How will Qualcomm layoffs affect SD area?

...and regress. The aforementioned IBM has hung through many cycles of regress, regress, progress, regress, regress, regress... While some other firms surged way ahead but eventually flamed out (Digital, Control Data). But then a lot of it is not-necessarily-warranted reputation. Ask any manager in the 1970s and 1980s about computers and you got a knee-jerk "IBM"; they didn't even know about the BUNCH (Burroughs, Sperry/Remington Univac, NCR, Control Data, Honeywell), nor DEC, nor Data General. They'd get this puzzled look on their faces if you mentioned any of them. I ascribe it to more evil influence from the frat-boy B-schools. I had a friend and a protege working on developing an OS for IBM (another thing on which the firm was clueless until they glommed onto Unix) at the Rat's Mouth facility in southern FL when Billy Gates's mommy pulled some strings with the board for him to broker the deal to sell someone else's OS to them. But at least they did pay the guy who had developed it, and hired him, and kept him as a consultant for quite some time after that.
— September 9, 2015 3:37 p.m.

How will Qualcomm layoffs affect SD area?

Yes. An older example is Nicolaus Otto, who had to drop out of school when his father died. He sold groceries, but ran across an article about a Frenchman's engine improvements. He got together with a machinist and made some improvements in the internal combustion engine. He had a couple employees who thought they were much better than he because they graduated from university and they eventually quit; one was Gottfried Daimler. Nicolaus's son founded another little firm known as BMW, but Otto & Cie. still exists under the name Deutz.
— September 9, 2015 3:14 p.m.

U.S. adds so-so 169,000 jobs in August, while June-July revised down

I don't see much of an excess in the math requirements for CS majors. Knowing the concepts helps in collaborative efforts with mathematicians. We've been seeing chronic unemployment and under-employment in STEM fields since at least 1987. We used to have a de facto apprentice system before H-1B. Employers would invest in 2-12 weeks of new-hire training and 2 weeks or more per year of retained employee training. But they first eroded and then eliminated the tax breaks for interview expenses, relocation expenses, and much of the education and training expeenses and locked into bodyshopping, instead. We've had a jobs dearth of about 30 million for a couple years (based on current and historical employment/population ratios from BLS). That's a misrepresentation of what Mittens said.
— September 19, 2013 12:33 p.m.

San Diego’s Qualcomm is the fifth-largest user of H-1B talent

"want to keep tech salaries -- and other salaries -- low." In the 1930s, the government wanted to sustain excessive price levels, thinking that this would keep salaries/wages from falling, so they destroyed crops and livestock. They didn't understand that, if you want value/goods, they have to be produced, first. When you destroy the goods people are made worse off. When it comes to supply and demand and price balancing, in this case, the government has increased the supply of currency, thus lowering its value relative to goods and services. People holding currency lose value when that is done, but not people holding other intellectual and physical assets. I'm not sure how they're keeping the devaluation of the currency within a box, as it were, but they've been doing some of this since about 1980. The job markets have been noticeably weaker since then (with more bodyshopping, longer durations of unemployment...), whether because of it or coincidence from other law and reg changes. It may explain the divergence of CPI from PPI, or that may be just due to a change in definitions. What it boils down to, though, is that the pols have been having their cake and eating it, too, and want to go on doing so without limit, but the economic system inherently knows better, and naturally tries to re-establish sanity, which the pols resist ever more aggressively. The correction is and will continue to be devastating until they stop their fraudulent games.
— January 11, 2013 9:35 a.m.

San Diego’s Qualcomm is the fifth-largest user of H-1B talent

"responsibility to communities, employees, vendors, customers" That's a bit too hand-wavy, for me. I just want the message driven home that they should not initiate force or fraud and should not violate people's privacy (keeping info longer and/or abusing it for different purposes than those the customer or employee believed it was being used at the time of a transaction, for instance). "I was told of one study..." There have been dozens, but 3-4 in particular by B. Lindsay Lowell and Hal Salzman (separately and together) concluded that we've been producing 2-3 times as many DEGREED US citizen STEM workers as we've been employing to do STEM work. Search for econ01NoShortage which links to a recent article about it in a 2011 July Chronicle Higher Education, and EPI article in 2012 December, congressional testimony to the same effect... From that same page: "Lowell, [in 2009 October] noting that U.S. colleges and universities produce 3 times [as many] STEM graduates every year [as] the number of STEM jobs available." He repeated this in a recent panel discussion. Matloff used to have a long-posted and several times updated article which pointed to numerous earlier research reports which concluded there was no shortage, but has withdrawn it in favor of his newer work.
— January 11, 2013 9:08 a.m.

