The trouble is that the US government got into an irrational "boost exports", "multiculturalism" kick. The US government and business executives are still making concessions on top of concessions to thugs like the Red Chinese, in hopes that one day they will increase freedom and open up to enough legal exports from the USA to make some profits. Nixon and every US president since has bent over backwards for them. But, instead of opening up, the Red Chinese subborned those US executives into helping violate people's rights, and planted over 3,000 front businesses for their spying and lobbying in the USA. (Fortunately, there have also been a few deals like the Lenovo buy-out from Ill-Begotten Monstrosities, and source-code grabs from trash producer M$.)
"In a private company the owners or the stock holders decide, directly or indirectly via the board of directors, how much the CEO"
Actually, if you'd watched the news over the last 8 years of so you'd known that nearly all of the C*Os and directors have thrown up barriers to stock-owners having any say in executive compensation. Yet, the stock-owners are nominally the owners of the corporation and should be determining the executives' compensation packages.
Several academic studies have concluded that there is not a competitive market when it comes to executive compensation. Instead, it's a good ole boy network that log-rolls compensation packages ever higher, regardless of actual personal performance.
"You are correct, it's a non-immigrant visa, but it has the capability to lead to a green card with sponsorship"
This was not always the case, and serves as a good example of the creeping worsening of the H-1B visa program. At first, applicants were required to show that they owned property or had other anchors to their nation of origin, and were required to swear or affirm that they had no intention of immigrating.
Now, they're "dual intent", meaning that you can apply for a green card.
But only a tiny fraction of H-1B guest-workers are sponsored for green cards... and even they are under-paid and generally far short of "best and brightest".
Studies by researchers from RAND Corporation, Stanford, Urban Institute, Harvard, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Georgetown, Rochester Institute of Technology, UC Davis, and Duke have reported that we have continually been producing far more STEM (science, tech, engineering, math) workers than we've been employing in these fields.
Examination of employment data and projections from BLS when compared with NCES (Dept. of Education) records of degrees earned by US citizens confirms these findings.
"As late as 1987, 60K graduates were competing for about 25K open positions, according to Janet Ruhl, author of _The Programmers Survival Guide_" --- Margie Wylie _CNET_ "The skills shortage that isn't: When the rising tide floats employees' boats, employers proclaim disaster" http://news.com.com/2010-1077-281060.html http://www.kermitrose.com/econ1998.html#19980204
In testimony to the House Science and Technology Committee, Harold Salzman reported that we've been producing as many as 3 times the numbers of STEM workers as we've been employing in these fields.
This isn't just about not paying at a higher rate for additional hours of work. It's about not paying for the additional work at all.
I have to wonder how many software engineers from Sopchoppy and Chicago will go into California's hideous cost of living not realizing that, no matter how much they work, they won't be paid for anything past the first 40 hours.
Why do so many people seem to assume that local, government-backed monopolies with large territories are the most efficient way to generate and distribute electricity?
It can be efficient to have gas-fired units generate for 15 square blocks or a single factory.
I'd much rather see wind-mills and solar panels scattered all through suburbia, with lots of competition, than big "wind farms" or "solar farms" in just a few places. It'd be better from the anti-terrorism angle, too.
Economist Walter J. Primeaux (U of Texas at Austin, U of Illinois) researched these unnatural monopolies back in the 1970s and 1980s. Other economists looked into the X efficiencies created merely because there was competition, even if it was only on the basis of quality of service. There were dozens and dozens of articles in the journals, the trade publications, and a few popular media reporting on the advantages of competition, though they hardly reached most main-stream media radar screens. Vail and Insull created quite a bit of meme-inertia with their propaganda campaign of a century ago.
Demonstrating that, not only does he not know much about science & tech, but he doesn't know anyone who knows anything.
But it's not as though Barracks O'Bama had a clue, either.
I'd much rather see Ron Paul, Bob Barr, and Chuck Baldwin getting some media coverage.
