To H-1B Or Not To H-1B?

[OhioChick]

Are we facing an IT shortage of crisis proportions, or systematically destroying a skilled and capable homegrown workforce?

By Alice LaPlante
InformationWeek
July 14, 2007 02:00 AM


Dave Lovelace laughs when you ask about the purported shortage of qualified IT workers. He has 35 years of senior-level IT experience under his belt, ranging from systems programming to systems engineering to business development. He's published a number of well-regarded books on storage technology, forged strategic alliances between multinational vendors, and negotiated multimillion-dollar contracts.
And, apparently, nobody needs his services.

Over the past 24 months, Lovelace has applied for hundreds of jobs in Silicon Valley, where he's based. It's rare he gets even a courtesy e-mail or call in return.

"I'm not just sending out resumés to every job posting, but only the ones I'm qualified for," said Lovelace, who just finished a book on storage migration for the SAP(SAP) environment. "There's clearly no shortage of technology workers. If that were the case, I'd been getting dozens of calls every week, and salaries would be going through the roof. And that's just not happening."

Or listen to Sharon Adler's story. Adler, like many former IT professionals, has simply stopped looking for work. She earned her master's in computer science from California State University, Northridge, in 1988 with a 4.0 grade point average and spent the next 12 years as a member of the technical staff at Bell Labs developing software -- first Unix kernel code and then data visualization applications using object-oriented technology and C++. In 2000, Adler moved from California to New Hampshire to develop e-commerce applications for a startup, and after the dot-com crash, she developed text-messaging systems for an international telecommunications company. In 2002 the Netherlands-based company closed its U.S. development facility. Adler hasn't worked in IT since.

"I even tried making my resumé look less experienced, and I never mentioned my age," said Adler, adding that she applied for everything from entry-level positions to those that matched her actual level of expertise. While job hunting, she got certified in J2EE by taking a Sun-sponsored course. Nothing came of that. "Most of the people in the class had their master's degrees and decades of experience, yet were finding it difficult to get any response from employers advertising for IT workers," said Adler. "It was like sending our resumés into a black hole."

http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=201000479

[wakeme2008]

1. K&N this is just about hiring low cost foreign nationals nt

[Xipe Totec]

2. Who eventually become residents,

and then citizens, legally.

So, we oppose illegal immigration, and legal immigration?

What's left?

Oh, yea, I forgot....


Outsourcing.

[ramapo]

3. Don't get me started

The skilled and capable homegrown workforce has already been destroyed.

The H1B fiasco started during the early-to-mid 90s. Windows NT was really taking off and skilled Windows system admins were commanding top dollar while being tough to find. So, as a "temporary" measure, the H1Bs were to help address the shortage while we grew more skilled technicians here in the U.S.

Well, funny thing but the rates for Windows admins began to drop as supply went up. Soon we were importing programmers, DBAs, Unix admin, etc.

These early H1Bs gained experience and made contacts. Some returned to India to start the great outsource revolution.

I could provide dozens of true-life examples of how thriving, well-paying positions have systematically been offshored, outsourced, downsized. Many thousands have lost jobs and careers. Even more will never have careers because projects will never get underway here.

Just a few examples....

--Top pharm company - Can't hire anybody in the U.S. for a technical/programming position unless it can be proven that the job CANNOT be done offshore

--The basic entry point of programmer no longer exists. Few companies do development any longer on shore.

--The thriving U.S. computer manufacturing, software development, and support industry of the '90s is gone

--People have lost careers, retrained in data processing, and then lost that career only to be told to go back to school, it's your fault you haven't kept up your skills.

I personally know dozens, probably a couple of hundred, who have lost their jobs (and careers).

Meanwhile our "representatives" vote to increase H1B limits each and every year. Of course, now it is getting to the point where few Americans will go into the field because job prospects suck.

All the rhetoric about valuing education, especially in the maths and sciences, is a bunch of crap. I have seen hundreds of resumes of Americans, desperately looking for work, all with amazing educations and backgrounds. They're just thrown upon the garbage pile of screwed workers.

It just makes me sick.

