My anecdotal experience says there's a ton of demand for skilled programmers. If we're graduating CS students that don't have the skills that tech companies need, that's a problem with quality rather than volume.
i'm interested to hear you experiences. Most companies I know (circleci included) are dying for skilled devs, though there's no shortage of not-great devs.
The demand for skilled programmers is unevenly distributed. There's huge demand in the Bay Area and then a much smaller smattering of demand elsewhere. If you are a skilled dev who doesn't live in the Bay Area, it can very much feel like you aren't in demand. I don't know if that is what he meant, or if he was just being contrarian.
Exactly. It's been my experience that programming job offers in certain areas are plentiful, but the vast majority require relocation if you aren't local.
A very small percentage might be open to remote workers, but unless you live in or around these "hot spots" you're going to have a more difficult time finding work, not to mention a comparatively lower compensation.
If you are hiring, your website does not make that particularly obvious.
(Interested applicants will read your blog to learn about you, but surely more prominent placement would generate more flow. Especially since your potential customers are your most likely employees.)
Similar experience in UK (Edinburgh, at least). Startup companies are dying to hire great devs, but the vast amount of people applying for tech jobs lack the necessary skills.
Multiply that by all Google's locations, add job listings from hundreds of other tech companies in SV.
Every time I hear this topic discussed by people who actually know what they are talking about (i.e. those running companies that try to hire competent programmers or those that are involved in the process, like VCs), it's always the same: finding good programmers is brutal.
Now, I'm sure that what you said is true in Alaska and many other parts of US that are not one of the tech centers, but when it comes to SV/Seattle/NY etc., it's clear that there is more demand than supply for skilled developers.
Really? Are there really 180 open positions at Google in the sense that they are desperate for hires? If they wanted to hire people by the droves they could simply make it a little easier to get a job there. It's misleading that they even list positions.
There are 180 open positions in Mountain View and 100,000 applications to Google every year. If you're telling me that out of 100,000 applications, there aren't 180 who could do a competent job, you have a problem totally unrelated to workforce supply.
They're sitting on what, 60 billion in cash? You mean to tell me they can't answer the need with a salary commensurate with their demand for good programmers?
"There's no shortage of smart, hardworking engineers. There's a shortage of smart, hardworking engineers willing to work for very little money." ~ David "Pardo" Keppel
Are you just playing devils advocate or do you actually believe this? As a recruiter who gets recruiting emails to come recruit engineers at other companies quite often, I have a hard time believing this.
It's important to note that even if this is true (and I suspect that the statistics lead more towards the statement that, "there is not a shortage of low-level IT trained workers" rather than "there is not a shortage of very talented developers") it doesn't mean that the right thing is to limit immigration.
Protectionism is almost always a negative for economic growth of a country. Even if wages in the US are depressed, that just means that wages were artificially high and that the US would soon become increasingly noncompetitive.
The biggest problem with H-1B visas seem to be the restrictions on working for a single established employer rather than having too many of them.
There can be a problem, though, with very uneven types of protectionism. For instance, suppose both apples and oranges are both subjected to very high tariffs. Then, you remove all tariffs from oranges, but leave them high on apples. you should expect domestic production to shift to apples and foreign production to shift to oranges, to the extent possible.
I can see how you would feel that creating more work visas would lead to a freer market. However, if these visas are heavily concentrated in STEM fields, this may end up producing a very distorted market that deters US citizens from pursuing degrees in this field.
One of the provisions of the immigration bill is to grant green cards to graduates of US-based STEM programs at the MS or PhD leve. Rather than a more general liberalization of immigration, that's just the sort of highly specific, targeted program that can produce severe market distortions.
Many of the people who object to these visas actually support more general liberalization of immigration - they just object to visa programs that are based on the notion that we need to use immigration specifically to increase the size of the STEM workforce. This is because they believe, as this article suggests, there is no shortage of STEM workers.
The I-94 (or I-797C) indicates which employer you can work for on an H1. When you transfer you don't get a new visa and the new I-94 invalidates the previous I-94. So you never hold two visas or two valid I-94s and are not authorized to work for two employers.
You can work for multiple employers on an H-1B if you have multiple approved I-129 petitions. Your original comment was in regards to a transfer which falls under AC-21.
edit: Technicalities in immigration law can have large consequences, working outside of one's status, or for an unapproved employer can result in being removed from the US and being banned from return for a number of years depending on the circumstances.
The problem is that you can't get very talented developers unless you're willing to let them enter into IT as low-level IT trained workers. That first job is often difficult. (The problem of course, is complex. An entry level worker may be worth x, whereas someone of 2 years is worth 4x. However, corporate incentives rarely work like that, leaving trained workers to leave in order to get raises.)
If we're really honest, starting salaries should be low, with a near doubling of salary within 6 months, if we were looking at real productivity.
There is no such a thing shortage of IT workers. These companies (google, facebook…)claim shortage of talents because they always want top ones (at least with the standard they think). As far as there are better quality foreigner workers they always claim shortage.
No shortage of good IT workers as well. My point is it doesn't matter how good local workers are. As far as there are better (their standard) foreign workers they claim there is a shortage because they want top ones.
So suppose, purely hypothetically I assure you, that I'm an engineer that does technical interviews.
What is going on, is HR filtering out all the good domestic talent and making me waste my time interviewing crappy candidates that they know won't make the cut just so that they can hire abroad?
If there is an abundance of qualified unemployed domestic talent then why can't I, the employed engineer, find some of that talent to recommend so that I can collect some of those juicy bonuses?
Or am I hypothetically in on this conspiracy to discriminate against domestic talent as well?
Maybe there is something simpler going on. Maybe most candidates really do suck.
I'm confused by their conflation of STEM (in particular CS) grads and IT workers.
For example they say, “For computer science graduates employed one year after graduation . . . about half of those who took a job outside of IT say they did so because the career prospects were better elsewhere, and roughly a third because they couldn’t find a job in IT,”
None of the people who work in the IT department at my company have CS degrees. They have, however, held various sysadmin and programming positions, and do a bloody good job running our IT. I'm not sure we'd hire a fresh-out-of-school CS grad for our IT jobs if they didn't have any experience doing sysadmin or equipment / facility maintenance stuff.
Companies that aren't in the tech industry usually lump their programmers (for their web site, or internal process tools) into the IT dept. Still, the conflation of terms in this article makes it hard to understand what it's really saying; most interpretations I can make are just hard to believe.
Yep. My official title is IT Technical Specialist 2 - but I'm an iOS Developer if we're playing with words that actually mean something when said together. Funny enough though, I don't have a CS degree, I have an Art degree. Though everyone I work with is either CS or ECE.
This (and the discussion around it) are bullshit. They somehow think on STEM job is equivalent to another, which is lunacy.
- Talking about all STEM graduates as equal is pointless, because some people are useless and some are amazing.
- Talking about STEM in general is useless, because software is booming, and nothing else really is.
- Talking about all H1B jobs as the same is also bollox: half are employed by infosys (etc) as low cost (and low quality) contractors to avoid paying a fair wage (against the rules of the H1B program as I understand it). However, Google and Facebook (etc) are paying them great salaries, equal to what they pay US employees (even though the expenses are higher with visa and relocation costs).
So startups and high growth companies are being starved of great talent, because chemists can't find jobs and Infosys is trying to depress wages of low-quality IT workers? Makes no sense.
Do you have statistics for this? While the need for STEM is obviously rising, I feel like a lot of this conversation devolves into an echo chamber: I'd love to see hard statistics about STEM career demand.
I know that when I sent an email to the YC founders list cause I needed a job (2 years ago, but that's recent), I got 100 replies. I also know I find it hard to find really good devs for CircleCI. But those are just anecdotes...
Anecdotal evidence in the opposite direction: only half of my computer engineering peers in my graduating class of 2011 had jobs in the industry within 3 months of graduating.
While I think some devs are in high demand, I think many have little horizontal or upward mobility if they can get a job at all. I don't have a lot of evidence to back this up, and that WP study seems to talk a lot more about IT than software development, but I think it's probably something to think about. I think there's a crisis in training and mentorship in our industry, rather than one of willing bodies.
I totally agree, and I don't think that's actually an argument in the opposite direction, but rather an affirmation: good people have great opportunity, bad people do not. Half of my classmates in college were poor programmers, so I don't doubt that yours were too.
Which is my point above: we're starved of great devs because of stats about shit devs.
A shit dev can't reverse a list. A good dev can code arbitrary problems you give him, and can actually ship working code. A great dev can discuss ins-and-outs of an arbitrary system you give him to design, moving up and down the stack with ease.
That's a rough guide, with many edge cases, but that's how we go about it.
But I think that misses my point... I don't think we get to complain about a lack of good developers without trying to do something to make the bottom 50% of developers better. Taken in the context of the general population, that bottom 50% is still highly intelligent and generally very capable group of individuals.
IMO we're starved of great devs because we don't make bad devs better.
It used to be that employers trained less skilled individuals and there was more incentive to stay with employers for a long time. Now there is very little loyalty between employees or employers. I think this is a significant part of the problem.
> It used to be that employers trained less skilled individuals and there was more incentive to stay with employers for a long time. Now there is very little loyalty between employees or employers. I think this is a significant part of the problem.
Uh, I dono about the whole staying long time thing, but employers do train, or at least hire unqualified people they expect to grow into the position.
Especially low-budget web startups... yeah, they talk about "rockstar ninja" this and that, but who do you think they actually get, when they are paying below market rates?
I mean, I'm not criticizing; some people really respond to "non-monetary compensation" - and that's what the rockstar ninja bullshit is.
I hire from the same pool, really; but I'm all apologetic about paying you shit. Who would you rather work for? me, saying "Hey, sorry I'm paying you shit. but hey, the last guy who had the job got a really good job with $realcompany after two years." - or some startup, that says you are an awesome best in the world rockstar ninja, and you aren't getting much money, but you have equity in this startup that will change the world!"
I mean, it's really the same thing, just framed in different ways. And most people? they like the rockstar ninja framing.
really? well, I'm actually looking for people right now. I mean, this month I need a bunch of rack and stack help (but I'm willing to take you through setting up several brands of switches, if you sign on before I set 'em up myself) I can pay $15/hr on a 1099, (remember, that means you pay both the employer and employee payroll taxes, so at minimum, that means you are paying 7.5% more of that as taxes than you would as a w2. Plus tax calculation effort and stuff.) but I've got a kinda informal headhunting deal with a buddy who needs similar skills. He pays a little more (full time, though, and w/ health benefits, on a w2, and I think he would pay like $15-$18/hr, but between the w2 and the benefits, that's significantly better than the $15 on a 1099.) I point him at good folks who work for cheap, and instead of giving me a recruiting bonus, he lets me rent you back at a discounted rate. So yeah, if you are in silicon valley, drop me an email (in my profile) and call your first few days 'paid interview' and maybe you get a full time gig with that other guy?
(I hire people full-time with benefits, too- but right now, I don't have enough revenue to hire another full-time. I do need some help moving, though, which is why that shady deal with my buddy is so good for me; I get some per-day work, but can attract someone that wants to be full time, and thus end up paying closer to full-time rates.)
I am okay with a full-day minimum; I'm not expecting you to show up for an hour for $15, and I usually get lunch or dinner or something.
But yeah; I don't know. “Napoleon's hat on the battlefield is worth 50,000 men”. - most people expect /leadership/ - and most people think leadership involves motivating people through personal charisma and confidence.
Personally? I understand how bad leadership can destroy value, but I don't really see how good leadership (in the personal charisma sense) can help anything. I think good leaders pick good people, (or, at least, the best people available considering the compensation the company can afford.) then mostly get out of the way. I mean, i do a lot of "no, don't spend time on that, this other thing is more important" - like today, I redirected an employee away from working on new images and towards improving our per-port BCP38. And I do training, too, but that's really more experienced individual contributor type work.
(And as for Napoleon, after the french revolution? the french soldiers were treated better than any of their contemporaries, and I think that had a lot to do with their success. I mean, I'm not entirely discounting Napoleon, but "Liberté, égalité, fraternité," I think, really had a lot to do with his success. It's not a unique strategy; every Caesar since, well, Caesar has used populist rhetoric and policies to gain and keep power, but at that time? the rest of the world really treated their soldiers poorly, and France was, at least in Europe, uniquely populist.)
I'm not really looking for work right now (nor am I in SV), but thanks.
As for how leadership can affect employees, I'm inclined to believe that leadership will always have a substantive effect on productivity and skill. Obviously, most employees do not work on projects entirely of their choosing; they are given tasks or projects to do, often decided by the team or by management. Certainly, the employee can have input, but ultimately employees exist to serve a role determined by higher-ups. Higher-ups, then, have the responsibility of appropriating their tallent in ways that are effective. Good people aren't good when they aren't given meaningful work.
>Higher-ups, then, have the responsibility of appropriating their tallent in ways that are effective. Good people aren't good when they aren't given meaningful work.
Sure, but that's in the "make the right decisions" category. Logistics, really. We're talking Marshal Berthier here, not Napoleon. Part of that is assigning the right people to the right tasks. That doesn't take personal charisma or being tall or anything, that's just being technically right.
I mean, it's obvious that the people making technical decisions need to do so competently. It's not always easy to do correctly, but I can understand the process... I understand what needs to be done.
I'm talking about, you know, leadership. When a teacher says someone has "leadership skills" they don't mean that the kid understands how to manage logistics; they mean the kid has a bunch of personal/emotional qualities that allow him or her to emotionally manipulate others to get what he or she wants. (Or, if you want to phrase it in positive terms, "they mean the kid has a bunch of personal/emotional qualities that inspire others to do what they want." )
That's the part I wonder if I need to spend time on. (I mean, logistics is huge, and I /know/ I need to spend more time on it, but that's just a matter of execution, really. I know what I want.)
