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

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.

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: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.

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.

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: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.