Microsoft Calls For $5B Investment In U.S. Education 257
Dupple sends this quote from ComputerWorld:
"Congress should invest $5 billion in the country's education system — particularly in math, science and technology education — over the next 10 years and pay for it with increased fees on high-skill immigration, a Microsoft executive said. The U.S. needs to push more resources into science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education because technology companies are running into huge shortages of workers, said Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel and executive vice president. With most U.S. industries relying heavily on IT systems, other companies will soon start to see those worker shortages as well, unless the country focuses more on STEM education, he said during a speech at the Brookings Institution Thursday.'We need to do something new,' he said. 'We need to try something different.'"
Re:Just a cheap H1-B visa scam, "for the kids" my (Score:5, Informative)
How the fuck did you create a 410 word post time stamped at the same exact time that the article was posted? I detect some tomfoolery here.
Grandparent is a subscriber, so he can see the article before it goes green and gets sent out to the unwashed masses.
They've gamed the market so long... (Score:5, Informative)
...they've forgotten how it actually works.
If you can't find people to hire, you're not offering enough money. If designing widgets or software had an advantageous salary (relative to marketing or finance), people would go into this field.
If you have decent people but they need to work with a new technology, train them. Even if they just have potential or are pretty green, train them. I can't remember when this changed, but at some point companies just stopped training and decided that they would only hire pre-trained people or worse yet, support a gladiatorial culture where workers are expected to train themselves or get replaced with 20 year olds who "already know it".
You have to change the sclerotic culture of business so that it's not a class of financial engineers and marketers who are treated as an aristocracy while engineers and more general labor are treated as plebs. I had a telling conversation with my wife, a senior marketing executive, about this. She basically came out and said that engineers were only worth so much money, period, and if they couldn't be had for that figure then they needed to be imported. But sales and marketing executives have no such cap, and they need to be paid whatever it takes to hire the right person. And she works for a company where there would be no product without engineers!!
Re:Just a cheap H1-B visa scam, "for the kids" my (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe read the article?
Re:Straw Poll (Score:4, Informative)
Posting as AC for obvious reasons.
I work for Microsoft as an SDE (currently Level 60, or SDE 1). I got hired on straight out of college two years ago and some change. I have only a BS in electrical engineering. I turned down an offer from Google at the same time (the starting salary was the same, but they wanted me to move to California). After one promotion-based pay raise, one pay-raise last year across all of MS R&D, and one normal yearly pay-raise, I make $104k base salary at one of MS's satellite offices, and I'm 24. I am contacted by a headhunter about every one to two months. The offers are so-so, but all the ones that would pay me anywhere near a comparable salary to MS want me to move somewhere crappy.
I work with quite a number of people here on foreign-hire programs, but I don't really know which programs (I hear some are more controversial than others). They are competent engineers and most have a higher level than I do (SDE 2 or Senior SDE), mostly because they have a higher education level and have been here longer. I can only assume that means they get paid more, but I don't know that for sure (and just in case they don't, I won't ask).
Re:Just a cheap H1-B visa scam, "for the kids" my (Score:5, Informative)
I'm a fairly high-level architect at Microsoft. I have interviewed a metric F-load of people, many of which are international candidates. If we could hire all domestic, we would, because the paperwork is way easier. But the most important thing is, the actual salary that we pay people (and all the paperwork and such) actually rarely figures into the hire / no-hire decision. For us, it's all about that person's skills and what they bring to the team.
I would be very, very happy to see the cost of H1Bs go way up, in order to fund tech education. Companies WILL pay the money. And the best part about that is, it doesn't give any company a competitive advantage over any other company -- it's a level playing-field. Often when I hear companies gripe about some change in laws, I use that to judge whether the griping is legitimate or not -- does a change in law favor one company (or one kind of company) more than other? But in this case, no, it doesn't. All tech companies that need to hire will face the same labor market.
H1B is not slavery. The majority of H1B workers are young and single, usually a few years out of college. H1B gives them an opportunity to come to the states and 1) gain really valuable experience, 2) make a decent amount of money. Most of the H1B workers I meet are Indian, Chinese, or Russian. They make very good money. Good money in US terms, and *fantastic* money by the cost-of-living of where they came from. If they don't like their work conditions, they can leave. Just like any other job on the planet. If they do, they still made a ton of money, and still have a gig with American Mega-Awesome Corp or whatever on their resume. That's hardly slavery.
I would seriously love to see more American candidates. But where *are* they?? Most of the candidates from domestic CS programs are, frankly, very weak candidates. There are exceptions, but they are exceptions. (For example, the Brown CS program is excellent, and produces a steady stream of first-class CS students.) Most of the American candidates I interview know a little web programming, and maybe some Java, but are extremely weak on machine architecture, assembly programming, networking, performance analysis, and problem-solving abilities.
Re:They've gamed the market so long... (Score:1, Informative)
I have interviewed over a hundred people in the last few years. And let me tell you, the issue is the quality, not the price. We have *plenty* of money to offer, and we do offer it. But most of the candidates I interview simply do not meet the requirements on intelligence, skills, and problem-solving abilities.
