Ever since I’ve been in Silicon Valley, I’ve heard mass anxiety about the state of higher education, particularly when it comes to training the next generation of tech thinkers, innovators and worker bees. But for all those speeches and pledges to change things, the situation only seems to be getting worse.
According to a new study released today by the Bay Area Council, the Campaign for College Opportunity and IHELP, some 40,000 new jobs are created every year in California that need people with degrees in science, technology, math or engineering. To meet that need the state would have to see a 90% upswing in these types of degrees. The study hints at a “devastating” impact the current shortfall of techy grads could have on the state’s $1.7 trillion economy if more people don’t go into these fields.
Of course, these groups recommend all sorts of investments in the University of California and other state education systems, but here’s a quicker, cheaper solution no one wants to admit outside the board rooms of Silicon Valley: Remove H-1B Visa caps.
The new study argues that international workers won’t be enough given the hightech explosion of jobs around the world. Ok, so let it fill some of them. Education is like the mess masquerading as the American healthcare system—there’s simply no quick fix. After all, the study doesn’t talk about a shortage in people going to college, just going into these fields. Is more money really going to change what people want to study? We need high tech workers: The India Institutes of Technology are graduating nearly 4,000 engineers per year who presumably would like jobs. And if they come here, they help build tech companies and we get tax revenue. How is that not a win-win?
Below is an interview I did with LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman about the topic a few months ago. He boldly argues that instead of restricting H1Bs, the government should just levy a payroll tax on them. That way there’s no argument that it’s a “cheaper” option for employers– it’s a pricey last resort, but one most tech CEOs would still jump at.
Give better benefits for working in the tech field. Have employers give out field trips like at school, or extended vacations to a certain group of people. Maybe bring other fields in to the tech field so a person can kind of work two jobs, not more hours, but get a taste of both so it isn’t so monotone.
Oh well, who knows, maybe I’m talking out my ass. Some people have to get more creative then me though, even if my ideas are somewhat tempting.
I think that part of it is just that there isn’t necessarily enough appeal in working in tech fields. People don’t look at tech jobs and think about how cool and exciting they would be, so they need to be made cool and exciting. Or at least made to seem cool and exciting. Although I would have no idea how to make looking through code exciting.
You can say that again!
Give better benefits for working in the tech field. Have employers give out field trips like at school, or extended vacations to a certain group of people. Maybe bring other fields in to the tech field so a person can kind of work two jobs, not more hours, but get a taste of both so it isn’t so monotone.
Some people have to get more creative then me though, even if my ideas are somewhat tempting.
Woops, sorry for the double post. Could someone delete this second one please?
I didn’t mean that literally.
I have no problem with letting foreign workers into the US to work high tech jobs, but the way the H1B system works disrupts the employment workers. Let the workers get the Visas, but don’t let the companies control them. Let those workers get jobs on the open market.
Agreed – H1Bs are a pseudo form of indentured servitude.
So true … there’s a SIMPLE solution to this .. make H1B’s a 36 month visa; companies can only ‘lock-in’ their visa holder for the first 6 months; then the visa holder is free to go into the open market … companies will choose not to, because 6 months of indentured servitude isn’t enough.
The elephant in the room is that companies don’t just want Tech Workers, they want tech workers that they can pay less! As one of Tech Crunch’s guest poster wrote … engineers’ salaries haven’t kept up with their productivity gains … (http://www.tech...ock-up-on-them/)
I’m going to guess that you are not in a high tech area so this does not threaten you in any way. I’d have a problem if the person who I’m ordering food from doesn’t speak English (I’m not racist I just can’t understand their language). How would you like to see people coming into this country to go after your job for a small fraction of what you are getting paid?
It is not really hard to find high-tech workers with a decent English level. Europe, India is full of it (most of the tech docs on the internet is in English anyway), also I don’t think you need to be Hamlet to code… Decent English is sufficient and people will progress if you talk to them you know
Also I wouldn’t be too worried about salary dumping, as long as companies need more employees than available there is no reasons for it to go down, foreigners also know how to compare job offers…
Lastly, based on my experience of US companies (not only US actually, Irish, Swiss as well…), who do you think is more likely to get the Team lead or manager position? Well for many understandable reasons it’s usually the local guy…
So I didn’t know that People with H1B aren’t able to switch jobs.. :p Well of course that’s pretty lame…
“Also I wouldn’t be too worried about salary dumping, as long as companies need more employees than available”
If you’re a US citizen, then, by your criterion, you should worry. We’ve been producing far more STEM workers in the USA than we’ve been employing as STEM workers for decades. In some years, we’ve been graduating 3 times as many as needed.
Studies by researchers from CRA, Duke, Georgetown University, Harvard, RAND Corporation, Rochester Institute of Technology, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Stanford, UC Davis,UPenn Wharton School, and Urban Institute, have reported that we have continually been producing far more US citizen STEM (science, tech, engineering, math) workers than we’ve been employing in these fields.
At rates of 3-4 years ago, it would take nearly 2 decades to absorb the unemployed STEM talent pool, and another several years to absorb the under-employed US citizen STEM talent.
In that light, a 10 year moratorium on E-3, F, H-1B, J, and L visas is warranted.
Agreed. This is a scam. We need to employ American tallent. PC affirmative action and quotas are driving real talent out of the system. All this nonsense it making the US a mediocre country. What happened to giving opportunities to the most deserving talent. You can’t legislate acheivement.
The person who writes code may not speak English very well but he can write the code. And it is misconception that they are on low salary. Some of them are low salary but the companies/consultants who put them on project take the same rate as an American employee.
Not it is for the workers to revolt against this
As a former H1B worker I can only say: fuck slavery.
your idea is good but do not forget that employers will lobby against this.
To remove the H1-B cap is only a temporary solution at best. It really has to start with education, and the situation in the US is very disturbing. Too many people struggle with very basic calculus because the educational system is letting students down; it’s no wonder they don’t go into science and technology! Eric’s comments are quite naive. There are plenty of jobs in science and tech with good compensation, and a job in science is most certainly not monotonous!
the way they teach people in our country just sucks. it’s probably the same elsewhere. I’m not saying that India has a better teaching method, but they’re probably more militaristic in some places about forcing kids to learn…I’m not saying that’s how to teach either. I’m just saying that’s probably what’s going down with all these middle-east and far east asian geniuses. PERIOD–regardless of how straightup and crazy that sounds.
That said, I don’t even agree that’s the best way to teach our kids either. Teaching needs to come from kids wanting to actually, FRICKING PERIOD! Our education system is about monotonously training kids in one thing after the other, rather than teaching kids GENERAL TO SPECIFIC! I took calculus in college not to long ago and I was in school not too long ago and I know exactly what’s wrong with teaching. Teachers aren’t EXPERTS in what they do. Our teachers suck. Entrepreneurs should teach students. You see where I’m going with this. The way I personally taught myself calculus–since I never actually went to class–was through analyzing what was going on in the field generally, and step by step granularly figuring out the specifics after understanding the bigger picture.
Basically, in Schools, they just have you solve problems according to formulas, and they don’t help you understand why you’re doing it or what goals you’re accomplishing. They turn you into commodities…I think people have heard this speel before. this isn’t nothing new, but the point is something truly capititalisitic, and entrepreneurial has to be done about it.
Kids in our country think school’s a joke and don’t take it seriously. WHY? Because it is. I personally think kids from an early age need to have a material and perhaps financial incentive to learn. They need to have a real incentive to devour information, just like all us 2.0 guys devour information about tech–because we want to make some cool tech stuff ourselves and we know that we can learn from what’s going on around us in tech.
