Yes, Silicon Valley is more liberal than other nexi of Galtian activity, but I agree with this completely:
These same companies are always looking to cut down their domestic labor costs. Mark Zuckerberg, in particular, is pouring money into a new advocacy group, Fwd.us, with a board consisting of big-name Valley luminaries, to push “comprehensive immigration reform” (read: letting Facebook bring in a cheaper labor force). In a remarkably cynical move, Fwd.us has separate left- and right-leaning subgroups to prod politicians across the political spectrum to sign on to the bill that would pad the company’s bottom line.
Ostensibly, the increase in visas for high-skilled computer workers is a needed response to the critical shortage of such workers here—a notion that has been repeatedly dismissed, including in a recent report from the Obama-aligned Economic Policy Institute, which found that the country is producing 50 percent more IT professionals each year than are being employed in the field. The real appeal of the H1B visas for “guest workers”—who already take between a third and half of all new IT jobs in the States —is that they are usually paid less than their pricy American counterparts, and are less likely to jump ship since they need to remain employed to stay in the country. Facebook’s lobbyists, reports the Washington Post, have pressed lawmakers to remove a requirement from the bill that companies make a “good faith” effort to hire Americans first.
While I support immigration reform, and am sympathetic to the idea that it should be sensitive to the needs of employers, there’s a fine line between “guest worker” and “indentured servant”. And, yes, bringing in workers in any industry will depress wages for those already here working in that industry.
Tech tycoons can find a way to shit on IT workers the same way last century’s Galtians shat on miners and steel workers.
Yatsuno
And the IT guys all think they’re Galtian geniuses who don’t need stupid socialist things like unions and collective bargaining.
jayackroyd
Especially when the visa is contingent on the particular job. The distinction between this and indentured servitude is pretty much a technical one. I suppose it depends on how long it takes to get citizenship to determine whether it’s better than a 7 year indenture.
jayackroyd
@Yatsuno: It’s been tragiccomic to see glibertarian tech commenters suddenly see the light when it’s their jobs on the line.
Eric U.
@Yatsuno: our IT guys are like that. Overpaid and lazy as all get out, which seems to be a republican/glibertarian trait. They aren’t very good to boot. They shut down our network access one time because someone had hacked one of our computers and was using it for a DOS attack. Turns out it was the computer they had insisted that they had to control because it had our web site on it.
schrodinger's cat
@jayackroyd: It is definitely more than a 7 year wait for many employment based GC categories, especially if you are from India, China, Mexico or the Philippines.
Petorado
Can we get H1B visas to bring in lower-priced foreign CEOs? The guys we have here are waaaay overpaid, and some foreign competition would increase shareholder returns and company profitability. The market just isn’t functioning properly at the executive level.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Remove the “good faith” requirement and replace it with requiring that all workers must be paid the same prevailing wage.
Keith G
I have never seen firm, reliable numbers of just what the IT workers deficit is.
BGinCHI
Is IT an acronym for “We don’t know what is causing it but we should have things fixed in 12-96 hours”?
Omnes Omnibus
San Fran psychedelica for a Silicon Vally post. Well played.
schrodinger's cat
@Petorado: H1B visas to bring in taxi drivers to write MoU’s columns.
srv
There’s nothing I like more than seeing a glibertarian replaced by an H1-B.
I will say the Hacker News crowd has gotten a bit better the last year or two. Been suspended once or twice for trolling the Peter Thiel fanbois posts, but now there’s a whole cadre of geeky dougjs and Levensons there.
Yatsuno
@Keith G: Refusing to work 100 hours a week for less than minimum wage. Hard to find any workers with that kind of ethic who will suck at the toes of the CEO.
MikeJ
It’s not just that people on H1-Bs won’t leave for a better job. Most of those I’ve known were terrified of being fired.
If you want a subservient workforce, hire a bunch of people you can throw out of the country. Don’t like his necktie? Back to the PRC!
Eric U.
@Petorado: unfortunately, the CEO class is going to take us all down with them. I think they are fooling themselves that they can shell out a giant company and they are the only ones that are going to be left. When your entire company is in India, why isn’t it an Indian company. Happened to the steel industry.
@jayackroyd: my experience is that the indentured servant aspect is somewhat overblown. I see my friends moving between jobs pretty readily. Of course, if you have an advanced degree things are a little different.
LongHairedWeirdo
It’s true – tech workers who are here on H1Bs are paid less and worked much harder than US workers, which is a double whammy – they drive down wages, *and* reduce the number of hires.
What’s even funnier is that they’re not typically hired by the IT biggies – they’re usually hired by contracting firms. They’re not getting actual jobs from employers like IBM or Microsoft (or, I presume, Facebook) – they’re getting jobs from people who supply work for those big names, so that the big companies don’t have to put a lot of (ugh!!) workers into their benefits programs, and treat them like actual human beings.
schrodinger's cat
@LongHairedWeirdo: The proposed changes in the immigration bill are heavily weighted against these IT contracting firms.
Gex
OT but I just need to vent:
Can I just say how much I hate all the articles by breeders celebrating how “fast” they’ve moved this issue? 1) 25% of my life expectancy isn’t fast. 2) 50% of my life expectancy isn’t fast. 3) 1776 AD -2013 AD isn’t fast. 4) 33 AD – 2013 AD (or whatever) isn’t fast.
Guess what? This was an issue before 2003 when they first became interested in it. Can they take their self-congratulatory masturbation in private where I don’t have to look at it?
After having watched 25% of my life, the prime of my life, flushed down the toilet watching these folks “wrestle with their consciences and faith” I’m not super interested in listening to them congratulate themselves for taking so long to come to such a fucking obvious conclusion.
I know, I know. I’m an ingrate. I can afford to be. I can alienate the majority. They can take back their beneficence for my impertinence. Wouldn’t hurt me at all because KATE IS FUCKING DEAD.
So no, I don’t really want to read all about how awesome that author thinks straight people are for taking 10-20 years to get to PlaySkool pretend marriages that go poof when you cross state borders and only partially work as marriages in the state that issues them.
Angry and bitter. Rage filled. FUCK everything.
kc
@Petorado:
Ha, brilliant. I am stealing that.
Redshirt
I’ll take the long view: Once outsourcing has moved to every single poor country left in the world, there will be no unexploited people left, and we’ll finally get FULL COMMUNISM.
Just a couple of hundred years away I figure.
Mino
And in real-politnik, FB’s group is lobbying for Keystone as a sop to their right for indugences in the immigration bill. One hand washes the other.
Keith G
@Yatsuno: So you’re saying that given a fair wage, there would be no shortage of IT workers currently living in the United States.
Schlemizel
Just as soon as all the fat, over-paid, benefit-taking, health and safety expecting American workers come to accept the wages and condition of China and Bangladesh there will be plenty of jobs and no immigration problem (who the fuck would want to come here any more?)
accept your fate
Omnes Omnibus
@LongHairedWeirdo: My only knowledge of how H1B1s play out the the experience that my ex’s sister and b-i-l had coming over to MS in 2006. They got salaries in the mid-$80k range and normal bennies – as newly minted bachelor degree holders (albeit really fucking good at what they do). B-i-l has since moved to Google with no problems. I take it that this situation is not typical.
Johnny Coelacanth
@Yatsuno: “the IT guys all think they’re Galtian geniuses who don’t need stupid socialist things like unions and collective bargaining.” Speak for yoself. I’m an IT guy who thinks none of that stuff, and I don’t know any who do. Of course there are some, but any high tech field is going to have a contingent of fiscally conservative, poorly-socialized engineer types. I know a Ph.D chemist libertarian who voted for Romney because Rand Paul was on the ticket.
rikyrah
Tech companies already shyt on AMERICAN IT WORKERS.
nothing new here.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Johnny Coelacanth: Come to Texas. Probably 75-80% of the programmers I know think that they’re doing just fine on their own and will never need the support of a union, who just takes people’s money and does nothing with it.
Todd
@Gex:
Really?
Cassidy
@Gex: I’m sorry. It has taken tool long and it’s completely selfish of them to act like it matters that they care now, even though they’ve enjoyed the benefits of marriage.
Cassidy
@Todd: That’s all you heard?
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@Keith G:
With good reason, it’s a made up “problem”.
Microsoft wails about this constantly and yet, they’ve somewhat gotten around it by setting up a massive satellite “campus” just across the border in Canada. There they bring in all the indentured servants they want plus the Canadians foot the bill for health care.
I know several pointy haired mid-level managers at M$ and they are some of the most liberal, hard-working Democratic operatives you can find. But ask em about the H1-B visa program and they channel their inner gliberatarian.
MattMinus
@Yatsuno:
As an IT guy, I can say that it’s more like we know we’d lose our jobs for even thinking the word “union”.
Most of us realize that we’re post-industrial plumbers.
RSA
@Keith G:
The Bureau of Labor Statistics keeps track of some relevant information. For this past April, for example, the unemployment rate for “Computer and mathematical occupations” was 3.0, compared with an overall rate of 7.1. Only two categories have rates lower than that, “Legal occupations” at 2.2 and “Healthcare practitioner and technical occupations” at 2.6. (The unemployment rate for legal is surprising, given what we hear about the glut of law school graduates, so maybe they’re counting in an unintuitive way.)
scav
@Cassidy: ‘f course! It’s not like there was anything else to hear beyond the fit and proper deference and gratitude et cetera to the fecund arbitrators of all.
