Potential H1B reform

a reply to: Aazadan

Workforce in smaller towns is an issue, agreed. That's kinda inherent, though. Smaller means less services overall.

I attend school about 50 miles away from where I live. The difference is really amazing between even the county seat here and the technological metropolis my school has become the center of. Engineers and engineering jobs are both plentiful there; here, not so much for either; the big employer is Walmart. The only reason I don't move is that I'm an old country redneck with roots too deep to uproot now.

TheRedneck

a reply to: Adonsa

Thank you for answering.

If I understand you right, it sounds like you are describing a job shop... the workers are hired by one employer in India, who then uses H1B to assign them to work in the US. The US client pays the job shop, who then pays the employee. Is that right, or did I misunderstand?

The Redneck

a reply to: TheRedneck

Just a quick question.. Do you think it's intentional that our current education system isn't churning out massive numbers of USA students ready to handle the current demand? Why do we need outside help?

a reply to: Aazadan

Maybe it will push some of these other companies to invest in the people here and get them better educated so that they can also fill those positions instead of having to bring people in.

The fact that we can't find talent here in the US is pathetic. We're basically too dumb and under qualified to be wanted by our own industries. How sad is that???

a reply to: JacKatMtn

We don't need help in most fields. The H1B is supposed to be for specific industries that have so few prospects they have to recruit from the global market. We have plenty of engineers, scientists (for most fields), doctors, etc.

Someone doing research on a new space vehicle might need someone super-specialized from another country... that's the intent. Just not the result. Our Universities are turning out some very good talent; it's the public school system that sucks big time.

TheRedneck

a reply to: TheRedneck

Communist Core is a Biatch!?

a reply to: JacKatMtn

Hi JackKatMtn,

Students know that hiring priority goes to Indian nationals. Their only hope of getting a stable IT job is in the federal workforce. If Hillary had been elected, that would have gone away, as Hillary is very friendly to India's NASSCOM lobby organization.

Several years ago, while staying at a hotel in San Diego, I noticed a job fair being held in conference rooms. So, I decided to check it out. It was a job fair for h-1b's. Except for US companies manning booths, I was the only US citizen in the room. Job fair was specifically for h-1b replacement-workers.

In another area, lectures were being given to US employers as to how to reject US citizens from their hiring process.

a reply to: TheRedneck

Hi Redneck,
You're correct.
Another term is bodyshoppers where the candidates are hired by consulting companies from India, then farmed out to US companies to work as consultants.

Body Shops don't mind abusing the h-1b's with indentured servitude status and promises of a green card upon arrival in the US. H-1b replacement workers seem to readily accept being indentured servants. h-1b replacement workers could collectively put a stop to being indentured by forming or joining labor unions, but their loyalty to the "Bangalore body shops" comes first.

h-1b replacement workers use the giant Immigration Voice website to organize congressional lobby strategies, to track their visa status, and to track their "transformation" from visa to green card. Again, the h-1b is not intended to be a path to green card. RINO Sen. John Cornyn is extremely friendly to India h1-b workers, NASSCOM, and the Bangalore body shops. Even though they aren't citizens and they aren't voters, John Cornyn still represents them as constituents.

Re: the proposed $60,000 pay raise for h-1b workers. NASSCOM will identify loopholes before the ink drys.

originally posted by: mOjOm
a reply to: Aazadan

Maybe it will push some of these other companies to invest in the people here and get them better educated so that they can also fill those positions instead of having to bring people in.

The fact that we can't find talent here in the US is pathetic. We're basically too dumb and under qualified to be wanted by our own industries. How sad is that???

That's not really it, at least not with software. The problem is that the technology moves very quickly, the most popular technologies today (especially web technology) didn't even exist in 2012. We have many good schools, but within 5 years of graduating your knowledge is basically obsolete. That's why people are mid level in the industry in 2 years and senior in 5 with a heavy focus on new graduates.

There's a lot of self study involved to stay current, which frankly many don't keep up with and at that point it's just a numbers game for new people. India has those numbers while we don't.

originally posted by: JacKatMtn
a reply to: TheRedneck

Just a quick question.. Do you think it's intentional that our current education system isn't churning out massive numbers of USA students ready to handle the current demand? Why do we need outside help?

Absolutely. They need outside help because they pay them significantly lower. Typically these foreigners are somewhat trained by Americans.

Being a Computer Engineer with 20 years in the industry , i would not encourage my son to go into the field. Why would i want him to put the time and money into a field where he has to compete with someone who has 1/10 th his cost of living. You cant compete with that.

I have been pretty fortunate in my field and not impacted because of my experience ,speciality, and doing more then just programming , but I see the trend.