The paradigm shift has to be from:
GOING TO SCHOOL BECAUSE IT’S JUST WHAT YOU DO
to
DON’T GO IF YOU CAN DO BETTER WITHOUT IT BUT HERE’S PRECISELY WHY YOUR LIFE WILL BE BETTER BECAUSE OF IT. And that has to happen at 14 years old. After 14 years old, there has to be proper system with checks and balances that truly motivates a young adult to go to school.
And I don’t think it’s impossible to motivate a 14 year old to want to learn for him/herself!!!
So long as kids go to school because it’s the thing to do, and because they watch movies of college frat parties and it’s just how it goes, kids aren’t going to learn anything. Yes, school’s about the community aspects of building social schools, but at least 50% of it, if not 75% of it should be about exactly what it’s meant to be about: LEARNING.
BOTTOM LINE: Is that the solution is rooted in something way deeper and psychological and sociological, not in more budgets for tech programs in colleges or something.
All these jobs are going to people from other countries because they’re more capable, or at least it’s because they’re more capable per the dollar. And all the people of our country with the employee mindset should be forced to step their game up, rather than given a hand-out–regardless if the pressure is in part due to the fact we live in a world economy. That’s not changing and going backwards.
Handouts and laziness is going to be the cause of the American empire, just like all empires and businesses. To solve this sort of problem is going to take a totally different sort of thinking. Specifically, we need to get our incentives and checks and balances in place.
Like Einstein says, “You can’t solve a problem with the same thinking that caused.” And all I’m seeing is solutions that came from the same thinking that caused this problem. The majority of our society is becoming stupider and stupider, and lazier and lazier, and it’s just the truth. As a culture, I don’t think we’re improving. I highly doubt it.
Thanks for your novel. Ironic that you’d complain so much about the quality of education when you’re fucking terrible at writing. I mean really, really bad. Please don’t write anything ever again, grocery lists included.
+1
this is why twitter gets so much love… because i don’t have the time to waste reading an unknown person’s rant*
Nevertheless, in a quick skim, you are basically +1 on learn by doing.
* rant defintion: at least 500 words, multiple uses of CAPS and multiple exclamation points.
Maybe Tech Crunch could limited comments to 500 characters.
@ Lout. LOL.
I think the point is that you can be excellent in something focused that actually brings financial and personal value to yourself and society (LIKE MYSELF–apology for the caps) without going to school for a bunch of stuff you barely care about that hardly makes you an asset to companies looking to hire.
Consider that my excuse for my “terrible” writing.
Too many letters. I am the product of “militaristic” education (USSR) and my daughter attends school here in US. She just finished fourth grade and we have spent several thousands dollars already on her after school additional courses. Math and English lessons mostly. So what can I say: in a few words her teachers are not teachers, sadly but true. Correct me if I am wrong – there are no BS and MS degree in Education here? In Russia, for example, you can not teach fourth+ grade students if you do not have special college degree (BS minimum). What does it mean? It means that math teacher in 5th grade knows not only simple fractions but differential equations, integrals, number theory, some knowledge of topology etc etc and can easily teach 10th grade students as well.
.
Another drawback of domestic school education I would mention – lack of competition in class. Every student is “on average level” or above average. Nobody will tell you that you son/daughter is among the worst students in class or among the best students. You have no idea if you child gets A-, B, B+ and sometimes Cs – is he/she in top 10%, may be he/she is the best in his/her class but we do not know. And the most worst – your child has no idea as well. She knows only her own scores and she thinks that B is very good score and she deserves Jumba Juice
My 6th and 8th grade math teachers had PhDs and were teaching us number theory and such. During that time I freaked out a university junior in mechanical engineering when he caught me reading the open page of his text and showed I had an at least rudimentary understanding of what it was talking about.
All US teachers are required to have a bachelor’s degree, and a teaching certificate. That’s the catch. Those educationism courses are feeble and attract many of the weakest students. The only reason they have the whole cert thing is because the unions got a stranglehold on both the jobs and the educationism colleges. Don’t get me wrong; there’s room for a 1-2 semester course on methods and tactics of teaching, childhood mental development, etc.
There was a Brit who ran a profitable franchise school operation for the poor in which he charged only a few pence tuition, and had the students teaching those 2 years behind them in sequence, to sharpen and drive their knowledge home while keeping the costs down.
Back in the day in the USA, women with little more than 4-5 years of formal education conducted “Dame’s schools”, about equivalent to grades 3-9, now, which would qualify students to enter the public schools (English and Latin or Greek grammar, equivalent to 2 years in HS now, was a prerequisite to be admitted to the public elementary schools in some cities).
Teaching in a one room school-house (grades 1-12), or at a grammar school (intense Latin, Greek and math), or at a high school or prep school was something that college students and law and medical students did to pay their living and tuition expenses. IOW, teaching was something people did before or while attending college.
It’s not unusual, reading old biographies, to run across people who founded or became principal at an “academy” or grammar or prep school within weeks of graduating from college. One of my 5*great-grand-father’s class-mates became president of Princeton just a few years after they graduated from it. And there were great US jurists who studied law for only 2-9 months before passing rigorous written and oral exams by the state board and hanging out their shingles.
What I’m getting at is that, today, we have some grade inflation and a lot of hyper-credentialism. You don’t have to have a PhD or even a BSCS to actually be a good hardware or software product developer. Wozniak readily comes to mind, but I’ve known several people who were productive, even excellent, software product developers when in HS or before earning a degree.
PhD teachers? What school have you attend to? If it is no secret?
Being a former High School Science Teacher in the USA, I agree with Bruce. I have known many teachers with a PhD and many with just a BA or BS. This is common in a state that pays teachers based on the number of college units they have completed in their subject area. Although a teacher must know a subject to teach it, knowing a subject does not necessarily make a person good at teaching that subject.
Also, High School teachers must know their subject to teach it; Unfortunatly Elementary and often Middle School teachers do not. One huge problem (one of many) that I see with our system is requiring elementary teachers to teach math that they never understood themselves. They are hired to teach all subject areas to kids from K-6th grade, and recently students are supposed to be taught different math concepts at younger and younger ages. Since their teachers usually do not understand the math (or science) concepts they are supposed to teach, the students do not learn the concepts correctly, and then come to higher grades with more math issues than if they had never been exposed to the math concepts in the first place.
Also, there is too much concern about getting students to graduate high school and college; forgetting that 8 years of “higher education” is just a waste of time, money, and energy if nothing useful was learned or developed.
I agree that the US needs to import engineers, but why bemoan our poor science & math higher education? It is poor, but it doesn’t matter. Americans don’t need to be the “worker bees”–that’s what the rest of the world does. We are the innovators. Name an important tech startup that isn’t from the US. We made YouTube, Google, Twitter, pretty much everything.
Yeah Sergei’s a Yank is he. Nice American name… Oh, and of course the best innovations came from people who knew nothing about the subject matter.
Just let the CEO’s invent, and outsource all the work. Then you’ll have an efficient engine poised for massive profits!
Perhaps all you armchair CEOs should learn some history before you start spouting.
Yes, Sergei Brin immigrated when he was 6 years old, and attended US public schools, graduated from the University of Maryland…
You can’t judge whether someone is a fresh immigrant by his name.
I agree with this idea of lifting H-1B restrictions 100%. Our immigration system is a joke; people who want to come here legally and work are dissuaded from doing so and those who come illegally and work are afforded most of the benefits of legal workers without the same visa restrictions, background checks, etc. I know several friends who’ve jumped back and forth between school and work in order to “stay legal”.