Suffern ACE
@Petorado: I’ve thought this issue would go away immediately if we could start a special program for H1B news anchors and pundits.
We could replace Matt Lauer with someone making less than 1/10th his salary and we wouldn’t notice the difference.
Pundits should be Indian, anyway.
Cassidy
@scav: They were a really awesome band. I just don’t see how Todd can be so insensitive to be critical about music choices when Gex was venting some very real pain. Some people just don’t like Kim Deal, but take that shit elsewhere.
schrodinger's cat
@Suffern ACE:
You mean Indian men. Women are the lesser and cannot officiate or perform most Hindu rituals.
Roger Moore
@Yatsuno:
The toes are not the body part tech CEOs expect to be sucked.
negative 1
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): FWIW we represent IT workers for a few colleges. They have the highest number of agency fee payers and we get the most recertification votes from their locals. I don’t know if other unions find this, but anecdotally IT workers are at least split on the idea of unions and those who are opposed tend to really be opposed. Any ideas as to why? I truly don’t get it, or maybe it’s just a small sample problem.
“there’s a fine line between “guest worker” and “indentured servant”’ Yes, that line is called the minimum wage. There’s a larger line between “available labor” and “guest worker”, it’s called a living wage.
Roger Moore
@Gex:
Feel free; you have a lot to vent about.
Xantar
@Gex:
From what I’ve seen of you in the past, your rant is probably about something I would agree with. Unfortunately I don’t know what you’re talking about. Literally. I have no context here.
Southern Beale
Different visa problem — this story refers to the J-1 program, which is operated by the State Department under the aegis of “cultural exchange” — but a couple years ago Hershey of chocolate fame got in trouble for abusing their J-1 workers at a packing plant. The kids had the nerve to actually PROTEST. The horror. Hershey blamed their subcontractor. Of course.
Unlike other visa programs, the J-1 visas don’t require employers to pay their workers minimum wage and it’s basically uncapped.
The big story, as always, is our nation’s addiction to cheap labor. This is the story no one ever wants to talk about, outside lefty blogs of course.
mike with a mic
I’m an IT guy and I support this. For the same reason I also support how we outsource our legal department overseas for cheaper labor as well, driving down the labor cost. It’s been the name of the game since the 1980’s. You can’t support immigration reform and not support driving down wages, that’s the entire reason the business community is always behind it. more workers competing for the same jobs will always lower the cost of labor, no matter who is gaming the system in what ways.
Plus, as the tech sector is socially progressive and firmly Democratic that’s what our party supports now, cheap labor. As firmly expressed by our pro immigration stance.
The only people upset by this are people who hate Indians and Asians, aka racists. If you’re not racist and can actually compete in the job market you have nothing to fear from this. And if you do fear for this, you probably didn’t deserve that job in the first place so don’t cry when you lose it.
Roger Moore
@Keith G:
We are supposed to have this thing called a “free market”, where people exchange things of value at a price dictated by supply and demand. If there aren’t enough IT workers, businesses are supposed to offer more money to attract them, and that’s supposed to encourage more people to acquire the skills needed to meet the demand. Somehow, though, that kind of market driven process goes out the window the moment it would result in money flowing out of the pockets of big companies and into the pockets of their non-mangement employees.
Zifnab
“Hey, if you want to bring in immigrants so badly why not make them citizens rather than dicking around with the ridiculous H1-B visa program?”
Should be the answer to anyone that supports this shamnisty of 2nd class citizenship.
Irish Steel
The quality of Indian food has risen dramatically here in State Farm town over the past decade. About a third of my students are Indian too.
Gex
My bad. As a lesser, you must always grovel and be gracious. You cannot be angry or bitter. You can be called names, but you cannot call names. Be a complete suck up, or you don’t even deserve support. Don’t make anyone feel bad about privilege. Don’t have your own interests, attitudes, or opinions. Be meek! We’ll let you know what you can and cannot do, what you can and cannot say. Tone police are in town and they want to have a word with me I’m sure.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Zandar and DougJ bait: A writer at Salon has declared Jon Stewart’s latest tantrum about Obama to be Stewart’s “Cronkite moment”. So a tone-deaf blunder by a regional IRS office, which resulted in no one being denied the tax-exempt status they were seeking, is Obama’s Tet Offensive
gene108
I call bullshit on this.
The H1-b workers I know are a lot more demanding about being paid top dollar than their American counterparts.
The appeal of H1-b visas is companies DO NOT NEED TO TRAIN ANYMORE.
They outsource the training to companies in India, who take kids fresh out of college, dump them into a field – .Net, Java, SAP ABAP or whatever – and train them up.
That way, when an IT company wants to hire an entry level programmer with 2-3 years experience, they have them ready to go from India or where ever.
Getting an entry level programming type job, without work experience, is damn near impossible.
Roger Moore
@MattMinus:
Except that plumbers tend to be unionized, at least where I live. Skilled trades like plumbing and electrical work are exactly where unions make the most sense.
cvstoner
While I support immigration reform, and am sympathetic to the idea that it should be sensitive to the needs of employers, there’s a fine line between “guest worker” and “indentured servant”.
Exactly. People focus on the money, and rightly so. But another important consideration is that the so-called “guest workers” are much less likely to complain when being taken advantage of.
There is no shortage of skilled domestic IT labor in this country, just a shortage of smart people who are willing to work for cheap wages, lousy benefits, and keep their mouths shut about it.
Gex
@Roger Moore: This.
Dear Free Market Evangelists,
Goods and capital can cross borders freely right? Then so should labor. Meaning if you want to keep on with the globalization trend, then immigration around the world needs to change to allow workers to move as freely as the other pillars of capitalism.
Immigration rules should rightly be seen as anti-market tariffs.
Roy G.
By all means, give Zucky the smackdown, but how about some props for Elon Musk? He blew the whistle on this little cabal, and he’s the überest geek there is – like Hank Rearden and John Galt all rolled together, except he’s willingly giving his own money to fix the 405, amongst the other small things he does.
Villago Delenda Est
The solution is tumbrels. Period.
Barry
“and am sympathetic to the idea that it should be sensitive to the needs of employers”
I’m not. What employers want is cheap, cowed, labor which can be easily punished.
Gex
To be fair, people who hate gays say that we rape children and fuck animals. It is nearly as bad as when us gays describe straight people as breeders, particularly when one of the main arguments in the issue is that straight people make babies and we don’t.
Fuck this noise. Fuck everything. Fuck Todd. Fuck the constant downward punching by allies. Fuck fuck fuck fuck.
Fuck this fucking fuck fuck world.
I hereby resolve to be the kind of person who sees someone in pain and tries to figure out exactly where to kick them to make it worse. Trying to do otherwise is what a chump does.
jamick6000
@jayackroyd: yeah, I work in the sciences and know a lot of people on work visas. Many are pushed a lot harder by their boss to be working all the time. And the employee basically has to because they live with a chronic fear of getting kicked out of the country if their boss decides to get rid of them. It’s especially a problem for people with kids.
Zifnab
@mike with a mic:
Employment. The ultimate “personal responsibility”. If you are unemployed, it’s entirely your fault. If you are underemployed, it’s entirely your fault. If you’ve got an education and can’t find a job, it’s your fault. If you don’t have an education and you can’t find a job, it’s your fault. If you have an education, but the student loan debt far exceeds the salary your job offers? Your fault.
Economic trends, structural shifts in employment, and immigration patterns are utterly irrelevant to your ability to find a job. Just remember, kids. If you are struggling daily… If you feel you did everything by the book, but just can’t catch a break… If it feels like the whole world is pitted against you in one giant conspiracy of scam artists…
You’re just an unworthy sack of shit. You don’t deserve what you have, and you should thank Job Creator Jesus that we haven’t thrown you out on the refuse pit yet for wasting our precious breathing space. Your lot in life is entirely, completely, 100%, no questions asked your. own. fault.
scav
@Gex: The mid to late adoptors claiming all homage for the conception, creation and implementation of the entire parade, patting themselves on the back for the choice of colors and route and insisting everyone write them thank you letters praising their efforts? What in there could possibly be a trigger?
Roger Moore
@Xantar:
She’s pissed because she’s in MN, and her state passed marriage equality just a few months after the death of her long-term partner. It’s an example of how real people are losing out every day we delay in granting marriage equality nationwide.
ETA: “Granting” is the wrong word.
mattH
@RSA:
I would bet it includes paralegals as well as JDs.
dww44
@Petorado: I love this! Needs to be broadcast all over the internet.
Keith G
An off topic aside: On this morning of a glorious day off, I delayed breakfast to re-watch an old favorite, Chinatown, on Amazon Prime.
It’s been years. What a glorious movie.
Villago Delenda Est
@mike with a mic:
You need to ride on Zuckerberg’s tumbrel, asshole.
Omnes Omnibus
@mike with a mic: Aha, the old “you can’t have both social progress and economic reform at the same time” guy is back.
jamick6000
@gene108: ok but overall it still has the effect of depressing wages.