[bonito]

4. K&R

[mile18blister]

5. H-1B? HELL, NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I borrowed and paid off thousands in student loans (at 7% to 9% interest). I worked as a teaching assistant, research assistant while working part-time jobs to get a BS and MS in Computer Engineering, and a PhD in Comp Sci. In fact, it took me several extra years to finish my education because of all the time I had to waste to pay for it. I was almost 30 when I got my PhD. Everybody wanted to hire me, and the offers I got were at the top end of the scale for my group. No one could even think about offering a foreign national a job until they went through the list of available Americans.

Like many ordinary Americans, I pursued the American dream and got screwed.

The IT job market today; forget about it. Between H-1B and off-shoring, if you're lucky to find something that pays, it's a fraction of what it should be. I was a student for almost 25 yrs if you count the time between kindergarten and my PhD, so excuse me if I'm not wild about going back to school and get retrained for a job that probably won't exist by the time I finish.

:nuke: :nuke: :nuke: :nuke: :nuke: :nuke: :nuke: :nuke:

[thunder rising]

6. The last person with his head in the sand has the only ass in the air.

There is no engineering talent shortage. If there where then wages would go up and American youngsters would find engineering disciplines a valid educational option. Considering the wages and career limitations that are offered to engineers because of the H-1B policy, American youth do not view engineering as a growth opportunity. Does an intelligent American youth want to put up with 4 years of engineering school, where foreign professors teach to foreign students, just to earn $50-60/yr after 10 years; assuming that the embedded H-1B managers in America are even hiring Americans.

If there were such a shortage of engineers, then why are engineering wages below the scale of middle management for which there is known to be a great supply and yet surprisingly remains the educational choice of the American youth. The opinion of the American business student is that only an idiot or a foreigner want to be an engineer. As things look in 10/20 years is the US going to out-source our national defense, since there will definitely be a shortage of American engineering talent?.

For the youngsters thinking about it ... if you're smart enough to be a rocket scientist, you're smart enough to know there is no future in a field that has such a high cost of entry and is being outsourced and onshored. You are not going to compete with H-1B's on cost and own a house.

I work for a company with a non-competitive bid for engineering resources. I am the lead, I report to a VP, and I am the only American on the team. I cannot tell you what I have to put up with in terms of no-talent unmotivated Y2K leftovers that I cannot get to work and cannot fire. I have begun to think this may be illegal, but you never can tell about Florida. Every day I talk to my onshores I can only think of the two displaced Americans they represent, while smiling.

(portions borrowed from Cuntry.com. A name purchased when I was unemployed and loosing my house)

[cascadiance]

12. I myself have seen the H-1B visa laws ABUSED on a wholesale level with tech companies...

H-1B Visa laws were intended to allow on a LIMITED basis, tech companies to be willing to pay EXTRA to have permission to get certain individuals to work here that they might not be able to find otherwise at the EQUIVALENT salary of an American worker with similar skills. If it is a combination of language skills along with certain technical skills, or certan areas of research, etc. then THOSE were valid usage of this law to help keep our companies competitive. I'm for that usage if that was the only way it was being used.

But instead you had big contracting companies set up in places like Silicon Valley that would ONLY hire H-1B Visa contractors. Since they had no domestic engineers in their employ as contractors, they used that as a loophole to pay these imported contractors at any rate they pleased. Then as a KEY way to take care and not hae their contractors measured against employees of the firms they contracted their contractors too, they made sure to have the legal language that they were "contracting a service" to the company hiring them, not "contracting a worker" to work on contracted projects. I had managers I knew at Sun which used to joke about this and very explicitly talk on how this was done then, which was their way to get things done at lower budgets.

And now you have the Senate immigration bill, which so many Democrats pointed to as the "good immigration bill" over the xenophobic one under Sensenbrenner, look to remove all caps on H-1B Visa hiring. Folks there HAS to be a third way of looking at immigration, and not these two bills that NEITHER effectively solves immigration or foreign worker problems.

As noted in this thread, it really is a losing proposition for kids in the U.S. to pursue this field any more. Though I'm already in it and senior, and feel pressure now if I want to switch to a different company (which might happen with the flux in tech companies these days), I went up the ladder in earlier days that is no longer available to many today.