In conjunction with this idea, I read an interesting post by the economist John Mauldin recently that advocated giving green cards to anyone who wanted to come to the U.S. and buy a house with cash. This would theoretically address the housing glut we still need to work through, give people a clear way to a green card, entice those from overseas who’ve had the wherewithal to earn and save money i.e. primarily the well-educated, and also address two issues people don’t want to talk about: (1) our immigration system and (2) the fact that we need MORE PEOPLE to compete with China and India in the 21st century!
“I agree with this idea of lifting H-1B restrictions 100%.”
So do I. The current restrictions are far too low. If we’re going to talk about admitting the “best and brightest” they’d better have IQs of at least 160.
Yea, that’s the solution to our education problem in CA. Just lift the H1B limit and flood the state with foreign workers. To hell with the state’s higher education system and to hell with the states citizen residents and students that will suffer from the population influx and further decay of our education system!
sorry sarah…
don’t buy it. the h1b is basically a bunch of crap.
i know 5-6 guys who are over 40.. who’ve been in the tech field for 15+ years, who’ve been laid off, and can’t find jobs…
these aren’t guys looking for top $$$. hell, they’d give their left n*t to simply have someone call them or reply to their resumes…
so until these guys get their shot, shut the damn hib down….
THIS.
We don’t need to import engineers; we have plenty of ‘em here. I’m with timy11; as long as one American engineer is still out of work, Not One More H1-B.
So Erbo, when your top notch telecom firm needs a coder, would you accept barely average american engineers from finance domain? Or would you try to find the best telecom engineer you can find?
These nonsensical “American only” ideas seem good on forums. But when you have a business to run, you don’t think this way. This country is not a socialistic country. And thank God for that.
some you are out of your damm mind if you think the only talent is from abroad…
i can find plenty of guys who can write telco code.. if they could simpy get someone to look at their resume and give them a call…
like i said.. when you get over a certain age,, it gets to be a bitch to get anyone to reply to your paperwork…
and the issues that allow this problem to continue our deep and complex.
i’m all for looking abroad, but only if you can really show that you’ve made the same/similar offer to a qualified US resource and it was turned down..
and that’s the issue.. the guys who are Us/qualified aren’t getting people to reply to their paperwork..
so quit talking out of your a*s on this…
I would hire one of the hundreds of thousands of unemployed US citizen engineers (telecomm or EE or CS), most of them experienced and productive in the field, before bringing in some rote brown-noser from Red China or India or VietNam with their phony “engineering” degrees.
OTOH, if I had the cash and a project requiring at least 32, I’d try to work it (within the anti-discrimination laws) to have at least 1 from the FSU or Poland to keep the cowboys in line, and maybe one German or Scot for their odd combination of industriousness and rigor and laid-back Euro work-style, to prevent team burn-out.
What’s so amazing is the clash of image versus reality in that regard. I’ve worked with people from around the globe. The workaholic, shifting schedule to the need, 12-30 hour day, 50-90 hour week workers, were all nth generation Americans, while the 9-5, long lunch, long week-end, long-vacationers were European. The Asians were a mixed bunch — most apparently quite smart, some rigor, some outward show of industriousness, but less productive.
And every such grouping has their share of completely botched projects… The worst of it was that the executives at least initially thought they’d done well on things they’d completely failed at. And some Americans rushed to put in the extra hours to patch it up, to get the job done properly, regardless of who had initially dropped the ball.
Agreed. There are a lot of unemployed techies right now. Companies want H1B’s because they are indentured servants who work for dirt cheap. People stopped majoring in CS and tech because mcdonalds paid better after the bubble burst. Now all of sudden we lack engineering talent.
If we remove the slavery associated with H1B’s by allowing them switch jobs then they wouldn’t drive down salaries for all engineers and people would start majoring in CS again.
Finally. I thought I might get through this whole list of replies without someone pointing out why they really want h1b’s. I’m glad to know someone else is paying attention.
I have been living in the Silicon Valley for a decade now, and this is the second downturn I have had to live through. I was still in college right before the tech bubble burst. My observations of people in school, the climate at places where I did internships in the Bay Area, and my subsequent professional experience has given me some first-hand knowledge of how we got to this place.
In college, I was surrounded by a mixture of people, but a lot of them were from other countries; mostly Asian and Middle Eastern. They were here getting grants and scholarships to go to school, enjoying the resources of this country. You have to wonder, if our educational system is so lacking, if other countries are so superior, why is it that so many of them come here? Same for jobs, if other countries are educating such superior engineers, why is it that the leading tech companies were started here by Americans? It seems that they want us to buy into the idea that all of the sudden we became a bunch of idiotic incompetents; please, give me an f-ing break. Our open-door policies fail to protect American citizens, and they are what got us to this point. Diversity is important, it is how this nation was started, and it certainly helps to spur innovation. But look at the models of European nations that look out for their own workers first; just because we are a nation of immigrants does not mean that we shouldn’t look out for our own people. And this country, and in particular California is overrun; just because it’s America doesn’t mean everyone in the world has an automatic right to a piece of the pie.
Like someone else stated previously, I too have many smart and experienced engineering friends looking for work. I have seen people come here to get their education funded, to move back to their own country to take a job at an “American” company that is getting a tax break for operating overseas. Whatever they can’t outsource they try to fill with H1B visa workers, and this isn’t fair to anyone. They do treat them like indentured servants, and they do use them to drive down wages in engineering. One of the issues here is that these companies don’t want to pay for the education of an American worker, they have forgotten that when you look at the wage you have to pay, that you are in fact paying for the use of that individuals education. This is a manifestation of corporate greed, just one of the many things corporations are doing to ruin this country. Engineers need to form more effective unions, unfortunately many fields are so disparate it would be difficult to get everyone even in, for example, electrical/computer engineering under one umbrella.
Cisco is one of the biggest offenders in this valley, so I will use them as an example to back up my points. Go right now to their website and do two simple searches based on country only to see what I mean; try India and then the US. You will see (currently) 9 pages of results for India and 7 for the US. Pretty close, but look at the first 4 pages of results for India; they are all customer support jobs that were still located here at the start of the decade, pages 6-9 are a huge swath of software engineering jobs that used to be here as well. Now go look at the US results, as of today there is exactly one customer service job listed and there and NO software engineering jobs. This is a problem with the business model fostered under the Bush administration, not any of it has to do with a lack of qualified engineers in this country. Now that these companies have had a taste for cheap labor it will take a huge effort to put protections back in place for the American worker, if it ever happens at all.
The other issue I have run into personally, and have heard from other people I know, is the reverse discrimination many of us are experiencing. I know someone who worked for Cisco for several years who referenced what they call the “Indian Mafia”. This is the trend at that company of Indian people in management positions who hire only fellow Indians, and squeeze others out. The friend I refer to is now working for another prominent networking company, and his boss is getting calls daily from people so fed up with the culture being fostered at Cisco, that even in this economy they are looking for a way out. The ridiculous hours for no pay, no raises and no bonuses for all those extra hours. They treat you like they own your life, so in that sense we are being indentured too.
Anyone supporting h1b’s has an agenda, and we need to start pressing our government. Americans need to recognize the seriousness of what is happening and take to the streets to protest in mass. We need to protest this issue and many others affecting the people of this nation, or they will never listen. Some may think this is extreme, but it’s the only way change ever happens in this country, and we are on a sinking ship people!
+1 I believe your analysis is right on the money but I fear that people have become too accustomed to greed and over consumption to listen to any change that helps average people instead of fattening the pockets of some corporate douchebag CEO.
How is this a discussion on visa restrictions? I recently graduated and I know tons of highly qualified engineers (including myself) that are looking for jobs and they are few and far between. Companies must be whispering their openings to just their employees because it’s not getting out to everyone or they’re not really looking very hard.
