Laws are badly written. They use imprecise language. They use convoluted phrasing. They use terms that don't have precise technical definitions or that have multiple definitions.
The purpose of our appeals courts is precisely to look at those badly written laws and label them as they really are for the purposes of making sure they comply with precedent and the constitution, as best they can.
Three points why I think that this is not the real reason for the problem.
1) Personal experience. I am an immigrant to the US. I probably cost my employer *more* than my peers due to legal fees, admin work, etc... before I got married. Throughout my tenure, my salary has always been comparable to peers. Sometimes it's a little lower (because I just started working in an area), sometimes a bit higher (once I have become tenured in that area), but on average identical. Between all of the additional costs I incurred annually, I was certainly less cost-competitive than others and that will be true of most people here on visas (except at companies likely to encounter some future legal difficulties).
2) Companies *everywhere* complain about this. Our clients in *India*(!!) complain about this exact problem. Not only that, but it's companies in all industries, for all types of jobs. This is far, far from being a tech-specific problem and therefore far, far from being a specific-visa problem.
3) Later in the article, there is a very good section on the shortage of good, experienced HR managers and how this has allowed hiring managers to expect to find employees that can plug right in without training. As much as we malign HR, too many good HR people were laid off in the recession and it's had an impact on managers' expectations when they post jobs and consider fit for role and the need for employee onboarding. I suspect that this shifting expectation about training is the real root cause.
It's actually pretty astonishing how many really good people are in the level of government just beneath senior leadership. We know people who work 12-16 hours a day at extremely high-stress, difficult jobs that would stretch the capabilities of most people. They love working in government despite the fact that they would get an instant raise of +25% (and the chance to get an annual bonus) if they moved to the private sector. The book "To Big to Fail" has a great description of Paulson looking at his staff in astonishment thinking that all of these folks would be making far more money if they weren't there in the room with him.
I think it's misleading to consider the "average" government worker. The *best* government workers are very, very good but have their salaries roughly capped at around 150k. This is probably a pretty good bargain for us taxpayers.
(Full disclosure: I work on one of the research teams at CEB.)
The survey data is very global with just less than 50% of the respondents being from US companies. The remainder are from almost every major geography with western Europe, Australia, Canada, and Mexico being the best represented (from a researcher's point of view though, pretty much every geography is well-represented because of the size of the dataset).
It's also important to call out that the "discretionary effort" cited in the article isn't just "more hours". It involves productivity while working, likelihood to bring new ideas to managers, etc...
There's a video here of the research director cited in the article walking through the results in more depth. The really interesting thing isn't that satisfaction has gone down, it's that *compliance* has gone down within IT. (ignore the last ten seconds of salesy-ness in the video.)
Your comment neatly highlights one of the major problems in science reporting and communication: many of the issues raised by reputable scientists over the past thirty years had timeframes for consequence on time scales of ten, fifty, to several hundred years.
Mainstream media often reports findings like "Scientists Predict That Ross Ice Shelf May Collapse" as if there is something imminent about to happen sometime in the current media cycle. The thing is, the reported events might not be likely to happen for a hundred (or more years).
These events are urgent to environmental scientists, where the phrase "long-term" means thousands of years. To the general media, "long term" seems to mean a financial quarter from now.
Furthermore, don't equate pollution with climate impact. Some parts of the old Soviet bloc are terribly polluted, to the point of being dangerous for people on the spot, but their overall output into the global climate system of materials that impact environmental change is small compared to the day to day output of north america (and increasingly China's) industrial output.
It's not about individual summers being nice/stormy, or winters being mild/harsh: it might take years to be able to decipher the impact of climate change on an area. There's widespread theory that this bout of climate change will produce more variable weather, which means that taking any single summer or winter as supportin or contrary evidence isn't very valuable.
(Note that the increased variability theory doesn't have enough data yet to be clearly demonstrated, at least according to http://www.ec.gc.ca/TKEI/cc_weather/cc_weather_e.c fm this.)
May I suggest The Economist (www.economist.com)?
