With H-1B Cap Hit, Zuckerberg and Ballmer-Led Groups Press For More Tech Visas 442
theodp writes: With the FY2016 H-1B visa cap reached in the first week of April (only the USCIS knows how many applications were submitted by outsourcing companies and from Bentonville, AR), it's no surprise that groups like Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us PAC and Steve Ballmer's Partnership for a New American Economy Action Fund are pooh-poohing Jesse Jackson's claims that foreign high-tech workers are taking American jobs, and promoting the idea that what's really holding back Americans from jobs is a lack of foreign tech workers with H-1B visas.
Lies, bullshit, and more lies ... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but Zuckerfuck and Ballmer claiming that there would be more American jobs if only they could bring in more foreign workers to replace Americans is complete and utter bullshit.
This is billionaire douchebags saying they could become even bigger billionaire douchebags of only they could get more cheap labor from overseas.
Will someone put these two clowns into the bear enclosure at the zoo and get rid of them for good?
Re:Lies, bullshit, and more lies ... (Score:5, Funny)
Zuckerfuck
That's Fuckerberg! Get it right or pay the price
Here are LINKS to the TRUTH re: Zuckerberg's Scam (Score:3)
FWD.US is a conspiracy created by Mark Zuckerberg to help drive down IT wages in America.
I have no problem with talented immigrants, but American corporations are LYING about the need for those H1B immigrants due to so-called "shortages" of STEM workers in America, and in the offing they are displacing QUALIFIED American workers with those immigrants (in clear violation of the law). Here are some FACTS to counter Zuckerberg's SPIN around his company's (and others, like MSFT, Cisco, Facebook, Google, etc.
Re:Lies, bullshit, and more lies ... (Score:5, Funny)
This is billionaire douchebags saying they could become even bigger billionaire douchebags of only they could get more cheap labor from overseas.
While I sympathize with your sentiment, you are absolutely wrong. There is simply no way for Zuckerfuck and Ballmer to become bigger doucebags.
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I do not know, I think we should try an experiment involving high pressure hoses and insertion to see if they do in fact get bigger.
Count me in. I'd be glad to be in charge of not applying lube ;-)
Re:Lies, bullshit, and more lies ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed.
Didn't the IEEE conduct a study that there is already a glut of people here already with at least a STEM education, but not working in STEM.... And we're graduating more people with STEM degrees than STEM jobs available every year?
Until we are at the point where anyone who wants to work in STEM can do so, I think we should not let in people. STEM jobs are generally jobs you want people to take...
Re:Lies, bullshit, and more lies ... (Score:5, Informative)
This has nothing to do with creating American jobs, and everything to do with driving down the cost of hiring people so that billionaire douchebags can run companies at a higher profit by making sure they pay Americans less money since they now have to compete with someone from India for a lower salary.
This is the big players distorting the labor market by lobbying politicians to allow them to change the playing field.
How many US tech workers are currently under or unemployed? And how many of them have these companies considered hiring?
Instead they write a job description which is impossible, or geared to bringing in a specific foreign worker.
This whole foreign worker crap is basically big corporations forcing wages to go down by bringing in people who will work cheaper.
As I said, billionaire douchebags. And this is more or less theft on a grand scale because people keep buying into the notion that what is good for companies is good for everyone else.
Re:Lies, bullshit, and more lies ... (Score:5, Interesting)
It'd be interesting to see the actual duties being performed by the H1-B worker who is hired to fill those jobs. I suspect that some of these hires aren't actually doing everything that was listed in the job description that disqualified American workers.
Re: Lies, bullshit, and more lies ... (Score:3, Insightful)
And, when every single one of those job descriptions list "excellent communication skills" among the top priorities, there is one requirement that almost no foreign workers can meet. I used to have a pretty good eat for understanding foreign accents. But these days it takes two or three times as long to pry any meaning out of what a lot of these guys are saying. And they don't seem to be putting any effort into improving either.
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Have to post AC so don't get busted! i was working in finance and sat in on the budget meetings with the CEO, VP of HR, and VPs of our functional groups. The VP of HR routinely asked the hiring managers to hire H1-B in order to cut costs. The managers balked at that saying that they could find a hire here in the US, but HR said, "Don't worry, we'll write it so we can justify hiring H1-B. We'll interview a few people here, but we'll find an excuse not to hire them. We'll just say they weren't a good fit
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The answer is honestly a Billionaire being hung to death from a tree on his estate and the home burned to the ground at the hands of his employees. These Assholes are not afraid of the working populace and that needs to change.
