Tech Looks To Obama To Save Them From 'Just Sort of OK' US Workers 441
theodp writes Following up on news that the White House met with big biz on immigration earlier this month, Bloomberg sat down with Joe Green, the head of Mark Zuckerberg's Fwd.US PAC, to discuss possible executive actions President Obama might take on high tech immigration (video) in September. "Hey, Joe," asked interviewer Alix Steel. "All we keep hearing about this earnings season though from big tech is how they're actually cutting jobs. If you look at Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, why do the tech companies then need more tech visas?" Green explained why tech may not want to settle for laid-off U.S. talent when the world is its oyster. "The difference between someone who's truly great and just sort of okay is really huge," Green said. "Culture in tech is a very meritocratic culture," he added. "The vast, vast majority of tech engineers that I talked to who are from the United States are very supportive of bringing in people from other countries because they want to work with the very best."
Read that statement as follows: (Score:5, Insightful)
They aren't interested in building up or maintaining US employees; they want to have foreign countries foot the bill for the training of their workers so they can sit around and reap the benefits of advanced training without laying out money to make it happen--and further, they want these employees dependent upon their employment with the company to remain in the country, rather than being able to move about at will.
Indentured workforce, in other words.
Re:Read that statement as follows: (Score:4, Insightful)
And the best thing about hiring a vIsa worker isn't even the low pay or the way it artificially drives down wages even for your American workers. It's the fact that you can threaten to have them deported if they complain or ask for a raise. They're the perfect indentured serv...oops...I mean "workers."
Re:Read that statement as follows: (Score:5, Informative)
Speaking as an H1B worker at one of the major tech companies, I can tell you right now that I'm anything but indentured. If you have {Apple | Facebook | Google | Microsoft} software engineer on your CV, you are not going to have trouble finding a job, willing to offer you another H1B, at the drop of a hat (in fact, you tend to receive dozens of emails from recruiters every single day). There's no issue at all with feeling like you're locked into one company, other than the normal golden handcuffs that large tech companies give you ofc.
Feeding the PR engine, (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't a tech report, it's political propaganda. There's plenty of awesome U.S. techs to do the jobs that are out of them, just as good as the imports, they just want U.S. wages.
Re:Feeding the PR engine, (Score:5, Insightful)
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Global market for talent (Score:3, Insightful)
This isn't a tech report, it's political propaganda. There's plenty of awesome U.S. techs to do the jobs that are out of them, just as good as the imports, they just want U.S. wages.
That last bit is the flaw in your argument. You mistakenly think there is such a thing as "US wages". The talent pool is global and what matters is your productivity versus your price. If you demand more in wages you had better be significantly more productive and able to prove it. Your economic value to any company is based solely on productivity per dollar spent. If an overseas worker can do the work needed and is willing to do it for less money then you had better find a way to increase your value e
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That's because corporations are parasites shopping for employees on a global market, but fraction the markets for their own products deliberately to counter precisely the thing they themselves are doing.
Re:Feeding the PR engine, (Score:4, Insightful)
The big problem is that the pipeline's been cut off.
You used to be able to interview 20 local people and get a choice of great candidates because the local people had come through the ranks and had to learn their shit.
These days you don't take on junior people and train them up. For the same money you can get the already experienced person over from India, or Malaysia, or China, or Bulgaria. Or if you're a multinational, don't even get them over: Open the office there, it's even cheaper.
So there aren't the junior learning roles, the apprenticeships, the low paid jobs in which people can learn the skills and become the great IT people we need.
It's a fucking tragedy and it's taken a failure of the outsourcing model to reveal the sudden disconnect and gap that's been created, and it's going to be another decade before that gap starts to be filled.
So right now it's actually true: there is a shortage of great people. Not because the locals aren't capable, or couldn't become great, but because there just haven't been the openings to let them develop those skills.
Must be an alternate earth. (Score:5, Insightful)
I've worked in tech (SE) for 15+ years now, and I don't know of a single colleague that would agree with the sentiment expressed in that quote.
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It's not colleagues, duh. It's subordinates.
You ask them: "Do you want to be fired today for saying no, or fired in 6 months when they let us hire a cheaper replacement for you?"
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Exactly...what a load of crap. It has gotten real hard to find employers that are willing to cultivate people from within these days which is a real shame.
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It's the bosses and PHB's who have that line.
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I've worked in SE for a bit over ten years. The best IT people I have worked with have been from America or Western Europe (England, France, etc.), but I can't say that any country has produced better IT folks than the other.
