Posted this a while back, but it bears repeating, IMHO
---------
I was drawing upon experiences watching a foreign couple go through this. There existed an exit barrier for her, since the company was doing the immigration mambo for her immediate family. They were Chinese (and this was several years ago), so leaving the job (and returning to China, if I understand correctly) would have been problematic. She implied that moving companies meant rebooting the immigration process, at which they'd been working for a while.
I suggest that part of her compensation was the possibility of US citizenship, which creates noise in the job market for the domestic workforce. Let's assume she and I have identical skillsets, experience, etc. If her compensation function was:
money + benefits + US citizenship
while mine was:
money + benefits + having a life
The hiring company is at a great advantage, since moving towards US citizenship is significantly valuable to her. The company can outsource the immigration stuff to lawyers (who, BTW, aren't likely to get pushed to finish) at lowest cost possible. If they have a number of such workers, economies of scale (re: the lawyers) kicks in, and the company reaps even more benefit.
Meanwhile, she percieves that she's making $X, and will work that hard, when financially, she's getting $X - value of potential US Citizenship.
The company is thrilled, so long as her value of potential US citizenship is less than marginal lawyer's fees. Note that an incentive exists to start the process quickly, get to an advanced stage, then actually MINIMIZE the legal talent and effort put forth, both financially, and from an HR standpoint.
I think that covers it. No trickery, no ethical wrangling, but a significant advantage for the company. Of course, not everyone's from mainland China...
I hate to say this, but they came here knowing that exportation at the end of their term was a possibility. I feel badly for those getting sent back, but that was the original deal, and if, by the end of their term, they didn't get resident status, well, those are the rules they signed up for.
Please note that every H1B employee I've ever met has been in the process of getting their green card through their employer. If that employer dragged their feet through the process (which, for the record, it's in their interest to do), then they should have seen it coming.
This tugging at heartstrings for "six years of their lives" is badly misplaced. Blame the employers who weren't straight with the workers.
My wife and I had a similar problem in that it seemed too expensive to bother with our postgraduate degrees, the payments on a loan ($80K in our case for both of us) work out to roughly a car payment, which we should be able to handle easily with the increase of income from our new gigs. Then, we're earning that much even after we pay off the loan. For us (we're both geeks), we're looking down the barrel at a 50% pay increase next year, assuming statistics for our school hold.
You'll have to wait a year or so to see how it turns out (we get out this spring), but over time, the payments will go away. The jump in salary won't.
Sorry, I was just drawing upon experiences watching a foreign couple go through this. There existed an exit barrier for her, since the company was doing the immigration mambo for her immediate family. They were Chinese (and this was several years ago), so leaving the job (and returning to China, if I understand correctly) would have been problematic. She implied that moving companies meant rebooting the immigration process, at which they'd been working for a while.
I suggest that part of her compensation was the possibility of US citizenship, which creates noise in the job market for the domestic workforce. Let's assume she and I have identical skillsets, experience, etc. If her compensation function was:
money + benefits + US citizenship
while mine was:
money + benefits + having a life
The hiring company is at a great advantage, since moving towards US citizenship is significantly valuable to her. The company can outsource the immigration stuff to lawyers (who, BTW, aren't likely to get pushed to finish) at lowest cost possible. If they have a number of such workers, economies of scale (re: the lawyers) kicks in, and the company reaps even more benefit.
Meanwhile, she percieves that she's making $X, and will work that hard, when financially, she's getting $X - value of potential US Citizenship. To work that amount, I would have to make $X, which puts me at a disadvantage.
The company is thrilled, so long as her value of potential US citizenship is less than marginal lawyer's fees. Note that an incentive exists to actually MINIMZE the legal talent and effort put forth, both financially, and from an HR standpoint.
I think that covers it. No trickery, no ethical wrangling, but a significant advantage for the company. Of course, not everyone's from mainland China...
As a manager, if you can find someone to do the job at 10% less than whatever rate gets stated, that's competitive advantage over all your competitors working in the same industry.
If you also get veto power over their presence in the US, I suspect that gets you tremendous leverage over salary negotiations in the future. This keeps costs down, and raises the possibility that you can get more work out of them.
I suspect noone would assume a given level of competence for H1Bs (as an aggregate), but would suggest that the company's interest isn't necessarily for labor, but more inexpensive laborers that they can more easily control.
