No they don't. Service is not income. Besides, even though they put $40,000 worth of equipment on the car, they probably only raised the value by a few thousand.
In fact, when most people upgrade their car, they actually LOWER the resale value. But some people might be willing to pay for the novelty of having a car done over by these professionals. I wouldn't myself, but some people might.
guy who believed in embracing technology.
Yup, back when I was still involved in synthesizers and MIDI, he was writing books which mentioned those subjects. I'd read the HHGttG series already and was floored to find he had similar technology interests as myself. (Prejudice on my part that writers are mostly non-technical)
The reason is that the American "IT" worker you referred to, is not smart enough to work in IBM Research
Certainly there are American IT workers who are smart enough to work for IBM research. However, most of them are probably gainfully employed elsewhere and can not be lured into the job for whatever salary IBM was offering. If they had upped the salary enough, someone would have taken the job, and that salary would by definition, have been the industry standard. The fact that they had to hire an H1B means either:
1. Not one of the 100 million or so working Americans had the skill to do the job. A plainly ridiculous thought. OR
2. Not one of the American qualified individuals for the job thought that the salary was sufficient for them to take the job.
There is probably also a healthy dose of:
3. None of the American qualified individuals were aware that the job was available. Making sure to advertise in such a way as to avoid catching the attention of qualified individuals is another tactic of companies that try to hire H1Bs instead of American workers.
See, this is what I don't get. If they had to pay you more than the prevailing wage than why did an American IT worker not step up to take the job? The answer is simple economics: that was not the prevailing wage and thus it was not attractive to the American IT worker.
They are deceiving you into thinking you are getting pervailing wage. You are not.
Look up the definition of troll. It is not "someone who posts evidence which destroys your opposing position."
What the GP said is absolutely true. India is rampant with bribery. My H1B Indian friend has told me stories of Indian firms accepting money for placement on the list of people to export. The amount converted to thousands of dollars. At least he had a CS degree.
You can agree with Bill, but it doesn't matter how much tepid coffee you put in the mug, it isn't going to get hot.
H1Bs are not the best and the brightest anymore. There are a few good ones, a few bad ones and most of them are average, just like the unemployed IT workers in the U.S. Why not just hire unemployed IT workers instead?
I worked at large construction and agricultural equipment manufacturer in the data warehouse department. Two of my coworkers were on H1B visas. They were making $35,000 per year. The average starting salary for a computer science graduate at the time was several thousand dollars higher than that. After three years, I was also displaced from the company in favor of foreign labor.
I applied there once. No reply whatsoever. And I know the difference between a linked list and an array, and a doubly linked list, and how to parse a b-tree, and amazingly all kinds of other stuff that I learned in college but haven't had to use in 15 years of programming.
Yeah, I like the little pissant companies who think they are bigshots, who have an installed base of maybe 30 customers who insist that all of their new hires already have experience in their little niche product. Oh yes, and they have reciprocal non-hire clauses with all of their customers.
However, high school students still are primarily getting computer science degrees.
In my neck of the woods, the High School students go into MIS. But hey, that works out for them, because when the companies around here want an IT person or a developer, they immediately post a position for an MIS major. If I wave my Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering degrees at them, they say, "No, we need an MIS major, someone who knows computers and programming."
H1B workers are not cheaper
If you read the law, they are paid prevailing wage. If you look at what they are paid, they are paid less than the prevailing wage. Either someone skews the statistics, or they fudge the job title. He does mention that he wants qualified labor
Most H1bs coming in these days are hardly cream of the crop. It's not the 1970s anymore. The H1bs I deal with on a daily basis are strictly average. Any American IT worker could do the same job. But they would demand a higher salary.
You need to let a bunch in, even if their wages are significantly less than Americans, just so we can (as a country) continue to attract some of the world's best and brightest.
How many more of the world's best and brightest are there? I wonder if the best and brightest are really applying, or just people desperate to get out of their country. In the 1970s we were getting some truly world class individuals. Most of the H1Bs I come across these days are pretty much on par with the average american. We have plenty of average people already, thank you very much.
I disagree with your disagreement. Back in the day, there were enough jobs that both the wheat and the chaff could be hired, and the wheat could quickly distinguish itself. Nowadays, bot the wheat and the chaff are looking for jobs, and since hiring companies can't tell the difference it becomes a crapshoot as to which one ends up with the job. Probably more likely to be the one that studied marketing in college rather than the one that studied engineering, though.