Va Highlander
@Zifnab:
I see you’ve met my parents.
scav
@Roger Moore: In part. There also seem to have been a few straight people explaining the proper way to do due deference to them and how to congratulate them on the splendid quickness of their conversion to the cause which, of course, was no true cause until they decided to agree, and should procede at no greater speed than they, the fecund, were comfortable with.
Johnny Coelacanth
@Cassidy: I think she did her best work with Frank Black anyway.
Roger Moore
@RSA:
I suspect that’s a lot of it. It turns out that people have a lot of respect for law degrees, so they can be a ticket to advancement in other fields. My impression is that the glut of law school graduates winds up being absorbed by other fields, like management. Once they’ve gone into another area, though, they don’t get counted in the unemployment statistics for the legal field.
jamick6000
@Petorado:
exactly! I forget who said it first, but our immigration system basically subsidizes rich people having nannies.
JustMe
@Gex: You can. You just might be ignored.
Honestly, when a comment starts with “OT, but…” my eyes tend to glaze over.
Narcissus
Can we outsource the media to a bunch of hardworking Indians and Chinese dudes for pennies on the dollar
Matt Yglesias can get a certification to suck dick under a bridge
jayackroyd
@Petorado: Dean Baker talks about similar issues in his book The End of Loser Liberalism. He notes that professions like law and medicine are protected from both foreign and domestic competition in their labor markets.
Roger Moore
@scav:
I think the straights congratulating themselves would be a lot more tolerable if it weren’t for her personal loss. They’re crowing about how fast they moved the issue, but it wasn’t fast enough for Gex. Equality delayed is equality denied to the people who lost their chance to get married.
Keith G
@mike with a mic:
In the post industrial economy, immigration becomes a dicier issue, more than at any other time in our society’s history. Part of that seems to be the notion that immigrant labor is an important part of our economic viability, but large pools of effective immigrant labor do create, what is in effect, their own negative externalties. Managing the trade offs and opportunity costs will become even more important as the years pass.
But mike, your equation of concern about this (as voiced here) with racism is bullshit.
Chet
No, actually, it doesn’t. Empirically doesn’t. It’s one of the most resilient findings in sociology and economics that immigration doesn’t depress wages, but for some reason, everybody continues to pretend like the reverse is true.
Imagine an average US city. I tell you that 1200 software engineers are moving there every year. Does that sound like “boom times for engineers” or “tough times for engineers” to you? If you (correctly) answered the former, then what’s the basis for your assumption that immigration into a city from the rest of the country is Good, but immigration into the country from another country is Bad? Is it just that everybody says that it’s bad, maybe?
jayackroyd
@Eric U.: Thanks.
RSA
@mattH, @Roger Moore: Thanks. Both explanations make sense.
scav
@Roger Moore: Of course. Just that having an actual face up in yours, demanding congratulations plus respect, and telling you how things should be done, is a hell of a trigger.
liberal
@RSA:
Unemployment rates notoriously don’t track those “not in the labor force”.
Julia Grey
They’re probably counting paralegals and legal librarians and clerks and such. There’s a good demand for non-lawyers to do all the research, motion drafting and other “jr. associate”-type work these days, but not so much interest in hiring actual members of the bar, who tend to be expensive.
This means, of course, that if you hire a firm which is staffing in this manner, you may not be getting trained legal (read: sneaky and convoluted) minds working on your case. A paralegal is unlikely to be able to see the obscure detail that might make a difference in your liability, for instance, or do that back-to-the-source-of-the-filing reasoning/thinking that they drill into you in law school. That backtracking also can bring out a missing fact or error (or another lawyer’s cute trick) that might be missed by someone who hadn’t been forced to find those kinds of things and write them up in 1L.
liberal
@Roger Moore:
Exactly. (Dean Baker makes this point repeatedly in a context broader than IT.)
liberal
@Gex:
The really only good reason for policing your own tone in such a matter is merely one of tactical effectiveness. But in terms of whether you have the _right_ to be pissed and use language which reflects that, there’s no valid argument against it.
liberal
@Keith G:
Agreed.
Omnes Omnibus
@jayackroyd: The legal field is less protected than one might suspect. Large amounts of discovery work are now being off-shored. It is not glamorous legal work but is it necessary to litigation. First, it was outsourced domestically, and then it started moving overseas. As long as it is “supervised” by a domestically barred attorney, it is considered acceptable. I could write page upon page laying out my disagreement with the practice.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Chet: Except you just mixed issues. Immigration is not “moving from another city in the country.” Immigration is moving people from a different country. When the supply of labor doesn’t change and there’s more demand for the labor, the cost per person goes up. When the supply of labor goes up – immigration – and there’s no increase in demand, the cost per person goes down.
I thought you understood capitalism.
Violet
@Petorado:
Been saying this for years. It will happen eventually, but the problem is, those CEO types all know each other from Davos and sitting on each others’ boards and whatever, so they all want the big bucks or Euros. Their loyalty is to the rich class, not country or culture.
Omnes Omnibus
@liberal: She prefaced it as venting. Given that, I doubt that she was out to persuade anyone, but rather just ranting to get it out.
Keith G
@Chet: Not all scholarly work agrees with that, as in this paper that I had to reference several years ago.
Roger Moore
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
There’s your mistake: believing that Chet knows anything but trolling.
liberal
@Chet:
Hard to believe; to first order, increasing the supply of anything will tend to decrease its price.
Not that there can’t be counter-effects. But your claim that it’s essentially settled is doubtful.
liberal
@Omnes Omnibus:
OK, sure; but more generally, I think the only good argument against ranting with some unclean, unkind language is that it’s not tactically effective. This “we need to be civil” stuff is just BS.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@liberal: Anecdote, for sure, but even when the last company I worked for closed their Indian outsource and brought some of the programmers to the US, they didn’t raise their wages up to match all of the local employees.
qkslvrwolf
I work in IT, at Akamai. I disagree with this as being a problem. We’re desperate for people. We can’t find people to fill jobs, and we already have a lot of people that are immigrants. We have a 6k referral bonus. I have a friend that works for car gurus that has a 20k referral bonus. There simply aren’t enough people out there to do the work, as is.
Also, I would argue that this is not a zero sum game. I’ve known a lot of good companies and start ups that were started by immigrants who originally came over on a work visa that are providing good jobs for Americans now. I would say we want the best, most motivated people to come to America and work, because they will create new jobs.
And yes, there are horror stories of people having to retrain replacements. I’m not worried though, I know exactly how much of an employee’s market it is right now in IT. Somebody is dumb enough to fire me for someone cheaper? Ok. I’ll probably get a raise out of it. But seriously, that doesn’t happen. At least not in Boston, I seriously doubt in Silicon Valley, either.
Tripod
@mike with a mic:
Well, we talked it over, and while the Paki guy’s beard was off putting, everyone figured you to be far more likely to shoot up the office. I would also note the mad IT skillz you think you have aren’t in evidence by your work history, industry certs or technical interview. But thanks again for applying and good luck in your search.
Higgs Boson's Mate
@Omnes Omnibus:
I’d be more sympathetic if Gex hadn’t used the word “breeders.” That stinks on ice.
qkslvrwolf
I’d also be really curious to see what this actually means: “including in a recent report from the Obama-aligned Economic Policy Institute, which found that the country is producing 50 percent more IT professionals each year than are being employed in the field.”
Because there are lots of people getting “technician” degrees from JuCos and training facilities. That’s nice, but that’s not the same as a good software engineer.
pseudonymous in nc
@LongHairedWeirdo:
Well, some of them are. And that’s part of the problem: the H1-B covers everything from the headhunted tech hire brought in from Europe on a six-figure salary to the Infosys insource/outsource brigades. The broadness of the category confuses things, and the visa class needs to change to narrow it down.
(And I hate to say it, but “IT Worker” is not really a job category. On the Infosys/Wipro side, there’s a fair amount of fungibility, and gene108’s comment sums up that situation, but a lot of the skills on the higher end are pretty specialised, and there’s little enthusiasm for training up workers when the tech landscape changes so fast.)
Omnes Omnibus
@Higgs Boson’s Mate: I am not a gay woman from a racial minority group who recently lost her life-partner so I am not completely sure how this works, but I think that people sometimes use intemperate language in rants. Besides, is breeder a horrible slur?
Cassidy
I have a great idea! Let’s all keep telling the nice lady who’s partner just died how she should feel and how she should express said feelings, especailly now that she is legally allowed to marry…just not her partner of many, many years. This sounds like an excellent plan.
/SM-fucking-H
ETA: “Breeders”…get the fuck over it. People are allowed to be pissed.
liberal
@qkslvrwolf:
At what wages, and what qualifications?
AFAICT “can’t find people” means “we want you to have three years experience with widget X, and we’re not going to hire anyone who might take a couple weeks on the job to learn it.”
scav
@Higgs Boson’s Mate: poor dear. Life is just so unfair.
liberal
@Cassidy:
Yeah…I’ve “bred” (dealt with the two rascals while their mom spent Mother’s Day in Vegas!), and I took no offense.
The Moar You Know
And starting with comment #1 we cut right through the bullshit to the core of the problem: if our native IT employees won’t stand up for themselves, why the fuck should anyone else?
Look who’s been funding abortion rights/anti-abortion groups for the last thirty years. Especially the higher-dollar donors – it’s the same group of people, both sides.
