens. Back when America had a virtuous policy of more-or-less open immigration. Poem on the Statue of Liberty & all that.

Nowadays we have "guest workers" instead of new citizens. Indentured servants who will go the fuck back home after they've done their work of suppressing wages for Americans. With this change there's an entirely different set of economic incentives on both sides.

Re:Tech employee here

[DontBeAMoran]

Considering he wrote "Made me laugh out loud out loud in my quiet office", I think he's part of said group.

Re:Tech employee here

[DontBeAMoran]

Excuse me, but I know Jack. He's a great guy, good fit for the job and all - BUT - don't talk to him about Linux or you'll never hear the end of it.

Re:Tech employee here

[dbIII]

There is capitalism and there is unfettered capitalism red in tooth and claw.
A bit of morality mixed in with capitalism is what we look at when we say capitalism works. Remove that and you have what Conrad wrote about in "Heart of Darkness", and a pile of other examples elsewhere.

Re:Tech employee here

[lgw]

Doctors have social status because they make vast sums. Remove the money, remove the status. This is why software developer can be a higher-status job in India than doctor or lawyer.

Re:Tech employee here

[Anonymous Coward]

Half right. H1B's are basically stuck to one employer, and are in fact in imminent danger of being deported if they leave their jobs. Giving the employer the freedom to treat them like crap, on the basis that it's very hard for an H1B to find another US employer to pick up their sponsorship.

Re:Tech employee here

[i286NiNJA]

Your words show you know this is a lie.
Conscription means you have no choice but to perform some labor.
It's all quite short of slavery and doctors under such a system can work outside of the government if they want.
You know this as w.... wait.. that sig. Agent "K"?

Your sig is from MIB.. Men In Black? You quote a will smith action/sci-fi/comedy like it's something deep?

Ok sorry forget I said anything at all.

Re:Tech employee here

[XopherMV]

Start hiring women? Every company I've worked at has gone out of their way to hire as many women as they could find. All the interns we've hired were women. We want women working with us. The problem is that they're damn difficult to find.

Re:Tech employee here

[AmiMoJo]

It's not a new thing at all. Back in the industrial revolution the market failed to even deliver a safe work environment where a person's life and limbs were valued enough to be protected.

Re:Tech employee here

[ls671]

GP must be in the six figures. Pretty standard for a little more money as he stated.

Re:Tech employee here

[Anonymous Coward]

They want them, but at reasonable true market driven wages like they used to be.

Not that I completely disagree with what you say, but...

1) "Reasonable" is a very subjective word. What's reasonable for some people may not be reasonable for others. Clearly, wages being paid right now must be, to some degree, considered "reasonable" by at least some people (since they are working for such wages);

2) The current state of wages is truly "market driven". In a TRULY free, no-barriers, labor market, you'll get such situations: if there's lots of supply of labor, wages tend to go down. That's what happens when you have "true market driven wages".

What you are suggesting (and I'm not saying I necessarily disagree with your suggestion), on the other hand, is not a "true market driven" approach, but actually an "interventionist" (or "State-regulated market") approach: to ensure that wages in a certain sector remain above a certain level, the State should do things such as "ensure the national labor market is not unduly diluted by cheap foreign labor" (your suggestion), "enforce minimum wages", "enforce labor laws", etc.

TL;DR: Be careful what you ask for and make sure it's what you *actually* want.

Re:Tech employee here

[ls671]

I guess you misunderstand how real booms work.

Re:Tech employee here

[ls671]

The shortage you are talking about has already been there for quite a while.

Re:Tech employee here

[kaur]

I have to correct myself. I did not mean that the government should provide free healthcare for all citizens; this would be a communist utopia. A mix of public and private / for-profit services should exist. The state should provide governance over the system and ensure that all citizens are covered, at least to a degree.

My point is that employers are not a part of this system.

The US situation where healthcare is so expensive and mis-governed that companies must kick in and use it as a hiring advantage - is perverse.

Re:Tech employee here

[Plumpaquatsch]

Exactly, me too! Tim Cook is only worried about not being able to hire as many H1-B workers as he needs. Jump off a bridge Cook!

"Cook cited the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program" - are you claiming his H1-B workers are all under aged too?

Re:Tech employee here

[Plumpaquatsch]

You know, a McDonalds won't be around long without a burger flipp

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/03/09/genius-burger-flipping-robot-replaces-humans-first-day-work/ - doesn't spit on you burger either, so no more "special sauce".

Re:Tech employee here

[Plumpaquatsch]

The Soviet Union, for all it's many and well-documented flaws, achieved for the average citizen a huge increase in standard of living compared with the system it replaced.

Many Russians say it was also better than the one it was replaced with https://www.thetrumpet.com/13769-more-than-half-of-russians-want-the-soviet-union-resurrected. Funny thing: the government is basically working the same it did back then.

Re: Tech employee here

[Plumpaquatsch]

Apple wouldn't even exist if Donald Trump and your Muslim ban had been in effect in the 1950's since Steve Jobs biological dad was a Muslim Syrian immigrant.

Whoa, slow down - you are giving people here ideas.

Re:Tech employee here

[MoarSauce123]

Trump hires a lot of foreigners. Look at his vineyard...Trump offer so low pay that no US worker was willing to take any of the jobs. Trump had to request to add cheap Mexican workers to keep the business going. Same with the many Trump hotels and resorts, he offers the lowest salaries in the industry with the most obnoxious work conditions. If you are not a 9 or 10 on his scale you do not get to interact with guests...if you get hired in the first place. To top that off, Trump is notorious for not paying his bills causing already many small companies to fold. Also, Trump went bankrupt with plenty of his own businesses due to shoddy management decisions. Furthermore, all his branded merchandise is made in Chinese sweat shops. Is that really the guy you are looking to for keeping your job or getting it back? If your answer is yes, then you are chronically naive beyond repair...or just dumb.

Re:Tech employee here

[jandersen]

Stop bringing in foreign experts

- like Albert Einstein, von Neumann, Wernher von Braun, Fritz Zwicky and so on. America's scientific leadership was built, by and large, on a lot of foreign experts, who then went on to develop your own, human capital, so it is not necessarily a good idea to keep them out.

Re:Tech employee here

[GLMDesigns]

Yeah. Take a look at the age BEFORE capitalism; then look at the beginning of industrialism (Charles Dickens era) then look at Golden Gilded age.

The lives of the average person sucked in all. BUT they were getting wealthier.

How do we know? Because poor people started leaving wills. Whereas before they had nothing now they mattresses and oak furniture and this and tht.

Wealth for the common man increased as a result of capitalism. Was their life still brutal by our standareds? F**k yes. Would I like to trade places with them? F**k no. But to say that capitalism did not increase the material well being of the society (and even those at the bottom) flies in the face of the evidence.

