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It has nothing to do with a conspiracy. Just go to any good university and look at their Computer Science department (or for that matter, check their Accounting, Finance, Biochemistry, Mechanical, Electronics, Instrumental departments). I bet more than 50% of the class will be foreign students or kids of first generation immigrants. This in turn translates to 50% of highly educated workforce being international students who would eventually work on H1B before they get their green cards.
It all has to do with the importance of education and willingness to work hard (which is a result of over population and extreme competition). Millions, I really mean millions, are graduating from universities in India and China every year. A very small fraction of that has the means to go to US, Australia, England, Canada, Singapore, etc. for higher education. Most of them work very hard and go on to succeed in their career.
You have a point. my mistake though that its not the H1B visa quota some lobbyists are fighting for but the quota of how many are processed for greencards. In the past, there were lot of indians and chinese being sent home because they didnt make it to greencard status in time. That was corrected during Clinton I believe.
The line to get the greencard is by country and processing indians and chinese has a very big backlog so they wanted to change the rules so the unfilled quota for other countries can be used for the indians/chinese. I guess the issue there is the slippery slope theory, that we'll be processing too many from those nations. Citizenship is more of a privilege than just filling the jobs
One thing I dont understand is why would this pass with a repub president and not with a dem president. Then theres that commercial about stopping more H1b processing because we/US has those talents/skills already. Obviously certain groups are promising votes to each side but the republican side smells a little fishy
You are right. And that's exactly why I said H1B workers are very mobile in the first 3-4 years of ther 7 year H1B visa term. In the first 3-4 years, they test the market, take chances, change jobs a number of times, reach 2-3x their original salary and then find a job/employer where they will stay for another 3-4 years so they can file their green card.
About changing from Company A to Company B, that's a piece of cake. There are hundreds of employment agencies/body shoppers who will sponsor their H1B visa transfer for a cut of their pay (e.g. H1B candidate gets employed at XYZ Corp at $110/hr; his employer Company A being a tier 2 vendor gets $85. They retain $25 as their cut and pay $60 to the candidate).
With software engineers who have H1B visas, the vast majority work for some sort of contracting firm that companies can hire at will. I used a few firms like that. We would get someone on an H1B visa who legally works for the contracting company, the contracting company would fly him/her to us for a year long job, then move that person to a new company when they are done. We had a few people on for close to five years who legally worked for the contracting company the entire time, so you can definitely get around the move from company A to B, in the software developer role at least.
there is one decent point in the article, which is
Quote:
The biggest users of these visas are not the tech companies that are calling for an increase in the quotas. They are outsourcing firms that hire foreign workers and loan them to other companies.
otherwise though i disagree. there is a shortage, if you amend the title to missing competent software engineers. i have never, ever, once in my life heard someone i knew who was both a good programmer and also had to hire other programmers say that there was not a shortage of good programmers. most people i know who claim there are plenty of programmers out there either aren't good programmers, don't have to conduct interviews of programmers, or both
put another way, every software group looking to hire is pretty much desperate. even profitable firms. google hires voraciously
the best description of what hiring software engineers i've seen is here:
Those 200 resumes you got from Craigslist? Those consist of the one guy who happened to be good, but he's only applying for a job because his wife wants to be nearer to her family, and the usual floating population of 199 people who apply for every single job and are qualified for none. And now you think you're being "super selective" but you're not, it's just a statistical fallacy.
this echos my own experience back when i used to hire programmers. tons of people would come in and be unable to perform simple hello world exercises. meanwhile the folks i know who are good programmers are never, ever unemployed. these guys agree:
I ask them to pull a list of records with null employee_ids in a dummy table with 10 records.
