And how large is the STEM workforce? http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth From the IEEE, STEM "crisis" since 1934. LOL, we're doomed. EDIT: "Even as the Great Recession slowly recedes, STEM workers at every stage of the career pipeline, from freshly minted grads to mid- and late-career Ph.D.s, still struggle to find employment as many companies, including Boeing, IBM, and Symantec, continue to lay off thousands of STEM workers." But, but, the crisis...
I don't claim to be a know it all. All I did was to clarify that your post had nothing to do with the H1-B situation and more of an outsourcing issue. Now back to your question, the US grants visas to foreigners cause there are tons of them who are damn smart with MS and PhD from top schools and you don't want to lose them. Ofc the system gets abused by companies using these visas to get cheap labor as well.
Ok, my last post is just rumor and tongue in cheek. However, 1st hand i can tell you a small company of 1500 employeees hired a lot of Russian electrical engineers at low pay to do what was advanced Engineering technicians work in support of lead design engineer. Thats 1 lead design engineer. A productive, prolific , high paid American lead engineer. The pay was low (about 80% of standard) and thats a fact. The engineers were extremely competemt, hard working and grateful for the job. The problem is with American kids. They have smoke blown up their ass that amounts to poor guidance mostly by thier schools and some by uninformed parents. It is like anything else (trading?). They all are told they can be that 1 lead design engineer. They assume they are studying/working hard enough to be that guy and feedback(grades/coddling) reinforces they are when in fact they are not and probably dont have a high enough inate intellect to begin with. Why hire an ill prepared, pampered dreamer who wont focus on the present. Give me a hard working foreigner who is grateful for the job. Ps. That 1 lead design engineer was for one of many products produced by that company. I dont mean to imply one engineer requires the support of 1500, although that might be possible.
The engineers should do the hiring. Anyone with a general business degree or HR degree is a worthless pile of shit IMO. Firing them all would solve 80-90% of the world's problems. The best is when the M&A team take over a company, lay off the old talent, and jam the screwed up projects down their existing engineer's/programmer's throats. 2-3 years later they're all fired because the project is behind schedule and over budget, simply because upper management couldn't transition the acquisition for shit. Our #1 talent is kicking the can down the road. No one does it better than us. Pretty soon we'll outsource that too.
Here is some irony for the ET folks. The crowd on this site loves the fact that former floor traders who use to make a good living on the floor making markets in options, futures and equities now find themselves out of work. They were replaced by.....ironically enough computer programmers. Oh the joy this crowd had at the suffering of the former floor guys. "They deserved it" screamed the ETers from the cheap seats. "They should move on and do something else" others yelled. "The world evolves and technology changes, they should suck it up and stop whining" chimed another out of work at home daytrader from his basement. See, when it happens to someone else, all is good. But when THEY lose their job. When their technology evolves and the world moves on and they find themselves priced out of the market, then it's a travesty. This can't be tolerated. Something must be done. I just find it ironic how this website cheers for the destruction of the financial industry and all it's workers. Article after article about the big bank layoffs and the out of work traders. Yet when their industry is affected, it's time to take action. Hypocrites.....the lot of them!
America is the #1 economy in the world because of their natural resources. About the brain department, they always had to grab it from other countries. You can study something no matter how high level in the USA, it will always be a multiple choice question on your test. That is unheard of in most European countries. I wonder how much students would pass a test if they had an empty list to choose from as their answer as most of the rest of the world. Maybe that's a reason why the USA needs so many foreign brains. Fact is, the american math level fore example is one of the lowest in the world in the developed countries: http://www.education.com/magazine/article/waiting-superman-means-parents/ 2. America is an under-educated superpower. On international tests, American children rank 25th in math and 21st in science, despite the push for greater accountability through No Child Left Behind. This 2002 law pledged that 100% of kids would be reading and doing math at grade level within ten years, but 8 years later the test scores look ominous: only 14% of Mississippi students, 30% of NY students, and 24% of California kids are proficient in math. Nationwide, only 20-34 percent of kids in the United States are currently reading at grade level. Whatâs more, although America is falling behind in math, our kids are first in confidence. American students get terrible math scores compared to their international peers, but they think theyâre great in mathâin fact, they have more confidence in their math skills than students from any other country. MAYBE YOU CAN STOP GIVING MEDALS TO AMERICAN KIDS WHEN THEY ARE JUST 'PARTICIPATING'
Thank you for bringing up this theme. They cheer when the "competition" got beatten, and complain when the game can't be played anymore.
They indeed deserved it. If they wouldn't flip screens with zero risk in the past and making money daily by helping their buddy out on the floor when the other day that buddy helped them out, only screwing the customer, I couldn't be more happy that they can't make money anymore with zero risk on the back of the customer. So screw them. Once they have to do something like 'pick a direction up or down' and it's not working, I'm glad they need to do something else. You call them traders? Bah wanna see a losing trader? Show me an old floor trader. Even your hero his work is based on somebody elses work and I'm pretty sure he couldn't make the same money as he did when he saw somebody come on the floor needed to sell.
The real issue with the H1-B Visa is that it is a form of indentured servitude. The Visa holder is sponsored by the corporation and cannot change jobs. This means that the company can offer any absurdly low (by U.S. standards) wage that it wants and the H1-B Visa holder cannot simply walk down the road to a higher paying company. This situation artificially depresses wages in the U.S. tech sector. I would support increasing H1-B Visas if they were set-up so a visa holder was not locked into an employer - so if the employer paid a sub-standard wage then the H1-B holder could simply walk down the road to a better paying job any time during the visa term. After all this is what "free market" is all about.
I have seen a great change in the quality of H1-B Visa holders over the past 30 years. Early in my career if a Visa holder joined your team then the team was ecstatic - the guy usually was an expert, smart as heck, and added great value to your project. The individual was normally paid a wage comparable to any skilled U.S. citizen in the same job role. Now most most of the H1-B visa holders sent to the U.S. are of mediocre quality. As an example of this - let me provide my experience every time we post a programming job. We get a pile of resumes from these Indian consulting firms - each of the resumes are exactly the same except for the person's name and address. The resume material indicates that the person is an expert for every single item that you listed in your job advertisement. Sadly, executives demand these consultants be hired because they are cheap. When they actually show up over here we quickly find out that the purported C++ expert has never programmed a line of code in C++.