We need to solve this problem fixing things on MULTIPLE fronts. Just trying to do one isn't going to solve it, and if someone looks at stats afterward and says such a strategy "failed" and shouldn't be tried again, they're missing the big picture, where it COULD be a useful cog in the overall solution. We need to:

1) Repeal or renegotiate NAFTA, CAFTA, GATT and other similar trade treaties and take ourselves out from under any WTO jurisdiction, and go back to charging tariffs, absent some "FAIR TRADE" type of agreements to replace agreements like NAFTA. Perhaps we can set up a fair trade sphere of countries, where we all agree to have fair rules for employees, etc. that wouldn't be exposed to tariffs, but where we feel we are all working under an even playing field, and have equal concern for our environmental costs, etc.

2) Limit H-1B Visa hiring to JUST a small number that are hired for the reasons that this bill was originally set out to do, and not to allow just cheap importation of labor. Restructure the rules so that true measure of a fair wage can be put in place, or throw out this rule altogether.

3) Subsidize at least a bachelor's level degree in college like they used to do in the state of California. They DO DO THAT NOW in India for their people. The big question an Indian student has after they get their FREE bachelor's degree is on whether to get a masters or PHD (which they do have to pay for) so that they can be better qualified to get the jobs over here. Though their bachelor's degrees from their own universities are recognized not to be comparable to ours in terms of quality of education, they certainly are above our paid for high school level of education. We need to get the costs of education to a point where at least that's on an even playing field with what foreign students feel. Foreign students also feel that they can get a bigger payoff for their education over there since they look greedily at being able to come over here for a while, getting the big bucks for their family, and returning home with a lot more capital to do other things later. Even if with an even playing field, our kids don't have that to look forward. We should shoot for every country not being able to look to do "migrant work" in another country for a while to get rich (which is usually us). Getting a college degree in a field should be measured as getting a decent job in their own country primarily, not being able to take advantage of the conditions to work here.

4) Have some sort of ways to factor in cost of living differences in different countries to ensure that there still isn't a "race to the bottom" to areas with lower costs of living. Find some way to over time flatten that as more countries develop their own economies to a better state, and the value of their assetts, housing, so that we're not penalizing any one's investments now (like our housing market here) by trying to do an immediate "flattening" of costs of living, etc.

5) Factor in ways to have each member country of such newer trade deals all commit to ways to keep their growing economies from moving away from being "green" economies that can affect global warming. We all want all workers around the world to be better off. But we should not want that to happen at the expense of heightening the rate of accelerating global warming effects to the point of no return.

6) Structure tax laws that favor companies that hire locally here and not those that try to locate here but outsource overseas all of their labor. Perhaps finding some way to add heavy taxes or something to those in charge of such companies to the point that they have to face the choice of either moving themselves and their company headquarters to the country that they are outsourcing to (which I'll bet many CEOs, etc. would NOT want to do), or having to pay a helluva higher price personally themselves if they want to have their companies continue to hire overseas instead of domestic workers.

[OhioChick]

13. Study: There Is No Shortage of U.S. Engineers

April 4, 2007
A commonly heard defense in the arguments that surround U.S. companies that offshore high-tech and engineering jobs is that the U.S. math and science education system is not producing a sufficient number of engineers to fill a corporation's needs.

However, a new study from Duke University calls this argument bunk, stating that there is no shortage of engineers in the United States, and that offshoring is all about cost savings.

This report, entitled "Issues in Science and Technology" and published in the latest National Academy of Sciences magazine further explores the topic of engineering graduation rates of India, China and the United States, the subject of a 2005 Duke study.

In the report, concerns are raised that China is racing ahead of both the United States and India in its ability to perform basic research. It also asserts that the United States is risking losing its global edge by outsourcing critical R&D and India is falling behind by playing politics with education. Meanwhile, it considers China well-positioned for the future.

Duke's 2005 study corrected a long-heard myth about India and China graduating 12 times as many engineers as the United States, finding instead that the United States graduates a comparable number.

"You had the brightest kids worrying about their jobs being outsourced. We thought, if kids at Duke were worried, then let's do a study about what's going on in education," Vivek Wadhwa, executive in residence at Duke University's master's in engineering management program and a co-author of the study, told eWEEK at the time.

