Silicon Valley Presses Obama, Congress On Immigration Reform 221
walterbyrd sends this excerpt from the LA Times:
"In a rare show of unity, Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer were among a coalition of high-profile executives and venture capitalists to send a letter on Thursday to President Obama and congressional leaders pressing for a fix to restrictive immigration laws by year's end. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, investors and executives are also planning a virtual "march" on Washington in April. 'Because our current immigration system is outdated and inefficient, many high-skilled immigrants who want to stay in America are forced to leave because they are unable to obtain permanent visas,' the letter says. 'Some do not bother to come in the first place.'"
The letter also offers these suggestions: "We believe that numerical levels and categories for high-skilled nonimmigrant and immigrant visas should be responsive to market needs and, where appropriate, include mechanisms to fluctuate based on objective standards. In addition, spouses and children should not be counted against the cap of high-skilled immigrant visas. There should not be a marriage or family penalty."
The real problem is .... (Score:2, Insightful)
IT workers not realizing they control the means of production
Re:NO!The real problem is *inaccurate information* (Score:2, Interesting)
Coming from the greedballs like Melissa Mayer, Bill Gates, John Chambers and the rest of that crowd who PROFIT by encouraging this race to the bottom. It's disgusting, and a blatant betrayal of the American worker.
Here are some references that *accurately* put the lie to the claims made by these lying SOBs. Does that sound harsh? It's meant to. These so-called "American leaders" are betraying the very workers who helped them make their unreal wealth. They need to be called out.
http://www.epi.org/publication
ageism (Score:3, Interesting)
If they didn't refuse to hire anyone over 40, they wouldn't have a problem...
Re:ageism (Score:4, Funny)
If people over 40 could put in the 60+ hour weeks needed to for US firms to stay competitive in the global market, instead of whining about needing to spend time with their families, then maybe they'd wouldn't lose out to younger people in hiring.
Re:ageism (Score:5, Insightful)
If people over 40 could put in the 60+ hour weeks needed to for US firms to stay competitive in the global market
If US companies *need* to force techies to put in the 60+ hour weeks to stay competitive, perhaps they're doing something wrong.
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Exactly... if you have 2 people working 60+ hour weeks then you really need to hire another person. Except that business doesnt want to hire more people because they're cheap bastards.
Despite all things pointing to the fact that overtime hours (more than 40 in a week or more than 8 in a day) contribute to reduced productivity. So those hours that people are getting paid 1.5x their pay are actually the hours they're usually least productive... If only the bean counters would realize that.
Also if they did th
Re:ageism (Score:5, Funny)
Fortunately IT people are legally excluded from overtime laws, so those extra 20 hours actually come for free. We can milk them for all they're worth, and since everyone is doing it we also maintain a job shortage so they're afraid to leave. I don't understand why the IT people don't appreciate our brilliant strategy, there's no down side!
Re:ageism (Score:5, Informative)
Except study after study has shown that a 60 work week produces about as much as a 40 hour work week. Productivity goes through the floor the longer the hours get. So there's nothing to gain. (With the exception of one-time, short-term periods of longer hours, but it's not sustainable after a week or two).
Not true (Score:2, Insightful)
I tell ya, what we IT people need is a Super Pac. If everyone that touched a computer got together and pitched in $5 bucks a month in we'd at least be able to buy some House reps, maybe even a senator. If that's how the game works, I say we start
Won't work (Score:5, Interesting)
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It's called a union.
Union you have to join. Super PAC is voluntary.
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I seem to recall actually that the studies that said 40 hours were the magic number were actually for manual labor, and after that point you did start get errors...and injuries. Studies on desk work were around 30 or 35 hours of productivity. You could have it all in 35 hours, or you could get 35 hours spread over 60, but it all works out the same in the end.
So this culture of putting in more and more hours to prove that you're really dedicated or have a better work ethic than everyone else is ridiculously
Re:Not true (Score:4)
It's not quite that simple, but it is roughly approximated by a parabola. After about 30 hours, you get rapidly diminishing returns from the extra hours. So the next 10 hours (to 40) get you about 5 hours of actual work (35 total), and the next 20 hours (to 60) get you about 5 hours of work (40 total). And when you cross the threshold where your work hours begin to reduce your sleep below 8 hours per night, employees' cognitive abilities and immune function decline markedly, resulting in more sick days and less productivity than at a lower number of hours.
For very short periods—two weeks or less—you can get away with 80 hour work weeks if and only if the employee is really excited to be working on a particular project. But after about two or three weeks, biology gets in the way, and the employees crash and burn. And that can never work if it is driven by management. When an employee decides to spend extra time because they feel that it is for the good of everyone, you get that productivity boost. When management asks an employee to spend extra time, you don't get any significant productivity boost. Fun with psychology.
