Tech Firms' Nightmare: Vanishing Green Cards (axios.com) 111
Thousands of green cards are about to go to waste, leaving Google, Microsoft and other tech companies fuming -- and pushing the Biden administration to ensure it doesn't happen again. Axios: Tech workers have waited years for green cards that will grant them permanent legal status in the U.S. -- but because of pandemic-related processing delays, they will have to wait even longer. The U.S. makes a certain number of family-based and employment-based green cards available each fiscal year. [...] Google and Microsoft are among the companies that have been urging federal officials to find a way to save the roughly 80,000 remaining employment-based green cards set to expire Sept. 30. Google says only 13% of its candidate applications filed since last October have been approved.
"The idea that we will leave tens of thousands of these applications unfilled at a time when businesses around the country are having a hard time finding qualified workers seems illogical," Google senior vice president of global affairs Kent Walker told Axios. "So we're really trying to encourage people to come together to fix this issue." What they're saying: Google and Microsoft say they have thousands of employees and their families awaiting green cards. "We have congressionally authorized numbers available right now that can help a significant number of people trapped in the backlog move to permanent residence," Jack Chen, associate general counsel at Microsoft, told Axios. "But without a fix, those numbers go into the shredder at the end of the month. It's a huge missed opportunity." Meanwhile, Apple CEO Tim Cook last week wrote to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on behalf of the Business Roundtable to press the issue.
"The idea that we will leave tens of thousands of these applications unfilled at a time when businesses around the country are having a hard time finding qualified workers seems illogical," Google senior vice president of global affairs Kent Walker told Axios. "So we're really trying to encourage people to come together to fix this issue." What they're saying: Google and Microsoft say they have thousands of employees and their families awaiting green cards. "We have congressionally authorized numbers available right now that can help a significant number of people trapped in the backlog move to permanent residence," Jack Chen, associate general counsel at Microsoft, told Axios. "But without a fix, those numbers go into the shredder at the end of the month. It's a huge missed opportunity." Meanwhile, Apple CEO Tim Cook last week wrote to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on behalf of the Business Roundtable to press the issue.
Go Go Gadget Misleading Statistic (Score:5, Insightful)
Ha. Now tell us what percentage they're in among the fields the tech firms are trying to hire them in.
Re:Go Go Gadget Misleading Statistic (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Go Go Gadget Misleading Statistic (Score:5, Insightful)
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No, the labor pool is a zero-sum game. It's not like there are millions of computer programmers sitting around saying, "I'd work in my field, but I can make more money as a male stripper or collecting unemployment." As long as there are many, many times more open positions than workers in the U.S., the only real option is to hire people from overseas.
If you don't do that, what happens is that wages continue climbing until a lot of smaller companies that can't afford the skyrocketing wages end up going ou
Re:Go Go Gadget Misleading Statistic (Score:5, Insightful)
There are, in fact, millions of computer programmers sitting around saying, "I'd work in my field, but I can make more money as a male stripper or collecting unemployment." US tech workers are chronically underemployed. Outsourcing, age discrimination, and ghoulish shit like this [hcamag.com] means the earning potential of tech workers by age 50 is zero unless they re-train into management. A lot of industries in the developed world try to cut costs by only employing exploitable youths [gamesindustry.biz]; that's how the culture of crunch in the video game industry got to where it is. Tech-giant-sponsored programs like Code.org [wikipedia.org] are an attempt to secure more young fodder for this process.
This is capitalism working as intended, treating the humans they employ like coal [youtube.com] and the poverty they generate [cnbc.com] like pollution (i.e., by ignoring it). By the time the average employee is used up and spat out, propaganda [youtube.com], debt [wikipedia.org], and obligations [wikipedia.org] are so entrenched that they have none of the flexibility needed to start their own businesses, or retrain into a less hostile industry, et cetera. They're taught and programmed to blame everyone imaginable—except the employers who discarded them—as the cause.
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That isn't "capitalism working as intended". Don't turn an otherwise good post into some useless anti-capitalist screed demonstrating that you don't understand capitalism.
Businesses that prey on cheap foreign labor in order to lower domestic wage scales are the ones that hate capitalism. They want to prevent parties involved in wage negotiations from being able to negotiate. Many of these foreign laborers can't even shop around for other employers without risking deportation! That isn't capitalism.
