I dispute that. There are far too many factories closing and shipping their robots to China for this to be true.
Of course, the government thinks manufacturing output is increasing- but the government has also redefined manufacturing to include assembling hamburgers at McDonalds, so I think we can safely ignore their "evidence".
He's against immigration policy. So why does he believe hiring immigrants is good for his company? Is it because he hates Americans? No. That's stupid, he is an American, and Microsoft has many American employees. Is it because he wants to pay less to his employees? No. These are immigrants, and they are getting pay comparable to people already living in this country. They are getting American wages, not Indian or Chinese wages.
As a rule, Microsoft has a history of firing older employees that would earn more, in favor of immigrants that earn less. Bill Gates, and his class, are not Americans- they have houses worldwide and owe no country any allegiance at all.
I just explained how he is not saving money with these immigrants.
You explained no such thing. Why are the LCAs for H-1bs 30% LESS than an American with the same experience if there is no cost savings?
You're also bringing up how these immigrants spent less money for their education in their respective countries.... that doesn't mean anything.
An American has a student loan to repay. The H-1b doesn't. That means a LOT when it comes to salary negotiations.
They live in an impoverished country, maybe that means they deserve the job more?
What they deserve is an end to subsidized American exports so that they can actually build an economy of their own so that their country is not impoverished.
And the fact of price for education doesn't matter - getting a good education in the U.S. is far easier to attain than a good education in India.
India Institute of Technology charges $1000/year for books and tuition. Oregon Institute of Technology charges $10,000/year for the same thing. Who is going to be able to undersell whom for a job at graduation?
The reason high school kids are not going as much into engineering and computer science is because of people LIKE YOU. Your false reasoning that companies have a bias against American students coming into the workforce is bull and is discouraging kids from pursuing these fields.
Rather it is the facts as I experienced them from 2001 to 2006. It forced me out of private industry and into civil service. Sorry, I experienced this bigotry firsthand.
The fact is that American kids have to compete in this flattening global workforce. Wherever you are in the world, you're gonna have to work your ass off to get a good tech job. This isn't the cold war where America was booming high over everyone else. Other countries are catching up and we will have to deal with it.
And one way to deal with that is to treat economics for what it is- a cold war that should turn hot.
Posting Anonymous... I work at Microsoft. I am here on an immigration Visa. I've got close to two decades of industry experience. My salary puts me comfortably in the upper 5% bracket of all salary based jobs in the US. My presence in the US puts, you can buy that or not, a US company into competitive advantage position over the competition in the space I work in. That generates tax income from the company and tax income from me.
At the cost of some person of equal talent being thrown out of their home in the last recession. Talent in software engineering is 99% training and 1% inborn. You are not unique.
So you are saying that, just because they spent "1/10th your cost growing up", immigrants have less skill or talent? Not only is this comment extremely racist, it is also nonsense! I've worked at one of the top research labs in the US and more than half of the scientists there were immigrants. Why weren't there more Americans? Not because immigrants are "cheap labor", but because they had more talent.
Cheaper education = cheaper talent. Research labs are not the jobs I'm talking about- Microsoft has no actual research labs.
Regardless of Bill Gates' motivations for "speaking out" against immigration policies, I am sure that the immigrants that are getting hired for IT jobs are simply better than their American competitors. Yes, even if their education was cheap (oh the horrors!).
I'm not, specifically BECAUSE their education was cheaper. That makes their willingness to work for a lower wage more important than talent.
It seems to me that what motivates you to make a comment like this is the same thing that motivates the minutemen on the border to kill all those "illegal" immigrants. "They are taking all our jobs! Kill them!"
This is the first thing you've said that is completely correct. I believe that the world isn't ready for economic integration.
We can either allow people to emigrate to the United States, or we can watch while all of the major development houses shift development work offshore because the people that these folks want to hire can't get into the United States.
Or we can ban exporting and importing until such a time that the rest of the world catches up with our standard of living (or our standard of living falls to catch them).
One of the huge advantages that the United States has had since World War II was that it was "the" country where all of the smart people wanted to go. Foreign born scientists and engineers are a huge part of the reason that the U.S. holds the technological edge over the rest of the world. Besides, you can compete with the Indians and the Chinese if they move down the street from you and have to pay U.S. prices for food, housing, entertainment, and travel. The problem is that in an increasingly interconnected world living in the United States is less of an issue. If moving to the U.S. becomes a hassle, then these folks will simply stay home and development will continue to shift offshore, and technical folk in the U.S. will be the ones that suffer.
