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Submission + - Move Over, Silicon Valley: St. Louis, Atlanta, Small Cities Gaining Tech Jobs (dice.com) 1

Submitted by SpaceForceCommander
SpaceForceCommander writes: According to the just-released Dice Salary Survey, Columbus and St. Louis enjoyed double-digit year-over-year growth in salaries (14.2 percent and 13.6 percent, respectively), and other cities such as Denver and Atlanta also experienced an ideal mix of growth and high salaries. These up-and-comers benefitted from the presence of key employers such as Amazon and IBM; in addition, a lower cost of living and plentiful amenities have made them increasingly attractive to technologists, even those coming from well-established tech hubs such as Silicon Valley.

Silicon Valley remains a world of high salaries—but the cost of living in the Bay Area remains extraordinarily high, which chews into that higher-than-average paycheck. And that’s before we factor in issues such as grinding commutes. In Seattle, New York City (also known as “Silicon Alley”), and other well-established tech hubs, costs are similarly high, which only makes up-and-coming tech hubs more potentially attractive to technologists.

Submission + - Gig Economy Might Not Pay Contractors Much, But Its Software Engineers Do Well (dice.com) 1

Submitted by SpaceForceCommander
SpaceForceCommander writes: Many “gig economy” companies—including Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash—have been hit with their share of controversies, including whether their apps exploit contractors for too little money. But an analysis of data from levels.fyi and other sources show these companies are paying their internal software engineers a good deal, showing that programming's an area where they don't feel they can skimp on talent. But much of this compensation is also based on stock, and as WeWork (which saw its IPO collapse) and Uber (which saw its stock price collapse after the IPO) have proven anything, taking a chunk of equity can sometimes prove a huge risk.

Submission + - Average H-1B Worker Salary: $89,779. But Some Make Noticeably Less. (dice.com)

Submitted by SpaceForceCommander
SpaceForceCommander writes: As promised, the Trump administration has begun revealing the names of contractors that utilize H-1B workers (information that previously wasn't disclosed). If you’re interested, you can now head over to the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) website and download a massive (over 100MB!) dataset of H-1B data for fiscal year 2019 (it’s under the ‘Disclosure data’ tab). Not only does this spreadsheet contain a detailed breakdown of over 412,425 H-1B cases, but it also reveals the “secondary entities” where primary employers might send H-1B workers, along with average H-1B salary for, well, pretty much everybody. For example, Amazon isn’t just a primary employer of H-1B workers (with 5,558 cases currently listed on this disclosure); it also contracts out H-1B workers from other firms (93 cases).

The sheet also contains another interesting tidbit of information: How much H-1B workers are paid. Although paychecks vary wildly from company to company, the average salary (based on the entirety of this dataset) is $89,779. As individuals, however, it's clear that many H-1B workers are making far less, raising again the much-asked question of whether they really count as "specialized" and otherwise-unobtainable labor.

Submission + - Tech Unemployment Hits 19-Year Low (dice.com)

Submitted by SpaceForceCommander
SpaceForceCommander writes: Tech unemployment hasn’t been this low since the turn of the century, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data crunched by CompTIA.

As of May, tech’s unemployment rate sat at 1.3 percent. “There is now the very real prospect of tech worker shortages affecting industry growth,” Tim Herbert, executive vice president for research and market intelligence at CompTIA, wrote in a statement accompanying the data. “Firms seeking to expand into new areas such as the Internet of Things, robotic process automation or artificial intelligence may be inhibited by a lack of workers with these advanced skills, not to mention shortages in the complementary areas of technology infrastructure and cybersecurity.”

Tech’s unemployment rate previously hit 1.4 percent, in April 2007 and March 2018. (The BLS began measuring occupation-level employment data in January 2000.) However, not all segments within tech are adding jobs at the same rate; although custom software development and computer systems design gained 8,400 new positions in May, for example, both information services and telecommunications saw modest losses.