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Except study after study has shown that a 60 work week produces about as much as a 40 hour work week.
Can you provide some citations for your "study after study"? A Google search returns lots of people repeating this "factoid", but none pointing to any actual research.
I have seen research that shows productivity per hour will drop with long hours, but that is different from an absolute decline, and even that was for hours far in excess of 60 hours per week.
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Something from Ford way back when that established the 8hr day/40hr week.
When Ford adopted the 8hr workday, they went from two 9 hour shifts to three 8 hour shifts, thus keeping the assembly lines running for an extra six hours per day. So this increased the productivity of the company by utilizing their capital more effectively, but that is different from an increase in labor productivity.
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And yet, most other nation's workers do NOT put in 60 hours.
Very few other nations [wikipedia.org] come close to our standard of living either. In particular, no other nation even comes close to the success of America's software industry.
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GDP is a very misleading metric, because it is the average of produced wealth across the entire population. If you want to see how the nation's workers fare, look at median income, and adjust for purchasing power, taxes, and services that those taxes buy.
And if you do all that, US is actually not all that good in terms of standard of living compared to other developed countries.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18144319 [bbc.co.uk]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Differences_among_countries_and_regions [wikipedia.org]
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Apparently the ability to detect sarcasm declines with age...
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As does abiliy to spell things correctly or write coherently.
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Amen, mod this guy up!
Re:ageism (Score:4, Interesting)
If they didn't refuse to hire anyone over 40, they wouldn't have a problem...
The problem with "over 40" techies, is that they mostly fall into two groups. The first group have learned with experience, have continued to educate themselves, are good at passing on their knowledge through advice and mentoring, and are invaluable members of any team. The second group are grumpy curmudgeons with stale skills, but still think they should be paid extra for "seniority". The problem is that the first group rarely needs to find a new job, and when they do, they can tap into a deep network of contacts. So almost any "over 40" techie that responds to an web-ad for a job is going to belong to the second group.
Re:ageism (Score:4, Insightful)
If they didn't refuse to hire anyone over 40, they wouldn't have a problem...
Why should they hire anyone above 40? How many 40 plus athletes are there? How many hostesses or security guards/soldiers you know above 40? IT is just another industry and there is no reason why companies should not prefer younger cheaper employees. Perhaps you should look at jobs where experience _really_ matters, e.g., Medicine, Aviation, Academics etc.
Considering the crap quality of so much of today's software, maybe a little experience would be a good idea.
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But the IT industry doesn't generally write that software. The question was about IT, not engineering.
IT is, quite frankly, a trade job. The required skills change constantly, and fresh grads from some place like DeVry are more likely to be up-to-date in their IT knowledge than people who have been doing it for decades. What this means is that for IT purposes, you arguably become less valuable as y
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Considering the crap quality of so much of today's software, maybe a little experience would be a good idea.
You'd think so... But my guess is that the IT industry is changing so fast anything more than 2-4 years of experience is overkill...
(Surely this depends on what kind of software you develop).
I'd imagine that domain specific experience is more important than general purposes development experience.
Experience with software for payroll systems is fairly worthless if you'd hired to program industrial robots.
Re:ageism (Score:5, Insightful)
Why should they hire anyone above 40? How many 40 plus athletes are there?
Why should people over 60 teach at universities? Hire people under 30 for professor positions! Oh, wait, it's a different field, this is about brains, whereas programmers are about muscles and beauty, that's why you mentioned athletes and hostesses, right? I mean, if your argument were stupid, I'm sure you wouldn't be mentioning it...or not?
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You are just trying to push the bogus idea that cheaper is better. Age is an entirely separate issue apart from whether or not the relevant talent is "cheap". Even in the industries where "young" actually matters, there are still requirements for people to actually be competent.
Experience even matters in the Army. That's why they train everyone. They don't just take a warm young body off of the street and throw it into a warzone.
They don't because that would get experienced officers and NCOs kill.
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If they didn't refuse to hire anyone over 40, they wouldn't have a problem...
Why should they hire anyone above 40? How many 40 plus athletes are there? How many hostesses or security guards/soldiers you know above 40? IT is just another industry and there is no reason why companies should not prefer younger cheaper employees. Perhaps you should look at jobs where experience _really_ matters, e.g., Medicine, Aviation, Academics etc.
How many writers are over 40? How many movie directors? Oh wait.... maybe somethings get better with age? Maybe when it comes to a industry that needs creativity and experience instead of beauty and muscles a little age is a good thing
At the same time (Score:4, Insightful)
...the US has a problem with high levels of employment.
Why can't these firms set up educational establishments to train US citizens to the skill levels they need? Or have apprenticeships? Or....
Actually I think it seems a cynical way to keep labour costs down, so perhaps companies ought to be allowed to hire from overseas providing they demonstrate they're paying that worker 25% more than a US citizen would earn in the same role.