"Half of knowledge is knowing where to find knowledge."
Whether your job title is "programmer", "programmer/analyst", "analyst", "software engineer", or "software architect" has nothing to do with whether you have a particular degree. Different organizations just use different titles for the same jobs, and different managers are hyper-credentialists, or credentialists, or believers in "self-made men".
A "software architect" *should* take a little different approach than a "programmer", but not especially diffeent from a talented or well-educated "analyst".
The Occupational OutLook HandBook has always been properly classified in the fiction section of the library.
Employment of software publishing production workers has been flat since the Clinton-Bush economic depression started.
The quarterly figures on employment and unemployment rates by detailed occupation have improved a little, but aren't exceptionally rosy.
On-line help-wanted advertising has risen since the deepest depths of the depression, but we don't have a pre-depression base-line (let alone a pre-bubble base-line) to know how this fits in the general schemes, i.e. to know whether it's growing as steeply or not as steeply as it should. Print help-wanted advertising is subterranean, down to 26 now, from 100 in 1987.
Overall labor force participation rates and employment to population rates are up, but LFPR and E/P rates for men are down.
And I don't know what to make of the Institute for Supply Management's employment indices.
You might declare it as defense research, but... the US constitution doesn't permit such subsidies.
"What gives you the idea the job market has 'no need' for those people?"
What gives me that idea are the hundreds of thousands of bright, well-educated science and tech workers who are under-employed and unemployed.
It would be far better to implement tax breaks to employers who invest in bringing in US citizens for interviews, in relocating US citizens, and in education and training US citizens... and to adjust such tax breaks that already exist in line with the inflation in costs of travel, education and training in the last 20 years.
They're doing far too little in the way of background investigations of visa applicants. Instead of these stupid instant data-base look-ups, they should be interviewing every applicant, their employers, co-workers, teachers, professors, family members, landlords, class-mates, etc. In a time when it can take a US citizen with ancestors going back to the 1700s 4 years to get a passport, all this whining from visa applicants because the current rubber-stamp process takes a few months is outrageous.
A few years ago, this came up with a friend who manufactures specialized foot-wear for theatrical purposes, re-enactments, etc. He said it costs only about $8 per pair to make shoes in the USA. Call it $10 per pair, today, to allow for some inflation.
So, why are these guys off-shoring the manufacturing, and still ratcheting up the prices to as much as $200 a pair? What is it about 500% and 800% returns that they're somehow not sufficient to please these executives? And, just to make it worse, they're turning out shoes made from low-quality materials with low-quality workmanship.
You point out something else, important, meadandale. There's far too much body shopping and far too little hiring. If you tell someone you only want them to work for you for a month or 3 months or 18 months, they're going to need a lot higher hourly rate.
People have caught on that body shoppers cut total compensation by not paying for vacation, bench time, education/training, pensions, etc., and that total life-time compensation for bodies shopped is a lot lower than for those with real jobs.
You might have gotten away with upping the hourly by 10% or 20% and cutting total benes, etc., by 80% back in 1999, but not since 2002. The word is out. People know that if they're not getting paid vacation, paid down-times, training, etc., they need to cover those things out of their hourly pay, so the hourly pay needs to be closer to double what it would be for a FTP employee.
And people are wise to the fact that some body shoppers try to scam people into believing it's long-term employment, then suddenly pull the rug out from under. They need some security, some means of restoring the balance so that if you do jerk them around, they'll have enough t tide them over until a real job comes along.
Or you're not covering the expenses for them to get to you for the interview. Or you're not offering to relocate them. Or you're not advertising the position in enough places and ways. Or you're not including a name, voice telephone number and e-mail address in your ads.
Or, like M$, HP, Ill-Begotten Monstosities, Bank of India.., you've got a bad reputation, so those who are bright have learned about you and stay clear. To overcome that, you're going to have to apologize for past misbehavior, start paying and otherwise treating current employees very well for a time in order to retain them, and hope that people forgive you.