Maybe depending on the outcome of this I might change my mind.

One thing Im excited about is that this may become an issue that is brought up to the forefront by the POTUS. Had clinton been elected, this big issue wouldnt be a beep in the radar and they would continue to push the their arent Americans who can do the job BS.

a reply to: JacKatMtn

Common Core is completely destroying our public education system.

It works like this: under the idea of tenure, a teacher cannot be fired for performance, supposedly to prevent school administrations from targeting teachers for philosophical differences. But the side effect has been that tenured teachers sometimes just get tired of the disciplinary problems, the lack of positive parental involvement, the regulations they have to operate under (which typically tick parents off to no end), and the lack of pay. Common Core adds another worry: if too many students now don't pass standardized tests, their job is suddenly in danger as well.

So in the face of all this, it becomes a choice: teach comprehension and understanding and risk losing the job, or teach memorization of test answers and maintain job security. Most have chosen the latter route. So when the kids graduate, they know the answers to questions on a test they will never take again, not how to get those answers. When they get to college, they don't even know how to learn... the real world does not revolve around memorization of facts. It revolves around thorough understanding of concepts.

India doesn't do Common Core. I have met students from there; they are very, very good at grasping concepts, where American students in general try to memorize. That's the educational difference between an American worker and a foreign worker in high-tech fields, not intelligence or ability. It's all about what they were taught early on, not about how to read, write, or do 'rithmatic, but how to learn.

TheRedneck

a reply to: Adonsa

That is a problem then. Most high-tech companies work for client companies. It's difficult to specify what is and is not a job shop legally without leaving loopholes. The only possible restriction I can think of would be to deny H1B consideration to any company which does not employ a sufficient percentage of Americans. As in, no consideration given to a company unless Americans comprise 2/3 or more of its workforce.

This bill doesn't do that... and with the cap removal, it's sounding like a bad deal for America.

TheRedneck

News tonight is that the Tech industry is about to launch a huge push back on this, possibly tomorrow.

Honestly, screw those ivory towered parasites. Exactly who will be left to buy their stupid gadgets if we can't make a decent wage/living?

originally posted by: kosmicjack
News tonight is that the Tech industry is about to launch a huge push back on this, possibly tomorrow.

Honestly, screw those ivory towered parasites. Exactly who will be left to buy their stupid gadgets if we can't make a decent wage/living?

i hope they do a good enough job to really piss of trump , so he puts a target on their back and stops the rampant h1 abuse by them.

a reply to: Edumakated

Actually they were the ones that exploited the H1B visas to begin with, with their corrupted lobbyist and lawyers buying out congress rats to support their idea that America was short on tech workers.

A lot of opinion and conjecture here in this thread so I'll relay my "front-line" experience.

I work as upper management for a small (< 50) software company in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. We've been fortunate enough to excel in our market and this year alone we'll be bringing on at least 3 additional programmers. We're currently interviewing for 1 open position - an entry-level/junior programming job focused on web-technologies.

Being the hiring manager, I had to take the first step in locating candidates and interviewing recruits. My first action was to place an ad on Indeed.com, a popular job search engine. Over the course of about 1 week I'd received roughly 9 resumes, all with the same skills, most with the same education (Bangalore) and most with the same amount of time in this country - less than 2 years. These folks were all over the country and were looking for something permanent.

Nothing about these resumes stood out as they all looked pretty boilerplate (templated) so I kept on searching.
I checked the local Craigslist (they have a Resumes section) and found 1 candidate locally whom I corresponded with via email. I checked his work-porfolio and while unimpressed, I did notice he had attended a local "bootcamp" training program. This program teaches roughly 3 stacks (levels of programming) within 12 weeks, with students spending 10+ hours a day learning, coding, building, researching and absorbing.

Further research into this program led me to a partnership offering in which they coordinate with local, hiring companies to place their graduates. I reached out to the person who manages this and we've formed a healthy relationship. They have classes graduating every 4 weeks with 8-14 students in each class. They offer assistance and guidance in job searching, interviewing, resume-writing, Linked-In profile building and pretty much anything that would be attractive to an employer.

This person also inquired as to my willingness to consider H1-B candidates since a few of their students fell into this category. I respectfully declined, stating that I'd prefer to staff with local talent who have a vested interest in the local communities. Period.

The talent, if not out there, is certainly coming since these "bootcamp" types of programs are on the rise. Texas just passed a provision requiring these operations to obtain a state license, similar to a beauty salon to try to deter any types of "fly by night" outfits.

To hear other companies say there isn't talent out there is naive. Either they aren't looking very hard or they are just looking for warm bodies to fill seats. Many contractual projects require a maintained headcount as a provision so as long as directives like that exist, so will the cry of "not enough talent".