I'm not a US citizen, but I think this, like offshoring is a way of trying to force labour costs down. Paradoxically I think you want labour costs up, as increasing the affluence of the lower/middle classes creates a larger market for your goods.
Because that's not how capitalism works (Score:2)
Australia OTOH, a largely socialist country, just voted a guy in on a platform of job protection.
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Have they been mixed together? Yes. But it is easy to demonstrate that the mix is largely unhealthy (and a sharp deviation from true capitalism).
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"Experience" - perhaps meaning exposure to training, practical applications, the opportunity to work with projects in industry?
i.e. the types of things training and apprenticeships are setup - specifically - to provide to develop the skills of talented people.
Re:At the same time (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course you need to search all over the world if you only want highly skilled people.
What bollocks.
I know highly skilled and qualified people (in the UK this is) who are cleaning offices for a living, while the politicians and businessmen are believing that such people can only be found abroad. In fact some of those office cleaners DID come from abroad under the delusion that they could get good jobs here and they are STILL overlooked by employers.
When did the bosses acquire this obsessive delusion that someone coming from abroad must be a superior worker to a home-grown one? Not in my experience anyway. How ironic it is that our UK universities are half-filled with overseas students - because UK teaching is held in high regard world-wide - and yet the bosses believe that people educated abroad must be better.
It is racial discrimination, although of the opposite sense to what is always assumed, but they get away with it.
It's not complicated (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not complicated. The workers are here on visas. They can be sent back on a whim. This gives the employer enormous leverage to make the H1B employee work harder. Also it lets them bring in a lot of extra workers, increasing supply and lowering demand. That drives down wages by $10k - $20k (USD, convert to your own currency)
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Scotland has a "Fresh Talent" initiative. In fact, they've had this since the mid 1990's, when senior staff from Scottish engineering companies were emigrating to work in Silicon Valley for better pay and neighborhoods. The MP's and executive got so fed up that people weren't willing to live in the regenerated neighborhoods chosen for them, that they decided that they would just import knowledge workers instead of allowing native workers to gain knowledge and go abroad for better living conditions (basicall
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Yes, there is racism in UK, way way worse than in USA. I am black, with a PhD, worked for some of the largest tech companies
You seem to have overlooked my point "It is racial discrimination, although of the opposite sense to what is always assumed". The large tech companies I have worked for seem to bust their guts trying to recruit and promote suitably qualified non-whites and women. They are terrified of being accused of discriminating against them. Maybe the other way round in small companies.
could not find another job in UK. Was even willing to take a pay cut - not even serious interviews came my way.
That seems to be most people's experience these days, at least in the technical and manufacturing industries. What vacancies exist
You haven't worked (Score:3)
Re:At the same time (Score:5, Informative)
"Of course you need to search all over the world if you only want highly skilled people."
According to a recent study mentioned in Mother Jones [motherjones.com] and elsewhere [sandiegoreader.com], H-1B workers are not even close to the "best and brightest" as these companies claim. In fact they probably don't hold up to American workers. All they are is cheap.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Why do employers insist on having a perfect fit? And do they really think that if they can't get an American that there is some Third Workd person who will know their breakthrough - bleeding edge technology? really?
If you have trouble finding people, you really need to look at your hiring methods and get a reality check.
You hit the nail on the head at the top of your post. They're simply not that desperate. What they want are all those skills for as close to nothing as they can get it. If they actually needed to hire people, then they'd just go ahead and do it and salaries would be going through the roof since it's hardly a cash-poor sector.
Industries which desperately need people - say, oil geology - have had their salaries explode (though similarly it's precisely because they haven't been training anyone, just poaching o
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Have you tried hiring specialists in the Valley? I do not care if I could train you to do something next year when I need someone now. I'm sure H1Bs and similar are misused, but It's no joke that tech companies have a problem finding people regardless of salary.
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Importing the same mediocre talent from India is not going to solve the problem. If the supply of talent in the US is crap, then you need to encourage the development of talent and stop broadcasting to the world that you want to treat us all like sh*t.
Re:At the same time (Score:5, Informative)
Sounds like tech companies should spread themselves out a little. If Silicon Valley needs piles of specialists, it needs people who are willing to move from anywhere - same country or different, visa or not.
Hiring specialists in the non-Valley would be a lot cheaper, you would find talent easier, and everyone would be happy. Let me summarize the business plan of a Silicon Valley company:
1) Mine the area talent as thoroughly as possible
2) Keep mining the same source
3) Repeat until Congress lets you hire barely qualified people from another country.
I can see a giant shift coming where the Valley is where the HQ sits, but you have projects centered in other large cities, which are largely autonomous. It doesn't work for smaller companies, but if the larger ones realized they are resource-starving their own ecosystem, it would come close to balancing out. Someday they will have to.