Oh, by the way, come the 1950s even Marxist historians were not disputing this - what Hobsbawn and others were saying was that there was more to life than material goods and that workers lost ... x, y, z That's not relevant to this discussion. Material wealth among the poor increased,

Re:Tech employee here

[GLMDesigns]

Sorry. Profit is not the result of exploitation of labor.

Wealth is not a zero-sum game.

Re:Tech employee here

[pnutjam]

There is nothing wrong with automation. It provides livable wages to people designing and building the robots. There is nothing inherently noble in doing a crappy repetitive job, but if your going to hire someone to do one, you have to pay them.

Re:Tech employee here

[cayenne8]

That's a good thing, so long as government contracts are for citizens only, right?

I have absolutely NO problem if that were to ever be the case.

Why not?

It is our tax dollars paying those government contracts, let's keep that money IN the US!!!

Re:Tech employee here

[HornWumpus]

They should quit crying and learn a skill, like the rest of us. 'Low skill' is curable, generally pretty quickly.

There is a large overlap between 'low skill' and 'unteachable'. They mostly grow out of that, shit/no jobs help.

Re:Tech employee here

[cayenne8]

The problem is un-moderated, unregulated, illegal immigration.

If we could close the border, and monitor who gets into the country, then we could regulate what skill levels get in....and help keep jobs filled, while at the same time, keeping wages higher at levels that are good for US working families...especially the CITIZENS.

:)

Re:Tech employee here

[Plumpaquatsch]

How do we know? Because poor people started leaving wills. Whereas before they had nothing now they mattresses and oak furniture and this and tht.

People who were too poor to learn how to read and write left wills for their mattresses? Yeah, right.

Re:Tech employee here

[AmiMoJo]

Closing the border would just create more problems and misery. Better to manage immigration properly, and give people legitimate ways to come so that they are part of the system instead of outside it.

Re:Tech employee here

[GLMDesigns]

Yes. (before I got into tech I was going for a Doctorate in History - not that it really matters, but I have a strong background in this subject)

First of all the will need not be written by the person himself. Often times put into writing at the local church. Second the level of literacy was not 0. Many were illiterate by our standards but not so illiterate that they could not make a list. Literacy was way over 50% by the 16th C

iron kettle - aaron
oak bed - bill
down comforter - charlie
horse - david
pig - earnie

Literacy was way over 50% in Western Europe and North America by the end of the 18th C. (This number is for males.) Take a look at the letters we have from the Revolutionary War, the pamphlet wars, the broadside.Take a look at the letters written by average soldiers in the Civil War. They weren't the mass of illiterate peasants you imagine them to be. Most every male, white child in the US learned his letters and 'rithmetic.

Re:Tech employee here

[LesserWeevil]

Amen. I remember a posting in 2009 that *required* "8 years experience with Solaris 10" ..which was released in 2005. Companies continue to hide behind automated HR screening systems with nonsensical requirements so they can then say there were "no qualified US citizens to fill those jobs" .. bring in the H-1B hires.

Re:Tech employee here

[Oceanplexian]

Capitalism doesn't 'demand' anything. It's not a person.

A capitalist society does not prevent you from forgoing an immediate profit to start a long term business. That's ridiculous. A socialist or communist society, likewise, does not prevent price gouging or rationing or people from getting sick. It simply changes the ownership to the government, instead of private individuals, which has no less a shortage of corruption and short-term thinking.

Re:Tech employee here

[lsatenstein]

There is nothing to move all priduct develolpment to Canada,India/China/Asia, Australia,

Re:Tech employee here

[wyHunter]

you'd rather that the poor were poorer, merely so the rich weren't so well off. You just said it. But the prices of goods bear almost no relation to wages any longer...

Re:Tech employee here

[wyHunter]

I'm a senior engineer. I've sat on many, many, many interviewing and hiring decision boards in my time. When we had women who applied, we often hired then because they were competent. However, in doing every 100 interviews in my career, typically there were two or three female candidates.

Re:Tech employee here

[WillAffleckUW]

They're screened out by HR before they even get to the tech review stage.

Re:Tech employee here

[cayenne8]

Closing the border would just create more problems and misery. Better to manage immigration properly, and give people legitimate ways to come so that they are part of the system instead of outside it.

Worse and misery for whom...? Illegals or citizens?

But, that being said, I did say close the border sealed shut to keep illegals out...but also to ease immigration process, but use that to meter who gets in here....based on skill level, etc...

Re:Tech employee here

[XopherMV]

No, we get women coming through the system. Almost universally, they're from other countries such as India and China where there are fewer opportunities for women. We hire many of these people.

American women have countless career options. Due to that, it's relatively rare to find an American woman interested in writing code over every other career possibility. We see few American women entering computer science. We see fewer of these women graduating in computer science. We see yet fewer American women applying for development internships. Fewer yet stick it out over years, gain experience, and apply for the jobs requiring experience that we hire for.

Re:Tech employee here

[AmiMoJo]

Isn't the American Dream that anyone can come and work hard and make it? Doesn't seem to require in-demand skills.

Re:Tech employee here

[david_thornley]

Ones born in certain Middle Eastern countries are often in doubt about whether they dare leave the country.

Re:Tech employee here

[cayenne8]

Isn't the American Dream that anyone can come and work hard and make it?

It does...but ONLY for US citizens....we're not trying to save the world here.

Re:Tech employee here

[Methadras]

Health benefits by employers were used as incentives at one time based on how well they were as a recruiting tool. Now they are basically entitlements since they are state by state enforcement inducements for them. There is a reason why Europe is in a serious decline and you stated it as government doing the rest. That is the antithesis of the American system of responsibility, accountability, and self-governance. I as an individual citizen am responsible for my own healthcare and health maintenance. Not government. What are the inducements for me to do anything to care for myself if government/tax payers are there to pick up the tab for my bad habits and behaviors? If I want to smoke, drink, do drugs and suffer the ill-effects of such behavior, who's responsible for making sure I get treated for treating myself so badly? Me or everyone else? This is the fundamental nature of the argument for universal healthcare. Why should my money and my work be responsible and used for other people's bad behaviors? If I screw up, that's for me to cover. Not government.

Re:Tech employee here

[david_thornley]

IT wages are what they should be.

I wonder about all such claims. How does one determine what wages "should be"? Why were they "crazy money" if employers thought it was worth paying those wages?

Re:Tech employee here

[david_thornley]

Profit sure can be the result of exploitation of labor. Wealth isn't a zero-sum game, but there are parts of the economy that are.