I wonder why that would be?
qkslvrwolf
And while I absolutely support getting as many computer people to come to the US and work, I’d also like to see engineers of all stripes unionize. We’re well paid, but compared to the CEOs? Not nearly enough. ‘course I feel guilty saying that, ’cause most Americans are doing far, far worse. :-(
Omnes Omnibus
@liberal:
This might be the scariest thing I’ve read on the ‘tubes all week.
Violet
@Gex: I’m sorry you’re having a rough time right now. Sending you lots of love and healing thoughts and virtual hugs. Hang in there. Be good to yourself and if you can find the energy do something nice for yourself. You deserve it.
pseudonymous in nc
@qkslvrwolf:
Point is, Akamai’s not going to train up staff in anything other than the specific stuff that’s unique to the company. And I understand that mindset in tech, but if they can’t fill needed positions, it’s no use closing their eyes and wishing for people with the baseline skillset to appear by magic.
qkslvrwolf
Well, software engineers, and I make 120k, which I believe is about average for everyone, including the immigrants.
When I got hired, I had zero experience in what they wanted (QA test), but they were more than happy to train me up.
Now, akamai is a bit more out there on that front, ’cause we’ve got so much internal tooling no one who isn’t already employed here is gonna know anything anyway. There is some constraint by wanting particulars, for sure.
liberal
@Omnes Omnibus:
Believe me—given the nature of the
twinsTier III Destructobeasts, I’m the one who’s scared.Roger Moore
@pseudonymous in nc:
Which is a huge part of the problem. Businesses don’t want to spend their own time and money building up employees to have the skills they need. Instead, they expect to fire people when their projects are done, hire new people with different skills to do their next project, and never have any problems finding people with the exact list of skills they need at the price they want to pay. It’s completely out of touch with reality.
qkslvrwolf
And I get sent to a conference about every 2 months, all in tech that isn’t specific to akamai. I spend a bunch more time on learning internal stuff.
mattH
I’d like a link or 3, because all the studies I have seen that addressed the alck of impact on wages pertain to low wage workers, not skilled and educated professionals.
Higgs Boson's Mate
@Omnes Omnibus:
It’s objectionable to me because it applies to anyone who isn’t gay, no matter how sympathetic they are or how much they’ve done for marriage equality.
The Moar You Know
@qkslvrwolf: I don’t normally like getting like this, but bullshit.
My family owns an IT shop – can’t get more specific than that, sorry – and for every opening we advertise we get anywhere between twenty and a hundred resumes, most (+80%) qualified. Maybe we pay people decently. But qualified people are busting down the doors to work.
Oh yeah, no H1B or any non-citizens. That’s required by the laws under which we do our work.
Now trying to hire government contracts people, that’s a hard market to find people in right now.
liberal
@qkslvrwolf:
Since I’m thinking of relocating to the Boston area anyway, want to back that up with an offer to refer my resume internally?
(I have a friend who worked there for years; he left recently. Haven’t applied for anything because I don’t recall seeing anything on job boards, but then again I’ve been busy lately.)
raven
@Higgs Boson’s Mate: FIDO
Suffern ACE
@qkslvrwolf:
I just want to point out that that transition from H1 to immigrant is not available, especially for the workers at the contractors. They will not sponsor and do not sponsor. I remember reading a response at either Dawn or India Today to regarding Wipro’s claim about the contribution of that their workers enhanced american society and it was rather chilling. Wipro, infosys, tata, etc. are responsible for a few thousand H1Bs a year and sponsored a less than a few dozen for residency. Oracle itself sponsored 600.
I can see the issue. Do Tata and Infosys hire US workers to work at its US facilities (sales doesn’t count).
liberal
@Roger Moore:
One example of this: while I’m kind of a jack of all trades at work, the most accurate job title I have would be “biostatistician”.
The resume I’ve posted at job boards reflects that. The only unsolicited leads I get are from pharma, and I’m amazed at the fraction of statistician work they want to hire on contract.
This is highly technical work by very educated people, and these positions are contract-based?
Higgs Boson's Mate
@scav:
My life is what it is. Nice try.
RSA
@pseudonymous in nc:
I ranted a bit on Facebook about this piece yesterday: “Sorry, College Grads, I Probably Won’t Hire You.” Check out the arrogance:
The writer proposes that states provide better training (leaving unsaid that this should be paid for by taxypayers), that companies should support schools more, and that non-techies “dabble in a bit of Python.” He notably doesn’t suggest that his company could pay more or provide the necessary training.
Cassidy
@Omnes Omnibus: I always tell people I’ve been laid at least 4 times; I have 4 kids.
@liberal: Just kind of annoyed. Gex is nice and always has been. If I came on here and ranted and some people were saying “ha! you deserve it dick.”, I’d get it because I can be a bit of an asshole. But Gex is cool. Some people just gotta get it out.
ericblair
@qkslvrwolf:
If you mean that you’re having trouble hiring people at the Masters/PhD level with multiple years of Hadoop experience and a CCNA, then yes, and we are too (with the added bonus of needing an active security clearance).
There’s a real purple squirrel problem in IT, for multiple reasons as I see it. The “best” reason is that things move so fast that you need people you can use now and can’t wait for training. Another structural reason you get sometimes is that companies don’t really want to pay to train up people from scratch just to get poached by the competition, which is a problem that companies brought on themselves by tossing loyalty out the window. Then there’s the ass-covering reason that you as a hiring manager don’t want to take a risk hiring somebody who isn’t a proven quantity in that particular job, even if it means the position goes unfilled.
So we’re all chasing the same group of people with the latest hot skill sets, and there’s a big group of people who have a real rough time getting into the club.
qkslvrwolf
I can certainly take your resume and give it to ’em. What do you do?
The one caveat I will make is that our HR deparment, according to a friend of mine who is cashing in on the referral program (bastard has 4 referrals…that’s a lot of extra scratch). He’d have more, but HR is…surprisingly unresponsive. It’s an issue that is getting some pretty severe complaints from everyone that has recs open.
Check out the careers site and let me know if there’s a specific job you want to be put in against. Like I said, there’s a lot of internal only stuff, so depending on the team, they can be pretty flexible as long as you’re good at learning.
qkslvrwolf
(Also, Tom Levenson works like 3 blocks away, which I must admit I geek out about :-)
Higgs Boson's Mate
@raven:
Accepted.
liberal
@mattH:
I don’t even buy it in the case of low-wage workers.
More generally, the only argument that is especially convincing is the case where a firm can easily outsource its labor overseas. In those cases, domestic labor might be screwed regardless.
Though Yves Smith (NakedCapitalism.com) makes the case that outsourcing overseas introduces coordination problems, which requires spending a lot more on management level stuff. But they like doing that anyway, so…
KXB
@mike with a mic:
Um, my family is from India, I have 2 siblings that work in IT, and many of their co-workers are from India on H1-Bs. I don’t hate this system, but I do have heavy misgivings. My sister is an Indian-American in an office with mostly Indian H1-Bs, and she studied alongside plenty of people who could do their job. The H1-Bs are well compensated, but they are tied down to their employer in a way that a green card holder or citizen is not.
I work for a small engineering company, and we often cannot get Americans to work for us, because we cannot offer generous benefit packages like our much larger competitors. Also, since we are a really small business, each of us often has to do stuff that is not in our job description. A guy who pursued a Ph.D finds himself narrating a web seminar, or an MBA (me) is in customer service, walking non-English speakers through our website to place an order. Some people do not want to deal with that. I know there are days I don’t.
Given our small size, an American engineer fresh out of school may not think there is much room to advance. A foreign grad-student may give us a chance, lest he/she be sent back to their home country.
One reform I am in favor of is allowing students who are here on a visa and graduate to stay. Having them find a job right away puts tremendous pressure, and they may decide they would rather go into business for themselves.
Omnes Omnibus
@liberal: Hiring contractors is easier. No benefits, no severance, discard at will. From the company’s point of view, what’s not to like – aside from lack of continuity, lack of institutional knowledge, lack of loyalty (if you no you are gone at the end of the project, why would you stick around if a marginally better offer comes down the pike?), etc.?
Roger Moore
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
Tell it to the grieving not-legally-a-widow-because-marriage-equality-wasn’t-passed-in-time.
? Martin
People really oversimplify the H1B visa issue.
The main abuses of the system are the large consultant firms like InfoSys (based in India) that bring B.S. level engineers to the US, train them here at US graduate programs while working here, and then send them back home. That’s indeed a problem, but it’s one that is somewhat orthogonal to the real issue that H1B is intended to solve.
The main problem is that US students are unwilling to pursue graduate degrees in the numbers that employers need. Many top US tech companies (folks like Broadcom, Google, Intel) hire some M.S. engineers, but mostly hire PhDs. The percentage of domestic students in engineering PhD programs in this country is down to something like 30%. And it’s not like these companies don’t pay well – there’s plenty of incentive from the market to pursue the degree, but there’s insufficient funding at the graduate level to support the number of PhD candidates that we need. Faculty can’t get enough grant money to support them. States are choking off the funding as well. So programs are increasingly turning to foreign students that bring their own money. And that’s where the need for the H1B develops.