I have no family, and no reason not to fly out to the Valley and work for piles of money. I just do not want to be part of that culture 24 hours a day, at work and away. I would be fine with telecommuting, but as Yahoo found out it is easy to abuse that if not kept in check. And a just-barely-big-enough company doesn't want to split itself.
So it's not about talent - it's about willingness to relocate. And by concentrating in the same place, the industry giants are starving themselves while claiming location is a vital benefit they don't want to lose.
Make up your mind what's important - people or location - and stick with it. Tough choice, but at least let's frame this as a resource issue caused by choice of location. Then we can talk honestly about it and find a solution.
"Not enough talent" is an outright lie - one of omission. "Not enough talent willing to relocate" is the problem, and H1-B is seen as the solution. How long do you expect to be able to import resources before you give up and re-locate?
Re:At the same time (Score:5, Insightful)
... It's no joke that tech companies have a problem finding people regardless of salary.
What a load of crap. I don't believe you. If you offer enough, people will jump ship to get it. You're obviously cheaping out, so of course you can't draw them out. Try shaving a hundred Gs off your CEO's multi-million dollar salary and spread that around among your line troop positions. That'll fix your HR problem overnight.
It astonishes me that greedy, thick headed morons like you are what we have to work for.
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No, it really won't. Well, it will, but it will increase someone else's HR problem. If the industry as a whole did this, nothing would change at all in the short term except that we'd have more money. And in the long term, because we would retire earlier, in a couple of decades, they would have an even bigger HR problem.
The core of the HR proble
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You know, you really don't have to restrict your dating pool to coworkers. In fact, it's usually the last place you should look.
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Nor have I ever met anyone who chose their career on the basis of increasing their romance chances. Oddly enough, men who do work with women (hairdressers, theatre people) are notorious for being gay - probably because they are more relaxed with women.
T
Two issues with taking educated immigrants ... (Score:2)
The brain drain is hurting the nation that the educated immigrant left behind (e.g. that immigrant is not filling positions nor creating opportunities in their homeland).
The immigrant is taking opportunities from educated Americans and likely reducing the potential wages of that educated American.
Why get an engineering degree just to train ur H1B (Score:3)
replacement?
This is also pushing Americans away from the tech field. Which will, eventually, cost the US it's technological edge.
If you want Americans to be attracted to engineering jobs, provide jobs for them.
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The brain drain is hurting the nation that the educated immigrant left behind
Wrong. The immigrants are leaving their countries of origin because the opportunities don't exist there. Undeveloped and/or socialist economies do an extremely poor job of utilizing the skills of their citizens. These countries benefit more by exporting skilled labor, and receiving remittances, and eventually (once they reform their economies) benefiting from the connections their emigres provide.
The immigrant is taking opportunities from educated Americans and likely reducing the potential wages of that educated American.
Wrong again. This is just a version of the Lump of Labor Fallacy [wikipedia.org]. Real economies don't have a fixed number
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The immigrant is taking opportunities from educated Americans
Nonsense. This is like those idiots who say things like, "You stole my job!" No, he/she didn't; you didn't have the job to begin with, or someone in charge willingly decided to give your job to someone else. Whatever the case, you're not entitled to a job.
These people also aren't entitled to come to my country.
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Your fight against globalization has pretty much the same chance of success like staying in front of Hurricane Sandy and yelling "thou shalt NOT pass!!!".
TL;DR: you can't win this fight. Period.
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Decades-long exclusive contracts (Score:2)
If globalisation is so great then why can't we have region free digital goods
Decades-long exclusive territorial distribution contracts agreed to before home broadband became affordable make that difficult. So do exchange rate discrepancies caused by historic lack of an export sector in a country's economy [wikipedia.org]. So does a dearth of local advertisers in some regions.
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The MPAA etc can't win that fight either. Torrents cost the same everywhere, and so eventually legitimate digital goods will too. But these are slow changes - they don't happen at internet speed.
Meanwhile, globalization has really driven down the cost of manufactured goods - that's been extensively studied. The net US wages lost to foreign manufacturing is far less than the net US savings from cheap imports (which makes intuitive sense: the total output of a factory is of course a multiple of the wages p
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It's always better for people to have more options for employment too. No one is going to go overseas for a factory job anyway but why should th
Re:Two issues with taking educated immigrants ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Trying to fight globalization on the whole is ineffective, but fighting the demand for more H1B visas with factual data isn't. Recent studies show that companies have been lying about their inability to find domestic talent AND about how much they pay their H1B visa employees. The long and short of it is, the experts exist within the US but the companies want to save money on H1B visas, so they lie to congress, all the while, claiming we need more tech-savvy Americans. When we produce the appropriately educated Americans, the companies won't hire them because they are too expensive compared to their H1B shortcut. All this fight is doing is creating over-educated Americans who will have lots of education debt and no jobs.