I mean, do I take time out from the logistics (which I know I need) to learn how to become slick? Certainly, on a personal level, nearly everyone prefers the up-beat, happy person who phrases everything positively, and acts as if they know what they are doing; someone who shows they are marching to certain victory, over to someone who says and does the same things, but who phrases it negatively and states up front that realistically, failure is the likely outcome, that if they do succeed, the reward will be middling, and acknowledges that they are just figuring it out/making it up as they go along.
My problem is that I tend to phrase things negatively, in part because all of my grave financial errors have been due to a terribly unrealistic level of optimism, and in part because I fucking hate guys like that.
Now, I always thought of myself as being more honest and direct... and in some ways, I certainly am, but I have been finding, lately that quite often my false humility comes off as being non-confrontational. Sometimes, I fear that it is. Sometimes, I find myself rephrasing my thoughts directly to be less confrontational, which really puts some people off. I mean, if I'm leaving in the negative phrasing, why go through the effort to also be non-confrontational? well, in part because humility is non-confrontational, and I'm attempting, however clumsily, to emulate humility; but should I? I mean, sure, it turns me in to a person I would like more, but most people are exactly the opposite.
I mean, my feeling on the matter is that I can fake what other people call 'confidence' fairly easily by simply letting my scorn for the fact that you value confidence show. Most people seem to think that's close enough to "confidence" to get me the job or the date or whatever. It doesn't really work long-term, but in a job, at least, by the time they figure it out, I've proven myself useful, so it's fine.
My current feeling? emotional bullshit is bullshit; so long as my logistics are good enough, it doesn't really matter all that much, so long as I avoid high-touch sales situations. It's probably fucking my personal life, but that can be dealt with later.
"There's no shortage of smart, hardworking engineers. There's a shortage of smart, hardworking engineers willing to work for very little money." ~ David "Pardo" Keppel
Anecdotally, Computer Engineering degrees have a bad rep with HR and hiring managers. The degrees seem to cover too little EE to do hardware work and too little CS to do software work.
I agree about the crisis in training and mentorship. A lot of people who seem like weak candidates are really just lacking in experience and direction.
It's hard enough to find qualified devs out of the pool of folks with CS degrees, which often fail to prepare students for the workplace. CE is possibly at a disadvantage because in covering two disciplines, it doesn't serve either particularly well; there aren't as many jobs where that kind of mixed software/hardware expertise is crucial. It's kind of a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none problem, at least in terms of perception.
One statistic I remember is from Brad Smith's talk at Brookings (http://www.brookings.edu/events/2012/09/27-stem-education#re...). He says (around the 6:30 mark) that Microsoft has over 3400 open jobs for engineers and software developers in this US and this number is a 34% increase from last year.
Is that because the job market is so tight, or because they're not paying enough for the level of talent they want, relative to alternatives like Wall Street and other major tech companies?
Microsoft used to be able to pay market (for tech) but get all-stars because of their name and the perceived quality of their stock. Now that they don't have that kind of brand, those same people are going to places like Google, Apple, Facebook or [insert hot startup] instead.
"There's no shortage of smart, hardworking engineers. There's a shortage of smart, hardworking engineers willing to work for very little money." ~ David "Pardo" Keppel
Exactly. Reminds me of a startup that complained to me they couldn't find any good engineers in Silicon Valley - when they were offering 25% below market comp.
"Google and Facebook (etc) are paying them great salaries, equal to what they pay US employees (even though the expenses are higher with visa and relocation costs)."
Is there a possibility, though, that what they pay US employees is influenced by the ability to grant visas to non-citizen workers? In that sense, the program could still suppress wages.
Undoubtably. If you run out of good talent, then the price of talent goes up. If you increase the pool of good talent, then it stabilizes.
However, I believe (and the point of the H1B program is) that being able to hire great people is a competitive advantage of US companies, and is more important than increasing salaries of existing employees (to the economy).
This raises another question, though - why is it more important to do this in high tech than other fields?
Nobel economist Milton Friedman scoffs at the idea of the government stocking a farm system for the likes of Microsoft and Intel. "There is no doubt," he says, "that the [H-1B] program is a benefit to their employers, enabling them to get workers at a lower wage, and to that extent, it is a subsidy."
So why subsidize Microsoft and Intel rather than other sectors of the economy? Why specifically attach green cards to graduate STEM degrees? Much of the objection here isn't to liberalized immigration or bringing great people in general, it's about tailoring our immigration system to increase the size of the STEM workforce, when the evidence does not support the notion that there is any shortage.
Also, keep in mind, there are long term dangers to restricting the domestic pipeline of talent into these fields. A sudden and massive increase in the size of a specific sector of the workforce through immigration will increase the pool of good talent in the short term, as the existing domestic workforce will not have had time to adjust to the new and reduced cost/benefit of a graduate degree in engineering. But in the long run, it may simply deter young people from entering the field and displace the existing workforce - not because it's a bad deal, but because talent can find a better deal in an area that is not targeted for increase through visa allocation.
This could leave the US heavily dependent on foreign students. Some people will say "so what? we'll have good engineers, for cheap, and if later we can't recruit as easily, domestic interest will increase." I'm not nearly so optimistic. I think that a healthy pipeline isn't something you can kill off and revive on a dime. When you lose it, it is very difficult to revive.
I want to be clear - I think it would be terribly foolish for the US to close the door to top talent from overseas. A healthy domestic pipeline requires a healthy infusion of talent from overseas as well. However, I think it needs to be carefully balanced As it stands, I don't think that people creating these policies are aware of the potential risks and damage they may be doing to the domestic pipeline, nor do they seem to understand the long term implications of narrowing the domestic pipeline.
I'd be really interested in finding out how that study defines "IT". And also how it defines "STEM job". Would being a quant on Wall Street be considered a "STEM job", for instance?
Basic dynamics of supply and demand would dictate that if there were a domestic labor shortage, wages should have risen. Instead, researchers found, they’ve been flat, with many Americans holding STEM degrees unable to enter the field and a sharply higher share of foreign workers taking jobs in the information technology industry.
In other words, wages haven't risen because the reduction in the number of domestic STEM workers has been offset by the increase in the number of foreign STEM workers; the total supply of STEM workers has remained the same, but more of them are foreign.
Note that if you remove the word "domestic" in front of "labor shortage", the above quote would be correct; but it includes that word, which makes it worse than wrong.
It's the same old, same old: It's an
old story that somehow too many powerful
people in the US Federal Government want
to do 'US national technical manpower
management'.
E.g., when Sputnik went up, the Feds via
the NSF flooded US high school and college
education with money, scholarships,
summer programs, etc. to get more US
citizens into STEM fields.
During the Cold War and the Space Race,
STEM students were paid nearly well
enough to buy a house; then the powers
that be got really scared.
But, with the stimulus, soon
the supply exceeded the demand; US
citizens who walked into a college STEM
course saw the TA and half of the students
from Asia or India, turned, and walked out.
So, right: Joe and Mary paid taxes to
support public education K-college and
graduate school. For their children
they struggled to meet college expenses.
And when their children went to college,
somehow they found lots of students
there from India and Asia. How come?
These students were from families with
annual incomes less than $10,000 yet
somehow got their children into the
college supported by the taxes of Joe and
Mary when Joe and Mary had to struggle
to pay for their children in that college?
Bummer. Sure: The students from India
and China were there on various scholarships,
indirectly paid for by Joe and Mary. Bummer.
Ripoff.
During the Viet Nam war, the head of the
Selective Service system was old General
Louis B. Hershey with the remark that
"The US Selective Service System has
national manpower management responsibilities
far exceeding staffing the armed forces."
by which he meant that US young men had
two, just two, options, (1) do well in
college or graduate school in STEM fields
or (2) go to Viet Nam. Of course, that
'responsibility' was only
in his egotistical imagination; still
he executed on his delusion.
Later much of the US 'military industrial
complex' concluded that there was a
US STEM shortage. So, the powers that be
got the NSF to set up a team of economists
to calculate, with essentially supply
and demand curves, how much 'stimulus'
would be needed to increase the labor
supply.
The stimulus didn't work well for US
citizens, so the plan was to write into
research grants in US research universities
that with the grant money so many students
had to be supported and that, hint, hint,
there were plenty of willing students from
India and Asia, hint, hint.
Then there got to be the H1B scam, mostly
just a new version of 'indentured servitude'
or 'slave labor'.
Basically, anytime STEM worker bees get
paid well enough to buy a house, big
forces in the US move to flood the
market with STEM graduates.
It's dirt simple: It's capital versus
labor. Capital has power and wants
cheap labor.
These US powers that be are just seeking
more money and power and, net, are seriously
hurting the basic strength of the US.
The solution is for US voters to become
informed and come together and vote
for the US for the US as a whole and
not just for the 1% richest capitalists.
This comment seems slightly overwrought and racist to me, specially this part, "US citizens who walked into a college STEM course saw the TA and half of the students from Asia or India, turned, and walked out." -- Really?
I don't see an option to downvote here, but if I could, I would definitely do that for this.
I'll put it to you this way: I'm of Western European descent, England and Germany. Still, no way do I want
the US Federal Government to flood US STEM classes with
students from England and Germany. This view is not racism.
Here is one thing it really is: The US is getting badly
hurt in the world economy. The real unemployment rate is
ballpark 20%. The US is creating boom times in several
other countries.
Well, one way for the US to help itself is for the US to
continue to have a great college and university system and, then, keep those educations for US citizens. That is,
US citizens are paying for those institutions and, thus, should be able to 'keep' the 'intellectual property' and
other advantages inside the US. So, it is now strongly
in the interest of US citizens to move not to let any
foreign students in US colleges or universities.
It is in the interest of US tax payers to pay to
educate the US but not the world that wants to
compete with the US economy.
In contrast, British universities are actually financed by the oversees students.
By keeping good education for a select few only, you do not actually help the US absolutely, you just make the other people less well off. (And even the US, but perhaps less so.)
Again, my point is that US citizens
Joe and Mary pay taxes, state and
federal. Those taxes are used in
part to support US higher education:
The state taxes support institutions
in the state of Joe and Mary. The
federal taxes provide support of
various kinds and essentially all
the research at US research universities.
Joe and Mary have children and want
them to get good higher educations
and, then, good jobs for good
careers. But the children still have
to pay to go to college. What they
pay for a state school is high;
for a private school, higher.
So, commonly such US children
skip some or all of college.
Then wonder of wonders, presto,
in US higher education paid for
partly by Joe and Mary, there
are foreign students in seats
the children of Joe and Mary
could not afford to occupy.
And the foreign student only
paid at most 1/3rd of the cost
of the education, not nearly
the full cost. For undergraduate
school, a big question is how
can a student from a poor country
afford the cost of a US education?
For graduate students, the US
NSF has arranged that there will
be STEM graduate students,
US or foreign.
Here Joe and Mary have a very
good reason to feel ripped off.
Why does the US do this? Because
some powerful people in the US
want to flood US STEM fields
with enough students to lower
labor rates in those fields.
So, the policy is to tax Joe
and Mary and use their money
to support foreign STEM students.
Then when those students enter
the US labor market, which some
do, they compete with the children
of Joe and Mary. Again Joe and
Mary feel ripped off.
There are many excuses given for
supporting foreigners in STEM
fields. One of the excuses is
that the foreign students are
better at creating jobs in the
US and, thus, help the children
of Joe and Mary get jobs. That's
saying that the US, with 330
million people, with universities
that dominate the list of the best
universities in the world,
that dominates the Nobel prizes
and the publications at the best
research journals, etc., somehow
is short on people to start
businesses. Nonsense.
Especially nonsense to the US
NSF that set up a group to
do calculations on how many
foreign students would have to
be imported to drive down the
cost of STEM labor. The whole
point was just to drive down
the cost of STEM labor. So,
it's no surprise that the cost
of STEM labor went down. And
the income of the children of
Joe and Mary went down if those
children were in STEM fields.
"By keeping good education for a select few only"
The US does no such thing: There are 330
million people in the US. All or nearly
all the states have state colleges and
universities. And there are private
universities -- Harvard, Stanford, etc.
The best students can go on scholarships.
Otherwise students who can get admitted
can get financial aid if they need it.
Still, often the cost to the student
and/or their family is high. But college
education is the US is not limited
to "the select few" US citizens and would
not be if US universities cut way back on
foreign students.
The US is hurting: The reasons are,
too many foreign wars, too many
foreign military bases, the disaster
of the US inflation caused by
the Viet Nam war that, then, caused
the S&L crisis and likely enabled OPEC,
the disaster of the
housing bubble from efforts to
'spread the home ownership around',
and, heavily, the idea of the US
State Department that for 'world
peace' the US should pursue 'world
trade' by which lower paid US
jobs would go to Japan, Mexico,
Canada, Taiwan, South Korea, India,
Pakistan, and now China. So, the
US has a real unemployment rate of
about 20%, and real incomes have
hardly increased since the Viet Nam
war in about 1960. In the 1950s,
Detroit had a license to print money
and looked like a dream town. Now
Detroit looks like a bombed out WWII
city. Much of US metal manufacturing
in the US Midwest has gone out of
business. Textiles in the Carolinas
have gone. GE got seriously hurt
by Japan. The heirs of Sam Walton
have done well by importing products
from Chi...
> The US is one of the few countries in the world that throws open its markets to foreign countries.
Please see e.g. http://www.economist.com/node/11586026 and observe the correlation between high-income and lower trade barriers. Does your argument still stand?
It's not "racist". It's just that
the US citizens quickly saw that they
didn't 'fit in'. So, they became afraid,
rightly so, that somehow it was a game
that promised not to be good for US
citizens. And that fear was correct.
The US citizens just saw that they didn't
fit in and turned, which is just what they
should have done. There are lots of situations
where a person might not fit in, and racism
need have nothing to do with it.
Or, where were all the other US citizens
that one would expect would be the TA and
the students? Were they all racists? Or
did they just see or sense something wrong?
There was something wrong, very wrong: The
labor supply was being manipulated in DC. It
was a rigged game and not what it looked like
superficially. When see such a situation,
don't ignore the obvious and wait 20 years to
discover the details of how DC rigged the
game and, instead, just sense that something's
wrong and leave.