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No that's exactly how capitalism works. The companies have power, they have the resources to access capital labour, the capital to buy the laws that enable it.
Because they have huge amounts of capital they can cope just fine without your labour for a while, waiting for someone cheaper to come along. You have far less capital so can't stay unemployed for too long.
The idea that two equals will come together and find a mutually acceptable agreement is nonsense. The power imbalance is huge, and they use their c
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"Two equals coming together and finding a mutually acceptable agreement" happens ALL THE TIME. Are you out of your mind? There are many forms of commerce that are conducted on a daily basis every day of the week based on such agreements. That is capitalism. Do not lie to people in claiming that capitalism = abuse.
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Capitalism doesn't exist where only one party is free to buy, sell, and trade. Exploitation of labor is only possible when circumstances prevent any negotiation on price.
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I'll try to be a bit clearer. It's a consequence of market economics that the wealthy are motivated to destroy the free market in pursuit of monopoly. Just so there's no confusion, pretty much everyone (myself included) is agreed that monetary systems, competition, private property, and wage labour are generally good things. In general virtually all self-described socialists and even most self-described communists, from the most authoritarian to the least, will still be in favour of all these ideas, at a mi
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"Monetary systems, competition, private property and wage labour" ARE capitalism. They're the logical extensions of a). being able to own things/yourself/your own time and b). being able to barter it away at a negotiated rate.
People "on the left" constantly demonize "an upper class that has achieved dominance solely through the accumulation of capital" as a way to erode the public trust in private ownership of property and the ability to buy/sell/trade individually.
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Okay. Now that we've got all the terminology out of the way, what part of Jeff Bezos shouldn't be demonized, exactly?
Nothing you state resembles my experience (Score:4)
There are, in fact, millions of computer programmers sitting around saying, "I'd work in my field, but I can make more money as a male stripper or collecting unemployment." US tech workers are chronically underemployed. Outsourcing, age discrimination, and ghoulish shit like this [hcamag.com] means the earning potential of tech workers by age 50 is zero unless they re-train into management.
Hmm, if I could make more money as a male stripper, I'd much rather be groped by drunk chicks. Too bad my gym closed down after the quarantine. Also, I know hundreds of software engineers. I don't know a single unemployed one. If they're sitting home collecting unemployment, it's not because no one will hire them. If you know basic Java, SQL, Python, or JavaScript, there is a huge surplus of jobs in the tech towns.
What you've stated is not remotely true for the field. I am not sure about Video Game programming. That's a specific niche, but in business software, which is FAR easier than game programming, and among the type of positions MS and Google are looking to fill, there's a massive talent shortage, hence why they want the green cards.
I worry very much about age discrimination, but my team is full of greybeards, as is my entire company. All my older coworkers have no problem finding jobs, including outside management. True, most go to management, but it's primarily because they don't like writing code very much and management is a lot easier (for most). I'd say less than 1/3 of the 1000s of engineers at my employer are under 30. Top employers, including Google and MS, as well as Amazon since you mentioned them, are constantly snagging our best talent, especially our best greybeards.
Sorry, I just don't see any evidence of what you are stating near me.
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If capitalism was working as intended then wages would go up when there is a crunch like this, which according to media and industry folks has been going on for decades yet wages in the sector aren't shooting up because of the very factors you listed, attempts to do everything possible to push out people early and exploit young and vulnerable workers and then complaining to the government to let you import more cheep labor rather than use what is in your back yard.
capitalism would mean that a labor crunch r
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Nonsense (Score:2)
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People working in underpaid and unfulfilling roles WITHOUT a higher-paid option
Capitalists love capitalism...right up until they have to pay for it.
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When PERM is filed, salary has to be published. you can download from DOL website
Re:Go Go Gadget Misleading Statistic (Score:5, Informative)
Green cards are pretty much the closest you're going to get to citizenship. they aren't H1-Bs which are at the beck and call of the company.
A company that is willing to go through the legal process of getting someone a green card means they want the person long term and it's not a convenience hire. Green Cards are extremely hard to get and it's a fairly arduous process.
It gives the holder of the green card full status in the US, and they're free to leave the company.