I am in the same situation, During our graduation I couldn’t find many people who got a job. So surprised to read the statistics. Are we dumb? or I didn’t search enough for jobs?
I can not find a job in the high tech field with 30 years of experience, and you want to bring in people from other countries?
As to our schools, we need to change focus directly. Let us have an open source project or something similar to Wikipedia that is a complete and free educational system for anyone with the ability to motivate themselves.
Our system is failing because we spend huge amounts of money on buildings, teachers, and books. None of those things are now needed to learn, the computer in front of you can replace them all.
sorry bill.
while it might be cool to pick up web/html/javascript off of a site…
i’m pretty leary of letting some guy whos got no formal training sit down and work on a control process for a medical facility.
or for that matter to really write a web app that’s going to handle credit card data…
this isn;t to say i trust the guy with the degree, but i do allow that that guy had the ability to at least jump over the hurdle that a degree infers..
I have written control software for medical laser systems and the systems that test them.
I have contempt for people that think that a degree confers intelligence (”isn;t”, “whos”?)
With only a High School Diploma, I have run engineering teams that had a sprinkling of Ph.D.s.
I envy people that have respect for teachers, but I think that they are naive. I have often found that knowledge in a good book, from an industry-respected author, is much more precise than that from a teacher that has never worked in the industry, or who’s knowledge is obsolete.
“Formal” training? If our system is producing workers that can not compete on the world stage, formal training is useless. Formal training is sitting on your butt and listening to someone tell you a story.
You can’t remove people – education will always be a labor intensive field as long as people respond better to people than to inanimate objects. This idea that we don’t need people is a fallacy that comes up often from people who see and understand the impact of technology but who do not understand what we know about education and child development.
Computing gives us a way to present and access information in a more efficient manner, but successful educational outcomes also rely on: having food, having a stable home environment, having people that listen, getting guidance on life, staying on task and learning priorities, etc.
Down the road, a teacher’s role may change to that of a mentor, a tutor, a coach, or just person to talk to about life, but they’ll never be completely removed.
Tech recruiters could find plenty of talent by just dredging through TechCrunch’s Deadpool or waiting outside the offices of MySpace for another body to be defenestrated.
Then again, maybe they don’t want to hire anyone who’s been Deadpooled or MySpaced.
Sarah, you know the reason first hand: everybody wants a high level job: a MANAGER, a LAWYER, a JOURNALIST, a REAL ESTATE BROKER, an OBAMA after all but not an engineer or someone with specialized knowledge, who gets their hands dirty. The American society could not handle wealth (yes, the average income of 50k or so is WEALTH), and thus is decaying.
MBAs did not exist when Ford was created, but they are dominating the society when it’s about to go bankrupt. Write your next book about this stuff.
Let me get this straight, Sarah. The report says we have 40,000 jobs that need to be filled. Techcrunch’s layoff tracker (http://www.tech...ch.com/layoffs/) says we lost 340,000 tech jobs. Seems like we still have more than enough engineers and other techie types to do the work. We still need more jobs and more importantly more innovation.
Excellent point for some reason people have blinders on when it comes to the real reality behind these calls for the lifting of H-1B caps.
Demand creates jobs not the other way round as this article seems to argue.
It’s about quality and not quantity the discussion should be about productivity gains and developing the best technology and not a numbers game because this ends up being political.
Give me 5 brilliant Enginners over 500 any day. The best tech is not developed by an army of developers but the creative geniuses that are few and far between.
Whilst this debate rages on about 40k jobs here and H1B visas you are missing the key point. It’s not about job creation but productivity growth – doing more with less.
As an example ask yourself what’s a better investment – teaching 1000 people how to use computers or paying 5 engineers to make using computers easier so anyone one use them.
I don’t get it. People here have said: they know 5 or 6 guys with 15+ years exp. who can’t find jobs; they know “tons” of highly qualified engineers who can’t find jobs; and someone with 30 years high tech exp. who can’t find a job. Yet there are thousands of tech jobs going unfilled? I don’t get it. How can there be large numbers of tech jobs going unfilled while at the same time a large number of experienced tech workers who can’t find jobs?
Two evil words:
“Human Resources”
Shall we go through the litany of brilliance that constitutes an interview in Silicon Valley?
“What is your greatest weakness?”
“How many ping pong balls does it take to fill a Boeing 747?”
“Do you blog?”
“Have you ever had a disagreement with a supervisor?”
“Would you describe yourself as a team player or a self-motivated individualist?”
“Where do you see yourself in five years?”
Then they get the immigrant applicant:
“How little are you willing to work for?”
$tran…
it’s worse than that…
the guys i personally know, never even get a reply to submitting their paperwork… they never get a chance. and these are guys who’ve built/managed some pretty impressive stuff…
being over 40 is a bitch…
Most of those questions are ridiculous, but the ping pong ball one is completely legit. If you can’t figure out basic dimensional analysis, you probably suck at thinking abstractly in general.
Every few months yet another study sponsored by industry cries about lack of trained people. This is all about controlling labor cost which is understandable at one level since cheap tech goods promote wider adaption. But this is really getting lame. There is no lack of skill people. Even if there was, simple solution is to increase wages and there will not be any shortage.
Wages would not be stagnant if there was labor demand.
The U.S. economy has automated every process possible. That means that companies can hire primarily uneducated people, and they can continue making high quality widgets just fine. I suspect that very little real innovation is happening at the large companies. The paradox is that everyone in this country is educated now because they were told that an education would help them tremendously. Corporateions now have their choice of people with Bachelor degrees, and jeese, half the people I know have MBA’s now. This economy is COMPLETELY on the side of big business. There is no competition for employees, and we need competition to inflate our wages.
In the middle of a terrible economic downturn, how congress cannot immediately shut off h1B is not comprehensible to me.
Dare I say: Congress has used these facts to intentionally destroy the middle class in the name of a purer control of the people.
Lastly, to address the title of this article: School does not teach a person bunk. It teaches methods. Practice in the real world is the most valuable. Yes, we lag other countries in pure education, but we cream them in creativity, which is far more important.
Yes, yes, yes…and YES!
The 1st point you make is true, and I would add that they have told us to go get an expensive education that puts us in debt before we even get started, and then refuse to pay us for it!
The 2nd point, I couldn’t agree more if I tried. Where is the protection of our jobs? And do we really need more bodies on this continent right now. Living in CA, I’m sick and tired of not being able to find 2 seconds of alone time, and I climb 14k ft. peaks in the back country!
To the 3rd point, you can thank the Bushies. If you read the neocons manifesto, you will see that destroying the middle class is exactly what they intended to do. Our government no longer represents the people of this country, democrats or republicans, so without a grassroots movement of 60’s proportions…well…we’re all screwed.
And to your last point. Yes, especially in engineering, what you learn in school is to problem solve. I’m sick of these jobs that post a long list of very specific required skills, not desired, required, and with the “employer’s market” they are actually serious about wanting all of them. It’s ridiculous, they act as though you could never pick up anything new. It used to be that if you knew a similar skill, or even had the right kind of degree they were willing to bring you in and let you come up to speed. Kiss those days goodbye. Honestly, in the vast tech field, who are you ever going to find with EVERY skill on a list? Engineers know they have to pick up new skills as they go, but the employers lack patience. Look at Japan, they actually invest long-term in their work force, providing training if workers want to move into other areas. And look at Japan’s automakers, they aren’t in the toilet like the US companies, now are they? Hmmmm…..
hire me? tech ain’t hiring, no one is hiring; engineers are generally assholes in the interviews; protecting turf.