It will take only one hanging to make all the billionaires suddenly stop being d-bags, sadly the united states people are too fucking lazy to do it.
Re:Lies, bullshit, and more lies ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, the french revolution, with it's massive use of the guillotine, did have a positive effect on European democracy and decentralisation of power. Here in Europe socialized healthcare, free (or very affordable) higher education and strong worker unions have been a normal part of life since a long time.
Generally, employers have less rights over the employees, and they are more restricted in what their contracts can stipulate, compared to the US and the UK.
Re:Lies, bullshit, and more lies ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Republicans have a incredible chance to capture a huge part of the IT vote by coming out strong against H1B visas.
Because this is a smart idea, they will of course not do this.
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I'm unemployed. been looking for tech work the last few months. I had 1 offer: it was for $50k less than I was making when I had a fulltime (contract) job.
if you are out of work, they see dollar signs in you. "he's abusable and will take anything we offer. oh, he's over 50, too? oh, standard operating procedure, everyone: offer him 1/3 less than he made before and deny him any benefits. tel^H^H^Hlie to him about 'temp to hire' (that is actually a typo, its 'temp to FIRE' in reality) and see if he's at
Re:Lies, bullshit, and more lies ... (Score:4)
I just saw this job position on /.
"Senior .NET Developer
Qualified candidates will have experience with most of the following technologies:ASP.net, C# (or VB.NET) SQL ServerSQL Reporting Services MVC Architecture JavaScriptAJAX XML
Salary: 45-65k"
I almost died laughing.
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Re:Lies, bullshit, and more lies ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Disallowing foreign competition is what is distorting the playing field.
You mean like disallowing customers to import goods sold on foreign markets at lower prices? You know; import protection.
If companies are against protectionism, they shouldn't get benefits of protectionism either.
Re:Lies, bullshit, and more lies ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit. Let them relocate overseas. You know what? Some of them do open up shops overseas. You know how well that works? Not well. They want U.S.-style infrastructure and government support, but they don't want to pay for American labor. They want cheap overseas labor without paying the price of shoddy infrastructure, higher taxes, and corruption. [Let me clarify that: corruption that does not directly benefit their interests.] Foreign companies are, not surprisingly, unable to provide a better product or undercut their pricing because those issues I mention prevent them from gaining an advantage.
I have no problem outsourcing labor. It will help developing economies by moving more wealth into those countries. Instead we are staffing our critical infrastructure with foreign nationals. We are wasting hundreds of billions on national defense, yet making the country insanely vulnerable to attack with these foreign labor practices.
Re:Lies, bullshit, and more lies ... (Score:4, Interesting)
The playing field is distorted by the current H1-B system.
For a citizen, the employer has not much more leverage over the employee than they should have (I think health insurance managed by the employer is something that should be changed, but that's beside the point).
For an H1-B, an employer can pretty much deport the employee. That is not a level playing field. That is an entirely different power dynamic that favors the employer unreasonably so.
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It's give and take.
You can talk about open labor markets, but the labor from the US (for example) isn't free to move to India, accept a lower wage and lower cost of living). It is unidirectional, and that too distorts the playing field.
I mean if you want to argue for uniform standards like the EU, where any person is free to settle in a member state, that's different I haven't heard about Europe having a shortage of tech works to a point of having to lobby for special visas, so I have to wonder what makes t
Re:Lies, bullshit, and more lies ... (Score:4, Insightful)
A friend of mine who works as a high school counselor is telling people to go business, accounting, or law. The adage that there is no such thing as an unemployed lawyer may not hold true in NYC or LA, but everywhere else in the US, a J. D. can find meaningful employment. Barring that, there are always tradeskills like an electrician, plumber, or HVAC person... skills which are not going to be tossed to a H-1B, since it takes too much time for them to get their state license.
