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.'"
Just a cheap H1-B visa scam, "for the kids" my ass (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, normally I defend Bill Gates and MS, just because I feel *someone* should stand up against all the reflexive MS-bashing around here. But on this, I've got to call a spade a spade (and a scumbag ploy a scumbag ploy) and point out that this whole "it's for education" stageshow is nothing more than a cynical attempt on MS's part to get more H1-B visas (i.e. slavery licenses) so they can import cheap high-skilled labor rather than raise their salaries to hire U.S. workers. MS is basically pitching the idea of the government letting them buy a presumably unlimited number of H1-B visas (and even permanent green cards now too), and trying to cloak it with a bunch of "this will help the kids" education horseshit.
The whole H1-B visa program needs to be severely curtailed, NOT expanded. The idea of H1-B visas started out as a reasonable sounding idea. When we have critical shortages, we can give special visa exemptions for foreign workers. But, in practice in recent years, it's become nothing more than a way for big corps to skirt the free labor market and artificially suppress wages for skilled labor. You advertise a job at a ridiculously low wage, or with ridiculous requirements, and when no American worker responds or qualifies (because American programmers and engineers won't work for $30,000 a year and don't have 20+ years Java development experience), you run crying to Congress and the Labor Dept. that you need more H1-B visas to fill the "critical shortages of qualified workers." So then you can import foreigners willing to work for cheap, rather than raise wages to get American workers (who ARE out there, and ARE willing to work--just not for peanuts). And, to top it all off, you can cleverly skirt the "prevailing wage" provisions of the H1-B program by artificially keeping wages low, or defining the job so narrowly that there is no field to compare it to. Corporations for the win!
And, sadly, the whole scam has been backed (and consistently expanded) by both Republican and Democrats in this country--not surprisingly, since they're both just corporate subsidiaries at this point. And while people have been warning about abuses in the program [wikipedia.org] for years, their complaints are consistently lost in the rain of cash the big corps are dumping on Washington before every election.
In short, fuck you Microsoft. You're not fooling me (and hopefully not anyone else).
Ironic (Score:3)
If this is indeed the case, then Bill is calling for more money to be spent to educate kids who will never be able to find work because of the H1-B workers have it all locked up.
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.
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I would seriously love to see more American candidates. But where *are* they??
We're over 40 and have been unemployed for more than 6 months; therefore, we are--by definition--not "qualified."
I have a degree in EE and I'll be finishing CS next year, but I'm desperately looking for something to get out of STEM. When I see students who don't understand a JMP instruction, or the concept that Object x has Method y which returns DataType z getting the job offers while I don't even get a call-back, my only conclusion is that it's your own fault.
From my perspective, it is obvious that employ
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I worked at Microsoft from 2004-2005. From my experience, the level of knowledge required to pass the interview does not match the level required for the job. Interviewing at Microsoft is ridiculously hard. However once you get in, the work is so simple it's boring. They have people with Masters degrees in Computer Science writing simple automated tests that junior developers at other companies would write.
There's no reason Microsoft couldn't hire most of the people they interview. There's no reason Microso
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What you say does not contradict that Microsoft wants more H1Bs to reduce their labor costs. It's simple supply and demand. By adding people to the job market, H1B visa workers will depress wages. While Microsoft is willing to pay more than market average, they will still benefit from a lower market average.
Re:Just a cheap H1-B visa scam, "for the kids" my (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a software developer at Microsoft. I'm also a foreigner, working on an L-1 visa (and know a bunch of people working on H-1B).
First of all, I can confirm that indeed there's no discernible difference in the way I'm treated (promoted, paid, not asked to work overtime etc) because of my visa. The compensation, when you account for all the bonuses, is above market average. And Microsoft sponsors my green card application right away - which wouldn't even make sense if they wanted to keep me in my present status. So that "slave worker" argument that you've replied to is clear BS.
On the other hand, regarding this:
H1B is not slavery ... If they don't like their work conditions, they can leave. Just like any other job on the planet.
The problem is that if you leave on H-1B, your visa also terminates effective immediately (unless you're in late stages of green card application). Technically, you're required to vacate the country immediately. Many people overstay in practice while looking for another job, but that's a violation.