I saw situations where the division was really
clear: Essentially all the worker bees were
from India or Asia, and essentially all the
managers were US citizens, white of
Western European descent. In that situation,
got to be from Asia or India to apply for a
slot even as a worker bee -- US citizens of
Western European descent need not apply. Period.
Look, set aside your PC sensitivities for a second
and look at some simple reality: A big theme
in the US from Alexis de Tocqueville on is for the
US to create an identifiable, exploited underclass.
That's what's going on here. Given that such an
exploited underclass has been created, then other
people don't 'fit in' and will not be welcome,
especially by the higher ups. Again, it's not
racism, especially on the part of the guy who sees
that he doesn't fit in, turns, and walks; instead, it's
reality.
Easy: The culture of a country,
as far as I can tell, any country,
takes a lot of time, years, mostly decades, and effort to
learn. In any country, someone
who recently arrived, to natives, obviously
has not been there very long.
It's easy enough in the US to spot
people recently from Canada, Mexico,
England, France, Italy, Germany,
and Australia;
spotting people recently from India
and Taiwan is much easier.
So, when the people clearly have not
been in the US long enough to
become US citizens, then that is
easy to tell.
It mostly tells me you haven't been around a wide variety of people. Live in any major US city and you'll meet thousands of citizens with heavy accents and atypical fashion sense (ever been to Brooklyn, or most of LA)? And there are lots of non-citizens that have lived in the US for years and blend in perfectly - many of the folks in my office are not US citizens, but as a natural-born American I'd be hard pressed to say which just by looking at them. If you could do better than 50% success - random guessing - in looking at my workplace or college class, I'd be surprised.
Again, if a person A who has been in the
US for a long time and has gotten good
with US 'culture' sees an adult B who
has not been in the US long enough to
qualify for US citizenship, then person
A will detect person B as an immigrant
and non-US citizen easily.
Your point is that this detection can
also be made by some non-US citizens
who have been in the US for a long time.
True but does not conflict with what I
wrote.
You are straining to find something
wrong with what I wrote. Sorry,
I wrote nothing wrong.
I don't need to strain: what you're saying - that you can look a bunch of people, and based on their faces and clothing, decide they're not American - is racist. In fact, it's pretty close to the canonical example of racist.
What I'm trying to explain is that there are lots of people who are US citizens that your test would fail with. They're native-born, but they don't happen to be white and/or they don't happen to dress like you. Just because someone isn't white and/or completely culturally assimilated doesn't mean they're less American or even second or third generation - we've been making that mistake for a few hundred years, be it with the Irish, Italians, Chinese, etc... I say that as someone who knows lots of third or later generation Americans who still get asked "what country they're from" by folks making the same mistake.
"I don't need to strain: what you're saying - that you can look a bunch of people, and based on their faces and clothing, decide they're not American - is racist."
No I didn't. In your straining, you are claiming
a stronger statement than I made. Again, yet again,
one more time, this time just for you, and read
carefully, I said that if some person X has been
in the US for a time too short to become a US
citizen, then a US citizen can easily detect
that person X is an immigrant.
In particular, there were years where a US
citizen could walk into a STEM class
and on the first day conclude that
the majority of the class was recent
immigrants, conclude that he didn't
'fit in', turn, and walk out. Why
could a US citizen do this? Because
the class had a lot of immigrants
only recently here. If the students
in the class had all been in the US
for a long time, then a US citizen
could not accurately detect that they
were immigrants.
Or, if you are a medical doctor working
in an emergency room and a person comes
in bleeding profusely, then you can detect
right away that he has a serious medical
problem. But this does not mean that
you can detect everyone with a serious
medical problem right away; indeed, the
ER and the hospital are packed with
diagnostic means for detecting who has
a medical problem. That is, being
able to detect an obvious medical
problem is not the same as being
able to detect all medical problems.
You mentioned that some people in the US for
a long time and non-US citizens can make the
same detection. True.
I did not say that a US citizen could detect
all immigrants.
It's a simple matter of a logical statement
and has nothing to do with racism. You
are not reading the logic correctly. Uh,
try to avoid courses in advanced mathematics
based on theorems and proofs.
> The students from India and China were there on various scholarships, indirectly paid for by Joe and Mary. Bummer. Ripoff.
Wait, are you saying someone like me from the third world can get a scholarship in the US from the US government?
Wish I had known that a few years ago. The people I know who studied in the US either did so out of pocket or via scholarships granted here in my country by local bodies.
Look, in a US college or university, essentially
no student ever pays for the full cost. One-third
is about the most a student pays. Instead
the institution gets money from taxes, research
grants, gifts, the endowment, and a few others. Essentially
all the money coming in is from US citizens or
US taxes from US citizens. So, the US is paying for those institutions.
If a student from outside the US gets accepted, arrives, and does well, then typically they can get a scholarship. So, who's paying for their education? Not the student, or their family. Instead their education is being paid for by US citizens or US taxes. Even if the foreign student doesn't get a scholarship, likely two-thirds or more of their education is being paid for by US citizens, not the
student.
When I was in one graduate school, a Midwest state university, somehow there were a
lot of students from India there. That university
was expensive for students from that state and much
more expensive for any students from other states.
A year there could cost as much as a new US car.
Today that would be ballpark $40,000. How is a family
in India going to come up with $40,000 to send
their child to a US university for one year?
Given the currency exchange rates at the time between
India and the US, tough for me to believe that people
in India were paying for those students from India at
out of state rates at that university. I believe I
know where the money was coming from, some special
program of the US State Department. So, it was US
taxpayers, struggling to get their own children
through college, paying for the college educations
of students from India. Why? Because somehow some
people at the US State Department believed that somehow
it was good for their effort to 'organize the world'
to take money from US citizens and use it to educate
students in a distant, poor country.
At another university, I had a graduate scholarship for
my Ph.D. The students were good but were nearly all US citizens and not very many of them. At one point a prof confided in me that the department had a lot of tuition scholarships going to waste: US citizens who were good students didn't want to come, and the department didn't like the quality of the applications from foreign students. But, whether the student was US or foreign, the cost, no doubt very expensive for the professors, buildings, supplies, overhead, was being paid for by US citizens.
Let me be even more clear: The list of the world's top
few dozen research universities is dominated by the US,
e.g., Harvard, MIT, Cornell, Brown, Yale, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, ..., University of Chicago, ..., Berkeley, Stanford, and Cal Tech. Now, they are 'research universities' which means that heavily what they do is research. The research is mostly paid for by research grants, and those are heavily from the US NSF and NIH.
The grants are very competitive. It is standard for
a university to take, as I recall, about 60% of the
grant money for 'overhead'. Hint, hint, that's how the
English department gets funded, along with the student
center, the string quartet series, the limo for the
president, the concert hall, the lawn care, the bronze statues of earlier presidents, the fountains, etc. And
that 60% number tends to come up again -- about 60%
of the budget of the university can come from such
research grants. YMMV, but look up details in the
annual reports of the top research universities. So,
it's clear: Those research universities, right down to
the grass mowing, are being paid for heavily by the
US Federal Government from tax money from US citizens.
Any student, US or foreign, however much they are paying,
is getting most of their education paid for by US
tax payers.
Then a question for US taxpayers is, why should they,
struggling to get their own children through college,
be paying for the educations of students in distant
countries?
If you went to a well known US college or university,
no matter how much you paid (maybe there are some
exceptions for students from some Mideast oil
...
You're guessing that these students are somehow federally subsidized, but if you're going to make that assumption, you need to actually substantiate it before composing an elaborate fiction of government malfeasance to explain it.
For many US colleges, foreign students are a profit center, because they pay "full fare." Which is why a lot of schools purposely recruit overseas students to help subsidize US students:
There are over a billion people in India. The fact that some tiny percentage of them can afford to go to school in the US should be entirely unsurprising, regardless of how low their median income is. Don't just assume that "Indians must be poor, because their country is poor."
"You're guessing that these students are somehow federally subsidized, but if you're going to make that assumption, you need to actually substantiate it before composing an elaborate fiction of government malfeasance to explain it."
Essentially every student in a well known US college or
university is "heavily subsidized" in that they pay roughly
only 1/3rd of the real cost with the rest from US citizens
via gifts or taxes. Even paying full tuition of $50,000
a year or some such is not the full cost.
This situation has held true in essentially all US
colleges and universities for at least 50 years.
Read what I wrote: The US NSF wanted to flood US
labor markets with STEM majors, and one way they
did that was to write into university research
grants that students must be supported. Since there
were so few US citizens that were good students and
wanted to do graduate work in STEM fields, the
universities got a huge fraction, roughly half,
from India and Taiwan. So, a lot of TAs were
good with Chinese but not English.
And, whatever those students paid, still they had their educations paid for almost entirely by US citizens via
gifts or taxes.
A few students of wealthy families are a very
different matter.
"Essentially every student in a well known US college or university is "heavily subsidized" in that they pay roughly only 1/3rd of the real cost with the rest from US citizens via gifts or taxes. Even paying full tuition of $50,000 a year or some such is not the full cost. This situation has held true in essentially all US colleges and universities for at least 50 years."
First of all, you're conflating gifts and taxes, which is at best sloppy and at worst, deceptive. People _choose_ to give gifts. Unless you're saying they were deceived, how those gifts are used seems irrelevant to a discussion of US subsidies of foreign students. If I donate to UNICEF, does that count as "foreign aid"?
Second, do you even have a citation or any kind of facts to back up that statement? Or is it just something you're parroting?
On your first point, it's super simple: My point is
that any student who goes to a well known US college
or university is having most of their education paid
for by US citizens via gifts and/or taxes. So, when
a foreign student gets such a US education, it was
mostly paid for by US citizens. Simple.
Why is this important? Because US citizens are
hurting, and (1) the foreign students are taking
educations paid for by US citizens when the children
of those US citizens are struggling to pay their
part of such an education and (2) the foreign students
who stay in the US then are job market competition for
US citizens. Did I mention that US citizens are
hurting?
The people pushing for foreign students to come to the
US are powerful in the US economy and want the foreign
students as STEM graduates for cheap labor. A related
point is often another goal to create an identifiable
lower class for STEM fields where US citizens of
Western European descent are not welcome. I.e., one goal is to create STEM fields as a lower 'caste'. The people
pushing worked through the NSF and the H1B program and
various immigration rules. But these people pushing
were not the tax payers Joe and Mary or usually
the wealthy giving gifts. That is, the US has
a university system paid for by US citizens, and
some powerful people in the US have partly
hijacked that system to their own ends of flooding
the US labor market in STEM fields.
For some years, a major result was that good
US students looked at graduate study in STEM
fields, saw something wrong, turned, walked
out, and went to professional school instead --
law, medicine, business, maybe even agriculture.
That's partly how the US got so many lawyers
and MBAs. So, some of these guys got an
undergraduate major in a STEM field, looked
around, 'got wise', and jumped out for
law, medicine, etc.
Second, for a citation, get the annual reports of
several well known colleges and universities and
see where the money comes from. You will see that
my statement that a student pays for about 1/3rd of the
total is correct. In some cases, a student pays
nothing -- as I recall, Rice long had that policy.
At the wealthy schools, no one is turned away due
to inability to pay. That is, the school decides
whom to accept and then provides financial aid
as needed. For the four year liberal arts college
I went to, the students paid only about 1/3rd.
Go look it up.
Or I'll put it to you this way: Suppose you want
to start a college or university. So, you have
no gifts, endowment, or tax money. "Tax money"?
Sure, all the state colleges and universities
are heavily supported by state taxes, e.g., in
NY, CA, MD, the Big Ten, Arizona, Florida, Tennessee,
Kentucky, Texas, Arkansas, Washington state,
Georgia, e.g., for Georgia Tech, Alabama,
Mississippi, MA, etc. So, you are going to fund your
institution with just tuition.
But you still have to hire professors,
erect buildings, set up a library,
have fountains, athletic facilities,
a student union, a concert hall,
a string quartet series, a student
health center, computing, administration,
etc. And you have to compete for good
students. So, Harvard has maybe $18
billion in endowment and lots of gifts
and the buildings already in place.
Ohio State has a campus in place and is
heavily supported by tax money from
citizens of Ohio and still has gifts.
E.g., they have the Fisher School of
Business. Why? No doubt some guy
Fisher made a big gift. So how will you
compete? Answer: You won't. So,
you don't. So, there are no such
US institutions. Clear enough?
I can believe that most foreign students
in US colleges and universities had to
struggle financially to get through and
guessed that they were paying for all their
education and maybe also leaving a profit
for the school. But the truth is, they
were not paying for all their education;
a larger part was being paid for by US
citizens.
So, why have US institutions long welcomed
foreign students? Well, the institutions
want to see themselves as helping the
world, civiliza...
The world has changed. There are a ton of well-off families in China and India, and most foreign students pay much higher tuition than Americans at this point (out-of-state tuition). This makes for a non-trivial contribution to most university budgets. The higher cost of tuition for these students is another reason for the bias towards STEM majors.
"This makes for a non-trivial contribution to most university budgets."
Just what is it about paying for 1/3rd of
the total cost instead of the full cost
you don't get? Again, yet again, once
more, just for you, again, over again,
students don't pay for the full cost of
a college or university education in the US;
not US
students, not foreign students, with only
very rare exceptions not foreign students
of wealthy families and, instead, US citizens
through gifts or taxes pay for 2/3rds or more.
E.g., Mike Bloomberg gave $100 million to
Johns Hopkins. One of the founders of QUALCOMM
just gave $133 million to the Cornell
technical university to be built on Roosevelt
Island. As I recall, there's a Gates building
at Stanford, from Bill and Melinda Gates. It
goes on and on.
When a foreign student gets an education in the
US, their education is being paid for mostly by US
citizens, via gifts or taxes.
This point is tough to understand?
Sure, there are now a few wealthy families in
China and India. But we're talking about
flooding the US with cheap labor via H1Bs
and US university educations, and the students
of the wealthy families are at most only a
tiny fraction of that.