As someone who has been in the industry since the late 1980s, I hate to say this, but STEM is a very tough career path, just because H-1Bs bring down wages so much that competing in that field is hard, especially when entering fresh from college. Especially with college tuitions skyrocketing and heavy loan debt required, so a college grad is sitting on $40-50k worth of debt, while his competition from China or India has had their college paid for by their country and can work for peanuts, because they don't have to cough up $500 a month to pay the debt off.
A good example of this was a few years back, at the job fair at a local university. The only group wanting CS grads at all was the US Army, and they would only accept you if you would take MOS 11X (infantry, they choose everything else.) So, it looks like a CS degree might be good if you want to be a front line grunt and make PFC after basic training, but not much else.
Yes, once one gets established, one can eke out a niche, but coming out of college with an internship or two, it is extremely hard for someone with a CS major to compete in the US job market because the jobs that are not overseas go to people flown in from overseas.
Re:Lies, bullshit, and more lies ... (Score:5, Insightful)
The job market for new graduates from anywhere but the big name law schools is terrible, has been getting worse for years, and shows no sign of improving in the future. Word is getting back and enrollment at lower-tier law schools has fallen off so much that the schools are getting desperate. Many have lowered their admission standards, and they've started lobbying to make the state bar exams easier.
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And the benefits after you've done your time, should you decide not to stay in, are impressive.
Disclaimer: my son was in for ~8 years, 6+ of them as an officer.
Re:Lies, bullshit, and more lies ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Even if U.S. STEM grads could get work, H1B's artificially drive down the wages so much that they wouldn't get paid shit even if they found work.
It's like farm labor back in the 90's in my hometown. When I was in high school and college (early 90's), you could make good money cutting tobacco for local farmers during the summer. They paid $7/hr. back when the minimum wage was around $3. A few years after that I went back to my hometown and asked some old buddies if they still cut tobacco in the summers. They told me that all the local farmers had started hiring illegals. And now all the tobacco cutting jobs only paid $4/hr.
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I absolutely have, and absolutely disagree. Firstly while those posts ARE made, they are frequently not posted in places where engineers are able to see them. Like in a cafeteria in a building of HR and accountants, who don't know the market for semiconductor engineers, for example. The one time I have been able to see one, was a company that is too small to do such things.
I am not going to name names, for obvious reasons. But this whole "market rate" thing is very shady and in the eye of the beholder. As e
Re:Lies, bullshit, and more lies ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Right now at the company I'm at there has been surplusing of higher grade workers which typically include grades four and five. Pay has also been essentially flat, even though most of us have security clearances which prevents the job from being handed to an H1B easily. Simply put, I don't buy this BS about needing to bring in more foreign workers to compete. The workers are there, else the company I'm employed with would be forced to try harder at retention.
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Re:Lies, bullshit, and more lies ... (Score:4, Insightful)
But have you seen your job listing requirements? 9000 years of experience in something that has been around for 9 seconds? Extensive experience in some obscure internal application that only 5 companies in the world run? Try accepting that you might have to TRAIN some actual human beings, and perhaps you will find you can adequately fill the positions.
Re:Lies, bullshit, and more lies ... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is usually my response to people who say "Software Development is red hot."
It's red hot if you're a senior level person in some specific tech/industry. It is also very dependent on geography, and people can't exactly get up and move easily.
Re: Lies, bullshit, and more lies ... (Score:3)
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Your anecdote may well be true, but it's just that, an anecdote.
Re:Lies, bullshit, and more lies ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Meanwhile, the company I'm at has teams at less than half strength, pretty much every silicon valley perk you can think of, great working conditions, very high pay, and just can't find people to fill the positions, even with being willing to sponsor visas if only we could find someone competent with low level code and rendering.
And then there's the issue that no one is willing to train. When I started in tech I worked for a large bank that trained me on their systems for a month before setting me loose on the user population. Can you find no one that could be up to speed in a month or two with training?