As the level of expertise is likely similar, it creates problems for experienced people who have become interested in quality of life issues (having a life outside the office). Period.
It's not a racial/immigration issue, it's an issue affecting the marketplace for labor.
Business risk is, in this case, slightly misstated. A smart company will already have figured out that the blade market will be suspect to copycats, etc., and will have built the cost of the lawsuits into the revenue they expect to get from the blades in the short term. The question shouldn't be if the copycats come in, but when.
As such, what are the razor blade manufacturers, faced with a copycat blade maker, supposed to do? You'd rather they sit back, and relax while their primary revenue stream is taken away? Despite the fact they probably have funds stashed away j.i.c. some copycat shows up?
The company has to protect its property (in this analogy, the patent on the blades), or the investors in the project are getting screwed over. I don't know of any way to fix this, but it's a critical notion in the transition to the new economy. The old money isn't just going to go away.
Heard today that BlueTooth chips will be $5 in volume by next year sometime. I suspect that a big problem w/Jini was that you needed to be on a network to use it, and most refrigerators, AFAIK, don't have rj-45 jacks.
Wireless AND ubiquitous access to the net, THEN they'll have something functional. What they'll do with it after that, I frankly have no idea. A "contents of my fridge" web page would be nice, but why? Now, remote control of my stereo from anywhere in the house....
AFAIK, there's no patch for the 8MB problem. If you look at the web site closely, I think the patch is for the 8MB MODULE, not the Visor deluxe.
I had one of the defective ones, which kind of sucked. My visor crashed twice in about three days, after working just fine for about three or four months. The first help desk tech I called blamed the installed software, which both pissed me off, and made me call back when it crashed again.
The second time they were very nice about it, and shipped a (non-problematic) replacement tout de suite. I suspect that this might be a mandate from on high, since it doesn't make much sense to keep the defective ones out there.
Other than that, it's been great. I added on one of the Targus keyboards to take notes in class, and it's terrific. Most of the functionality of a laptop in 1/8 the weight and space.
At issue isn't whether, or how such things should be transferred digitally/electronically, as that appears inevitable.
What IS at issue is exactly how the artists will be recompensed for their time and effort. Well produced albums take time and money to produce. Freeloading (those that don't buy the CD) mp3 addicts use the product without paying anything back to the artist.
While Lars isn't the best spoken guy on the planet, and I'm not a fan of most of what he's saying, I think THAT's the issue here, and it's not one that anyone has an answer for yet, TTBOMK.
I've noticed, since I started hitting/. about a year ago, a recent tendency toward effluvia, not so much in the trolls/Nat Portman stuff, but in the stories that are getting over the wire. Movie reviews? An apparent obsession with the Star Wars, Episode I DVD? Why?
Similarly, the opportunity to ask questions of Mr. Katz could be interpreted as relatively shameless plugging of a new novel, which I didn't think this site was about. If I wanted commercially tainted reporting, I could just hit Ziff-Davis' site.
While the trolls can't be kept at bay without ending anonymous posting, the signal to noise ratio for which I value/. seems to be creeping downward somewhat of late. I'd be interested in Mr. Katz's opinion, both of whether I'm right, and what effects the curse of popularity may have on/..
IMHO, the point appears to be that one could easily surrender the confusion of a PC if all one does is gaming, quicken/checkbook, WWW, email, and minor word processing. I would claim (without reference to anything) the the 80/20 rule would easily apply here, and a system like a PS2 would be of incredible use to home users. Besides, plug it into your suburban family cable modem, and you've got instant multiplayer possibilities without having to worry about modem hookups.
Yes, there are security issues, yes, there are privacy issues, yes, there are issues of usability and access, but if grandma wants a web connection, this might be a good way to go.
I wasn't a big fan of it. It had a pretty steep usage (as opposed to learning) curve, and it really bit when playing Diablo. I started getting carpal tunnel, switched from it, and my wrist has been OK since.
Slashdot Mirror
Posted this a while back, but it bears repeating, IMHO
---------
I was drawing upon experiences watching a foreign couple go through this. There existed an exit barrier for her, since the company was doing the immigration mambo for her immediate family. They were Chinese (and this was several years ago), so leaving the job (and returning to China, if I understand correctly) would have been problematic. She implied that moving companies meant rebooting the immigration process, at which they'd been working for a while.
