"I would prefer to have people who actually are on track to stay here and build a life." ...
I would prefer to see more reasonable numbers of visas, and proper background investigations of each one.
If 20K student visas were issued each year to the very best instead of 300K-516K, and if 1K H-1B visas and 1K L-1 visas were issued each year, and they were all reliably and rationally tested and certified brilliant, exceptionaly knowledgeable, and experienced, I'd prefer that they "stay here and build a life".
But 1M to 1.4M more green cards per year plus 1M to 1.3M more illegal aliens flooding in, 300K-400K J exchange visas (some with guest-work privileges), 300K-425K total H guest-workers, 124K-156K L guest-workers (and their families), 5K-13.2K NAFTA guest-workers, 10K-20K supposedly Einsteins on O visas (including, bizarrely, the occasional, ahem, "outstanding" Dorismar or Bechar-bunny), 3K-4K Australian E-3 guest-workers, 9K-11K vo-tech students on M visas... with no background investigations, some not even so much as interviewed (no, a "check", i.e. a data-base look-up of some of the known and identified worst criminals, does not suffice)... is totally insane.
Yes, many people who get green cards, i.e. immigrants, become citizens.
Ron Hira at RIT has repeatedly looked at how many H-1B guest-workers are sponsored for green cards and reported that it's a very small fraction. One year, as I recall, it was below 1%.
But it varies widely by employer. A very few employers sponsor a super-majority of their L and H-1B visa-holders for green cards, but I don't think any of the "big guys" -- the firms which apply for over 1K H-1B visas each year -- do so.
"Interestingly, we can see that pretty much all "professional occupations" have a low unemployement rate; only "arts and entertainment" being fairly high." ...
That's the wrong lesson. What the stats show is that each kind of occupation has a characteristic "full employment" unemployment rate, and that the current unemployment rates for STEM occupations are worse (not just in the last 6 years, but over the last several decades), compared with their full employment levels, than the aggregate of all occupations now compared with the aggregate "full employment" unemployment rates (over the last several decades), and actors are doing slightly better, even though their raw unemployment rate is considerably higher.
Unemployment rates, and the flip-side -- employment/population ratios -- have to be examined in context, not as absolute numbers, not even as rigid proportions of unemployed to a specific sub-set "labor force", but as proportions to the reasonable optimal level... and in light of the current legal and regulatory scheme as compared with those of other times.
What's most interesting about the last several recessions is the lack of full recovery. Durations of unemployment (average and median) have been growing longer. Employment/population ratios have been falling (well, for everyone except female-type people, and though their e/p ratios have increased over the last 60 years or so, some who "work at home" would prefer to be able to land a real job while others working outside their homes would prefer to be able for their families to afford for them to "work at home".
What makes "full employment" level or target difficult to discuss is that most people's visceral reaction is that everyone who wants to be should be employed all the time. But transition times from leaving one job and landing another are non-zero. Re-tooling, brokering an employment deal, etc., all take time, and in the interim you're unemployed, regardless of how bright, creative, knowledgeable, industrious... you are. So, there's an inherent "friction"... and then there are disasters, general economic disasters and personal disasters (e.g. injuries). So, no one expects the unemployment rate to reach zero... well except for judges and CEOs considering their own personal situations, perhaps... followed by dentists, veterinarians... The vast majority of STEM professionals are a ways down the list, and actors are in the sub-basement (they tend to cheer up when their unemployment rate is ONLY 20% or so).
Since the 1950s, for instance, the federal government has several times lowered their sights on what constitutes "full employment", i.e. increased the "full employment" unemployment rates. "The United States is, as a statutory matter, committed to full employment (defined as 3% unemployment for persons 20 and older, 4% for persons aged 16 and over)..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"In the Kennedy administration, 4% unemployment was set as an 'interim' unemployment target because they did not want to defend even this [too high] level of unemployment..." --- Lester C. Thurow 1980 _The Zero-Sum Society_ pg 73
see also: Stanley Lebergott "Annual Estimates of UnEmployment in the United States, 1900-1954" _The Measurement and Behavior of Unemployment_ pg 231
The big/significant economic effects are always at the edges where the changes take place. What does changing supply by 1, without changing demand do? ...
What does increasing the labor supply by 136K (number of H-1B visas issued in fiscal year 2012, according to the State Dept. annual report) do?
What does increasing the supply by 2.3M (the numbers of new/initial H-1B visas issued since 1990) do?
What does adding 400K to 600K H-1B guest-workers present in the USA at any particular time in recent years do? (No, the federal government does not have a good handle on the exact numbers. They experimented a few years ago with trying to track people as they entered and as they left, in order to move toward estimating the numbers present in the USA, and gave up after only 2 months.)
Does it make it easier or more difficult for a US citizen in an affected field to get an interview? (more difficult)... to get a job? (more difficult)... to negotiate a raise? (more difficult)... to make long-term economic calculations for decision-making (whether to invest, whether to take out a loan, whether to marry or have children, whether to move for a different job)? (more risky and difficult)
Does it make an employer more or less likely to buy job ads or retain a head-hunter? (less)
Does it make an employer more or less likely to hire or put on retainer an immigration lawyer? (more)
Does it make an employer more or less likely to fly a US citizen candidate across the country for an interview? (less)
Does it make an employer more or less likely to provide relocation assistance to that US citizen employee? (less)
Does it make an employer more or less likely to retain an employee? (less)
Does it make an employer more or less likely to invest in 2-14 weeks of new-hire training that was common before H-1B? (less)
"Except that it is not. There are currently about two million practicing engineers in the USA, and that number is growing by about 70,000 per year." ...