Below is an interview I did with Hoffman
Your interviews is MIA.
its the entrepreneurship that gives sillicon valley the edge. Britain apparenly is a great place for science research, but that research is hardly ever spun out into new companies. There will always be people ready to take the techy jobs, even if it immigrants from wherever.
A case in point, during the war britain developed computers to break german codes, after the war finished we classified the technology whearas america embraced the commercial aspects. When america loses the entrepreneurial culture, that is when you should start to panic.
I agree. I think per capita, we’re losing our entrepreneurial culture already and for some time now. But because of our history of entrepreneurship, and somewhat lenient immigration policy (more than people give it credit), it won’t be surpassed by that of another country any time soon. But, if you look at all the tech startups, so many of the founders are from other countries, but running the company in the states. I’m not sure if that even counts as American entrepreneurship. Does it count if you’re fresh off the boat from another country, with an accent and all? For real, does it.
So, at least our history still serves to inspire. I’d say that the entrepreneurship factor is definitely on it’s way out in kids born and raised in this country–we just happen to bring some of the best from all over the world still!
Those are the metrics I’d put my money on if I was forced to say where our entrepreneurship is going and coming from.
The number of highly qualified unemployed engineers in the Silicon Valley tells a different story.
There really aren’t that many. And the ones who are unemployed think they are more qualified than they actually are.
aaron…
i know 4 guys who are in their 40’s… got laid off.. and can’t get anyone to even reply to their paperwork for the positions they’ve replied to…
hell, they’ve even replied to entry level positions. they get no replies. so don’t tell me that they;re not qualified.
so yeah.. i think there are a lot more than you realize, or want to acknowledge…
peace
Sorry no more Cobol jobs around
OK maybe not that funny :/
How abt a guy unemployed with skills in BI, DWH, Web Dev with double masters including an MBA and a patent in his name? Times are tough don’t laugh. You never know when you are on the other side.
The U.S. and Europe are losing their gravities as places to go for the big bucks, because Asia is where the money is at right now.
In high tech, the top talent is all that matters, because your product needs to blow the other products out of the water.
That top talent is moving to Asia right now for the fortunes that will be made tomorrow.
… that’s why Google, Facebook and Twitter all started in Asia … welcome back to reality Cerberus
“…is moving to Asia right now for the fortunes that will be made tomorrow”
Not only tech talent, mind you, but financiers and top research talent in biosciences, to name a few fields.
Sure, U.S. will still produce their share of tech giants going forward, but the ‘gravitas’ is elsewhere for those hungry enough.
This is simple supply and demand. When you have cheap H-1 slave labor at 5th the cost why would American young go for technical education and be without jobs. The cabal of large American corporations(IBM, BOA), job shops, and slave trading Indian outsourcers are to blame for this.
These nationless corporation strip mine American market without contributing to its well being. So a tax on H-1 makes perfect sense given most are underpaid.
Sarah, I am sure we can find somebody who will work at 1/5th your salary and do a better job too. The same goes for doctors too.
No offense just facts before you Valley folks spew nonsense about a flat world living in a bubble.
I know a better solution:
We need to let the ’slaves’ who do the better job become US citizens and fire the US-born uneducated, lazy, crazy, obese, obsessed, on Prozac … mmm… INCAPABLE ‘workers’. Let them live in a white trash trail parks…
Oh! I forgot! There is one already! It is called SV!
The H-1B visa laws are a joke.
The H-1B visa is being used to help siphon jobs offshore. As BusinessWeek’s article, Indian Firms, Microsoft Top H-1B List ( http://www.busi...0223_946195.htm ) indicates:
“Four India-based companies topped the list [of H-1B visa recipients]: Infosys Technologies (INFY) was the top recipient on the USCIS list, receiving approval for 4,559 visas?the same number it received in 2007. Next was Wipro (WIT) which received approval for 2,678 H-1B visas in 2008, up from 2,567 in 2007. Third on the list was Satyam (SAY), which remains embroiled in a scandal where the company’s chairman admitted to inflating its earnings. The company got approval for 1,917 H-1B visas in 2008, significantly more from the 1,396 it received in 2007. Tata (TCS.BO) came in fourth with approval for 1,539 visas last year, nearly double the 797 it got in 2007…In fiscal year 2007, six of the top 10 visa recipients were based in India; two others among the top 10, Cognizant Technology Solutions (CTSH) and UST Global, are headquartered in the U.S. but have most of their operations in India.”
Does it not stand to reason that since most of the top 10 companies using H-1B visa workers – companies whose entire business model relies on using workers in low-cost countries such as India – does it not stand to reason that the H-1B visa is being used to offshore work? The H-1B visa comes, learns the job/business from US citizens, then takes that information back to their country where the job is performed. Poof – job gone from US.
H-1B visa beneficiaries are indentured servants. As long as an employer holds the H-1B visa, the foreign worker cannot freely change jobs if he is unhappy with that employer. The foreign worker has no bargaining power over his wages. The foreign worker is reliant on his employer for his Green Card. Foreign worker H-1B beneficiaries are able to transfer to new employers, but most H-1Bs will not be able to take much advantage of this, since the problem still remains that their Green Card processing would have to begin from scratch again, something most H-1Bs would consider unthinkable if they have already put in a couple of years toward a Green Card under their present employer.
I’d like to offer a little anecdote regarding employers’ ability to exploit foreign workers:
A gentleman named Vivek Wadhwa has long been a pioneer of change and innovation in the technology industry, and has founded 2 software companies, Seer Technologies and Relativity Technologies.
A check of the Dept. of Labor’s H-1B Web page shows that Wahdwa’s firm, Relativity Technologies, hired an H-1B Software Engineer for $44,144, and a Computer Programmer for $31,933.
Wahdwa believes that his hiring of the two H-1B programmers was justified on the grounds that they are brilliant people.
There is, however, the issue of how much to pay them. The one making $44K had a Master’s degree and had been working part-time for Wadhwa in Russia for the previous three years. Moreover, at the time Wadhwa hired this worker, the guy had been working for a Russian government joint venture company in Russia, developing telephone and networking systems, which is sophisticated work. And yet as an H-1B he was being paid less than a Bachelor’s graduate with no experience.
The reader’s reaction to all this is probably, “Well, THAT must be illegal. The salary Wadhwa paid this H-1B didn’t take into account the worker’s Master’s degree and his work experience.” But that is a perfect example of the myriad loopholes in the law.
The key point is that under the law, prevailing wage is defined by the JOB, not by the WORKER. If the job just requires a Bachelor’s degree, then an H-1B with a Master’s can legally be paid a Bachelor’s-level wage. What about this worker’s experience? Doesn’t that have to be taken into account? Well, first of all, the experience level DOL used at the time lumped everyone with 0-2 years of experience into one category, and this worker with three years of part-time and one year of full-time experience might fall into that category. But beyond that, again, keep in mind the prevailing wage is defined by the JOB, not by the WORKER. If this was an entry-level job, then the guy could legally be paid an entry-level salary.
Last but not least, what about the fact that the guy is supposedly brilliant? The guy got his Master’s degree at the age of 16! (He was only 17 at the time Wahdwa hired him.) On the open market, that would command a premium salary. But remember, this ain’t the open market. And there is nothing in the prevailing wage law about factoring in brilliance.
So, the bottom line is that Wadhwa got a brilliant worker with a Master’s degree and the equivalent of something like two years of experience for the price of a Bachelor’s graduate of average talent and no experience. And don’t forget, that isn’t even accounting wage savings an employer accrues by hiring H-1Bs–by hiring young H-1Bs, he avoids hiring the older, thus more expensive, Americans.