Unless, of course, we change the interconnectedness of the world. It's a human invention and can be changed if we don't like it.
The fact of the matter is that U.S. students have plenty of opportunity. There just aren't enough of them that are interested in going into technology.
You've got that backwards- if there was any opportunity, US students would go into technology in droves. The depression proved that there is no opportunity.
As for 'preventing' hiring of highly-paid American citizens, I'm glad you think only American citizens should have the oppurtunity to be hired by Microsoft and such companies. At least you're clear about your xenophobia.
Well, my Xenophobia runs both ways. I also think MSIDC should be sold to some enterprising young Indian to produce operating systems in the 40 different languages of India to be sold in India, and that Windows should not be allowed to be exported and sold there. Only then will Indian Citizens get a fair shake in such companies. Otherwise we end up with a glass ceiling- American corporations with no lower wage jobs below management in America, factories overseas where you can't rise above floor supervisor because all those jobs are in America.
I am not disagreing with you, but you do realize you saying pretty much the exact same thing as you think Bill Gates did.
IE that he was a priviliged kid, and that him and his family are better than those below him, and his status needs legal protection. I read your statment to say the same thing. That you and your family were born in this country, and theirfore you and your family deserve preference over anyone who didn't. It is very easy to extend that one step further and say that non-americans are not as Human as americans ( I know that wasn't even close to what you meant. )
Just to jump to the other side for a second- I'd point out that we wouldn't have the problem with illegal immigrants if it wasn't for cheap American Subsidized NAFTA food destroying the Mexican Agricultural Ecconomy. Trade destroyes people on *both* sides of any border.
At every company I have been at we have been starved for good engineers. Every single time there was talk of outsourcing it was always around the concept of simply being able to hire fast enough. Money was never the issue.
I'll give you a secret of how to hire fast enough: Pay college students to be interns at a rate high enough for them to get the training you need. It's that simple. No need for outsourcing. No need for importing foreign workers. This is what American manufacturers did for decades. Why is it so hard for the managers of the American software industry to get this right?
Where we paying below market rate? No, and as a matter of fact, given the afore-mentioned success, many people got wealthy. Where our standards too high? I don't know. I can say they were at least high-enough, and I can say that in retrospect the things we asked people to be able to do were not unreasonable at all. Write some code to solve some problems on the whiteboard. Is that so hard? This is what you are claiming you can do for us on a regular basis, right? These are not trick questions, they are designed to be straight forward and demonstrative of basic coding skills.
Did you try training people to do this directly?
I honestly cannot explain the difference in experiences I've had from yours. Why would you be trying to work for a company like Microsoft anyway when there are so many good companies out there struggling for talent?
Actually, I'm not. I gave up on Microsoft long ago. But I did spend 3 years sending out resumes with *NO* 2nd interviews. I finally gave up and started working for government- where training and raises and unions are guaranteed rights.
Remember that people in other countries are people too. Many of the Founders were Englishmen, who would have to apply for work permits to make a living here these days.
Why do you think they cannot create their own wealth and jobs? It's because of American Subsidized Food Exports! Protectionism should go both ways.
To date I don't believe Microsoft has ever laid off American talent for any reason even though we heavily recruit abroad.
The union WashTech was created partially due to this problem existing between 1999 and 2003.
I'm sitting here as a relative new-hire at Microsoft and the position I was hired for (software developer) was open for months.
It was open for months *because* Microsoft has gained a reputation for being a horrible employer in the period from 2001-2005.
I can also tell you that at my previous company talent shortage was one of the biggest impedements to growing the business. I'm not naive and I know that business owners would love to flood the talent pool to lower costs, but all I've seen around here is a huge demand for talent with nowhere near the number of qualified people.
There's a pretty easy answer for that- grab people out of the unemployment line and train them to be qualified. 99% of software engineering is training. It is NOT an inborn talent.
If anything, we're looking for international talent so that we *don't* lower the quality bar and hire whoever we can locally.
In other words, they hire international talent so that they don't have to train Americans.
In the end this is better for the U.S. Besides, I personally enjoy being around people who are far better educated than the average American.
So why not pay to educate the Americans? Oh yeah- cheaper taxes....
The price of food that maximizes farmers' revenue is determined by supply and demand. Farmers can demand a higher price for their food, but doing so will decrease their revenue (because supply and demand have not changed), and then the farmers will have even less money to pay their workers. Farmers can not hope to overcome this economic law by simply paying their workers more.
