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Or lower your standards and make a plan to promote in company education, make the specialized work force you need yourself!
EDIT: I appreciate the responses. Raising the fee is probably the wrong idea.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a tough question, because I would generally prefer to allow the market to set employment and wage levels. The problem here is that employers in high tech are asking for special consideration - granting green cards specifically to STEM degrees. Unfortunately, this puts us in the position of playing favorites through government - we're deciding that there "should" be more engineers than we're getting at current…
I understand your point, but if you prefer to allow the market to set employment and wage level, you should be for much looser immigration. The government regulating immigration is anything but free market. If the government were to loosen requirement for STEM immigrants, that is having freer market, not less.
If almost every country and profession had equally liberal immigration policies, then yes, I'd agree. But we're not doing this evenly, and I think this is why so many people who hold a favorable general view of immigration nonetheless object to these targeted visa/green card programs. As it stands, I think that adding a green card to every STEM degree (but not every JD, MD, MBA, DDS, etc) will end up creating market distortions that will probably just further deter US citizens from entering this field, amplifying the cycle of "shortages" and perhaps eventually creating exactly the "crisis" that the policy is intended to address.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a tough question, because I would generally prefer to allow the market to set employment and wage levels. The problem here is that employers in high tech are asking for special consideration - granting green cards specifically to STEM degrees. Unfortunately, this puts us in the position of playing favorites through government - we're deciding that there "should" be more engineers than we're getting at current…
I understand your point, but if you prefer to allow the market to set employment and wage level, you should be for much looser immigration. The government regulating immigration is anything but free market. If the government were to loosen requirement for STEM immigrants, that is having freer market, not less.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They can hardly be blamed for not wanting to go live in rainy Seattle, work under someone as uninspiring as Steve Ballmer, and put up with awful stack ranking BS.
Seattle seems like a great place to live to me. I would jump at the chance to move there! But MS might be a tougher sell. ;)
Or you could find a position at the many Seattle-area employers willing to relocate you: Google, Adobe, Boeing, Valve, a whole grip of game companies. The world, as it were, is your oyster.
I'm for skilled immigration, but can we please, please rethink the H1B program? At the very least, don't make it so the individual goes out of status the day they leave their job. Give them time to shop around. And get rid of the fee/paperwork every time they switch jobs. Raise the fee to $50k and apply it to the first employer that sponsors them only. More of the risk of holding an H1B needs to go to the first emplo…
How about these companies told to start offering training programs? The US has no shortage of eager workers, some quite creative (which is good for such jobs). The crux of this is companies are devaluing people in general, and don't really give much care about it.
Two of the main issues are that employers have been increasingly unwilling to train new employees, even if they're clearly eager, bright and have the proper basic credentials. Everyone wants to hire seasoned veterans, because logically those people reach a higher level of productivity much faster and require less development talent/skill set wise. While there is a specious logic to this, it's extremely short-sided. Everyone starts at the bottom and needs an opportunity to grow and get their initial experience from somewhere.
Even with experienced individuals, companies often don't want to pay the premium that substantial experience in a field will confer. There were some interesting news stories (don't remember the actual links, but they're easily google-able) about the large numbers of former NASA engineers laid off in the last year having tremendous difficultly finding new employment. The interesting part is that it wasn't that they weren't getting job offers, on the contrary many employers seemed to be eager to hire highly qualified individuals with 20+ years of high quality experience, they just didn't want to pay for it. These people were getting offers that were literally a fraction of the salaries they were commanding previously.
You can't have it both ways. If you want experience, pay for it. Or else invest in less experienced, but otherwise qualified talent.
From the Huffington Post: "The Bureau Of Labor Statistics has released its annual Occupational Employment and Wages report, and the top-paying industries are dominated by health care professionals. In fact, nine of the 10 highest-paid jobs in America are in the health care industry. The only other group that made the top 10 is corporate executives." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/20/top-ten-highest-pai... Here…
I've encountered this sort of response citing the high pay in healthcare before. So I wanted to throw a thought out there for feedback. A relevant point is the "carrying capacity" for healthcare professionals. The USA can probably double the number of people employed in healthcare (using a handwavy argument that that 40 million [edit: I earlier wrote 40%] of the population is uninsured). Note the number of people wit…
I'm also comparing a small field tightly controlled by what I believe is a cartel with a large, generally open market. A PhD in CS is great to have, but there isn't an association of CS PhD's that can bar people with lower degrees (or no degree) from writing code.
Still, I think the comparison is more relevant than you do, because it's a reflection of what people who are academically talented can earn in other fields. If we're going to start talking about how there "should" be more supply of engineers at a current salary level, it does make sense to see what people can earn with degrees that have higher completion rates and often take considerably less time, with lighter undergraduate requirements to boot.