235,000 Software Engineers Can't Be Wrong, Right?

jgeelan writes "The Boston Globe has carried a report on how 235,000 engineers and computer scientistsl are calling on Congress to study the impact of the country's H1-B visa program, the recession, and the outsourcing of jobs overseas on the unemployment rate of engineers and other information technology professionals. It's an issue that's bubbling on discussion sites all over America too, though in one case developers (Java developers in this instance) seem completely unable to agree on whether H1-B is really a contributing factor or not."

another go-round

[Kwantus]

Clearly time to trot out Dr Matloff again

http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.html

there is no `tech boom', never was (not since 70s at least); it's a ploy to generate cheap labour, the H1-1 campaigns part of that

They're not throwing people out...

[Jack_Frost]

The article mentions tighter limits on the number of H1-B visas granted to foreign nationals. Current H1-B holders won't be "thrown out" at all.

not 235000 engineers

[h4x0r-3l337]

It's the IEEE that asks this of Congress, not its 235000 individual members.

Re:The problem with HB1 visas...

[StrutterX]

This is SO untrue. When you have an H1B you can easily hop jobs - all the new company needs to get is labor certification (that guarantees that there were no other suitable US national candidates).

I should know, I've done it three times already. The very fact that my first employers could not find a suitable candidate from US nationals means that I am desirable for other companies (I have a very rare skill set) - and that they too will find labor certification reasonably easy to get.

StrutterX

Myths about H1B visa holders

[teetam]

As I peruse the replies to this post, I see a lot of misrepresentations and uninformed generalizations. Below, I try to address some of these:

1. H1B workers are paid lower salaries than citizens - This is mostly true. However, hiring a H1 candidate results in additional costs like INS fees and immigration lawyer fees. Adding all these up, there is not too much of a saving by hiring a H1 candidate. It is illegal to pay an H1 candidate a lower pay than a similarly qualified citizen. Even if this were true, who is this more unfair towards - the H1 worker or the citizen? Think about it.
2. Given a choice between a H1 worker and a citizen, companies prefer the former - Today's software engineering cycles are very short, lasting only a few months. Given that H1 approval by itself takes months (including paperwork and INS wait time), no logical person will prefer a H1 candidate to a local worker. It is only when a locally qualified person is hard to find, that companies are willing to wait and get a H1 worker.

In short, legally and logically, it would be a very rare case where a local worker would lose his job to a H1 worker. H1 workers are hired only if the companies involved are not able to find qualified local candidates.

The job shortages in today's market is due to the prevailing bad economic climate. Let us not try to find scapegoats.

Re:Didn't Stallman say something like this would h

[Leto2]

Good call? Good troll!

You insert a link to google, but just to the mainpage and not to the search terms you used.
You insert a link to gnu.org, but that link 404s on me.

No matter how I personally think about RMS, trolling away is not the way to go. I dare you to post the real link to his article!

Re:They're whining about 4.8-5.3% unemployment!?!

[frank_adrian314159]

Any economist will tell you that frictional unemployment is 6%

And fourty years ago, the figure was 4%. The fact that people have had more economic opportunity during the last 10 year boom to loaf between jobs automatically raises this rate. In general, it is a bogus statistic. Better rates to track this type of number is either average # of weeks on unemployment (don't forget to adjust upward for those whose unemployment has run out) or % of people working below skill level. You can get more data on the first than the second (available via US Dept. of Labor).

However you want to slice it, there is a programmer glut right now. As a (not currently) hiring manager, I see the number of resumes that come in for each job and I have the less than enviable task to select which of these people will be re-employed and which will not. To me, cutting the number of H1-B visas (not, as suggested in some posts, kicking out people), seems to be prudent at this time.

Re:They're whining about 4.8-5.3% unemployment!?!

[bunratty]

Sheesh! Any economist will tell you that frictional unemployment is 6%! What that means is if you have 100 workers and 100 jobs, at any given moment 6 of them will be unemployed (going to school, bumming around Europe, dropping a kid, "finding themselves", or just jerking off). Anything less than 6% indicates a shortage of workers!

Any economist will also tell you that people going to school or bumming around Europe are not considered "unemployed." Only people actively looking for work are considered unemployed. See this definition of unemployment rate [moneychimp.com]. A 4-6% unemployment rate is healthy, but around 2% is reachable.

Yes, They--Or Their Organization--Can Be Wrong

[John Murdoch]

First, the math:
If somebody wrote an article asserting that 235,000 members of the National Council of Teachers of English had sent a letter to Congress I'd have just let it pass. You can depend upon English teachers to never split an infinitive, but numbers sometimes escape them. Engineers, on the other hand, have no excuse: this was not 235,000 EE's, it was the US trade association to which they belong.