Now let's talk about India. India seems to be a popular source for software engineers, testing services, documentation, etc., and I cannot for the life of me understand why. Building anything takes forever; standards are ripped apart and tossed to the wind; things crash, don't log, don'
Re:Must be an alternate earth. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ditto, this!
He clearly means "I have talked with CTOs" and doesn't grasp that that title just means yet-another-stuffed-shirt, not any sort of actual engineer.
Because, while I have no doubt that good engineers exist outside the US - They don't need to come here to work as indentured servants. Thus we have exactly the wrong sort of selection bias in who applies for H1Bs in the first place.
"Tech Looks To Obama To Save Them From 'Just Sort of OK' US Workers"? No. Real tech (as opposed to "pointy-haired cat herders") wants Obama to clamp down on importing "Just Sort of OK" foreign workers to displace equally qualified American workers. Simple as that.
Re:Must be an alternate earth. (Score:5, Interesting)
I guess I have karma to burn.
I have no problem with the many talented Indian and Chinese engineers and programmers I worked with at my last job. Most of them were excellent. That job was a pretty high-tech joint that didn't just employ software people, but also hardware, RF, scientists, etc.
It was strange when I came to my current job that the Indian programmers applying for jobs here were CLEARLY underskilled hacks, with recruiter-edited false resumes. This place is basically a web shop with a database backed product. Some interesting problems, but nothing like the last one. The guys here couldn't even relate to what I was telling them about the highly talented Indian and Chinese programmers at my last place.
I was once asked point blank, by a union employee of the public school system, "What do you think of the immigrants coming and taking your jobs and lowering your salary. My honest response was, "Without the kind of talent the people I'm working with bring to this country, my company wouldn't exist."
I'm not saying there aren't obvious profound flaws with the rest of what the tool in this article is saying, but I will admit that I am perfectly willing to invite top talent to this country if it means businesses operate here. That's hugely different from the 95% of trade school hacks who account for most of the visas, but I'm still happy to welcome those 5% (or 1%, or whatever).
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I was taking issue with the surreal falsity of the quote...the guy specifically asserted that the "vast, vast majority of tech *engineers* supported..." blahblahblah.
To me, that's a bald-faced lie. The decision to hire offshore "talent" is driven by MBAs, not MSes or PhDs. Now if he'd said "tech execs" or "CTOs," I would have believed him i
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"What do you think of the immigrants coming and taking your jobs and lowering your salary. My honest response was, "Without the kind of talent the people I'm working with bring to this country, my company wouldn't exist."
Wait.... you understand that "most of the visas" are "trade school hacks", "clearly underskilled", with "false resumes". That most of this program is just to undercut the local employees. You are fully cognizant of this.... and when someone asked you what you thought about that... you ignored the question and how themajority of the system operates, and focused on how well the system worked for your company.
Huh.
As a tangent, why aren't you working for the high-tech joint anymore? Did they replace you with an
Re:Must be an alternate earth. (Score:4, Interesting)
"What do you think of the immigrants coming and taking your jobs and lowering your salary. My honest response was, "Without the kind of talent the people I'm working with bring to this country, my company wouldn't exist."
Wait.... you understand that "most of the visas" are "trade school hacks", "clearly underskilled", with "false resumes". That most of this program is just to undercut the local employees. You are fully cognizant of this.... and when someone asked you what you thought about that... you ignored the question and how themajority of the system operates, and focused on how well the system worked for your company.
Huh.
Yeah, you pretty much nailed it, honestly. I've got about 20 years work experience today. At the time I was asked (not quite 10 years ago), I was pretty lucky to have worked at shops where we had mostly good talent, and there really weren't enough trade school hacks for me to recognize the larger pattern.
As a tangent, why aren't you working for the high-tech joint anymore? Did they replace you with an Indian PHD and force you to move down into the trenches of web-dev? What do you think of that?
No, while you nailed the first part, you got this 100% wrong. I'm thankful to have worked with the talented people I did, and I left voluntarily. I left because I was moving back to a regulated product from an unregulated one, and I felt my skills withering when I worked on the regulated stuff because 80% or more of my time was in meetings getting documents approved and very little time coding. I am in fact a full-stack web dev now and though I miss working on high tech, I realize that I have broader employability in my geographic region in case my current employment stint doesn't work out. I do miss the awesome test lab and "gee whiz" factor sometimes, but I'm WAYYYY better at actually writing code, because I do it almost all day, almost every day.