Right now, food prices have been removed from supply and demand by excessive subsidies. Therefore your argument is completely outside of reality.
If farmers could do what you suggest, why shouldn't farmers pay their workers a million dollars a year and then adjust the food prices accordingly?
They could. The specific minimum wage does not matter, because inflation will wipe out the wage gain eventually anyway.
If a million dollars a year is too high, then why not $500,000? Or $100,000? Why can the farmers only raise their food prices in order to support a living wage for workers, but no higher?
Because inflation will eventually make whatever wage we pay the bottom of society slightly below a living wage. We can slow the process by limiting increases in the minimum wage to a living wage, or we can eliminate the problem by instituting a maximum wage. Since the American Public will never accept the later, it's best to simply readjust the minimum wage every few years or at a constant rate (as has been done in Oregon).
But is there really an inversely proportional relationship between cheap and quality? In other words do people from, say, India have less talent than Americans because they're willing to work for less?
Not talent. Motivation. People with an internal locus of control come from rich countries because they have learned to take responsibility for their lives. People with an external locus of control come from poor countries because they have no control over their lives, and thus are not used to taking responsibility for mistakes. Talent is NOT the only measurement that affects quality.
I wonder if better paid Americans really do produce better products? If so, I wonder what it is about Americans that makes them better and why there's not a market for such talent.
The reason there isn't a market for it is because high quality products are invariably low profit products. Low profits, in any economy dominated by a stock market, means few businesses willing to invest.
I work for a company as an administrator for a 2000+ Linux cluster. We hire a lot of people from India and Eastern Europe. Should we fire them because they're not American?
No, what you should be doing is giving education loans to American College kids to learn Linux with the expectation that you will hire them, for life, after they get out of school so that they can pay back the loan.
There seems to be a hint of racism in your argument. I really don't know, perhaps we are better off being isolationist. But maybe you need to make the argument against free trade and diminishing borders in broader economic terms rather than in just citing Microsoft's delayed release of Vista.
This is really the wrong medium for that one- but here's the broader economic and psychological terminology for it: A strong trading partner with a weak trading partner destroys comparative advantage on both sides. We should only be trading with countries that are our equal when it comes to standard of living because only then will we be able to get the workers and quality we expect from a strong internal locus of control. Of course, this brings up the problem that we currently have the highest standard of living in the world. A couple of decades of isolationism will fix that in two ways: it will allow the rest of the world time to build a new standard of living, and it will allow us to readjust our economy to a higher standard of education and a lower standard of living. In a couple of decades, we can emerge from isolationism as an equal trading partner with China, Russia, and India; for their standard of living will have come up as ours went down.
A top-flight programmer or engineer from Russia or India is going to be supported by IT staff that comes from the US.
No he isn't. He's going to be supported by the outsourcing company that has taken over IT Staffing- which usually means TCS or some other body shop that is ALL L-1 and H-1b labor.
Some day oil will stop and the world will be a better place (without you!).
Funny thing is, I agree with EVERYTHING you said. But here's the kicker- the United States would be a better place without the rest of the world too. Bush and his ilk are 1% of the American population- the rest of us are being screwed over by them as much as anybody in the third world is. I say, bring the troops home, place them on our border, and ban both exports and imports with a shoot-first-ask-questions-later order for a couple of decades. By then our standard of living will have fallen, and the rest of the world's would have risen, enough for trade to be between equals.
As long as it's more economical to offshore than pay a living wage, our standard of living NEEDS to drop like a stone.
Just throw out everything made in Taiwan and see what you have left.
Everything that is made in Taiwan today was once made in the United States- at a higher level of quality- with natural resources found in the United States.
Check out some basic economics. How much does a computer made with 100% US parts cost?
Well, at US Stuff Computers, looks like about twice what foreign made would be. But then again, if you're a PATRIOT instead of a TRAITOR, that's the price you pay to make sure your NEIGHBOR can survive.
They basically refuse to pay that price point because above a certain pay level it's simply more economical to offshore the job.
I can think of an easy answer for that one: Ban imports. Put the United States into isolationist mode. Label anybody who does business offshore for what they are: A traitor, worthy only of execution. That should stop that argument dead in it's tracks, pardon the pun. And wait until inflation brings the rest of the world up to our standard of living, or until we degrade down to theirs.