It's a British publication that has quite possibly some of the most in-depth and incisive articles on American Politics and Economics. If you pick up a copy at the newstand today, the current issue's cover title is "No Way to Run a Democracy" and does an in depth look at some of the big political issues in this election.
I'm personally a big fan of The Economist for my news... they have a bias, but are open about it and remind readers that they are prone to certain positions and how those positions influence their opinions.
So by that standard, I didn't read over 2000 pages of history, world events, or hobby related materials last month. Nor did I read weekly neews magazines, or monthly specialist ones. I also didn't read the daily newspaper.
Although they have a broader point of comparison 'reading', it doesn't expand too much on the first definition too widely.
I'd be interested in a less biased study (after all, this is from the national endowment of the arts) that breaks down what people actually raed, as opposed to defining reading favourably to my point.
While I agree with you in principle (anyone selling anti-satellite rockets, perchance?) I'd just suggest this:
When the first company to take 'advantage' of this advertising strategy announces that they will do so, write them a very polite letter telling them that you will boycott every product they ever produce from now until the cold bitter end if they actually proceed. Tell them that you will then spend sizeable effort convincing friends, neighbours, your children's schoolmates, etc... to forever blacklist that company. Tell them that websites, protests, bad press and tv spots of little children looking up at the sky and saying "Why is pizza hut making it hard to use my christmas present telescope, daddy?" will be forthcoming.
Granted, it'll probably take someone to actually do it, and then see massive loss in business before other companies really take notice.
The problem with the Carthage analogy, however, is that the armies of Carthage under Darl Hannibal savaged the Roman republic for years causing untold suffering and carnage before they were taken down.
In fact, I think that there were a total of three Punic wars. So we should ask ourselves if anyone is in the position to spring up after SCO to take up the same business model and start wars II and III.
According to page 19 of the report, under the heading of Ribbon Infall,"The raw numbers suggest that the worst case cable infall is not as bad as the best case, nominal operation of current rocket programs."
Granted, they supply no numbers and they explicitly state that they have done no serious quantitative analysis of this, so I'm curious how they came to his conclusion.
Slashdot Mirror
Laws are badly written. They use imprecise language. They use convoluted phrasing. They use terms that don't have precise technical definitions or that have multiple definitions.
The purpose of our appeals courts is precisely to look at those badly written laws and label them as they really are for the purposes of making sure they comply with precedent and the constitution, as best they can.
(Erg, first post eaten by mis-click.)
Three points why I think that this is not the real reason for the problem.
1) Personal experience. I am an immigrant to the US. I probably cost my employer *more* than my peers due to legal fees, admin work, etc... before I got married. Throughout my tenure, my salary has always been comparable to peers. Sometimes it's a little lower (because I just started working in an area), sometimes a bit higher (once I have become tenured in that area), but on average identical. Between all of the additional costs I incurred annually, I was certainly less cost-competitive than others and that will be true of most people here on visas (except at companies likely to encounter some future legal difficulties).
2) Companies *everywhere* complain about this. Our clients in *India*(!!) complain about this exact problem. Not only that, but it's companies in all industries, for all types of jobs. This is far, far from being a tech-specific problem and therefore far, far from being a specific-visa problem.
3) Later in the article, there is a very good section on the shortage of good, experienced HR managers and how this has allowed hiring managers to expect to find employees that can plug right in without training. As much as we malign HR, too many good HR people were laid off in the recession and it's had an impact on managers' expectations when they post jobs and consider fit for role and the need for employee onboarding. I suspect that this shifting expectation about training is the real root cause.
It's actually pretty astonishing how many really good people are in the level of government just beneath senior leadership. We know people who work 12-16 hours a day at extremely high-stress, difficult jobs that would stretch the capabilities of most people. They love working in government despite the fact that they would get an instant raise of +25% (and the chance to get an annual bonus) if they moved to the private sector. The book "To Big to Fail" has a great description of Paulson looking at his staff in astonishment thinking that all of these folks would be making far more money if they weren't there in the room with him. I think it's misleading to consider the "average" government worker. The *best* government workers are very, very good but have their salaries roughly capped at around 150k. This is probably a pretty good bargain for us taxpayers.