Now, yes, you could try finding another company that's willing to sponsor a new H-1B application for you, and secure a job position there before leaving. This is not particularly easy, however, and certainly puts H-1B workers in a disadvantaged position compared to local workers, which in turn means that they have less leverage against any potential abuses by employeer, be it low compensation, overtime, or something else (since they always have that threat of being kicked them out right there and then hanging over their heads).
Now, Microsoft doesn't use this potential to abuse its H-1B employees, which is definitely a good thing. But, in general, the potential for such abuse is inherent in the system, and there has been plenty of evidence of other companies abusing it that way.
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The whole thing would be easy to fix. Just require the company to offer the workers 10% more then what the CEO earns (including bonuses and stock options). If they can't get a worker under those terms, then sure, import someone.
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You advertise a job at a ridiculously low wage, or with ridiculous requirements, and when no American worker responds or qualifies (because American programmers and engineers won't work for $30,000 a year and don't have 20+ years Java development experience), you run crying to Congress and the Labor Dept. that you need more H1-B visas to fill the "critical shortages of qualified workers.
I still get H1-B phony pitches. ColdFusion programmer jobs half-way across the country offering $35K a year. Yeah, I'
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But, in practice in recent years, it's become nothing more than a way for big corps to skirt the free labor market and artificially suppress wages for skilled labor. You advertise a job at a ridiculously low wage, or with ridiculous requirements, and when no American worker responds or qualifies (because American programmers and engineers won't work for $30,000 ...
This hasn't just been the case in recent years, it has been the way the H1-B scheme has worked from the beginning. The place where I was
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I was an H1-B "slave". Now I pay significantly more taxes than the average US citizen.
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.
Re:Just a cheap H1-B visa scam, "for the kids" my (Score:4, Interesting)
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Slashdot Post: 10:12AM
400 word response: @10:21AM
Your response: 10:19AM
Someone is traveling back in time and not telling the rest of us.
Like you think Slashcode can handle something as complex as time?
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7 digit UIDs have been around for a while, I've seen the GP post often lately, it's not like he just signed up for the account today as is usual for shillage. As was mentioned by another commenter, he's a subscriber. Subscribers see the articles before they're posted, and the time they will be posted is marked on it. Easy to have a relevant, non-troll FP when you're a subscriber.
As to EFF "astroturfer," since the Electronic Frontier Foundation is a true grassroots outfit, there is no such thing as "EFF astr
Re:Just a cheap H1-B visa scam, "for the kids" my (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe read the article?
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Recommendation #1:
Establish a new and supplemental allocation of 20,000 H-1B STEM visas to meet employersâ(TM) hiring needs and generate up to $200 million for new investments in the American STEM pipeline.
Linking H-1B to "STEM pipelines" will also help it survive political adversity.
Personally, I don't mind the presence of the H-1B. But it shouldn't be a indentured servant program because then, US workers can't compete with H-1B visa workers (it wouldn't be legal for US workers to work under similar conditions to those that H-1B visa workers experience, such as getting booted out of the country, if the company fires them).
Re:Just a cheap H1-B visa scam, "for the kids" my (Score:4, Interesting)
Part of the plan includes increasing the fees for visas by about 4-5 times.
That said, I don't think even a $10000/year fee (It looks like it's $10k one-time being proposed?) is enough... The fee should be at least $20000/year to reduce the financial incentives for companies to use the visas.
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Not only that, the workers should be able to leave and go to work for other companies if they want. The new company can take over the fee in that case.
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Re:Just a cheap H1-B visa scam, "for the kids" my (Score:5, Interesting)
Except they KNOW the money won't actually improve education. They will basically just buy more visas.
The real problem is that US students are competing with India and China students... Their population EACH is four times the US. If a similar "top 10%" of talent is equal to our students, there are 8 foreign students for 1 American competing for jobs. It's a numbers game.
The second problem is that American schools refuse to teach students the "job skills" portion of CS degrees. The game has always been that you get out of school and have to work really cheap... That was nice for companies that were hiring for a 10 year plan. In the new scheme, the foreign kids are coming from schools focused on producing programmers with years of real experience.
