From: vijay gill
[mailto:vgill@vijaygill.com]
Sent: Monday, August 13, 2007 2:48 AM
To: dave@farber.net
Cc: ip@v2.listbox.com
Subject: Re: [IP] Jobs
On 8/4/07, Dave Farber <dave@farber.net> wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: Stephen Unger [mailto:unger@cs.columbia.edu]
Sent: Sunday, August 05, 2007 6:19 AM
To: Dave Farber
Subject: Jobs
Dave,
I hope you will find this interesting enough to post on ip.
Steve
..............
There is a lot going on with respect to the jobs of computer people
and other engineers. The old cries of shortages are being raised in
the context of efforts to increase H-1B allotments. At the same time
there is much talk about what should be done about
"guest workers" of
a different category: those at the bottom of the economic heap, mostly
from Mexico and central America. Economists express horror at the idea
of laws that might protect American workers from the outsourcing
process that seems to be moving the US into the third world category.
I believe we have to look beyond slogans and rigid economic
ideology. To begin with, we need to debunk the nonsense about
shortages. I have taken a crack at clarifying this murky situation
in
an essay entitled, "Jobs", that can be found at:
http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~unger/myBlog/endsandmeansblog.html
............
Speaking as a hiring manager, this jumps out at me
" Altho most employers deny this, the real motivation for hiring H-1B's is
that they can be paid less and, secondarily, due to the circumstances of their
employment, they can be worked harder. Estimates are that an H-1B can be hired
for roughly 25% less than the going rate for similarly qualified Americans.
There is a shortage of technical people only in the sense that it might be hard
to find people with very specific skill sets who are willing to work for a low
salary."
No, the real motivation with hiring H-1Bs is that I am not seeing enough
qualified candidates coming through. And when I say enough qualified candidates
I don't mean people with a certain set of checkboxes on their resumes. I am
hiring for specialized skillsets and talent, and people with the talent to do
the job aren't always available here. In my industry (internet ops), as it is
with software, the best people are 5x to 10x better (productive, faster at root
cause analysis, internal metrics du jour) than the average candidate. So
obviously, I try to hire for the best people, and unfortunately, the best
people are hard to come by. So we cast a wide net. If we were king widgets with
people being interchangeable widget slotters, the above argument doesn't hold.
Also, re: the salary requirement - for the top folks, salary doesn't motivate
as much as many other things, I try not to have a coin-op shop, and I think we
are better for it.
/vijay