The survey data is very global with just less than 50% of the respondents being from US companies. The remainder are from almost every major geography with western Europe, Australia, Canada, and Mexico being the best represented (from a researcher's point of view though, pretty much every geography is well-represented because of the size of the dataset).
It's also important to call out that the "discretionary effort" cited in the article isn't just "more hours". It involves productivity while working, likelihood to bring new ideas to managers, etc...
There's a video here of the research director cited in the article walking through the results in more depth. The really interesting thing isn't that satisfaction has gone down, it's that *compliance* has gone down within IT. (ignore the last ten seconds of salesy-ness in the video.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WD08P6kYCuI
Your comment neatly highlights one of the major problems in science reporting and communication: many of the issues raised by reputable scientists over the past thirty years had timeframes for consequence on time scales of ten, fifty, to several hundred years.
Mainstream media often reports findings like "Scientists Predict That Ross Ice Shelf May Collapse" as if there is something imminent about to happen sometime in the current media cycle. The thing is, the reported events might not be likely to happen for a hundred (or more years).
These events are urgent to environmental scientists, where the phrase "long-term" means thousands of years. To the general media, "long term" seems to mean a financial quarter from now.
Furthermore, don't equate pollution with climate impact. Some parts of the old Soviet bloc are terribly polluted, to the point of being dangerous for people on the spot, but their overall output into the global climate system of materials that impact environmental change is small compared to the day to day output of north america (and increasingly China's) industrial output.
It's not about individual summers being nice/stormy, or winters being mild/harsh: it might take years to be able to decipher the impact of climate change on an area. There's widespread theory that this bout of climate change will produce more variable weather, which means that taking any single summer or winter as supportin or contrary evidence isn't very valuable. (Note that the increased variability theory doesn't have enough data yet to be clearly demonstrated, at least according to http://www.ec.gc.ca/TKEI/cc_weather/cc_weather_e.c fm this.)
May I suggest The Economist (www.economist.com)? It's a British publication that has quite possibly some of the most in-depth and incisive articles on American Politics and Economics. If you pick up a copy at the newstand today, the current issue's cover title is "No Way to Run a Democracy" and does an in depth look at some of the big political issues in this election. I'm personally a big fan of The Economist for my news... they have a bias, but are open about it and remind readers that they are prone to certain positions and how those positions influence their opinions.
They do define what they mean by reading:
Published poetry, plays, or narrative literature.
So by that standard, I didn't read over 2000 pages of history, world events, or hobby related materials last month. Nor did I read weekly neews magazines, or monthly specialist ones. I also didn't read the daily newspaper.
Although they have a broader point of comparison 'reading', it doesn't expand too much on the first definition too widely.
I'd be interested in a less biased study (after all, this is from the national endowment of the arts) that breaks down what people actually raed, as opposed to defining reading favourably to my point.
Matt
While I agree with you in principle (anyone selling anti-satellite rockets, perchance?) I'd just suggest this: When the first company to take 'advantage' of this advertising strategy announces that they will do so, write them a very polite letter telling them that you will boycott every product they ever produce from now until the cold bitter end if they actually proceed. Tell them that you will then spend sizeable effort convincing friends, neighbours, your children's schoolmates, etc... to forever blacklist that company. Tell them that websites, protests, bad press and tv spots of little children looking up at the sky and saying "Why is pizza hut making it hard to use my christmas present telescope, daddy?" will be forthcoming. Granted, it'll probably take someone to actually do it, and then see massive loss in business before other companies really take notice.
The problem with the Carthage analogy, however, is that the armies of Carthage under Darl Hannibal savaged the Roman republic for years causing untold suffering and carnage before they were taken down. In fact, I think that there were a total of three Punic wars. So we should ask ourselves if anyone is in the position to spring up after SCO to take up the same business model and start wars II and III.
According to page 19 of the report, under the heading of Ribbon Infall,"The raw numbers suggest that the worst case cable infall is not as bad as the best case, nominal operation of current rocket programs."
Granted, they supply no numbers and they explicitly state that they have done no serious quantitative analysis of this, so I'm curious how they came to his conclusion.