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Are American Engineers in Short Supply?
The 60% figure seems to be made up. US citizens earned 82% of CS degrees, 79.5% of engineering degrees, and 85.9% of all STEM degrees in the USA according to the 2008 figures from the US Dept of Education's NCES (where STEM includes biology, communications technology, computer and information sciences, engineering, engineering technology, physical sciences, mathematics and statistics). But counts and percentages of degrees earned don't tell the whole story. NSF reported some time ago, that 44% of professional computer wranglers in the USA did not have degrees with majors in computing, and about 22% of engineers did not have degrees with majors in engineering, and that would seem to include those with minors in those fields, those with degrees in completely different fields (some of the best software developers have backgrounds in music, classical languages, psychology, etc.), people who have no degrees but may have some university education (from 1 to 130 credit hours which may or may not fit into the rigid combinations of degree requirements), and autodidacts -- those who bought the books and the tools and learned on their own. Still, the academics who study STEM job markets have been reporting that we've been turningout about 3 times as many US citizens with STEM degrees as we've been employing in STEM jobs. How many US citizen non-founder autodidact STEM workers have Jacobs and other tech execs been hiring over the last 20 years? And why focus on new young college grads instead of looking at the huge pool of bright, industrious, experienced US STEM workers who are unemployed and underemployed?— March 10, 2011 11:29 a.m.
Are American Engineers in Short Supply?
That inspired me to check the numbers of new visas issued: 278,168 H visas; 110,367 H-1B visas; 353,798 F (student) visas (which feed into the OPT and H-1B visa programs); 345,541 J (exchange) visas (ditto); 124,275 L visas (which are commonly abused as substitutes for H-1B visas); 2191 E-3 visas... all in fiscal year 2009, and these only count new visas issued by US consulates and embassies abroad, but do not count those applicants initially rejected by DoS and they don't count change of status from some other category to each of these visa types if the person is already in the USA. Even without considering that those numbers significantly under-represent the numbers currently in the USA on each kind of visa, each one of those is between 10 and 80 times reasonable levels. I've spoken with some of the people with H-1B visas who work at Qualcomm and the neighboring tech offices -- just casually talking shop about software design, the merits of this programming language vs. that for various purposes, IDEs, data-base analysis methodologies, hard vs. soft real-time programming and such, as I would with anyone else in the field -- and they're not "best" or "brightest", nor do they have knowledge not otherwise widely available among the huge pool of unemployed and underemployed US citizen STEM job candidates.— March 9, 2011 10 a.m.
Are American Engineers in Short Supply?
"Under H-1B, foreigners with at least a bachelor’s degree take jobs in a variety of fields including biotech and law." and fashion modeling. Don't forget those highly-skilled fashion models who are vitally necessary to innovation in the American economy because we obviously have a terrible shortage of gorgeous women with stony expressions who walk funny. USCIS says that they approved these numbers of H-1B applicants who lacked the equivalent of a US high school diploma: year number 2000 554 2001 247 2002 169 2003 148 2004 123 2005 107 2006 96 2007 72 2008 80 2009 108 And who lacked the equivalent of a US bachelor's degree: 2000 2986 2001 3983 2002 2655 2003 2249 2004 1803 2005 1345 2006 914 2007 913 2008 643 2009 829 so the equivalent of a bachelor's degree is apparently not a genuine requirement, though it is mentioned in the statute, as is not harming the employment prospects and compensation of US citizens, which is equally ignored. Of course, USCIS has violated the statute, before, when they withheld for several years annual publication of the required statistics on characteristics of those approved for H-1Bs.— March 9, 2011 9:29 a.m.
Comparatively, Tech Workers Haul in Bucks in San Diego
"The DOL requires employers to pay wages that are at least equal to the actual wage paid to other workers with similar experience and qualifications for the job, pay the prevailing wage for the job, whichever is greater." That's not quite honest. They are supposedly required to pay the "prevailing wage", but "prevailing wage" is a term of art and not what it is intended to seem to the public to mean, not the actual local market compensation for the specific work, experience, credentials, etc. It's by the "job title", and not linked to credentials, experience, etc. They are supposed to provide similar benefit packages, but, because guest-workers are "temporary" workers, they receive "temporary worker" benefit packages which are quite a bit less than real employees. And by the time it's all filtered through a bodyshop, the actual compensation ends up being, as Vandrevala confessed, 25% to 35% below that of US STEM workers with real jobs (note that Miano had found hourly rates for guest-workers that were "only" 12%-15% below local market compensation). An employer can even pay all of his, e.g. "software developers" at a particular facility well below local market compensation, and thus rationalize also underpaying the guest-workers. They can legally put a person into a position that is well below his abilities and experience, but have them do any work in the range from the level of job they're being paid for to what they're able to do, and thus pay them well below the local market compensation. Then there's the "we consider you to be salaried professionals" scam by which they avoid paying at all for hours worked over 40 per week, let alone the "time and a half" that is the norm... and don't try to get by working only 40 hours per week, either. That's not to imply I have a lot of respect for academic credentials. I've seen great software product developers doing R&D on commercial products, who were still in high school, some who had only a year or two of university course-work, and others who had degrees in music or psychology or Latin and Greek literature. One firm profiled in the Wall Street Journal said they hired only programmers with music backgrounds and said they had lower turn-over and absenteeism, and better esprit de corp. One of the illegal under-payment scams publicized in 2006 by an investigative reporter... let's see... Matt Wickenheiser of the _Portland ME Press Herald_, was applying on the basis of the guest-worker being located in a low cost of living/low pay work-place, but using a mail-drop or rented closet "office" and actually sending the guest-worker to a high cost of living/high pay location to do the job. There was a more recent case of a bodyshop with a phony office in Iowa and work being done in New Jersey; and they even tried to beat up and otherwise lean on the whistle-blower... who was wearing a wire. Gotcha! :B-)— January 10, 2011 11:48 a.m.