JustMe
@KXB: I work for a small engineering company, and we often cannot get Americans to work for us, because we cannot offer generous benefit packages
Do you offer health insurance, retirement, and stock options? If so, great. If not, I don’t blame people who want to maintain a decent standard of living for not wanting to work for your company.
qkslvrwolf
@ericblair: I’ll agree that’s a problem, although not one I see as being the same as “they’re driving wages down by hiring from overseas!”
I have heard some rumbles of people addressing that, but of course it’ll remain to be seen whether it gets wide enough attention and action.
CEOs are still evil, even for IT companies.
ranchandsyrup
Have a friend that is a CEO of an IT staffing group and his take is that there are very few companies that can (I read as “want to”) pay the current salary demands for US workers so quite a few customers are outsourcing or putting projects on hold. He set aside high level IT workers and focused on the standard developing/testing functions. Most of these are contractors. But without cheap H1B workers the companies have to use permanent employees on these tasks which results in the work being more expensive and slower.
He also said that the US contract workers are in the catbird seat because they get a lot of offers to jump ship from where they are when a large company needs work urgently and are willing to pay.
He says right now there are 150K open positions that have been out there for 6 months or more.
Chris
@RSA:
Modern day American employers have the most extraordinary sense of entitlement. They truly expect fully formed whiz kids, 110% familiar with every last aspect of the job AND the two dozen side jobs you’ll assign to them to fall from the sky like so many raindrops. And yet, on the rare occasions when they find such whiz kids, they fully expect them to work for them forty hours a week with unpaid overtime on evenings and weekends for $7.25 an hour. And they’re truly shocked, SHOCKED, when these whiz kids leave them at the drop of a hat for their competitor down the street who had the innovative idea of offering them one more dollar.
“No one will hire me because I don’t have experience because no one will hire me” is an old joke but it’s becoming more and more of an insane truth in a world where employers refuse to offer on-the-job training or anything of that nature.
As I’ve said a million times about the job market… if you refuse to invest anything but the absolute bare minimum in your employees, they will invest nothing but the absolute bare minimum in you. (And you can hardly complain if in the process you’re creating a market where employees and potential employees don’t have the skills you wish they had).
liberal
@qkslvrwolf:
I’ll post an email address in a comment on the blog you link in your name; is that OK? I’ll have to find one that’s relatively anonymous first, though; the live.com one I was going to use looks like it was deleted (inactivity).
qkslvrwolf
What Martin said. We graduate MBAs like they’re toilet paper, or “Information Management Systems’ degrees from business schools (which I’m pretty sure get counted as IT degrees even though they’re just useless management degrees), but waaaay too few people get good, solid engineering degrees. Part of that is with the structure of our education (fail once, you’re done, anathema to functioning IT, which is do, fail, learn, repeat), but part is also that we have very little in the way of encouraging people to get useful degrees. (Before anyone yells: Philosophy = useful. Literature = useful. Business = crap. Communiations = crap.)
qkslvrwolf
or you can just send me an email: qkthrow, and I use the Big G.
liberal
@? Martin:
But that’s a chicken-and-egg problem. Presumably more people would go into those fields if the pay were higher.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@? Martin: So, how many US companies are willing to pay for these graduate degrees? They are not cheap.
It sounds like, once again, the companies just want someone who knows what to do, without investing in the person.
liberal
@qkslvrwolf:
Thanks. I appreciate your kindness in this, despite the disagreement on policy issues in this thread.
schrodinger's cat
@? Martin: Two points, there is glut of PhDs, people languish in post-doc positions forever. There aren’t enough jobs in academia. Which is the reason most people go into a PhD program in the first place.
2. Graduate students in the sciences and engineering don’t pay their own way, this includes international students. They are usually on an assistantship which carries a stipend and tuition waiver.
Omnes Omnibus
@qkslvrwolf:
Nice save.
qkslvrwolf
“No one will hire me because I don’t have experience because no one will hire me” is an old joke but it’s becoming more and more of an insane truth in a world where employers refuse to offer on-the-job training or anything of that nature.
I had this problem when I first graduated, for sure. I haven’t had it as much since then, but of course, now I have experience. I’ve shifted job titles a lot though. Sysadmin->systems engineer->QA engineer-> release engineer. Most of the shifts have happened in house, but not all.
scav
@Higgs Boson’s Mate: Wasn’t trying anything. So long as you’re content with your perfection, why should the opinions of mere mortals matter? So it’s not as though my comment was directed toward you, certainly not with the expectation of convincing you, the perfectly brushed under all circumstances. Metatag for others, possibly, or just a microcomment.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@qkslvrwolf: I don’t have time to look up the study, but what your saying is bullshit. There are more than enough people that graduate with engineering degrees. It’s been documented.
qkslvrwolf
@Belafon: everywhere I’ve ever worked pays 5k a year in training for degrees, + free conferences. I guess it’s not all of it, but I thought it was decent…
raven
@Higgs Boson’s Mate: Only a suggestion. I’ve written 5 comments on this issue and deleted every one of them.
liberal
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
One big problem of course is that of positive externalities; if you educate someone, what’s to say they won’t just go work for another company? Sure, there are ways to try to get around that (contracts), but from a policy perspective that’s not ideal either.
One point (perhaps not original to him) one of my favorite USENET posters made is that due to the fact you can’t truly “capitalize” investments in education without mechanisms like indentured servitude, the “market” will underinvest in education. Thus, the state should take upon itself to do so (contrary to all the glibertarian people who say we shouldn’t because well-educated people will make more money in the long run anyway than other taxpayers).
Trollhattan
@Omnes Omnibus:
Don’t you want somebody to shove?
If we wanted to forge sufficient “affordable and qualified” tech people, presuming there’s actually a shortage and this isn’t an elaborate fabrication to craft more-better quarterlies, by golly we could educate them ourselves. Yet we seem to lack interest in doing so; I wonder why that is?
I’m guessing there are many thousands of unemployed and underemployed ‘merkin tech folks.
KXB
@JustMe:
We have 3 full-time employees (including the owner), three part-timers. We are based in IL, but because we have a very small office in CA, we pay substantial taxes to CA. Having recently turned 40, my health insurance went up 20%. On paper, my salary and benefits went up, but I did not see a nickel of it.
Meanwhile, companies with dozens or hundreds of employees can dangle generous benefit packages to propsects. We have to compete for talent, and H1-Bs are one of the tools that help us. Of course, plenty of big companies are competing for that same pool of H1-Bs.
Mnemosyne
@Gex:
Okay, I’m going to throw in some pitch-black humor here, and we’ll see if it comes across:
But but you’ll be able to marry your next partner! Shouldn’t that be good enough for you?
/straightsplainer
Chris
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Ding ding ding.
“There’s no such thing as a free lunch” applies to Job Creators and Captains of Industry too. You cannot have a skilled workforce if you’re not willing to pay for it. Any more than I can have a cheeseburger at Burger King without shelling out a dollar and twenty nine cents.
Businessmen really have become the aristocracy of our day, expecting the entire world to bend to their every whim simply because “don’t you know who I AM?”
ETA: and no, I’m not limiting myself to IT; it’s the entire job market that’s become like that.
qkslvrwolf
@Belafon: All I know is, the only thing people in the industry are complaining about is not enough people. And I’m not saying the CEOs: I’m saying the low-level managers who get recs and can’t fill them. So you need to find the study at let me look at it, because my reality isn’t matching your study.
liberal
@schrodinger’s cat:
Big problem is that many views were formed a few generations ago, when they were creating entire universities from scratch.
In the long run, in terms of tenured professorships, we shouldn’t expect the number of positions to grow much faster than population. So all the profs who mint PhDs, basically only one of them will be able to get a job (in a long-run equilibrium).
There’s other problems, like NIH funding. It’s a perennial gripe about how hard it is to get a grant; yet over the past few decades funding has increased quite a bit (if not recently). One of the more convincing explanations I read is that big increases in funding leads to the creation of more institutes, research programs, etc, which leads to a much greater supply of potential investigators. So when aggregate funding no longer increases, the situation is just as competitive as before.
Finally, there’s an enormous conflict of interest. This came up in my own field, where NSF had a study (later debunked) showing a huge demand as profs retired. And you can see it in graduate departments everywhere; law schools; etc. It’s in the professor and schools interest to graduate lots of students—it makes them look good, might increase their funding; etc. So it’s a win-win, except for the graduate students, and for them not until long down the road.
ericblair
@qkslvrwolf:
Right, it’s a problem with the industry in general. Another problem is HR, which is very good at picking out keywords from zillions of resumes but shit at figuring out who could actually do the job with a couple months of training. If you’re a hiring manager, it’s like pulling teeth to get a decent set of resumes from HR even if they exist.
A foreign angle to this is how expensive universities are in the US compared to other countries. It’s insane. We’ve given most foreign candidates a huge headstart in education when they have to pay little or nothing for multiple degrees. Of course, it doesn’t benefit actual academics at US universities, who are getting squeezed into subsistence piecework adjunct positions by university administration.
qkslvrwolf
What KXB is going through is a major problem, and it actually means that there are less available businesses that can open up. Also, there is the concentration factor: there are good reasons for people to start their web companies here in the states, but if we keep sending all the talent back to other countries, those good reasons will degrade.