Re:Tech employee here

[david_thornley]

The prices of goods are set by supply-demand curves, and the demand curves depend heavily on how much money potential purchasers have. If wages go up, demand curves go up, and prices go up.

I believe fluffernutter was referring do currency units, not real wealth, in his comment.

Re:Tech employee here

[david_thornley]

Is that the thing that should be titled something like Barbie as a software management consultant?

Re:Tech employee here

[david_thornley]

If dumb Irish didn't like their arduous, dangerous, low-paying factory jobs, they could go to other companies for arduous, dangerous, low-paying factory jobs. If a company had jobs that were a little less arduous and dangerous and had slightly higher pay, they could get all the good workers they could handle. Since any number of people could play that game, factory jobs eventually became reasonably safe and paid reasonably well.

This works if the worker is legally able to work in the country and free to job-hop. It doesn't work with illegal aliens and H-1B holders.

Re:Tech employee here

[david_thornley]

Should we hire legal or illegal immigrants to grind down that poem on the Statue of Liberty?

Re:Tech employee here

[david_thornley]

The shortage may be on the supply side. Make IT work sufficiently unattractive and there will be a shortage of workers.

Re:Tech employee here

[AmiMoJo]

Make it easier for people to legally immigrate and become part of the system. The US is almost uniquely well placed to manage immigration.

Re:Tech employee here

[HornWumpus]

Unless the labor was coerced, all perfectly ethical. No being hungry is not coercion.

Re:Tech employee here

[HornWumpus]

How long do you think CS or EE takes? Medicine, vet or law are all graduate programs.

Re:Tech employee here

[houghi]

Nice that you gave the Dutch as an example. There was the VOC with a monopoly. And also obviously the first crash in The Netherlands due to Tulips.

Re:Tech employee here

[wienerschnizzel]

You have no idea what Shkreli did and why (hint - he didn't get any money from the drug price increase). You need to be more careful before jumping to conclusions.

Re:Tech employee here

[david_thornley]

Unless we provide the necessities for people who do not work, almost all labor is coerced to some extent. We have no facilities for large numbers of people deciding to leave the system and support themselves.

Inequality of negotiating leverage eases into coercion. There's no sharp bright moral line. This particularly applies with a society set up to favor large businesses, which this one is. The rules of the economy are neither natural nor divinely inspired.

Re:Tech employee here

[HornWumpus]

Your belly might coerce you. But your belly isn't your employer and your employer isn't guilty of coercion because you are hungry. Become a breatharian.

Re:Tech employee here

[Hognoxious]

But not in the private sector. There it's all free market this and competition that.

You don't mind people getting replaced by H1-Bs if it means cheaper shit for you. But heaven forbid you'd have to face competition yourself, because you're special.

Re:Tech employee here

[Hognoxious]

Really? So what's the deal with all those buildings on Ellis Island?

Re:Tech employee here

[david_thornley]

The employer is functioning in a society that says that people in general have to work to live. Usually, it's considered coercion when it's comply or die.

Sure...

[Anonymous Coward]

...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.

Re:Sure...

[unixisc]

The only thing I've noticed Tim be concerned about is LGBTQ causes. Not his company or employees

Re:Sure...

[pnutjam]

You don't learn what the drone bees want by asking the queen.

Re:Sure...

[david_thornley]

That's what I liked about something I read about being a Trump proposal, that H-1B applications be awarded based on pay rather than randomly. We could get the ones for whom money is no object without allowing companies to underpay H-1Bs to lower the pay in the field.

They needn't be

[rsilvergun]

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.

Re:They needn't be

[elrous0]

Yeah, sadly, it looks like Trump has no intention of keeping his promises on meaningful H1B reform. Oh well, I always gave it about a 30% chance he would follow through at best. Better than the 0% chance that Hillary Clinton would have done anything to reform the H1B program, but ultimately useless either way.

Re:They needn't be

[hackel]

Yeah, fuck the spouses of legal immigrants! They're bankrupting our country with all their damn taxes and productivity and contributions to insurance pools we don't need.

Re:They needn't be

[Captain Splendid]

Trump's entire cabinet is comprised of billionaires and Goldman Sachs people.

I was gonna rebut with SecDef Mattis, but according to Forbes, the fucker's worth 5 million.

Re:They needn't be

[shess]

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.

No. Cook might be concerned about H1-B (though I think he's a good guy and is probably not as cynical as you put things). But employees are concerned about whether they, as an American citizen, can travel to visit their relatives in a banned state without being hassled about getting back to their home. Or whether their relatives can visit them at home. Or whether a non-citizen (greencard holder or on a working visa) will have their papers confiscated by customs officials with no recourse. Or whether they will be stuffed in a back room for 17 hours without access to counsel or contact with friends and relatives waiting for them, etc.

How do I know this? Because I have heard these kinds of concerns directly from people via the old-fashioned social network, directly talking to people. And it is pretty damn upsetting to hear.

Now, I will agree, only a small proportion of overall tech employees will be directly affected by this. But that doesn't mean it's not a general problem for tech, because those employees are mixed in with all the rest of the employees, so when the shit hits the fan for them, everyone will hear about it and get upset that someone we know is having their life worked over through no fault of their own.

Re:They needn't be

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, sadly, it looks like Trump has no intention of keeping his promises on meaningful H1B reform. Oh well, I always gave it about a 30% chance he would follow through at best. Better than the 0% chance that Hillary Clinton would have done anything to reform the H1B program, but ultimately useless either way.

For Pete's sake... Trump has been stymied by the courts just trying to institute a pause in entries by people for a number of countries for some things he said during the campaign (when his opponent could issue said order, because She didn't say something during the campaign).. What makes you think the courts will allow him to enforce any kind of limits on immigration? His opponents will just run off to the 9th Circus and get his orders reversed...

Re:They needn't be

[fluffernutter]

Why would Trump promise things that would be difficult to pass in the courts? He was the one that was supposed to anticipate these issues, and it's not the court's fault. Either he was lying or he has no idea what he is doing.

Re:They needn't be

[fluffernutter]

Then let the economy be free and price goods according to their global average, not according to what the people in that country can pay for them.

Re:They needn't be

[Archangel Michael]

The Courts are not the Executive Branch, nor the Legislative Branch. They are starting to act like all three. Our Republic is doomed.

Re:They needn't be

[AHuxley]

Re "that would be difficult to pass in the courts? "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The changes to US law can be seen over the years.
US courts are now taking into consideration the feelings of people with no legal standing outside the USA who want to enter the USA.
Law has not changed, US policy is the same, the US courts are just been very political.

Re:They needn't be

[Reverend Green]

But it's DUH LAW, and we got a show trial to prove it!