Comparatively, Tech Workers Haul in Bucks in San Diego
"I don't get it. You like having good foreign students coming here (displacing locals), but you don't want them to stay and apply that knowledge for the benefit of American companies after they graduate?" You're mistaken from the start. I like having a few hundred of the very best foreign students each year immigrate to the USA after getting at least the equivalent of a BS abroad. I do not like the vastly excessive flood of hundreds of thousands per year of mediocre (and worse) foreign students (and exchange visitors) we've seen over the last 50 years. (And we definitely do not need any more Farooque Ahmeds or Faisal Shahzads!) I do not like the massive transfer of knowledge, intellectual property, defense secrets, and advanced capital equipment (machine tools, chip-making equipment, computers, night-vision...) and billions of dollars of financial investment from the USA to Red China and India, which is facilitated by the wide-open student and exchange visas, internship, guest-work, off-shoring pipe-line.— January 10, 2011 11:03 a.m.
Comparatively, Tech Workers Haul in Bucks in San Diego
Some time back I touched base with some economists of my acquaintance. One was in VietNam when I wrote, and observed that Intel had with much fanfare announced they were going to open a facility there to employ several thousand. They placed ads and got tens of thousands of applicants for EE positions. None of them were remotely up to snuff. But they had expected that. They took less than a handful to begin training. The workers are so cheap that the execs planned on a series of recruiting "events", spread over years, and selection of a fraction of one percent of the best of the low-quality applicants, and a huge investment in training there over a period of years before the factory would be ready to begin operation. These days, a chip fab costs a couple billion dollars, but they get land grants and 10 and 20 year tax breaks to place them in various places in Asia, but are strictly held to agreements on numbers of local citizens they have to hire. USA states have been known to hand out $19M in incentives and then openly allow the facility to be staffed by guest-workers, albeit graduated from "local colleges", and in far lower numbers than promised in the original deal. IOW, they're free and easy with US tax-victims' money and resources to subsidize firms typically from Indian and Red China.— January 10, 2011 9:38 a.m.
Comparatively, Tech Workers Haul in Bucks in San Diego
"The attitude is that the stockholder is the board's only constituency" Close. The board and C*Os are their own constituency. Look at how hard they've struggled over the last 8 years or so against even token, symbolic, advisory stock-owner votes on approval/rejection of board and executive compensation packages, and opportunity to nominate candidates for the board. Look at the scams to pump up the stock value temporarily so that the executives get their "performance" bonuses, and then let that value drop back to something closer to market values. Come to think of it, look at the performance bonuses they've gotten as stock prices plummeted.— January 10, 2011 9:26 a.m.
Comparatively, Tech Workers Haul in Bucks in San Diego
A STEM degree requires more intelligence to begin with, more work to learn the material (more course hours, class-room time, labs, after-hours work, etc.), and more expensive books and materials and classes. Of course, those who are good at it should be paid more than average. In fact, since the very best can produce more than the next 12, they should be paid quite a bit more. Some guest-workers are well-educated at US tax-victim expense. Most are savvy BSers. Very few are actually bright. Most guest-workers are in the bottom quartile according to US DoL, and an examination of the job descriptions and pay show that even the near-best of them are doing mediocre work at mediocre tasks. Even those sponsored for green cards are typically paid only 1.001 times the median, while Tata's Vandrevala admitted that they're typically paid 25%-35% below US local market compensation. We need to bar those mediocre visa applicants, and pick the genuinely best and brightest -- the top 0.5% -- for admission to our universities and guest-work opportunities. Dozens of university/academic studies show we've long been producing as many as 3 times the number of US citizen STEM workers demanded for STEM work. graphs of numbers of degrees earned (US DoE NCES), pay (not total compensation), employment, unemployment, duration of unemployment, BLS IT and STEM work-force estimates, etc.: http://www.kermitrose.com/jgoEconData.html— January 10, 2011 9:17 a.m.