Re: Jobs

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

From: vijay gill [mailto:vgill () vijaygill com] 
Sent: Monday, August 13, 2007 2:48 AM
To: dave () farber net
Cc: ip () v2 listbox com
Subject: Re: [IP] Jobs

 

 

On 8/4/07, Dave Farber <dave () farber net> wrote:



-----Original Message-----
From: Stephen Unger [mailto:unger () cs columbia edu]
Sent: Sunday, August 05, 2007 6:19 AM
To: Dave Farber
Subject: Jobs

Dave, 

I hope you will find this interesting enough to post on ip.

Steve
..............
There is a lot going on with respect to the jobs of computer people
and other engineers. The old cries of shortages are being raised in 
the context of efforts to increase H-1B allotments. At the same time
there is much talk about what should be done about "guest  workers" of
a different category: those at the bottom of the economic heap, mostly 
from Mexico and central America. Economists express horror at the idea
of laws that might protect American workers from the outsourcing
process that seems to be moving the US into the third world category.

I believe we have to look beyond slogans and rigid economic
ideology. To begin with, we need to debunk the nonsense about
shortages. I have taken  a crack at clarifying this murky situation in
an essay entitled, "Jobs", that can be found at: 
http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~unger/myBlog/endsandmeansblog.html ............


Speaking as a hiring manager, this jumps out at me 
" Altho most employers deny this, the real motivation for hiring H-1B's is
that they can be paid less and, secondarily, due to the circumstances of
their employment, they can be worked harder. Estimates are that an H-1B can
be hired for roughly 25% less than the going rate for similarly qualified
Americans. There is a shortage of technical people only in the sense that it
might be hard to find people with very specific skill sets who are willing
to work for a low salary."

No, the real motivation with hiring H-1Bs is that I am not seeing enough
qualified candidates coming through. And when I say enough qualified
candidates I don't mean people with a certain set of checkboxes on their
resumes. I am hiring for specialized skillsets and talent, and people with
the talent to do the job aren't always available here. In my industry
(internet ops), as it is with software, the best people are 5x to 10x better
(productive, faster at root cause analysis, internal metrics du jour)  than
the average candidate. So obviously, I try to hire for the best people, and
unfortunately, the best people are hard to come by. So we cast a wide net.
If we were king widgets with people being interchangeable widget slotters,
the above argument doesn't hold. Also, re: the salary requirement - for the
top folks, salary doesn't motivate as much as many other things, I try not
to have a coin-op shop, and I think we are better for it. 

/vijay

 

 

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