While US citizens have recently been earning between 81K and 97K engineering degrees per year, 41K to 66K "computer and information sciences" degrees per year, 240K to 327K STEM degrees each year, according to the US Dept. of Education, National Center for Education Statistics.
"So we are not "shedding" STEM jobs. The unemployment rate for computer professionals and engineers is about 3% [bls.gov] compared to an overall rate of over 7%."
Let's see. BLS, unemployment rates by detailed occupations, math and computer science, 2013Q4: 3.5%, down from 3.9% in 2013Q3, up from the historical full employment level for these occupations of roughly between 1.1% and 2%, i.e. roughly 1.75 and 3.5 times worse than what an economist would call full employment.
Architecture & Engineering, 2013Q4, 3.4%; 2013Q3, 3%; 2013Q2 & Q1, 3.8%... compared with full employment level running roughly between 1.3% and 2.2%, about 1.4 to 2.9 times worse than full employment.
Sciences in recent quarters had unemployment rates between 3.5% and 4%, compared with full employment levels of roughly between 1.4% and 2.5%, roughly 1.4 to 2.9 times worse than full employment.
The unemployment rate for actors has recently been running between 20.9% and 40.1% as compared with full employment levels of roughly between 10.7% and 16%, roughly 1.3 to 3.4 worse than full employment.
All occupations, recently 6%-7.4%, compared with full employment levels of... 3.5% - 5%, roughly 1.2 to 2.1 times worse than full employment.
Another problem is that BLS does not look at the talent pool for each occupation, only at those currently employed in a particular occupation category divided by the total of those employed in that category plus those whose most recent employment was in that category who are actively seeking work.
A former software architect employed as a pet-sitter is categorized by them as a fully-employed pet-sitter, not as an under-employed software architect. Ditto a former biophysicist teaching the occasional section at the junior college or teaching at a high school.
If the number employed were divided by the number in that talent pool (analogous to what they do with the more general employment/population ratios they do publish) the waste of US citizen STEM talent would be clearer.
"So no, the scientific method works, and has worked for centuries, and will continue to work as long as scientists are rewarded based on [their adherence to] the scientific method." ...
Yes, the more closely we can adhere to that, the better. That's never happened perfectly. After all, as I understand it, scientific journals started as letters among over-lapping circles of acquaintances until someone with a bit of ambition assembled, edited and sent the collections of letters back out to all of the participants. And it was common for friendships and animosities to pre-exist or to develop among these overlapping circles. When there were good editor/publishers, working with well-considered, well-written letters, it worked well.
Unfortunately, despite (because of) "peer review" as practiced today, the scientific method is often abandoned for the sake of politics... as most often is the case with the "warmist hysterics" vs. the "deniers". Factions circle around particular publications, blocking papers from other factions, and making snide remarks and otherwise propagandizing about the others, often disregarding the merits and essential faults of each.
OT1H, no one should be forced to publish sentiments with which he disagrees, or to associate with those with whom he disagrees. OTOH, sustaining the debate as openly and honestly as possibly is the thing.
IMO, it should all get published, with the names of the authors, the (unfudged, un"trick"ed, un-homogenized) data. Dispense with the propagandizing and restrictions against assertions and counter-arguments and counter-counter-arguments from reaching the public light of day.
Dispense with the government subsidies for this political faction and not that, dispense with the "scientists" meetings with editorials and media moguls to plan the propaganda strategies, or at least attempt to get knowledge of all such meetings out to the public as quickly as possible and reported in as much depth as possible.
Let everyone see where data has been jiggered and decide whether those processes are valid or not. Let everyone see the back-slapping and back-stabbing cliques clearly.
Let each person examine and judge each issue to the extent of his ability within his economic means...
I don't see anything wrong with "self-plagiarism". I mean, if X wrote it, X wrote it. It doesn't matter whether X wrote it 1 time or 100 times; it's still X's work. OTOH, I can see how a publisher of one paper might object to material in that paper being re-used in another, because the first publisher won't be able to fully milk it. As a writer not compensated by publishers/producers for some work whose value went to others on a number of occasions that's not tugging at my heart-strings just now.
"No one's saying that the U.S. shouldn't invest more in rural education." ...
I hereby am saying the USA should not expect spending more on education -- whether rural, suburban, city or slum -- to necessarily improve academic results. We already spend horrendous sums in some of the under-performing neighborhoods.
What works is when the locals value academic achievement, when these individuals and family heads see some pay-back coming to "their people" whom they know well. When the school admins, teachers, students and parents place a high priority on academic achievement, when they see that it is possible and that it pays -- both personally and generally -- higher academic achievement results.
In big parts of the USA, UK, and Europe that link between effort, academic achievement and proportional rewards, meritocracy on that basis, has been broken and people won't invest more effort when they see other accessible options.
OK, let's do it this way, then; let's only test Americans in the poorest neighborhoods in which academic achievement is least valued, and test only the children in the wealthiest neighborhoods where academic achievement is most highly valued in China and see how the results come out.
Or we could test all of their students and all of our students and compare, examining the average, median, worst, best, standard deviations.
Or only test the top students in the top US schools and compare them with the top students in their top schools for a change.
Can you see the differences such selective testing produces from universal testing?
which violates my privacy, unlike the local red-necks (which, BTW, originated as a designation for Presbyterians). But the vast majority of south-easterners drive quite well... except for some of the retirees and "Yankee tourists". I've seen a pilot project test or 2 and was not impressed.