Depends on if you took your parent's advice and took out a 30 year mortgage at the start of your so-called "career" or not.:-) But yes, I see outsourcing and H-1b labor as preventing the rise in wages that would otherwise happen to correct the market- and that prevents hiring Americans. Prevent is the correct word.
Why...why...that's the most un-American post I've ever seen!! You sound like one of 'em stinkin' socialists. But seriously, America has always been about (1) capitalism and (2) good business. What you suggest is quite the opposite -- it would be bad for business and is anything but capitalism. You're talking protectionism, which goes against the American ideal of "best price/quality ratio wins". Perhaps a lot of outsourced work is crap, but a lot of it isn't, and if it was ALL crap, well then business wouldn't exist anymore would it?
Quite the opposite- you just need to look at WalMart and what it's done to the American Manufacturing industry. Just about EVERYTHING WalMart imports from China is crap that will need replacing 3 times a year today- and they did it by forcing American companies to such a low price point that they had to close the factories here and outsource.
Just look at Vista and you'll see that Microsoft's overreliance on H1b labor and outsourcing has done the same thing to software.
Which do we really need here in the US? Do we really want highly skilled immigrants to fill highly skilled jobs, or do we want cheap labor that will do the jobs no one else wants to do?
We want cheap highly skilled labor to prevent having to actually pay for the society in which we live.
Are kids who grew up here complaining about losing construction/landscaping and migrant farm jobs to immigration?
Some are. I really do not like that the way I learned to work (picking strawberries, cane berries, and doing landscaping) will not be available to my son because a bunch of illegal immigrants took all of those jobs long ago. Without such jobs, he may not be able to afford to go to college. It's all tied together.
Microsoft is doing what they think is in their best interest. Their purpose isn't to justify your education, or try and boost the number of CS majors. Their purpose is not to give you, or anyone else, employment. Nor is that the purpose of any company.
Exactly right! So why should we change our laws, written by representatives elected democratically, to help a bunch of sociopaths who are just out to get what they can regardless of the destruction they cause to the rest of society? I say we should be disbanding any corportion that doesn't have, as a part of it's charter, a duty to support the citizens of the country that is granting it incorporation papers. It's not worth the cost in lowered taxes to allow such sociopathic systems to incorporate.
On a slightly different topic, I note that farmers in Colorado can't get the labor they need because of the tighter border control. Cutting our nose off to spite our face is truly clueless. We need these people.
Sorry, but whoever told you that is the granddaddy of all liars. Farmers in Colorado (and other states) can't get the labor they need because they refuse to pay a living wage for that labor and accept the inflation in food prices that comes from paying a living wage. The border control isn't any tighter- border patrol agents who actually use guns to enforce the border get sent to jail, and the National Guard troops we've sent there don't have any ammo. If anything, the border control is LOOSER than it was in the 1990s.
They're already doing it- Microsoft has a huge R&D center in Bangalore that they used to prevent the hiring of highly paid American citizens during the 2001 high tech depression.
Our colleges need them, our startups need them, our Fortune 1000 companies need them.
But the question is why the need? With 300 million Americans, there must be a price point that will make getting a CS degree profitable enough to attract employees. Or is it that these three groups just refuse to pay that price point?
Translation- I made billions in this industry, but if you try to work your way up from intern in my company to my level I'll fire you and replace you with somebody who spent 1/10th your cost growing up and getting an education, regardless of skill, because it's better for my bottom line.
With attitudes like this among our upper class, can anybody blame high school kids for not going into computer science?
Every programmer out there who lived through the depression in our industry of 2001-2005 is asking "Where was Bill with these jobs then?", and unfortunately the answer is Bangalore.
I suggest that to change this image, for every H-1b Microsoft hires, Bill Gates donates a $60,000 scholarship to an American high school student to study computer science, or a $50,000 scholarship to an unemployed American programmer to update their skillset and get a higher degree. Then maybe we'll believe what he says on this topic. Until then, he's just lobbying for the Cheap Labor crowd, which includes his own business.
My problem, I guess, is that I just can't bring myself to trust these folks any longer. They'll go for cheap over quality any day of the week- even when it means a 7 year delay in the next operating system only to have a bunch of GUI bells and whistles and no real new fixes or functionality.
In today's international corporate world, legality is for chumps who actually care about the nation they are in or the system they are working for. Simply select the overseas addresses.