Re:Must be an alternate earth. (Score:5, Informative)
Exceptional workers don't need H1Bs. H1Bs are not designed to bring talent to the US; they're (ostensibly) designed to meet a temporary demand that cannot be adequately met by the domestic workforce. That's why they are temporary permits. Talented workers get first priority [state.gov] in immigrating, and I welcome them along with you. I welcome anyone who immigrates here, TBH. More power to them. But that doesn't change the fact that H1Bs are being exploited [fromdev.com], and it's negatively impacting the labor market for citizens as well.
Take it for what it is. (Score:4, Insightful)
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One reason I route all email from my company's PAC to my junk folder. Why should I help fund legislation against my own interests as well as those of the country.
Now if there was a permanent residence visa program, I might go for it. The foreign workers would have more bargaining power over their salaries/benefits and they would be long-term paying payroll taxes and other things that would help the US economy and budget.
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Why would they? Most voters have bought hook, line and sinker the demonization of employee rights. Anything that is seen to not benefit the corporations and their profits is "socialism" and must be stopped at all costs.
Which is amazing because people like Henry Ford realized a century ago that raising pay and benefits made for better employees and ones that were willing and able to buy his company's products. But this attitude is now considered "socialism" and will obviously bankrupt the economy. *rolls eye
Translation (Score:5, Insightful)
"The difference between someone who's truly great and just sort of okay is really huge"
Especially when you want to keep that person tied to the company for the duration of their visa and pay them less than someone with a non-visa.
What they're really saying is... (Score:5, Insightful)
We're too cheap to hire a less experienced person and train them to do their job properly.
Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't disagree that there are some really smart people around the world who want to work for Google, but really valuable people don't need special programs to come over to work. The existing system is already set up to admit them. This is a smoke screen to hide the true purpose of the program: finding more people who don't know the value of their skills, preferably ones without many existing relationships that are easier to overwork.
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
That is why I laugh when I get a recruiter or ex-coworker that tells me I should go work at amazon or yahoo or netflix. The bigger the name, the bigger the h1bribe pool, the lower the salary.
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Price/Performance Ratio (Score:2)
Of course they want to hire the "very best", where "bestness" is measured by how little money they are willing to work for.
ALL companies want to hire the maximum performance for the minimum price. What else were you expecting? If someone else can do the job and demands less money to do it why wouldn't the company hire them instead of you? Labor is judged solely on productivity versus price at the end of the day. You can maximize that equation by increasing productivity or decreasing price but either way the question is what will maximize that ratio. Where the workers are from is irrelevant in the equation beyond how it af
"Culture in tech is a very meritocratic culture" (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's be honest here: no it isn't.
Tech skills are hard to objectively verify. Technical results are hard to objectively verify. We collectively proxy that by having lots of tests, competitions, selection, and other heuristics. But that's not a symptom of us respecting skill more than other jobs(maybe more than other specific office jobs, but not more than lawyers, doctors, manufacturing technicians, similar things), it's a symptom of it being really hard to tell.
These companies are looking to take shortcuts. And some are looking for excuses to cut salaries. That's it.
OK, NOW I'm pissed. (Score:5, Insightful)
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More politely - if these guys spent as much (re)training each US worker as they spend on lawyers, visa fees and other costs related to bringing in the replacements, they wouldn't have a problem.
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I think what all of "just OK" tech workers are going to have to do is form our own companies and route around the big corps. The big guys seem hell bent on taking the path they want to take, and it doesn't include us. The only viable option for the normal people is to form communities and support each other in these communities. Maybe the Republic of Texas whack jobs were on to something...they just went about it the wrong way. M
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"and to hell with quality"
This has been the mantra for American Corporations for well over 3 decades now. Look at GM for a perfect example of this.
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Or are you
It sounds like rubbish (Score:2)
Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Show me ONE.
Just fucking ONE.
He or she must have a pulse,
be conscience,
have an IQ over 30,
full citizenship,
NOT A POLITICIAN,
NOT A CEO,
NOW SHOW ME ONE.
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I am an engineer. I appreciate the folks from other countries I work with, who are smart and capable engineers.
Now, I have no idea why my employer chooses to recruit at certain international engineering schools, nor do I know why they choose to sponsor some people for work VISAs. I interview who I'm told and make no distinction in my recommendations based on their national origin (because I'm a professional, not just because it could be illegal). Those I recommend for hire based on their technical skills
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Great people enhance the environment for all, diversity of ideas and points of view can have a major positive impact.
Too many though, are using this to take advantage of people who are willing to work for fa
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*raises hand*
I've posted about this before many times.
I have a pulse
I am not sure about having a conscience -- that may disqualify me.
I have an IQ over 30
I am a citizen
I am not a politician
I am not a CEO.