Re:books (Score:4, Informative)
Books costing as much as the class themselves? I call BS. Your speaking of "that rare occasion you can buy a used book" sounds like college books, so let's see... grabbing the current tuition rate from my alma mater (FSU), using the in-state rate, that gives $212.09 per semester-hour. Most classes are three or four semester hours. Using the lower of those gives $616.27 per student per class. So, at $200 a book, you're looking at each class calling for three books for the books to cost as much as the classes.
You then talk about districts raising money for books, which sounds like public school. So let's look there. First off, most public schools don't buy new books for every class every year. And I haven't seen any one-use web access codes for books for public schools -- I've seen it for college books, but not ones intended for the public school market. So let's see.... Let's say $200 a book, buying books every other year, buying 40 books for a class. That's $4000 for books per year per class.
Now... what are all the other expenses associated with running that class? Well, a big one up front is the teacher. Let's say the teacher makes $35k a year -- that doesn't seem unreasonable. There are also further benefits included with the job, though, so that teacher probably costs the school district at least $50k a year. $50k / $4000 = 12.5. So, unless that teacher is teaching 13 or more classes a year, just the teacher is already costing more than the books. Most districts these days seem to have a seven-period day, with teachers having one free period during the day, so realistically, we can expect that the teacher is teaching six classes. $50k / 6 = $8,333.33... so the teacher is costing a bit more than twice as much as the books. And that's leaving aside all the other expenses involved for each class -- like the cost of building and maintaining the school, amortized over all those classes. The cost of administrative and support personnel, again amortized over the classes. The costs of lab materials, handouts, and other class materials.
If the school buys new books every year, then the cost of books is roughly the same as the cost of the teacher. But I've never known a school to actually do that.
Now, I agree that the books cost too much -- but they're not costing as much as the class. Not even close. Looking around for figures, it looks like textbooks are about 1% of school budgets. But then, how do we get from that to needing multi-million dollar bond raisings?
Well, one problem is that school systems are used to mandating a whole new lineup of books every five or six years, which means the expense hits heavy in one year, then is small for a few years (during which only books that are lost or badly damaged are replaced). Meanwhile, textbook costs have risen roughly 5% a year over the last decade, leading to "sticker shock" as schools see that new books are going to cost about 34% more than they did last time (six years ago). If they've been setting aside money for the last five years, planning on maybe a 10% increase in price in keeping with the past, then they're getting a sudden, unpleasant surprise.
Looking around a bit, I found a detailed school system budget (the Norwalk, Connecticut public schools). It's the first one I found -- I didn't select it specially. In it, the textbook cost is about 0.1% of the budget. I'm going to assume that's normal for a year in which no new books are being introduced. If we accept the Kentucky figure that textbooks are 1% of the overall budget over time, then that implies that in a year of book replacement, new books are 5.9% of the budget. Call it 6% for ease of figuring. If that's what it was in the last cycle, and prices have risen 34%, but budgets haven't increased, then the new cost is 8% of the budget, for a shortfall of 2% of the budget. Looking back at Norwalk's budget again, overall budget is about $200m... so that would be $4m for them. So, yeah... they'd be looking at a multi-million
Re:Just a cheap H1-B visa scam, "for the kids" my (Score:3, Informative)
We already throw a fuck TON of money at education. We throw as much if not more than most of the world at our educational system, but the majority of that money doesn't make it directly to affecting the student.
Most of the money..is wasted on administration.
Most of the money is wasted through programs and promises to appease the teacher unions, which serve themselves instead of the students. Why is it so hard to fire a bad teacher? Heard the stories about teachers they can't fire, but can' use to teach, and they PAY them to sit in a room all day doing nothing? Really?
We have to get parents back to being interested in their kids education...my parents pushed prodded and well, at times kicked my ass through my educational years. Thanks God for them doing so....trouble is, you can't legislate that.
Culturally...we need to make being an educated person, that can think and be successful the ikon of youth's admiration and something they seek to emulate. Right now...you have foul mouthed thugs speaking into mike (not even musically mind you)...espousing crime and criminality as they way to be.
You have so many males today...that only think it is beneficial to try to be the pro athlete with all the money and glory...even though, that chances of that level are achieved only by a few more people than win a major lottery jackpot. Hell, that seems to be one of the reasons women are outnumbering men in graduating with higher degrees, etc. The other reason is targeted educational programs that helped to raise women...and they have worked, but they sadly have done this to the detriment of our young men in the US.
And sadly, one more thing we need to address in our schools...discipline.
Our teachers often spend more time trying to keep the class room from spilling over into anarchy, rather than imparting educated ideas. Maybe we need to think of education more as a privilege, than a 'right'.?
Why teach to the lowest common denominator? Why pay so much attention to troublemakers and the less inclined to learn at the expense of kids that have it mentally and want it??
Why not have different tracts for kids. As they get older...and need extra help...put them into classes that can cater to them. Maybe they can be put back in regular classes along the line...maybe not.
Kids that can't cut it mentally....and maybe those that won't behave...they get put more on a track for vocational education....they aren't going to do as much 'book learning'....so, why not teach them a skill that they can use to earn a living?
I'm just throwing ideas around out there...but something major has to be done. I don't think we can really fix the current system, too many special interests are ingrained in the educational system...and they won't let things change.
We need to make the focus of education in the US....education, and not all the programs and rules and special interests and administration that currently surrounds and leaches off the system to the detriment of our children.