On the other hand, i’d love to go work in another country, so maybe if that goes far enough other countries will start letting Americans in…hmm….Send ’em back! ;-)
(I only kid because by the time it goes that far, I’ll be to old to want to galavant about the world anymore)
qkslvrwolf
Agree with everything you’re saying, eric.
qkslvrwolf
Belafon and Chris, what do you think is a reasonable investment in graduate work for companies? Curious because I know what companies currently offer.
liberal
@KXB:
No offense, I’m sure you’re sincere, a good person, etc (and I’d ask you about your company too, except that I’m not thinking of relocating to IL or CA).
But…in some testimony years ago about H1-B, etc, some small business owner made similar arguments. She was saying, IIRC, that she was able to get a sysadmin for a very reasonable wage through these programs, and it enabled her business to thrive.
Well, every time I pay for something—at the grocery store, gas station, mortgage bill, etc—it would be really nice to get a price cut, because it would help me thrive, too. But somehow that doesn’t happen.
schrodinger's cat
@liberal: The root cause of all our problems is the fact that our policies have favored capital over labor since at least the 80s. The austerity debates, unemployment problem, etc are all different manifestations of the same problem.
liberal
@qkslvrwolf:
Hmm…
For all the talk about India’s rising middle class, tech sector, etc, the place is a complete $hithole. I don’t mean to be perjorative, but if you look at the female literacy rate, and look at how many people take a crap outside every day because of a lack of sanitary facilities, it’s really really bad.
Of course, that’s not the fault of those people, nor even necessarily those relatively well-off in India. (Solving problems of good governance is a hard problem anywhere.)
China seems to be in much better shape.
liberal
@schrodinger’s cat:
Yep.
danielx
@Gex:
Truly sorry for your loss…it keeps coming back, doesn’t it? Especially when state legislators are bloviating about their enlightened views in 2013.
As I recall: Gex lost a life partner a few short months ago and in my not very humble opinion is entitled to vent on the topic of same sex marriage/lack thereof (or any other topic) in whatever terms or vernacular chosen*.
*Why not, everybody else here does – if you git offended because of name calling or use of the word fuck, you’re in the wrong place and should seek another source of opinion and commentary, quickly. Possibly the editorial pages of the Washington Post or the New York Times, where they are never rude and never ever say FUCK. As in FUCK Tom Friedman, David Broder and George Will, just for starters.
? Martin
@liberal:
The starting pay for an engineering PhD is 6 figures – with top notch benefits packages. Honestly, you’re not going to do better than that anywhere but Congress and the NFL.
The problem is that there is insufficient money to support domestic PhD candidates. Engineering PhDs are not expected to pay for school when they can earn $60K with a B.S. degree. The cost of supporting a PhD student is significant, and there isn’t the grant money or the state money to do so.
In short, the nation is making an economic decision – either low taxes and H1Bs or higher taxes and proper support for educating our next generation of tech leaders and entrepreneurs. We’re choosing the former.
liberal
@Trollhattan:
The funny thing is that people like Bill Gates have gone on record trying to encourage people to go into comp sci and related fields in college, yet clearly push for policies that undercut wages.
pseudonymous in nc
@RSA:
Applies beyond tech. Once there were apprenticeships in things like welding. Now you’re expected to pay your own way through technical school / community college and then deal with Galtard employers who fart and moan about how “you just can’t get the staff” at $10/hr. Fuck no. If you were training people up, you could justify it, but you expect to pay apprentice wages without providing apprenticeships.
schrodinger's cat
@liberal:
Only if you are Han Chinese and don’t mind being told what to think and how many children you can have. According to my Chinese friends the development in China is pretty uneven geographically.
liberal
@? Martin:
I’m not sure I buy that.
And IIRC the problem with engineering is that if you’re not promoted to management, your salary growth will be relatively flat even over the long haul.
liberal
@schrodinger’s cat:
I was going to type, and didn’t, that I have an American-born Chinese high school friend who’s done some collaboration over there, and it’s not the greatest if you’re not Chinese or not fluent. OTOH, that’s probably true of a lot of nations.
liberal
@schrodinger’s cat:
I’m sure that’s true. But the difference in aggregate stats between China and India is astonishing.
schrodinger's cat
@liberal: They are pretty terrible to their ethnic minorities, see for example Tibet.
pseudonymous in nc
@liberal:
It depends on the company. Leaner, more engineering-driven tech firms hate coordinating projects like that, so having to wait on the next round of H1-Bs for their foreign hires (because Infosys/Wipro et al. have scalped them all) means setting up satellite offices and trying to coordinate over big timezone differences and it’s a complete pain.
There’s a lot of irony in how web-centric tech businesses really don’t work well with telecommuting or any kind of remote workflow.
schrodinger's cat
@liberal: India’s political class could give Congressional Republicans a run for their money in sheer ineptitude and crassness.
The Moar You Know
@liberal: It’s not. I’ve been there. Outside of the cities the average Chinese peasant lives a life little different from their Neolithic ancestors.
pseudonymous in nc
@qkslvrwolf:
Master of Bugger All.
? Martin
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Quite a lot of them. If you want to know why top tech companies stay so close to top engineering schools, this is part of the reason. Stanford is not a large university – they have about 7,000 undergraduates on campus. They have 3,300 graduate students just in engineering.
$40,000 for a masters degree is fucking cheap to an employer that’s already paying a B.S. $60K plus benefits plus the cost of recruiting and training them.
There’s a lot of cheap-ass IT out there, don’t get me wrong, but there’s just as much gold-star IT/Engineering with signing bonuses and the whole lot. I know a few folks that came to the US on H1B visas and they’re fucking superstars. It’s not to say there aren’t equally qualified people in the US, but these folks often aren’t in high need of a job. If anything you’re going to have to poach them, which is fine (wages go up), but it doesn’t address the demand. The company you poached them from still needs that talent. At some point you need to find a domestic student coming out of a program in the US and there are too damn few of them. Period.
Tyro
@? Martin: The starting pay for an engineering PhD is 6 figures – with top notch benefits packages. Honestly, you’re not going to do better than that anywhere but Congress and the NFL.
Doctors, nurse practitioners, and physicians assistants all do as well. Management consultant with the equivalent years of experience to having a PhD do as well.
Engineering is one of those things that pays a relatively high starting salary but is not actually that high in the scheme of things, given the level of effort, quantitative skills, and education required. It’s fine, though.
pacem appellant
I work in IT in the Silicon Valley (in a very specific specialization, but my IT tendrils reach long) and I have never, ever, not even once, met a single IT professional who is lazy, underperforming, or glibertarian. While I concede that one, maybe two must exist out there (as I’m sure there’s a gliber in every profession, like blogging, finance, or interior design), there are not as numerous as portrayed in such scientifically accurate movies like Jurassic Park or Golden Eye.
All folks I’ve interacted with in IT (not management, mind you, I have known IT managers who don’t know SOX from what’s between their toes and soles) are good natured, eager to help out, genuinely remorseful when the systems they are tasked to keep heathy fail, and probably underpaid for the crap they have to put up with.
The H1B employees I’ve worked with are also all very talented and wonderful, but I’ve never encountered them in IT. Mostly it was in very specific engineering specializations, like IC design and civil engineering.
Ol’ Zuck may think he wants cheap labor from the PRC, but Facebook would never be able to take advantage of it (short of moving operations to China). Also, I just read in the Palo Alto paper yesterday that two big backers of Fwd.us have backed out due to the pact running ads in support of the Keystome XL pipeline, decidedly something that has nothing to do with immigration reform as far as SiVl big wigs are concerned.
Trollhattan
@liberal:
Exactly. And I have yet to read of a crisis of lack of applicants to college and university engineering programs. Now that state universities are setting aside more seats for foreign (premium tuition) students, I don’t see this “shortage” being resolved anytime soon.
Mandalay
@liberal:
Of course you meant to be pejorative. You went out of your way to be pejorative. How long did you live there?
Anyone who criticizes blacks, or hispanics, or gays, or the poor on this board rightly gets pounded. But calling a country a “shithole”, or criticizing a nationality simply because they come from a particular country is perfectly OK around here.
BJ: selectively prejudiced, and proud of it!
ericblair
@pseudonymous in nc:
Part because there is so much detailed two-way coordination required in development projects, and (IMHO) mostly because outsourcing is sold as being cheap and naturally the companies are trying to cheap out on overhead. My understanding as well with India is that there’s a small group of ultratalented grads from IIT and the like, and a large mass of people who basically went to Uncle Al’s Technical College and Bait Shop, and not much in the middle.
Ironically, telecommuting was supposed to make domestic employees’ lives so much easier: hey, you can work from Vail, or Miami Beach, it doesn’t matter! Trouble is, management figured out 27 nanoseconds later that someone else could do it from Bangalore too.
? Martin
@schrodinger’s cat:
International MS students pretty much all pay their own way. If you want to know what graduate engineering programs in the US are full of – it’s folks that showed up with proof they had $50K in the bank that US schools can turn out and make a few bucks off of in order to subsidize their domestic programs. Here in CA, a student paying their own way drops $6,000 more each year into our coffers than a domestic student being covered by the state subsidy. The marginal net cost of each domestic student is right now about $2,000 per year. That’s how much of a loss we turn on them. If not for the international students, state universities would have gone bankrupt years ago. If the powers that be (tuition increase, state subsidy, grants – we don’t fucking care) can make up that gap so that the marginal net cost of the next student is even slightly negative (so we have some money left over to upgrade facilities, hire more faculty, etc.) then the universities will wholesale shift from filling seats with students that carry their own money to domestic students. And the H1B demand will shift with that.