Interestingly, amongst all this shortage whining, help-wanted print advertising is down to less than a third of what it was in 1987, according to the Conference Board, which has been tracking it since the 1950s. Unfortunately, there's no pre-depression base-line for on-line help-wanted advertising to tell whether it's above or below pre-depression levels.
What's the current average starting salary for a brand new wet-behind-the-ears grad in your niche? What's the current median for old pros in your niche? Please, point to the BLS, NACE or other sources for your assertions.
M$ isn't doing anything. Bill Gates and Craig Barrett and their executive colleagues are doing this because they think it is in their own personal interest.
Unfortunately, having been dishonest, having initiated fraud, now they're pushing for the government apparatus of extortion and subsidy to increase it's depredations on the US public for these executives' own personal benefit.
What they should have done was be honest. They should have said, "You know, I've gotten a lot of money out of this field, but I'd like to get more. And one way that occurs to me to get more is to dump a few tens or hundreds of thousands of my bright, well-educated, experienced US citizen employees and dodge my pension obligations, then bring some of them back from time to time on a temporary basis without paying them benefits or quite the same total decennial wages or salaries, and replace a lot of them them with cheaper foreign labor. We'll start that year after next. In the mean time, we're cutting back on our education and training time and budgets, and we're not going to place so many help-wanted ads in print. And when we do place an ad let's leave off the contact name, e-mail address and telephone number and drive them to this idiotic resume parser that won't catch a tenth of their capabilities and store them in a data-base. Sure, we'll be passing up a lot of great, talented, well-educated people, but if everyone's doing it, customers won't have much in the way of alternatives to our rotten software."
Only that's what they should have begun saying more than a decade ago.
Slashdot Mirror
The trouble is that the US government got into an irrational "boost exports", "multiculturalism" kick. The US government and business executives are still making concessions on top of concessions to thugs like the Red Chinese, in hopes that one day they will increase freedom and open up to enough legal exports from the USA to make some profits. Nixon and every US president since has bent over backwards for them. But, instead of opening up, the Red Chinese subborned those US executives into helping violate people's rights, and planted over 3,000 front businesses for their spying and lobbying in the USA. (Fortunately, there have also been a few deals like the Lenovo buy-out from Ill-Begotten Monstrosities, and source-code grabs from trash producer M$.)
"In a private company the owners or the stock holders decide, directly or indirectly via the board of directors, how much the CEO" Actually, if you'd watched the news over the last 8 years of so you'd known that nearly all of the C*Os and directors have thrown up barriers to stock-owners having any say in executive compensation. Yet, the stock-owners are nominally the owners of the corporation and should be determining the executives' compensation packages. Several academic studies have concluded that there is not a competitive market when it comes to executive compensation. Instead, it's a good ole boy network that log-rolls compensation packages ever higher, regardless of actual personal performance.
"You are correct, it's a non-immigrant visa, but it has the capability to lead to a green card with sponsorship"
This was not always the case, and serves as a good example of the creeping worsening of the H-1B visa program. At first, applicants were required to show that they owned property or had other anchors to their nation of origin, and were required to swear or affirm that they had no intention of immigrating.
Now, they're "dual intent", meaning that you can apply for a green card.
But only a tiny fraction of H-1B guest-workers are sponsored for green cards... and even they are under-paid and generally far short of "best and brightest".
Studies by researchers from RAND Corporation, Stanford, Urban Institute, Harvard, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Georgetown, Rochester Institute of Technology, UC Davis, and Duke have reported that we have continually been producing far more STEM (science, tech, engineering, math) workers than we've been employing in these fields.
Examination of employment data and projections from BLS when compared with NCES (Dept. of Education) records of degrees earned by US citizens confirms these findings.