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The problem is H1B scamming, not immigration. Give everyone on an H1B a greencard, and the problems go away. No "talent shortage", real of fictional, and no gimmick that lets companies cheap and (illegally) underpay immigrants.
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The problem with what you're saying is tat you're trying to fix a kludge with another kludge. If a company lied while employing H1Bs, smack their asses with huge fines and they'll not do it again. Instead, they'd outsource that entire organization, branch or LoB and you'll STILL not get a job.
About this education debt thing... I think US education (college and above) is way overrated, at least concerning IT. You can learn most IT related at home or by taking some specific classes, which would cost you less
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Just because someone points out the issues with globalization doesn't mean that they are fighting against globalization.
The way things stand today, globalization is for the multinational corporations who desire international trade to push down the costs of production while increasing the cost of goods. Very little regard is given to the individual who is ultimately affected by these laws.
Now if globalization was negotiated in terms of those people, raising the standards of living for the disadvantaged, the
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Your fight against globalization has pretty much the same chance of success like staying in front of Hurricane Sandy and yelling "thou shalt NOT pass!!!".
No, I believe it is a passing phase. At the moment we have a barmy situation whereby I see in my South Wales supermarket bottles of water brought from the Alps, beer brought from India and the Far East (insipid stuff anyway), and vegtables from South America - none of which could not be and are not produced here. With rising fuel prices, follies like driving a lorry-load of water across Europe will become more rare, as will airliner tourism.
As natural resources run out, overtaken by spiralling popula
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These people also aren't entitled to come to my country.
Moreover, the people who want to hire them aren't entitled to breaks on immigration quotas so they can make a few more bucks.
If you don't believe in open borders, there will be immigration limits. Why should a company get subsidized with a free pass to bypass those limits?
How about we set the quota for spaces, and take bids from *anyone* who wants the slot?
Re:Two issues with taking educated immigrants ... (Score:5, Interesting)
My understanding is that supposedly they do that. They advertise somewhere, rule out the locals, then hire the H1B.
Trouble is, there's no objective demonstration that the H1B can do anything local hires can't. Elsewhere, I suggest objective *tests*. At least give locals a real chance to compete, instead of having their applications thrown out in a bogus "we're pretending we're looking for local hires" kabuki dance.
But even if a company demonstrates that a H1B is more qualified, why should that put the company's needs for a worker ahead of the needs of everyone else who would like to use that immigration slot? Just more crony capitalism.
The immigration slot is a valuable asset. Any slots set aside for economic reasons should go to the highest bidder.
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It's the job of the immigrant's government to make their economy competitive and make it interesting for him to stay in his country. It shouldn't be very difficult, the person probably has personal and family ties there already.
Sounds like cloud cuckoo land. In the UK, many of the immigrants we get are positively escaping or avoiding their families, or getting away from a trail of petty crookery (or worse) and starting fresh (ie fresh crookery). The East Europeans in particular have set up an extensive new gangster culture here. Metal theft is a speciality among them - they send it back to agents back home on containers. No doubt their bringing UK railway lines to a halt because of stolen copper signal cables is not something
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ROTFL. If you had the choice between an Asian hooker, an Eastern European hooker, and an English hooker, you'd seriously pick the English one?
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But hey, who wants to study economics anyway? I am sure they are all full of shit, like the geologists or the biologists.
The problem is that many parts of economy is more like meteorology combined with (group) psychology, since there's so many butterfly wings flapping and crazy hordes of investors, customers and suppliers trying to outsmart each other and because almost everything in economics happens by a decision, either it's to buy, sell, produce, decommission, hire, lay off, in-house, outsource, integrate, specialize and choices of technology, markets, distribution channels, promotion and so on. It is very much unlike geo
So the management over the development teams... (Score:2)
...hasn't learned the lessons that manufacturers and call center managers have learned?
That seems odd.
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...hasn't learned the lessons that manufacturers and call center managers have learned?
They've forgotten more than we mere "help" have learned. Such as supply & demand, "You get what you pay for", & etc. They'll proudly throw $117 million at their CEOs, yet it would usher in the Apocalypse if they were to toss a few thou to those doing actual work. My last client couldn't ship my position off to Brazil fast enough, yet I was brought in to fix something their existing staff were afraid to touch for fear of breaking it. There's some serious reality distortion affecting management t
Looks like the smart ones stay away.... (Score:2)
The current state is a really bad deal. The smart ones realize this and stay away (well, that and the US looking more and more like a fundamentalist state...). Hence the quality of foreign workers drops and they cannot be used to depress the wages of the US workers so easily anymore, which of course is bad for corporate US, but good for US citizens looking for a job.
Just look at who complains and the story becomes pretty clear.