It's not an abused process - it's something you really have to believe in because it costs a lot of money, there's a ton of paperwork involved and the employee is free to move after getting it. Companies that get green cards for employees do not do so just for "cheap labor". Cheap labor is only cheap because it's immobile. Green card holders are mobile, have a US passport, and are free to move to another company or line of work without worrying about status. They don't even have to be employed! They can, like other American citizens, be a bum.
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Green card holders do not have a US passport. My wife had a green card and her foreign passport. She got a US passport by becoming a US citizen. One of a number of reasons she became a US citizen was so that INS couldn't do anything to her because of some executive order targeting foreign citizens even if they held a green card.
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Just to be clear, there was not an order targeting her, but she was concerned that with anti-immigrant sentiment, such a thing would be possible
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unemployment.
big tech shows just how stupid american engineers are
Not OUR problem! (Score:5, Insightful)
Tech workers have waited years for green cards that will grant them permanent legal status in the U.S. -- but because of pandemic-related processing delays, they will have to wait even longer.
Two of the biggest tech companies can't come up with a solution to the problem.
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It's only a solution to them, if it increases profit for the shareholders. Nothing else matters.
Can't find or don't want? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sometimes (Score:4, Interesting)
A few years ago the company I work for was looking for an entry level data analyst. Basically, we'd teach them SQL and how to write reports. Pay was pretty decent for an entry level position, and we intended to move them into a services engineer position after a year of training with a signifgant pay bump. We were prepared to hire anyone with the most basic computer programming skills and train them.
It took four months to find someone. We had two different headhunter agencies working on it. They couldn't find anyone at *any* price.
We ended up hiring an H1B employee. He was, literally, the only candidate who met the criteria who applied.
Re:Sometimes (Score:5, Insightful)
They did not want to hire a man in his 40's and instead choose foreign workers.
Age discrimination is rampant in our industry.
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I am calling BS. I have applied for many jobs only to have the hiring companies claim there were no candidates.
How would you, an outsider candidate, know what a hiring company claimed to an employer they were working for?
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A free lunch will buy all kinds of insider data.
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I am calling BS. I have applied for many jobs only to have the hiring companies claim there were no candidates. They did not want to hire a man in his 40's and instead choose foreign workers. Age discrimination is rampant in our industry.
As an ex H-1B holder (now citizen through marriage) I can attest to this. Starting around my 40th birthday, I endured a 6+ months long unemployment. I can't remember how many interviews I took and how many recruiters I spoke to, but there was nothing. (to me that is, while I see people getting hired for the position I applied for, much younger and probably much cheaper) At 50 years of age, you have another stigma that almost no one can over come and I got unemployed few months short of my 50th b-day. Agai
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I am calling BS. I have applied for many jobs only to have the hiring companies claim there were no candidates. They did not want to hire a man in his 40's and instead choose foreign workers. Age discrimination is rampant in our industry.
As an ex H-1B holder (now citizen through marriage) I can attest to this. Starting around my 40th birthday, I endured a 6+ months long unemployment. I can't remember how many interviews I took and how many recruiters I spoke to, but there was nothing. (to me that is, while I see people getting hired for the position I applied for, much younger and probably much cheaper) At 50 years of age, you have another stigma that almost no one can over come and I got unemployed few months short of my 50th b-day. Again 6++ months. Not that I was asking for more money but when people see someone in his 50s they don't give him the time of the day. In both times of unemployment, I had to buck up and take a no benefits, lower paying contracting position. Thank god my wife had a job with health insurance so that I was not left to die. Then crawled my way up to permanent employment. Now that I am past my mid 50's, I am shaking in my boots about the day my employer is going to go for lay off. Because I know I am done when that happens. Not a nice feeling, while these bozos at the helm of tech giants are crying for cheap labor supply. They can do with 80,000 less cheap seat-fillers for a year. Screw them. US has an obligation to its citizens not to the corporations which hoard money to their off-shore tax heaven subsidiaries.
The U.S. has no obligation to employ you. The guy eating at the National Till for a higher stock price does. Thus the ignored rules for H1-B
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The U.S. has no obligation to employ you. The guy eating at the National Till for a higher stock price does. Thus the ignored rules for H1-B
No but it is good for the US government to work to have employment for its citizens. And since his tax dollars pay for that government, when it does the exact opposite of employing US citizens, people have a right to question that. Asking for policies that favor the employment of citizens has been a good idea for governments for centuries. Its a public policy, there are lots of shades of gray in there and thinking it needs to be a couple of shades in a different direction is normal and rational. Stop pl
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Sorry, wasn't trying to be obtuse.