In other words, any way you slice it, Wadhwa got a great bargain–one that would have been impossible on the open market.
I’d like to also point to the following link:
http://www.info...cleID=201000479
From the link:
“The H-1B program is deeply flawed. It’s lose-lose for the U.S. economy and for the technology profession, and lose-lose for the H-1B workers themselves”
The article further says:
“He also surveyed employers to see how long it was taking them to fill open engineering positions with U.S. workers. His conclusion: Although other countries, particularly China, are surging ahead of the United States in graduating engineers with advanced degrees — and that trend should be taken very seriously — there’s no indication of a shortage of engineers in the United States.”
H-1B visa holders paid less than Americans
http://timesofi...how/1967955.cms
From the link:
“Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) vice president Phiroz Vandrevala even admitted that his company enjoys a competitive advantage because of its extensive use of foreign workers in the United States on H-1B and L-1 visas, according to the study by IEEE-USA, a unit of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.
“Our wage per employee is 20-25 per cent less than US wages for a similar employee,” Vandrevala said.
“Typically, for a TCS employee with five years experience, the annual cost to the company is $60,000-70,000, while a local American employee might cost $80,000-100,000.
“This (labour arbitrage) is a fact of doing work onsite. It’s a fact that Indian IT companies have an advantage here and there’s nothing wrong in that. The issue is that of getting workers in the US on wages far lower than the local wage rate.”
H-1B visa holders get paid less than Americans
http://www.dnai...?NewsID=1051857
From the link:
A new report published on Thursday by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, USA, a Washington-based public policy body, says that, “Immigrant engineers with H-1B visas may be earning up to 23 per cent less on average than American engineers with similar jobs.” It adds, “On an average, applications for H-1B workers in computer occupations were for wages $13,000 less than Americans in the same occupation and state.”
And I’d like to end with this article:
http://www.cio....ndia-and-china/
The next wave of globalisation: Offshoring R&D to India and China
From the link:
“Entrepreneur-turned-academic Vivek Wadhwa is up front about his use of offshoring and importing foreign talent in a previous professional life as founder and CEO of two technology companies. ‘I was one of the first to outsource software development to Russia in the early ’90s. I was one of the first to use H-1B visas to bring workers to the U.S.A.,’ Wadhwa says. ‘Why did I do that? Because it was cheaper.’”
Another interesting quote:
“That tactic is even more lucrative for corporations today, says Wadhwa: ‘When you have a person on H-1B waiting for a green card, you have them captive for six to 10 years.’”
There is one more important issue in the US: business education is separated from the tech education. Like COMPLETELY. Basically businessmen typically have no idea about the technology, engineers have no clue about biz. It’s mostly opposite in the countries that show growth these days.
BTW, this trend was started by McNamara and nobody else (read the textbook).
KEY TO GETTING TALENT = OPEN, FLEXIBLE IMMIGRATION (ii.e.,easier H-1 B visa!)
The key to fixing a talent shortage is to find ways to attract talent. Having spent 21 months in India I can tell you that in India there are a lot of UNDER-employed talented engineers including IIT graduates. Most of the engineers who I have spoken to have told me that they would LOVE to work in the US, if they could find ways of getting to the US. The US needs to find a way to make it easier to acquire this talent.
One way is to make it easier to get the H1-visa and to detach it from the employer so that the candidate can work at any company. Regardless of what anyone says, immigrants (from IIT engineers to domestic household workers) have been a foundation of America’s innovation and strength – we need to keep it that way. Otherwise, no one benefits – the US loses as well as the immigrants’ home countries (because countries like India have NOT figured out a way to motivate and reward premium talent – I have discovered this from my own entrepreneurial experience).
You are missing the point. American workers deserve American jobs. In case nobody has noticed, this country is in a big bunch of trouble, so we don’t really have the resources to solve everyone else’s problems right now. And we don’t need to bring in foreign workers to fill those positions. I can name 10 people I know off the top of my head that have 10 or more years of Silicon Valley industry experience. It isn’t America’s duty to employ Indian engineers. Maybe Indians need to concentrate on bettering their situations at home, that’s what we are trying to do by limiting h1b, and in my opinion they should eliminate them altogether.
I’m really getting tired of everyone, including the author of this article, spouting about how we “suck when it comes to high-tech education” without providing some REAL evidence (not some “study” sponsored by industry). For every “study” you come up with, I can find one that says otherwise.
http://www.busi...1212_623922.htm
From the link:
“…researchers at Duke University have determined that some of the most cited statistics on engineering graduates are inaccurate. Statistics that say the U.S. is producing 70,000 engineers a year vs. 350,000 from India and 600,000 from China aren’t valid, the Duke team says. We’re actually graduating more engineers than India, and the Chinese numbers aren’t quite what they seem. In short, America is far ahead by almost any measure, and we’re a long way from losing our edge.”
“We found that the U.S. was graduating 222,335 engineers, vs. 215,000 from India. The closest comparable number reported by China is 644,106, but it includes additional majors. Looking strictly at four-year degrees and without considering accreditation or quality, the U.S. graduated 137,437 engineers, vs. 112,000 from India. China reported 351,537 under a broader category. All of these numbers include information technology and related majors.”
“…our higher education system isn’t in trouble — in fact, it’s still the world’s best. We spend the most on research, produce the most patents, have the most innovative curriculum, and educate many of the world’s leaders. Take Duke University. It spends $50 million a year just on engineering research, and members of its faculty are world renowned.”
75% of the students in my masters of engineering class at rutgers was either indian or chinese
So you’re putting your little anecdotal “evidence” up against peer reviewed academic studies?
The Science Education Myth
http://www.busi...1025_827398.htm
From the link:
“Forget the conventional wisdom. U.S. schools are turning out more capable science and engineering grads than the job market can support.”
From the Urban Institute:
http://www.urba...man_Science.pdf
Please, people. Use your critical thinking when it comes to garbage like this article. Don’t take things at face value.
you still suck writing articles , This is your Best So far, atleast It has stirred up emotions
Wrongheaded.
Money flows freely, labor does not. When standards of living, worker protections, human rights, and immigration/emigration policies come to about parity between countries, maybe we can talk about “Globalization” (or opening up the H1B program). Until then, it’s a race to the bottom in a shiny McDonald’s-yellow veneer.
You can go to IIT, get sponsored, and live in California. Can you go to MIT, get sponsored, and live in Bangalore? This question was researched recently – someone contacted various organizations in countries like India (business orgs, government orgs, immigration agencies) and asked if they had programs like the H1B. They were laughed at hysterically.
Not to mention what was laid out in paragraph 1. Even if you COULD move to these places and get a job easily, do you really want to live in a race to the bottom world? Do you want to live in places with poor sewage systems, garbage on the streets, and terrible human rights policies? Places with health care systems more broken than in the US?
I’m ALL for it once we have all those protections standard of living in place. The funny thing is, once that happens, NO COMPANY WILL EVEN BOTHER UNLESS THEY ARE DESPERATE FOR A PERSON WITH A PARTICULAR SKILLSET THAT THEY CAN’T FIND IN THEIR OWN COUNTRY. Why? Well, it’s not about skills in many/most cases – it’s about cheap labor. Once labor costs are a parity between countries, that “advantage” will disappear and these sorts of programs will get little more than a shrug.
THis is crap from the start to the finish. 50 % of all college grads from this year are unemployed. We have thousands of unemployed STEM grads. There are 3 US grads for every single tech position. 250,000 STEM workers have been laid off in the last 2 years. THERE IS NO SHORTAGE OF STEM WORKERS. THERE IS A SHORTAGE OF STEM SLAVES.