Wrong! It is bad for the economy as a whole (Score:3, Informative)
Look. I work in a major US tech company and am involved with hiring from a technical level, and I can tell you first hand that the quantity of quality people in North America IS lacking. Out of all of the employees you hire, maybe 1 of the 10 is the rockstar you need for your project... the rest are OK, sure, but when you are working under tight timelines and need creative solutions on a global stage, you don't need a bunch of churned-out code monkeys, you NEED those rock stars.
This is NOT about cheap labor
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You're managing to hire 10% "
No (Score:2)
How about hiring some americans at competitive wages, instead of indentured servants?
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globalisation is only about screwing people over (Score:2)
But we still get web sites, films, games, etc divided up into regions. Why can't I take advantage of globalisation and buy games from anywhere? Why is it harder for an American to go to Hong Kong and take a job where he may be needed m
objective standards (Score:2)
" include mechanisms to fluctuate based on objective standards."
How about objective *tests* for these positions that supposedly there are no competent citizens available to perform?
If no citizens can pass the test, and H1B candidates can, fine, let the H1B candidate win.
The bogus thing is, the H1Bs hired by pimp contract agencies aren't the best available, they're just the whores that the pimp with the employment contract happens to own, and indentured servants who you can kick out of the country if they di
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Facebook certainly uses objective tests for hiring developers. Most big-name software houses do, but Facebook was the most objective of anyplace I've ever interviewed. Their screening process is entirely "write working code on a timer that produces exactly the specified output", and they set the bar quite high.
Personally, I think they're far too focused on people who memorize language trivia and can write perfect code without an IDE, but for damn sure they're using objective tests.
While most of the big so
Investors and executives planning a virtual march (Score:2)
Of course it will be a virtual march for them:
Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, investors and executives are also planning a virtual "march" on Washington in April.
They will be underpaying highly skilled immigrants to march for them.
I've seen the 'less restrictive laws' at work. (Score:5, Interesting)
'Less restrictive' is code for 'lower paid'. There are plenty of out-of-work US citizens that could have done these jobs, but if they hire H1B, they can pay less and keep them longer because of the sponsorship requirement. I was able to review resumes for one position, and there were definitely capable US citizens to do these.
I'm not against hiring talented, smart, folks. I'm not even against companies paying less and driving down wages if it makes products cheaper.
I am against lying about why they are doing it. Just be honest, and admit Mr. Zuckerberg that you just want to hire people you can pay less money.
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In the last three months, our company has hired THREE H1B employees, one being a programmer. They had to post the jobs, so I got to see the salary ranges.
Can we assume you've reported your company's illegal behavior to the INS?
That's so cute (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Thats cute, you think a national budget of $3.8 Trillion isn't enough to fund something like that. How much does the federal government need before it will fund that? $5Trillion, $10 Trillion?
4 years ago we spent $850 Billion on "infrastructure" and "shovel ready jobs" because the infrastructure needed $1.2 Trillion in fixing up at the time. Today we need $2 Trillion. How much of that $850 Billion went to where it was promised to go? None.
Why do you think giving them MORE money will fund something that
Re: (Score:2)
> I am against lying about why they are doing it. Just be honest, and admit Mr. Zuckerberg that you just want to hire people you can pay less money.
Why would an entity(corporation) 'admit' something like that ? What you expect them to say ? Something like this:
- We won't hire expensive local people. We want easier access to poor submissive {indians, pakistanis, etc.} so we can make them work harder and give them less money for it, which in turn maximizes our profit. ... be real.
Why people by default thin
There needs to be a counter march (Score:3)
What they are doing is importing cheap skilled labor willing to work for below market rates. They are trying to cheat the free market of supply and demand within the United States. The is no shortage of people able to do the job. There is a shortage of people willing to work at half the market rate in a slave type manner.
I will agree that the laws are outdated. Congress shouldn't be limiting by artificial numbers but rather by the going market rate of employees. Lets start at 25% over the market rate and have it exponentially increase from there.
We should start a web sites for tech workers looking for work and their qualifications and then the companies have to prove why there are not hiring these Americans. They should be forced to show why they let go of past employees and how they could not perform the task that some imported worker could.
I would in fact favor laws that forced companies to hire and spend money proportionately from all the countries in which they derive their income. If Facebook makes 90 million a year from France then it should be obligated to spend at least half of that in that country and have a proportionate number of workers (total salary) not only from that country but actually in that country.
reform higher EDU / more trades / apprenticeships? (Score:2)
reform higher EDU / more trades based schools / apprenticeships?
Right now we have lots college who are turning out people who have skills gaps do the over load of theory that can be over kill for most jobs.
The Trades / techs schools get passed over even when at some of them you can learn more in 2 years then you do at a 4 year school.