Re:They needn't be

[Reverend Green]

But they are - literally! - holding a gun to your head when they require you to pay for food and land rent. Don't believe me? Try eating some food, then sleeping somewhere, without paying. =)

Re:They needn't be

[AmiMoJo]

If you want skilled people you need to allow their spouses in and to work. Most other countries you are competing with do that, because why would someone with valuable skills bring their value to you if it means ripping up their family or their spouse having to suspend their career?

Re:They needn't be

[goose-incarnated]

Why would Trump promise things that would be difficult to pass in the courts? He was the one that was supposed to anticipate these issues, and it's not the court's fault.

If it was possible to tell what a court would decide before it decides it, why bother having courts? You look like a fool for suggesting that the outcome of a court decision is known in advance.

Re:They needn't be

[pnutjam]

Courts are protecting the rule of law, which is their job.

Re:They needn't be

[david_thornley]

In other words, the courts are issuing rulings you don't like. That's what your statement actually means.

Re:They needn't be

[david_thornley]

An intelligent person will have a good idea what the courts will think of most proposals. Said person won't be right all the time, and won't be able to make a good guess on a few things, but will do a pretty good job of prediction.

Re:They needn't be

[goose-incarnated]

An intelligent person will have a good idea what the courts will think of most proposals. Said person won't be right all the time, and won't be able to make a good guess on a few things, but will do a pretty good job of prediction.

And an intelligent person would predict that the court would, most of the time, uphold the law as it is written. That they did not do so in this particular case makes an argument *for* Trump, not against him.

Re:They needn't be

[david_thornley]

You seem awfully sure that the Supreme Court didn't apply the law as written. It's not a matter of strict constitutional law (which I do have strong unqualified opinions on), and I didn't read anything the Supreme Court wrote about the case, so I'm not nearly so sure. The Constitution specifies that border regulation is Congress's job, and I'm not familiar with all the statutes. The Court, however, seems convinced that this is a Constitutional end-run to discriminate against Muslims because they're Muslims. Since Trump's tweets have been announced to be official Presidential documents, and he keeps tweeting about a Muslim ban, the Court had to interpret his executive order in that light.

Re:They needn't be

[unixisc]

So is Apple full of employees related to people from Somalia or Yemen or any of the other 4 countries in that travel ban list?

Which "Tech Employees" are we talking about?

[JudgeFurious]

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?

Re:Which "Tech Employees" are we talking about?

[kqs]

I'm a "Tech Employee" and American citizen, but many of my co-workers were born in other countries and I am very nervous that Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric is causing them problems. I am nervous that many of my talented co-workers may have problems staying in the US, and that future potential-co-workers will not be hired because of the legal changes.

Note that some companies abuse the H1B visa program, and I'm happy with changes to fix that. But what I hear is "all immigrants BAD", which is stupid. I feel like the prevailing attitude is "the US's borders should have been closed the day after MY ancestors got here".

If you're in the US, you are the descendant of immigrants. (Though full-blooded native americans at least have a stringer claim than the rest of us.)

Re:Which "Tech Employees" are we talking about?

[bluefoxlucid]

what I hear is "all immigrants BAD", which is stupid. I feel like the prevailing attitude is "the US's borders should have been closed the day after MY ancestors got here".

It's pretty much this, yeah. Economics is complex and difficult. People want to believe that you have a solid linkage between lever A and trapdoor B; it's not like that. It takes me several hours of research and a few pages of dissertation to work out how moving imports to American manufacture affects America, and it's always three parts: it makes all Americans poorer, no matter what we pay the factory workers; it might create jobs if we pay the Americans as little as possible, and will net-reduce American total jobs faster and faster as we increase the American wage for these factory jobs; and the job change doesn't matter anyway because population and labor force rapidly expand and contract to move toward a stable unemployment level.

If you want to send a signal to reassure Americans, well. Welcome to politics. Fact: we've created more jobs than population growth year-after-year since the recession (that's what's driving unemployment down). In tech, we've created far more tech jobs than the total lay-offs, year-after-year, meaning those H1-Bs aren't cutting into the total tech job market. These are comforting facts.

It's also an economic fact that prices are constrained by costs: you can't price something so low that your revenue won't pay the wages required to make it. That's not just about hiring $80,000 Indians instead of $140,000 Americans; the core of wealth is technical progress. Economic growth can be from population growth (when population is below carry capacity) or technical progress; technical progress reduces the wage-hours invested to produce goods and service, meaning we end up able to make and buy more for the same hours of labor worked. Prices come down because of competitive market forces, but only so far as is both profitable and mathematically sustainable.

That means somebody's gotta lose their job eventually.

So yes, that reassurance? It's true. It's also political: even without the H1-B labor, we're going to have rounds of layoffs every time things get better. That part you don't call attention to in this context.

You can call attention to it in another context. Americans do need reassurance against the pain distributed by those general economic forces, after all; and we're currently able to supply that, but only with new policy--and no new taxes. What our nation really hungers for is a new deal for the American people, and it's about time we commit ourselves thusly.

Re:Which "Tech Employees" are we talking about?

[ganjadude]

who is saying "all immigration is bad"??? I have yet to hear a single person say that. Ive hear people claim that others say it, but ive never heard a single person make the claim that " all immigration is bad"

somehow in the past decade, wanting to protect our borders from ILLEGAL immigrants, has turned into "all immigration is bad"

Re:Which "Tech Employees" are we talking about?

[laie_techie]

I'm a "Tech Employee" and American citizen, but many of my co-workers were born in other countries and I am very nervous that Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric is causing them problems. I am nervous that many of my talented co-workers may have problems staying in the US, and that future potential-co-workers will not be hired because of the legal changes.

Note that some companies abuse the H1B visa program, and I'm happy with changes to fix that. But what I hear is "all immigrants BAD", which is stupid. I feel like the prevailing attitude is "the US's borders should have been closed the day after MY ancestors got here".

If you're in the US, you are the descendant of immigrants. (Though full-blooded native americans at least have a stringer claim than the rest of us.)

I was born and raised in the US (some of my ancestors arrived here over 300 years ago). I have been an IT professional for 17 years. Over 60% of the workers at my office are foreign nationals, while 80% of project managers are foreigners. My company has a Chief Diversity Officer and designates a Female Worker of the Month (there is no male employee of the month, or just employee of the month).

Re:Which "Tech Employees" are we talking about?

[swb]

Nobody is saying that, but you can't sustain an "anti-immigrant" narrative without claiming that significant plurality is against all immigrants & immigration. And once you get people to believe in that one, then it's pretty easy to convince them that this ephemeral anti-immigrant group is really opposed to immigration because they're racist. Once you've made that association, you're home free -- now anyone who questions immigration on any level can simply be disregarded as a racist.