What is needed is cheap labor. That’s all Microsoft cares about. They are looking for Indian wetbacks, incompetents who are here with fake credentials who train on the job to do the jobs that used to be done by Americans.
Get rid of the wetbacks. Cancel the H-1B program entirely. After all, Americans deserve to get a job in America.
One of my most beloved classics:
Grace Llewellyn’s “The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education”
http://tinyurl....mazonQuitSchool
Sarah – IIT stands for Indian Institute of Technology and not India Institute of Technology. Just wanted to let you know of the errata.
A correction to Sarah’s post: it is not “India Institute of Technology”, but “Indian Institute of Technology”. Noticed the same mistake in her previous post as well (I think yesterday’s).
I couldn’t agree more. Getting rid of the visa quota is long overdue.
I was recently studying in Berkeley’s EE department, and met a number of Chinese doctoral students. Despite the opportunities and breakneck growth going on in China, many of them (somewhat to my surprise) were enthusiastic about staying long-term in the US. But the immigration system made the prospect of staying in the US at best unpredictable and frustrating, and at worst impossible.
Why should any PhD in EE or any other science at Stanford, Berkeley or MIT who wants to stay and live in the US have trouble doing so? It makes no sense to me.
By indulging in such short-sighted immigration policies, this nation is losing a golden opportunity to revitalize innovation and job growth in the US. And as developing nations like China get richer and richer, it will be all the more difficult to draw the most brilliant foreign students, scientists and engineers to our shores.
If people are worried about unfair competition and jobs (and understandably so), then policies involving pay equalization and taxes (such as the ones described in the article) should be implemented to address these concerns. I think many immigrants would nevertheless want to stay, overwhelmingly to the economic, scientific and cultural benefit of the US.
I wonder, are there any groups or organizations that are lobbying for these changes? I would be interesting in helping to push for reforms.
“Pay equalization”? Set by whom? The government? That’s communism. These immigrants do not come here to help America. They come here to get a U.S. education and then return home to help build their own countries and offshore U.S. jobs with their new degrees. If they do work here, it’s to export America’s capital when they send their paychecks home. And the best and the brightest come from overseas? Then why do China and India refuse to participate in world-standard STEM tests which gauge proficiency? Name one new industry or invention to come out of China that anyone uses. Funny, but America’s econ was booming BEFORE we started importing these supposedly brilliant people, now that we’ve had 10 years of cheap imported labor, the economy is a disaster. We need to keep our scientific and engineering knowledge in USA, in the heads of our own workers, not in the heads of foreign competitors who come here to learn from us and make some money, and then return home to become our new competitors.
Fact:
The employer-sponsored green card categories used by the tech industry consist of three levels, EB-1, EB-2 and EB-3, in order from most to least talented. The fact is that, according to the US Department of State ( http://www.trav...letin_4438.html ) there have been long waits in recent years only for EB-3, which is for ordinary workers of no special talents.
So please spare us with the, “Oh, you’re making it so difficult for foreigners with PhDs” ignorance. And if you’re worried about exceptional talent coming to the US, look to the O-1 visa, which has no quota ( http://www.usci...00045f3d6a1RCRD ). Educate yourself.
Please, enough with the “communism.” By “pay equalization,” I mean that an Indian or a Chinese engineer should be paid at least at the same level, no less, than a US engineer who offers a similar talent set. This is a measure to level the playing field and protect American workers. Please answer the argument based on its substance — don’t make it into a fight over -isms and false labels or mischaracterize my position.
As for those of you who are screaming about how tech immigrants kill America, give me a break. Everyone in the US is an immigrant or has an immigrant background, unless you’re Native American. Immigrants are what made this country and contribute enormously particularly to Silicon Valley. Look at Andy Grove, Sergei Brin, Vinod Khosla, Jerry Yang and numerous other entrepreneurs in the Valley from Europe, the Middle East, Asia — these are often either 1st generation immigrants or the sons of first generation immigrants. Lots of immigrants from all over the world want to make their lives here, not just pillage the American system. It’s not the immigrants who are bringing the country down — though xenophobia and unfounded anti-immigrant outrage might.
Also, no matter what visa you’re seeking to get, EB-1 or 2 or 3, you need a company to sponsor you. The process of getting a green card can take many years, and red tape and the sponsoring company often string out the process. So for all those years, the immigrants can’t make long-term plans, right at a time of their lives when many of them are thinking about whether to marry, settle down, raise kids, etc. So whether quotas are fulfilled or not is irrelevant. The fact of the matter is, the immigration policies make life difficult for many who want to stay in the US for the long-term and could contribute a lot to the US if they did.
Of course, I agree that many people may take the degrees and know-how that they received in the US and run. But there are also many who want to be part of this terrific country for many years to come — like my own parents did, thank God. And for those people — whether they have a doctorate (EB-1) or a bachelor’s (EB-3), if they’re hard working, have great skills and want to become citizens of this country and raise their families in this country, then I believe we should welcome them. That’s how the US became strong, and it’s how it will keep strong into the future.
Just to clarify, EB-1, 2 and 3 are not visa categories, they are Green Card categories. And it’s not about quotas.
I’m afraid you’re missing my point. My point was that for visa beneficiaries placed in the EB-1 Green Card category – those with exceptional skills – THERE IS NO WAIT! NONE! EVERY PERSON WHO WAS PLACED IN THOSE CATEGORIES RECEIVED THEIR GREEN CARD. THERE IS NO WAIT. The only real wait for a Green Card are for those in the EB-3 category – THOSE WITH NO SPECIAL SKILLS. So I’m not sure what you’re complaining about.
I can only assume you want to flood the market with more average workers. You mentioned in one of your previous posts that you think US workers should be protected in some way regarding wages, suggesting that H-1B visa holders are paid less. I applaud you for that much. However, you want to flood the market with more people. And what effect will that have? It will drive down wages further. That’s your agenda, isn’t it? You can admit it. It’s pretty obvious.
Since, you have been dodging EB2 I’ll point it out. EB2 also has wait periods of more than 4-6 years for Indian and Chinese. Currently, one has to find a company that would sponsor H1 and would also be willing to do GC processing. Add 1-2 years for labor clearance and I-140 in 4-6 years wait period i.e. on an average one would have to spend 5-6 years in a company to get GC and get out of shackles of H1B. Go figure! And, read carefully about EB1. It is for someone with very advance degree i.e. you won’t qualify even if you had MS from MIT/CalTech/Stanford.
There are millions of unemployed techies in California. Get rid of all cheap foreign labor on H1b and there will be jobs again. There are thousands of highly skilled Americans that are unemployed that are willing to take these jobs. It’s about time that we help Americans which helped bail out Wall Street. The American middle class has been devastated by these temporary Guest worker visas that were not meant for immigration purposes. It’s about time we help our own American Citizens and local residents instead of bringing in cheap foreign labor. There is no skills shortage just companies that don’t want to pay prevailing wages.
Yeah. The moment you do that labor rates would go high over here and as a result more jobs would be shipped to India/China/Indonesia. Sounds counter intuitive but, very true. At least, some one on H1 spend almost 80% money here in US to fulfill the great american dream.
Based on the misspelling of your article’s headline, I think it’s the reporter who needs to go back to school. Can you seriously blame Americans for not wanting to study science/math when they know there is zero hope of them getting a job in that field because the field has been flooded with cheap labor from abroad? In 1998 at the height of the boom BEFORE we flooded the USA with cheap labor, college kids were lined up across the country to study engineering. And BTW, Bill Gates & Steve Jobs were college dropouts. As Einstein said “Creativity is more important than knowledge”. Where is the Indian operating system? Name one software product that comes from India that anyone uses. Give me a break.