As I explained, one reason foreign students
get graduate educations in US research universities
is that the US NSF wrote into research grants
that students must be supported on the grants
and the students can come for foreign countries --
commonly not England, France, or Germany but
India and Taiwan.
I can fully understand that with rare exceptions
a foreign student who
pays for some or all of tuition, fees,
books, room, board, etc. at a US college
or university believes that they are paying a lot,
and they are, but they still are not paying nearly
the full cost, and US citizens are making up the
difference.
> How is a family in India going to come up with $40,000 to send their child to a US university for one year?
You're kidding right?
There are tens of thousands of millionaires (in US$ terms) in India. You only ever see the cream of the crop from India in your US universities... rich kids from wealthy families.
"You only ever see the cream of the crop from India in your US universities... rich kids from wealthy families."
No, as I explained, the US NSF long had a program to
increase STEM majors by requiring that research grants
also support students and, hint, hint, students were
available from Taiwan and India. For a while those
students made up roughly half the US STEM graduate
student populations, were on scholarships paid for by
the US NSF, and were rarely if ever from wealthy families.
We're talking about the US Federal Government using
foreign students and workers to flood the US labor
market in STEM fields. Foreign students from wealthy
families are a very different matter. For such students,
the US has long welcomed them because US foreign policy
holds that it is better for the US for such students to have US educations. Since the families are wealthy,
scholarships are no doubt small potatoes. E.g., if the
student is living in a $3 million condo and getting to school in a new Ferrari, he doesn't need a scholarship.
"The students from India and China were there on various scholarships, indirectly paid for by Joe and Mary. Bummer."
I went to Cornell. The undergrads from India and China were often from extremely wealthy families (far more so than the average undergrad). They were typically paying close to full boat to an Ivy League school, after all. Currently, here's the guidance on scholarships for international undergrads:
"Cornell has a limited amount of funding available for international undergraduates, only 30-40 scholarships are awarded to students in each entering class."
That's out of an entering class of 3300, 19% of which were international -- meaning maybe 1 in 20 had a scholarship. For calibration, the Indian undergrad I knew best was in the immediate family of the president of Tata group (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tata_Group -- $100B in revenue).
Now, at some level Cornell was eager to get people of that ilk, just as prospects for future giving. No telling how much special treatment they might get. But in no way was the typical Indian/Chinese undergrad on scholarship (as the figures above indicate).
*
The picture changes dramatically, of course, if you consider international grad students. These were typically supported by research assistantships or teaching assistantships. But in either case, they were being paid the same ~10K/year as "domestic help" (like me) to do work on government-sponsored research projects (advancing US government interests -- NSF, NIH, and DARPA aren't charities), or to grade papers and hold tutorial sessions.
But that's poorly paid, the same deal as offered anyone (US or international). In fact, while there, I held a US government fellowship (NSF) that was closed to foreign students. It was paid for by your hypothetical Joe and Mary.
*
I think you do have a point that the H1B program is, in many areas, employer-driven to depress wages. But your surrounding narrative is wrong.
No, I am still correct. That some wealthy foreign
students went to Cornell is no doubt recent and not
at all what I am talking about.
If you will read what I wrote, then you will see that
there were students from India in a US Midwestern
university. They were not wealthy. And at the time
there's no way they could have been paying their way.
Net, in US universities, even in undergraduate
programs, a major fraction of STEM students were
from foreign countries, especially India and Taiwan.
In simple terms, they were on scholarships of various
kinds.
Further, again, yet again, this time just for you,
over again, no student in a well known college or
university pays the full cost. Rarely do they pay
more than 1/3rd. E.g., as I have already posted
in this thread, Mike Bloomberg gave $100 million to
Johns Hopkins, and a founder QUALCOMM recently
gave $133 million to the Cornell technical university
being built on Roosevelt Island, and this story is
standard all across US colleges and universities.
At a research university, expect that a professor
will get about $500,000 a year from NSF, NIH, etc.
About 60%, 300,000, will go to the university as
'overhead'. The remaining $200,000 will cover
the professor's salary, travel, equipment,
supplies, etc. And a little will go for
graduate students. So, again it's Joe and Mary
paying for the university.
Net, students don't pay the full cost. Instead the
full cost is paid by gifts and taxes, taxes, e.g.,
for Joe and Mary who are still having a tough time
paying for their own children to go to college. Some
of the taxes go quite directly to the institutions, e.g.,
all the state schools in NY, MD, CA, the Big Ten, etc. A lot more
money goes from tax payers to the universities via
NSF and NIH.
You mentioned DARPA: There were old rules
that the US DoD could not fund work at universities.
Long much DARPA (ARPA) work was so 'confidential' that
it could not be done in universities. But clearly, e.g.,
with some of the DARPA Challenge projects, e.g., at CMU
and Stanford, some DARPA funding is making its way into
universities. Still I doubt that a major fraction of
DARPA money goes to universities.
Yes, the situation of the NSF flooding the US
with foreign STEM students is more extreme
in graduate programs. But the NSF money that
goes to students is not really because the
research projects need the student's labor!
No, the money is because the NSF demands that
students be supported because the NSF wants
to flood the US labor markets with STEM
students with graduate degrees. Maybe you
believe that you worked hard for your
research assistantship, but, really, the NSF,
NIH, etc. mostly just want you to add to the
US STEM worker pool to keep down costs to
US industry and the US 'military-industrial'
complex.
"Rarely do they pay more than 1/3rd. E.g., as I have already posted in this thread, Mike Bloomberg gave $100 million to Johns Hopkins, and a founder QUALCOMM recently gave $133 million to the Cornell technical university [...] So, again it's Joe and Mary paying for the university."
Wait, is it Joe and Mary footing the bill? Or Mike Bloomberg and Irwin Jacobs (the Qualcomm founder you mention)?
And I contend that when the NSF, NIH, or other government agencies give contracts to universities that are in part executed by grad students, that's labor bought and paid for. Not a handout (in part) to foreigners.
As I wrote in this thread over and over,
it's US citizens, via gifts or taxes, e.g.,
taxes from Joe and Mary, that is paying for
most of any education in a well known US
college or university. So, in particular,
there's no way a foreigner is paying his/her
way; the foreigner is getting an education
mostly paid for by US citizens.
For the graduate student who gets a stipend
for work grading papers or working
in a lab for a prof, that's mostly just
make work. I've done it as a grad student,
and I've hired it as a prof. I will say
that when I was teaching calculus at a
Big Ten school as a grad student I was
earning my keep.
The NSF wrote into its grant
contracts that students must be supported
as a way to get more STEM grad students,
not because the NSF wanted those students
to contribute to 'research' but because the
NSF economists did a calculation to see how
to increase STEM graduate degree labor
in the US labor market.
So, sure stockholders of United Technologies,
GE, Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, etc. like the idea
of the NSF generating more STEM Master's
degrees, but Joe and Mary can see that their
tax money is not getting their children
through college but is getting foreign students
through grad school to compete with their
children should they manage to get through
grad school. So Joe and Mary have a right
to feel ripped off.
"Not a handout (in part) to foreigners."
No, that basically is what is going on,
and because the NSF insists so, and so
insists because the NSF wants, as I explained,
to participate in 'US national manpower management',
i.e., flood the US with cheap labor,
in STEM fields and not just research.
Mostly it is just not in the economic
interest of any country to be giving away
high end education to foreigners.
Having read the comments here and many blog posts on HN on this subject it seems that many recent graduates are not up to scratch with what the industry expects.
Yet a degree is required to obtain a H1-B visa or 12 years (IIRC) work experience, could the removal of this requirement ever possibly be lobbied for with judgement left up to the potential employer?
I realise that a degree is used as a general quality standard in immigration processes but this seems like a situation in which it could actually be detrimental.
Note: I'm from the UK, I see the same problems here and I'm curious about the U.S situation.
From what I understand, companies are currently asking for the H1-B visa quotas to be increased. This suggests that they are finding plenty of people to hire who qualify for an H1-B visa but there are simply not enough visas to go around. With this in mind, dropping the degree requirement is probably not necessary yet.
This piece fails due to a logical fallacy: the fallacy of composition. What is good for each scientist or engineer is a higher salary, but this is not necessarily good for all of them, or the rest of a country.
Perhaps having more scientists and engineers would depress their salaries, (though this is not necessarily true,) while increasing the country's total productivity, and making the average citizen richer.
So this article proves nothing, and fails to clearly define what they mean by shortage.
Be careful trusting data from the EPI, a left/labor/economic-protectionist think tank. It will be selectively chosen and spun to advance their core idea that domestic/union laborers need constant government rescue, via things like immigration restrictions. (Of course data selected by think tanks with other ideologies deserves skeptical reading, as well.)
As was pointed out last time the EPI scored a press hit with their claim of stagnant IT wages (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4880332), they appear to be leaving out the very real possibility a younger/earlier-career mix of workers -- a demographic bulge -- makes their broad wage averages look worse, even while each individual cohort is better off.
And, when in this latest study they highlight how many college graduates who fill IT positions have non-IT degrees (Figure F: 38%+), or of all IT workers have no degree at all (36%, p. 8), they should realize that one way to deal with a skills shortage is to make-do with less-skilled/less-trained people, but then pay them less while they learn or simply play-out-of-position. (This making-do also creates the early-in-career demographic bulge mentioned above.)
On the other hand, when the EPI looks at the fact many STEM majors don't wind up working in STEM jobs (Figure D), it is spun as: "For every two students that U.S. colleges graduate with STEM degrees, only one is hired into a STEM job." From that wording you'd think the streets are filled with woeful idle STEM graduates! But maybe, given the still very low unemployment among all with college degrees (and especially technical degrees), these graduates found something else they preferred? Or maybe they really weren't very good at or happy with their exact STEM degree area?
It requires the EPI's factory-floor mindset, where STEM degree recipients are cogs that could (or should) be dropped into closely-matching STEM jobs, to make this natural dynamism sound like we might have way more idle STEM graduates than we can use.
I won't go into EPI numbers, any study -- left, right, or center -- there is always a bias. There is a simple fact in the STEM debate, however, there was a period in time where companies invested in people, trained them, and established a relationship with the employee based on mutually beneficial growth.
Today, that is long gone. There are many STEM individuals that did not adapt with the times that are considered no longer employable. Rather than reaching out to and training these individuals, companies want the quick fix -- thus the H1B path. There are amazing individuals that want to establish or work for businesses in the US that may be victims of the process, at the same time, there are average individuals getting work visas that could just as well be handled by a local (possibly skilled, possibly w/ a bit of training).
Companies no longer invest in the average individual, after a certain point it is all about the dollar. I think any immigration policy around STEM in this country needs to include some incentives for training and investment in current citizens.
The mix of interests of governments, companies and individuals are never going to be perfectly aligned. Indeed greater transparency on the motives of companies can only be a good thing - then nobody is disillusioned when they act in ways which are apparently at odds with other groups in society. The problem is how do individuals create institutions which are supportive and sustaining. The two options so far have either been government or unions, both of which, given their track record, are discredited to different degrees. For STEMs some form of professional society (non-political union) along the lines of the American Medical Association would seem to be a good approach. However this carries significant risk of degenerating back into the morass of competing factions and once more the interests of individuals lose out. Perhaps a step up from the current levels of organization, based on technical interests, e.g. The Professional Society of Python Developers or Amalgamated Interests Of Developers in the Finance Industry, similar to the original Friendly Societies, might provide a more robust model that meets the long-term interests of its members.
> "There are many STEM individuals that did not adapt with the times that are considered no longer employable. Rather than reaching out to and training these individuals, companies want the quick fix -- thus the H1B path."
I think it is very easy for companies to lose their patience with people who have not kept up with technology and need to be retrained when, on the other hand, a large portion of the people that they are hiring are kids with no experience who trained themselves with current technologies and require less handholding with those current technologies.
So basically let's say 25% of your new-hires are out of school and ramp up in a few weeks. What do you do with the other 75%? Hire people who have more industry than the young 25% but require more training with recent tech, or look potentially outside the country for some more of those 25% types?
Companies used to hire and invest in training, many don't do that now.
On the other end, there are a lot of tech workers that don't try and keep abreast of new technologies and build their skill set. Often life/work may not allow for it, but one should be able to find a few hours a week to explore something new.
Unfortunately, the middle of those two circles are the ones hardest hit re: STEM at the moment.
I, personally, believe that if we are going to incentivize STEM work visas, there should be a cost associated with the visas that goes into a pool/fund that pays for training for STEM candidates that are out of work. If you are importing labor, despite an existing pool, there should be a cost associated with it.
I think what I am suggesting is that if the younger in-experienced STEM job candidates were not so experienced with modern tech, then companies would be more willing to invest in teaching older experienced STEM job candidates new technology.
As one of those young people I can tell you that we lack the domain knowledge that the old dinosaurs who produce crap code have. Who is easier to bring up to speed is hard to say but I'd bet against us.
> Hire people who have more industry than the young 25% but require more training with recent tech
What evidence do you have that kids just out of college do require less training than people with work experience?
What kind of "new tech" are kids using these days, that experienced employees can't handle?
In any kind of STEM field (other than the most basic IT tech support) college kids definitely aren't going to be able to "ramp up" to the level of someone with 10 years experience in a few weeks.
My hypothesis is that all tech people teach themselves whatever is trendy at the time when they are still in school (college, or if they decide not to go that route, highschool). Older more experienced candidates of course did the same, but the trendy tech they taught themselves in school is now out of date.
There will of course be those golden candidates that have extensive industry experience but also know the modern newfangled hipster shit that any junior in college is hacking away with at the time. I don't see these candidates having trouble finding work.
You're a startup. You're trendy; your office is littered with nerf-guns and shit, or whatever trendy startups are doing these days. Your systems are all Node/Go/Ruby/Whatever. ...Do you hire the guy out of college, for an "out-of-college" salary, that has all of this stuff on his resume? Or do you hire the guy with 15 years of experience on his resume who only has "C/C++/Perl" on his resume for a "15 years of experience" salary?