Then that's not eager enough in my book
Why should we have to uproot our families, sell our homes, and move hundreds if not thousands of miles just to get a job? Stress is increased, children are traumatized, taxes, forwarding mail, getting a new bank account and all those things are a hassle for a year or more after the move.
Heck, you send jobs to India, why can't you give a job to someone who works in another town than your corporate HQ?
As I see it, I live in a part of the country with a lower cost of living, I have a cable modem, I have a computer, a phone, a compiler, a refrigerator that keeps soda cold. I have everything I need to perform 95% of software development jobs. And I am probably in the same price range as you would pay some firm in India for an FTE.
Since you had a spelling error in your post (and by definition of spelling flame, mine will too), I will tell the story of our search for a FORTRAN and C developer back in the early 1990s. The first week, the newspaper spelled FORTRAN as FORTAN. True to their agreement, they ran it with the corrected spelling the second week for free. However, even after two weeks of posting, we got only about 10 resumes and TWO of them said they had skills in FORTAN!
How do you account for people who have been out of the loop due to unemployment or underemployment?
I used to work for Sybase Professional Services. DBA and Data Warehousing is my preferred line of work. After the market collapsed, I got a job which is at least technical, but has nothing to do with DBA or Datawarehousing. Every time I get a notification of a job in that area, I apply. They ask me if I have three years experience with Sybase ASE 12.5. I inform them that ASE 12.5 is less than two years old, and that I have been in a different line of work for the last three years. I also tell them that I was hired at Sybase with NO EXPERIENCE IN SQL PERIOD, and within one year went from associate consultant to consultant, was widely regarded as one of the most knowledgeable Replication Server consultants (and still am regarded as such by some individuals, despite my lack of recent experience) in the Chicago area and was offered a senior consultant position and a 50% salary increase when I received an offer from another company. I have yet to make it past a recruiter to an actual interview with a company.
The only decrease there are the number of students.
Well, duh. Why waste tens of thousands of dollars on an education when all the jobs are going to go to foreigners anyway? It just makes good financial sense to buy a car with those tens of thousands of dollars. A car will at least have some value in four years.
You're right. It is hard to find good people. It is much easier to find average people and pay them a lot less.
But since the IT industry is in a labor shortage at the moment, I'm very surprised Bill hasn't called me back on the reums I submitted a couple of years back. Maybe they throw them out after 90 days. I'll go ahead and send another one right now. I'm sure that in the present IT labor shortage, I will definitely get a call back on my resume, including over 15 years of programming, system administration, database administration, data warehousing, and project management experience. Since its not about the money, its about finding good people, right?
Just as you state in your post, a company can hire an H1B for 5% over the minimum pay for the job. Why should they hire locally at the average rate, which is probably 50% or more above the minimum? In order to compete, the unemployed local worker has to lower his salary expectation to 5% above minimum. When this happens enough, the average wage gets dragged down.
I am aware that H1Bs have to pay into social security and medicare which they, much like me, will never be able to take advantage of. At least we have that small amount of recompense for the fact that by your very own mathm you admit that they would pass over perfectly good US workers to hire an H1B.
What Native American Indian tribe are you a member of?
Not insightful. Irrelevant. And redundant. This is the third post I've encountered (probably all by you) inferring that only people in an American Indian tribe should be allowed to complain about immigration.
Prior to Europeans entering and settling the Americas, there was no system of law governing immigration.
In 1776 the United States of America was formed and rules on citizenship were created. Since then, it has been possible for non-native americans to be citizens of the United States by birth, or even by immigration. In fact, American Indians themselves were not granted citizenship until June 2, 1924. From a legal standpoint, Europeans who settled here hundreds of years ago have more right to complain about immigration than native americans.
That said, anyone in the United States, including citizens, resident aliens, H1Bs, and Native Americans may complain legitimately about illegal immigration. Only illegal immigrants have no legitimate reason to complain, but this being a free country, they are still free to complain if they want.
Oh, yes, and I am part Cherokee, by the way. But as I said, that is irrelevant to the conversation.
I think a law requiring companies based in the US to have to offer visa holders the company average for the job they are applying for
That is the law already. Companies lie and misuse statistics in order to get around it.