"book scanning"
Librarians were already doing that quite well, though not well funded, and that "work on digitization" goes back decades.
Gmail is brain-dead these days, insisting on mobile phone numbers and other privacy violations. Ad targeting is similarly entertaining, at least: I don't wear many sarongs or extremely ugly high heels, not the least bit interested in dating other guys... But the search results have been getting worse and worse, with the "headlines" not matching the URLs and the content, and fairly often not matching the search criteria.
The real problem with so many of these "brilliant" firms (FB, Goog, MSFT, Oracle, GE, Siemens, LinkedIn, Friendster... and their execs) the media seem to love soooo much is their determination to violate peoples' privacy. As one receent article put it, too many people confuse getting money with earning money, being wealthy with being virtuous. Of course, the left tends to the opposite, assuming anyone who is wealthy must be evil unless proven to have leftist credentials. The reality is that one must actually look closely at how the wealth is obtained and sort out the details to arive at the net balance for each executive.
"There are plenty of tech jobs doing interesting stuff with stable income." ...
Where!?!?
I certainly don't hear of them through my network, nor from Dice, Monster, Indeed, NationsJob... As a matter of fact, the web-based job search sites have worked hard to make it nearly impossible to filter out the bodyshoppers to get to the great firms developing great hardware/software products.
Great employers have become much more difficult to find.
(And recruiting intensity has dropped through the sub-basement over the last couple decades. "Drag your rear out here for the interview and let us know when you reach town; maybe we can schedule a meeting within the next month or two after that... or the next year, perhaps." "Relocation assistance!? Training?! Esmit, Raj, listen; this guy's such a kidder!")
"they're pretty much defining top talent as someone who has - or says - he has an offer from google, fb & or some other high" crime privacy violating company.
"With eight qualified candidates for every 10 openings" ...
Sure, but how many able and willing candidates were there? 200 for every 10 openings? 300 for every 10 openings? The tech execs' lobbyists and tools refuse to say.
"20% isn't steep enough. If employers really can't find qualified people in this country" ...
Yah, sure. Racists consider people of whatever race they dislike to be "unqualified". Age discriminators consider people who are older or younger than they prefer to be "unqualified". Those with unethical schemes consider people whose professional ethics preclude them from collaborating in schemes to, e.g. violate people's rights, initiate force or fraud, identity theft, extortion, privacy violation..., to be "unqualified" and "unwilling".
Many of these employers consider even highly able (gifted/genius, creative, knowledgeable, industrious, experienced) and willing/enthusiastic US citizen STEM professionals to be "unqualified", and they just can't find anyone other than guest-workers who are "qualified" (and want us all to pay no attention to the new artificial barriers they've erected to employing or actively recruiting US citizens since the advent of the H-1B visa program).
But they are willing to spend $billions on lobbyists, to try to convince the low-information public, and the easily bri, er, uh, cultivated and discerning media, congress-critters and other politicians.
"allow them to have a 1 year grace period between jobs" ...
H-1Bs are supposed to be TEMPORARY guest-work visas, not long-term visas. They should have to apply for renewal every 3-10 months. Of course, renewals and extensions should go a lot more quickly than the initial/new visa application, because they will only require a month or so for the incremental background investigation rather than 3-6 months for the initial investigation (of course, if they have a student visa and apply to change to H-1B, that change of status should only require an incremental, too, but then the more extensive investigation should be done before they can get the student or exchange visa). 1-5 weeks between gigs is generous.
H-1B visas are also supposedly for the "best and brightest" with arcane niche skills not available anywhere among US citizens and green card holders, if you believe the executives, immigration lawyers and their lobbyists, so the pay should be significantly above the mean and median. (And no, filling out a bodyshoppers-R-us time sheet or project planning form 8-C is not a highly valuable niche skill meriting a visa of any kind.)
weirdo -- one who is weird, one assigned a task or quest ...
weird -- Middle English wird, werd, from Old English wyrd akin to Old Norse urthr fate (as in required to fulfill a function or complete a quest), Middle English worthen from Old English weorthan to become, weorth worthy, of a specified value akin to Old High German werdan to become and werd worthy, worth... of, relating to, or dealing with fate or the Fates (the Weird Sisters), or the super-natural; magical; unearthly; mysterious; of an extraordinary character; fantastic
I'd been doing tech support, programming and sys an work for a couple years before I heard a bodyshopper drop the term "coders". He was very proud of himself, bragging to a contract over-seer, that he did all of the design and assigned small, rote tasks to "coders". ...
I never visited his shop, and have never seen it done that way in any of the outfits I've worked. Sure, we had mathematicians, various kinds of mechanical engineers, electrical/electronics engineers, statisticians... but those were specialties in our collaborations.
"When I change the world in concrete measurable ways, the feeling is euphoric" ...
Definitely. When I worked on CAD/CAM/CAE software -- investing both the 1% creativity and that 99% perspiration in 30-hour work sessions -- and then I'd see a family car or sleek-looking sports car, or a power-tool, crane, warhead (and they tore down the wall!), back-hoe, cherry-picker, telephone, skin for a sky-scraper, diesel engine, parts for a ship defense system, toy, or disk drive... designed using our apps, it was a huge kick, especially when some customer's engineer had consulted with you.