Even if you'd go with the 15+ years guy, can you see why companies might become frustrated?
In my experience there are few college kids with Node/Go/Haskell/Clojure on their resume, and those same kids will have whatever is new and exciting in 10 years on their resume then too.
Your average brand new college CS graduate knows Java.
The average foreign programmer also knows Java.
The average programmer with 10 years experience knows Java and probably C++.
The average programmer doesn't work with "modern newfangled hipster ship", and the average employer isn't looking for employees who do.
And if you are a startup, you definitely aren't going to find people skilled in Node/Go/Whatever by hiring cheap H1-B workers.
In general Colleges are about 10-15 years behind what's considered the new hip thing in programming. Since most new grads only know what they learned in college most new college grads are 10-15 years behind the new hip thing in programming.
Startups don't hire new grads because they can ramp up faster, they hire them because they don't have families to take up their time, so they don't mind working 80 hours a week for peanuts.
> In my experience there are few college kids with Node/Go/Haskell/Clojure on their resume
> Your average brand new college CS graduate knows Java.
Maybe we are reaching different conclusions because we are looking at different anecdotal evidence. What you are saying in these two lines does not jive with what I have observed at all.
Colleges are not teaching that trendy stuff, but CS programs in American universities don't teach any technology anyway (aside perhaps from an OS course or two that focuses on the Linux kernel a bit too much, and the obligatory first freshman quarter with Java/C++). The tech college students come out of school with, from what I have seen, is the stuff they taught themselves outside of their coursework. That stuff is almost invariably the trendy shit. At the very least, the trendier parts of Java.
> they don't mind working 80 hours a week for peanuts.
Either way, it is either about the ability to do the work for those salaries, or the willingness to to do the work for those salaries. Even if I'm off-base and it is entirely the second, it makes sense that companies are going to start looking for some more of the same sort of cheap but effective talent.
>The tech college students come out of school with, from what I have seen, is the stuff they taught themselves outside of their coursework.
That's the thing, the majority of students don't teach themselves anything outside their coursework. The ones that do are the top x% that everyone wants to hire, and they are still teaching themselves new stuff when they have 10 years experience. Being passionate about programming has nothing to do with age.
> Even if I'm off-base and it is entirely the second, it makes sense that companies are going to start looking for some more of the same sort of cheap but effective talent.
Of course companies are going to look for cheaper talent, the people doing the hiring for the most part are looking to optimize for the short term.
The problem is that it's very hard to accurately and objectively measure programmer productivity, so companies use ineffective proxies.
Hiring an inexperienced programmer who works for $25 an hour vs an experienced one who works for $50 an hour may look like a good deal when it's likely that it actually isn't.
> That's the thing, the majority of students don't teach themselves anything outside their coursework.
Right. So I don't know how many recent graduates are like that, I think I am less pessimistic about that than you (I want to collect some of those juicy referral bonuses, but everybody that I know is either employed or plainly incompetent, including everyone I knew in school... By far most of them are employed), but basically I consider those people to be a part of the essentially unemployable pool. There are no doubt a lot of fundamentally unemployable people that want to be in tech (without being willing to crack a book outside of class), but as far as I can tell there is a clear shortage of competent employable people.
If you're talking about top graduates from top schools, or recent graduates working for some hip startup in the valley, then you're probably right, they're aren't many who didn't do extra outside of class.
But the majority of programmers are those mediocre students who didn't do anything extra, and are now slaving away writing some internal purchase order management system for XYZ corp (in Java)--someone has to do that stuff.
I suppose you are probably right. I guess where I am coming from is that I am not convinced that there isn't a labour shortage just because there are a ton of those mediocre Java-slaves bouncing around.
You know why schools teach kids Java/C (the lingua francas of computing) rather than the latest hot 5-min fad? Because it doesn't matter. The kids are taught those languages simply to enable the teaching of computer science theory and software engineering.
This is the way it should be. You will learn new tech as needed your entire career, if you have the right preparation it should be a no brainer. You need to learn the theory once. Outside of the west coast most companies realize this and invest in training as needed.
It is the hipster too cool for school startup kids that have things wrong. They never went to school, they don't realize that picking up their favorite $language is trivial for anyone with the proper background and just a means to an ends, writing useful software.
>>Startups don't hire new grads because they can ramp up faster, they hire them because they don't have families to take up their time, so they don't mind working 80 hours a week for peanuts.
This, although foreign workers can be appealing for some of the same reasons.
> Your systems are all Node/Go/Ruby/Whatever ... Or do you hire the guy with 15 years of experience on his resume who only has "C/C++/Perl" on his resume
I tend to prefer the guy with 15 years of experience with "C/C++/Perl" on his resume.
Our software is a mix of Python, Scala, Java, CoffeeScript and Obj-C (different components). Scala is the driving force right now for the backend and the code that we've built in it is heavy on concurrency and functional programming. We've also standardized our workstations on Ubuntu (not Windows, not OS X).
From my experience, the language or the technologies themselves are NOT THE PROBLEM. The problem is finding people that are able to build software, people that when faced with a problem, they solve it, even if the problem is new to them.
Our backends also need to handle massive traffic and we don't have the resources to throw hundreds of servers in the mix for scale. To build efficient backends you need an incredibly difficult to achieve mix of knowledge that I won't even bother to enumerate.
We also have to analyse terabytes of logs daily. So besides setting up clusters for map/reduce, those scripts have to infer knowledge from those logs, going into the territory of statistics / machine learning and natural language processing.
So you're a hipster that knows Go/Node/Ruby/Whatever. Great, but what can I use you for?
There are absolutely roles where the developer with more industry experience is unambiguously the correct choice.
But if this is widely the case, then is there a labour problem at all? If we are all trying to hire the guys with lots of industry experience and are all willing to let them ramp up on new tech while earning their industry experience salaries, then what is the problem? Everything is great if that is what is going on.
However the horror story that I seem to be hearing from other people is that the big names in tech right now are only interested in hiring people straight out of college, hence the "college style" non-monetary perks and whatnot.
Responding here since I can't respond to the grandchild comment of yours.
You're right as far as experience of new graduates vs. those with 10 years experience (that basically, all either knows is Java), at least as far I experienced when I hired people when I worked for a university. However, the key difference between the younger set and the older set was that the fresh grads were open to and eager to learn new technologies whereas the older set basically gave me responses of: "Drupal, why would you use that?"
"PHP, that's horrible."
"That's not JSR-168 compliant"
And on... Now, you might say they were right to be skeptical. However, experience showed they were not. We did such a good job of replacing the old Java/Websphere/Oracle based systems for various university functions that we put a number of the Java engineers out of jobs without need to replace them (don't worry they were union so they just got transferred).
>However, the key difference between the younger set and the older set was that the fresh grads were open to and eager to learn new technologies whereas the older set basically gave me responses of: "Drupal, why would you use that?" "PHP, that's horrible." "That's not JSR-168 compliant"
That's partially because the younger kids didn't know enough to know what's wrong with PHP, but mostly because fresh college grads are so happy to actually have a job that they'll do anything to please.
This isn't a case of the old guys not wanting to learn something new (PHP and java are almost exactly the same age). It's a case of old guys knowing enough about PHP to know that it has problems.
Put it this way, if you want to hire someone to hit himself with a whip all day long, you find someone who doesn't know enough to know it hurts (or is a masochist).
There is a shortage of technical specialists in computer programming. It seems that companies are reluctant to train local workers. Startups like to show growth by listing jobs, but they only want "rock stars" so the positions sit unfilled. This saves on labor costs and signals a growing business. It gives an artificial view of the job market however.
What kind of training would a company offer? CS is one of those disciplines where wealth of materials, books, documentation, videos and working code examples are available online, for free or at pretty reasonable prices.
Why would you sign up to waste a day at New Horizons listening to some drone over-explaining stored procedures on a whiteboard?
The problem with this whole discussion is that it is lumping all STEM graduates together. There is really only high demand for CS and some engineering fields. There is a surplus of graduates in many of the other fields that are categorized under STEM. When someone says there is a shortage of STEM graduates, they are really only talking about the T & E, they aren't talking about the S & M.
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[ 1.1 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] threadA very small percentage might be open to remote workers, but unless you live in or around these "hot spots" you're going to have a more difficult time finding work, not to mention a comparatively lower compensation.
(Interested applicants will read your blog to learn about you, but surely more prominent placement would generate more flow. Especially since your potential customers are your most likely employees.)
I'm getting unsolicited requests for interviews from software companies by the bucket.
There are 180 open positions at Google in Mountain View alone (https://www.google.com/about/jobs/search/#t=sq&q=j&j...).
Multiply that by all Google's locations, add job listings from hundreds of other tech companies in SV.
Every time I hear this topic discussed by people who actually know what they are talking about (i.e. those running companies that try to hire competent programmers or those that are involved in the process, like VCs), it's always the same: finding good programmers is brutal.
Now, I'm sure that what you said is true in Alaska and many other parts of US that are not one of the tech centers, but when it comes to SV/Seattle/NY etc., it's clear that there is more demand than supply for skilled developers.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/jobs/ref=j_sq_btn?jobSearchKeywords...
Protectionism is almost always a negative for economic growth of a country. Even if wages in the US are depressed, that just means that wages were artificially high and that the US would soon become increasingly noncompetitive.
The biggest problem with H-1B visas seem to be the restrictions on working for a single established employer rather than having too many of them.
I can see how you would feel that creating more work visas would lead to a freer market. However, if these visas are heavily concentrated in STEM fields, this may end up producing a very distorted market that deters US citizens from pursuing degrees in this field.
One of the provisions of the immigration bill is to grant green cards to graduates of US-based STEM programs at the MS or PhD leve. Rather than a more general liberalization of immigration, that's just the sort of highly specific, targeted program that can produce severe market distortions.
Many of the people who object to these visas actually support more general liberalization of immigration - they just object to visa programs that are based on the notion that we need to use immigration specifically to increase the size of the STEM workforce. This is because they believe, as this article suggests, there is no shortage of STEM workers.
edit: Technicalities in immigration law can have large consequences, working outside of one's status, or for an unapproved employer can result in being removed from the US and being banned from return for a number of years depending on the circumstances.
If we're really honest, starting salaries should be low, with a near doubling of salary within 6 months, if we were looking at real productivity.
What is going on, is HR filtering out all the good domestic talent and making me waste my time interviewing crappy candidates that they know won't make the cut just so that they can hire abroad?
If there is an abundance of qualified unemployed domestic talent then why can't I, the employed engineer, find some of that talent to recommend so that I can collect some of those juicy bonuses?
Or am I hypothetically in on this conspiracy to discriminate against domestic talent as well?
Maybe there is something simpler going on. Maybe most candidates really do suck.
None of the people who work in the IT department at my company have CS degrees. They have, however, held various sysadmin and programming positions, and do a bloody good job running our IT. I'm not sure we'd hire a fresh-out-of-school CS grad for our IT jobs if they didn't have any experience doing sysadmin or equipment / facility maintenance stuff.
- Talking about all STEM graduates as equal is pointless, because some people are useless and some are amazing.
- Talking about STEM in general is useless, because software is booming, and nothing else really is.
- Talking about all H1B jobs as the same is also bollox: half are employed by infosys (etc) as low cost (and low quality) contractors to avoid paying a fair wage (against the rules of the H1B program as I understand it). However, Google and Facebook (etc) are paying them great salaries, equal to what they pay US employees (even though the expenses are higher with visa and relocation costs).
So startups and high growth companies are being starved of great talent, because chemists can't find jobs and Infosys is trying to depress wages of low-quality IT workers? Makes no sense.
Do you have statistics for this? While the need for STEM is obviously rising, I feel like a lot of this conversation devolves into an echo chamber: I'd love to see hard statistics about STEM career demand.
While I think some devs are in high demand, I think many have little horizontal or upward mobility if they can get a job at all. I don't have a lot of evidence to back this up, and that WP study seems to talk a lot more about IT than software development, but I think it's probably something to think about. I think there's a crisis in training and mentorship in our industry, rather than one of willing bodies.
Which is my point above: we're starved of great devs because of stats about shit devs.
That's a rough guide, with many edge cases, but that's how we go about it.
IMO we're starved of great devs because we don't make bad devs better.
Uh, I dono about the whole staying long time thing, but employers do train, or at least hire unqualified people they expect to grow into the position.
Especially low-budget web startups... yeah, they talk about "rockstar ninja" this and that, but who do you think they actually get, when they are paying below market rates?
I mean, I'm not criticizing; some people really respond to "non-monetary compensation" - and that's what the rockstar ninja bullshit is.
I hire from the same pool, really; but I'm all apologetic about paying you shit. Who would you rather work for? me, saying "Hey, sorry I'm paying you shit. but hey, the last guy who had the job got a really good job with $realcompany after two years." - or some startup, that says you are an awesome best in the world rockstar ninja, and you aren't getting much money, but you have equity in this startup that will change the world!"
I mean, it's really the same thing, just framed in different ways. And most people? they like the rockstar ninja framing.
(I hire people full-time with benefits, too- but right now, I don't have enough revenue to hire another full-time. I do need some help moving, though, which is why that shady deal with my buddy is so good for me; I get some per-day work, but can attract someone that wants to be full time, and thus end up paying closer to full-time rates.)
I am okay with a full-day minimum; I'm not expecting you to show up for an hour for $15, and I usually get lunch or dinner or something.
But yeah; I don't know. “Napoleon's hat on the battlefield is worth 50,000 men”. - most people expect /leadership/ - and most people think leadership involves motivating people through personal charisma and confidence.
Personally? I understand how bad leadership can destroy value, but I don't really see how good leadership (in the personal charisma sense) can help anything. I think good leaders pick good people, (or, at least, the best people available considering the compensation the company can afford.) then mostly get out of the way. I mean, i do a lot of "no, don't spend time on that, this other thing is more important" - like today, I redirected an employee away from working on new images and towards improving our per-port BCP38. And I do training, too, but that's really more experienced individual contributor type work.