But face it, there are foreign workers willing to work harder for less money; tech workers in the US are generally spoiled IMO (with many exceptions) I say let the genuinely talented or hard working into the US and give 'em a green card
I would say to do that if there were not unemployed or underemployed genuinely talented and hardworking citizens already here in the US. Hoewver, there ARE such people here inthe US. Why not give them first crack at the jobs?
The reason, of course, is as you alluded to above, money. H1Bs can be gotten for cheaper than the citizens here are willing to work. The laws SAY that you have to offer a job at industry standard wage, and if there are not qualified applicants, you can go abroad. I say that there are 150 million or more working age people in this country already and 99.9% of the time, the reason you don't get a qualified applicant is because the wage you are offering is NOT industry standard. There are a very small number of skillsets that just can not be found in the US already. The problem is not that people can not be found here who have programming skillsets, it is that people can not be found here that have those skillsets and are willing to work at the wage you are offering.
Technically, it is always cheaper to hire a local worker than an H1B, because you are supposed to offer the same wage that a local worker would take if there were local workers available. On top of that, there are fees you have to pay. The intent is that a company would do everything in their power including offering slightly above average wage in order to attract a local worker before succumbing to the extra expense of importing an H1B.
In real life, it doesn't work that way. Companies misuse statistics to justify a lower wage than a local employee would take, and then the company imports an H1B, all for less cost than it would take to attract a local worker.
I'd just like to mention that I live in an at-will state, and my employer still requires me to give two weeks notice. That means they could fire me at any time, but I have to notify them.
However, if I had not been so desparate for a job, I could have made them amend the contract to state that they had to give me notice as well.
At-will state or not, a contract is a contract. If you are in a bargaining position and not desperate like I was (wife and 4 kids, no job), get them to put a notice period in your contract!
That doesn't hel H1Bs as they are automatically not in a bargaining position since 10 million other people would be happy to have that same job, and worse case, the company could always pay the $20-$30k more that a local would demand to do the job.
Slashdot Mirror
No they don't. Service is not income. Besides, even though they put $40,000 worth of equipment on the car, they probably only raised the value by a few thousand.
In fact, when most people upgrade their car, they actually LOWER the resale value. But some people might be willing to pay for the novelty of having a car done over by these professionals. I wouldn't myself, but some people might.
Come on. Give NASA a break. Who would have figured there would be SAND on MARS?
guy who believed in embracing technology.
Yup, back when I was still involved in synthesizers and MIDI, he was writing books which mentioned those subjects. I'd read the HHGttG series already and was floored to find he had similar technology interests as myself. (Prejudice on my part that writers are mostly non-technical)
You misspelled "Cancer of the Larynx which had spread to the liver and other areas."
HTH
HAND
The reason is that the American "IT" worker you referred to, is not smart enough to work in IBM Research :
Certainly there are American IT workers who are smart enough to work for IBM research. However, most of them are probably gainfully employed elsewhere and can not be lured into the job for whatever salary IBM was offering. If they had upped the salary enough, someone would have taken the job, and that salary would by definition, have been the industry standard. The fact that they had to hire an H1B means either:
1. Not one of the 100 million or so working Americans had the skill to do the job. A plainly ridiculous thought. OR
2. Not one of the American qualified individuals for the job thought that the salary was sufficient for them to take the job.
There is probably also a healthy dose of
3. None of the American qualified individuals were aware that the job was available. Making sure to advertise in such a way as to avoid catching the attention of qualified individuals is another tactic of companies that try to hire H1Bs instead of American workers.
See, this is what I don't get. If they had to pay you more than the prevailing wage than why did an American IT worker not step up to take the job? The answer is simple economics: that was not the prevailing wage and thus it was not attractive to the American IT worker.
They are deceiving you into thinking you are getting pervailing wage. You are not.
Look up the definition of troll. It is not "someone who posts evidence which destroys your opposing position."
What the GP said is absolutely true. India is rampant with bribery. My H1B Indian friend has told me stories of Indian firms accepting money for placement on the list of people to export. The amount converted to thousands of dollars. At least he had a CS degree.
You can agree with Bill, but it doesn't matter how much tepid coffee you put in the mug, it isn't going to get hot.