Second, the subject is moot
Despite the fact that Congress authorized up to 160,000 H-1B visas per year, the Globe article points out that only 40,000 were used last year, and only half of those were for IT jobs. Look at the job sites: again, and again, and again you will see "We will|do|can not sponsor H-1B applicants." Petitioning Congress to limit the number of H-1B visas when they're not being used is kind of beside the point.

Third, they're whining
C'mon--unemployment of 5.7%? That's hardly a catastrophe--and the numbers are deeply suspect. First, not every EE is a programmer (or works in IT). Second, not every programmer is an EE--and in point of fact a lot of EEs have little business attempting to program. Much like Computer Science curricula, EE programs focused on IT tend to focus on skills that aren't in demand--and ignore skills that are important to a lot of commercial programming. Databases don't fall within the purview of a EE program--but database programming is a big part of the IT job market. If a company brings in somebody from the Indian subcontinent on an H-1B visa to write stored procedures on Oracle, does an EE lose a job? Post hoc ergo propter hoc (logical fallacy of false cause).

Fourth, what solution do they propose?
Bleating to Congress is a lovely thing for the association's executives to do, in order to demonstrate to their members that the execs deserve to be paid. But what exactly do they propose? That we track down all of these people on H-1B visas and ship them home? With their husbands or wives, with their children? Even if those children, born in the U.S.A., are U.S. citizens?

A Word from the English Teachers:
Stand up, clear your throat, and recite with me:

The New Colossus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
with conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
a mighty woman with a torch
whose flame is imprisoned lightning,
and her name Mother of Exiles.

From her beacon-hand glows
world-wide welcome;
her mild eyes command the air-bridged harbor
that twin cities frame.
"Keep ancient lands your storied pomp!"
cries she with silent lips.

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Emma Lazarus (1849-1887)

Re:How many decent jobs are there

[brsett]

Perhaps, but read my other post about what happened to 14 h1-b's I worked with. I've seen it at 3 companies I've been with. Perhaps you're lucky, or perhaps my experience is atypical, but the guys I met from Nigeria were getting 42,000 as Oracle DBA's and worked about 80 hrs a week (one slept on a cot at work many days). The 14 Indians got terminated. Then 2 Indians, and 3 Chinese got treated pretty well at another project, but didn't get paid for OT, and didn't receive many of the benefits available to the rest of us. In each case these guys were brought in and mistreated by body shops. It was never the company that employed them directly, but it makes no difference to me. That shit is wrong.

Re:As an H1B Visa holder...

[Zeinfeld]

Two years ago there were people complaining about the number of H1Bs entering the country, but they were voices in the wilderness.

They were Cobol programmers who were wazzed off because no Internet startups wanted to hire them.

We hired H1B people because US engineers were mostly more interested in jumping on the bandwaggon of the latest no-revenues-let-alone-earnings dotcom startup than working for higher wages at a profitable company. Now that times are harder they think they have the right to the jobs of the people who would work for us???

Re:They're whining about 4.8-5.3% unemployment!?!

[jpmorgan]

Any economist will tell you that frictional unemployment is 6%!

Maybe in Europe it is, in the US the full employment level is closer to 3-4%.

Quick lesson in basic economics for those who don't know the term: Unemployment can be classified into three basic categories: frictional, cyclical and structural.

Structural unemployment is due to people being unemployed since they don't have the skills to find work where they live; a good example of this were the Canadian maritime provinces about a decade ago - a lot of people were unemployed when the cod fisheries were shut down (due to chronic overfishing, there weren't any left). This unemployment is structural: there were jobs available, but the fishermen didn't have the skills to be able to do them. Structural unemployment is usually solved through government sponsored retraining programs.

Cyclical unemployment is what you get during a recession. People in this category have skills that are needed, but due to an economic downtirm companies cannot afford to hire them. They are usually unemployed for long periods of time, but find work again when the economic recovers.

Frictional unemployment is what this poster is describing. It is ever present in an economy and is also known as the full employment level (when all that is left is frictional unemployment an economy is said to be at full employment). It consists of people who are between jobs for short periods of time (people deciding to change careers, looking for better prospects, getting fired for being an idiot, etc...). An economy running below this level is overheating, and the usual symptom of this is high inflation.

The US actually has one of the lowest frictional unemployment levels in the world. This is not a good or a bad thing. Most other developed countries have better social security nets so people can afford to go between jobs for longer and consequently be more picky in what they choose. The higher frictional unemployment is then balanced out by higher individual productivity.