Sorry it doesn't add much to the topic but I wanted to let folks who might be considering an entry into the tech world to not give up. The jobs are there

a reply to: TXRabbit

This is getting off topic, but since you're actually hiring these people, you'll probably have some good perspective.

Bootcamps are pretty new, they've really only been around for a couple years now. How has your experience been with them? The usual feedback I see is that they don't really produce people with any actual level of experience, and that they're stuck on one specific technology with little ability to branch out.

The most popular bootcamps seem to be for front end web development, but to be perfectly honest that field has virtually nothing in common with any other programming field (I have a web dev associates in addition to a computer science bachelors, so I'm well acquainted with the difference). It puts people in a pretty narrow niche and depending on the company it's often times a design job rather than a development one, which further removes you from the code, which is quite bad for career advancement because back end pays much better and leads away from the web designer trap jobs.

Are bootcamp graduates actually meeting your business needs? I contrast this with my university experience, we're expected to be able to pick up any language/framework within days if not hours and focus heavily on concepts like data structures and algorithms (two subjects which are virtually ignored in bootcamps), in addition to being expected to be able to optimize our code for memory footprint/speed so that it costs the business the least amount of money to run. The theory is that by teaching learning over multiple technologies instead of just a narrow range it results in employees that can adapt to new tech as business needs evolve, assuming the employee in question doesn't stagnate. I think bootcamps are still too new to have really seen much change though so it's tough to rate how they do on this front, though Ruby which is quite popular with bootcamps has been quickly losing market share the last two years.

Outside of school, what I see on the employment side of things is that in the tech hubs there are A LOT of jobs for people with these skillsets, much more than we can possibly fill. However, business is pretty bad at actually communicating their needs. For example, a company might want their front end dev entry level candidate to have 5 years of experience in Angular, a technology that has only existed for 6 and been out of beta for 4. Or they give a totally irrelevant technical interview, by asking poor questions which are more trivia than job related issues, and then they don't get the person they actually need.

To sum things up, there's definitely jobs out there, and I think a lot of companies know they need people with these job titles, but I don't think they actually know what they need those people to do which has lead to a very poor hiring process. The whole bootcamp craze isn't helping things either in my opinion because it's creating a whole bunch of poorly skilled workers. It's like giving someone a crash course in how the pieces move in chess, and suddenly expecting them to be competitive with grandmasters.

To put things in perspective, a bootcamp is roughly 720 hours of instruction using 12 weeks*10 hours/day*6 days/week (they usually get a day off). A 1 semester class is 8 hours/week*16 weeks, for 128 hours. Thus, a bootcamp is worth about as much in instruction time as 5-6 college classes, which is basically 1 busy semester (or two if you're also taking some unrelated classes). That puts them on par with half an associates degree, and associates are worthless, which is why I legitimately wonder just how good these programs are long term for business. I wonder about their worth for students too since they're unaccredited, only teach the very basics, and some cost as much as two full years of actual college.

originally posted by: kosmicjack
Honestly, screw those ivory towered parasites. Exactly who will be left to buy their stupid gadgets if we can't make a decent wage/living?

Ivory towered parasites? I'm not quite sure where that insult is coming from. I usually associate Ivory Towers with academics who are too caught up in research to do anything practical. But tech companies are all about applying knowledge to solve problems. Parasites I can understand, even though I disagree with it.

a reply to: Aazadan

This is good, so they don't have to use foreigners for cheap pay. They can just use Americans instead. If they really have a shortage than outsiders would do.

a reply to: amfirst1

It seems to me like business as usual. It will probably discourage H1-B's from being used to fill entry level positions but that doesn't fully solve the issue. This is mostly going to be an issue in a few parts of California, and for that you need to understand how corporate culture is structured in California.

Basically, you come in at an entry level/junior position fresh out of school (or totally skip school). Over the next 2-3 years you get some massive pay raises and end up in a mid level developer position. At this point, your pay is now competitive with H1-B's. You've also finally gotten competent enough that you're going to make the company some real money.

All this really does is shift the burden from new grad positions to more experienced developers. If the company wants to go with H1-B's, which they now can in unlimited amounts... that's essentially what they're going to do. This largely has the effect that it's going to push our own citizens out of the tech hubs, or atleast out of California.

Maybe that's a good thing, I don't really know. I read this bill as largely it being great for California (which is why California introduced it to the House), but not great for the industry, and not great for America. I would prefer to see something else proposed. I do agree the cap needs to be removed, but at the same time I want to see hiring preference go to competent Americans first, and I want salaries to be based on the local value of the dollar so that the legislation doesn't push all the jobs to high COL areas.