(And as for Napoleon, after the french revolution? the french soldiers were treated better than any of their contemporaries, and I think that had a lot to do with their success. I mean, I'm not entirely discounting Napoleon, but "Liberté, égalité, fraternité," I think, really had a lot to do with his success. It's not a unique strategy; every Caesar since, well, Caesar has used populist rhetoric and policies to gain and keep power, but at that time? the rest of the world really treated their soldiers poorly, and France was, at least in Europe, uniquely populist.)
As for how leadership can affect employees, I'm inclined to believe that leadership will always have a substantive effect on productivity and skill. Obviously, most employees do not work on projects entirely of their choosing; they are given tasks or projects to do, often decided by the team or by management. Certainly, the employee can have input, but ultimately employees exist to serve a role determined by higher-ups. Higher-ups, then, have the responsibility of appropriating their tallent in ways that are effective. Good people aren't good when they aren't given meaningful work.
Sure, but that's in the "make the right decisions" category. Logistics, really. We're talking Marshal Berthier here, not Napoleon. Part of that is assigning the right people to the right tasks. That doesn't take personal charisma or being tall or anything, that's just being technically right.
I mean, it's obvious that the people making technical decisions need to do so competently. It's not always easy to do correctly, but I can understand the process... I understand what needs to be done.
I'm talking about, you know, leadership. When a teacher says someone has "leadership skills" they don't mean that the kid understands how to manage logistics; they mean the kid has a bunch of personal/emotional qualities that allow him or her to emotionally manipulate others to get what he or she wants. (Or, if you want to phrase it in positive terms, "they mean the kid has a bunch of personal/emotional qualities that inspire others to do what they want." )
That's the part I wonder if I need to spend time on. (I mean, logistics is huge, and I /know/ I need to spend more time on it, but that's just a matter of execution, really. I know what I want.)
I mean, do I take time out from the logistics (which I know I need) to learn how to become slick? Certainly, on a personal level, nearly everyone prefers the up-beat, happy person who phrases everything positively, and acts as if they know what they are doing; someone who shows they are marching to certain victory, over to someone who says and does the same things, but who phrases it negatively and states up front that realistically, failure is the likely outcome, that if they do succeed, the reward will be middling, and acknowledges that they are just figuring it out/making it up as they go along.
My problem is that I tend to phrase things negatively, in part because all of my grave financial errors have been due to a terribly unrealistic level of optimism, and in part because I fucking hate guys like that.
Now, I always thought of myself as being more honest and direct... and in some ways, I certainly am, but I have been finding, lately that quite often my false humility comes off as being non-confrontational. Sometimes, I fear that it is. Sometimes, I find myself rephrasing my thoughts directly to be less confrontational, which really puts some people off. I mean, if I'm leaving in the negative phrasing, why go through the effort to also be non-confrontational? well, in part because humility is non-confrontational, and I'm attempting, however clumsily, to emulate humility; but should I? I mean, sure, it turns me in to a person I would like more, but most people are exactly the opposite.
I mean, my feeling on the matter is that I can fake what other people call 'confidence' fairly easily by simply letting my scorn for the fact that you value confidence show. Most people seem to think that's close enough to "confidence" to get me the job or the date or whatever. It doesn't really work long-term, but in a job, at least, by the time they figure it out, I've proven myself useful, so it's fine.
My current feeling? emotional bullshit is bullshit; so long as my logistics are good enough, it doesn't really matter all that much, so long as I avoid high-touch sales situations. It's probably fucking my personal life, but that can be dealt with later.
I agree about the crisis in training and mentorship. A lot of people who seem like weak candidates are really just lacking in experience and direction.
Microsoft used to be able to pay market (for tech) but get all-stars because of their name and the perceived quality of their stock. Now that they don't have that kind of brand, those same people are going to places like Google, Apple, Facebook or [insert hot startup] instead.
Is there a possibility, though, that what they pay US employees is influenced by the ability to grant visas to non-citizen workers? In that sense, the program could still suppress wages.
However, I believe (and the point of the H1B program is) that being able to hire great people is a competitive advantage of US companies, and is more important than increasing salaries of existing employees (to the economy).
Nobel economist Milton Friedman scoffs at the idea of the government stocking a farm system for the likes of Microsoft and Intel. "There is no doubt," he says, "that the [H-1B] program is a benefit to their employers, enabling them to get workers at a lower wage, and to that extent, it is a subsidy."
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/72848/H_1B_Is_Just_An...
So why subsidize Microsoft and Intel rather than other sectors of the economy? Why specifically attach green cards to graduate STEM degrees? Much of the objection here isn't to liberalized immigration or bringing great people in general, it's about tailoring our immigration system to increase the size of the STEM workforce, when the evidence does not support the notion that there is any shortage.
Also, keep in mind, there are long term dangers to restricting the domestic pipeline of talent into these fields. A sudden and massive increase in the size of a specific sector of the workforce through immigration will increase the pool of good talent in the short term, as the existing domestic workforce will not have had time to adjust to the new and reduced cost/benefit of a graduate degree in engineering. But in the long run, it may simply deter young people from entering the field and displace the existing workforce - not because it's a bad deal, but because talent can find a better deal in an area that is not targeted for increase through visa allocation.
This could leave the US heavily dependent on foreign students. Some people will say "so what? we'll have good engineers, for cheap, and if later we can't recruit as easily, domestic interest will increase." I'm not nearly so optimistic. I think that a healthy pipeline isn't something you can kill off and revive on a dime. When you lose it, it is very difficult to revive.
I want to be clear - I think it would be terribly foolish for the US to close the door to top talent from overseas. A healthy domestic pipeline requires a healthy infusion of talent from overseas as well. However, I think it needs to be carefully balanced As it stands, I don't think that people creating these policies are aware of the potential risks and damage they may be doing to the domestic pipeline, nor do they seem to understand the long term implications of narrowing the domestic pipeline.
27.0305 financial math
see the official list here
http://www.ice.gov/doclib/sevis/pdf/stem-list.pdf
Basic dynamics of supply and demand would dictate that if there were a domestic labor shortage, wages should have risen. Instead, researchers found, they’ve been flat, with many Americans holding STEM degrees unable to enter the field and a sharply higher share of foreign workers taking jobs in the information technology industry.
In other words, wages haven't risen because the reduction in the number of domestic STEM workers has been offset by the increase in the number of foreign STEM workers; the total supply of STEM workers has remained the same, but more of them are foreign.
Note that if you remove the word "domestic" in front of "labor shortage", the above quote would be correct; but it includes that word, which makes it worse than wrong.
E.g., when Sputnik went up, the Feds via the NSF flooded US high school and college education with money, scholarships, summer programs, etc. to get more US citizens into STEM fields.
During the Cold War and the Space Race, STEM students were paid nearly well enough to buy a house; then the powers that be got really scared.
But, with the stimulus, soon the supply exceeded the demand; US citizens who walked into a college STEM course saw the TA and half of the students from Asia or India, turned, and walked out.
So, right: Joe and Mary paid taxes to support public education K-college and graduate school. For their children they struggled to meet college expenses. And when their children went to college, somehow they found lots of students there from India and Asia. How come? These students were from families with annual incomes less than $10,000 yet somehow got their children into the college supported by the taxes of Joe and Mary when Joe and Mary had to struggle to pay for their children in that college? Bummer. Sure: The students from India and China were there on various scholarships, indirectly paid for by Joe and Mary. Bummer. Ripoff.
During the Viet Nam war, the head of the Selective Service system was old General Louis B. Hershey with the remark that "The US Selective Service System has national manpower management responsibilities far exceeding staffing the armed forces." by which he meant that US young men had two, just two, options, (1) do well in college or graduate school in STEM fields or (2) go to Viet Nam. Of course, that 'responsibility' was only in his egotistical imagination; still he executed on his delusion.
Later much of the US 'military industrial complex' concluded that there was a US STEM shortage. So, the powers that be got the NSF to set up a team of economists to calculate, with essentially supply and demand curves, how much 'stimulus' would be needed to increase the labor supply.
The stimulus didn't work well for US citizens, so the plan was to write into research grants in US research universities that with the grant money so many students had to be supported and that, hint, hint, there were plenty of willing students from India and Asia, hint, hint.
Then there got to be the H1B scam, mostly just a new version of 'indentured servitude' or 'slave labor'.
Basically, anytime STEM worker bees get paid well enough to buy a house, big forces in the US move to flood the market with STEM graduates.
It's dirt simple: It's capital versus labor. Capital has power and wants cheap labor.
These US powers that be are just seeking more money and power and, net, are seriously hurting the basic strength of the US.
The solution is for US voters to become informed and come together and vote for the US for the US as a whole and not just for the 1% richest capitalists.
Of course there's more at Prof. Norm Matloff's
I don't see an option to downvote here, but if I could, I would definitely do that for this.
Otherwise, it seems to me more like graycat is describing racism, but you can't tell greycat would support it based on that comment.
Here is one thing it really is: The US is getting badly hurt in the world economy. The real unemployment rate is ballpark 20%. The US is creating boom times in several other countries.
Well, one way for the US to help itself is for the US to continue to have a great college and university system and, then, keep those educations for US citizens. That is, US citizens are paying for those institutions and, thus, should be able to 'keep' the 'intellectual property' and other advantages inside the US. So, it is now strongly in the interest of US citizens to move not to let any foreign students in US colleges or universities.
It is in the interest of US tax payers to pay to educate the US but not the world that wants to compete with the US economy.
By keeping good education for a select few only, you do not actually help the US absolutely, you just make the other people less well off. (And even the US, but perhaps less so.)
Joe and Mary have children and want them to get good higher educations and, then, good jobs for good careers. But the children still have to pay to go to college. What they pay for a state school is high; for a private school, higher.
So, commonly such US children skip some or all of college.
Then wonder of wonders, presto, in US higher education paid for partly by Joe and Mary, there are foreign students in seats the children of Joe and Mary could not afford to occupy. And the foreign student only paid at most 1/3rd of the cost of the education, not nearly the full cost. For undergraduate school, a big question is how can a student from a poor country afford the cost of a US education? For graduate students, the US NSF has arranged that there will be STEM graduate students, US or foreign.
Here Joe and Mary have a very good reason to feel ripped off.
Why does the US do this? Because some powerful people in the US want to flood US STEM fields with enough students to lower labor rates in those fields. So, the policy is to tax Joe and Mary and use their money to support foreign STEM students. Then when those students enter the US labor market, which some do, they compete with the children of Joe and Mary. Again Joe and Mary feel ripped off.
There are many excuses given for supporting foreigners in STEM fields. One of the excuses is that the foreign students are better at creating jobs in the US and, thus, help the children of Joe and Mary get jobs. That's saying that the US, with 330 million people, with universities that dominate the list of the best universities in the world, that dominates the Nobel prizes and the publications at the best research journals, etc., somehow is short on people to start businesses. Nonsense.
Especially nonsense to the US NSF that set up a group to do calculations on how many foreign students would have to be imported to drive down the cost of STEM labor. The whole point was just to drive down the cost of STEM labor. So, it's no surprise that the cost of STEM labor went down. And the income of the children of Joe and Mary went down if those children were in STEM fields.
"By keeping good education for a select few only" The US does no such thing: There are 330 million people in the US. All or nearly all the states have state colleges and universities. And there are private universities -- Harvard, Stanford, etc.
The best students can go on scholarships. Otherwise students who can get admitted can get financial aid if they need it. Still, often the cost to the student and/or their family is high. But college education is the US is not limited to "the select few" US citizens and would not be if US universities cut way back on foreign students.
The US is hurting: The reasons are, too many foreign wars, too many foreign military bases, the disaster of the US inflation caused by the Viet Nam war that, then, caused the S&L crisis and likely enabled OPEC, the disaster of the housing bubble from efforts to 'spread the home ownership around', and, heavily, the idea of the US State Department that for 'world peace' the US should pursue 'world trade' by which lower paid US jobs would go to Japan, Mexico, Canada, Taiwan, South Korea, India, Pakistan, and now China. So, the US has a real unemployment rate of about 20%, and real incomes have hardly increased since the Viet Nam war in about 1960. In the 1950s, Detroit had a license to print money and looked like a dream town. Now Detroit looks like a bombed out WWII city. Much of US metal manufacturing in the US Midwest has gone out of business. Textiles in the Carolinas have gone. GE got seriously hurt by Japan. The heirs of Sam Walton have done well by importing products from Chi...
Please see e.g. http://www.economist.com/node/11586026 and observe the correlation between high-income and lower trade barriers. Does your argument still stand?
The US citizens just saw that they didn't fit in and turned, which is just what they should have done. There are lots of situations where a person might not fit in, and racism need have nothing to do with it.
Or, where were all the other US citizens that one would expect would be the TA and the students? Were they all racists? Or did they just see or sense something wrong?
There was something wrong, very wrong: The labor supply was being manipulated in DC. It was a rigged game and not what it looked like superficially. When see such a situation, don't ignore the obvious and wait 20 years to discover the details of how DC rigged the game and, instead, just sense that something's wrong and leave.
I saw situations where the division was really clear: Essentially all the worker bees were from India or Asia, and essentially all the managers were US citizens, white of Western European descent. In that situation, got to be from Asia or India to apply for a slot even as a worker bee -- US citizens of Western European descent need not apply. Period.
Look, set aside your PC sensitivities for a second and look at some simple reality: A big theme in the US from Alexis de Tocqueville on is for the US to create an identifiable, exploited underclass. That's what's going on here. Given that such an exploited underclass has been created, then other people don't 'fit in' and will not be welcome, especially by the higher ups. Again, it's not racism, especially on the part of the guy who sees that he doesn't fit in, turns, and walks; instead, it's reality.
So, when the people clearly have not been in the US long enough to become US citizens, then that is easy to tell.
Does that answer your question?