I've been an engineer at Microsoft since 2000. I've worked on developer tools and ERP products. I've worked in Redmond; I currently work in Fargo.
I have interviewed hundreds of people for Microsoft positions. I am not a manager, but I've played manager at times. I understand the compensation system quit
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I'm a foreign contractor. I've worked all my 35+ career with foreign contractors. Most of them are rubbish. A few of them are great. I've also worked most of my career with domestic staff. Most of them are rubbish. A few of them are great.
"90% of everything is crap". What are you trying to say?
as long as there is a high min wage + OT pay for t (Score:3)
as long as there is a high min wage + OT pay for them.
As some places use them as cheap workers chained to the job.
also if they want to use them as the best then they should be locked to that job with just about no time to find an other (h1bs have to get out as soon as there job is over) if they get fired or layed off.
Quite time = successful engineer (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe tech companies need to develop culture that encourages good engineers rather than hiring foreign workers.
So... what does that mean? (Score:4, Informative)
So that means that tech workers from abroad are better than tech workers here? Well, that must then mean that schools abroad are better than schools in the US because, hey, where would they get their knowledge from. And that of course must mean that we'd also find much better managers in India and Pakistan than we can find here, for obviously the same reason.
I fail to see a lot of H1B visa applications for CEOs, though? I really, really wonder what could possibly be the reason. I'd really want to work for a great CEO for a change, I can tell ya. I mean, when we all want to work with superior colleges, I can only assume that we would all just outright LOVE to work for a superior CEO!
Re:So... what does that mean? (Score:4, Interesting)
>> Well, that must then mean that schools abroad are better than schools in the US
I am a Brit now living in the US, and have a young son. Honestly my own (fairly average) school education in England makes that provided to him by public schools in the US look _very_ poor and low quality by comparison.
I'm sure you made your comment with some degree of self-evident sarcasm intended, but based on what I have seen first-hand I'd be very surprised if there actually isn't a lot of truth in it, especially in comparison to many EU countries.
Fwd.US (Score:2)
Facebook's Wealth Demands Unlimited Slaves
I bet it was intentional, you know the Zuck loves to mock people right in front of their faces.
Response Bias (Score:5, Interesting)
I guarantee you that "the vast, vast majority of tech engineers" would not assume that "other countries" automatically meant "the very best". The general consensus in my neck of the woods is that engineers of foreign origin are about on par with our native engineers. The consensus I've seen in pop culture is that the foreign engineers are generally much worse. I can only imagine the question that would lead to the response above:
Q: If faced with a choice between a top foreign engineer or a mediocre American one, which would you hire?
A: The foreign one. I'd want to work with the very best.
Yes OK (Score:2)
So why can't *I* do the same thing with a lawyer, notary, accountant? You telling me *there* I have to use a local person? 2+2=4 in China too.
Oh that's different.
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I would prefer we did this with CEO's and executives. A company can have HUGE savings by outsourcing the useless upper management to a management center in China.
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This too!
cancel your Facebook account (Score:2)
BS, yet with the tiniest grain of truth (Score:2)
Anyone who has worked in the IT field long enough knows this truth -- there are rockstar, mediocre and just plain awful tech workers in both the foreign and domestic camps. However, other than people complaining in general about how awful people they have to work with are, I've never heard anyone say anything like "All US engineers/programmers/IT guys are universally bad and so my company should hire foreign workers so I get to work with the best of the best." (I've seen a lot of people who *think* they're
well, I for one... (Score:2)
Inherently built into the supporting factor(s) of the tech industry, is the eventual collapse of workers that want to work. Using the same business practices that are practiced today, the overseas folks that are going to be taking these jobs will eventually need to be
Foreign vs US developers (Score:3)
We're crazy (Score:3)
That's easy to believe. I feel the same way.
Yet sometimes I hear people bitching about immigrants in other contexts. If they're agricultural workers instead of tech workers, somehow they're undesirable. That doesn't make any sense to me at all. It makes so little sense to me, that I think it's just plain stupid.
But that's just, like, my opinion, man. We don't open the borders. Every election we nearly unanimously scream that we want highly restricted immigration consisting of very few people, and the thought of making any moves toward meritocracy makes us so incredibly angry and resentful, that we go out of our minds with blind rage.
So, tech workers and tech industry customers (i.e. most of America), if this is how you really feel, then you need to live with the consequences. You can't say justice, fairness, and efficiency are important, yet also things you totally don't care about. Make up your fucking mind. If you speak about programmers from India in a fundamentally different way than farmers from Chihuahua, maybe you are the problem, psycho.