Different people see different things as being dull and different things as being interesting or exciting. My chemistry friends don't enjoy the same things as my CS friends, and they don't enjoy the same things as my engineering friends, gardening friends, politics friends, wood-working friends, brick-mason friends, genealogy friends, carpentry friends, car restoring friends, video-gaming friends, camping/hiking friends, medical friends, economics friends, older people, the academics vs. government vs. real world...
For that matter, people in one niche of computer wrangling are quite different from those in other niches. Some relatives whose work is in different areas can barely talk shop. (There are data processing people, data-base people, ERP, networking, content management, statisticians, SCADA, sys admins, contract oversight people...)
But B-school bozos hardly ever seem to have much of a clue -- they get all worked up over some tiny spark you casually throw off, and don't appreciate great break-throughs. They also have no idea what a software developer can do in the blink of an eye while you're working on 3 other things, and what will require an extensive amount of research accompanied by a long series of experiments, consultations...
"Those visas mandate proper salaries" that are typically 12% to 35% below local market compensation for the particular kind of job. This isn't me claiming this; this is what the VP of Tata claimed, what Singh said, and what numerous researchers examining what sketchy data are publicly available have found repeatedly over the last 15 years and more.
"A lot of people finish their degrees and decide it isn't for them..." ...
That's not how it is with most of the computer science people I've known. Sure, maybe 1% just can't cut it or are too lazy, maybe 1% wanted to practice patent and copyright law so CS was a stepping-stone. But nearly everyone taking CS classes loved programming, loved figuring out a new way to get the system to do something, or getting it to do something new. Ditto with the mechanical engineering and EE students I worked with at the U.
I recall exchanging e-mail with a reporter who claimed that it was no big deal that only one-third to one-half of STEM grads were able to land STEM jobs over the last decade, because he majored in Russian and had no expectation that he'd ever use at work what he learned by getting that degree. That's how some of those non-STEM people view life.
I can't think of anything we covered in CS classes that I have not used on the job.
Then there are the folks who believe universities are merely bigger vo-tech schools. Getting the work permit was the goal, the only goal, to the exclusion of actually, you know, learning anything. I've seen that in people whose aim was to be K-12 teachers, and in people whose aim was to be medical doctors. The only short-term goal either had was to ace the next test, not to understand anything, or fit any of the little bits and pieces into a context. In some cases, they have expressed shock that anyone would attend a university for any other purpose, or take classes off that narrow path.
"went to college, got drunk and smoked pot...and made connections. GWB
and BHO
got farther with his connections than you or I did with our productive skills."
Just trying to be non-partisan. We've seen the pictures, read their books, heard them reminiscing, seen their mentors/sponsors in action. And besides, they're cousins... albeit a few generations back.
I wonder how long either would survive in a burger flipping job to pay for his college, without a car and without connections...? Doing data entry to work through college as one of my friends did? Operating a printing press? Doing bio or chem lab research experiments? Porting a statistics app? Sys admin and debugging software for NASA? I wonder whether either of them knows the differences between Keynesian theory and Austrian school economics and the monetarists?
"Just glance at the jobs offered today---excel spreadsheet specialist, java developer, database administrator,.NET, test engineer, etc., while all are technically "technical" jobs, they suck and nobody wants them." ...
:B-) A couple weeks back, I caught an interview of the pres. of the local juco (junior college), and he was sooo proud of their beefed up STEM program, and the STEM degrees and certificates they were offering. So I figured I'd look at their site to see what they had there. Certificates in word processing and spread-sheets, and a degree program in how to become an apprentice lathe or milling machine operator. That was their STEM program of which they are very proud.
Just before WW2, at the tail-end of FDR's Great Depression, some of ye ancestors were out of work and someone told them about the new aircraft engine plant that was going to be opening. Orville Wright his own self appeared at the grand opening, and by that time, just a few months after my tale began, they had trained thousands of precision machinists. Sure, in late 1940 they were farm laborers, housewives, and salesmen -- many unemployed -- but by mid-1941, they were precision machinists turning out aircraft engines, for aircraft to ship to England. The plant employed about 6 engineers, several dozen QA inspectors, maybe 6-12 janitors, and thousands of machinists. One relative was a machinist and another was in charge of all the QA people. They sold it to GE after the war, which converted it to producing jet engines, which they still do there.
Sometimes, in some of the articles claiming there's a turrrrible STEM talent shortage, I get the impression that they don't really want savvy software architects, computer hardware design engineers, or architectural engineers, or biophysicists. They really only want a lot of cheap, young, pliant labor that doesn't really know all that much but will work diligently until they're dumped after a few months or a few years.
I mean, Intel squaks about wanting more PhDs, but they employ hardly any. The vast majority of the software product firms I see today are one guy working in his living room, or maybe collaborating with his friend the graphic artist across town... And the rest of the jobs seem to be at bodyshops for low-skill labor doing data processing at non-STEM firms for executives and managers who are not really STEM savvy, so they stick every buzz-word they come across at the office or at conferences, along with university degrees, on their requirements lists.
Geoffrey.landis wrote: "This reminds me of the 1980s, when the editorials were dire complaints about the shortage of physicists in the US, while all the physicists I knew who were earning Ph.D.s were asking 'where are all these purported jobs?'" ...
It was in the mid-1980s when the NSF started laying the groundwork to claim shortages in all STEM/MINT fields. "Data, shmata! Don't confuse us by citing facts. We'll cobble something together, and then just keep on pounding the drums until we get the flood of cheap, young, pliant labor with flexible ethics we desire."
Actual data of a current shortage of any major category of STEM worker has never been produced.