"The first thing you do in a study is you look at the facts. But we couldn't find any facts. The more we dug, the more we looked, the more we discovered there were no facts," said Wadhwa.

However, Duke's 2005 study reported serious problems with the quality of Indian and Chinese bachelor-level engineering graduates, and predicted both shortages in India and unemployment in China. The current report finds these predictions to be accurate, with China's National Reform Commission reporting that the majority of its 2006 graduates will not find work. There are also oft-heard whisperings of a engineering shortage in India, though private colleges and "finishing schools" are going far to make up for the Indian deficiencies, the report said.


http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2111347,00.asp

[Fearless]

7. The Whole H-1B thing is unfortunate but...

Capitalism as it is today dictates that corporations will look for the cheapest labor. Imported "immigrants" tend to make less than their "American" counterparts. It makes fiduciary sense for them. For us as a nation however there are arguments that it takes work from "Americans" which it of course does. However, so long as there is a limit on the number of people they can hire, a balance will be reached. If too many H-1B workers are "allowed" then the value of the job will be depressed, thus lowering the amount "American" workers will be able to make. Likewise, if too few are allowed, then the company may decide to move a department or the whole corporation overseas, leaving all American workers out of the job.

What needs to happen long term is that we must level the playing field. I've been saying this for a long time. Workers in other countries must be able to make the same or close to the same as American workers make, that is they need minimum wage laws first and then strong unions. This way, American-based companies will not have incentive to leave the country.

The shortest term possibility is to repeal NAFTA and WTO agreements and levy high tariffs against foreign nations. However, this should be discouraged because, as both China and India are growing strongly, and would continue to do so even without us, they will soon out-pace us if we seclude our markets. Think back to the automotive tariffs that have virtually bankrupted Detroit in the past few decades.

[Lasher]

9. Your level playing field is the exact same standard of living for everyone, worldwide

If Americans were to lower their living standards to those of India and China the problem would be 'solved'.

[Fearless]

17. True

But I wouldn't dare see that as an option. I'd prefer to wear shoes than make them, if that's not too crass.

[provis99]

8. same thing in Britain

If you watched the movie Sicko, or heard the news about the foreign doctors arrested in Britain, or been there, you'd notice that a very high proportion of the doctors are foreign trained. The British government prefers them because they don't have to go through the expense of training doctors from the British population. Same thing in Canada. Same in France. Actually here in Canada, I didn't have a single Canadian professor until my fourth year of college; most were American or Commonwealth imports. Reason? Grad students are expensive to train, so their numbers are severely limited. Why train a Canadian when you can import a foreigner for free, force them to work at a designated university for x number of years?

Forget outsourcing; call it insourcing.

[mile18blister]

11. Foreign grad students often have their education paid for.

I have a friend who is a full professor at a major university. He has 12 PhD students. None of them are Americans. Some of them are "free"; meaning they are on full scholarships from their own governments. The others? It took a few years into *'s administration, but for the first time in his career, my friend's NSF money dried up and he can't support students as research assistants. There are only so many teaching assistant positions to go around. What sane American wants to borrow a fortune and compete with the entire country for any sort of an outside job for an advanced degree that gives them absolutely no advantage?

[mile18blister]

10. Kicking for the AM crowd.

Because this is destroying my life and I am pissed.

:kick:

[Yael]

16. I hear ya...

:hug:

[Daveparts]

14. The Average H1-B IT

starts at $12,000 less than a native born IT

[Yael]

15. Another K&R on this one

Shortage? SHORTAGE? :rofl:

Oh please. I work in an IT firm. I can assure y'all that every time we open a req for a programmer or systems analyst, they come out of the woodwork like someone just kicked an anthill.

Part of this is the drive in the late 90s that everyone graduating high school thought that a CompSci degree or DeVry certification was the only way that they were going to make any money. The other part of this is the H-1B and offshoring.

The good news is that Dell and Microsoft (that I know of, not sure who else) are reviewing their offshore Customer Service/Tech Support arrangements due to the vast and clamorous complaints that they have been getting about it being anything but 'service and support'.

Bring the jobs back here!!!!!