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Either there's missing information, misinformation, and/or an incredibly bad HR department behind it. I'd also be skeptical about headhunter agencies wasting much time on an "entry level data analyst".
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was looking for an entry level data analyst. Basically, we'd teach them SQL and how to write reports.
We had two different headhunter agencies working on it. They couldn't find anyone at *any* price.
Then maybe you should have fired the headhunters and either continued to try different hiring agencies or just done the work of hiring someone yourself without using the inept headhunting agencies.
Because basic SQL should not be that hard to find. SQL has been around for a long time now. There are tons of people who know how to use it.
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Re:Sometimes (Score:4, Informative)
That can frequently be the case. I've worked in a number of situations where an H-1B was the only option.
Unfortunately, I've also worked in situations where the employer was obviously trying to undermine domestic workers. And that happens often enough the H-1B's are getting a bad rap.
Until the abuses of H-1B are curbed, I wouldn't expect employers to get much sympathy. Which is a shame, because in concept it really is a useful and valuable resource.
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Sounds to me like you need a better headhunter. You don't even need a college graduate for that skill set. A competent high school kid could pick that up. Aside from that, community colleges and universities are churning out thousands of graduates every year. Sorry...gotta call BS on this one.
location is everything (Score:1)
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A few years ago the company I work for was looking for an entry level data analyst. Basically, we'd teach them SQL and how to write reports. Pay was pretty decent for an entry level position, and we intended to move them into a services engineer position after a year of training with a signifgant pay bump. We were prepared to hire anyone with the most basic computer programming skills and train them.
It took four months to find someone. We had two different headhunter agencies working on it. They couldn't find anyone at *any* price.
We ended up hiring an H1B employee. He was, literally, the only candidate who met the criteria who applied.
Two headhunting firms couldn't find anyone with the most basic computer programming skills? Bullshit.
You could have found that any day of the week posting on a college job board.
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I do not believe the "*any* price" part for one moment.
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There is something rotten in Denmark here. I used to be a project manager at a previous job, and finding entry level people was very easy. There are TONS of staffing agencies, from Kelly temps, to K-Force, to Accenture, all of which can get me someone of that caliber who is willing to learn SQL. Especially if they know that they will have a non-trivial role after a year.
You know what... I've read this boo-hoo story before about no local talent. In many years of IT, there is always someone available. Th
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"Must have 5 years experience with version 2009 of this software.(in 2010)"
Must speak fluent Mandarin (for a U.S. service center job).
It's the tool to get an H1-B into a job despite a glut of workers qualified.
Can confirm, can't find engineers in my town (Score:5, Interesting)
These are companies that don't want experienced (read over 38) or expensive workers. They want people who are cheap and beholden to them.
We have tons of engineers in their 50s and 60s, probably about 25% of our technical staff. We're not turning down qualified candidates of any age. YMMV in your city, but in mine, I don't see the age discrimination.
It may happen. As an old fuck, I am certainly worried about it. However, the established players seem happy to hire old fucks like me who can do the work. My public resume includes my college graduation date, so they can easily figure out my age and they call me constantly. When I tour the big tech companies in my project for various reasons, I see a lot of grey hair among the engineers.
We simply cannot find remotely qualified employees to even come in for an interview. Before we even talk salary, the few that come in SUUUUCK so bad, we can't hire them. I am constantly having to interview people with 10-15 years on their resume, focused on Java, who cannot do simple operations on collections. We hire for senior level positions and we get senior-level resumes of employees that have focused their career on Java and can't pass a Java 101 coding test....like "Here's an array of Strings, return the lists sorted and without duplicates."...and by not pass, I don't mean come up with my preferred solution, I mean can't even get a compiled solution that would have been valid 20 years ago.
So there's definitely age discrimination. I definitely see it at startups and shit employers, but the labor shortage is very real and has been for a long time. I don't see it at the major players and I honestly don't know a qualified engineer who cannot find a job.
I have the reverse problem. My team is chronically understaffed and while I have tons of friends in the industry, none of them want to leave their current place or if they do, they don't want to join my company because we're in the city and they found a shorter commute with a smaller place near their suburban house....or the found a "more inspiring" job elsewhere. We lose a bunch who wanted to leave a large company for a startup or some idiosyncratic reason.