Slashdot Mirror
US manufacturing output is INCREASING
I dispute that. There are far too many factories closing and shipping their robots to China for this to be true.
Of course, the government thinks manufacturing output is increasing- but the government has also redefined manufacturing to include assembling hamburgers at McDonalds, so I think we can safely ignore their "evidence".
He's against immigration policy. So why does he believe hiring immigrants is good for his company? Is it because he hates Americans? No. That's stupid, he is an American, and Microsoft has many American employees. Is it because he wants to pay less to his employees? No. These are immigrants, and they are getting pay comparable to people already living in this country. They are getting American wages, not Indian or Chinese wages.
As a rule, Microsoft has a history of firing older employees that would earn more, in favor of immigrants that earn less. Bill Gates, and his class, are not Americans- they have houses worldwide and owe no country any allegiance at all.
I just explained how he is not saving money with these immigrants.
You explained no such thing. Why are the LCAs for H-1bs 30% LESS than an American with the same experience if there is no cost savings?
You're also bringing up how these immigrants spent less money for their education in their respective countries.... that doesn't mean anything.
An American has a student loan to repay. The H-1b doesn't. That means a LOT when it comes to salary negotiations.
They live in an impoverished country, maybe that means they deserve the job more?
What they deserve is an end to subsidized American exports so that they can actually build an economy of their own so that their country is not impoverished.
And the fact of price for education doesn't matter - getting a good education in the U.S. is far easier to attain than a good education in India.
India Institute of Technology charges $1000/year for books and tuition. Oregon Institute of Technology charges $10,000/year for the same thing. Who is going to be able to undersell whom for a job at graduation?
The reason high school kids are not going as much into engineering and computer science is because of people LIKE YOU. Your false reasoning that companies have a bias against American students coming into the workforce is bull and is discouraging kids from pursuing these fields.
Rather it is the facts as I experienced them from 2001 to 2006. It forced me out of private industry and into civil service. Sorry, I experienced this bigotry firsthand.
The fact is that American kids have to compete in this flattening global workforce. Wherever you are in the world, you're gonna have to work your ass off to get a good tech job. This isn't the cold war where America was booming high over everyone else. Other countries are catching up and we will have to deal with it.
And one way to deal with that is to treat economics for what it is- a cold war that should turn hot.
Posting Anonymous ... I work at Microsoft. I am here on an immigration Visa. I've got close to two decades of industry experience. My salary puts me comfortably in the upper 5% bracket of all salary based jobs in the US. My presence in the US puts, you can buy that or not, a US company into competitive advantage position over the competition in the space I work in. That generates tax income from the company and tax income from me.
At the cost of some person of equal talent being thrown out of their home in the last recession. Talent in software engineering is 99% training and 1% inborn. You are not unique.
So you are saying that, just because they spent "1/10th your cost growing up", immigrants have less skill or talent? Not only is this comment extremely racist, it is also nonsense! I've worked at one of the top research labs in the US and more than half of the scientists there were immigrants. Why weren't there more Americans? Not because immigrants are "cheap labor", but because they had more talent.
Cheaper education = cheaper talent. Research labs are not the jobs I'm talking about- Microsoft has no actual research labs.
Regardless of Bill Gates' motivations for "speaking out" against immigration policies, I am sure that the immigrants that are getting hired for IT jobs are simply better than their American competitors. Yes, even if their education was cheap (oh the horrors!).
I'm not, specifically BECAUSE their education was cheaper. That makes their willingness to work for a lower wage more important than talent.
It seems to me that what motivates you to make a comment like this is the same thing that motivates the minutemen on the border to kill all those "illegal" immigrants. "They are taking all our jobs! Kill them!"
This is the first thing you've said that is completely correct. I believe that the world isn't ready for economic integration.
We can either allow people to emigrate to the United States, or we can watch while all of the major development houses shift development work offshore because the people that these folks want to hire can't get into the United States.
Or we can ban exporting and importing until such a time that the rest of the world catches up with our standard of living (or our standard of living falls to catch them).
One of the huge advantages that the United States has had since World War II was that it was "the" country where all of the smart people wanted to go. Foreign born scientists and engineers are a huge part of the reason that the U.S. holds the technological edge over the rest of the world. Besides, you can compete with the Indians and the Chinese if they move down the street from you and have to pay U.S. prices for food, housing, entertainment, and travel. The problem is that in an increasingly interconnected world living in the United States is less of an issue. If moving to the U.S. becomes a hassle, then these folks will simply stay home and development will continue to shift offshore, and technical folk in the U.S. will be the ones that suffer.