I have the answer.... (Score:2)
All they want H1B visa's will be granted, each one hired must be paid at least 50% higher than the national median or local median, whichever is higher, for that job.
If they REALLY need higher skilled workers, make the fuckers pay for them.
False idea of the genius (Score:3)
Lots of geniuses FAIL. They fail spectacularly.
To be truly successful, you need to be a genius and be lucky.
I don't care how smart you are, you need the luck - if for no other reason than being born in the right country, not having a debilitating disease, and not having family that desperately needs your help. Because sometimes good luck is simply not having bad luck.
But that's beside the point. Lots of genius just had the wrong timing. There was this guy - a real genius. he came up with a great idea to help kids tie their shoes. But someone else came out with Velcro shoes that year. If he had his idea one year earlier, he would have made a couple of million and the Velcro guy would end up selling the idea to the Kid's Shoe King, instead of becoming the Kid's Shoe King.
Genius is not that rare, and the difference between the best and the second best guy is for all purposes irrelevant. Other things matter more than creativity and intelligence.
Timing, luck, and hard work matter just as much as genius.
Scum of the earth (Score:4, Insightful)
He's right, I have said that. Of course, I always follow it with "but only if they have unrestricted visas that give them the same freedom I have to shop the market and work for whomever they want", and I suspect everyone he's talked to (presuming he isn't making it up) have said something similar.
Because when the best of the best make $200k a year, it kicks the wind of out the whiners who complain about the the average programmer salary. But when they work for $80k and they can't switch jobs, that depresses my salary, and that is precisely why lying fuckwits like Joe Green and Mark Zuckerberg want to bring them here.
Translation (Score:2)
"We want A workers at C prices."
bag of something (Score:2)
"The vast, vast majority of tech engineers that I talked to who are from the United States are very supportive of bringing in people from other countries because they want to work with the very best."
Ah, so any American engineer who disagrees with you obviously doesn't want to work with the very best, and since most of them are going to disagree with you, they prove your point that they're all mediocre.
Not my experience (Score:2)
Body Shops get most of the H1-Bs (Score:3)
As a manager at a company that does to hire the best and the brightest, I can say that people calling for more H1-B visas are full of s#!t.
The biggest users of H-1Bs are consulting companies, or as Ron Hira calls them, "offshore-outsourcing firms."
"The top 10 recipients in [the] last fiscal year were all offshore-outsourcers. And they got 40,000 of the 85,000 visas — which is astonishing," he says.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/allte... [npr.org]
Here is the break-down of my reports.
15 - born in the USA.
3- naturalized citizens when I hired them.
2- from Egypt on L1 visas (we have an office in Cairo)
2- from Korea that had green cards when I hired them
1- from China that was a grad student that we supported. F1 students visa changed to H1B by obtaining a sponsorship position with an H1B sponsor company.
1- from India that was a grad student we supported. F1 students visa changed to H1B by obtaining a sponsorship position with an H1B sponsor company.
It is fairly easy to convert F1 visa for a student that has completed graduate school in the USA to an H1B, and as far as I can tell there is no limit.
(I am not an immigration lawyer, nor do I play one on TV.)
If tried to hire highly qualified individuals from outside the US and was told that I would not be able to get them H1B visas because they were all taken (by the body shoppers). These people had PhDs from prestigious Universities and years of relevant experience. They made the unfortunate mistake of not attending a US
graduate school.
So the solution is quite simple. Stop giving H1B visas to "consulting companies".
Re:That's why slashdot is against tech immigration (Score:5, Insightful)
> Proof that US slashdotters techies are just sort of OK at best since they don't want high skills immigration. Low skills immigration is fine since it doesn't compete directly with their jobs though.
What immigration?
H1Bs are an indentured servitude program.
It was a stark realization the first time found out that the imported PhDs in my shop were making less than I was. I was in a much better position to negotiate for better salary despite having less education and a more generic specialty.
I had the legal standing to tell my employer to "take this job and shove it".
I happily took advantage of the situation but never forgot the injustice of it.
Re:That's why slashdot is against tech immigration (Score:5, Interesting)
Then your company is breaking the law and you should report them. Companies are required to pay above the prevailing wage for the position and region. We paid both of our H1B workers well above average for our staff and when they worked out sponsored their green cards (and boy is that process a cluster!), we're the kind of employer that the program was actually designed for, we were looking for extremely rare talent sets and had advertised the positions for months before looking abroad. I have to say that I have much bigger problems with the screwups in the green card program than I do with the H1B system, permanently bringing smart people from abroad raises the GDP of the US and brings diversity to the country.