Re:Which "Tech Employees" are we talking about?

[R3d M3rcury]

If you're in the US, you are the descendant of immigrants.

Unless you're the one who came here. Then you are the immigrant.

And what about those of us who were here before there was a United States?

Re:Which "Tech Employees" are we talking about?

[swillden]

somehow in the past decade, wanting to protect our borders from ILLEGAL immigrants, has turned into "all immigration is bad"

Our immigration laws suck and make it insanely hard for people to immigrate legally. If you give people no way to come legally they'll come illegally.

If you want to convince me that you really favor legal immigration, you need to start by learning about the problems with our immigration system and fix that. Heck, making it possible to immigrate legally will fix most of the illegal immigration problem! If you just fight to bring the hammer down on illegal immigrants while simultaneously maintaining the laws that make it impossible for them to come legally, then you clearly just hate immigrants, and no amount of protesting otherwise is going to convince me that you don't.

Re:Which "Tech Employees" are we talking about?

[Reverend Green]

It takes me several hours of research and a few pages of dissertation to work out how moving imports to American manufacture affects America, and it's always three parts: it makes all Americans poorer, no matter what we pay the factory workers; it might create jobs if we pay the Americans as little as possible, and will net-reduce American total jobs faster and faster as we increase the American wage for these factory jobs; and the job change doesn't matter anyway because population and labor force rapidly expand and contract to move toward a stable unemployment level.

Only three pages of dissertation to prove an obvious falsehood? Good job, my brother! Keep up the boot licking!

Re:Which "Tech Employees" are we talking about?

[Reverend Green]

Our immigration laws suck and make it insanely hard for people to immigrate legally.

Agreed. The virtuous position is to allow open immigration. My ancestors came to America in the 1800s under a fairly open regime, and I believe today's immigrants deserve the same. Fuck H1B indentured servant programs, end them all now. But if you want to give up your old citizenship and become an American - well then, my brothers and sisters, welcome to America.

I can already hear both the kick-the-poor crowd bawling - "but what about the safety net??!? We can't afford to allow all these lazy immigrants into our welfare paradise!!" Well I'm just going to call bullshit on this one now. I've had the ever so enlightening personal experience of being destitute in America. There is NO safety net. Sure, there are long-term welfare dependency programs. Which have very fucking few public supporters. But no safety net. At all. First-hand experience. So I reject out of hand that argument and anyone foolish/insincere enough to advance it.

Emperor Trump, if you're listening, make America great again: bring back open immigration.

Re:Which "Tech Employees" are we talking about?

[AmiMoJo]

The problem is that the rules for legal immigration are arbitrary, you can make them whatever you like to exclude whoever you want. The US was built on immigration, almost the entire population is immigrants or the decedents of immigrants, but now you want to pull up the ladder and stop others having the same opportunity.

On top of that, US foreign police is making life pretty bad for a lot of these people who then out of desperation try to get into the US illegally.

I'm not saying you could have no controls, but Obama had the right idea with making the system fairer and offering amnesty, rather than trying to build a bloody wall.

Re:Which "Tech Employees" are we talking about?

[goose-incarnated]

It's also an economic fact that prices are constrained by costs

Only on the bottom end. On the top end it's constrained by what the market will bear. If the industry has a large margin then moving the labour won't make any difference to the price - they will still be set to what the market is prepared to pay.

And, like you pointed out, the relationship is more complex than that - moving the labour to the US might actually mean increased profits over the economy as a whole if the move lowers the unemployment and/or reduces the number of people receiving welfare.

Overall, though, moving the workforce to the US is going to be better than *not* moving the workforce to the US.

Re:Which "Tech Employees" are we talking about?

[bluefoxlucid]

It's an "obvious falsehood" as much as it's obvious that video games make people violent murderers because there's conflict in video games.

Look, money is labor trade. You work for $10/hr, I work for $20/hr, I can induce you to work 2 hours for every 1 hour I work. (Caveat: taxes, etc.; it's not that straightforward.) Making a product requires a certain amount of labor, thus wages. To pay wages, you need revenue, thus prices which collect at least that much revenue.

In other words: the number of sustainable jobs is governed by how much people can trade for their labor. Taking it in one step closer, it's governed by how much people can spend. Jobs are created by demand: you want (and have the money) to buy 1,000,000 of a thing a year, we have enough people to make 500,000 of that thing per year, we gotta hire twice as many people to keep up.

So Chinese labor, including social insurances (taxes for things like unemployment) costs $3.20/hr. Take a look at Men and Boys's Cotton Trousers and Shorts, at $6.12/pair import cost. It costs under $1,300 to import a 40-foot-long shipping container, roughly 20,000 pairs of trousers, at 6.5 cents per pair. Average retail? $14.97.

You're talking about 1.89 hours of labor per pair. Trucks that ship 20,000 of these to the warehouses around the country. 987 retail scans per cashier per hour. People stocking shelves. Roughly half the actual cost is domestic shipping; retail is trivial.

At minimum wage ($8.25/hr), and with 18% overhead (that means your employer pays 6.2% OASDI payroll, 0.2% Medicare payroll, and $1,900/year for all of your benefits), you're looking at $27.25/pair for pants. You're going to lose 40% of the involved shipping and retail jobs. It comes out to be, maybe, 40,000 net new American jobs in total, out of an apparent 171,000 full-time jobs required to produce the number of trousers we import.

By that time, minimum-wage workers go from working 1.81 hours to working 3.3 hours to buy a pair of pants. The median-income ($54k) household must expend 0.55 hours today to buy a pair of trousers, and 1.01 hours if we stop importing them from China. These expenses mean you either buy fewer pants or buy fewer of other things. If those other things are physical goods, you have less shipping and retail, and fewer jobs there; if they're things like Spotify, Netflix, and other digital services, you have fewer tech jobs.

Bump that to $21/hr (GM line worker, model cost $24.78) and you're already around a net 90,000 loss of American jobs, with minimum wage workers expending 6.5 hours and the median-income household expending 1.99 hours to buy pants (= poorer). Last I checked, the average cost of an American factory worker was $78/hr.

So I can pull the number of Chinese imported pairs of pants (it's 195,585,312 pairs in 2015), compute the number of theoretical factory jobs required (it's 171,056), and spend a few pages writing out methodology, information sources, data analytics, and just plain how many retail-level jobs are represented by the same dollars going to fewer people (because that's what paying more for the same thing is: giving someone more money, and giving someone else less); and it'll turn into a huge, huge roll of stuff that would never keep your minuscule attention span.