This is the consequence of austerity policy plain and simple.
Not in engineering. Why take a $60K per year teaching job when you can earn double that in industry? Good newly minted PhDs are damn hard to find. What you say is true in the Humanities and Social Sciences, though. How much private sector demand for PhDs there? Not much.
LongHairedWeirdo
@Omnes Omnibus:
Nod. There’s nothing saying an H1B can’t be a step in the door for good talent, who can then make it big. But I’ve seen a good number of damn good people with mid-level talent getting paid poorly and overworked.
They’re not geniuses, but they’re pulling their weight, and more, and should be valued for that, both in salary and in benefits (including that ridiculous benefit people now call “work-life balance”. Fucked up world where they need a special term for “you do your job, and then get to go home”).
Trollhattan
@? Martin:
In my experience (couple decades in engineering organizations) the majority of engineers have masters, not PhDs. And ironically, the career path (entry into the land of big bucks) goes from working as an engineer to becoming a project manager to becoming a program manager to becoming a VP with stock options and being there when the company is bought out. SCORE!
The higher up the ladder, the less they’re an engineer to the point where they do approximately zero technical work. People skills: optional.
Mandalay
@? Martin:
I agree. One issue that gets overlooked in IT is that the value gap between a solid, competent performer and a top notch performer is huge. Nobody argues when (say) Michael Jordan or Lionel Messi earns loads more than their team mates, because even at the highest levels they are still obviously so much better than their peers.
But the value of someone who really knows what they are doing in IT is much less obvious. For example, someone attending a meeting and providing a persuasive and compelling reason not to go down a particular path that nobody else had considered might save a company millions. But it is hard to see that IT action as equivalent to scoring a winner in the final as the game ends.
Really good IT people really are worth a lot of money.
? Martin
@liberal:
http://ewc-online.org/data/salaries_data.asp
So, in 2010 it was $89K for PhD starting nationally. It’s higher here in CA. And higher since 2010.
When you’re starting near $100K, that’s really something of a relative problem, no? Nobody is fighting off poverty here. And that data is showing decent salary growth for PhDs. Not so much for M.S., though.
dollared
I don’t know where to begin with this thread, but I must say something: I contract with a tech behemoth. They suck up H-1Bs and they absolutely have two tracks, both destructive to the nation’s well-being: 1) the contract model with Indian and Chinese sweatshop companies, where the H-1Bs get pulled over for tech sweatshop (test and tools) work at 30% of US standard contract rates, displacing jobs that used to be first jobs for college graduates, and 2) “why shouldn’t I lay off 75% of my workers over 40 when I can bring in entire university graduating classes from Turkey and Romania?”
They even seem to accept a 5% rate of old guys that sue them successfully, but keep up with the pattern of literally thousands of layoffs over-40 employees.
H-1B’s don’t just lower wage rates. They eliminate the entry level jobs that got most IT people started in the US, and they cut the life span of engineering jobs by 30%. They make the decision to not be an engineer, and become a math teacher instead, fairly rational.
Roger Moore
@liberal:
Or if non-pay aspects of the job (e.g. job security, being treated as other than a disposable part) were better.
Chris
@qkslvrwolf:
You tell me. Figure out what those skills are that that hand-wringing douchebag I was criticizing wants but can’t find in any applicants. Then figure out how much it would cost to pay for a graduate program that would endow Applicant X with these skills. And then pay for that program. If the problem is that he isn’t getting any qualified applicants, well, start making them.
Chris
@The Moar You Know:
From what I understand, Chinese urban-based industries like having a vast supply of cheap labor, and uses the peasants kind of the way we use illegal immigrants. In other words, feature not bug. Would that be right?
dollared
@Mandalay: That’s true for plumbers and welders too. We resolved that in favor of a bit of compression. Because otherwise it’s madness.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@? Martin: Interesting thread.
You write:
Pretty broad brush there. Maybe it’s that way at Stanford, but it’s not universal by any means.
There are a few things that I think you’re missing:
1) Lots of people go on to get a PhD in STEM because they want to do research. There are many government positions that are still research related, as well as some in industry. A post-doc is often a required stepping-stone for such a research position.
2) Too many professors treat graduate students as low-cost labor. You cannot graduate until you satisfy him/her (even if you’ve done all the work) and I know of cases where graduate students were not paid but could not graduate either until the prof said Ok. In research, yes even in engineering, multiple post-docs are common these days.
3) Graduate education is expensive even if you don’t have to pay tuition. You’re giving up 5-10 years of a “real job” for the privilege of working 60-80+ hours a week in an extremely competitive environment for very low pay. Back in the stone age when I was working on my PhD in engineering, there was a brief time I was making $150 a month. Yeah, I was told people would be beating down my door, too. :-/ Fewer and fewer people are willing to put up with that when they hear stories of new PhDs working at Starbucks.
4) Several PhDs I know went to work for small start-ups that were dependent on SBIR funding. That is drying up. So they’re back on the post-doc merry-go-round.
You’re right that people simplify the H1B issue too much, but a PhD in Engineering is not a way for someone (other than a few superstars) to write their own ticket.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
qkslvrwolf
Liberal, for the other country, I’d take most any industrialized country and some of the less so. My first targets are probably gonna be europe, maybe japan or korea, maybe NZ and australia.
qkslvrwolf
Also agree very much with ImNotSure. Several of my classmates got PhDs. They love teaching, but can’t stand how hard it is to get a spot and how much you’re expected to sacrifice.
Mandalay
@dollared:
Right. And I’m sure the same principle applies to many other professions: forensic accountants, electricians, dentists, etc…
The folks who are really, really good at what they do shouldn’t be earning 20% more than their peers…they should earn twenty times as much.
That currently only happens in fields where payment is truly linked to performance (i.e. $$$ revenue) such as sales, sport and entertainment, or when the person is self-employed.
Roger Moore
@liberal:
The big problem is that we haven’t come up with an effective alternative to the graduate school model. What we really need are more basic research institutions that hire long-term staff as dedicated employees, rather than abusing the cheap labor from people who are nominally students but are really lab slaves. Unfortunately, the grant system assumes most of the work will be done under the current system and is reluctant to give money to people who pay their workers a living wage.
qkslvrwolf
Trollhatten:
“Exactly. And I have yet to read of a crisis of lack of applicants to college and university engineering programs. Now that state universities are setting aside more seats for foreign (premium tuition) students, I don’t see this “shortage” being resolved anytime soon.”
The problem isn’t with applicants, it’s with the way we run classes to “weed out” people early on. It’s counterproductive. But apparently, there are also perverse incentives beyond just “this is a hard major and we want people who can cut it”. Apparently there’s some funding reasons too, although I don’t remember what they are.
Personally, I’d like to see us stop offering scholarships for the most popular degrees and take the savings and put them into scholarships for “most useful” degrees (yes, there’s a concept that is fraught with peril, but it’s a question with asking and discussing, anyway). Also, though, we really need give people a chance to find themselves before they go to college so that they have the best chance of doing well at college. We’re also not set up for that.
liberal
@schrodinger’s cat:
Not saying it’s all good.
Though one advantage China has over India is that the latter, AFAICT, is really riven by all sorts of class/caste, religious, linguistic, and other divisions.
liberal
@qkslvrwolf:
I used to teach calculus at the undergraduate level and it was clear it was being used in that way.
I could understand maybe weeding out engineers that way, but not business majors and psychology majors.
liberal
@Roger Moore:
Agreed; there’s definitely economic value in job security.
liberal
@Mandalay:
You clearly can’t read. Just because India is a shithole doesn’t mean Indians are shit.
I’m saying India, in terms of political economy, appears to be extremely screwed up. How you get from there to “racist” is unclear to me.
qkslvrwolf
I can’t understand weeding anyone out ever. The point is to educate. “weeding people out” isn’t educating them. I’d really like to have a model where you pay for a class and you get to keep taking that class until you pass it. Sure, you’ll have some people that just float along, but sometimes it takes a coupla passes to really grok something. Nearly all of the smartest people I know had SOMETHING they got hung up on, and had it been the FIRST thing they tried, or had they not already had money, they’d’ve been screwed, too.
liberal
@The Moar You Know:
Well, the aggregate stats say you’re wrong.
liberal
@schrodinger’s cat:
Sadly, that would make them pretty much normal.
qkslvrwolf
Also, the point of business isn’t to educate, it’s to schmooze and socialize. No point in weeding anyone out of that, you never know whose parents might have money.
liberal
@qkslvrwolf:
That sounds reasonable.
schrodinger's cat
@? Martin: That has not been my experience most graduate students, international and otherwise are usually supported by their academic departments for a tuition waiver and an assistantship. This is true about both engineering, CS and the hard sciences.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@schrodinger’s cat: Don’t assistanceships/TAs/etc. often start after the first year? IOW, aren’t graduate students usually on their on for the first (most-stressful) year? (That’s the way it worked in my case in the late-80s.)
Cheers,
Scott.
liberal
@schrodinger’s cat:
My recollection—man, it’s been a long time!—agrees with what you’re saying.