Re:That's why slashdot is against tech immigration (Score:5, Insightful)
Companies are required to pay above the prevailing wage for the position and region.
First of all, the "prevailing wage" is already artificially lowered because of the presence of H1B's. But, even so, it doesn't matter because there are a million ways around this law anyway. Want to get around having to pay your Indian software engineer the prevailing wage for a software engineer? No problem! Just hire him as a "Junior Programmer."
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Pretty sure the job description for junior programmer that the DOL uses doesn't qualify for an H1B slot...
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Re:That's why slashdot is against tech immigration (Score:4, Insightful)
And the program is only supposed to be for filling jobs that CANNOT OTHERWISE BE FILLED. It's supposed to bring in geniuses and highly skilled technical workers, not fill the cubicle mazes with bodies.
What the H1B program really needs are some quantifiable metrics, i.e.
= You can only bring in H1B people for jobs where the qualified US applicant pool is smaller than X. (Only allow for highly specialized jobs)
= A person on an H1B visa must be paid at least the average regional salary for their job position (remove the lower wage incentive)
= The job which the H1B person is being hired for must require a 4 year college degree and the candidate must have received said degree from a recognized
institution.
I also support a tax on these workers, to be paid by the employer in addition to normal wages and taxes, that would directly fund educating/retraining American workers to fill tech jobs that are open. Note, this is a fair tax because only companies that want to use H1B visas would be burdened--it's totally their choice.
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A person on an H1B visa must be paid at least the average regional salary for their job position (remove the lower wage incentive)
You realize that this is already a requirement of getting an H1B visa, right?
The job which the H1B person is being hired for must require a 4 year college degree and the candidate must have received said degree from a recognized institution.
The 4 year part is not a requirement, but having exceptional qualifications is already a requirement.
I also support a tax on these workers, to be paid by the employer in addition to normal wages and taxes, that would directly fund educating/retraining American workers to fill tech jobs that are open. Note, this is a fair tax because only companies that want to use H1B visas would be burdened--it's totally their choice.
While not direct, this is already effectively the case. When an employer needs to bring in an H1B worker they end up shelling out huge amounts for lawyers fees, moving expenses etc. It is not a cheap option to hire H1B workers. Quite the opposite in fact.
Re:That's why slashdot is against tech immigration (Score:5, Informative)
Here's an example of how one company apparently applies that "no American available" policy:
What to Do When My US Company Won't Hire Americans? [soylentnews.org]
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Re:Not exactly endearing you to the public (Score:5, Insightful)
So this tool just shit on U.S. workers and claims that people who are essentially nothing but ITT Tech graduates from a third world country are superior.
They are cheaper, more subservient, less likely to push for raises, and are perfectly happy work 60-80 our weeks.
I'm sure he has illegals mowing his lawn too. I wonder if Google Car can be programed to run someone down.
Re:Not exactly endearing you to the public (Score:5, Funny)
They are cheaper, more subservient, less likely to push for raises, and are perfectly happy work 60-80 hour weeks [while getting paid for 35 - AC].
That's what he meant by "truly great."
Re:Not exactly endearing you to the public (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly - truly great for this quarter's share price. Maybe the next couple of quarters. Beyond that I don't care as I'll be vested and can cash out.
Re:Not exactly endearing you to the public (Score:4, Interesting)
As a tech worker myself, I don't see why foreign workers would be inherently worse. I mean I've seen some people, very much home grown, who seem to have such a poor grasp of how things work that I wonder how on earth they even have a job.
Re:Not exactly endearing you to the public (Score:5, Insightful)
They are not, *inherently* worse. Not by a long shot. Some of them are very, very good.
The problem is that they are being selected, not on the basis of technical skills, but on the basis of lower costs and more subservience. Companies prefer, not just foreign workers, but H1B workers specifically - because they are powerless and easier to abuse.
Just a look at the 'products' these so-called tech companies are churning out should be enough to give lie to the idea that they have any interest at all in technical excellence. They do not. They want cheap code-monkeys that will crank out utter crap as directed with no back talk, no wage pressures, and no looking for a better job to worry about.
"I mean I've seen some people, very much home grown, who seem to have such a poor grasp of how things work that I wonder how on earth they even have a job."
Sure. But we dont have any kind of monopoly on those people. Outsource to save money and you are likely to get the south asian equivalent - all the same problems, plus communication and cultural difficulties on top of it.
Re:Not exactly endearing you to the public (Score:5, Insightful)
" I don't see why foreign workers would be inherently worse."