It's not that Americans need 6 billion more dollars to keep from cutting into jobs; it's not even that they need to be more-productive on their end to have more wealth. The problem is the labor on the other end--at the factory--is so slow and expensive that it's going to cut into your paycheck. Generally, when you get to this point, someone proposes the correct solution: Reduce the labor by automating the factories. That means create as few American factory worker jobs as possible to avoid destroying other American jobs and spiking unemployment. Of course, with China doing just that on their end as soon as the technology to automate the factories exists, you're still better off just letting them make the damned things; we've got better things to do--like build a gigabit Internet infrastructure.

Re:Which "Tech Employees" are we talking about?

[bluefoxlucid]

Only on the bottom end. On the top end it's constrained by what the market will bear. If the industry has a large margin then moving the labour won't make any difference to the price

That's not quite true.

Look at Cell phones. When cell phones came out in 1983, they cost $4,000 (that's over $9,000 with inflation today). The same is true of flat-panel TVs (LCD vs Plasma at first) to replace CRTs. At that level, even with healthy demand, the market looks like ... well, the market for electric vehicles: people who can afford an $80,000 Tesla are not your average American, and there are fewer of them.

So maybe you can get a 30% profit margin on a luxury good with a market of 100,000 consumers. It's a luxury good because it's expensive and everyone else can't afford it. That means the next guy to come compete with you has got to put down shitloads of money and take enormous risks trying to capture your market away from you. A 1% capture is only 1,000 customers, and isn't going to sustain his business. Likewise, your competitors--or, maybe, competitor, single, at this level--can't very well undercut your prices much and expect to profit for what of your market they capture.

Now look what happens when electric cars cost $15,000 to make.

Suddenly, your market is 300,000,000 American and 50,000,000 new vehicles sold per year. You can sell those cars for about $20k off the lot at a 12% net operating profit margin. You're competing with 23 other manufacturers, and a small manufacturer capturing 1% of the market gets 3,000,000 sales--which is why GM bought so many competitors over the years and had over a dozen brands.

Cell phones gave way to smart phones in the same way, with narrowing margins. These are things people just buy, and they're cheap enough that you have competitors all over the place. They're not like supermarkets, where you're taking a 2% operating profit because every moron who can file for a $20 LLC license and get a $100k bank loan can open a corner grocer. You're looking at a 7% net operating profit five-year average for some of the specialized companies; the gross profit margins are always bigger, and between products those gross margins are bigger on the luxury phones (iPhone, Galaxy S8) than on the commodity phones.

The market has to bear competition. This is kind of the result. Historically, yes, when costs go down, prices go down. Margins don't necessarily go down; they tend not to increase, because lower costs means lower barriers to entry and thus more robust competition. Sometimes, that robustness is in the form of just squeezing the prices down a bit more; sometimes, it's damned easy for anyone to jump into your market, and now you have 5,000 small businesses. If you want to see how ridiculous it gets, look at the MVNOs--like Ultra/MintSim, Ting, and Cricket.

Overall, though, moving the workforce to the US is going to be better than *not* moving the workforce to the US.

Moving the workforce to do X to the U.S. can cause the cost of product X to increase, while the wealth of the U.S. consumer base doesn't increase. Then you end up concentrating more income into fewer hands, but also making everyone poorer because they buy less stuff. That "buying less stuff" means fewer retail scans, thus fewer cashiers, fewer things stocked on shelves, fewer shelf stockers, fewer truck drivers because of less stuff shipped, and so on.

Now you have a new workforce of 40,000 U.S. factory workers making pants, and you lost 80,000 U.S. truck drivers, retail workers, and so forth. The average American goes from working 0.55 hours to buy a pair of pants to instead having to expend 2 hours of his labor to buy pants.

Overall, throwing 10% of your virgin teenage girls into a volcano to appease the Volcano God is going to be better than *not* throwing 10% of your virgin teenage girls into the volcano to appease the Volcano God, right?

Re:Which "Tech Employees" are we talking about?

[laie_techie]

If you are so special, take your talents to an organization that feels the same way. If no such organization exists, the market has spoken and any attempt to use the political system to naysay its judgement is futile.

The world doesn't owe you a particular place on the Totem pole and neither does the nation.

I am not asking for special treatment, just equal treatment. Race, ethnicity, sex, gender, nation of origin: none of these should impact one's ability to perform one's job (although nation of origin could potentially affect one's ability to communicate). None of these should have any bearing on who to hire or promote, or how much pay one should receive for the position.

Re:Which "Tech Employees" are we talking about?

[JudgeFurious]

I never took an anti-immigrant position. I just asked a simple question about whether American tech workers were unhappy or just those who came here to work.

Re:Which "Tech Employees" are we talking about?

[JudgeFurious]

Honest question because I don't know the answer to it but does anyone in the world today allow open immigration? This isn't the 1800's and allowing anyone in the world who can get here to immigrate is foolish at best. I do think our situation with Mexico is such that we'd be better off allowing any Mexican citizen who passed a simple health screening and had no criminal record to get a green card on request. Instead of trying to keep that labor out of this country we should instead focus on trying to regulate employers who want to pay less than legal wages. If we did that we'd have a much better idea of who was coming here and it would be a better system and safer for all of us. Just make the employers keep the playing field level and let in all the motivated, hard working, and law abiding people who want to come. At that point you have cut the acceptable immigrant candidates out of the "herd" and you make the penalties for smuggling drugs or crossing illegally for those who cannot legally meet those simple requirements much harsher.

Re:Which "Tech Employees" are we talking about?

[ganjadude]

getting into Harvard is also almost impossible. maybe we should all just start going illegally.

is that REALLY the logic you want to go with??

Re:Which "Tech Employees" are we talking about?

[ganjadude]

an anon acoward with no source, yeah i bet 90% of the people down south (ignoring that 90% of the people down south include those people too) think that. its on the internet so it must be true!

Re:Which "Tech Employees" are we talking about?

[david_thornley]

Net operating profit doesn't quite work like that. Supermarkets get away with very little markup because they have very high turnover. Suppose they pay $1 for a head of lettuce and sell it for $1.01, and on the average a head sells in a couple of days. Then the supermarket makes $1.80 on that shelf spot for a head of lettuce a year. If a book sits on bookstore shelves for an average of two months before selling, the bookstore's going to need a lot more than a 1% operating profit.

Re:Which "Tech Employees" are we talking about?

[david_thornley]

The people whose ancestors were here when the Mayflower arrived generally get really crappy treatment. It's the recent immigrants (as in their ancestors came here in the last few centuries) that do well.

There are people who'd like to see this illegal immigration business applied retroactively.

Re:Which "Tech Employees" are we talking about?

[swillden]

getting into Harvard is also almost impossible. maybe we should all just start going illegally.