I suggest that part of her compensation was the possibility of US citizenship, which creates noise in the job market for the domestic workforce. Let's assume she and I have identical skillsets, experience, etc. If her compensation function was:
money + benefits + US citizenship
while mine was:
money + benefits + having a life
The hiring company is at a great advantage, since moving towards US citizenship is significantly valuable to her. The company can outsource the immigration stuff to lawyers (who, BTW, aren't likely to get pushed to finish) at lowest cost possible. If they have a number of such workers, economies of scale (re: the lawyers) kicks in, and the company reaps even more benefit.
Meanwhile, she percieves that she's making $X, and will work that hard, when financially, she's getting $X - value of potential US Citizenship.
The company is thrilled, so long as her value of potential US citizenship is less than marginal lawyer's fees. Note that an incentive exists to start the process quickly, get to an advanced stage, then actually MINIMIZE the legal talent and effort put forth, both financially, and from an HR standpoint.
I think that covers it. No trickery, no ethical wrangling, but a significant advantage for the company. Of course, not everyone's from mainland China...
I hate to say this, but they came here knowing that exportation at the end of their term was a possibility. I feel badly for those getting sent back, but that was the original deal, and if, by the end of their term, they didn't get resident status, well, those are the rules they signed up for.
Please note that every H1B employee I've ever met has been in the process of getting their green card through their employer. If that employer dragged their feet through the process (which, for the record, it's in their interest to do), then they should have seen it coming.
This tugging at heartstrings for "six years of their lives" is badly misplaced. Blame the employers who weren't straight with the workers.
My wife and I had a similar problem in that it seemed too expensive to bother with our postgraduate degrees, the payments on a loan ($80K in our case for both of us) work out to roughly a car payment, which we should be able to handle easily with the increase of income from our new gigs. Then, we're earning that much even after we pay off the loan. For us (we're both geeks), we're looking down the barrel at a 50% pay increase next year, assuming statistics for our school hold.
You'll have to wait a year or so to see how it turns out (we get out this spring), but over time, the payments will go away. The jump in salary won't.
Just something to consider.
drat. Her salary function should ACTUALLY read:
salary + benefits + pot. US citizenship + (percieved effort in getting to where she is in the process)
The company, then, has every incentive to move the process quickly at first, get to an advanced stage, then start dragging their feet.
Think, THEN post.
Sorry, I was just drawing upon experiences watching a foreign couple go through this. There existed an exit barrier for her, since the company was doing the immigration mambo for her immediate family. They were Chinese (and this was several years ago), so leaving the job (and returning to China, if I understand correctly) would have been problematic. She implied that moving companies meant rebooting the immigration process, at which they'd been working for a while.
I suggest that part of her compensation was the possibility of US citizenship, which creates noise in the job market for the domestic workforce. Let's assume she and I have identical skillsets, experience, etc. If her compensation function was:
money + benefits + US citizenship
while mine was:
money + benefits + having a life
The hiring company is at a great advantage, since moving towards US citizenship is significantly valuable to her. The company can outsource the immigration stuff to lawyers (who, BTW, aren't likely to get pushed to finish) at lowest cost possible. If they have a number of such workers, economies of scale (re: the lawyers) kicks in, and the company reaps even more benefit.
Meanwhile, she percieves that she's making $X, and will work that hard, when financially, she's getting $X - value of potential US Citizenship. To work that amount, I would have to make $X, which puts me at a disadvantage.
The company is thrilled, so long as her value of potential US citizenship is less than marginal lawyer's fees. Note that an incentive exists to actually MINIMZE the legal talent and effort put forth, both financially, and from an HR standpoint.
I think that covers it. No trickery, no ethical wrangling, but a significant advantage for the company. Of course, not everyone's from mainland China...
If it works for you, godspeed.
I don't understand the indian thing either.
As a manager, if you can find someone to do the job at 10% less than whatever rate gets stated, that's competitive advantage over all your competitors working in the same industry.
If you also get veto power over their presence in the US, I suspect that gets you tremendous leverage over salary negotiations in the future. This keeps costs down, and raises the possibility that you can get more work out of them.
I suspect noone would assume a given level of competence for H1Bs (as an aggregate), but would suggest that the company's interest isn't necessarily for labor, but more inexpensive laborers that they can more easily control.