"As late as 1987, 60K graduates were competing for about 25K open positions, according to Janet Ruhl, author of _The Programmers Survival Guide_" --- Margie Wylie _CNET_ "The skills shortage that isn't: When the rising tide floats employees' boats, employers proclaim disaster"
http://news.com.com/2010-1077-281060.html
http://www.kermitrose.com/econ1998.html#19980204
In testimony to the House Science and Technology Committee, Harold Salzman reported that we've been producing as many as 3 times the numbers of STEM workers as we've been employing in these fields.
http://democrats.science.house.gov/Media/File/
Commdocs/hearings/2007/tech/06nov/salzman_testimony.pdf
http://www.kermitrose.com/econ200711.html#Runnerup2007
This isn't just about not paying at a higher rate for additional hours of work.
It's about not paying for the additional work at all.
I have to wonder how many software engineers from Sopchoppy and Chicago will go into California's hideous cost of living not realizing that, no matter how much they work, they won't be paid for anything past the first 40 hours.
Why do so many people seem to assume that local, government-backed monopolies with large territories are the most efficient way to generate and distribute electricity?
It can be efficient to have gas-fired units generate for 15 square blocks or a single factory.
I'd much rather see wind-mills and solar panels scattered all through suburbia, with lots of competition, than big "wind farms" or "solar farms" in just a few places. It'd be better from the anti-terrorism angle, too.
Economist Walter J. Primeaux (U of Texas at Austin, U of Illinois) researched these unnatural monopolies back in the 1970s and 1980s. Other economists looked into the X efficiencies created merely because there was competition, even if it was only on the basis of quality of service. There were dozens and dozens of articles in the journals, the trade publications, and a few popular media reporting on the advantages of competition, though they hardly reached most main-stream media radar screens. Vail and Insull created quite a bit of meme-inertia with their propaganda campaign of a century ago.
Demonstrating that, not only does he not know much about science & tech, but he doesn't know anyone who knows anything. But it's not as though Barracks O'Bama had a clue, either. I'd much rather see Ron Paul, Bob Barr, and Chuck Baldwin getting some media coverage. "Half of knowledge is knowing where to find knowledge."
Whether your job title is "programmer", "programmer/analyst", "analyst", "software engineer", or "software architect" has nothing to do with whether you have a particular degree. Different organizations just use different titles for the same jobs, and different managers are hyper-credentialists, or credentialists, or believers in "self-made men".
A "software architect" *should* take a little different approach than a "programmer", but not especially diffeent from a talented or well-educated "analyst".
The Occupational OutLook HandBook has always been properly classified in the fiction section of the library.
Employment of software publishing production workers has been flat since the Clinton-Bush economic depression started.
The quarterly figures on employment and unemployment rates by detailed occupation have improved a little, but aren't exceptionally rosy.
On-line help-wanted advertising has risen since the deepest depths of the depression, but we don't have a pre-depression base-line (let alone a pre-bubble base-line) to know how this fits in the general schemes, i.e. to know whether it's growing as steeply or not as steeply as it should. Print help-wanted advertising is subterranean, down to 26 now, from 100 in 1987.
Overall labor force participation rates and employment to population rates are up, but LFPR and E/P rates for men are down.
And I don't know what to make of the Institute for Supply Management's employment indices.
check the graphs
http://www.kermitrose.com/jgoEconData.html
You might declare it as defense research, but... the US constitution doesn't permit such subsidies.
"What gives you the idea the job market has 'no need' for those people?"
What gives me that idea are the hundreds of thousands of bright, well-educated science and tech workers who are under-employed and unemployed.
It would be far better to implement tax breaks to employers who invest in bringing in US citizens for interviews, in relocating US citizens, and in education and training US citizens... and to adjust such tax breaks that already exist in line with the inflation in costs of travel, education and training in the last 20 years.
They're doing far too little in the way of background investigations of visa applicants. Instead of these stupid instant data-base look-ups, they should be interviewing every applicant, their employers, co-workers, teachers, professors, family members, landlords, class-mates, etc. In a time when it can take a US citizen with ancestors going back to the 1700s 4 years to get a passport, all this whining from visa applicants because the current rubber-stamp process takes a few months is outrageous.