It mostly tells me you haven't been around a wide variety of people. Live in any major US city and you'll meet thousands of citizens with heavy accents and atypical fashion sense (ever been to Brooklyn, or most of LA)? And there are lots of non-citizens that have lived in the US for years and blend in perfectly - many of the folks in my office are not US citizens, but as a natural-born American I'd be hard pressed to say which just by looking at them. If you could do better than 50% success - random guessing - in looking at my workplace or college class, I'd be surprised.
Again, if a person A who has been in the US for a long time and has gotten good with US 'culture' sees an adult B who has not been in the US long enough to qualify for US citizenship, then person A will detect person B as an immigrant and non-US citizen easily.
Your point is that this detection can also be made by some non-US citizens who have been in the US for a long time. True but does not conflict with what I wrote.
You are straining to find something wrong with what I wrote. Sorry, I wrote nothing wrong.
What I'm trying to explain is that there are lots of people who are US citizens that your test would fail with. They're native-born, but they don't happen to be white and/or they don't happen to dress like you. Just because someone isn't white and/or completely culturally assimilated doesn't mean they're less American or even second or third generation - we've been making that mistake for a few hundred years, be it with the Irish, Italians, Chinese, etc... I say that as someone who knows lots of third or later generation Americans who still get asked "what country they're from" by folks making the same mistake.
No I didn't. In your straining, you are claiming a stronger statement than I made. Again, yet again, one more time, this time just for you, and read carefully, I said that if some person X has been in the US for a time too short to become a US citizen, then a US citizen can easily detect that person X is an immigrant.
In particular, there were years where a US citizen could walk into a STEM class and on the first day conclude that the majority of the class was recent immigrants, conclude that he didn't 'fit in', turn, and walk out. Why could a US citizen do this? Because the class had a lot of immigrants only recently here. If the students in the class had all been in the US for a long time, then a US citizen could not accurately detect that they were immigrants.
Or, if you are a medical doctor working in an emergency room and a person comes in bleeding profusely, then you can detect right away that he has a serious medical problem. But this does not mean that you can detect everyone with a serious medical problem right away; indeed, the ER and the hospital are packed with diagnostic means for detecting who has a medical problem. That is, being able to detect an obvious medical problem is not the same as being able to detect all medical problems.
You mentioned that some people in the US for a long time and non-US citizens can make the same detection. True.
I did not say that a US citizen could detect all immigrants.
It's a simple matter of a logical statement and has nothing to do with racism. You are not reading the logic correctly. Uh, try to avoid courses in advanced mathematics based on theorems and proofs.
Wait, are you saying someone like me from the third world can get a scholarship in the US from the US government?
Wish I had known that a few years ago. The people I know who studied in the US either did so out of pocket or via scholarships granted here in my country by local bodies.
If a student from outside the US gets accepted, arrives, and does well, then typically they can get a scholarship. So, who's paying for their education? Not the student, or their family. Instead their education is being paid for by US citizens or US taxes. Even if the foreign student doesn't get a scholarship, likely two-thirds or more of their education is being paid for by US citizens, not the student.
When I was in one graduate school, a Midwest state university, somehow there were a lot of students from India there. That university was expensive for students from that state and much more expensive for any students from other states. A year there could cost as much as a new US car. Today that would be ballpark $40,000. How is a family in India going to come up with $40,000 to send their child to a US university for one year?
Given the currency exchange rates at the time between India and the US, tough for me to believe that people in India were paying for those students from India at out of state rates at that university. I believe I know where the money was coming from, some special program of the US State Department. So, it was US taxpayers, struggling to get their own children through college, paying for the college educations of students from India. Why? Because somehow some people at the US State Department believed that somehow it was good for their effort to 'organize the world' to take money from US citizens and use it to educate students in a distant, poor country.
At another university, I had a graduate scholarship for my Ph.D. The students were good but were nearly all US citizens and not very many of them. At one point a prof confided in me that the department had a lot of tuition scholarships going to waste: US citizens who were good students didn't want to come, and the department didn't like the quality of the applications from foreign students. But, whether the student was US or foreign, the cost, no doubt very expensive for the professors, buildings, supplies, overhead, was being paid for by US citizens.
Let me be even more clear: The list of the world's top few dozen research universities is dominated by the US, e.g., Harvard, MIT, Cornell, Brown, Yale, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, ..., University of Chicago, ..., Berkeley, Stanford, and Cal Tech. Now, they are 'research universities' which means that heavily what they do is research. The research is mostly paid for by research grants, and those are heavily from the US NSF and NIH. The grants are very competitive. It is standard for a university to take, as I recall, about 60% of the grant money for 'overhead'. Hint, hint, that's how the English department gets funded, along with the student center, the string quartet series, the limo for the president, the concert hall, the lawn care, the bronze statues of earlier presidents, the fountains, etc. And that 60% number tends to come up again -- about 60% of the budget of the university can come from such research grants. YMMV, but look up details in the annual reports of the top research universities. So, it's clear: Those research universities, right down to the grass mowing, are being paid for heavily by the US Federal Government from tax money from US citizens. Any student, US or foreign, however much they are paying, is getting most of their education paid for by US tax payers.
Then a question for US taxpayers is, why should they, struggling to get their own children through college, be paying for the educations of students in distant countries?
If you went to a well known US college or university, no matter how much you paid (maybe there are some exceptions for students from some Mideast oil ...
For many US colleges, foreign students are a profit center, because they pay "full fare." Which is why a lot of schools purposely recruit overseas students to help subsidize US students:
http://www.npr.org/2011/03/16/134585499/U-S-Schools-Hire-Com... http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/story/2011-11-...
There are over a billion people in India. The fact that some tiny percentage of them can afford to go to school in the US should be entirely unsurprising, regardless of how low their median income is. Don't just assume that "Indians must be poor, because their country is poor."
Essentially every student in a well known US college or university is "heavily subsidized" in that they pay roughly only 1/3rd of the real cost with the rest from US citizens via gifts or taxes. Even paying full tuition of $50,000 a year or some such is not the full cost.
This situation has held true in essentially all US colleges and universities for at least 50 years.
Read what I wrote: The US NSF wanted to flood US labor markets with STEM majors, and one way they did that was to write into university research grants that students must be supported. Since there were so few US citizens that were good students and wanted to do graduate work in STEM fields, the universities got a huge fraction, roughly half, from India and Taiwan. So, a lot of TAs were good with Chinese but not English.
And, whatever those students paid, still they had their educations paid for almost entirely by US citizens via gifts or taxes.
A few students of wealthy families are a very different matter.
This is difficult material to understand?
First of all, you're conflating gifts and taxes, which is at best sloppy and at worst, deceptive. People _choose_ to give gifts. Unless you're saying they were deceived, how those gifts are used seems irrelevant to a discussion of US subsidies of foreign students. If I donate to UNICEF, does that count as "foreign aid"?
Second, do you even have a citation or any kind of facts to back up that statement? Or is it just something you're parroting?
Why is this important? Because US citizens are hurting, and (1) the foreign students are taking educations paid for by US citizens when the children of those US citizens are struggling to pay their part of such an education and (2) the foreign students who stay in the US then are job market competition for US citizens. Did I mention that US citizens are hurting?
The people pushing for foreign students to come to the US are powerful in the US economy and want the foreign students as STEM graduates for cheap labor. A related point is often another goal to create an identifiable lower class for STEM fields where US citizens of Western European descent are not welcome. I.e., one goal is to create STEM fields as a lower 'caste'. The people pushing worked through the NSF and the H1B program and various immigration rules. But these people pushing were not the tax payers Joe and Mary or usually the wealthy giving gifts. That is, the US has a university system paid for by US citizens, and some powerful people in the US have partly hijacked that system to their own ends of flooding the US labor market in STEM fields.
For some years, a major result was that good US students looked at graduate study in STEM fields, saw something wrong, turned, walked out, and went to professional school instead -- law, medicine, business, maybe even agriculture. That's partly how the US got so many lawyers and MBAs. So, some of these guys got an undergraduate major in a STEM field, looked around, 'got wise', and jumped out for law, medicine, etc.
Second, for a citation, get the annual reports of several well known colleges and universities and see where the money comes from. You will see that my statement that a student pays for about 1/3rd of the total is correct. In some cases, a student pays nothing -- as I recall, Rice long had that policy. At the wealthy schools, no one is turned away due to inability to pay. That is, the school decides whom to accept and then provides financial aid as needed. For the four year liberal arts college I went to, the students paid only about 1/3rd.
Go look it up.
Or I'll put it to you this way: Suppose you want to start a college or university. So, you have no gifts, endowment, or tax money. "Tax money"? Sure, all the state colleges and universities are heavily supported by state taxes, e.g., in NY, CA, MD, the Big Ten, Arizona, Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky, Texas, Arkansas, Washington state, Georgia, e.g., for Georgia Tech, Alabama, Mississippi, MA, etc. So, you are going to fund your institution with just tuition.
But you still have to hire professors, erect buildings, set up a library, have fountains, athletic facilities, a student union, a concert hall, a string quartet series, a student health center, computing, administration, etc. And you have to compete for good students. So, Harvard has maybe $18 billion in endowment and lots of gifts and the buildings already in place. Ohio State has a campus in place and is heavily supported by tax money from citizens of Ohio and still has gifts. E.g., they have the Fisher School of Business. Why? No doubt some guy Fisher made a big gift. So how will you compete? Answer: You won't. So, you don't. So, there are no such US institutions. Clear enough?
I can believe that most foreign students in US colleges and universities had to struggle financially to get through and guessed that they were paying for all their education and maybe also leaving a profit for the school. But the truth is, they were not paying for all their education; a larger part was being paid for by US citizens.
So, why have US institutions long welcomed foreign students? Well, the institutions want to see themselves as helping the world, civiliza...
Just what is it about paying for 1/3rd of the total cost instead of the full cost you don't get? Again, yet again, once more, just for you, again, over again, students don't pay for the full cost of a college or university education in the US; not US students, not foreign students, with only very rare exceptions not foreign students of wealthy families and, instead, US citizens through gifts or taxes pay for 2/3rds or more.
E.g., Mike Bloomberg gave $100 million to Johns Hopkins. One of the founders of QUALCOMM just gave $133 million to the Cornell technical university to be built on Roosevelt Island. As I recall, there's a Gates building at Stanford, from Bill and Melinda Gates. It goes on and on.
When a foreign student gets an education in the US, their education is being paid for mostly by US citizens, via gifts or taxes.
This point is tough to understand?
Sure, there are now a few wealthy families in China and India. But we're talking about flooding the US with cheap labor via H1Bs and US university educations, and the students of the wealthy families are at most only a tiny fraction of that.
As I explained, one reason foreign students get graduate educations in US research universities is that the US NSF wrote into research grants that students must be supported on the grants and the students can come for foreign countries -- commonly not England, France, or Germany but India and Taiwan.
I can fully understand that with rare exceptions a foreign student who pays for some or all of tuition, fees, books, room, board, etc. at a US college or university believes that they are paying a lot, and they are, but they still are not paying nearly the full cost, and US citizens are making up the difference.
This is difficult to understand?
You're kidding right? There are tens of thousands of millionaires (in US$ terms) in India. You only ever see the cream of the crop from India in your US universities... rich kids from wealthy families.
No, as I explained, the US NSF long had a program to increase STEM majors by requiring that research grants also support students and, hint, hint, students were available from Taiwan and India. For a while those students made up roughly half the US STEM graduate student populations, were on scholarships paid for by the US NSF, and were rarely if ever from wealthy families.
We're talking about the US Federal Government using foreign students and workers to flood the US labor market in STEM fields. Foreign students from wealthy families are a very different matter. For such students, the US has long welcomed them because US foreign policy holds that it is better for the US for such students to have US educations. Since the families are wealthy, scholarships are no doubt small potatoes. E.g., if the student is living in a $3 million condo and getting to school in a new Ferrari, he doesn't need a scholarship.
This is difficult material to understand?
"The students from India and China were there on various scholarships, indirectly paid for by Joe and Mary. Bummer."
I went to Cornell. The undergrads from India and China were often from extremely wealthy families (far more so than the average undergrad). They were typically paying close to full boat to an Ivy League school, after all. Currently, here's the guidance on scholarships for international undergrads:
"Cornell has a limited amount of funding available for international undergraduates, only 30-40 scholarships are awarded to students in each entering class."
That's out of an entering class of 3300, 19% of which were international -- meaning maybe 1 in 20 had a scholarship. For calibration, the Indian undergrad I knew best was in the immediate family of the president of Tata group (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tata_Group -- $100B in revenue).
Now, at some level Cornell was eager to get people of that ilk, just as prospects for future giving. No telling how much special treatment they might get. But in no way was the typical Indian/Chinese undergrad on scholarship (as the figures above indicate).
*
The picture changes dramatically, of course, if you consider international grad students. These were typically supported by research assistantships or teaching assistantships. But in either case, they were being paid the same ~10K/year as "domestic help" (like me) to do work on government-sponsored research projects (advancing US government interests -- NSF, NIH, and DARPA aren't charities), or to grade papers and hold tutorial sessions.
But that's poorly paid, the same deal as offered anyone (US or international). In fact, while there, I held a US government fellowship (NSF) that was closed to foreign students. It was paid for by your hypothetical Joe and Mary.
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I think you do have a point that the H1B program is, in many areas, employer-driven to depress wages. But your surrounding narrative is wrong.
If you will read what I wrote, then you will see that there were students from India in a US Midwestern university. They were not wealthy. And at the time there's no way they could have been paying their way. Net, in US universities, even in undergraduate programs, a major fraction of STEM students were from foreign countries, especially India and Taiwan. In simple terms, they were on scholarships of various kinds.
Further, again, yet again, this time just for you, over again, no student in a well known college or university pays the full cost. Rarely do they pay more than 1/3rd. E.g., as I have already posted in this thread, Mike Bloomberg gave $100 million to Johns Hopkins, and a founder QUALCOMM recently gave $133 million to the Cornell technical university being built on Roosevelt Island, and this story is standard all across US colleges and universities. At a research university, expect that a professor will get about $500,000 a year from NSF, NIH, etc. About 60%, 300,000, will go to the university as 'overhead'. The remaining $200,000 will cover the professor's salary, travel, equipment, supplies, etc. And a little will go for graduate students. So, again it's Joe and Mary paying for the university.
