AOL to fire 1200 people, I heard they're hiring in India

[rchiu]

How much do you think we were paying our H1B software engineers straight out of college?

heh, well you are talking about 4.0GPA top 5 CS/Engineering major who kick ass in programming and Hacp is talking about some liberal art guy pretending to be a programmer and hoping to land a software engineering job.

Of course those fake software guys need to lower their expectation and not expect 6 figures and 5 offers every time they wanna get a new job.

 

[halik]

You just don't get it. We are short on TALENTED workers. I have 10 requisitions open for software engineers which are slow to get filled even though we must have interviewed over 100 people and I don't even know how many resumes get screened out. And we STILL hired 4 H1B's, of which two of them left for more money (we pay H1B's the same salary AND incur the cost of their sponsorship)!

THIS x 10000000

There's a difference between tech support monkeys that follow flow chart and qualified, educated and skilled employees. Bill Gates wants more h1bs because he needs PH.D - level talent, not to replace people fixing his printers.

One of my good friend is in his last year or so of CS Ph.D. at Michigan and as a white American, he's a minority in the program. Same thing for another friend doing comp. neuroscience PhD at Chicago.

Hell even my Master's program at Michigan was 45% foreign kids from asia.

People need to wake up and realize that mediocrity makes you compete with the rest of the uneducated world. Supply and demand.

 

[BigDH01]

You just don't get it. We are short on TALENTED workers. I have 10 requisitions open for software engineers which are slow to get filled even though we must have interviewed over 100 people and I don't even know how many resumes get screened out. And we STILL hired 4 H1B's, of which two of them left for more money (we pay H1B's the same salary AND incur the cost of their sponsorship)!

This statement reflects exactly the kind of thinking that protectionists are trying to prevent.

What you are really saying in this statement is not that we are short on talented workers, it's that we are short on talented workers for your position. There are clearly talented engineers out there and they have a market price. The fact that you can't fill your need for talented workers is simply the byproduct of one of two things: you are not paying that market price or you are not signaling to potential applicants that you are paying market price. That you lost half of your H1Bs to higher offers suggests to me that you are not paying what the market demands.

Your solution, more H1Bs, answers the problem of "not enough people at the salary we are offering." You are trying to bring the equilibrium price for this kind of talent down to a level that is more affordable without saying as much. This argument won't move protectionists.

Your only real solution for the time being is to increase the salary you are offering or lower your expectations. You could also outsource, but the mention of that will probably result in a much longer off-topic discussion.

 

[1prophet]

THIS x 10000000

There's a difference between tech support monkeys that follow flow chart and qualified, educated and skilled employees. Bill Gates wants more h1bs because he needs PH.D - level talent, not to replace people fixing his printers.

One of my good friend is in his last year or so of CS Ph.D. at Michigan and as a white American, he's a minority in the program. Same thing for another friend doing comp. neuroscience PhD at Chicago.

Hell even my Master's program at Michigan was 45% foreign kids from asia.

People need to wake up and realize that mediocrity makes you compete with the rest of the uneducated world. Supply and demand.

It's only going to get worse, America pretends it lives in isolation education wise and can lower standards to meet some politically correct goal and avoid lawsuits but in the end it will have its ass handed to it by foreign students who they are now in competition with.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/12/education/12exit.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

 

[halik]

This statement reflects exactly the kind of thinking that protectionists are trying to prevent.

What you are really saying in this statement is not that we are short on talented workers, it's that we are short on talented workers for your position. There are clearly talented engineers out there and they have a market price. The fact that you can't fill your need for talented workers is simply the byproduct of one of two things: you are not paying that market price or you are not signaling to potential applicants that you are paying market price. That you lost half of your H1Bs to higher offers suggests to me that you are not paying what the market demands.

Your solution, more H1Bs, answers the problem of "not enough people at the salary we are offering." You are trying to bring the equilibrium price for this kind of talent down to a level that is more affordable without saying as much. This argument won't move protectionists.

Your only real solution for the time being is to increase the salary you are offering or lower your expectations. You could also outsource, but the mention of that will probably result in a much longer off-topic discussion.

To some extent you have a point,
but if the salary was indeed too low, they'd have no one to interview either. But generally yes, increase the salary offered and you'll get more candidates.

On the other hand, I would argue that increasing the supply of highly qualified people (H1b and otherwise) is a net positive and just about the only way for the US to retain it's competitive edge.

I would even go on and make the argument that the supply of Ph.D. level talent is shrinking, just given that larger and larger portion of the US phd candidates are foreign. So more h1bs would just keep the market in the standing equilibrium.

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

Yes, I do support an overall lowering of salaries in the US because it will subsequently make things cheaper but if you have one field bear the burden, no one will want to enter that field and we won't have any programmers in the future.

I suggest you be the first to give back your wages to your employer. Let us know how that works for you.

 

[BigDH01]

To some extent you have a point,
but if the salary was indeed too low, they'd have no one to interview either. But generally yes, increase the salary offered and you'll get more candidates.

On the other hand, I would argue that increasing the supply of highly qualified people (H1b and otherwise) is a net positive and just about the only way for the US to retain it's competitive edge.

I would even go on and make the argument that the supply of Ph.D. level talent is shrinking, just given that larger and larger portion of the US phd candidates are foreign. So more h1bs would just keep the market in the standing equilibrium.

The whole argument that JS80 makes boils down to, "increase supply, reduce prices."

I'm not going to argue if protectionism is right or wrong, because frankly, I don't think it matters. In a world with extremely mobile capital it's not very relevant.

I'm looking into PhD programs in Mechanical/Chemical/Electrical engineering that really involve Bioengineering as I'm interested in BioMEMS and NEMS. I have not talked to a single American (I mean born in America) professor. This somewhat bothers me, not because foreigners have this info, but because Americans seemingly don't. I have no doubt that there are Americans out there that could conduct research and become experts in this area so I'm assuming they don't care or they don't believe this knowledge is valuable. I imagine if I went to MBA programs or business PhDs, I would find a much greater number of Americans. I get the sense most Americans want to be Gordon Gecko.

Sorry for the sloppy grammar, in a hurry to get to photonics .