A few years ago, this came up with a friend who manufactures specialized foot-wear for theatrical purposes, re-enactments, etc. He said it costs only about $8 per pair to make shoes in the USA. Call it $10 per pair, today, to allow for some inflation. So, why are these guys off-shoring the manufacturing, and still ratcheting up the prices to as much as $200 a pair? What is it about 500% and 800% returns that they're somehow not sufficient to please these executives? And, just to make it worse, they're turning out shoes made from low-quality materials with low-quality workmanship.
You point out something else, important, meadandale. There's far too much body shopping and far too little hiring. If you tell someone you only want them to work for you for a month or 3 months or 18 months, they're going to need a lot higher hourly rate.
People have caught on that body shoppers cut total compensation by not paying for vacation, bench time, education/training, pensions, etc., and that total life-time compensation for bodies shopped is a lot lower than for those with real jobs.
You might have gotten away with upping the hourly by 10% or 20% and cutting total benes, etc., by 80% back in 1999, but not since 2002. The word is out. People know that if they're not getting paid vacation, paid down-times, training, etc., they need to cover those things out of their hourly pay, so the hourly pay needs to be closer to double what it would be for a FTP employee.
And people are wise to the fact that some body shoppers try to scam people into believing it's long-term employment, then suddenly pull the rug out from under. They need some security, some means of restoring the balance so that if you do jerk them around, they'll have enough t tide them over until a real job comes along.
Or you're not covering the expenses for them to get to you for the interview.
Or you're not offering to relocate them.
Or you're not advertising the position in enough places and ways.
Or you're not including a name, voice telephone number and e-mail address in your ads.
Or, like M$, HP, Ill-Begotten Monstosities, Bank of India.., you've got a bad reputation, so those who are bright have learned about you and stay clear. To overcome that, you're going to have to apologize for past misbehavior, start paying and otherwise treating current employees very well for a time in order to retain them, and hope that people forgive you.
Interestingly, amongst all this shortage whining, help-wanted print advertising is down to less than a third of what it was in 1987, according to the Conference Board, which has been tracking it since the 1950s. Unfortunately, there's no pre-depression base-line for on-line help-wanted advertising to tell whether it's above or below pre-depression levels.
Show me.
What's the current average starting salary for a brand new wet-behind-the-ears grad in your niche?
What's the current median for old pros in your niche?
Please, point to the BLS, NACE or other sources for your assertions.
"Yes, employment is better now..."
Not that I can tell.
http://www.kermitrose.com/images/SWProdDev.jpg
http://www.kermitrose.com/jgoEconData.html
M$ isn't doing anything. Bill Gates and Craig Barrett and their executive colleagues are doing this because they think it is in their own personal interest.
Unfortunately, having been dishonest, having initiated fraud, now they're pushing for the government apparatus of extortion and subsidy to increase it's depredations on the US public for these executives' own personal benefit.
What they should have done was be honest. They should have said, "You know, I've gotten a lot of money out of this field, but I'd like to get more. And one way that occurs to me to get more is to dump a few tens or hundreds of thousands of my bright, well-educated, experienced US citizen employees and dodge my pension obligations, then bring some of them back from time to time on a temporary basis without paying them benefits or quite the same total decennial wages or salaries, and replace a lot of them them with cheaper foreign labor. We'll start that year after next. In the mean time, we're cutting back on our education and training time and budgets, and we're not going to place so many help-wanted ads in print. And when we do place an ad let's leave off the contact name, e-mail address and telephone number and drive them to this idiotic resume parser that won't catch a tenth of their capabilities and store them in a data-base. Sure, we'll be passing up a lot of great, talented, well-educated people, but if everyone's doing it, customers won't have much in the way of alternatives to our rotten software."
Only that's what they should have begun saying more than a decade ago.