Lastly, there really aren't THAT many jobs in the high end STEM fields. Biology and chemistry are filled with PHd hopefuls doing most of the day-to-day work... At half pay. But there's no jobs when they actually GET the PHd. Engineering just plain isn't building anything... The old guys can barely keep their jobs. Computer Sciences don't really employ that many people. For a company like Apple or Microsoft with 100k workers, way less than half are actually programming... Most are service or sales jobs. So unless you really want to live on the east or west coast, there really isn't a return on investment for going with an insanely hard CS program. For the most part, jobs are supporting manufacturing or sales activities... The Financial and Siftware jobs are really the 10% tip of the iceberg.
India and China have better test takers (Score:2)
India and China have better test takers and india coders suck and turn out poor code
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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? Hea
Re:Just a cheap H1-B visa scam, "for the kids" my (Score:5, Interesting)
Education should be a right, not a privilege, of living in an advanced society. Kids shouldn't get thrown out and left without an education because they didn't fit in or were holding back other kids; they need to be trained to live in modern society, even if their stupid parents aren't doing their parts.
The answer is to have tiered education, the way the Germans do it. Kids that are troublemakers get put in special classes with other dolts, which are run by teachers trained to deal with them. They're not going to learn at the level of the smart kids, who are elsewhere in their own classes, but they'll learn something, even if it's discipline. The problem our country largely has is "mainstreaming": we want to treat everyone like equals, when they simply aren't. Parents get all pissed off when little Johnny gets held back a grade or put in a "special" class, so for decades we've been trying to stick all kids together in the same class, even when they don't learn at the same rate and some are troublemakers and need special attention. Get rid of mainstreaming and many of your problems will disappear.
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I don't agree that we need to throw metric assloads of money at the issue, we simply need to revert education to classical education instead of what we have done for the last 50+ years in forcing schools to teach workplace education. Politicians broke our education system when they forced all schools to teach to "standards testing" instead of teaching people to "think!"
The fix does not require tremendous amounts of cash as you suggest, simply a different method of education and curriculum changes that corr
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If we are going off anecdotal evidence, I consult with several companies hiring H1B and I only see 30k/year salaries being offered. I call BS on your unqualified implied generalization.
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Hey hey hey... let's try to keep religion out of this shall we? I presume that by "nation of undereducated idiots" that's what you're talking about.
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No it's not. Religion is a GLARING exception in a mind which might otherwise be consistently rational. It's a corruption of thought.
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Actually, there's a fair number of people who send their kids to Catholic schools who aren't even Catholic.
I went to Catholic middle school, and I really don't remember a lot of religious education. Maybe it's changed. I do remember having to go to Mass once in a while, but as middle-schoolers, we just sat there and didn't really know what was going on.
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There is a way. It's called the congressional hearing. They have had those and nothing seems to come of it. In the end, they seem to end up becoming a political contribution drive.
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At Stark Enterprises you have to compete with JARVIS though. Which would pretty much limit your job opportunities to Eye Candy for Tony, or the guy who makes annoying kinetic sculptures for the desk of Pepper Potts.
Everyone has it all wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Everyone has it all wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. Start paying engineers more than MBAs, and the problem will fix itself.
Re:Everyone has it all wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Given that those who are doing the hiring are likely MBAs themselves, you're not going to see that happen.
Re:Everyone has it all wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
Also include teachers in this mix. If you want really good engineers to graduate from 5-year college programs, you need good math teachers in secondary schools. And the only way you're going to get good math teachers in secondary schools is to pay them enough so that it's a rational economic choice to go into teaching rather than engineering (or engineering stock trades).
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Teachers should come from experienced professionals, not straight out of college. As such, an education system should try to be courting the 50+ cohort who are looking to get out of engineering and the sciences, and pay them accordingly. It will upset the unions since education is more about jobs, than about the kids.
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Let me put it this way: My dad made the switch from working programmer to math teacher in late middle age, and not once did he run into a problem with unions.
Re:Everyone has it all wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
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Or you go into STEM fields and then have trouble continuing employment the older you get unless you move into business anyways... So why not just start there? Requires far less advanced math then most of those STEM courses do as well...
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And of course finding people who are both smart enough to do well in it and dumb enough to pick such a terrible field reduces your potential students even further.
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They're terribly paid for what they are.
Given time, your average engineer (I'm not talking about the Asberger's end of the spectrum here) could probably learn how to do a manager's job.
There's no way in hell the average manager could do the average engineers job.
