There will be glitches in my transition from being a saloon bar sage to a world statesman. - Tony Banks
Namma Suvarna Karnataka
Experience keeps a dear School, but Fools will learn in no other.
---
Benjamin Franklin - Postal official and Weather observer
Originally posted by Homer Phillips:
hi dave,
If you're talking about entry level jobs in the US they are reserved for foreign nationals. OK, if US person got master's from MIT summa cumme laude somebody will hire.
Otherwise there is a large supply of foreign nationals with experience that get hired first. Frequently on this board you will find them asking questions about US jobs. The IT industry pays polticians well and they get a nice ROI.
YMMV
Mike Gershman
SCJP 1.4, SCWCD in process
Mike Gershman
SCJP 1.4, SCWCD in process
Originally posted by Homer Phillips:
BTW, Peter, often when I see you're the poster I skip past your post.
Originally posted by Mike Gershman:
Homer's post is not off-topic - it gets to the core of the problem.
but that has no relevance to the question of whether what universities teach is useful.
Originally posted by Homer Phillips:
[QB]They made some terrific investment of time, life and capital. Now society should not be importing experienced foreign nationals at entry level prices and knocking them out of the market.
How about we raise the minumum salary for H-1b and L-1 holders to $50,000 US or some equal number Euros or Yen? The minumum slary is now the indexed average of 50K for 10 years when it expires and congress revisits it.
Failure to post an opinion defaults to I'm vehemently against it.
If someone else has made an investment of time, life and capital, what God-given right do these graduates have to a job over an experienced foreign national who is willing to work for less?
Mike Gershman
SCJP 1.4, SCWCD in process
Originally posted by Mike Gershman:
I can't speak for the Almighty, but US immigration law forbids H1B workers underbidding US nationals.
Your phrase "experienced foreign national" explains why some participants on this forum
I was recently speaking to a friend who graduated from university three years ago with a decent computing degree, but has only just found a job in the computing industry. He's one of the lucky ones - of the 40 or so people who graduated with him, about 4 have got a job in computing.
I suspect its a bit of both. On the one hand employers (influenced by employment agencies who know nothing about the industry) are probably a little unrealistic in how much experience they demand for some more junior roles. How can it be expected that a person applying for a junior programming position will have five year's java experience?
The universities are also partially to blame. In my degree course there were about 30-40 people in the final year, and I was probably in the top two or three skill-wise, and got a good final grade. When I started work I found that what I knew was barely enough for me to scrape by.
US immigration law merely forbids H1B workers from being paid less than what BLS bureaucrats have arbitrarily set the "prevailing wage" to be. Wether that is more or less than what US residents work for is totally irrelevant.
Why should the accident of anyone's birth give them some inalienable right to a livelihood? That went out with feudalism.
Mike Gershman
SCJP 1.4, SCWCD in process
Originally posted by Mike Gershman:
The BLS is supposed to be setting the prevailing wage accurately so that there is no price incentive to hire H1B workers.
I see no reason why middle class American parents shouldn't also try to preserve some good jobs for their children. That's why there are (under-enforced) restrictions on the H1B visa program.
It's interesting and ironic to note that much of India's post-independence history is filled with far more government regulation and "set-asides" based on birth and class than America's. Today, India is moving towards the American model, and some Americans want to move towards the Indian model. The relative success of these models will be no different in 2008 than they were in 1948.
Bottom line, if H-1B workers wish to compete on price I'd say let 'em. Efforts to make non-immigrant labor artificially expensive introduced the notion of offshoring, where you are already competing with people across the world based on price.
Mike Gershman
SCJP 1.4, SCWCD in process
Originally posted by Mike Gershman:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the traditional professions such as law and medicine are still mainly reserved for upper caste Indians. I think that that is one reason why talented Indians are flocking to IT. There is no traditional IT caste - yet.
Originally posted by Mike Gershman:
Circling back to the main topic, no change in the US CS curricula will offset the availability of underpaid H1B programmers claiming 5 uncheckable years of
experience in India.
The big issue in US CS education is that US companies are too greedy and short-sighted to invest in entry-level US programmers when they can hire experienced H1B programmers for the same money or less.
What if the fact that their experience is unverified at best or fabricated doesn't matter?
James Gosling ... said that software development wasn't a branch of math, science or engineering - it's a Fine Art, and should be treated as such.
If I can hire an experienced individual for the same money or less as an entry-level person, it's not greedy or short-sighted. It would be considered retarded to do otherwise.
Mike Gershman
SCJP 1.4, SCWCD in process
Originally posted by Mike Gershman:
That's strange since a lot of his code is right out of CLR, even giving credit. javac is based on javaCC, which is based on the dragon compiler book.