Re:Lies, bullshit, and more lies ... (Score:4, Insightful)
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the south east is jesusland (bible belt). many of us in the bay area would not be caught dead living in the deep south. I should not have to splain it to you, either.
if you grew up there, fine. if you are not from there, they do not want you (and I don't want them, either).
any place that has, as a first social question 'so, which church do you belong to?' is no place for me; same with most of the people I know in the silicon valley area.
its expensive here but its not as 'christy' and that is wroth a lo
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Absolutely this. I have friends who moved from the valley to the South/Midwest areas and are either unhappy or have moved back. The thing is this: even though you, as a professional working for a corp can avoid the fanatics and bible thumpers without too much effort. Your kids don't have that luxury. In school, they are surrounded by roving bands of teenage proselytizers, or kids whose attitude towards the world have been so shaped by their hard-right parents. If they are not white & the right kind of
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Zuck has always been a d-bag, just ask anyone that was a part of the start of facebook.
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Maybe the problem is the insane super-capitalist culture that Americans are taught from a young age - the idea that you are nothing unless you are at the top, the idea that you have to get to the top at any cost. Maybe that culture is what spawned these douche bag CEOs trying to squeeze every last drop of blood out of what they fail to see as human beings.
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Will someone put these two clowns into the bear enclosure at the zoo and get rid of them for good?
Why do you hate bears? What did they ever do to you?
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The other trick is that the law says that H-1Bs have to be paid "prevailing wages". But if you look at most large companies' salary bands, the bottom end of each band is often barely half of the top. So an H-1B can make, say, $60K, in the same position where the average employee makes $85K-$90K, with some making $110K, but since they're all within that position's stated salary range, the company is still not technically "underpaying" the H-1Bs.
Re:Lies, bullshit, and more lies ... (Score:5, Interesting)
First of all, welcome to Canada and I hope you're having a good time in our great nation. Sorry about the winters!
Second of all, if the USA wants to do the H1-B visa fairly for all USA citizens, here's a suggestion: Make the minimum annual salary for each H1-B visa holder 10 times "the poverty threshold for a single person under 65" (about 10 x $11,490US = $114,900US based on 2013 numbers.)
That way you will eliminate the problem of employers getting "cheap" labour to corrupt and undercut the job market to displace honest, capable USA citizen workers, and you'll still be able to attract the genuine foreign talent that these billionaires claim to need.
If these billionaires REALLY want what they claim they want, then they'll have no problem with this change. And pigs will fly, too!
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hey dont worry dude , even if they wher giving me a H-1B on a gold platter i wouldn't take it as it basically would put me in indentured servitude not tbeing able to change employer thus not being able to properly negociate for wage , my employer has me working on assets in the states without having me to cross borders , H-1B is nothing less then modern soft slavery
Trust me, with your writing skills, not a single employer will consider you for a position. There is no space before a comma, and sentences generally do not start with a lowercase character.
Yeah I get it (Score:5, Insightful)
Because without those H1B workers fuelling the local economies, Amaricans can't find work.
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I'm curious, do autonomous robots count as foreign or domestic?
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New American Economy (Score:4, Insightful)
= "none"
The whole thing has been turned into a gigantic cream-skimming operation.
Woah Jessie Jackson gone Nativist (Score:3)
The things you see if you live long enough
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Yes Yes, I know they're taking our jerbs so companies can save a few bucks and that's bad. But "diversity"?
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Or things you're surprised about because you are so young. Look back at the last 30-40 years, most if not all minority leaders were screaming to keep foreign workers out of the country, especially illegal immigrants.
http://www.usnews.com/debate-c... [usnews.com]
Libs are so cute when you all twist yourselves up. I remember 50 years of "Minorities" backing the democrats while they did everything they could bring illegals. BTW the last president to do anything about illegal immigration was Eike
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/... [csmonitor.com]
Keep the foreigners at bay! (Score:2)
At least until the locals catch-up to the market requirements...or else they risk being put out of a job because they cannot compete.
Let's not forget that foreigners lower average wage because they are willing to work for less.
Better to make sure they cannot enter the US so they can go elsewhere for a long enough time for the US not to be a destination for talent any more.
OMG competing for resources and needing to be useful at a competitive rate, the shock, the horror. Think you can do better? think y
Re:Keep the foreigners at bay! (Score:5, Informative)
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At least until the locals catch-up to the market requirements...or else they risk being put out of a job because they cannot compete.
While that is a valid counterpoint to keeping the H1B program, I think part of the problem is companies choose not to invest in training programs and/or set the bar to high many times. Your mom and pop operation does not need to hire Donald Knuth to update their CRUD based inventory system.
