OFF TOPIC:
Since I tried to stop this exchange from happen, I will be completely
inconsistent and wait until it has died down to get involved. (Actually, I
wanted to do it earlier but had trouble getting through.)
> >>> There are enough stoopid Americans out there. This takes us back to
> Chaz, Mgmt. has indicated that they would rather take better educated
> foreign persons (basic education) for less money than lazy, dumb
> Americans. <<<
> 1. In many places the Americans are laid off who created the software,
> designs, etc, and the cheaper foreign replacements do maintenance
> programming, which takes much less skill and which you can do cheaper. No
> new software is written at that company, and the new owners suck it dry
> and discard it. They take the money back overseas to fund their own new
> development, having destroyed their American competition in this way.
One of the things that I find irritating about how people like you argue
about things like this is that they couch anecdotal evidence as if it is
some broad social trend. We both know that you don't know what is going on
in "many places" at this level of detail, any more than do the people that
are arguing on the other side. At best you have newspaper reports to go on,
and if you have ever talked to a reporter about anything and then read the
story you know how reliable that is.
Before you get too incensed about my response, I am aware that this
irritating habit on the part of "pinkos" (your term from a previous post but
I think is fair enough based on arguing with Marxists during my college
days) is matched by even more irritating habits on the part of fat-head
reactionary types (don't worry, folks, you have no idea who you are -- it is
practically your defining characteristic), and I don't even think that you
are necessarily wrong on this topic.
> They do send in some good people, for the Americans to train. They serve
> as knowledge sponges, and when the day comes to compete with us directly
> from some other base those people will do it.
This remark and others makes you sound almost like a pre-Adam-Smith
economist. Are you really trying to say that the our standard of living was
better when America had huge tariffs to discourage economic trade? Boy, if
we had only kept all that TV technology under our control when we could -- I
really miss those huge black and white Zenith's with the tubes in them, and
the old Chevy Impala, there was a car...
> 2. A huge percentage of the h1Bs will be used for physical
> therapists. Want to explain how being lazy and stupid works into that
> scenario? Bad massages?
How big is the percentage and according to whom? This sounds like abuse and
a good point...
> 3. Many of the replacement workers get funneled into jobs like network
> administrator. This is not a high skill job. I don't know if you have
> ever asked yourself whether the American engineers are overawed by these
> workers, whether we feel they can measure up to us, but I will tell you
> for free the answer is no. Of course you would probably go with the
> management line.
> There are exceptions to all the above. My best friend happens to be a
> foreign worker - from France. His skill level is tremendous. He works 65
> hour weeks. He also gets paid a lot of money, by his French firm, and gets
One of my best friends is also French, and he gets paid a lot of money by an
American firm, and they would hire any number of people like him from
anywhere. Thanks to the INS he almost had to leave the country. We shouldn't
just meet people like him at the airport with a limo, we should have the
limo pick them up overseas. These people create jobs, not take them.
> 4. "This takes us back to Chaz,...for less money than lazy, dumb
> Americans."
Anyone who has read this list knows that either you are a consummate
con-artist or that this isn't true, and I can't believe that a talented
con-artist would waste time posting here.
> Money. And incompetence. Management is no longer capable of managing new
> software development, and they see the smart things as repurposing,
> recycling, and acquiring, for which you don't need the best talent. In my
> view, it's American technical management that needs to be replaced. Way
> too many MBAs, and few technical chops there.
> We are losing primacy in the software business in exactly the same way we
> lost the TV manufacturing business, most of the computer hardware
> business, the satellite launch business, and soon, the phone manufacturing
> business. You can't expect America to continue to prosper when American
> management and finance keep selling out one industry after another. We
> have no EC or ASEAN to protect us. We protect them.
I think that this might be where we finally get to the heart of your
argument, which I think that I have never understood. Apparently you think
that programming is an inelastic commodity -- I think that it's probably the
opposite; like lawyers and doctors, the more programmers there are the more
work there is. (You know the old joke: Why is software an aerospace
contractor's dream? Because it is arbitrarily expensive and it doesn't weigh
anything.)
My experience is clearly different from yours, but I won't pretend that I
know that it is representative. I work as system-level programmer (pretty
far up this particular food chain, and so have been relatively insulated
from worrying about my job). When I want to hire someone to work with me,
which I have needed to do regularly over the last 10 years on various
projects for various companies, I always find it hard to find people. I
don't care *at all* about salary, and I have never had anyone I wanted not
get hired by my company-of-the-moment, so I have never had anyone I wanted
not get hired on the basis of salary. The last time I looked I was prepared
to accept someone fairly junior (5+ years of experience programming in C and
some assembler experience), and I found only 2 people that were even close
after going to 6 recruiters. Both of these people were H-1 holders that had
been educated in the US, and I picked the one that my fellow team members
and I liked the best. We have been waiting over 4 months for him to join
us. I would have selected a US citizen or someone with a green card in a
second, to avoid this nonsense, so I find it hard to believe that there are
qualified candidates milling around outside our building and that it's only
that our incompetent and short-sighted middle-and-upper management is
refusing to hire them.
I have interviewed some of the sort of newspaper sob-story engineers that
would be employed if it weren't for mean managers that don't want to pay
them what they deserve after years of designing missiles, and the ones I met
I wouldn't hire on a bet. The ones I have seen are just like the people that
I knew when I worked (briefly) for the Navy who didn't want to leave because
they had "job security" and then when the got RIF'd they discovered years
too late that job security comes from being able to do a job.
I have no illusions that any of my companies (big or small) wouldn't have
fired me in a moment if had seemed to be the best thing to do -- actually,
they wouldn't because managers hate to fire people, and I quit immediately
if I am not contributing significantly to one of my company's highest
priority projects, since I'm being wasted and I can't stand that. But work
isn't some sort of extended family or fraternal organization (or if it is, I
want out of there). And in the part of the industry that I work, all I see
is a chronic labor shortage.
If we are using H-1 visas to bring in semi-skilled labor then I would love
to see it stopped, because then we would have more visas for semi-skilled
and skilled programmers. My experience is that if all of the best and
hardest working programmers in the world were brought to Silicon Valley,
things would be exactly as they are now, since most of them are here. I just
wish we could get the rest of them because I could hire the top 10 or 15 of
the remaining ones and I might not have to work so much...
|