Sure, there may be some 1 in a billion niche that someone would have to study for a few weeks before he'd be productive. But it's awfully suspect that it was shortly before the H-1B was launched that they cut back on new-hire and retained employee training, on flying in US job candidates for interviews, and on relocation assistance... and, for that matter, on sponsoring new-hires for security clearances.
It wasn't until the mid-1990s that they royally bollixed up the MINT/STEM job markets by deploying "candidate management systems" guaranteed to bury the vast majority of able and willing candidates's records and falsely slap the label "unqualified" on them.
Slashdot Mirror
...
I would prefer to see more reasonable numbers of visas, and proper background investigations of each one.
If 20K student visas were issued each year to the very best instead of 300K-516K, and if 1K H-1B visas and 1K L-1 visas were issued each year, and they were all reliably and rationally tested and certified brilliant, exceptionaly knowledgeable, and experienced, I'd prefer that they "stay here and build a life".
But 1M to 1.4M more green cards per year plus 1M to 1.3M more illegal aliens flooding in, 300K-400K J exchange visas (some with guest-work privileges), 300K-425K total H guest-workers, 124K-156K L guest-workers (and their families), 5K-13.2K NAFTA guest-workers, 10K-20K supposedly Einsteins on O visas (including, bizarrely, the occasional, ahem, "outstanding" Dorismar or Bechar-bunny), 3K-4K Australian E-3 guest-workers, 9K-11K vo-tech students on M visas... with no background investigations, some not even so much as interviewed (no, a "check", i.e. a data-base look-up of some of the known and identified worst criminals, does not suffice)... is totally insane.
...
Yes, many people who get green cards, i.e. immigrants, become citizens.
Ron Hira at RIT has repeatedly looked at how many H-1B guest-workers are sponsored for green cards and reported that it's a very small fraction. One year, as I recall, it was below 1%.
But it varies widely by employer. A very few employers sponsor a super-majority of their L and H-1B visa-holders for green cards, but I don't think any of the "big guys" -- the firms which apply for over 1K H-1B visas each year -- do so.
...
That's the wrong lesson. What the stats show is that each kind of occupation has a characteristic "full employment" unemployment rate, and that the current unemployment rates for STEM occupations are worse (not just in the last 6 years, but over the last several decades), compared with their full employment levels, than the aggregate of all occupations now compared with the aggregate "full employment" unemployment rates (over the last several decades), and actors are doing slightly better, even though their raw unemployment rate is considerably higher.
Unemployment rates, and the flip-side -- employment/population ratios -- have to be examined in context, not as absolute numbers, not even as rigid proportions of unemployed to a specific sub-set "labor force", but as proportions to the reasonable optimal level... and in light of the current legal and regulatory scheme as compared with those of other times.
What's most interesting about the last several recessions is the lack of full recovery. Durations of unemployment (average and median) have been growing longer. Employment/population ratios have been falling (well, for everyone except female-type people, and though their e/p ratios have increased over the last 60 years or so, some who "work at home" would prefer to be able to land a real job while others working outside their homes would prefer to be able for their families to afford for them to "work at home".
What makes "full employment" level or target difficult to discuss is that most people's visceral reaction is that everyone who wants to be should be employed all the time. But transition times from leaving one job and landing another are non-zero. Re-tooling, brokering an employment deal, etc., all take time, and in the interim you're unemployed, regardless of how bright, creative, knowledgeable, industrious... you are. So, there's an inherent "friction"... and then there are disasters, general economic disasters and personal disasters (e.g. injuries). So, no one expects the unemployment rate to reach zero... well except for judges and CEOs considering their own personal situations, perhaps... followed by dentists, veterinarians... The vast majority of STEM professionals are a ways down the list, and actors are in the sub-basement (they tend to cheer up when their unemployment rate is ONLY 20% or so).
Since the 1950s, for instance, the federal government has several times lowered their sights on what constitutes "full employment", i.e. increased the "full employment" unemployment rates. "The United States is, as a statutory matter, committed to full employment (defined as 3% unemployment for persons 20 and older, 4% for persons aged 16 and over)..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"In the Kennedy administration, 4% unemployment was set as an 'interim' unemployment target because they did not want to defend even this [too high] level of unemployment..." --- Lester C. Thurow 1980 _The Zero-Sum Society_ pg 73
see also: Stanley Lebergott "Annual Estimates of UnEmployment in the United States, 1900-1954" _The Measurement and Behavior of Unemployment_ pg 231
...
What does increasing the labor supply by 136K (number of H-1B visas issued in fiscal year 2012, according to the State Dept. annual report) do?
What does increasing the supply by 2.3M (the numbers of new/initial H-1B visas issued since 1990) do?
What does adding 400K to 600K H-1B guest-workers present in the USA at any particular time in recent years do? (No, the federal government does not have a good handle on the exact numbers. They experimented a few years ago with trying to track people as they entered and as they left, in order to move toward estimating the numbers present in the USA, and gave up after only 2 months.)
Does it make it easier or more difficult for a US citizen in an affected field to get an interview? (more difficult) ... to get a job? (more difficult) ... to negotiate a raise? (more difficult) ... to make long-term economic calculations for decision-making (whether to invest, whether to take out a loan, whether to marry or have children, whether to move for a different job)? (more risky and difficult)
Does it make an employer more or less likely to buy job ads or retain a head-hunter? (less)
Does it make an employer more or less likely to hire or put on retainer an immigration lawyer? (more)
Does it make an employer more or less likely to fly a US citizen candidate across the country for an interview? (less)
Does it make an employer more or less likely to provide relocation assistance to that US citizen employee? (less)
Does it make an employer more or less likely to retain an employee? (less)
Does it make an employer more or less likely to invest in 2-14 weeks of new-hire training that was common before H-1B? (less)
...