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Re:Keep the foreigners at bay! (Score:5, Insightful)
The absurd notion that we should all be competing with the lowest wage earners on the planet is absurd.
Globalization is what happens when corporations tell us we should be competing with people in Bangalore for salaries and jobs.
Globalization is basically fucking everyone else over in the name of corporate profits.
Letting massive multinational companies decide that local salaries are more than they want to pay and importing people who will take less money is a surefire way to be on a race to the bottom.
Between the lie of saying cutting taxes for corporations will make the economy better, and the lie that importing cheaper foreign labor will create new domestic jobs ... the fucking corporations are basically robbing us blind, and idiot politicians are bending over backwards to ensure they have the tools to keep doing it.
The US and every other country playing this stupid game is basically gutting its own economy in favor of allowing corporations to maximize profits at the expense of the society which stupidly keeps giving them tax breaks.
And, sadly, the politicians who are bought and paid for to skew the deck in favor of corporate greed are usually direct beneficiaries, so it makes them even more wealthy and corrupt when they cede ever more to corporations.
You should absolutely blame corporations for foreigners stealing jobs, because they're the ones who have demanded the ability to bring in outside labor and change the rules.
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OMG competing for resources and needing to be useful at a competitive rate, the shock, the horror. Think you can do better? think you deserve more money? prove it by doing better and getting paid more...or keep blaming greedy corporations and "foreigners stealing jobs".
So Americans should forego having families (or at least not have them live with them, they can live somewhere really cheap and just send money they make back home), live 5 people to an apartment, and work unpaid overtime just so they can get a job at a ridiculously low wage so a company can bump up profits? Because that is about the only way a lot of these H-1B positions would actually be affordable for the average American worker. That "competitive rate" is fixed worse than an election in Chicago. Why d
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Baristas & warehouse workers (Score:2)
Yeah, the only American jobs these H-1B workers create are low-paying jobs like baristas to serve the H-1B dudes coffee and warehouse workers to ship the product.
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Re: Baristas & warehouse workers (Score:2)
Hey, that just "creates" more jobs, because when a worker gets sick of one employer he can't move on to another employer, thus freeing up two jobs.
Work training (Score:2)
Re:Work training (Score:5, Insightful)
The college system isn't broken. It's just not "job training," which is what corporate types want.
They want to offload all that "develop the workforce" crap off on the government and other education institutions. They don't care about education. When the job training is obsolete they simply throw away the disposable workers and get the next batch.
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With H-1B Cap Hit, CEOS Press for Outright Slavery (Score:5, Insightful)
Or as close as they can possibly get, and the H1-B is edging fairly close.
Of course there's plenty of domestic STEM talent, just not for $45K a year with no benefits.
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my experience with H1-B hired engineers is that they are making $65K/yr to $75K/yr straight out of school with no experience in the North Eastern USA (Not NYC). don't know if this is representative but seems reasonable.
Re:With H-1B Cap Hit, CEOS Press for Outright Slav (Score:4, Interesting)
That may be. I haven't tracked salaries recently, but I know we're offering programming jobs to H1-Bs at 60K. The advantage, from management's perspective is that these guys are like indentured servants. They're unlikely to quit, or complain.
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[Citation needed].
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Wana take bets on the cap getting raised? (Score:2)
Just watch these caps get raised (instead of slashed like they should) just because these billionaire mofos can bribe the right people. And face it, that is the ONLY reason these caps would be raised.
Increasing foreign outsourcing increases American jobs? Wow, they really don't live in reality do they. Take away their billions, let them go unemployed for a few years, then let them try and find a job, and see if they are still singing the same tune.
Quality of education (Score:2)
It seems to me quality of education in the US has suffered from religious interference. First by people believing in that which goes against good evidence, then by undermining science education with nonsense like creationism/intelligent design.
Yay American Greed? (Score:2)
Why doesn't some politician campaign against this selfish behavior and call this jackholes out for being anti-American? Maybe everyone's in on the scam.
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There are people who stand in UK elections on similar platforms but they are never of one of the two main parties that form governments.
I guess the US situation will be the same.
More jobs, not less? (Score:2)
So okay, here's what I don't get.
With illegal immigration, the argument is the immigrants are taking jobs no one here wants to do. I can buy that - they're not claiming that illegal immigrants create jobs.