Unless, of course, we change the interconnectedness of the world. It's a human invention and can be changed if we don't like it.
The fact of the matter is that U.S. students have plenty of opportunity. There just aren't enough of them that are interested in going into technology.
You've got that backwards- if there was any opportunity, US students would go into technology in droves. The depression proved that there is no opportunity.
As for 'preventing' hiring of highly-paid American citizens, I'm glad you think only American citizens should have the oppurtunity to be hired by Microsoft and such companies. At least you're clear about your xenophobia.
Well, my Xenophobia runs both ways. I also think MSIDC should be sold to some enterprising young Indian to produce operating systems in the 40 different languages of India to be sold in India, and that Windows should not be allowed to be exported and sold there. Only then will Indian Citizens get a fair shake in such companies. Otherwise we end up with a glass ceiling- American corporations with no lower wage jobs below management in America, factories overseas where you can't rise above floor supervisor because all those jobs are in America.
I am not disagreing with you, but you do realize you saying pretty much the exact same thing as you think Bill Gates did.
IE that he was a priviliged kid, and that him and his family are better than those below him, and his status needs legal protection. I read your statment to say the same thing. That you and your family were born in this country, and theirfore you and your family deserve preference over anyone who didn't. It is very easy to extend that one step further and say that non-americans are not as Human as americans ( I know that wasn't even close to what you meant. )
Just to jump to the other side for a second- I'd point out that we wouldn't have the problem with illegal immigrants if it wasn't for cheap American Subsidized NAFTA food destroying the Mexican Agricultural Ecconomy. Trade destroyes people on *both* sides of any border.
At every company I have been at we have been starved for good engineers. Every single time there was talk of outsourcing it was always around the concept of simply being able to hire fast enough. Money was never the issue.
I'll give you a secret of how to hire fast enough: Pay college students to be interns at a rate high enough for them to get the training you need. It's that simple. No need for outsourcing. No need for importing foreign workers. This is what American manufacturers did for decades. Why is it so hard for the managers of the American software industry to get this right?
Where we paying below market rate? No, and as a matter of fact, given the afore-mentioned success, many people got wealthy. Where our standards too high? I don't know. I can say they were at least high-enough, and I can say that in retrospect the things we asked people to be able to do were not unreasonable at all. Write some code to solve some problems on the whiteboard. Is that so hard? This is what you are claiming you can do for us on a regular basis, right? These are not trick questions, they are designed to be straight forward and demonstrative of basic coding skills.
Did you try training people to do this directly?
I honestly cannot explain the difference in experiences I've had from yours. Why would you be trying to work for a company like Microsoft anyway when there are so many good companies out there struggling for talent?
Actually, I'm not. I gave up on Microsoft long ago. But I did spend 3 years sending out resumes with *NO* 2nd interviews. I finally gave up and started working for government- where training and raises and unions are guaranteed rights.
Remember that people in other countries are people too. Many of the Founders were Englishmen, who would have to apply for work permits to make a living here these days.
Why do you think they cannot create their own wealth and jobs? It's because of American Subsidized Food Exports! Protectionism should go both ways.
To date I don't believe Microsoft has ever laid off American talent for any reason even though we heavily recruit abroad.
The union WashTech was created partially due to this problem existing between 1999 and 2003.
I'm sitting here as a relative new-hire at Microsoft and the position I was hired for (software developer) was open for months.
It was open for months *because* Microsoft has gained a reputation for being a horrible employer in the period from 2001-2005.
I can also tell you that at my previous company talent shortage was one of the biggest impedements to growing the business. I'm not naive and I know that business owners would love to flood the talent pool to lower costs, but all I've seen around here is a huge demand for talent with nowhere near the number of qualified people.
There's a pretty easy answer for that- grab people out of the unemployment line and train them to be qualified. 99% of software engineering is training. It is NOT an inborn talent.
If anything, we're looking for international talent so that we *don't* lower the quality bar and hire whoever we can locally.
In other words, they hire international talent so that they don't have to train Americans.
In the end this is better for the U.S. Besides, I personally enjoy being around people who are far better educated than the average American.
So why not pay to educate the Americans? Oh yeah- cheaper taxes....
The price of food that maximizes farmers' revenue is determined by supply and demand. Farmers can demand a higher price for their food, but doing so will decrease their revenue (because supply and demand have not changed), and then the farmers will have even less money to pay their workers. Farmers can not hope to overcome this economic law by simply paying their workers more.