This is a 10,000 ft. overview. Real economic models get a lot more complicated. :)

going to school, bumming around Europe, dropping a kid, "finding themselves", or just jerking off

Actually, none of those will classify you as unemployed. To be considered unemployed you have to be actively looking for work. If you think about that for a minute, you'll realise that unemployment is actually a skewed representation of a country's current economic condition.

Economics isn't a zero-sum game

[rolofft]

To paraphrase P.J. O'Roarke, its not like the economy is a pizza and if I have too many slices you're left with just the box. If economics were a zero-sum game [stanford.edu] like that, then more immigrants would mean less jobs. Since, in fact, immigrants must spend their money on services and products made by natives, they create as many jobs as they fill.

Stephen Moore at the Cato Institute did an interesting study [cato.org] about the H1-B issue:

"...every additional high-tech worker brings to the United States about $110,000 of free human capital. An additional 50,000 H1-b immigrant visas is the equivalent of a $5.5 billion transfer of wealth from the citizens of foreign countries to the citizens of the United States. High-tech immigration is like reverse foreign aid."

2% is reachable?! What kind of crack are you smok

[autopr0n]

Any economist will also tell you that people going to school or bumming around Europe are not considered "unemployed."

No shit, dumbass. If they were the unemployment rate in this country would be about 55% Not 6. Notice the person you are replying to said 'workers' not 'people'

Before the 90s boom, most economists were beginning to give up on the idea of a 4% unemployment rate as realistic. The only time the unemployment rate was anywhere near 2% was during WWII!

In the interim, the rate was between 5 and 7, IIRC

Re:How many decent jobs are there

[Anonymous Coward]

The post mentioned "body shops". Contract help, typically, bills for the shop by the hour and usually gets paid flat time for each hour worked. This is always true for 1099 and corp-to-corp, and true most of the time for W2 sub-contractors.

Not OT, exactly. But, H1B consultants must be "hired" by the body shop (W2) and, quite often, the shop will not pay H1B's more than 40/week.

Re:How many decent jobs are there -KEYWORDS

[Giltron]

When ever you post to online resume services be sure to include key words. Most companies have programs run through the resumes for specific keywords and throw out the rest. So when applying to a job online just add a bunch of keywords at the bottom of the resume that correspond to the job description. It will atleast get you past the first stage.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

So who knows who H1B's actually work?

[surprise_audit]

I'll tell you, because I've been there.

A prospective employer likes your resume, applies for an H1B visa for you. If/when it's granted, you get to enter the USA.

What you don't see is that behind the scenes, the employer has to show:

1) they advertised the position and no suitably qualified American citizen applied;

2) the pay scale is equal to the going rate for the advertised position;

3) that the position has been advertised for sufficiently long time that any interested citizen can apply.

Once the H1B is granted, it is valid for a maximum of 6 years, after which the worker has to exit the US for 1 year, then repeat the process.

During the worker's 6 years of H1B, a green card can be applied for. This requires:

a) Labor Certification - i.e. proving the job was advertised and still no qualified citizen wants it. Dept of Labor also checks that H1B is being paid the going rate, not slave wages;

b) Petition for Alien Worker - where the employer begs the INS for permission to apply for a green card.

c) Filing for the Green Card, and possibly for a temp work permit if the H1B visa will soon expire;

d) get to your local INS office very early in the morning complete the final paperwork and to get a stamp in your passport. You need to take along two very specific photos (head/shoulders, 3/4 face, right ear showing, not too much hair, etc), and if the INS official disapproves of them, you have to get new ones.

I think I may have missed a step between b) and c), but I'm not sure.

The major criterion in H1B and Green Card apps is that the position has to be advertised, at a fair salary, and there were no qualified citizens that wanted the job . If an H1B is going for a green card and a qualified citizen applies during the advertisement stage, the H1B is out and the citizen gets the job.

Here in Oklahoma Labor Cert can take 30-45 days, the Petition for an Alien Worker can take 18 months, and the Green card app take a further 2 years or so.

Humorous side note: my 10yo daughter, wearing long hair and a dress, was standing right in front of the INS official and even so was marked on the final app as a boy... We didn't notice until the plastic card arrived. The same official also stamped my passport with a temporary visa stamp that expired the previous day instead of [now+1 year], because someone had altered the date stamp and hadn't put it back... Fortunately I caught that one while the official was processing my wife's papers.

You're wrong!

[Clansman]

Here in the uk - this mantra was repeated every day by the CBI and other employers groups. We then put in a minimum wage and ... unemployment and inflation continue to fall. Even the CBI now agrees that they were mistaken.

Sorry.