H1Bs are not the best and the brightest anymore. There are a few good ones, a few bad ones and most of them are average, just like the unemployed IT workers in the U.S. Why not just hire unemployed IT workers instead?
I worked at large construction and agricultural equipment manufacturer in the data warehouse department. Two of my coworkers were on H1B visas. They were making $35,000 per year. The average starting salary for a computer science graduate at the time was several thousand dollars higher than that. After three years, I was also displaced from the company in favor of foreign labor.
I applied there once. No reply whatsoever. And I know the difference between a linked list and an array, and a doubly linked list, and how to parse a b-tree, and amazingly all kinds of other stuff that I learned in college but haven't had to use in 15 years of programming.
Yeah, I like the little pissant companies who think they are bigshots, who have an installed base of maybe 30 customers who insist that all of their new hires already have experience in their little niche product. Oh yes, and they have reciprocal non-hire clauses with all of their customers.
However, high school students still are primarily getting computer science degrees.
In my neck of the woods, the High School students go into MIS. But hey, that works out for them, because when the companies around here want an IT person or a developer, they immediately post a position for an MIS major. If I wave my Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering degrees at them, they say, "No, we need an MIS major, someone who knows computers and programming."
H1B workers are not cheaper
If you read the law, they are paid prevailing wage. If you look at what they are paid, they are paid less than the prevailing wage. Either someone skews the statistics, or they fudge the job title.
He does mention that he wants qualified labor
Most H1bs coming in these days are hardly cream of the crop. It's not the 1970s anymore. The H1bs I deal with on a daily basis are strictly average. Any American IT worker could do the same job. But they would demand a higher salary.
You need to let a bunch in, even if their wages are significantly less than Americans, just so we can (as a country) continue to attract some of the world's best and brightest.
How many more of the world's best and brightest are there? I wonder if the best and brightest are really applying, or just people desperate to get out of their country. In the 1970s we were getting some truly world class individuals. Most of the H1Bs I come across these days are pretty much on par with the average american. We have plenty of average people already, thank you very much.
I disagree with your disagreement. Back in the day, there were enough jobs that both the wheat and the chaff could be hired, and the wheat could quickly distinguish itself. Nowadays, bot the wheat and the chaff are looking for jobs, and since hiring companies can't tell the difference it becomes a crapshoot as to which one ends up with the job. Probably more likely to be the one that studied marketing in college rather than the one that studied engineering, though.
Then that's not eager enough in my book
Why should we have to uproot our families, sell our homes, and move hundreds if not thousands of miles just to get a job? Stress is increased, children are traumatized, taxes, forwarding mail, getting a new bank account and all those things are a hassle for a year or more after the move.
Heck, you send jobs to India, why can't you give a job to someone who works in another town than your corporate HQ?
As I see it, I live in a part of the country with a lower cost of living, I have a cable modem, I have a computer, a phone, a compiler, a refrigerator that keeps soda cold. I have everything I need to perform 95% of software development jobs. And I am probably in the same price range as you would pay some firm in India for an FTE.
Since you had a spelling error in your post (and by definition of spelling flame, mine will too), I will tell the story of our search for a FORTRAN and C developer back in the early 1990s. The first week, the newspaper spelled FORTRAN as FORTAN. True to their agreement, they ran it with the corrected spelling the second week for free. However, even after two weeks of posting, we got only about 10 resumes and TWO of them said they had skills in FORTAN!
How do you account for people who have been out of the loop due to unemployment or underemployment?
I used to work for Sybase Professional Services. DBA and Data Warehousing is my preferred line of work. After the market collapsed, I got a job which is at least technical, but has nothing to do with DBA or Datawarehousing. Every time I get a notification of a job in that area, I apply. They ask me if I have three years experience with Sybase ASE 12.5. I inform them that ASE 12.5 is less than two years old, and that I have been in a different line of work for the last three years. I also tell them that I was hired at Sybase with NO EXPERIENCE IN SQL PERIOD, and within one year went from associate consultant to consultant, was widely regarded as one of the most knowledgeable Replication Server consultants (and still am regarded as such by some individuals, despite my lack of recent experience) in the Chicago area and was offered a senior consultant position and a 50% salary increase when I received an offer from another company. I have yet to make it past a recruiter to an actual interview with a company.