Do you really want to equate immigrating to the US with attending Harvard? You can't get into Harvard by being born in some particular place; start putting requirements on being in the US and a lot of Americans are going to have to leave.

"Send them a signal"?

[93 Escort Wagon]

If Tim Cook hasn't noticed that Trump's been sending bloody obvious signals for the past two plus years, he haven't been paying attention.

Heart and Courage

[Kunedog]

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."

Cook really has his finger on the pulse of what workers want (lower H1B wages), just as he knows what customers want (fewer useful ports, no headphone jack, and expensive, complicated earphones). It's definitely not just what he wants or anything.

Of course ....

[King_TJ]

If you're a legal U.S. citizen OR you have a legal work visa, I don't think you have anything to be "nervous" about?

Yeah, the mainstream media likes to work people up into a frenzy over "what COULD happen" based on the conjecture of reporters with no first-hand knowledge of anything. But just listening to Trump's own speeches (which are so poorly spoken, it's obvious they come from him and aren't the result of careful editing and vetting like most presidential speeches) -- he keeps clarifying that all of his immigration issues are about stopping the "undocumented" people.

Last I checked, Apple wasn't employing a bunch of illegal immigrants who have no green cards?

And quite frankly, I've been a bit disappointed that "Mr. Build-a-Wall" has said so little about cracking down on the number of H1B visas we keep granting people to come over here and do our tech jobs. That's one area where it's FAR from provable that we just don't have anyone in America capable of doing the work....

Re:Of course ....

[ljw1004]

If you're a legal U.S. citizen OR you have a legal work visa, I don't think you have anything to be "nervous" about?

Are you not thinking of the tech employees with legal work visas who went home for their holidays as normal, but then weren't allowed back into the US because of the short-lived immigration ban? And the tech companies which advised their legal-work-visa-holding employees not to travel abroad for fear of not being allowed back?

Yep, there were a lot of nervous people.

Re:Of course ....

[david_thornley]

Countries that are a threat to us? Like Saudi Arabia?

Again?

[hackel]

Do we really have to report on every fucking thing Tim Cook says? Come on, msmash... This is ridiculous.

Re:Again?

[ganjadude]

what about what goes in his mouth?

ZING

Nervous about what???

[SuperKendall]

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.

Re:Nervous about what???

[SuperKendall]

Technological progress is in fact halted by favoring the poorest of the poor over more socially advanced and skilled immigration (even when both groups come from Mexico).

Re:Nervous about what???

[AHuxley]

Costs and seeing US workers getting real wages and better conditions again?

They should be nervous.

[sethstorm]

When there's a policy that will favor citizens instead of guest workers, nerves should be a bit frazzled.

That's how we know Trump has chosen the right policy. Besides, it's time that globalists like Cook show a little heart for citizens - by respecting the law and enforcing it consistently.

Re:They should be nervous.

[AmiMoJo]

Alternatively, globalists like Cook will just move the jobs overseas as well.

Immigration actually helps keep jobs in the US, by allowing gaps to be filled. If it gets to the point where there are a significant numbers of jobs at the US office that can't be filled, but say Paris can provide enough skilled labour for everything, the office can move to Paris.

Re:They should be nervous.

[wyHunter]

Actually the one advantage of a globalist like Cook moving jobs - is that his lies will become quite obvious, yes?

Re:They should be nervous.

[sethstorm]

Easier to mop up any "accidents". If he's not a US citizen, we don't have to protect him.

Re:They should be nervous.

[wyHunter]

Huh? If you're referring to constitutional protections - you're quite wrong. The US constitution determines what government can do - aka "Congress shall make no law..." but maybe I misunderstand what you mean.

They went too far replacing people

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

H1Bs

[unixisc]

Here, it's not illegal immigration, but rather, H1B employees that are the topic here.

From a political POV, the argument has been that H1B workers are used to simply undercut American workers - both citizens & permanent residents. Note that in the Labor Certification process, which a company has to go through while applying for these visas, they have to demonstrate that there are no American citizens or permanent residents available to take that job. That argument is badly undercut when you have outgoing American employees being required to train their replacements. Obviously illustrating a violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of the law.

From the corporate standpoint, there have been two arguments. One is that it's impossible to find American workers who are interested in doing those jobs. One may add the caveat about the salaries required to do those. If those jobs can be offshored, it's a win-win: the US doesn't have to issue all those H1B visas, and the companies can pay Indian salaries to Indians sitting in Bangalore or Pune. If they cannot be, that's where the companies should be made to cough up the cash.

The other argument is that it's impossible to find Americans who are qualified to do those, which was the original purpose of the H1B visas. This is where the EB1/2/3 category comes into question. In which case, again, see if they can be done offshore, and if they can't, then issue those visas, but for a big price.

The best suggestion I've heard about H1B's is to put a floor of $150k on the salary. That would cut out the sub-par coders here that people complain about.

Re:H1Bs

[Fire_Wraith]

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.

Re:H1Bs

[AHuxley]

Re ", they have to demonstrate that there are no American citizens or permanent residents available to take that job."
That can be done with a few select "newspaper ads" over time to show that part of the law was fully explored before bringing in people from outside the USA.
If that aspect was in any way legally difficult to show, very few workers would be able to get into the USA.
Re "One is that it's impossible to find American workers"
Tell good US universities what the USA needs. What skills all the workers for other nations have that no US university can teach?
Do other nations educational systems only pass students on merit? Are their tests more difficult? Their exams set to a higher standard?
More homework? Better labs? Better study? Study for longer? More math? More science?
What is so lacking in every US university setting that makes cheap workers from other nations so ready for US jobs?

Re:H1Bs

[TheGratefulNet]

what I suggest is a way to enforce the current rules, which are 100% ignored.

how can we do this? start a 'secret shopper' program. you know, stores have fake customers that work for management and they check on the employees to see if they are following rules and treating customers correctly.

do the same for the h1b farce. the US government should hire a bunch of out-of-work americans who have decent resumes, decent experience and SHOULD be hirable, but they - for 'some reason' - are not. give them jobs checking up on the companies who are abusing h1b rules!

you'd have definite proof of them breaking the rules; if enough of your skilled secret interviewers are turned away, likely there is something there to be checked on and maybe some nice juicy fines or even jail time for the execs!

oh, how I'd love to be part of that! I've been on the 'train your replacement' side more than once and so I'd love to get some revenge and teach those SOB companies a lesson they won't soon forget.

if you don't have a program like this, you won't catch the offenders.

the fact that we don't have this means we were never serious about stopping this abuse. its just that simple.

I was out of work for long stretches of time, during my recent past. I have felt the pain of the rich assholes who want a 2nd yacht and refuse to hire locals for available jobs. I would work that secret shopper job knowing that I'm directly helping restore some sanity and balance to the tech employment world.