Also in tech there are lot's things where you need to work hands on to learn and that is where a Apprenticeship system can work good.
Some of the H1B's only have paper skills /
Letter Signers Secretly Blocked Labor Mobility (Score:5, Insightful)
Whichever side of the issue you stand on, it's worth noting that arguably the most prominent signatories to this letter and/or the companies they represent - Intel and Google - came under fire for allegedly secretly conspiring together to block worker mobility ("The no-hire paper trail Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt didn't want you to see [theverge.com]"), so a cynic might suggest perhaps they're not quite as concerned with labor's free-and-natural-flow when it doesn't suit their needs. Also, Ireland seems to be finding that importing tech labor isn't quite the rising-tide-that-lifts-all-boats that it was cracked up to be ("Ireland too scared to tax big tech, Let the poor eat potatos") [techeye.net], "Google paid only £5.6m tax despite £10bn turnover"). [independent.ie]
Welcome to the unfettered capitalism you voted for (Score:3, Insightful)
So now you've got a choice. Ship cheaper workers in (the lesser evil), or ship jobs overseas, and never punish corporations for doing so. Happy unregulated market. Is there nothing you can't do? Of course, you voted for it in your 20s, when you weren't going to be the person with obsolete skills that got laid off, before you had a spouse and kids. Before you got sick and got the hospital bill that bankrupted you. Before you were conned into buying an overpriced house because you actually were stupid enough to believe the value would keep going up, forever. Before you decided that the benevolent Wall Street geniuses would make stock markets go up forever, and never down. Before you were bought the oil company line that gasoline would always be cheap and plentiful. Before you realized that companies wrote contracts that allowed them to change the terms of your retirement health care at will. Before if finally soaked in that laws are purchased for corporations, not voted in for the benefit of the citizenry. Before it dawned on you, finally, that you might not be the big winner in the casino of capitalism.
You, who voted for Reagan. For Bush, and Bush again. You voted for it. You got it.
So, enjoy the increasingly unregulated, conservative, free market capitalism you ranted about in your 20s as it comes back to bite you ever so slowly and painfully in the ass.
I will now sit back and wait for the legions of morons who will tell me this is all the fault of over-regulation, liberals, muslims, taxes and evil spirits. We've all heard it all before. Have at it.
Re: (Score:2)
As I said before: those foreigners coming to the USA are more than happy to work for half your wage, which is 5 times their usual national wage.
Furthermore, when you see "they're not allowed to switch jobs", they see "we have job security".
Re:I call bullshit... (Score:5, Informative)
"We believe that numerical levels and categories for high-skilled nonimmigrant and immigrant visas should be responsive to market needs and, where appropriate, include mechanisms to fluctuate based on objective standards. In addition, spouses and children should not be counted against the cap of high-skilled immigrant visas. There should not be a marriage or family penalty."
We should improve the education system and encourage our fine American youth to make use of it rather than importing immigrants from abroad. Why is the knee jerk reaction from these greedy corporate bastards always to import talent or export jobs rather than fix the what's wrong at home?
Because training workers from scratch to do the job costs MONEY. Rumor has it, way the hell back when, Steve Jobs hired people with zero coding experience who had the 'proper hacker mindset' and taught them inhouse, then worked them 80+ hours a week cranking out Apple II software. Reputedly, it took a couple years for Apple to recoup their investment on training them.
Quickest way to destroy a country? Keep the people ignorant and uneducated. Implement programs like 'No Child Left Behind' designed to reward the underachievers and make everybody 'feel better about themselves' rather than teach them the skills they need to survive in today's society. Defund education to the point where nobody learns anything anyway, and jack up the cost of college to the point where only the richest 5% can afford it, even though most colleges in the US these days tend to be run as 'profit centers' rather than as institutes of learning. Politicize the few remaining 'real' universities to the point where students either obey the Party Line or get kicked off campus and handed a bill for their 'education'. Rig the student loan system so that borrowing to finance an education incurs a lifelong debt to be paid,
Trade schools? Why bother with those when the people learning those trades will be replaced by robots in a few years anyway? I did a stint of a couple years learning 'high tech electronics that would employ me for a lifetime' back in the 70's. The 'career ' I trained for was obsolete in 10 years. NOBODY repairs tvs anymore, they toss them and buy a new one. You can't repair one anyway, you can't find the ICs on the open market for less than the cost of a new set.
Re: (Score:2)
Because training workers from scratch to do the job costs MONEY.
Nobody has to train the workers from scratch. The workers already have related skills, they don't even want to pay for training to update those skills. Of course, every year less workers have related skills, since progress marches on but their training doesn't.