AS one that has had to work with some great guys I can tell you that communicating took 3-5X longer. Sorry but some accents are so thick that we had to waste so much time it was not funny, we finally gave up on meetings and went to text based communication.
Hamir is a fantastic guy, but I can not understand him, and he had trouble understanding me.
Re:Not exactly endearing you to the public (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Not exactly endearing you to the public (Score:5, Insightful)
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People that are so desperate to continue to put in long hours that they need recommendations on a recliner to work in?
Re:Not exactly endearing you to the public (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not exactly endearing you to the public (Score:5, Interesting)
Green is a big fat liar. "The Best" account for less than 10k a year - across all disciplines. Cut all other visas then give these people green cards then citizenship.
75% of STEM workers leave the field due to substandard conditions. There isn't a recruiting problem, there is a retention problem.
Re:Not exactly endearing you to the public (Score:5, Insightful)
We have a visa for 'top' 'extraordinary' workers. It is the O visa. Funny there are no caps for it...
H1B is being abused and they know it. It was meant for 1-2 month gigs and they leave. Instead its turned into 6 year stints. Nearly 500k people are h1b at this time. A 6 year job is a job not a short term contract work. You can produce front to end a decent software product in 2 years. If it takes longer you are probably doing something very wrong.
There are give or take about 140 million jobs in the US. Of those 1.5-3 million depending on how you count it are IT jobs. Or about 1 out of 5 IT jobs are filled by an H1B worker.
Wages in a sellers market should go up. However, they are flat to no growth. Because companies are using the h1b to depress wages by reducing mobility.
I make it a point to show h1b workers that they are truly getting fucked over. I am currently on 15 who have up and quit and moved on to get better pay.
Many do not realize they are getting fucked over. As the standard they are coming from is so much lower. I show them how they could have *even* more and their greed kicks in every time. I also make sure they push hard on HR to get that green card. They then realize HR does not work for them either. I make it expensive to keep an H1B. Funny thing is I accidentally lucked into this at my first job as I saw a friend being screwed over being passed up for 3 raises.
Re:Not exactly endearing you to the public (Score:5, Informative)
H1B is being abused and they know it. It was meant for 1-2 month gigs and they leave. Instead its turned into 6 year stints
Almost true. While you are correct that the H1-B visa in itself is limited to a 6 year maximum stay, the visa can be renewed indefinitely if the holder is the beneficiary of an approved I-140 petition in the 5th year. This means that any H1-B holder can stay on that H1-B for a long time as long as they find someone willing to sponsor their greencard, and they have about 4 years -in the US- to find them.
Reason for this is that there is disconnect between the amount of H1-B visas (which are not limited per country) and amount of greencards (which are limited per country). We all know which country I'm talking about: the folks from India, however you may feel about their presence, are hitting this the most: For each EB category (EB1, EB2, EB3 in general), there are 265 greencards available per month. That's a little over 9500 per year. On the other side is the number of H1-B (and L-1) visa that get allocated to workers chargeable to India. Just for H1-B, that number comes close to 170,000 just for FY2012 (source [uscis.gov]). Then there are the L1 visa holders, which are uncapped.
So, you end up having ~10k greencards, vs ~200k influx, just for India alone. This means that there is a huge waiting list for people with approved I-140s, but not eligible to file for AOS. What are you going to do with them? Sent them back? Politics chose to let them stay by renewing their H1-B every 1 to 3 years, even after the 6th year.
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Yes.
I totally understand your sentiment. However, do remember that these folks already have an approved greencard petition and the only reason that they haven't received it yet is because they are waiting for their priority date to become current.
In theory, the employer has provided evidence to the Department of Labor and USCIS that they have done a reasonable effort to hire a local (citizen or permanent resident) for the job that the alien is performing. DOL and USCIS both approved a petition to grant the al
Re:The US does not have an IT talent monopoly (Score:5, Insightful)
The only economic reason they'd hire an American over an H1B is if the American is willing to let his kids starve and be downright abused for $10 an hour after spending his whole life studying his craft.
You outsourcing shills are downright retarded. It should be criminal. US IT workers shouldn't have to live like utter slaves, work 80 hour weeks and need food stamps just because some barely qualified H1B will do it for $10/hr. We are not disposable blue collar idiots. We are white collar professionals and we just want the same damn respect accountants, other dept managers, other educated employees and even secretaries get within the same organization. We are often abused just about everywhere companies get away with it. We're also treated with copious amounts of paranoia and mistrust.