SELECT employee, employee_id
FROM tb_employee
WHERE employee_id = null
i think that's actually wrong. at least for some dbms systems. you have to say "employee_id is null" - using the "is" operator rather than the equality "=" operator. the reason is that some dbms systems will evaluate null = null as false. iirc, i got bit by that once on MSSQL 7
i agree with you in your principle though and i wouldn't use remembering that particular fact about null equality logic in an interview since it's such a non intuitive thing and in fact is a debated topic
i also don't know if MS's implementation differs from the ANSI standard. if i had to pick a language for "least standardized" i'd nominate SQL, sadly
also i do understand some folks aren't in top form in an interview - nervous, surprised, etc. but like you i've had "experienced" applicants fail at things that were basically "hello world"
EDIT - in case you care why, consider what would happen on an inner join on a column with some nulls if (null = null) evaluated to true. that's a quick and dirty explanation, and makes me think most/all dbms will handle it this way
Last edited by OdysseusNY; 08-22-2013 at 06:02 PM..
yeah, it's wrong, at least on MSSQL. try "select 'hello world' where (null = null)" and you get an empty result set. "select 'hello world' where (null is null)" gives the expected single row result set
anyway, i'll go back to my dark basement now. everyone else, carry on
It has nothing to do with a conspiracy. Just go to any good university and look at their Computer Science department (or for that matter, check their Accounting, Finance, Biochemistry, Mechanical, Electronics, Instrumental departments). I bet more than 50% of the class will be foreign students or kids of first generation immigrants. This in turn translates to 50% of highly educated workforce being international students who would eventually work on H1B before they get their green cards.
I attended a good university and have been involved with other good universities (comp eng, comp sci, human-computer interaction, physics, and economics) and I can honestly say that there's few foreign students and first generation immigrants. The ones that are first generation are 1.5 generation immigrants. There's a lot of second generation immigrants, however. Primarily from Asian and East European countries.
there is one decent point in the article, which is
otherwise though i disagree. there is a shortage, if you amend the title to missing competent software engineers. i have never, ever, once in my life heard someone i knew who was both a good programmer and also had to hire other programmers say that there was not a shortage of good programmers. most people i know who claim there are plenty of programmers out there either aren't good programmers, don't have to conduct interviews of programmers, or both
put another way, every software group looking to hire is pretty much desperate. even profitable firms. google hires voraciously
the best description of what hiring software engineers i've seen is here:
this echos my own experience back when i used to hire programmers. tons of people would come in and be unable to perform simple hello world exercises. meanwhile the folks i know who are good programmers are never, ever unemployed. these guys agree:
A lot of competent software engineers are not great programmers. While it helps, one does not need to be a great programmer to be a great software engineer.
I attended a good university and have been involved with other good universities (comp eng, comp sci, human-computer interaction, physics, and economics) and I can honestly say that there's few foreign students and first generation immigrants. The ones that are first generation are 1.5 generation immigrants. There's a lot of second generation immigrants, however. Primarily from Asian and East European countries.
CCNY's MS CS program is has a large majority of foreigners, primarily south asian. i am sure of this as i saw the stats once. i'm not sure about their undergrad program, but at the very least it is a large minority. if i had to guess, i would say a majority if you include 1st gen, a minority if you don't
columbia's grad CS program is majority too i think, at least at the MS level. but i am not sure on that one
of course, NYC programs are skewed
my ugrad CS program was primarily domestic but that was over 10 years ago
CCNY's MS CS program is has a large majority of foreigners, primarily south asian. i am sure of this as i saw the stats once. i'm not sure about their undergrad program, but at the very least it is a large minority. if i had to guess, i would say a majority if you include 1st gen, a minority if you don't
columbia's grad CS program is majority too i think, at least at the MS level. but i am not sure on that one
of course, NYC programs are skewed
my ugrad CS program was primarily domestic but that was over 10 years ago
Well, he referred to good schools. CCNY is out.
I've taught CS at Columbia (Undergrad). They're makeup is mostly second generation immigrants and white people. I did my undergrad in CS at Princeton... it was mostly second gen asian and white people.
I was at UPitt and CMU during the same semester once... UPitt had quite a bit of foreigners while CMU did not... they had some... but nowhere near 50%.
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and i wouldn't use remembering that particular fact about null equality logic in an interview since it's such a non intuitive thing and in fact is a debated topic