In an ideal world, tech companies would love to replace well paid senior employees with life commitments outside their job with equally qualified young people. The simple fact is nothing is more expensive than a cheap engineer and the technology and languages that dominate today are over 20 years old, so old fucks know it as well as the young. 20 years ago, it made no sense to hire a greybeard COBOL programmer for a Java/PHP/ColdFusion job who would just rant about his glory days on dead languages and never bother to learn the new technology. Today, that dot-com workforce is all grey. The old fucks with decades of experience on the precise technologies used prove their value and usually perform better than their 20-something counterparts and the major players know that. Late hours produce shit work.
Profitable companies want reliability, quality, and low bugs, not long hours. I can do the work of my recent grad peers in 1/5 of the time with far less code and much higher quality and performance. I have the unfair advantage of doing this for almost 25 years. My employer knows that. That's why nearly every technical lead is well over 38 and some are near retirement age.
Some shit show startups definitely want to discriminate. However, I can confirm my local Google and Microsoft offices have snagged some of my best greybeard team mates....doesn't mean there's not rampant age discrimination. I can just confirm these 2 companies and the major players in my area are constantly recruiting me and my old friends and hiring them.
Re: Can confirm, can't find engineers in my town (Score:2)
>Here's an array of Strings, return the lists sorted and without duplicates.
I've sat through those kinds interviews. Are you looking for someone to write the quick sort in Java? Or is the candidate free to use a Set to depupe the strings, then use Arrays.sort() for... sorting? Or with a little more time, do the work with Java 8 streams?
In the six years I've been doing Java I've never had to write a sort. Java comes with those things.
Mostly I spend my days trying to glue together half-baked Apache project
Any viable answer is fine. (Score:2)
>Here's an array of Strings, return the lists sorted and without duplicates.
I've sat through those kinds interviews. Are you looking for someone to write the quick sort in Java? Or is the candidate free to use a Set to depupe the strings, then use Arrays.sort() for... sorting? Or with a little more time, do the work with Java 8 streams?
In the six years I've been doing Java I've never had to write a sort. Java comes with those things.
Mostly I spend my days trying to glue together half-baked Apache projects into usable distributed systems.
I write my questions so that any solution that works is fine. I don't give a shit about your computer science skills. I write code daily and have little patience for college CS exercises a professional would never use. I just want to see you manipulate a collection. If you tried to write a sorting algorithm, I'd stop you instantly. So yes, put the array in a TreeSet and I'd consider that a good solution. Stream it and sort it and I'd be delighted. Fucking do a loop and I'd consider it a reluctant pas
Re: Any viable answer is fine. (Score:2)
Ok. Wow. I've interviewed a lot of candidates for my company. I haven't have the horrible experiences you have had. Maybe because HR did a phone screen first. I don't know. I would quit doing interviews after half a dozen people couldn't describe a map. That's nuts.
Recruiters have no incentive to screen (Score:2)
Ok. Wow. I've interviewed a lot of candidates for my company. I haven't have the horrible experiences you have had. Maybe because HR did a phone screen first. I don't know. I would quit doing interviews after half a dozen people couldn't describe a map. That's nuts.
Recruiters have no incentive to effectively screen. There's a shortage. Screen everyone and it looks like you're sitting on your ass. When in doubt, send them through so you look like you're working and if they accept the candidate you get your bonus or don't get fired. If you screen out someone who could have made it, then you've lost money. We have in-house recruiters, but they're still incentivized and have some pressure on them to deliver or get fired because...well...anyone can be a recruiter. :)
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These are companies that don't want experienced (read over 38) or expensive workers. They want people who are cheap and beholden to them.
That doesn't make any sense. Once you get someone a greencard they're much more free to leave you and work anywhere they choose.
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These are companies that don't want experienced (read over 38) or expensive workers. They want people who are cheap and beholden to them.
Exactly. They want to do it on the cheap. That will backfire.
Apparently Slashdot really cares about tech firms (Score:1, Insightful)
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And horse de-wormer. It's like they work the establishment.
Where did I put my sad face? (Score:4, Insightful)
Let 'em pay market value for American workers. Those companies have spent decades lobbying for excessive H1B visas to artificially depress IT salaries here in the US, and to depress the number of American graduates in IT from American universities.