While US citizens have recently been earning between 81K and 97K engineering degrees per year, 41K to 66K "computer and information sciences" degrees per year, 240K to 327K STEM degrees each year, according to the US Dept. of Education, National Center for Education Statistics.
"So we are not "shedding" STEM jobs. The unemployment rate for computer professionals and engineers is about 3% [bls.gov] compared to an overall rate of over 7%."
Let's see. BLS, unemployment rates by detailed occupations, math and computer science, 2013Q4: 3.5%, down from 3.9% in 2013Q3, up from the historical full employment level for these occupations of roughly between 1.1% and 2%, i.e. roughly 1.75 and 3.5 times worse than what an economist would call full employment.
Architecture & Engineering, 2013Q4, 3.4%; 2013Q3, 3%; 2013Q2 & Q1, 3.8%... compared with full employment level running roughly between 1.3% and 2.2%, about 1.4 to 2.9 times worse than full employment.
Sciences in recent quarters had unemployment rates between 3.5% and 4%, compared with full employment levels of roughly between 1.4% and 2.5%, roughly 1.4 to 2.9 times worse than full employment.
The unemployment rate for actors has recently been running between 20.9% and 40.1% as compared with full employment levels of roughly between 10.7% and 16%, roughly 1.3 to 3.4 worse than full employment.
All occupations, recently 6%-7.4%, compared with full employment levels of... 3.5% - 5%, roughly 1.2 to 2.1 times worse than full employment.
Another problem is that BLS does not look at the talent pool for each occupation, only at those currently employed in a particular occupation category divided by the total of those employed in that category plus those whose most recent employment was in that category who are actively seeking work.
A former software architect employed as a pet-sitter is categorized by them as a fully-employed pet-sitter, not as an under-employed software architect. Ditto a former biophysicist teaching the occasional section at the junior college or teaching at a high school.
If the number employed were divided by the number in that talent pool (analogous to what they do with the more general employment/population ratios they do publish) the waste of US citizen STEM talent would be clearer.
...
Yes, the more closely we can adhere to that, the better. That's never happened perfectly. After all, as I understand it, scientific journals started as letters among over-lapping circles of acquaintances until someone with a bit of ambition assembled, edited and sent the collections of letters back out to all of the participants. And it was common for friendships and animosities to pre-exist or to develop among these overlapping circles. When there were good editor/publishers, working with well-considered, well-written letters, it worked well.
Unfortunately, despite (because of) "peer review" as practiced today, the scientific method is often abandoned for the sake of politics... as most often is the case with the "warmist hysterics" vs. the "deniers". Factions circle around particular publications, blocking papers from other factions, and making snide remarks and otherwise propagandizing about the others, often disregarding the merits and essential faults of each.
OT1H, no one should be forced to publish sentiments with which he disagrees, or to associate with those with whom he disagrees. OTOH, sustaining the debate as openly and honestly as possibly is the thing.
IMO, it should all get published, with the names of the authors, the (unfudged, un"trick"ed, un-homogenized) data. Dispense with the propagandizing and restrictions against assertions and counter-arguments and counter-counter-arguments from reaching the public light of day.
Dispense with the government subsidies for this political faction and not that, dispense with the "scientists" meetings with editorials and media moguls to plan the propaganda strategies, or at least attempt to get knowledge of all such meetings out to the public as quickly as possible and reported in as much depth as possible.
Let everyone see where data has been jiggered and decide whether those processes are valid or not. Let everyone see the back-slapping and back-stabbing cliques clearly.
Let each person examine and judge each issue to the extent of his ability within his economic means...
I don't see anything wrong with "self-plagiarism". I mean, if X wrote it, X wrote it. It doesn't matter whether X wrote it 1 time or 100 times; it's still X's work. OTOH, I can see how a publisher of one paper might object to material in that paper being re-used in another, because the first publisher won't be able to fully milk it. As a writer not compensated by publishers/producers for some work whose value went to others on a number of occasions that's not tugging at my heart-strings just now.
...
I hereby am saying the USA should not expect spending more on education -- whether rural, suburban, city or slum -- to necessarily improve academic results. We already spend horrendous sums in some of the under-performing neighborhoods.
What works is when the locals value academic achievement, when these individuals and family heads see some pay-back coming to "their people" whom they know well. When the school admins, teachers, students and parents place a high priority on academic achievement, when they see that it is possible and that it pays -- both personally and generally -- higher academic achievement results.
In big parts of the USA, UK, and Europe that link between effort, academic achievement and proportional rewards, meritocracy on that basis, has been broken and people won't invest more effort when they see other accessible options.
...
OK, let's do it this way, then; let's only test Americans in the poorest neighborhoods in which academic achievement is least valued, and test only the children in the wealthiest neighborhoods where academic achievement is most highly valued in China and see how the results come out.
Or we could test all of their students and all of our students and compare, examining the average, median, worst, best, standard deviations.
Or only test the top students in the top US schools and compare them with the top students in their top schools for a change.
Can you see the differences such selective testing produces from universal testing?
3 alternate links. Take your pick:
http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell120313.php3
http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2013/12/03/a-challenge-to-our-beliefs-n1756023/page/full
http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-on-the-right/120213-681322-blacks-working-class-whites-were-similar-before.htm?p=full
Technically, they invented AdSense to make ads more intrusive... and to worsen privacy violations.
