A scheme to lower engineers’ wages

Post by Klockan » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 3:29 PM UTC

beat wrote: post #6

Once when debating the poor quality of programmers with a friend, I said "You know how dumb the average programmer is? By definition, half are even dumber!" He responded, "Only half? Do you mean the mean, the median, or the mode?" And there's the rub. There may not be a shortage of engineers, but there's a serious shortage of good engineers. And I'm not sure more H1B will solve that problem.

Post by Klockan » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 3:34 PM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #11

rguzman wrote: post #7

> A 2013 study by the Economic Policy Institute showed that American universities graduate 50 percent more students in computer, information science, and engineering each year than are hired in those fields This is a reasoning flaw: companies don't need people who graduate from certain fields. They need people with certain skills that are difficult to attain. A degree in those fields is correlated with the skills in…

And companies can only find those skill abroad? And not by - say - offering local graduates lower starter pay but extra training? When everyone is talking about how hard it is to predict hiring outcomes, it's a bit of a stretch to suggest that this problem magically disappears for prospects who happen to be from other countries.

Post by warfangle » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 3:38 PM UTC

bsbechtel wrote: post #20

PaulHoule wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have some familiarity with the "job shops" that hire a lot of H-1Bs, they do advertise for jobs in the US but I will say that the basic business model is something like "charge the customer $120 an hour and pay somebody $35 an hour to do the work" (Now there is some overhead, so this is not as bad as it sounds, but it is pretty bad.) One thing that is fairly shocking is the low pay rates for people with skills that…

My questions is why can't someone else offer these same programmers >$35/hr and steal them away? What's the friction in the market preventing this?

Post by hapless » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 3:44 PM UTC

therealwill wrote: post #19

Sponsoring an H1-B employee, in theory, is always more expensive than an hiring a local because not only do you have to pay an H1-B visa employee the same wage as a local you also have to pay the lawyer and visa fees. Often times employers will also have to provide an employment contract guaranteeing x number of years of employment in order to increase chances of visa approval. In practice, this is not the case. H1-b…

Post by hapless » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 3:46 PM UTC

mc32 wrote: post #12

fsk wrote: post #4

The worst part of importing workers via H1-b is the indentured servant aspect. That makes the H1-b employee more attractive than a comparably-qualified American earning the same salary.

So would you support an effort to make it easier for foreign engineers, sw developers and physicians to come in to get a legal job in the us? Foreign knowledge workers seem to not enjoy the same sympathy low wage immigrants enjoy, perhaps due to the more immediate threat of job stability foreign knowledge workers pose to domestic knowledge workers, even when this fear hasn't been substantiated.