Mr. Gates goes to College

[Rufus BugleWeed]

Bill Gates went on a campaign tour last week, trying to reinvigorate his base, as they say in politics.
The number of students majoring in computer science is falling, even at the elite universities. So Mr. Gates went stumping at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, M.I.T. and Harvard, telling students that they could still make a good living in America, even as the nation's industry is sending some jobs, like software programming, abroad.

Link to whole story.
If you follow the money, you'll find M$ was one of the biggest contributors in the lobby to expand the H1-B quota to 195K. IMO, this flooded the US labor market with supply. Most people say salaries are down 20 to 25%. Freshers can't buy a job. People are selling their furniture to eat.
Now Bill is out there stumping. Life must be different in the other America.

[Mark Herschberg]

If you look at the picture, the guy second in line (in behind the girl at the mic) is a friend of mine.
--Mark

[ChanSan Mehbubani]

Originally posted by Rufus BugleWeed:

If you follow the money, you'll find M$ was one of the biggest contributors in the lobby to expand the H1-B quota to 195K. IMO, this flooded the US labor market with supply. Most people say salaries are down 20 to 25%. Freshers can't buy a job. People are selling their furniture to eat.
Now Bill is out there stumping. Life must be different in the other America.

But now no more H1B are coming to your county.Also B1/L1 are very few.So where is the problem?You mean to say those H1B in US are controlling IT market?Almost all job openings require anybody to born and brought up in USA.So whats your problem now?

[Jeroen Wenting]

Just another cheap shot at Microsoft, what else? Nothing new, combination of jealousy at the success of others and a tendency to say "ME 2", following the herd of cattle who think it is "kewl" to be against Microsoft.
A few years ago EVERY IT company lobbied for more H1B visas and Microsoft naturally did as well and as they are large they obviously lobbied large...

[Ko Ko Naing]

Originally posted by Tanga Palti:

Almost all job openings require anybody to born and brought up in USA.

Is it real? So do u mean that even foreigners with green card cannot get a job? I heard that U.S. is moving its workforce to countries like China and India...

[ChanSan Mehbubani]

Bill Gates says "People are overreacting".Some of the jobs are moved but all jobs can't be.Its common sense.Which manager wants his workers working 6000 miles away?

[Jeroen Wenting]

Originally posted by Ko Ko Naing:

Is it real? So do u mean that even foreigners with green card cannot get a job? I heard that U.S. is moving its workforce to countries like China and India...

There's maybe a million total non-US citizens holding fulltime jobs (rather than shortterm contracts) in the US.
On 80 million? citizens that does indeed mean that you (unless with special classifications) cannot get a job in the US.
Outsourcing is another thing entirely.

[Tim Holloway]

He's going to have a hard sell. It's hard to believe someone's claims that these skills are so valuable when you can't get a job.
And right now, blame who/what you will, the job market absolutely sucks.
There's also a hint of the "only white people can innovate" attitude there too, methinks.
But actually the funniest part of the interview I read was where Bill tried to dodge the question of whether Linux would be sucking away any of that creativity. He tried very hard to pretend that Linux doesn't even exist, and the effort made him almost incoherent.

[Don Stadler]

Originally posted by Tim Holloway:
He's going to have a hard sell. It's hard to believe someone's claims that these skills are so valuable when you can't get a job.
And right now, blame who/what you will, the job market absolutely sucks.

I remember the same thing during the early 80's. I think it has less to do with outsourcing than with lack of investment in software applications right now. At my U the proportion of students taking computer majors dropped by 70%. It took a few years but resulted in a hellacious shortage about 5 years later.....

[shay Aluko]

Originally posted by Tanga Palti:

But now no more H1B are coming to your county.Also B1/L1 are very few.So where is the problem?You mean to say those H1B in US are controlling IT market?Almost all job openings require anybody to born and brought up in USA.So whats your problem now?

please stick to the facts, L1 visas are not few, as a matter of fact a lot of fortune 500 companies routinely abuse L1 visas. I know cos i was a victim of the L1 very recently

[Matt Cao]

Hi,
Bill Gates picture and the story seems out of sync. He tries to sell a positive vision for software engineering, but the picture seems like he got backfired.
Regards,
MCao

[JiaPei Jen]

Bill Gates went on a campaign tour last week, trying to reinvigorate his base, as they say in politics.
The number of students majoring in computer science is falling, even at the elite universities. So Mr. Gates went stumping at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, M.I.T. and Harvard, telling students that they could still make a good living in America, even as the nation's industry is sending some jobs, like software programming, abroad.

Try to revive the goose that laid golden eggs?

[David Weitzman]

I can't comment on what Gates specifically said at MIT or Harvard, but the article definately seems to be a poor representation of what he said at CMU. The talk was mainly about the future of software, with only a few remarks about the software industry towards the end. Nothing he said strikes me as coming very close to, "telling students that they could still make a good living in America, even as the nation's industry is sending some jobs, like software programming, abroad." After all, the talk was entitled Software Breakthroughs: Solving the Toughest Problems in Computer Science, not Why Being A Programmer Is A Good Idea.
Now I won't argue the point that Gates is predicting a good decade for the advancement software, or that what's good for software is good for those who write it. It follows transitively that Gates would predict a good decade for software developers. But I don't get the impression that's what he came to say.
You might say that his talk was just a premise for nudging students towards a good feeling about becoming programmers even if that wasn't the topic, but nevertheless I think he made a number of good points in a convincing and sound argument. Unfortunately not all reasonable analyses of the future are accurate. We shall see.
[ March 04, 2004: Message edited by: David Weitzman ]