111–120 of 128 posts
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Truly world-class engineers can be brought to the US on O visas. H1Bs are trying to fill a need for good or even great, but not amazing, engineers. Which is why it's a tragedy that so many of the spots go to shitty outsourcing firms for mediocre wages.
They could not get O visa for Linus Torvalds. Not amazing enough, eh?
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They could not get O visa for Linus Torvalds. Not amazing enough, eh?
I haven't seen anything about Linus applying for an O visa and getting denied. Where can I read about that?
This is amazingly bad statistics. The author is using self-reported surveys of STEM majors who didn't work for an SV company to answer the question of what SV companies are looking for. There are giant assumptions: 1) they wanted to work for an SV company 2) they're not deluding themselves about why they didn't get offered an SV job. A much better source would be to actually ask the SV companies why they didn't hire…
I'm more of an observer to the field, so I'm curious, what does a "bad" resume look like? And what kinds of things do you find on those few good ones? My assumptions are that everyone is applying with decent CS background and at least a BS in the field, or is that off?
The biggest secret in software is that we simply don't know how to teach software. Half of all graduates in all relevant programs, at all universities, are simply unhirable. Talented, second-year interns are more valuable than the median graduate.
We know how to take talented students and make them better, but we don't know how to identify talented students early, and we don't know how to make untalented students even barely competent.
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There's freelancing and remote work, which are less restricted. The flow of information between transacting parties is a fairly central problem of economics. It's believed to be why companies exist (since alternatively the logical end point for a perfect free market is a thin gas of individual, rational agents), and it explains the "Market for Lemons". Solving that problem preoccupies a large part of the economy. And…
> The flow of information between transacting parties is a fairly central problem of economics. The prevalence of spammers and scammers is how this manifests on freelancing sites. > the logical end point for a perfect free market is a thin gas of individual, rational agents Is that like, the "heat death" of the market economy? (Of capitalist society, actually.)
It's only a model. Discovering why it's wrong has been very fruitful and instructive for economists.
Given that immigration laws are import quotas, that the free market will fix things is a confused argument. There's no such free market in software engineering labour.
In order to usefully define a market you must define it as a closed system. Otherwise, you can push the price of anything at all to whatever you like simply by "importing" asymptotic quantities from "outside". By the same reasoning, the Second Law of Thermodynamics poses no problem for any creature living on Earth, because we can always import more energy from the Sun.
Strictly speaking, "if you wish to build an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe". Fine, but the rest of us have work to do and can cope with imperfect models.
Of course if Silicon Valley CEOs were smart about immigration they wouldn't try jumping on the "comprehensive immigration reform" bandwagon. Or even pushing for an increase in the number of visas. Instead they should be pushing for a H1B salary floor in the 90k-100k range. This would allow them to claim the majority of the existing H1B pool, and it's hard to argue that jobs like "Food Service Manager" are jobs Americ…
This would never fly politically. "They want to give IMMIGRANTS six-figure jobs while Americans are unemployed???"
Still, the politics are still fraught with TOOK EHR JERBS stuff.
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Depending on the field getting an O visa can be exceptionally hard as they are intended for exceptional people. One of my clients has four or five employees with O visas and these people are all top of their field including a nobel laureate. You could easily be in the top 5% of your field and get rejected for an O.
Yes, that's the idea.
There's a big problem with the bar graph in the article. They are lumping Engineering Technology together with Engineering and Information sciences in with Computer Science. Engineering Technology is completely different from Engineering, just like CIS is completely different from Computer Science. Grouping those together is like grouping employment numbers for electrical engineers and electricians just because they…
I have an MIS degree and have had no trouble working alongside CS grads my entire career. Likewise for my family member with an Engineering Technology degree. I don't think there is that huge of a gap. It is still about getting your foot in the door and doing things on the job.
Sure, but how much of that has anything to do with your MIS degree.
Sure there are CIS majors who can program, and there are high school dropouts who can program as well. But CS degrees teach you how to program while CIS degrees do not. They prepare you for two completely different fields. Employment figures for Software developers and IT people are very different.
>Likewise for my family member with an Engineering Technology degree
Engineering Technology is also a different field. Again, sure there are people with engineering tech degrees that work as engineers and are paid like engineers, but the vast majority do not.
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Yes, but this reasoning only goes so far. In order to pay all your engineers 500k/year, you'd have to absurdly profitable. Maybe MS and Google could pull that off, but most companies could not.
Then those other companies are not competitive and will wither away in a Capitalist economy. Problem solved. tl;dr: paying high salaries is becoming a competitive advantage.
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Any idea when this was? He is a US citizen which takes a long time, so this must have been a while ago. Depending on when he was denied he could easily not met the qualifications.
It's been when he got job in Transmeta in early 2000s. At that time he has already been very well known. You obviously have not been involved in O visa process otherwise you'd known that the qualifications for O visa are chiefly publications (other qualifications would be academic awards, involvement with awarding those awards and such). So any PhD can get one while a programmer who is not into writing books and arti…