How would you feel if hospitals outsourced all their surgical labor to Mexican H1B's getting paid $19,000/yr and still gave you the same $2,000 bill for giving your kid antibiotic eardrops after a 5 minute visit?
Americans can't compete on price. Point blank. It costs too much to BE an American and LIVE in America. We can't tolerate spending our entire lives (and a lot of personal money) dedicated to being the skilled folks we are only to be forced to compete at a hair above minimum wage. Get a grip.
And you think unionization killed US manufacturing? No. Outsourcing did. And as good as we are at pissing off the rest of the world, being a society of unemployed skilled workers, management, minimum wage employees and lawyers will kill us if the world cuts us off.
If you can be replaced for $10/hour... (Score:3, Insightful)
The only economic reason they'd hire an American over an H1B is if the American is willing to let his kids starve and be downright abused for $10 an hour after spending his whole life studying his craft.
If you spend your life studying something that allows you to be replaced for $10/hour then you are frankly retarded. Nobody owes you a comfortable living. You need to earn it and part of that is having the foresight to see what might be valuable to employers.
US IT workers shouldn't have to live like utter slaves, work 80 hour weeks and need food stamps just because some barely qualified H1B will do it for $10/hr. We are not disposable blue collar idiots.
Who is suggesting that you do? If you provide enough value for the wages you command then you should be able to live very nicely. But if your job can be done by someone willing to work for $10 per hour then you better reconsider just how valuable wh
Re: (Score:3)
If you spend your life studying something that allows you to be replaced for $10/hour then you are frankly retarded. Nobody owes you a comfortable living. You need to earn it and part of that is having the foresight to see what might be valuable to employers.
No. I'm worth more than that, it's just desperate folks in 3rd world countries with degrees will take 1/3rd of what I'm paid. Like I said, I shouldn't have to live on food stamps because your arrogant rich ass can tap into 3rd world labor and undercut the value that exists right here. Sure, most of them really aren't as good but what does quality matter with automatic updates and the ability to sell the product for the same price as companies hiring Americans?
Who is suggesting that you do? If you provide enough value for the wages you command then you should be able to live very nicely. But if your job can be done by someone willing to work for $10 per hour then you better reconsider just how valuable what you do actually is. Furthermore, just because someone does a "blue collar" job doesn't mean they are an idiot. Stop looking down your nose at people who don't work in an air conditioned office typing on a computer. You think you are too good to get your hands dirty? Are you really that arrogant?
No, I get my hands quite dirty running cable
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There is something going on here that no one seems to be talking about: the collapse of markets.
Karl Marx made one chilling prediction: when the workers did not have the money to buy the goods they produced, markets would collapse and capitalism itself would collapse. Henry Ford beat Marx when he paid his workers an unheard of $5 a day, creating in a single stroke the blue collar middle class and a market for his own goods. And this made America an economic powerhouse, not just for it power to produce, but
Re:Not exactly endearing you to the public (Score:4, Insightful)
'The vast, vast majority of tech engineers that I talked to who are from the United States are very supportive of bringing in people from other countries...'
Name them.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
To the employer that is a huge form of merit that can easily outweigh others!
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And how, prey tell, do you determine who is and is not employed, and who is and is not a US Citizen here on Slashdot?
... that none of the things you listed are "the latest technologies".
That being said, I'll tell you what most of us here on Slashdot do know, regardless of if we are employed or a US citizen
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is that you can't call it a union, even though programming is closer to a skilled trade than a profession. Most tech workers are lone wolves, Ayn Rand devotees, etc. who feel there's absolutely no benefit to something like this. I've heard lots of arguments where people's sole experience with unions boiled down to something like "I was at a trade show/hotel/construction site, and the IBEW guy refused to let me plug in my own equipment." They conveniently forget that those electricians are gettin
Re: (Score:2)
too bad management isn't a meritocratic culture
It's about cost versus productivity (Score:2)
It's about cheapest workers, not better ones.
Not quite. It's about the cheapest workers that can still get the job done. Companies are in business to maximize profit and you do that by maximizing the performance of the labor per dollar spent. You can hire fewer but more productive workers or cheaper but less productive workers. If you cannot discern the difference in productivity (which can be difficult sometimes) then the cheaper guy will win almost every time. You will note that country of origin plays no direct role in that equation.
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Why are only employees hired on merit and not executives? Because employees are hired by managers who at least have some experience judging fitness for the job. Executives, on the other hand, are hired by board members and shareholders who have absolutely NO experience hiring effective executives.
Corporations are like little countries and their management structure is like government. In an effective government, laws get made by people who have incentive to benefit the tax base. In a democracy this is the c