Though there were a few people who had prestigious national scholarships from their own countries, IIRC.
Mandalay
@liberal:
Why is it a “shithole”, and how do you know that? Have you even been there?
No, that is what you are saying to cover your ass. Before you simply said India was a shithole.
Why you put “racist” in quotes is unclear to me since I did not use that word, but if the shoe fits…
Keith G
@Higgs Boson’s Mate: You are allowed to have that opinion and since you expressed it without malice you should not be derisively lectured (but you will be).
In my salad days, we always used “breeder” as negatively loaded slang – as in, “That’s all they are good for”.
Well that and a quick trip on the down low.
Keith G
Deleting a dub.
FYWP
schrodinger's cat
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: I guess it depends on the school and the student.
Walker
@schrodinger’s cat:
PhDs are supported. Masters (especially professional Masters) are not.
Our MEng degree is a big money maker for my department.
? Martin
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
Which is not the same thing as “people languish in post-doc positions forever”. If they go into them by choice as a stepping stone to something larger, then what’s the problem? I’m not trying to disparage people’s career decisions, rather I’m suggesting that unlike some other disciplines, engineers and some other STEM fields (which is relevant to the H1B discussion) have far more options to pursue and horror of doctoral students unable to find work really don’t apply very commonly.
This may be more of a regional distinction though. Not all programs have the kind of career back-yard that Stanford does. I have no fucking idea where all of Purdue’s PhDs wind up, but they sure as hell aren’t all getting work in Indiana. And this might account for more than a bit of difference between experiences.
Well, I won’t argue better administration isn’t needed.
Sure, but every layer of education has this tradeoff. In the case of domestic STEM students the goal at least is to sweeten the pot by ensuring they aren’t racking up significant debt while they make that move to an advanced degree. It’s not a great lifestyle, but it beats the alternative. And right now the alternative is that at least the public universities are struggling to provide support to domestic STEM students (in no small part because grants need to cover the student fees as well so the huge tuition hikes means that the same student support dollar only goes half as far as it used to – or we need twice the grant money to support the same number of PhDs), so they’re looking at either another n years of loans or $60K per year taking employment. I can’t fault them too much for taking the job and hoping their employer pays for the MS. When the jobs aren’t there the students go for the loans, kick the can down the road another year or so and hope they roll out with an MS in a better job market.
liberal
@Mandalay:
Uh, because I can read? As in, lookup aggregate stats?
By the same token, if I told you that you can’t survive on the Moon without a supply of oxygen, would you reply “Have you ever been there?”
Look up the female literacy rate for India sometime, numbnuts.
liberal
@Mandalay:
LOL. So for a country to be a shithole, it’s not enough for it to be a shithole economically?
Fact of the matter is that any country with India’s population, female literacy rate, and lack of sanitary infrastructure is appropriately designated a “shithole”. I’m sorry if that offends your tender fee-fees.
liberal
@Mandalay:
If someone tells you that there’s no oxygen on the moon, do you respond “Have you ever been there?”
Yes, I’m saying that any country with India’s population, female literacy rate, and lack of infrastructure in basic sanitation—all of which have to do with political economy—is a shithole. I’m sorry if that hurts your tender fee-fees.
PurpleGirl
@Omnes Omnibus: And in the past we have been receptive to her venting, that is, telling Gex that she can vent as much as she wants and in whatever language she wants to use.
I find that I can see a name and skim the comment and decide if I want to read the whole vent. It does not really matter if I read it, but it does matter that the venter (Gex) feels she can vent here. We are safe place for her and that’s important.
(Gex: I truly hope you do find peace and calm at times.)
JaneE
I have a special loathing for H1-B visas.
I worked on a project with a consulting firm in the lead. Their employees were all H1-B holders. I am not sure how their employees were different from slaves. Average wage was about one third of what my company paid its employees, and we were on the lower half of local wages. Some people put in 100 hour weeks. Any complaint got you a one-way ticket home, with maybe 48 hours notice, plus entry on a black list so no other consulting firm would hire you. Because the visa is issued to the employer, not the employee, you cannot quit and find another job. Effectively, slavery.
These were all really good people, getting shafted every which way. Back home (India and South Africa) there was no work at all. Most all of the recruitment made the job sound better than it almost always was. Some jobs did have shorter hours, but most of the time the low bid/fast time frame was based on killing hours of work.
If conditions changed and your services were no longer needed, your visa could and would be sold to any employer who wanted you. If you were lucky you would be given a chance to find a job yourself, otherwise you might be told who you were now working for. Or sent home, to wait for an opportunity to come up.
That was 10 years ago, but I doubt that anything has changed much.
And yes, it would have been more effective for my company to have trained its own employees. Several million dollars cheaper. (The cost of trash-canning the consultant’s version of half the project, and starting over when some of our own people had been brought up to speed on the software)
H1-B’s should come with a $100K annual fee, to be used to fund the training of another employee of the firm requesting the visa to bring their skills up to the specific standard they supposedly do not meet. If they really need someone they cannot get at home, they can still go abroad. But it should be cheaper to bring people already here up to speed than to import more people. And the salary for visa holders should be at least median of the job category at the company applying for the visa.
There is almost never a shortage of workers with the required skills, just a shortage of skilled workers willing to work 80-100 hours weeks for slave wages.
schrodinger's cat
@JaneE: The latest version is targeting the very “consulting” companies that you speak of. Plus H1-B visas are used by other employers too not just IT folks. I do agree with you that the visa should not be tied to the employer. Unfortunately that’s how the employment based visa system is designed even the green cards are tied to the employer. You cannot self petition except in the case of extraordinary ability or the national interest waiver petitions.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@? Martin: (Is there some simple way to install the appropriate font to get your Martian glyph? Half of my PCs can’t display it. Thanks.)
But I’m talking about engineers and STEM graduates, not people with a PhD in Sanskrit Poetry or something. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that. ;-) For every example you can find of a Stanford graduate getting a $100k offer there are probably multiples of that of first-rate graduates from top-10 engineering schools that are struggling to find a job.
The problem is, if someone goes into a field expecting a 2 year post-doc after they graduate before getting a permanent research (or teaching) position, and it turns into 2-3 post-docs with no end in sight, then people get discouraged. It shows that the system is broken. Stories about engineering PhDs starting at over $100k aren’t typical.
I think this is more typical these days – Weissman at the Atlantic:
Graduation usually isn’t a surprise, for people who don’t have something lined up by then it usually isn’t for lack of trying. There are obvious limitations in the data he presents. The point is that an engineering PhD isn’t a guarantee of a stable, well-paid job any more either (if it ever was).
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
gene108
@JaneE:
There is another category of visas, L1’s, where you can continue to pay someone what they were making in the country of origin plus a living allowance.
In cases of L1 visas, wages would be considerably lower than U.S. wages, but I’m not sure how much the L1’s are used today as getting them has been made tougher.
The driving force behind L1’s is a company wants to pay ‘x’ for an IT project and a firm like Wipro/Infosys/IBM comes in and says they can do it for ‘x’, but the only way they can make money at ‘x’ is to have a large off-shore presence to do a chunk of the work.
When some coordination needed to be done people came on various visa categories, such as B1, L1 or H1-b. The B1’s and L1’s don’t have the same wage protections as h1’b visas, as the work is really considered to be very temporary, but people wanted to stay on on L1 or B1 status, so their stays got extended.
I’ve done it once. It wasn’t fun.
I know some guys who do it regularly. They are workaholics.
At some level, everyone wants to get things done quicker for less, whether it’s home renovations or a large firm doing IT projects.
At some level wanting more done cheaper is a driving force behind off-shoring of IT services.
The flip side of this is in India, for example, senior level positions – like architects – just don’t exist. If you want to be move up on the technical side, you can’t stay in India. Those jobs just aren’t there and are likely not going to go there, as most of the IT work and the business processes that drives it originates in the U.S.
L1’s and B1’s are harder to get, so the wage arbitrage advantage people got by getting off-shore wage costs and getting work done here isn’t happening.
The flip side to all this talk about H1-b visas is if firms aren’t getting work done here for what they want to pay, they will move work overseas, whether to India, Russia or wherever.
Off-shoring is actually the biggest threat to the demand for H1-b visa holders, from a purely business cycle/trends point of view.
JoyfulA
@Southern Beale: More recently in the Hershey area, we had cultural exchange students working at several McDonald’s, all owned by the same man, who rented out the basements of houses he owned at $50/week/student.
They, too, had the guts to do protest rallies, unlike the vast majority of us.
The State Department really needs to clamp down on the outfits it allows to set up these cultural exchanges.
Ruckus
@Gex:
You have a lot to say and all of it has positive value. You should be pissed or as it sounds way past that. A country supposedly created for individual freedom(which we know is bullshit if not in theory, it is in actual practice).
We should all be yelling at the top of our lungs and we should all be mad as hell. And if a little swearing and yelling is considered bad form, fuck them. Fucking with your life for no fucking reason, no upside what so ever? Fuck them.
pseudonymous in nc
@JaneE:
That’s the “worker drone” end of the scale. At the the other end, it’s different, although there are still issues with job lock. But that just makes the point that the H1-B class is way too broad and needs to be broken up. Which in turn requires a visa-issuing bureaucracy that’s clued into the difference.