3 ms·
I think you are missing an important part. There is low barriers for your job to be shipped abroad. A doctor's job is hard to ship, especially the emergency on
by ardit33 18y ago
I think you are missing an important part. There is low barriers for your job to be shipped abroad.
A doctor's job is hard to ship, especially the emergency ones (you still hear about people going abroad for cosmetical work), and lawyers have barriers (you have to pass the Bar, laws changing constantly by state etc.), therefore they can command higher salaries.
But for software engineers, the barrier of job shipping is really low. My company has a team in Argentina, doing decent work. If I was twice as expensive as I was now, the company probably would have just hired all the engineering there, and maybe one or two "architect" types in the US.
Eventually american engineers with less experience would have to lower their salaries, to get into a level where the efficiencies that are gained by having somebody with the same culture/understanding on site is worth the extra cost that the average american programmer commands.
1. Remember, you are competing in a global pool of talent. Doctors/lawyers have an huge local advantage that engineers simply don't have.
2. H-1B is an recent trend (late 90s trend). I doesn't explain the lack of interest in engineering/math for american graduates. (see number 1. Even if your salary was so high to spark interest, your job it would be outsourced soon, or your company will go bust as so many did in 2001-2003).
3. In the late 90s salaries were really high. It motivated the wrong kind of people to get into school. I remember, a lot of "I am in CS for the money, not b/c the passion" types in late 90s (when I started school, and the dot com was all the rage. Within the year a lot of them were in a different major, b/c they couldn't handle it. Information technology, or business being the fallback majors of choice.
4. Even until lately, salaries for engineers have been really good. CS is one of the few majors where you can command 50-70k right after college, and where by 25 you can easily be pulling 6 figs. (I was by 25).
While I agree, that H-1B should be used to bring really skilled people in (and not used a simply a cost control school), eliminating it, is a sure path to Detroit-ing Silicon Valley.
- geebee 18y agoIt's hard to include all my points in such a nuanced issue. I actually agree with you that a visa program that brings in a smaller number of truly talented people (and preserves their freedom to choose their profession, job, and location) would be a good thing for the US. The H1B as it stands is wretched. Yeah, it brings in these folks, but it is also a massive scale indentured worker program, used extensively to facilitate outsourcing. A lot of people are surprised to discover that 6 or the top 10 users of the program are actually Indian outsourcing companies, who use the visa to cycle a worker through the US for a couple of years to facilitate moving the job overseas. And two of the remaining top 10 are based in the US but are essentially outsourcing companies. The first US company on the list, Microsoft, only comes in at #5! I think a lot of the dispute comes from a misunderstanding about how the visa is used. It's almost like two completely alternate universes - one side is using it to bring in innovators, and the other is using it to replace ordinary american workers with ordinary workers from overseas at a lower rate. Everyone seems to agree about this, the only dispute is the extent. You might want to check out this article - : http://news.yahoo.com/s/bw/20090224/bs_bw/feb2009tc20090223946195 http://news.yahoo.com/s/bw/20090224/bs_bw/feb2009tc200902239...
- myutdtme 18y ago>While I agree, that H-1B should be used to bring really >skilled people in It is becoming impossible to do academic collaborations with the US - you can't send postdocs/professors to work on US telescopes, particle accelerators etc because they can't get H1B visas. Initially this is great, other coutries part fund the projects but only americans can work on them. the trouble is that the next round of instruments won't be in the US, Cern was built in Switzerland for this reason, ITER is in France.
- geebee 18y agoThat's terrible. Those researchers should be able to get visas easily. However, I disagree with the notion that we should solve this problem by just awarding more visas. Doesn't it strike you as strange (and genuinely horrible) that universities can't get visas while outsourcing companies are gobbling up these visas by the tens of thousands? Doesn't it strike you as strange that Microsoft claims it can't bring in super high paid developers because we've hit the visa cap, yet some of these visas have been going to firms that pay the "critical worker that couldn't be found in the US" $12/hr? (sorry, no cite on that, I heard it in an interview with Ron Hira, a professor of public policy... I'll try to dig it up). The H1B lobby loves the example you gave, because they get to claim that the H1B detractors are "opposed to letting researchers into the US for innovative collaborations." Uh, no. We've taken hundreds of thousands, maybe even over a million H1B workers into the US (the dept of labor doesn't keep exact numbers). Maybe one of these visas could have gone to the researcher, rather than some average dude who read the Oracle manual? This program is in desperate need of a fix, no question about that. But to me, fixing it by just removing the cap, or setting an extremely high cap, is unacceptable. I don't need a fire hose to blow out my birthday candles.
- poimnu 18y agoIt's even becoming hard to hold academic conferences in the USA. You can't be sure that invited speakers from countries other than Europe/Japan will be allowed in. Then there are the cases of people being arrested for speaking at computer security conferences, people working on eg. stem cell research outside the USA are worried that they might be next.