On No Child (Score:5, Insightful)
There was just a really nice article on why the US Healthcare system is so bleeding expensive and the conclusion of an extensive multi-year study was: because it can be. My buddy drove a school bus until they privatized that and cut his wages. Did the district save money? Nope, not after 3 years. They're just so short on cash they wanted to sell their bus fleet so they could operate another year, and hope the voters would take a 1% tax raise to pay for schools (they didn't). Now the company that has the contract is jacking up prices because they know the district can't afford to buy back their fleet and make it public again.
But yeah, it's a nice side effect that it makes a weak, dumb populace.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
We should improve the education system and encourage our fine American youth to make use of it rather than importing immigrants from abroad. Why is the knee jerk reaction from these greedy corporate bastards always to import talent or export jobs rather than fix the what's wrong at home?
Because training workers from scratch to do the job costs MONEY.
Who said about "training from scratch"? Schools an universities should do much of the training. And if someone is going to be good at something it will have been a hobby too. I am a senior professional engineer and was model engineering from about the age of 8. My son was writing games programs from about that age too and is now an IT consultant.
Once intelligent people have the basics of a subject it does not take them long to adapt to a particular applications.
But bosses tend to look for exact ma
Re: (Score:3)
Actually, schools and universities should focus on what they were originally intended for: developing the underlying skills that allow intelligent people to learn new things and adapt that basic knowledge to different situations.
When I was a teenager with a couple of identified talents, I spent most of my free time honing them at home and believed that apprenticeship-style "education" would be far better for me; I only resentfully took unrelated classes intended to make me a "well-rounded" student because t
Re: (Score:2)
Quickest way to destroy a country?
I know... is it start 2 unfunded pointless wars and cut taxes, divert money into propping up the financial sector at the expense of everything else, block a recovering economy by debt ceiling bullshit coupled with a poorly implement budget cuts, while preserving tax breaks for the wealthiest corporations in the history of the world?
Defund education to the point where nobody learns anything anyway, and jack up the cost of college to the point where only the richest 5% can afford it, even though most colleges in the US these days tend to be run as 'profit centers' rather than as institutes of learning.
Ah yes, piling on massive education debt (let free market pricing tuition rise until blood is squeezed from aspiring students) which survives bankrupty. That'll help things along
her home (Score:2)
or from her home.
Re:Marissa Mayer (Score:4, Insightful)
I read somewhere that Mayer's salary package for Yahoo works out at $117 million over her five year contract. Now, if saving money is important, and companies aim to get skills from anywhere in the world, then why don't they get rid of Mayer and hire an Indian or Chinese CEO? Pay them, say, $5 mil a year. There would be hundreds of possible candidates willing to work like dogs for that sort of money.
But this never happens for the upper echelon of management. CEOs (wherever they're from) are paid the same ridiculous sums, even if they tank the company in the process (can Yahoo afford to dish out $117 million to one person? Don't think so).
So essentially the Zucks, Mayers and other bosses make sure their sky-high pay packets are protected. Yet if they really believed in the 'free market' they'd be happy to see their job go to someone paid less. Of course they'll tell us that their skills are irreplaceable and therefore they deserve that sort of money. Then in the next breath they'll say they can't get certain skilled engineers so therefore... they need to buy in cheap ones from abroad implying the skilled engineers are replaceable cogs in their cash-making behemoth.
Sure there's issues with education in most countries, but put yourself in the position of a teenager thinking of going into this sort of business. They know if they go to MIT or Stanford they'll be okay. However if they graduate from a normal college they'll either be working for peanuts, replaced by an immigrant or worked much harder than their peers in similar professional roles for less money. Meanwhile respect for their job will be pretty low, management will see them as mere 'code monkeys' & the popular culture is likely to portray them as comedy geeks. Being a 'rock star' in the computer world is about as easy and likely as being an actual rock star. Is it any wonder so many of the youngsters don't give a shit?
Re: (Score:3)
But hey, we've figured out where the shift key is.
XIII. "Neither slavery nor indentured servitude" (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Because the laws regarding H1-Bs are quite fair to all involved, and certainly constitutional. The real problems with underpaid H-Bs come from companies breaking existing law. It's already illegal to pay your H1-Bs less then locals (but many companies just cheat). It's already fairly straightforward for someone on an H1-B to changes jobs (but many companies just lie to young employees about this).
There's no constitutional problem here, because the existing laws, as written, are fine. It's the real-world
Re: (Score:2)
Really, can you provide some examples of how you "take more immigrants" and i don't mean "temporary" H1B's but real immigration with full citizenship.
For example, the US takes in [cia.gov] more immigrants per thousand people than the EU countries, except for Luxembourg, Spain, and Italy. During the 90's, the immigration rate was considerably higher and the US probably outmatched any other developed world country.
It looks to me like most of the slow down [wikipedia.org], while occurring in the restrictive 9/11 era, also was due to the economic and political weakness of the largest states, particular California, Illinois, and New York. For example, the fraction of California's p