You could swap an average manager out for another average manager and barely notice. If you swap out your engineer, be prepared for your project to stall, crash, and burn, because you just did the equivalent of deleting the libraries folder from you
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Quants are what happens when good mathematicians turn to the Dark Side. Instead of working on creating value, they are employed inventing ways to hide value.
books (Score:2, Interesting)
Until the books are better priced you will not see anything. And throwing 'more money at the problem' actually makes it worse (as people have more cash and can buy more so prices go up).
By my estimate many of the books out there are costing as much as the class themselves. With very little changed from one revision to the next (usually rearranging the questions and answers). Or better yet using web material lockins for that rare occasion you can buy a used book (costing 50+ bucks just for web access).
Thi
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A good teacher shouldn't need a book.
There's lots of old, free books. Why not use those?
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You only need one good teacher to make one good book, and release it under a Creative Commons license though. We're in an era where technology makes this easier than ever before.
For homework questions, how about you just write one, and release it. Even if only a few teachers do this, there should be enough questions on a given topic to keep the students busy for years.
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
Another bullshit whine (Score:5, Insightful)
No, that is not the issue. The issue is you, the employers, do not want to hire people above a certain age, people who might need a bit of training to get them up to speed or people you will have to pay what their skills are worth.
There are tons of people in the IT field, not just programming, who are either stuck where they're at or unemployed because of your deliberate actions to not hire them. Telling someone to upgrade their skills, which they do at their own expense, then be told, "Well, it's not EXACTLY what we're looking for", then whining you can't find anyone is the direct result of your actions.
You cannot expect every person you hire to have the EXACT experience you want, especially when you refuse to provide training. If all you want are experienced people but don't train anyone, then eventually you will run short/out of experienced people because no one was trained to replace them.
Start hiring people who are close to what you need, regardless of age, train them in the way YOU want them to be, and you your supposed shortage will magically disappear.
Re:Another bullshit whine (Score:4, Interesting)
As someone who is having trouble hiring people in IT in my home area where there are rumors the unemployment rate is 2% or less for IT, I can promise you we're not having a problem because we're not looking for wide enough.
What the real problem for me happens to be that people aren't willing to learn once they come on board. They want to pretend they're experts in their field and know everything there is to know and how dare I insult their intelligence with a technical interview which shows me (and them) how narrow their knowledgebase really happens to be.
While I disagree with STEM as a concept in education, there are those who believe it is really a worthwhile venture because it shifts how education is done. I argue that if the STEM model is that great, it should be rolled out to ALL K-12 and not simply those who win the lottery and get into a STEM-focused institution. But that's besides the point here.
What we really need to focus on is teaching children that they can always learn and should seek it out. Egotistical coders are nothing new and will not likely change, but if we could capture at least some people and change their attitude, we could really have a thriving group of individuals who are all about bettering themselves continually. This may eventually spread to employers who are willing to train, develop, and lead people in new directions to create a better overall product instead of hiring what they believe are the best of the best who just happen to be very good at feeling they can accurately assess someone's abilities in a few interviews.
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Another issue is that the US gov't spends more on debt interest than on education. http://www.usfederalbudget.us/defense_budget_2012_3.html [usfederalbudget.us] There's a math joke in there somewhere.
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Which, in part, led to the massive arms race and excessive military spending and huge debt we have today.
Maybe they should have created the Dept of Education a few years earlier...
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One must also consider that if I hire a immigrant, and sponsor them, or if they are undocumented, I have much more control over that person than if i hire a citizen with freedom to move to a better job, or
Straw Poll (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot seems to have its fair share of the sort of 'high skill STEM/IT/Tech' types that Mr. William H. Gates III is referring to a shortage of, so, I ask:
Is this a 'shortage' as in "Yup, damn headhunters won't stop calling and I'm turning down fairly attractive offers just for not being very attractive on a routine basis." or a 'shortage' as in "Cry, cry, we want CCNAs with a decade of experience to be begging when we offer them 30k/yr!"?
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I'd definitely say the first one. I get a new call from a headhunter at least every week. My female coworkers get them practically daily. And none of us are anything that special - ~5 years of dev experience in java/C++/web stuff.
The thing is, most "qualified" programmers suck. When I was in college I would trust maybe 1/4 of the people in the class to work with me on a group project. Programming is hard, and good software engineering (which is a separate problem) is even harder.
Combine that with the fact t
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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).