If this means that they have to pay a premium, maybe they'll take it to heart and start encouraging American college students to consider IT careers.
Nah, who am I kidding? It always has been and will be a lot easier to lobby Congress to import people that they can hire for 40% off.
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Amen. I'm too mad at the H1B visa program for deflating my wages for 3 decades, that I'm not going to even bother to seek out my world's tiniest violin.
Good! (Score:2, Interesting)
The riskier hiring foreign labor becomes, even if that risk is coming from administrative and process failures the better it is for the American worker!
Immigration does nothing but depress wages and degrade our environment. Illegal immigration does nothing but endanger us all.
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Immigration does nothing but depress wages and degrade our environment.
Tech companies started by first and second generation immigrants:
Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Oracle,
IBM, Uber, Airbnb, Yahoo, Intel,
EMC, eBay, SpaceX, VMWare
AT&T, Tesla, NVIDIA, Qualcomm,
Paypal, ADP, Reddit, Slack, WeWork,
Stripe, Cognizant, Intuit, 3M, and Zoom.
https://techstartups.com/2020/... [techstartups.com]
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Stop using software (Score:4, Insightful)
In the early 2010s, the average corporate job posting attracted 120 applicants, says the study, but by the end of the decade this figure had risen to 250 applicants per job. Companies have responded to this deluge by deploying brutally rigid filters in their automated filtering software. This has had the effect of rejecting viable candidates, contributing to the large pool of job-seekers.
Perhaps these companies whining they can't find people should get some eyeballs on the people's resumes applying for positions instead of relying on crappy, inflexible software. Then again, these people probably think the crappy, inflexible software in their automatic cars are just grand.
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What's fun about this is, it's not just crappy software doing the filtering. You also have HR departments that have less than zero clue about the technical side of things attempting to filter based on useless certifications and college degrees and utterly ignoring experience and / or other variables. We even went to the trouble of interviewing multiple candidates for a job, then handing a fully prepared report on each candidate, both good and bad, and the fuckers trashed the one we thought was more viable
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It takes some serious mental gymnastics to understand the typical HR mentality when it comes to hiring. Stupid software is just a nice thin layer of frosting on the stupid that is HR.
I don't usually do conspiracy theories but, either HR was given instructions to make H1Bs happen, or their protecting their own jobs by providing a "superior" solution. Us peons aren't supposed to meddle with the decisions of "superiors." .cough.
"Hard time finding qualified workers" (Score:3)
I'm so heartbroken... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm so heartbroken... hang on, let me get out this 1x1 mm piece of tisue to dab at a non-existant tear.
Burn. In. Hell. Tech. I worked in this shit for 20 years now, plus another 20 as hobbyist. First it was made in USA, then it was China, Taiwan... then anywhere BUT here.
And for a while now they do the same with people. Get them over here by the planeload, from India, from China, from anywhere but here, pay them peanuts, and get rid of the skilled, expensive, experienced people.
You how they "motivate" in India? Fire 2/3rds of the staff forthwith. The remaining drones -- and the replacements -- will be very pliable and obedient. I got this nugget from someone who set up a call center in Bhopal. That's how the Indian tech industry motivates in their home country.
Importing cheap labor, shit should be illegal, period.
Hire American citziens. (Of any race/nationally/whatever, jesus, that I have to put that on means we've jumped the sharked with the PC / woke bullshit). Have green card, or were born here? Get in.
No suitable Americans? Look harder. Pay better. Hire "experienced" people. Still none? Do what our great-granddads and grandaddies did in War Two when they had no skilled workforce: they made one. They trained. They educated. They made welders, carpenters, architects, pilots, nurses, anything they needed. And for a few decades this held true. Junior, if he wished, could follow Dad into GM Saginaw and make steering racks. They'd teach him machining. Junior could then marry Sally, and have 2.5 kiddies a house with a yard, and a dog to poop in that yard. That stopped being true around the 80's.
That, right there is the root of the current "employment" crisis.
But now, like everything, instead of making our own workforce, we're importing foreign at a fraction of the cost. But it IS costly!