Submission + - DOE Makes It Easier for Predatory For-Profit Coding Schools to Dupe Students (dice.com)

Submitted by SpaceForceCommander
SpaceForceCommander writes: Department of Education (DOE) Secretary Betsy DeVos is making a critical rule change that will allow for-profit schools and career certification providers to prey on unwitting students. It could also mean the proliferation of even more suspect coding schools.

Specifically, the DOE now wants to end the "Gainful Employment" (GE) rule, which requires for-profit colleges to make debt-to-earnings ratios available to students or potential students.

The DOE is arguing that for-profit schools are playing by different rules than non-profit schools, and that’s unfair. It’s also asserting a four-year degree in Computer Science and a 10-month certification in web development are not the same thing but that both institutions should follow the same governance for reporting data, because for-profit schools are wrongfully targeted by the GE rule.

But there’s good reason for the GE rule: For-profit schools are notoriously suspect; for-profit certification provider ITT folded because it couldn’t display an appropriate debt-to-earnings ratio, which affected its federal funding and financial aid status. More recently, Woz U has raised eyebrows.

Submission + - These Brutal Tech Recruiter Rejection Email Templates Are Just the Best (dice.com)

Submitted by SpaceForceCommander
SpaceForceCommander writes: Tech recruiters are a thirsty bunch, and most are just trying to do their job the best way they know how nonetheless, some represent companies you’d just rather not work for, often for ethical reasons. So what do you do when a recruiter reaches out to you about a job at one of those companies? There’s a GitHub repo with rejection letters for some of the worst actors in tech, ready for your copy-paste treatment via email. There are also citations for the claims in the letter you can use, if you want to be thorough about your position. Naturally, the letters can be edited to better suit your circumstances. Just use caution when sending one of these letters. These templates are leg-sweep actions; that recruiter will never contact you again, and may blacklist you in a company’s recruitment database.

Submission + - Tech Recruiting Is Totally Broken: Fish Are Taking Your Jobs! (dice.com)

Submitted by SpaceForceCommander
SpaceForceCommander writes: Tech recruiting is broken, and you know it. Want some proof? Check out the case of one developer who created a fake LinkedIn profile to see if anyone would reach out and offer the account a job. It worked; a recruiter pinged them via LinkedIn to say they wanted to talk about a gig. The job (iOS Developer) was local to the user, and fit their listed experience. The recruiter offered a starting salary of about $72,000 (£55,000) and $20,000 in stock (£15,000). There's just one problem: The LinkedIn account belonged to a Sea Bream. Yes, that's a fish.

You might be wondering: “Are Sea Breams smart enough to code?” The answer is no, they cannot code, and are not bright sea creatures. An Octopus? Maybe. They pick World Cup winners. Eels? They probably use snake-case, and iOS code is best with camel-case styling. In the meantime, tech recruiting obviously has some issues that this funny snafu hints at.

Submission + - The State of H1B, Two Years After Trump's Executive Order (dice.com)

Submitted by SpaceForceCommander
SpaceForceCommander writes: Two years ago, President Trump signed the “Buy American and Hire American” executive order. The program was intended to “protect the economic interests of U.S. workers and prevent fraud and abuse in employment-based visa programs,” in the words of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). But has it actually accomplished those goals?

But what has USCIS actually done over the past 24 months? The short answer: Not as much as critics would like, at least in the context of the visa programs that matter a good deal to tech companies. In order to mark the anniversary, USCIS is touting the launch of a webpage that provides “additional data on various employment-based immigration programs,” along with statistics on employment authorization documents; it’s also very big on the H-1B Employer Data Hub it recently produced that breaks down which employers are petitioning for H-1B visas.

In addition, USCIS has tweaked a number of policies related to H-1B approvals. For instance, it squeezed off premium processing while it worked through a backlog of applications, and instated a more aggressive review system (such as not taking prior visa decisions about applicants into account) that may have led to a rise in the rate of denials for new H-1B petitions. It also targeted H-4 EAD, which allowed the spouses of H-1B visa holders to obtain work, for elimination.