Right now, food prices have been removed from supply and demand by excessive subsidies. Therefore your argument is completely outside of reality.
If farmers could do what you suggest, why shouldn't farmers pay their workers a million dollars a year and then adjust the food prices accordingly?
They could. The specific minimum wage does not matter, because inflation will wipe out the wage gain eventually anyway.
If a million dollars a year is too high, then why not $500,000? Or $100,000? Why can the farmers only raise their food prices in order to support a living wage for workers, but no higher?
Because inflation will eventually make whatever wage we pay the bottom of society slightly below a living wage. We can slow the process by limiting increases in the minimum wage to a living wage, or we can eliminate the problem by instituting a maximum wage. Since the American Public will never accept the later, it's best to simply readjust the minimum wage every few years or at a constant rate (as has been done in Oregon).
But is there really an inversely proportional relationship between cheap and quality? In other words do people from, say, India have less talent than Americans because they're willing to work for less?
Not talent. Motivation. People with an internal locus of control come from rich countries because they have learned to take responsibility for their lives. People with an external locus of control come from poor countries because they have no control over their lives, and thus are not used to taking responsibility for mistakes. Talent is NOT the only measurement that affects quality.
I wonder if better paid Americans really do produce better products? If so, I wonder what it is about Americans that makes them better and why there's not a market for such talent.
The reason there isn't a market for it is because high quality products are invariably low profit products. Low profits, in any economy dominated by a stock market, means few businesses willing to invest.
I work for a company as an administrator for a 2000+ Linux cluster. We hire a lot of people from India and Eastern Europe. Should we fire them because they're not American?
No, what you should be doing is giving education loans to American College kids to learn Linux with the expectation that you will hire them, for life, after they get out of school so that they can pay back the loan.
There seems to be a hint of racism in your argument. I really don't know, perhaps we are better off being isolationist. But maybe you need to make the argument against free trade and diminishing borders in broader economic terms rather than in just citing Microsoft's delayed release of Vista.
This is really the wrong medium for that one- but here's the broader economic and psychological terminology for it: A strong trading partner with a weak trading partner destroys comparative advantage on both sides. We should only be trading with countries that are our equal when it comes to standard of living because only then will we be able to get the workers and quality we expect from a strong internal locus of control. Of course, this brings up the problem that we currently have the highest standard of living in the world. A couple of decades of isolationism will fix that in two ways: it will allow the rest of the world time to build a new standard of living, and it will allow us to readjust our economy to a higher standard of education and a lower standard of living. In a couple of decades, we can emerge from isolationism as an equal trading partner with China, Russia, and India; for their standard of living will have come up as ours went down.
A top-flight programmer or engineer from Russia or India is going to be supported by IT staff that comes from the US.
No he isn't. He's going to be supported by the outsourcing company that has taken over IT Staffing- which usually means TCS or some other body shop that is ALL L-1 and H-1b labor.
Some day oil will stop and the world will be a better place (without you!).
Funny thing is, I agree with EVERYTHING you said. But here's the kicker- the United States would be a better place without the rest of the world too. Bush and his ilk are 1% of the American population- the rest of us are being screwed over by them as much as anybody in the third world is. I say, bring the troops home, place them on our border, and ban both exports and imports with a shoot-first-ask-questions-later order for a couple of decades. By then our standard of living will have fallen, and the rest of the world's would have risen, enough for trade to be between equals.
Your standard of living would drop like a stone.
As long as it's more economical to offshore than pay a living wage, our standard of living NEEDS to drop like a stone.
Just throw out everything made in Taiwan and see what you have left.
Everything that is made in Taiwan today was once made in the United States- at a higher level of quality- with natural resources found in the United States.
Check out some basic economics. How much does a computer made with 100% US parts cost?
Well, at US Stuff Computers, looks like about twice what foreign made would be. But then again, if you're a PATRIOT instead of a TRAITOR, that's the price you pay to make sure your NEIGHBOR can survive.
They basically refuse to pay that price point because above a certain pay level it's simply more economical to offshore the job.
I can think of an easy answer for that one: Ban imports. Put the United States into isolationist mode. Label anybody who does business offshore for what they are: A traitor, worthy only of execution. That should stop that argument dead in it's tracks, pardon the pun. And wait until inflation brings the rest of the world up to our standard of living, or until we degrade down to theirs.