With H1-B visas, Zuckerburg and Ballmer are claiming that more visas will somehow create more jobs. The only way I can see this happening is if companies start paying job applicants to go away so they can apply for more visas.
Can ANYONE make sense of this idea that H1-Bs create jobs?
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It may "create" jobs - just not the ones we want. I can envision that it would create lower paying service jobs in the short term.
I think the intention of the H1B system was to bring the "best" people over to the US. Their "ideas" would create jobs, but I don't think that has panned out over the long term.
Here is the playbook of the tech CEO's (Score:5, Insightful)
1. We want to drive down wages in the US
Rationale: Wages in the US are high compared to the rest of the world. To sell to consumers and customers in the rest of the world, US wages must come down.
2. We prefer to import H-1B's. Opening offices in other countries is not as efficient as bringing skilled people to the US where employers have the upper hand.
Rationale: The US is the only developed country with 'employment at will' This is preferred over 'just cause' used by most of the rest of the world. By importing H-1B's we get the business-friendly legal framework, and we can deport any troublemakers back to thier home country if they rock the boat. Opening offices in
other countries is costly and requires a management to be present in the offshore country, and the timezone differences hamper productivity.
3. The US federal government is one of the few in the world set up to put the interests of the 'opulant minority' ahead of the common people.
Rationale: We can pay lobbyists to promote laws in our interest knowing that we will get favorable laws passed which are not popular with the US electorate.
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3. The US federal government is one of the few in the world set up to put the interests of the 'opulant minority' ahead of the common people.
Foreign governments don't put the interests of the common people first either, they just favor a different set of insiders.
Where will future workers be trained? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm in systems engineering/administration, and have been through many, many outsourcing/offshoring exercises. I consider myself extremely lucky, having gotten into the tech field in the early 90s and building up enough experience to stay employed despite this. Younger people just graduating, in my opinion, don't have as many opportunities. In addition, us older experienced types (just turning 40 this year, so much fun...) are increasingly jumping from place to place as IT is offshored. Eventually, no one will have anywhere to jump to, and that's my major concern with the abuse of the H1-B program.
I've mentioned before that H1-B is used for two primary purposes. The first is the intended one -- short term hiring of extremely talented people who really possess a skill that can't be found. I've seen this used in product development and other arenas, and I support that use because it really does work. The second is the "cheap labor" use where foreign workers with masters' degrees and above are brought in to do low level coding or administration work. This just drives wages down for everyone. Also, it's not universal, but in my experience the quality of work is much lower simply because the outsourcer doesn't have any insight into how the stuff they're doing fits into an organization's plans. There are far more H1-B cheap labor users than there are talent importers.
Raising the H1-B cap is simply a way to lower wages and make the profession less attractive to native workers who demand a higher salary. I've worked with tons of people, foreign and native, and the reality is that some are awesome, some are OK, and some shouldn't be working in this field...no matter where they came from. The problem comes when offshoring firms compete with each other to see how cheaply they can offer a service, still get away with the awful level of service the customer gets, and make greater profits.
I don't know the answer, beyond setting up a guild/apprenticeship system, which techies would never go for. If we could make entry level labor cheap enough to compete, weighing the cost of having to redo offshored work vs. having it done here, etc. and have a slower wage progression over a career, that might do something. I'm not trying to be an apologist, but I do see some companies' points when they have to hire a "rockstar Ruby developer" for $200K who turns out to not be a rockstar. Improvements in education might help as well, but companies need to understand that their workforce needs to be trained. Not everyone is a drop-in replacement for the guy who just left.
Re: Where will future workers be trained? (Score:3)
I have advocated for a tech apprenticeship program many times. I've seen others advocate for it right here on /.
It make more sense... (Score:2)
We need more coolies! (Score:3)
Amounts to nothing more than that.
Why not hire in "Flyover Land" before India? (Score:5, Insightful)
Next, H1-Bs don't create jobs because they are not allowed to start a company. The system is designed that way. (OK, legally they can create a corporation on paper, but the condition of their visia is that they are only allowed to be employed by their sponsor and aren't allowed to be employed by or draw salary from their own company, so the practial effect is they can't work for their own start-up). If they are creating companies and they or their famlies are working for the start-up, it's a violation of their visa.