The only decrease there are the number of students.
Well, duh. Why waste tens of thousands of dollars on an education when all the jobs are going to go to foreigners anyway? It just makes good financial sense to buy a car with those tens of thousands of dollars. A car will at least have some value in four years.
You're right. It is hard to find good people. It is much easier to find average people and pay them a lot less.
But since the IT industry is in a labor shortage at the moment, I'm very surprised Bill hasn't called me back on the reums I submitted a couple of years back. Maybe they throw them out after 90 days. I'll go ahead and send another one right now. I'm sure that in the present IT labor shortage, I will definitely get a call back on my resume, including over 15 years of programming, system administration, database administration, data warehousing, and project management experience. Since its not about the money, its about finding good people, right?
Just as you state in your post, a company can hire an H1B for 5% over the minimum pay for the job. Why should they hire locally at the average rate, which is probably 50% or more above the minimum? In order to compete, the unemployed local worker has to lower his salary expectation to 5% above minimum. When this happens enough, the average wage gets dragged down.
I am aware that H1Bs have to pay into social security and medicare which they, much like me, will never be able to take advantage of. At least we have that small amount of recompense for the fact that by your very own mathm you admit that they would pass over perfectly good US workers to hire an H1B.
What Native American Indian tribe are you a member of?
Not insightful. Irrelevant. And redundant. This is the third post I've encountered (probably all by you) inferring that only people in an American Indian tribe should be allowed to complain about immigration.
Prior to Europeans entering and settling the Americas, there was no system of law governing immigration.
In 1776 the United States of America was formed and rules on citizenship were created. Since then, it has been possible for non-native americans to be citizens of the United States by birth, or even by immigration. In fact, American Indians themselves were not granted citizenship until June 2, 1924. From a legal standpoint, Europeans who settled here hundreds of years ago have more right to complain about immigration than native americans.
That said, anyone in the United States, including citizens, resident aliens, H1Bs, and Native Americans may complain legitimately about illegal immigration. Only illegal immigrants have no legitimate reason to complain, but this being a free country, they are still free to complain if they want.
Oh, yes, and I am part Cherokee, by the way. But as I said, that is irrelevant to the conversation.
I think a law requiring companies based in the US to have to offer visa holders the company average for the job they are applying for
That is the law already. Companies lie and misuse statistics in order to get around it.
But face it, there are foreign workers willing to work harder for less money; tech workers in the US are generally spoiled IMO (with many exceptions)
I say let the genuinely talented or hard working into the US and give 'em a green card
I would say to do that if there were not unemployed or underemployed genuinely talented and hardworking citizens already here in the US. Hoewver, there ARE such people here inthe US. Why not give them first crack at the jobs?
The reason, of course, is as you alluded to above, money. H1Bs can be gotten for cheaper than the citizens here are willing to work. The laws SAY that you have to offer a job at industry standard wage, and if there are not qualified applicants, you can go abroad. I say that there are 150 million or more working age people in this country already and 99.9% of the time, the reason you don't get a qualified applicant is because the wage you are offering is NOT industry standard. There are a very small number of skillsets that just can not be found in the US already. The problem is not that people can not be found here who have programming skillsets, it is that people can not be found here that have those skillsets and are willing to work at the wage you are offering.
Technically, it is always cheaper to hire a local worker than an H1B, because you are supposed to offer the same wage that a local worker would take if there were local workers available. On top of that, there are fees you have to pay. The intent is that a company would do everything in their power including offering slightly above average wage in order to attract a local worker before succumbing to the extra expense of importing an H1B.
In real life, it doesn't work that way. Companies misuse statistics to justify a lower wage than a local employee would take, and then the company imports an H1B, all for less cost than it would take to attract a local worker.
I'd just like to mention that I live in an at-will state, and my employer still requires me to give two weeks notice. That means they could fire me at any time, but I have to notify them.
However, if I had not been so desparate for a job, I could have made them amend the contract to state that they had to give me notice as well. At-will state or not, a contract is a contract. If you are in a bargaining position and not desperate like I was (wife and 4 kids, no job), get them to put a notice period in your contract!
That doesn't hel H1Bs as they are automatically not in a bargaining position since 10 million other people would be happy to have that same job, and worse case, the company could always pay the $20-$30k more that a local would demand to do the job.