...
which violates my privacy, unlike the local red-necks (which, BTW, originated as a designation for Presbyterians). But the vast majority of south-easterners drive quite well... except for some of the retirees and "Yankee tourists". I've seen a pilot project test or 2 and was not impressed.
"book scanning"
Librarians were already doing that quite well, though not well funded, and that "work on digitization" goes back decades.
Gmail is brain-dead these days, insisting on mobile phone numbers and other privacy violations. Ad targeting is similarly entertaining, at least: I don't wear many sarongs or extremely ugly high heels, not the least bit interested in dating other guys... But the search results have been getting worse and worse, with the "headlines" not matching the URLs and the content, and fairly often not matching the search criteria.
The real problem with so many of these "brilliant" firms (FB, Goog, MSFT, Oracle, GE, Siemens, LinkedIn, Friendster... and their execs) the media seem to love soooo much is their determination to violate peoples' privacy. As one receent article put it, too many people confuse getting money with earning money, being wealthy with being virtuous. Of course, the left tends to the opposite, assuming anyone who is wealthy must be evil unless proven to have leftist credentials. The reality is that one must actually look closely at how the wealth is obtained and sort out the details to arive at the net balance for each executive.
...
Where!?!?
I certainly don't hear of them through my network, nor from Dice, Monster, Indeed, NationsJob... As a matter of fact, the web-based job search sites have worked hard to make it nearly impossible to filter out the bodyshoppers to get to the great firms developing great hardware/software products.
Great employers have become much more difficult to find.
(And recruiting intensity has dropped through the sub-basement over the last couple decades. "Drag your rear out here for the interview and let us know when you reach town; maybe we can schedule a meeting within the next month or two after that... or the next year, perhaps." "Relocation assistance!? Training?! Esmit, Raj, listen; this guy's such a kidder!")
"they're pretty much defining top talent as someone who has - or says - he has an offer from google, fb & or some other high" crime privacy violating company.
...
Sure, but how many able and willing candidates were there? 200 for every 10 openings? 300 for every 10 openings? The tech execs' lobbyists and tools refuse to say.
...
Yah, sure. Racists consider people of whatever race they dislike to be "unqualified". Age discriminators consider people who are older or younger than they prefer to be "unqualified". Those with unethical schemes consider people whose professional ethics preclude them from collaborating in schemes to, e.g. violate people's rights, initiate force or fraud, identity theft, extortion, privacy violation..., to be "unqualified" and "unwilling".
Many of these employers consider even highly able (gifted/genius, creative, knowledgeable, industrious, experienced) and willing/enthusiastic US citizen STEM professionals to be "unqualified", and they just can't find anyone other than guest-workers who are "qualified" (and want us all to pay no attention to the new artificial barriers they've erected to employing or actively recruiting US citizens since the advent of the H-1B visa program).
But they are willing to spend $billions on lobbyists, to try to convince the low-information public, and the easily bri, er, uh, cultivated and discerning media, congress-critters and other politicians.
...
H-1Bs are supposed to be TEMPORARY guest-work visas, not long-term visas. They should have to apply for renewal every 3-10 months. Of course, renewals and extensions should go a lot more quickly than the initial/new visa application, because they will only require a month or so for the incremental background investigation rather than 3-6 months for the initial investigation (of course, if they have a student visa and apply to change to H-1B, that change of status should only require an incremental, too, but then the more extensive investigation should be done before they can get the student or exchange visa). 1-5 weeks between gigs is generous.
H-1B visas are also supposedly for the "best and brightest" with arcane niche skills not available anywhere among US citizens and green card holders, if you believe the executives, immigration lawyers and their lobbyists, so the pay should be significantly above the mean and median. (And no, filling out a bodyshoppers-R-us time sheet or project planning form 8-C is not a highly valuable niche skill meriting a visa of any kind.)
...
weird -- Middle English wird, werd, from Old English wyrd akin to Old Norse urthr fate (as in required to fulfill a function or complete a quest), Middle English worthen from Old English weorthan to become, weorth worthy, of a specified value akin to Old High German werdan to become and werd worthy, worth... of, relating to, or dealing with fate or the Fates (the Weird Sisters), or the super-natural; magical; unearthly; mysterious; of an extraordinary character; fantastic
Sounds good, to me.
...
I never visited his shop, and have never seen it done that way in any of the outfits I've worked. Sure, we had mathematicians, various kinds of mechanical engineers, electrical/electronics engineers, statisticians... but those were specialties in our collaborations.
...
Definitely. When I worked on CAD/CAM/CAE software -- investing both the 1% creativity and that 99% perspiration in 30-hour work sessions -- and then I'd see a family car or sleek-looking sports car, or a power-tool, crane, warhead (and they tore down the wall!), back-hoe, cherry-picker, telephone, skin for a sky-scraper, diesel engine, parts for a ship defense system, toy, or disk drive... designed using our apps, it was a huge kick, especially when some customer's engineer had consulted with you.
Different people see different things as being dull and different things as being interesting or exciting. My chemistry friends don't enjoy the same things as my CS friends, and they don't enjoy the same things as my engineering friends, gardening friends, politics friends, wood-working friends, brick-mason friends, genealogy friends, carpentry friends, car restoring friends, video-gaming friends, camping/hiking friends, medical friends, economics friends, older people, the academics vs. government vs. real world...