I've worked with them. The code we got from India and Vietnam had to be gone through by our own guys, and most of it had to be re-written. $15 million and 3 years wasted. Yeah! Rockingstar! You all Rockingstars! -.- I'd rather deal with a 60 year old neckbeard that has done it and seen it instead of a 30 year old Indian sans clue at the other end of a 6-second delay to figure out why none of the variables are named as spec'd. And somehow that task fell to me in Systems, not to someone in Dev. Fuck 'em. Long gone from that joint - but you see what I mean? Outsourcing ended 1 CIO career, her underling DBA darling, and one dev manager, wasted 15 million usd, and 3 years.
The sins of the father are right now being visited upon the son, in the form of effects of their brain-dead decisions half a century ago. Enjoy!
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H-1B vs Education and Training. (Score:4, Insightful)
Huh, this subject line was in my autofill. Weird.
I'm okay with these H-1B's going to "waste" and companies, tech or otherwise, having to actually pay market rates for, or invest in the training and education of someone who can fill those needs for them. I've always been a proponent of training people and investing in them, so you can encourage them to stay. The H-1B program isn't doing what it was meant to do when it was created. It's now a program to allow companies to cheaply fill positions that could go to US workers, if companies invested in training and education.
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Simple Answer: They can't find anyone offshore (Score:3)
Why wouldn't they just offshore the position, if they can't get someone to do it cheap in the US?
If they could get the job done as well overseas for cheaper, they would have offshored the position 20 years ago when this fad started. The only reason I and most software engineers have the jobs we do is because the labor shortage is global and anyone from India, the Phillipines, China, etc who you would want to hire has already been hired by someone else who is willing to pay more. I don't have a job in an expensive tech city out of charity. I actually do a better job and cost less. Nothing is more ex
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They're not going to open new offices for you. (Score:2)
"Anyone who says they have an Indian Engineer willing to do the job for a fraction of the cost of an American is lying. Talented engineers either get snagged locally or are hired on VISAs for American wages. The big tech companies are sitting on tons of cash. They can pay top dollar for engineers anywhere. Despite earning good wages in the USA, we're actually underpaid for our actual value. The companies could pay a lot more and still make a profit, here or overseas. They have no need really to do scams to underpay engineers." If that were true they'd pay engineers in nowhereville Arkansas the same rate as they pay in the valley or more since they don't have to pay for those campus perks and relocation expenses. If they can afford to pay less for domestic workers who live in other states then they don't have a shortage.
Most employers want you to be in the office. They're not going to set up a shop in nowheresville AK if they want you in the office. Many don't want full time remote employees. You can debate if they should or shouldn't, but I think it's reasonable for someone to want you on premise, if needed. Also, most pay for relocation, but most managers believe you do your best work in the office where it's easy to collaborate and focus on work only.
So your theory is pretty weak. Just because a company won't d
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And want you to work 80hrs, live on campus, work for free, eat via feeding tube and evacuate via built in waste disposal systems. The difference between what they want and reality is supply and demand of talented labor.
Beggers can't be choosers, if they are choosing they aren't begging. If they aren't begging there isn't a shortage. They are importing workers merely to keep labor a buyers (employers) market where they have the leverage to set such terms and prev
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Duly noted (Score:2)
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I suppose they would have offshored the position already, if it were something that could be sent offshore, and was cheaper than an H-1B visa. Wouldn't they?
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if companies invested in training and education
Not happening.
The companies that can afford to do that have highly specialized products or locally-tied services that can't be outsourced easily. Software and electronics companies in the US compete directly with China and India where good engineers are paid half a rupee an hour or something. That's why they can't afford to invest in the long term and rely on H1Bs to stay somewhat competitive.
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.... and whose fault is that, that US workers are having to compete against a guy that can live on 1/10th the cost?
The same companies that are crying for cheap and easily exploited labor, have spend billions on lobbying since 1980.
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The H-1B visa is a nonimmigrant work visa that allows US employers to hire foreign workers for specialty jobs that require a bachelor’s degree or equivalent.
So, are you implying that the US doesn't have IT workers with Bachelor degrees, or that IT workers with Bachelor degrees are going to China and India? The H-1B visa was made to let US employers fill positions they couldn't find talent for in the US, but now it's become a cheap way to import labor instead of moving your firm to another country to
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That is misleading. The companies invent this fake shortage so they can keep importing mass quantities of workers and flood the labor market. They also do so because subsets of these workers have filtered up to management and are either tribalist bigots or trading favors.