"I think the most striking thing is the change in denial rates has happened without any new law or regulation that many people feel would be necessary to have allowed an agency to deny so many applications in a legal manner," Stuart Anderson, executive director of the National Foundation for American Policy and a former staffer on the Senate Immigration Subcommittee, recently told Wired. But for critics of the system, tweaks are just that—minor adjustments to a system they view as desperately in need of a radical overhaul.

Submission + - NYC's E-Bike Crackdown Bad for City's Transportation Future (medium.com) 2

Submitted by SpaceForceCommander
SpaceForceCommander writes: New York City continues to crack down on electric-powered bikes... but only certain kinds of electric-powered bikes. The preference for 'pedal assist' over 'throttle powered' bikes is creating a strange situation in the city, where professionals and hipsters who prefer pedal assist are allowed to legally zoom around while those on throttle-powered bikes (primarily deliverymen) are impacted with fines and confiscations. Scooters are technically legal, but The NYPD isn't rushing to confiscate them.

In the longer term, this weird legislation and enforcement could have a big impact on how the city runs, especially given its current issues. From the article: "New York City’s subways are a mess (to put it mildly), and congestion pricing is going to make it very expensive to try to drive a car into Manhattan. Scooters and e-bikes represent a partial solution to the escalating traffic nightmare—but only if the city relaxes its asinine restrictions on what people can ride, and enforces the laws equally. The police, and the mayor, have better things to do than ensure delivery people can’t make a living, all while letting Williamsburg hipsters zoom their e-bikes and scooters around."

Submission + - Why Apple is Patenting Swift Features, Even Though It's Open Source (dice.com) 1

Submitted by SpaceForceCommander
SpaceForceCommander writes: Swift, the language Apple developed and then made open-source in 2015, is growing up fast. But a few have noticed Apple is patenting features for the language, and it’s causing a stir. But in the forums on Swift.org, users are noticing Apple’s patent filings reach beyond hardware and into the language itself. Specifically, Apple patented the method for optionals chaining, a feature released in Swift version 4.2 that allows developers to query or call properties, methods, and subscripts that may be nil. The user who originally posted Apple’s language feature patent to the Swift.org blogs calls it “disturbing,” adding: “It’s like Apple has gone insane. Computer languages are not supposed to be owned by any company. We learned this mistake with Java and APIs. Computer languages are supposed to be a part of the Commons, owned by everyone for the benefit of humanity, not the benefit of a greedy corporation.”

Submission + - Trump Administration Formally Offers H-1B Lottery Changes (dice.com)

Submitted by SpaceForceCommander
SpaceForceCommander writes: The Trump Administration is pushing a huge change to the H-1B visa system. If the proposal is accepted, all applicants (including those with advanced degrees) will now enter the "general pool" of 65,000 visa slots, and once that cap is hit, any remaining applicants with advanced degrees will end up in a 20,000-visa “master’s cap” pool. This is a big change from the current system, in which those applicants with advanced degrees are first placed in the “master’s cap” pool, and those that aren’t accepted in that first round are placed in the “general pool.”

A spokesperson for the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) told CNN that this change might increase the number of H-1B holders with advanced degrees by as much as 16 percent. By “flipping” the pools, those with a master’s degree or higher have two successful shots at a successful H-1B application.

Approving more H-1B applicants with advanced degrees could benefit tech companies such as Google and Apple, which regularly voice their need for workers with advanced qualifications, while potentially harming the consulting and subcontracting agencies that pursue visas for bachelor’s degree holders.

Submission + - Teenager Hacks Ultra-Double-Secure Apple Network (reuters.com)

Submitted by SpaceForceCommander
SpaceForceCommander writes: Australian teenager pleads guilty to hacking into Apple's "main computer network," downloading a bunch of files (90 GB worth), and even accessing customer accounts. "The sensitive documents were saved in a folder called 'hacky hack hack,' according to Reuters, and the boy supposedly "boasted about his activities on the mobile messaging service WhatsApp." An Apple spokesman said the company’s information security personnel “discovered the unauthorized access, contained it, and reported the incident to law enforcement” without commenting further on the specifics of the case. Feeling secure today?

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