Then pay taxes, MS (Score:4, Interesting)
If MS wants the U.S. to educate its workers, then perhaps MS needs to stop looking for ways to pay U.S. taxes [blogspot.com].
Oh, that's right. MS just wants the other U.S. taxpayers to increase MS's profits. I forgot.
Easy way to get more STEM workers (Score:3)
Go hire and train this years graduates! That is all it will take to prime the pump and keep the student/worker training going.
I know of way too many people with STEM degrees who work outside their field because they could never get the "entry level" experience in the field.
Same ol' new and different (Score:3, Interesting)
'We need to do something new,' he said. 'We need to try something different.'
Since education spending has tripled or quadrupled (depending on who you ask) over the past 30 years, and and educational outcomes have been virtually unchanged, yeah, dumping more money into a crumbling educational bureaucracy is really new and different. That'll probably work.
Until we do something about this, more money is not going to help any more than it already has:
graph [manlyexcellence.com]
bankrupted statement (Score:5, Interesting)
"technology companies are running into huge shortages of workers"
I've heard this shortage of workers again and again so much it is a bankrupted statement. I've heard back in 1980s about shortage of engineers, only to have engineers laid off in early 1990s. then again shortage of engineers in 1990s, only to have layoffs in early 2000s.
Perhaps there is a shortage of people with good skill mix of hardware and software skills. But from what I see, this has been discouraged. Going into engineering is fine with most people as long as you transition into management two or three years later, otherwise you are perceived as a loser. If you are not a millionaire by the time you are 30, you are perceived as a loser. Many engineers got interests in taking apart stuff (usually not much luck putting them back together) when they were children. Or the youngster hacking into computers or do phone phreaking (now regarded as terrorist activities). And young people experiment with chemistry kits (you old timers from 20th century remember they use to have these available). Many hands-on shop classes have been eliminated. Plus anything techie that is being built is done outside USA (i.e. iPhone, and I'm not sure if you can hack this thing either). Then having do all this plus considerable time with tech courses to what, getting employed in a diminishing industry? Of course if you are a super star then you will always have it great. But if it is like you either have to be really good or you will be scraping by (no in between i.e. middle class), then most people are going to do something else.
That's my Gripe Of The Month.
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A couple of relevant economic definitions for you:
shortage: (n) A situation where the price of what you want to buy is going up.
surplus: (n) A situation where the price of what you want to buy is going down.
Since employers are buying engineering labor, they want surpluses, not shortages. Since a lot of /.ers are the labor that they're buying, we should want a shortage, not a surplus.
Corporate irresponsibility... (Score:5, Insightful)
There is absolutely no shortage of qualified workers. There is shortage of corporate responsibility.
With corporations already shed responsibility for retirement and education they are now trying to shed responsibility for on-job job-specific training.
As a veteran of a tech sector, I had to escape into consulting/regulation side exactly because of this phenomena.
You are expected to upgrade/maintain your qualifications without any kind of time/money allowance from the employer, but then most corporations would not promote from within, so you are stuck at the same wage level. Then when you finally leave to get your promotion they expect to hire someone with exact qualifications you had, never mind the fact that you left because they didn't pay you enough.
Culture of promoting from within and investing in on-job training has to come back. You can't expect to perpetually suppress wages, not invest into your workers and have people willing to do it. Eventually people figure out this is bad field to work in and jump the ship.
STFU! and put your money where your mouth is (Score:3)
Ah, the cries for cheap labour. (Score:3)
One of the great democratizing things that's happened with the rise of App Stores, free tools, computers so cheap they're effectively free, open access to information.. and access to virtual manufacturing tools - is that now you can start a company with little capital from just about anywhere.
Keep whining. Soon you won't be needed, and the technically minded can connect directly with those who want the goods and services produced by their skills.
Much like Napster and iTunes fortold the end of the multi-million dollar record deals, but enabled a whole generation of new musicians to make a decent living, access to cheap tools, social networking connections, kickstarter type operations, and virtual machine and manufacturing shops will be the end to the Bill Gates empires of the world.
Or maybe not, but I like to think the free market, like nature abhors a vacuum and while slow, will respond in kind.
I might be a little older now, but I'm not jaded yet.
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!!
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You're the microsoft architect right?
Perhaps the money you are offering isnt enough?
As someone else here pointed out, if you offer more money (and make this known), the market will move to correct the lack of supply you see. Witness the steady increase in the ranks of web developers after the heady salary excesses of the nineties.