For that matter, people in one niche of computer wrangling are quite different from those in other niches. Some relatives whose work is in different areas can barely talk shop. (There are data processing people, data-base people, ERP, networking, content management, statisticians, SCADA, sys admins, contract oversight people...)
But B-school bozos hardly ever seem to have much of a clue -- they get all worked up over some tiny spark you casually throw off, and don't appreciate great break-throughs. They also have no idea what a software developer can do in the blink of an eye while you're working on 3 other things, and what will require an extensive amount of research accompanied by a long series of experiments, consultations...
"Those visas mandate proper salaries" that are typically 12% to 35% below local market compensation for the particular kind of job. This isn't me claiming this; this is what the VP of Tata claimed, what Singh said, and what numerous researchers examining what sketchy data are publicly available have found repeatedly over the last 15 years and more.
...
That's not how it is with most of the computer science people I've known. Sure, maybe 1% just can't cut it or are too lazy, maybe 1% wanted to practice patent and copyright law so CS was a stepping-stone. But nearly everyone taking CS classes loved programming, loved figuring out a new way to get the system to do something, or getting it to do something new. Ditto with the mechanical engineering and EE students I worked with at the U.
I recall exchanging e-mail with a reporter who claimed that it was no big deal that only one-third to one-half of STEM grads were able to land STEM jobs over the last decade, because he majored in Russian and had no expectation that he'd ever use at work what he learned by getting that degree. That's how some of those non-STEM people view life.
I can't think of anything we covered in CS classes that I have not used on the job.
Then there are the folks who believe universities are merely bigger vo-tech schools. Getting the work permit was the goal, the only goal, to the exclusion of actually, you know, learning anything. I've seen that in people whose aim was to be K-12 teachers, and in people whose aim was to be medical doctors. The only short-term goal either had was to ace the next test, not to understand anything, or fit any of the little bits and pieces into a context. In some cases, they have expressed shock that anyone would attend a university for any other purpose, or take classes off that narrow path.
and Barack H. Obama
"went to college, got drunk and smoked pot...and made connections. GWB
and BHO
got farther with his connections than you or I did with our productive skills."
Just trying to be non-partisan. We've seen the pictures, read their books, heard them reminiscing, seen their mentors/sponsors in action. And besides, they're cousins... albeit a few generations back.
I wonder how long either would survive in a burger flipping job to pay for his college, without a car and without connections...? Doing data entry to work through college as one of my friends did? Operating a printing press? Doing bio or chem lab research experiments? Porting a statistics app? Sys admin and debugging software for NASA? I wonder whether either of them knows the differences between Keynesian theory and Austrian school economics and the monetarists?
...
:B-) A couple weeks back, I caught an interview of the pres. of the local juco (junior college), and he was sooo proud of their beefed up STEM program, and the STEM degrees and certificates they were offering. So I figured I'd look at their site to see what they had there. Certificates in word processing and spread-sheets, and a degree program in how to become an apprentice lathe or milling machine operator. That was their STEM program of which they are very proud.
Just before WW2, at the tail-end of FDR's Great Depression, some of ye ancestors were out of work and someone told them about the new aircraft engine plant that was going to be opening. Orville Wright his own self appeared at the grand opening, and by that time, just a few months after my tale began, they had trained thousands of precision machinists. Sure, in late 1940 they were farm laborers, housewives, and salesmen -- many unemployed -- but by mid-1941, they were precision machinists turning out aircraft engines, for aircraft to ship to England. The plant employed about 6 engineers, several dozen QA inspectors, maybe 6-12 janitors, and thousands of machinists. One relative was a machinist and another was in charge of all the QA people. They sold it to GE after the war, which converted it to producing jet engines, which they still do there.
Sometimes, in some of the articles claiming there's a turrrrible STEM talent shortage, I get the impression that they don't really want savvy software architects, computer hardware design engineers, or architectural engineers, or biophysicists. They really only want a lot of cheap, young, pliant labor that doesn't really know all that much but will work diligently until they're dumped after a few months or a few years.
I mean, Intel squaks about wanting more PhDs, but they employ hardly any. The vast majority of the software product firms I see today are one guy working in his living room, or maybe collaborating with his friend the graphic artist across town... And the rest of the jobs seem to be at bodyshops for low-skill labor doing data processing at non-STEM firms for executives and managers who are not really STEM savvy, so they stick every buzz-word they come across at the office or at conferences, along with university degrees, on their requirements lists.
...
It's impossible to "punish" anyone in a proper debate. You can refute them, educate them, be refuted or be educated, but you cannot "punish".
Corrupt moderators, OTOH...
...
It was in the mid-1980s when the NSF started laying the groundwork to claim shortages in all STEM/MINT fields. "Data, shmata! Don't confuse us by citing facts. We'll cobble something together, and then just keep on pounding the drums until we get the flood of cheap, young, pliant labor with flexible ethics we desire."
Actual data of a current shortage of any major category of STEM worker has never been produced.
Sure, there may be some 1 in a billion niche that someone would have to study for a few weeks before he'd be productive. But it's awfully suspect that it was shortly before the H-1B was launched that they cut back on new-hire and retained employee training, on flying in US job candidates for interviews, and on relocation assistance... and, for that matter, on sponsoring new-hires for security clearances.
It wasn't until the mid-1990s that they royally bollixed up the MINT/STEM job markets by deploying "candidate management systems" guaranteed to bury the vast majority of able and willing candidates's records and falsely slap the label "unqualified" on them.