(maybe someone with some power to get things done will read this and think a little bit about it.)

Re:H1Bs

[david_thornley]

It's always possible to find good American workers. Just pay 10% more than the competition. The market solution for shortages of workers in particular fields is to pay the people in those fields more, so they'll be more attractive.

Tech needs a career progression ladder

[ErichTheRed]

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.

Re:Tech needs a career progression ladder

[xtal]

I recommend IT as a last option to anyone anymore unless you've got the acumen to work for yourself.

If you're smart enough to make it in IT you can do something else.. and I'd recommend protected trades (electrician, plumbing, HVAC.. there's even a massive shortage of elevator techs - google it) over going into computing services.

IT workers need a proper union or trade protection. The older I get the more that becomes very clear.

My $0.02.

Executives are Worried

[wisnoskij]

That Trump will prevent them from outsourcing all work to India, and bringing in Indians for 1/2 the salary of home grown talent.

Re:Executives are Worried

[david_thornley]

In other words, they're afraid Trump will make people do what he says, not what he does.

Re:Yep, nervous.

[bluefoxlucid]

He's a President; he doesn't have a constituency.

Don;t believe anonymous sources

[randomErr]

There are some many 'anonymous sources' in the news today you don't know what to believe. When I see those words I automatically think 'fake news'. If it true just come and say it.

BTW: An anonymous source says that /. is about to make me their CEO.

Re:Don;t believe anonymous sources

[Anonymous Coward]

There are some many 'anonymous sources' in the news today you don't know what to believe. When I see those words I automatically think 'fake news'.

apparently nixon did nothing wrong, because his accusers were anonymous

Re:Don;t believe anonymous sources

[Neo-Rio-101]

The media often abuses the English language to make a biased point. Typically they leave out important information which leads to confusion and vagueness.
Phrases like "Many people have said" or "A study shows that" deletes important information. *Who* actually says and *which* studies show? ... or are they just made up and fake?

http://www.angelfire.com/nd/da...

Re:Why would we be nervous?

[Altus]

So you work for a company that doesn't do continuous integration or code reviews and that for some reason can't check on the quality of engineers work well enough to fire people who can't write code but you expect me to believe that 2 Pakistani developers were the source of all your troubles?

We're not talking about spouses of immigrants

[rsilvergun]

They're spouses of workers here are what are ostensibly temporary visas which were themselves issued for temporary labor shortages. Those 'temporary' shortages have been going on for at least 15 years. That's 3 full college classes start to finish.

Re:We're not talking about spouses of immigrants

[Archangel Michael]

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.

Re:We're not talking about spouses of immigrants

[Reverend Green]

Why only 20%?

Where I live - outside the US - a "low paid" foreign worker costs about 400% as much as a skilled local worker. That means a) jobs are only done by foreigners that really truly cannot be done by locals. And b) the local population aren't particularly resentful of the (very tiny) population of foreigners, since we surely are not taking their jobs or dragging down wages.

So how about a 300% tax on foreign guest workers? It won't even slightly deter companies who are genuinely using H1B to employ one-in-a-million geniuses. But it would instantly make >99% of H1B work uneconomic.

Re:We're not talking about spouses of immigrants

[SnarkSide]

It's those college students I'm most apt to protect. Everyone says we need to get all these masses of students ready for STEM jobs, but in order for inexperienced workers coming out of school to get good jobs there has to be some pressure on the market so employers are willing to take risks and invest in people. We owe it to young people to protect the market we are so busy telling them is their best path to a future.

why is this down modded?

[ganjadude]

this shouldnt be at neg 1

Re:why is this down modded?

[ganjadude]

ahh got ya. i guess even a troll is right once in a while

Trump says a lot

[WillAffleckUW]

Almost entirely lies.

So, don't believe him.

Verify. Don't trust.

Think of him as the Russian Liar-in-Chief.

Why is it supply and demand only works for Capital

[rsilvergun]

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...

I hate this Biz

[Anonymous Coward]

I graduated college in the late 90s and out of all the places I've worked there was only ONE that had any vested interest in developing a long term career path for its people - then they were bought out by a capital investment firm and all that went out the window in the name of profit.

It seems like no company puts value on people who stay longer than a few years, certainly there are no career paths other than promotion through making a lateral move to another, similar company.

No documentation, few senior level people with a any in depth knowledge, lots of half finished things (always in motion.)

Is the whole IT world this dysfunctional? Can it change?? Can WE make it change?

He could go on twitter and demand action

[rsilvergun]

from Congress. It's a popular issue. He could easily shame them into putting through laws to stop the program's abuses (or better yet, the program entirely). All it would take is a few tweets. And if it's one thing we know about the Donald, he loves tweets. The fact that he doesn't shows either a) the issue isn't important enough to him and/or b) he doesn't want to act.

T is doing it Wrong [Re:They needn't be]

[Tablizer]

[Some offered amnesty] Yet not a single one did anything to help control the flow of [illegal] immigration.

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.

This was Trump's first plan on the agenda, put off by some liberal judge with his nuts tied around his neck like a bowtie.

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.

Re:Why would we be nervous?

[Reverend Green]

Sounds like a pretty typical tech company...

Re:Signal is there - American jobs for Americans!

[Plumpaquatsch]

Read Trump lips (or just listen to what he said every opportunity). American jobs for Americans! This means no outsourcing. No H-1B exploiting.

Or look at who works at his construction sites and resorts.

Re:They are taking your jobs, putting YOU on benef

[Plumpaquatsch]

start protesting, vote with your wallets, let Apple, Microsoft, Facebook etc. know that it is YOU they should hire, not someone from Europe or China or wherever.

Yeah, exactly. Buy from Samsung or Huawai instead.

Who's nervous?

[LesserWeevil]

I'd say the folks most nervous are the captains of tech who might actually have to employ tech talent and pay the going rate instead of importing H-1B tech slaves by the thousands.

Lots of tech employees are nervous

[TJHook3r]

I find many of my tech colleagues are nervous, probably stems from too much coffee.

Re:We'll never know.

[unixisc]

Sorry, Karl Rove was a never-Trumper and to the end did not believe that Trump would win PA, much less WI or MI. And on election day, he credited the WI win to Paul Ryan, despite the fact that Ryan refused to campaign w/ Trump due to the Access Hollywood tape. And he had been all over FNC trashing Trump: it was only after the election that he's been somewhat more favorable, but still insufferable

Haven't seen it happen in practice

[sethstorm]

The only thing that has happened is the outflow of work, not the inflow or increase of citizens hired.

Besides, Apple can be replaced by a more faithful company.