All green cards need to disappear (Score:2, Interesting)
And any woke nut that is for this green card thing while tech/corps exports jobs to asia, is living in cognitive dissonance (sin).
Give me some qualified Americans then (Score:3)
I want these woke places to hire americans. And any woke nut that is for this green card thing while tech/corps exports jobs to asia, is living in cognitive dissonance (sin).
You know nothing about "woke" people nor apparently the tech industry. Any "woke"-ness in content or moderation is your paranoia. Just because these tech companies won't tolerate criminal activity on their platforms, like the January 6 attack, doesn't mean they're woke. The mainstream of America dislikes right wing extremism just as much. If you think big tech is out to get you, I have news for you. Centrists find you just as repellent, not just the woke.
Any talk of diversity is just wokeness theat
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Google keeps grabbing my older coworkers (Score:2)
They create preposterously specific requirements for job listings, often asking for more experience with technologies than those technologies have existed and use hiring strategies that favor recent graduates to exclude most perfectly qualified people from the hiring pool. This creates a false scarcity so they can keep mass importing workers and dilute the labor pool. Google goes to great effort to maintain the illusion that they are desperate to hire. They even created their degree substitution certification courses but they don't hire the people who graduate.
Putting your extremely incoherent and off-topic political rant aside.... You can rant and hate Google all you like, but Google has snagged some of my best teammates, nearly all were 40 or older. They're all still working there. I am actually kind of sad because they have a habit of stealing my favorite people. When my kids are older, I may apply there.
Google has famously high standards, but they're kind of talent hoarders in my city. It seems their model is hire top talent first, think of what to d
Why is this a problem? (Score:2)
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A green card is for a foreign national to come to the US and work. That takes a slot from an american. Most of the time they are paid less.
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I guess not (Score:2)
Can't most code monkey jobs be done just as easily in Bangalore or Beijing?
Nope. if they could, they would have moved the job long ago. The labor shortage is global. Nearly every qualified code monkey is spoken for.
Funny (Score:3)
Google says only 13% of its candidate applications filed since last October have been approved.
Funny how the Biden administration is more tacitly anti-immigrant than Trump ever dreamed. Democrats could campaign on that and win 15% of the Republican vote. They won't, because it contradicts a carefully established narrative, but reality so often does.
Nobody owes you a work around (Score:2)
Last time I checked we had massive pandemics raging out of control in many states and a lot of people unemployed.
You can forget about being "owed" green cards.
Those days are over.
The adults are back.
Cheap labor (Score:1)
Go green cards (Score:5, Informative)
Important distinction here, unlike H1Bs, the green card holder does not have to stay in the company. So they cannot be forced to accept lower salaries. For all purposes they are Americans, except for voting of course.
So, as long as the process is followed (education and experience requirements), let us fix the problem.
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Where are my mod points when I need them? I came here to post this exact same thing.
H-1B's have definitely been abused, and reform is needed. However obtaining permanent resident (i.e. green card) status gets these H-1B holders out from under the abusive/manipulative thumb of the sponsor. This allows them to find other jobs at better wages and better conditions, decreasing the sponsor's grip on them. Assuming the undersupply of qualified domestic candidates is real (not saying it is, just saying *if* it
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But that is why we need to stop letting them import all these workers not a reflection on the workers themselves. This is still the United States of America and these are legal immigrants who were extended the opportunity to
bullshit (Score:2)
> The idea that we will leave tens of thousands of these applications unfilled at a time when businesses around the country are having a hard time finding qualified workers seems illogical
Bullshit. I'm perfectly qualified to work at Google, though they probably would not hire me. I'm not willing to put up with an asinine interview process designed for people fresh out of school. They probably want to pay less than I want to make too.
Google, its you not me.
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Doesn't fit (Score:2)
Google has supported a scheme of cutting the pay of workers who relocate to areas with a lower cost of living despite receiving the same production output. You increase compensation when labor is scarce. Obviously Google has a labor surplus not the sh
The border is open (Score:2)
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Two, the problem isn't bodies, it's trained and experienced 24/7 workers on a leash.
hard to get those at the border.
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Also "The federal government counted almost 190,000 people trying to illegally cross the southwest border into the United States in June, a 5 percent increase from May" -- please check your numbers.
Microsoft and Google donated a lot of money to put this administration in power -- they are welcome to interview those crossing the border to find talent.