You mean avoid, not prevent.
:-) But yes, I see outsourcing and H-1b labor as preventing the rise in wages that would otherwise happen to correct the market- and that prevents hiring Americans. Prevent is the correct word.
Depends on if you took your parent's advice and took out a 30 year mortgage at the start of your so-called "career" or not.
Why...why...that's the most un-American post I've ever seen!! You sound like one of 'em stinkin' socialists. But seriously, America has always been about (1) capitalism and (2) good business. What you suggest is quite the opposite -- it would be bad for business and is anything but capitalism. You're talking protectionism, which goes against the American ideal of "best price/quality ratio wins". Perhaps a lot of outsourced work is crap, but a lot of it isn't, and if it was ALL crap, well then business wouldn't exist anymore would it?
Quite the opposite- you just need to look at WalMart and what it's done to the American Manufacturing industry. Just about EVERYTHING WalMart imports from China is crap that will need replacing 3 times a year today- and they did it by forcing American companies to such a low price point that they had to close the factories here and outsource.
Just look at Vista and you'll see that Microsoft's overreliance on H1b labor and outsourcing has done the same thing to software.
Which do we really need here in the US? Do we really want highly skilled immigrants to fill highly skilled jobs, or do we want cheap labor that will do the jobs no one else wants to do?
We want cheap highly skilled labor to prevent having to actually pay for the society in which we live.
Are kids who grew up here complaining about losing construction/landscaping and migrant farm jobs to immigration?
Some are. I really do not like that the way I learned to work (picking strawberries, cane berries, and doing landscaping) will not be available to my son because a bunch of illegal immigrants took all of those jobs long ago. Without such jobs, he may not be able to afford to go to college. It's all tied together.
Microsoft is doing what they think is in their best interest. Their purpose isn't to justify your education, or try and boost the number of CS majors. Their purpose is not to give you, or anyone else, employment. Nor is that the purpose of any company.
Exactly right! So why should we change our laws, written by representatives elected democratically, to help a bunch of sociopaths who are just out to get what they can regardless of the destruction they cause to the rest of society? I say we should be disbanding any corportion that doesn't have, as a part of it's charter, a duty to support the citizens of the country that is granting it incorporation papers. It's not worth the cost in lowered taxes to allow such sociopathic systems to incorporate.
On a slightly different topic, I note that farmers in Colorado can't get the labor they need because of the tighter border control. Cutting our nose off to spite our face is truly clueless. We need these people.
Sorry, but whoever told you that is the granddaddy of all liars. Farmers in Colorado (and other states) can't get the labor they need because they refuse to pay a living wage for that labor and accept the inflation in food prices that comes from paying a living wage. The border control isn't any tighter- border patrol agents who actually use guns to enforce the border get sent to jail, and the National Guard troops we've sent there don't have any ammo. If anything, the border control is LOOSER than it was in the 1990s.
They're already doing it- Microsoft has a huge R&D center in Bangalore that they used to prevent the hiring of highly paid American citizens during the 2001 high tech depression.
Our colleges need them, our startups need them, our Fortune 1000 companies need them.
But the question is why the need? With 300 million Americans, there must be a price point that will make getting a CS degree profitable enough to attract employees. Or is it that these three groups just refuse to pay that price point?
Translation- I made billions in this industry, but if you try to work your way up from intern in my company to my level I'll fire you and replace you with somebody who spent 1/10th your cost growing up and getting an education, regardless of skill, because it's better for my bottom line.
With attitudes like this among our upper class, can anybody blame high school kids for not going into computer science?
Every programmer out there who lived through the depression in our industry of 2001-2005 is asking "Where was Bill with these jobs then?", and unfortunately the answer is Bangalore.
I suggest that to change this image, for every H-1b Microsoft hires, Bill Gates donates a $60,000 scholarship to an American high school student to study computer science, or a $50,000 scholarship to an unemployed American programmer to update their skillset and get a higher degree. Then maybe we'll believe what he says on this topic. Until then, he's just lobbying for the Cheap Labor crowd, which includes his own business.
My problem, I guess, is that I just can't bring myself to trust these folks any longer. They'll go for cheap over quality any day of the week- even when it means a 7 year delay in the next operating system only to have a bunch of GUI bells and whistles and no real new fixes or functionality.
In today's international corporate world, legality is for chumps who actually care about the nation they are in or the system they are working for. Simply select the overseas addresses.