Maintainable code may be an art but efficient code is a science called Computer Science. Check out the google screening exam.
In an interview, instead of stupid logic puzzles or GoF design pattern regurgitation, he'll be able to say "let me tell you about the issues I've dealt with the last four years". While there are some hidebound dinosaurs that believe that paid experience is the only real experience, the truth is that "experience" involves working in a production setting, with a live app, live users and real-world problems.
Mike Gershman
SCJP 1.4, SCWCD in process
What's puzzling is the insecurity of the average US programmer. Do you think that the brilliant minds in the top 2% are spending their days obsessing over being replaced by a half-dozen "average" programmers like you and me making a lot less? We're not even on their radar screen, because what we can do can't scale up. People need to start thinking that way and ensuring that what they do can't be replaced by an untrained, inexperienced individual making a fraction as much.
Experience keeps a dear School, but Fools will learn in no other.
---
Benjamin Franklin - Postal official and Weather observer
Originally posted by Shawn DeSarkar:
If all the industry is in other countrys, what will happen to our currency over the long term ?
Experience keeps a dear School, but Fools will learn in no other.
---
Benjamin Franklin - Postal official and Weather observer
Originally posted by Shawn DeSarkar:
The point is that something is going to give pretty soon. Companys are being greedy and we can see that, but you cant blame the people who are takeing our jobs because they are simply taking the best deal they are offerd to avoid being poor. Americans/Canadians are no longer going into IT School like they once did, will even more jobs be replaced with cheep labour, will India and China become more powerful than the U.S? Is north america canabalizing its own economy?
Textile, Electronics, Cars, and now IT and accounting. If all the industry is in other countrys, what will happen to our currency over the long term?
Originally posted by Luke Kolin:
If they can still build cars in North America despite worries about offshoring of auto manufacturing that began before you were born, our grandchildren will still be developing software.
Originally posted by Tim Holloway:
Does Alan Kay count as in the top 2%? It appears that HP just canned him.
I'm getting worried. The last 2 weeks, all I ever seem to read about is how major corporations are planning layoffs in the thousands and even tens of thousands. That does not bode well.
Originally posted by Luke Kolin:
You could see the HP layoffs coming months away, since right after the Compaq merger. That's a company that has seriously lost its way, and to expect job security out of such an entity is extremely perilous.
Cheers!
Luke
Originally posted by Luke Kolin:
Was Alan Kay's job shipped offshore? Didn't think so.
Experience keeps a dear School, but Fools will learn in no other.
---
Benjamin Franklin - Postal official and Weather observer
Originally posted by Luke Kolin:
What's interesting to note is that I drive an Acura. Well, that's not interesting, but where it's made is - Ohio. My neighbor drives a Honda minivan - which I believe is made just down the 401 from Toronto. They make Hyundais in Alabama, Nissans in Tennessee, and BMWs just up I-85 from me in Spartanburg, SC. The fact is, the United States and Canada have been net beneficiaries of auto manufacturing offshoring in the past 20 years.
Everyone keeps talking about the decline of auto maunfacturing in the US, but it's really only limited to the big 3, and that's mostly because they build garbage. The offshore manufacturers have been building new plants in the US for decades, and there's a reason why.
There are a number of components to the cost of each car, and labor and benefits are only one. There's also the cost of raw materials, and the cost of transporting said raw materials to the factory, and then shipping stuff to the eventual consumer. Then there's (lack of) quality costs, like warranty repairs. The experience of the car manufacturers has been that with automation (and a lack of unions) the labor/benefits portion per unit manufactured gets down to the point where the other cost factors outweigh that of labor. Which is why manufacturers build new factories in America - they're reasonably well automated, benefits aren't crazy, and the negligible rail shipping costs for steel and autos make a lot more sense than building a plant in some Third World country. VW had something in Brazil, but shipping and quality costs made it a failure.
While the dynamics are somewhat different for services (the product/raw material transportation costs are communications, which is much cheaper) the principle is the same - when you knock down unit labor costs (the pessimists say by lowering wages, I say by increasing my productivity) to the point where communications costs and quality costs of offshore match the labor costs, then you'll keep stuff in North America.
If they can still build cars in North America despite worries about offshoring of auto manufacturing that began before you were born, our grandchildren will still be developing software.
Cheers!
Luke
Originally posted by Homer Phillips:
I have been seeing many a new GM product on the streets lately. For junk, the paint jobs sure look impressive.
Luke aren't Canadians sort of nationalistic? They go so far as to say some percentage of programming on their radio/tv stations has to be home grown. Think of it, people demand their goods based on the accident of where they were created.
I suppose it's hard to argue that a person who has benefited so greatly from the H1B program would not be all for it. When US citizens meddle in Canadian affairs is it well received?