To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter Tue Apr 9 21:17:34 PDT 2013 After I made the posting to my e-newsletter this afternoon, http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/FacebookAge.txt a reader sent me the remarks below, which I am displaying here with his permission. Let's call him MR, for My Reader. For those of you nontechie readers--academics, journalists, policy makers and so on--I think the message below will be highly illuminating. Pure numbers, of which I've provided a lot, don't tell the full story, and the industry lobbyists' mesmerizing images work quite effectively even on people who are normally careful thinkers. So consider this a value case study. In particular, please carefully note the following: 1. Note that MR is a contractor. This is extremely common in the software world, and in other tech areas. As I said earlier today and have emphasized many times, contractors don't show up in unemployment data, even if they find it harder to get contracts, and find that they need to lower their rates substantially. So the industry lobbyists' citing of unemployment rates is misleading (especially, as I've said, when one takes in account the former programmers and engineers who had to bail out of the field when it became hard to find work). 2. MR knows his stuff. He's got two Master's degrees, one of which he earned later in his career. So all this talk from the industry lobbyists that the older workers can't be hired because they haven't kept up with their skill sets is false in MR's case, and is false in the cases of many, many people I know like him. 3. MR has given up in trying to get work with those Silicon Valley companies that are seeking skills like his, because he doesn't look like the people in the pictures on Facebook's careers Web page, which effectively bans him from the premises. As one young Silicon Valley engineer once explained to me, people like MR "don't fit The Profile"--the profile being young, and by the way, being single. It's a classic case of "I only hire people who look like me." After all, what college kid wants to invite people his parents' age to his dorm party? More regarding Point 2 above: Today I heard from a researcher who said he supports H-1B, providing there are protections for American workers and providing that more funding is provided for STEM education to remedy the STEM labor shortage. I hear this all the time from the pro-industry people, and it makes my head spin. If we do have a STEM labor shortage, why the need for protections???? Those with a STEM education should be able to easily get work at high salaries (just like Sandberg says). On the other hand, if there is no STEM labor shortage, and in fact it's not so easy for many Americans in STEM to get work, why would we want to get more college students in to STEM? You can't have it both ways. That brings up some other riddles: A. If only the young new graduates have the latest skills, who taught them those skills? Answer: Old guys like me. B. If technology changes so rapidly that tech workers become quickly marginalized (recall Intel Chairman Craig Barrett saying, "The half life of an engineer, hardware or software, is only a few years"), then what sense does it make to give green cards to new foreign STEM graduates from U.S. schools? After a few years, they too will have outlived their usefulness, becoming just like MR or worse, and will be permanent fixtures in the labor market. (This insight was brought to my attention by another astute reader.) C. Which one is right--Barrett or Sandberg? Need I answer that one? MR's remarks follow below. (SV = Silicon Valley, SWE = software engineer, PM = Product Manager. Not sure why he lumps Thibodeau in with the rest, as his article was sympathetic, but MR's frustration comes through clearly.) Norm ******************************* I have a long resume with SWE experience and PM experience showing. I rarely get responses on this resume when submitting to SV companies, because it obviously took some years to get the experience. Banks, on the other hand, like the long resume, but they can have qualms when I show up for the in-person with gray hair. (So what do they think it took to get the experience?) I have managed to stay relatively consistently employed over the years, but it's not like when I first started doing contracts. I would leave one job on a Friday and walk into a new one the following Monday. Now it takes several months of getting back into the interview mode and finding the right contract. And I've got the gray hair. So of course I start looking 3 months before I think the current contract will end. But Thibodeau and Zuck are so totally lacking in understanding the experiences of most Americans that their opinions are almost laughable. They're like that industrialist (I think it was your story) who said he didn't advertise on radio on Saturdays because everybody was out playing polo. The lack of ability to empasize is astounding. They would give Marie Antoinette a run for her money. Archived at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/