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Go do more east coast recruiting. I have a hard time believing that RPI, CMU, Cornell, grads are programming chumps.
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I would instead make the argument that Microsoft, as a software company founded and run by a software developer, is one place where the culture isn't as sclerotic and where they realize that their engineering talent is actually important. Basically they're doing it right.
But they're also in high-stakes competition for the cream of the crop, both technically and otherwise, with deep-pocketed competitors like Google, Amazon, Apple and others. So they're not *just* doing it right (or much better than averag
Captialism only works for CEOs (Score:5, Insightful)
It Depends on where you are. (Score:2)
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Here in Oklahoma, we are desperately looking for programmers, engineers, and believe it or not: welders. Three local companies have Billboards up looking for welders, who are paid more than engineers!
I believe that. Grew up there and graduated from OU with a degree in engineering. Even if those companies did pay more than my big city pay and no doubt cost of living is cheaper, I still wouldn't move back. There are certainly worse places to live, but I wouldn't move there either. Neither would any of the other Okies I know in the computer industry that migrated around the same time I did. Pretty much everybody I knew from college has fled to at least as far as Texas.
Money != Good Education (Score:2)
History and trends apparently haven't driven this point home.
If what gives a great education is money, Camden, NJ (the poorest city in America) should have the most awesome education available since the amount of federal and state aid it gets per pupil is truly staggering.
Does money help? Sure. But it can't make up for parents who don't care, broken homes, etc.
If throwing money at education would solve the problem, it would be solved by now.
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Thats one of the things people seem to forget, that culture plays a signifigant part in learning outcomes. Plus the american educational system isn't really all that well set up to provide situations which develop independent thinking and problem solving ability.
New Approach (Score:2)
I have an idea (Score:4, Interesting)
'We need to do something new,' he said. 'We need to try something different.'
How about pay STEM people reasonable wages and offer reasonable benefits. I am sick of getting offers in the $30-$40k range to jump from my current position that currently pays over double that. I do get real offers now and then but probably 80% are the joke ones where they want people with 5 to 10+ years experience in a laundry list of not widely used technologies, want a minimum of a BS with a MS or PhD preferred, and expect you to start at $30k a year with 2 weeks vacation. I got a call from a recruiter the other day who thought I might be interested in some positions that ended up I laughing at because the offerings were absurd. She was shocked at the amount of money it would take to get me to change my job, even though it was only about a 10% increase over what I currently make. I have gotten offers for almost twice what I make but would have to move to places I don't want to live that cost over twice what it costs where I currently live so it would have been a net loss for me.
Throw money at the problem! (Score:2)
Sure, let's throw more money at the problem. Money solves all issues! We don't need brains, or make wise decisions. Just throw more money at it! How's that education working out for the Microsoft people lobbying Congress to do this? Not so well I see.
US Education Spending In A Graph (Score:3)
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/public-school-spending-theres-a-chart-for-that/
We're spending 300% more than we were in 1970, yet, scores aren't going up.
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I blame the western culture of "special".
In school, Everyone is Special. Everyone gets a prize for participating.
The only prizes I got in school, I damn well worked hard for. I never saw anything in my early years, apart from promotion from a lower class to another, largely because of a lack of the athletic achievement that was essential for our school awards scheme.
Later on, I was the best in school in two out of three of the major sciences, and part of their most successful rowing team ever with trophies
and 4.8B being spent on MicroSoft Software (Score:2)
wanna bet that if this money does start flowing that Microsoft will do everything it can to grab as much of it as possible??
(spend 48K on "dinners" get 4.8B in business)
(oh and to the folks trying to get a degree DREAMSPARK ---- best way to get MS stuff without paying for it LEGALLY
This is why monopolies are bad (Score:3)
They get things like this passed because they have an asswad of liquid assets to lobby with. It won't surprise me when this goes through.
Ignoring the glut in unemployed STEM graduates... (Score:2)
Microsoft says we need to invest $500M/year for the next ten years ($5BN total) to create even more STEM graduates.
No, we need kids to walk out of 12th grade functioning at a 12th grade level in reading and math, college is the new high school, as reported in today's USA Today.
SAT scores are declining, college costs are soaring, and everyone seems to think that taking on massive student debt and waiting four years (or more) to enter the work force is the key to future success.