San Diego’s Qualcomm is the fifth-largest user of H-1B talent

"Food and energy prices are sky high" And the last several weeks. The weight or volume of containers go down but the price per container tends to stay the same for a while. Sometimes, price increases are masked by shifts to cheaper materials or cheaper workmanship (faster methods which aren't quite as good); this is more often seen in tools, clothing, automobiles, houses. Many measures of price levels fail to take these into account. The BLS issued a statement that they hadn't been engaged in playing such games, yet, out here in the real world, our costs of living seem to be exploding. And there's an odd divergence between CPI and PPI. In ye olden days, the WPI and PPI and CPI and the implicit GNP deflator and the implicit GDP deflator tracked each other very very closely. Over the last 30 years or so there has been a huge divergence of CPI from PPI.
— January 11, 2013 8:45 a.m.

San Diego’s Qualcomm is the fifth-largest user of H-1B talent

I'd nominate Fred_Williams for dean of the business college... any business college, except that, if he taught them that, the reaction among the B-school students would be, "Wow! Great idea! Let's tell everyone we know and go do more of this!"
— January 10, 2013 6:25 a.m.

San Diego’s Qualcomm is the fifth-largest user of H-1B talent

I'd go further than Dr. Matloff. The only "reports" which claim "talent shortage" come from polls of STEM execs, but I've never seen an actual market or statistical study which examined supply and demand and price (compensation) that came to that conclusion.
— January 10, 2013 6:23 a.m.

Fed H-1B Visa Probes May Help American Engineers

Correction: the State Department says they issue over 100K H-1B visas per year; in light of that, the supposed "limits" or "caps" are irrelevant. Prof. Matloff uses the term "fraud" only for certain kinds of fraud related to the H-1B visa program, and thus asserts that fraud is only a relatively minor aspect of the problem. I, OTOH, consider the whole "best and brightest" claim to be intentionally fraudulent from the start, the "innovative" claims are largely fraudulent, some of the educational credentials and experience claims by visa applicants are fraudulent (as shown by the back-pedalling and wailing when USCIS started actually cross-checking such claims), the "limits" or "caps" are fraudulent, the "talent shortage" claims are fraudulent, the vast majority of assertions about who and how "qualified" job candidates are to be fraudulent, the capable STEM work-force estimates are at the very least well below the reality, claims about how "difficult" it is to recruit STEM talent turn out to be fraudulent on examination, the advice commonly dished out by immigration and employment lawyers merely dances along the fringes of fraudulence... Everything surrounding this cluster of issues is soaked in fraud.
— February 8, 2012 4:32 p.m.

Are American Engineers in Short Supply?

There also seems to be a large talent pool of skilled US workers who are being displaced by cheap, pliant foreign labor . http://www.kermitrose.com/econ10PersonalToll.html . There are software architects and engineers who, before H-1B was hatched, could get 10 interviews and 9 offers within a couple months, complete with full relocation and new-hire training packages. There weren't any "phone screening" trivial pursuit tests. When they called it was to ask your flight preferences. After H-1B, US candidaes are lucky to get one pre-screen call-back from a "recruiter" per year. Executives don't want to fly US candidates in for interviews, or relocate, or invest in either new-hire or retained employee training, but do invest a great deal of effort in trumping up pretexts on which to reject all US applicants. Before H-1B (and resume parser systems), the requirements lists were fairly short, did not include specific versions or brand names of tools but mentioned kinds of tools, and described one job. Sometimes, they would mention familiarity with a particular area of application. They focused on capabilities, and assumed you'd be part of a work-team including multiple specialists (mathematicians, statisticians, data-base analysts, mechanical engineers, medical doctors, software engineers) who must be able to communicate and work together. Now the requirements are long, insist on particular brand names and versions down to the third level, and listed in combinations appropriate for 3 or 4 different employees (e.g. software product developer, data-base admin, sys admin, pre-sales support). They focus on buzz-words, not abilities and knowledge. The irony of the hyper-credentialism and over-specificity of requirements is that most of the "skills" are things that any savvy US pro could pick up in between a couple hours and a couple weeks from scratch, but many tend to have experience with very similar tools which would greatly shorten their learning curves. There's a lot less emphasis on nuts and bolts science and engineering, and more on bidness, accounting, massive data-bases, privacy violation schemes... Judging from the jobs advertised, there's much more bodyshopping (contingent, contract, consulting, temp, services, bidness process services) and far less real employment (long-term employment designing, developing and improving great software products).
— March 10, 2011 12:18 p.m.