Net, students don't pay the full cost. Instead the full cost is paid by gifts and taxes, taxes, e.g., for Joe and Mary who are still having a tough time paying for their own children to go to college. Some of the taxes go quite directly to the institutions, e.g., all the state schools in NY, MD, CA, the Big Ten, etc. A lot more money goes from tax payers to the universities via NSF and NIH.
You mentioned DARPA: There were old rules that the US DoD could not fund work at universities. Long much DARPA (ARPA) work was so 'confidential' that it could not be done in universities. But clearly, e.g., with some of the DARPA Challenge projects, e.g., at CMU and Stanford, some DARPA funding is making its way into universities. Still I doubt that a major fraction of DARPA money goes to universities.
Yes, the situation of the NSF flooding the US with foreign STEM students is more extreme in graduate programs. But the NSF money that goes to students is not really because the research projects need the student's labor! No, the money is because the NSF demands that students be supported because the NSF wants to flood the US labor markets with STEM students with graduate degrees. Maybe you believe that you worked hard for your research assistantship, but, really, the NSF, NIH, etc. mostly just want you to add to the US STEM worker pool to keep down costs to US industry and the US 'military-industrial' complex.
"Rarely do they pay more than 1/3rd. E.g., as I have already posted in this thread, Mike Bloomberg gave $100 million to Johns Hopkins, and a founder QUALCOMM recently gave $133 million to the Cornell technical university [...] So, again it's Joe and Mary paying for the university."
Wait, is it Joe and Mary footing the bill? Or Mike Bloomberg and Irwin Jacobs (the Qualcomm founder you mention)?
And I contend that when the NSF, NIH, or other government agencies give contracts to universities that are in part executed by grad students, that's labor bought and paid for. Not a handout (in part) to foreigners.
I just know what the heck I'm talking about.
As I wrote in this thread over and over, it's US citizens, via gifts or taxes, e.g., taxes from Joe and Mary, that is paying for most of any education in a well known US college or university. So, in particular, there's no way a foreigner is paying his/her way; the foreigner is getting an education mostly paid for by US citizens.
For the graduate student who gets a stipend for work grading papers or working in a lab for a prof, that's mostly just make work. I've done it as a grad student, and I've hired it as a prof. I will say that when I was teaching calculus at a Big Ten school as a grad student I was earning my keep.
The NSF wrote into its grant contracts that students must be supported as a way to get more STEM grad students, not because the NSF wanted those students to contribute to 'research' but because the NSF economists did a calculation to see how to increase STEM graduate degree labor in the US labor market.
So, sure stockholders of United Technologies, GE, Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, etc. like the idea of the NSF generating more STEM Master's degrees, but Joe and Mary can see that their tax money is not getting their children through college but is getting foreign students through grad school to compete with their children should they manage to get through grad school. So Joe and Mary have a right to feel ripped off.
"Not a handout (in part) to foreigners."
No, that basically is what is going on, and because the NSF insists so, and so insists because the NSF wants, as I explained, to participate in 'US national manpower management', i.e., flood the US with cheap labor, in STEM fields and not just research.
Mostly it is just not in the economic interest of any country to be giving away high end education to foreigners.
Having read the comments here and many blog posts on HN on this subject it seems that many recent graduates are not up to scratch with what the industry expects.
Yet a degree is required to obtain a H1-B visa or 12 years (IIRC) work experience, could the removal of this requirement ever possibly be lobbied for with judgement left up to the potential employer?
I realise that a degree is used as a general quality standard in immigration processes but this seems like a situation in which it could actually be detrimental.
Note: I'm from the UK, I see the same problems here and I'm curious about the U.S situation.
Perhaps having more scientists and engineers would depress their salaries, (though this is not necessarily true,) while increasing the country's total productivity, and making the average citizen richer.
So this article proves nothing, and fails to clearly define what they mean by shortage.
As was pointed out last time the EPI scored a press hit with their claim of stagnant IT wages (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4880332), they appear to be leaving out the very real possibility a younger/earlier-career mix of workers -- a demographic bulge -- makes their broad wage averages look worse, even while each individual cohort is better off.
And, when in this latest study they highlight how many college graduates who fill IT positions have non-IT degrees (Figure F: 38%+), or of all IT workers have no degree at all (36%, p. 8), they should realize that one way to deal with a skills shortage is to make-do with less-skilled/less-trained people, but then pay them less while they learn or simply play-out-of-position. (This making-do also creates the early-in-career demographic bulge mentioned above.)
On the other hand, when the EPI looks at the fact many STEM majors don't wind up working in STEM jobs (Figure D), it is spun as: "For every two students that U.S. colleges graduate with STEM degrees, only one is hired into a STEM job." From that wording you'd think the streets are filled with woeful idle STEM graduates! But maybe, given the still very low unemployment among all with college degrees (and especially technical degrees), these graduates found something else they preferred? Or maybe they really weren't very good at or happy with their exact STEM degree area?
It requires the EPI's factory-floor mindset, where STEM degree recipients are cogs that could (or should) be dropped into closely-matching STEM jobs, to make this natural dynamism sound like we might have way more idle STEM graduates than we can use.
http://www.ice.gov/sevis/stemlist.htm http://www.ice.gov/doclib/sevis/pdf/stem-list.pdf
TIL - STEM as defined by the government apparently includes:
- Agricultural Animal Breeding
- Livestock Management
- Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Engineering Technology/Technician
- Explosive Ordinance/Bomb Disposal
Today, that is long gone. There are many STEM individuals that did not adapt with the times that are considered no longer employable. Rather than reaching out to and training these individuals, companies want the quick fix -- thus the H1B path. There are amazing individuals that want to establish or work for businesses in the US that may be victims of the process, at the same time, there are average individuals getting work visas that could just as well be handled by a local (possibly skilled, possibly w/ a bit of training).
Companies no longer invest in the average individual, after a certain point it is all about the dollar. I think any immigration policy around STEM in this country needs to include some incentives for training and investment in current citizens.
I think it is very easy for companies to lose their patience with people who have not kept up with technology and need to be retrained when, on the other hand, a large portion of the people that they are hiring are kids with no experience who trained themselves with current technologies and require less handholding with those current technologies.
So basically let's say 25% of your new-hires are out of school and ramp up in a few weeks. What do you do with the other 75%? Hire people who have more industry than the young 25% but require more training with recent tech, or look potentially outside the country for some more of those 25% types?
On the other end, there are a lot of tech workers that don't try and keep abreast of new technologies and build their skill set. Often life/work may not allow for it, but one should be able to find a few hours a week to explore something new.
Unfortunately, the middle of those two circles are the ones hardest hit re: STEM at the moment.
I, personally, believe that if we are going to incentivize STEM work visas, there should be a cost associated with the visas that goes into a pool/fund that pays for training for STEM candidates that are out of work. If you are importing labor, despite an existing pool, there should be a cost associated with it.
What evidence do you have that kids just out of college do require less training than people with work experience?
What kind of "new tech" are kids using these days, that experienced employees can't handle?
In any kind of STEM field (other than the most basic IT tech support) college kids definitely aren't going to be able to "ramp up" to the level of someone with 10 years experience in a few weeks.
There will of course be those golden candidates that have extensive industry experience but also know the modern newfangled hipster shit that any junior in college is hacking away with at the time. I don't see these candidates having trouble finding work.
You're a startup. You're trendy; your office is littered with nerf-guns and shit, or whatever trendy startups are doing these days. Your systems are all Node/Go/Ruby/Whatever. ...Do you hire the guy out of college, for an "out-of-college" salary, that has all of this stuff on his resume? Or do you hire the guy with 15 years of experience on his resume who only has "C/C++/Perl" on his resume for a "15 years of experience" salary?
Even if you'd go with the 15+ years guy, can you see why companies might become frustrated?
In my experience there are few college kids with Node/Go/Haskell/Clojure on their resume, and those same kids will have whatever is new and exciting in 10 years on their resume then too.
Your average brand new college CS graduate knows Java.
The average foreign programmer also knows Java.
The average programmer with 10 years experience knows Java and probably C++.
The average programmer doesn't work with "modern newfangled hipster ship", and the average employer isn't looking for employees who do.
And if you are a startup, you definitely aren't going to find people skilled in Node/Go/Whatever by hiring cheap H1-B workers.
In general Colleges are about 10-15 years behind what's considered the new hip thing in programming. Since most new grads only know what they learned in college most new college grads are 10-15 years behind the new hip thing in programming.
Startups don't hire new grads because they can ramp up faster, they hire them because they don't have families to take up their time, so they don't mind working 80 hours a week for peanuts.
> Your average brand new college CS graduate knows Java.
Maybe we are reaching different conclusions because we are looking at different anecdotal evidence. What you are saying in these two lines does not jive with what I have observed at all.
Colleges are not teaching that trendy stuff, but CS programs in American universities don't teach any technology anyway (aside perhaps from an OS course or two that focuses on the Linux kernel a bit too much, and the obligatory first freshman quarter with Java/C++). The tech college students come out of school with, from what I have seen, is the stuff they taught themselves outside of their coursework. That stuff is almost invariably the trendy shit. At the very least, the trendier parts of Java.
> they don't mind working 80 hours a week for peanuts.
Either way, it is either about the ability to do the work for those salaries, or the willingness to to do the work for those salaries. Even if I'm off-base and it is entirely the second, it makes sense that companies are going to start looking for some more of the same sort of cheap but effective talent.
That's the thing, the majority of students don't teach themselves anything outside their coursework. The ones that do are the top x% that everyone wants to hire, and they are still teaching themselves new stuff when they have 10 years experience. Being passionate about programming has nothing to do with age.
> Even if I'm off-base and it is entirely the second, it makes sense that companies are going to start looking for some more of the same sort of cheap but effective talent.
Of course companies are going to look for cheaper talent, the people doing the hiring for the most part are looking to optimize for the short term.
The problem is that it's very hard to accurately and objectively measure programmer productivity, so companies use ineffective proxies.
Hiring an inexperienced programmer who works for $25 an hour vs an experienced one who works for $50 an hour may look like a good deal when it's likely that it actually isn't.
Right. So I don't know how many recent graduates are like that, I think I am less pessimistic about that than you (I want to collect some of those juicy referral bonuses, but everybody that I know is either employed or plainly incompetent, including everyone I knew in school... By far most of them are employed), but basically I consider those people to be a part of the essentially unemployable pool. There are no doubt a lot of fundamentally unemployable people that want to be in tech (without being willing to crack a book outside of class), but as far as I can tell there is a clear shortage of competent employable people.
But the majority of programmers are those mediocre students who didn't do anything extra, and are now slaving away writing some internal purchase order management system for XYZ corp (in Java)--someone has to do that stuff.
This is the way it should be. You will learn new tech as needed your entire career, if you have the right preparation it should be a no brainer. You need to learn the theory once. Outside of the west coast most companies realize this and invest in training as needed.
It is the hipster too cool for school startup kids that have things wrong. They never went to school, they don't realize that picking up their favorite $language is trivial for anyone with the proper background and just a means to an ends, writing useful software.
>>Startups don't hire new grads because they can ramp up faster, they hire them because they don't have families to take up their time, so they don't mind working 80 hours a week for peanuts.
This, although foreign workers can be appealing for some of the same reasons.
I tend to prefer the guy with 15 years of experience with "C/C++/Perl" on his resume.
Our software is a mix of Python, Scala, Java, CoffeeScript and Obj-C (different components). Scala is the driving force right now for the backend and the code that we've built in it is heavy on concurrency and functional programming. We've also standardized our workstations on Ubuntu (not Windows, not OS X).
From my experience, the language or the technologies themselves are NOT THE PROBLEM. The problem is finding people that are able to build software, people that when faced with a problem, they solve it, even if the problem is new to them.
Our backends also need to handle massive traffic and we don't have the resources to throw hundreds of servers in the mix for scale. To build efficient backends you need an incredibly difficult to achieve mix of knowledge that I won't even bother to enumerate.
We also have to analyse terabytes of logs daily. So besides setting up clusters for map/reduce, those scripts have to infer knowledge from those logs, going into the territory of statistics / machine learning and natural language processing.
So you're a hipster that knows Go/Node/Ruby/Whatever. Great, but what can I use you for?
But if this is widely the case, then is there a labour problem at all? If we are all trying to hire the guys with lots of industry experience and are all willing to let them ramp up on new tech while earning their industry experience salaries, then what is the problem? Everything is great if that is what is going on.
However the horror story that I seem to be hearing from other people is that the big names in tech right now are only interested in hiring people straight out of college, hence the "college style" non-monetary perks and whatnot.
You're right as far as experience of new graduates vs. those with 10 years experience (that basically, all either knows is Java), at least as far I experienced when I hired people when I worked for a university. However, the key difference between the younger set and the older set was that the fresh grads were open to and eager to learn new technologies whereas the older set basically gave me responses of: "Drupal, why would you use that?" "PHP, that's horrible." "That's not JSR-168 compliant"
And on... Now, you might say they were right to be skeptical. However, experience showed they were not. We did such a good job of replacing the old Java/Websphere/Oracle based systems for various university functions that we put a number of the Java engineers out of jobs without need to replace them (don't worry they were union so they just got transferred).
That's partially because the younger kids didn't know enough to know what's wrong with PHP, but mostly because fresh college grads are so happy to actually have a job that they'll do anything to please.
This isn't a case of the old guys not wanting to learn something new (PHP and java are almost exactly the same age). It's a case of old guys knowing enough about PHP to know that it has problems.
Put it this way, if you want to hire someone to hit himself with a whip all day long, you find someone who doesn't know enough to know it hurts (or is a masochist).
Thankfully there are no thinktanks that are willing to fudge the existing data to "prove" the opposite to serve their interests.
Why would you sign up to waste a day at New Horizons listening to some drone over-explaining stored procedures on a whiteboard?