It is time to do something diff
Not just education (Score:3)
We need to produce high-skill jobs to occupy high-skill graduates. And we need medium-skill and low-skill jobs to employ the people who aren't up to doing high-skill jobs.
In short, we need more jobs. And that means we have to get off of dependency on manufactured goods exported from near-slave-labor countries.
Gates is talking about slapping a band-aid on a gaping wound.
Competitive devaluation, tarrifs, etc. (Score:3)
We're reliving the 1930s. There are currency wars, trade wars, etc. That's not to say that it's not a good thing, even though it's recessionary. Huh?
Flash back to 1990s discussion with comm-school room-mate. Me: This NAFTA and Free Trade thing is a bad idea. Him: We need this to make the economy grow. Me: Then we're doomed because you can only grow until you have Free Trade agreements with the entire world. Him: Comm school profs are telling us this. You're just an undergrad, what do you know?
Flash forward again. What I think this really means is that there's an optimal level of trade. Free Trade isn't free. Unrestrained FT means that certain industries will concentrate in a particular nation, and they will monopolize that industry. The fundamental aspects of monopoly that you are taught in ECON 101 are at odds with the more "advanced" ideas regarding trade that are taught. Comparative advantage at the local level also doesn't scale to the global level--it just creates monopoly nation-states. No, abolishing nation-states doesn't solve this problem either, my dear libertarian friend.
Long story short, we will regress to the optimal level of trade; but it will be messy. Think of the economic boost from Free Trade agreements as the "party money" you get from selling your industry. Now we have to work to get that money back. Ironicly, the work of regaining industry will actually put people out of work in the near term, because it's initially recessionary.
Following the Money (Score:2)
Kids today aren't as often following their passions in school, as much as they're trying to figure out what will be a viable, paying career when they get out. Kids need to follow their passions in education, so when they get into the world of work, they're doing something they love and what they do is better because they're there doing it.
That said, before we go pouring money into the education system, I think it's time to ask: What should a graduate look like? What skills should they have?
Today's K12 sys
The Knowledge Age is over (Score:2)
we're becoming an economy based on the Knowledge Age, and we need workers who are Knowledge Workers, not Industrial Workers.
No, the Knowledge Age is over. It peaked in the 1980 through the 00s, when huge numbers of people started using computers. But as the computers got better and became more interconnected, the steps that involved people became fewer and fewer. Computing has changed from "a computer on every desk" (once Microsoft's corporate goal) to giant data centers with almost nobody inside.
When you buy something on line, nowhere in the process does a human do any significant thinking. Along the way, a few humans ta
And let me guess, (Score:3)
MS got all sort of tax concessions from the states where they are located.
If corporation are people why don't they pay income tax the same way human beings have to?
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Well, MS headquarters are in Washington state, which doesn't have an income tax. There certainly are taxes on businesses, though.
"We need to try something different." (Score:2)
"We need to try something different." Because throwing money at a problem hoping that will fix it is such a novel idea.
Just a scam for MSE certification (Score:2)
Columbia.edu watered down curriculum is nothing more than MSE certification program for Microsoft talent at a price WallSt. wants to pay. This subsidized proposal should be viewed as just such a scam as well
WHat aout those 60 bilion of revenue? (Score:3)
Let me see! I sit e here atop this 60 bilion of yearly reveneue, and tell others to invest 5 billion over 5 years, so that I can get people to hire that are cheaper tahn foreigners? Riiiight!
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you mean people actually want paid for high pressure and stress jobs?
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Considering we spend about 900 billion per year on education, more than any other industrialized country -- both in total and per capita maybe spending an extra 0.5 billion per year is just pissing in the ocean. We have doubled per capita inflation adjusted dollars since 1980 -- somehow spending an additional 0.01% is not likely to be a game changer.
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You are aware that MS sells severly discounted software to scool districts AND offers similarly deeply discounted copies of Windows Office for students to use at home (Home Use program, $29 for Office 2010 for up to three PCs), AND offers free copies of their various tools & OS (incl Server and development tools) to current HS & college students, RIGHT?
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Yup, get 'em while they're young.
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The average teacher finds rote memorization very challenging. I wouldn't trust them to teach "Critical Thinking Skills". Spend some time in the teacher break room at your locall public school - it will be an eye-opening experience.