“Hi
I have been abroad for 15 years and orginally Indian..
Now ..regarding Indian companies. .. these companies should directly be banned like
wirpo,tcs, infosys,satyam..why they are not providing you any service they are just interested inexploiting cheap labour ..
You are saying 6 %…Pay scale if being affected I feel it is 80%….The it industry is just doomed by this industry.. outsourcing.. !! But what they do is scary ..They get enginners ..
who can be fakes ..and with lot of fake experience to sit in their company and they will claim they have that skill,
The European recruiters are much smarter to catch these frauds.
One more thing fake pride is creating a lot of trouble.. I had seen lot of Indians bragging they are the best and all those fake lies which result in people getting annoyed..
The other problem is lies and greediness. is always there in Indian company..I know it is human..But you know what I like in usa..is there are some super rich guys who have set up companies and after making the profit they give to poor ..for some social cause..
that is what is required..
Americans have to be smart to identify the blood suckers..Lot of people trying to suck your blood..wipro,tcs ,infosys are just examples of this..
I had seen how people work here for 4 months and get paid 200 dollars and they wer every happy enginners..THese are the frauds which occur here..
Just telling my thoughts..
Why I like usa.. is they spend a lot of money on research but there are so many blood suckers trying to rob them..which is not fair.
H1 visa should be made in such a manner that these companies should be blackl isted
even still it wont solve the problem..People who set compnaies should be allowed but theere shoudl be a proper audit. .LIke it should not happen the company is set and it becomes a hole from which all ur money goes from your country to some other country..
That is possible cause of outsourcing..
FOr h1 visa normally a person is abused in India too..
I THINK The uk system of hsmp is more intersting they just get the talented guys..directly.and once u reach there unless ur truly talented its then only you get a work permit..
Something shoudl be done by which the companeis wont have a hold in issuing hsmp..
cause it is just a misuse visa..
And when wipro is telling usa to open up the ecenomy tell them to open indian ecenomy first.. they are never open..like you cant buy a american car here in india..it has dutys which is charged 200%….same you can do. atleast for outsourced jobs.
Efforts needs to be done to kick of these outsourcing companies..
They are danger for the full world.
@Samir: your US bhakti is appreciable. But, wanted to comment on opening up US economy vs Indian economy. First of all capitalism is the US concept that it preaches in the whole world and now, when it is hurting; they are talking about protecting US interests. The Indian economy is closed and it needs protection because unlike US; INR is not the world currency thus, India can not keep printing money and spend. The only way it can trade internationally is to produce goods/services and sell it outside then and only then it can buy stuff from the world and for that it has to pay in US dollars. So, it has an inherent disadvantage (the same goes for all other countries whose currency is not dominated in international trade). Thus, allowing unabated imports of subsidized american goods (steel and agri products) would be unsustainable for it.
This has also created a huge disparity between relative purchasing powers vs real transaction rate between both currency. So even though 1 US dollars can buy 48 Rs.; you can only buy goods and services worth Rs. 5-7. So, as long as these natural barriers are there; India must protect its industries and try promoting home grown industries.
Apple CLOSED their R&D center in India in 2006 and they employ mostly American labor. And now Apple is BOOMING. Stock’s at $130. Microsoft sent a lot of the work for Vista to India and Vista is a disaster. MS is losing customers and the stock is at $20. Need I say more?
Correction – stock’s now at $142 – using mostly American labor.
Brilliant foreign ’scientists’ like Arun Netravalli destroyed Bell Labs (once America’s premeire R&D lab). It’s now being turned into a hotel and shopping mall. Aluakah Kamar, also from India, became CEO of Quark and nearly destroyed that company before he got fired. Google “Quark debacle”. These India, Inc. conmen are destroying every company they touch. Everyone here does know that GM (which was also booming) outsourced to Wipro in 2006. And now GM is bankrupt.
Two excellent points in a row, Mike.
I’m more than a little exhausted with hearing how much more competent Indian and Asian engineers are than Americans. It amounts to propaganda designed to mask corporation’s attempts to devalue engineers and gain cheap labor. My personal experience is that, in general, they spend a lot of time on the job, but there doesn’t seem to be much work product as a result, and the quality often suffers. In addition to that, they tend to be “clicky”, and refuse to document to ensure “job security”.
I’m not saying that there aren’t brilliant engineers of all nationalities, but we need to recognize what has become a form of discrimination against us in our own country. We are corporate run and corporate owned, and since corporations can claim “personhood” through the 14th amendment (go here if you want to learn more http://www.recl...org/personhood/) they hold the same rights we do, but they have the money to assert their interests above that of actual people.
Yeah. The smart asses in America destroyed the world economy. Go figure! Does that prove US economists are worlds most stupid?
If Indians are so much more brilliant then American programmers, then where is the Indian operating system. Indians go to Japan and try to say they are the experts in software and the Japanese look at them and say “Are you nuts? The whole world knows Americans are the experts – just look at their operating systems”. The Indians walk away red-faced. Because we allow open foreign control of our media, India, Inc. is doing a number on the U.S. public with all this propaganda – meanwhile the companies they take over ALL DIE. And the U.S.A. is dying along with them. It is ABSURD to think that people who cannot even remotely make their own country work can “help” America. They are here to take from us, and that is all.
Except that nowhere in the Constitution are corporations given the right to vote.
True enough, but don’t get me started on elections in this country…
Yeh, of course we don’t suck at high tech HIGHER education. We are by far the best at high tech ed. But, most of those graduates quoted above are foreign (or 1st, 2nd gen American) students. I’ve taught in high schools in South Central LA and Harlem. There are a few good schools between Atherton and Alexandria; but for the most part, it’s so much worse than you can imagine. Forget a homegrown tech/science talent pool, ’cause we can’t fix this system. Sorry.
Reid’s claim that we should “levy a payroll tax” is the most ridiculous of them all. If the government refuses to enforce laws concerning fake qualifications and unpaid bench time, what is is going to make them magically enforce something like that? With a written pledge? Give me a break. Reid knows it would turn into another unenforced mandate that sounds good on paper but never works in the real world.
How about a law making it against the law for a politician for lie?
- write me at ‘Global CIO’ rpreston@informationweek.com
“government refuses to enforce laws concerning fake qualifications and unpaid bench time”
Again Rob supports the ‘vermin’. He’s getting better at acting like a NASCOM writer and burying his agenda in other rhetoric.
I can’t believe that in all of these post not one of you have given consideration to the real problem. “WE HAVE BEEN OUT-ENGINEERED!” I have gotten my AAS degree as an electronic tech, plus I have been in the tech field for about 12 years now. I have worked everywhere from Compaq to Dell and a lot of EMS companies in between, so I’d like to think I am qualified to speak on the matter. I remember at one subcontractor place they put me to work trying to troubleshoot Cisco’s Presto and Nitro series of router boards (circa. 1999). These things were like 2×2 feet big and were crawling with all kinds of VLSI, ASIC, made by Altera, Xilinx and others. Needless to say while trying to troubleshoot the thing, I felt like throwing the oscilloscope out the window and walking out the door! Do these companies honestly expect a 2-4 year degree graduate to come in and be able to fix these things! SVEngineer, I can tell you’ve been around and I sympathize with you, all of your points are correct. Companies have taken the attitude “These guys aren’t going to be of any real use to us, so we might as well offshore to get as many millions as possible so our board members and shareholders will be safe while the rest of the middle-class goes under”. You have to know your ABC’s before your XYZ’s, so If you have a 2-4 year degree, in this industry, that puts you in the hole by about 60 years!