As the level of expertise is likely similar, it creates problems for experienced people who have become interested in quality of life issues (having a life outside the office). Period.
It's not a racial/immigration issue, it's an issue affecting the marketplace for labor.
Business risk is, in this case, slightly misstated. A smart company will already have figured out that the blade market will be suspect to copycats, etc., and will have built the cost of the lawsuits into the revenue they expect to get from the blades in the short term. The question shouldn't be if the copycats come in, but when.
As such, what are the razor blade manufacturers, faced with a copycat blade maker, supposed to do? You'd rather they sit back, and relax while their primary revenue stream is taken away? Despite the fact they probably have funds stashed away j.i.c. some copycat shows up?
The company has to protect its property (in this analogy, the patent on the blades), or the investors in the project are getting screwed over. I don't know of any way to fix this, but it's a critical notion in the transition to the new economy. The old money isn't just going to go away.
Heard today that BlueTooth chips will be $5 in volume by next year sometime. I suspect that a big problem w/Jini was that you needed to be on a network to use it, and most refrigerators, AFAIK, don't have rj-45 jacks.
Wireless AND ubiquitous access to the net, THEN they'll have something functional. What they'll do with it after that, I frankly have no idea. A "contents of my fridge" web page would be nice, but why? Now, remote control of my stereo from anywhere in the house....
wouldn't a Beowolf cluster of these be cool?
AFAIK, there's no patch for the 8MB problem. If you look at the web site closely, I think the patch is for the 8MB MODULE, not the Visor deluxe.
I had one of the defective ones, which kind of sucked. My visor crashed twice in about three days, after working just fine for about three or four months. The first help desk tech I called blamed the installed software, which both pissed me off, and made me call back when it crashed again.
The second time they were very nice about it, and shipped a (non-problematic) replacement tout de suite. I suspect that this might be a mandate from on high, since it doesn't make much sense to keep the defective ones out there.
Other than that, it's been great. I added on one of the Targus keyboards to take notes in class, and it's terrific. Most of the functionality of a laptop in 1/8 the weight and space.
> If you buy a music CD at a used CD store, the
> artist (and the RIAA) get absolutely nothing
> for your purchase.
Hey, thanks for reminding me! My RIAA boycott is in its third year and still going strong!
Woo-hoo!
Plug for a good used CD URL: Spun
At issue isn't whether, or how such things should be transferred digitally/electronically, as that appears inevitable.
What IS at issue is exactly how the artists will be recompensed for their time and effort. Well produced albums take time and money to produce. Freeloading (those that don't buy the CD) mp3 addicts use the product without paying anything back to the artist.
While Lars isn't the best spoken guy on the planet, and I'm not a fan of most of what he's saying, I think THAT's the issue here, and it's not one that anyone has an answer for yet, TTBOMK.
I've noticed, since I started hitting /. about a year ago, a recent tendency toward effluvia, not so much in the trolls/Nat Portman stuff, but in the stories that are getting over the wire. Movie reviews? An apparent obsession with the Star Wars, Episode I DVD? Why?
/. seems to be creeping downward somewhat of late. I'd be interested in Mr. Katz's opinion, both of whether I'm right, and what effects the curse of popularity may have on /..
Similarly, the opportunity to ask questions of Mr. Katz could be interpreted as relatively shameless plugging of a new novel, which I didn't think this site was about. If I wanted commercially tainted reporting, I could just hit Ziff-Davis' site.
While the trolls can't be kept at bay without ending anonymous posting, the signal to noise ratio for which I value
Thanks.
IMHO, the point appears to be that one could easily surrender the confusion of a PC if all one does is gaming, quicken/checkbook, WWW, email, and minor word processing. I would claim (without reference to anything) the the 80/20 rule would easily apply here, and a system like a PS2 would be of incredible use to home users. Besides, plug it into your suburban family cable modem, and you've got instant multiplayer possibilities without having to worry about modem hookups.
Yes, there are security issues, yes, there are privacy issues, yes, there are issues of usability and access, but if grandma wants a web connection, this might be a good way to go.
I wasn't a big fan of it. It had a pretty steep usage (as opposed to learning) curve, and it really bit when playing Diablo. I started getting carpal tunnel, switched from it, and my wrist has been OK since.