Laws are badly written. They use imprecise language. They use convoluted phrasing. They use terms that don't have precise technical definitions or that have multiple definitions.

The purpose of our appeals courts is precisely to look at those badly written laws and label them as they really are for the purposes of making sure they comply with precedent and the constitution, as best they can.

(Erg, first post eaten by mis-click.)

Three points why I think that this is not the real reason for the problem.

1) Personal experience. I am an immigrant to the US. I probably cost my employer *more* than my peers due to legal fees, admin work, etc... before I got married. Throughout my tenure, my salary has always been comparable to peers. Sometimes it's a little lower (because I just started working in an area), sometimes a bit higher (once I have become tenured in that area), but on average identical. Between all of the additional costs I incurred annually, I was certainly less cost-competitive than others and that will be true of most people here on visas (except at companies likely to encounter some future legal difficulties).

2) Companies *everywhere* complain about this. Our clients in *India*(!!) complain about this exact problem. Not only that, but it's companies in all industries, for all types of jobs. This is far, far from being a tech-specific problem and therefore far, far from being a specific-visa problem.

3) Later in the article, there is a very good section on the shortage of good, experienced HR managers and how this has allowed hiring managers to expect to find employees that can plug right in without training. As much as we malign HR, too many good HR people were laid off in the recession and it's had an impact on managers' expectations when they post jobs and consider fit for role and the need for employee onboarding. I suspect that this shifting expectation about training is the real root cause.

It's actually pretty astonishing how many really good people are in the level of government just beneath senior leadership. We know people who work 12-16 hours a day at extremely high-stress, difficult jobs that would stretch the capabilities of most people. They love working in government despite the fact that they would get an instant raise of +25% (and the chance to get an annual bonus) if they moved to the private sector. The book "To Big to Fail" has a great description of Paulson looking at his staff in astonishment thinking that all of these folks would be making far more money if they weren't there in the room with him. I think it's misleading to consider the "average" government worker. The *best* government workers are very, very good but have their salaries roughly capped at around 150k. This is probably a pretty good bargain for us taxpayers.

(Full disclosure: I work on one of the research teams at CEB.)

The survey data is very global with just less than 50% of the respondents being from US companies. The remainder are from almost every major geography with western Europe, Australia, Canada, and Mexico being the best represented (from a researcher's point of view though, pretty much every geography is well-represented because of the size of the dataset).

It's also important to call out that the "discretionary effort" cited in the article isn't just "more hours". It involves productivity while working, likelihood to bring new ideas to managers, etc...

There's a video here of the research director cited in the article walking through the results in more depth. The really interesting thing isn't that satisfaction has gone down, it's that *compliance* has gone down within IT. (ignore the last ten seconds of salesy-ness in the video.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WD08P6kYCuI

(Comments apply only to the US; I love the train system in Europe and wish we had more here.) I live in Washington DC and people in the area take the train in two main cases: 1) Commuting to and from work. If you live in one of the suburbs and you work downtown, it's often much easier (and frankly less stressful -- those of you not from the area may never have driven on the beltway at rush hour) and generally cheaper to take the metro. 2) Going to and from the other large NE cities. For example, it's a five hour drive up to Manhattan (including traffic and all that) whereas taking the train is generally only 4 hours. The train also has a huge advantage over both car and rail when going from big city to big city; downtown to downtown connection. I get on at Union Station and get off right in the middle of Manhattan. The train, granted, isn't very cheap but it is the nicest and most pleasant way to travel up and down the coast. Outside of these two cases, though, it's usually simpler just to take your car especially as most of the places you might want to go outside major metropolises don't get frequent service.