Here's how to quash this BS. Create a national registry of unemployeed STEM workers and make them offer to pay the moving costs to move the employee from whereever to the job site. NATIONAL, not just Seattle and San Jose. Make them hire off that list before they can go overseas. If they can show they offered a job and offered a move to somebody in the US and got turned down six times, then they can do the H1-B thing. Next, if they do hire a H1-B because there is no "qualified" american worker, make them sponsor a scholarship in that field and train somebody until they are qualified. If they hire an engineer on a H1-B, then they must pay the scholorship and internship for an american to make him qualified. That newly minted engineer now goes into the job pool.
Look at the Cohen & Grigsby video on youtube! (Score:2, Informative)
They already go through the motions. The government DOES NOT ENFORCE THE CURRENT LAW. The law requires them to look for US workers, but they BS their ways through that requirement.
Look at the Cohen & Grigsby video on youtube! They're so brazen in their violating the law, they even post videos on how to do it out in public.
Imagine someone posting youtube videos on how to do tax evasion on your tax form. They'll have IRS agents arresting them in minutes.
But here we are talking about how to evade the
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I am all for putting a ton of strings on the granting of H1B's. If it's really needed for a position, a company should be paying well above market rates and be able to prove that they exhausted every avenue state side.
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Those from Flyover Land may not be interested in moving to CA. Maybe its more, "we can't find native qualified workers we can convince to come live in our overpopulated active fault and wildfire zone arid-and-drying-further climate, but if someone is already crossing an ocean, they don't much care where they land."
I get inquiries weekly, and its always big names, and its always the big coastal cities (read: SF metro, Seattle, NYC).
Meh.
what about TN visas? (Score:2)
Simple form of protest. (Score:3, Interesting)
I worked for a consulting firm that wrote a fairly complex mobile app which interfaced to devices over Wifi, Bluetooth, and BLE. Our client decided that they wanted to save money, and rather than just hiring US employees, they decided to hire a bunch of people offshore. Of course, this plan depended on the current team sticking around to "train" these guys who claimed to have years of experience in mobile development. After a few sessions, realizing that they had plagiarized their way through school, and B.S.'ed their way through jobs, we all quit. They were full of bluster, lies, backstabbing and finger-pointing, absolute team killers.
So far, they've done one checkin/bug fix this month, for something the most junior member of my team could have done in 2 days. Yep, you guys saved a lot of money.
Treat the companies that export jobs like the traitors that they are. Don't work for them. Don't help them. You'll be stuck on late night calls with "programmers" basically trying to figure out ways for you to do their job for them, or to point fingers at you if you don't. No amount of money is worth that.
H1B's have their place (Score:2, Insightful)
But only after qualified American tech workers and engineers have been hired to fill those positions. Speaking as an unemployed systems engineer, the attitude of MS and Facebook totally piss me off! They'd rather underpay a young, inexperienced, foreign worker than an older, yet fully qualified and capable, American such as myself.
Companies defraud American workers (Score:3)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCbFEgFajGU [youtube.com]
This is what is happening in the US. Companies are disqualifying American workers so that they can justify hiring foreign workers. They claim that they can disqualify based on any reason: over qualified, requested pay too high, etc. They don't even try to negotiate. They come up with ridiculous requirements that are impossible to meet and then turn around and hire a foreign worker with a different set of requirements.
It's not right.
Because new MBAs are idiots (Score:3)
They all have the same revelation, "Gosh, we can save money by outsourcing!" but since they don't have to think about the details (and maybe *can't* think about details if some of the one's I've met are any indication), they implement the strategy, move on to a new position in 18 months during the next re-org, and leave the mess for someone else to clean up. The next newly minted moron MBA becomes a hero by undoing the mess (i.e. hiring local), gets his bonus, and then he moves on in 18 months and the cycle starts over again.
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Well, this is precisely why society shouldn't be catering to corporate whim. Eventually it hurts everyone involved. This includes the corporate sector itself since it is so unable to look past the next quarter when making any decisions.
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Something similar happened during the Irish Potato famine IIRC.
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I don't begrudge them profit, either. I do begrudge them profit to the exclusion of all else.
Corporations are people. And some are complete assholes.
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