To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter Thu Aug 22 22:40:19 PDT 2013 Today, the Forum program on KQED-FM, San Francisco's main NPR affiliate, ran a show on age discrimination in Silicon Valley, http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201308221000 They asked me to publicize the above link, and I am happy to do so. This is a very serious show. The erudite host, Michael Krasny, is an English professor at San Francisco State University, and he does his homework. He researches the subject prior the show, and quality comes as a result. Interestingly, Michael also mentioned that one of his daughters is a recruiter in the tech industry. I think you'll find listening to the archive at the above URL to be informative, and I won't repeat the contents here. But I do want to expand here on a remark I made during the show, and comment on an organization, ProMatch, that played a major role in the conversation. One of the panelists, Suzie Wong, says that she was a victim of age discrimination in the past in Silicon Valley, but bounced back, helped by ProMatch, and is now a recruiter for eBay in the Analytics area. As you all know, I have pointed out that the H-1B work visa program fuels a large part of the age discrimination in tech, as the H-1Bs are overwhelmingly young. Since eBay had come up, and since former eBay CEO Meg Whitman has been outspoken in her support of the H-1B program, I used eBay as an example at one point during the show. I first noted that if you go to eBay's careers page, http://www.ebaycareers.com/home.aspx you'll see a picture of attractive 20-somethings, and if you then go to their employee profiles page, http://www.ebaycareers.com/employee-stories.aspx you'll see a bunch more of young people featured. Clearly, eBay is targeting this demographic in its hiring. I then mentioned that if you go to LinkedIn and plug "software engineer eBay" into the search engine there, you'll see people who are actually working as software engineers at eBay--and THEY are almost all young. And interestingly, the vast majority appear to be H-1Bs. Unfortunately, Michael misunderstood me here. In the midst of my sentence, he thought I was saying that LinkedIn targets young workers too, and he moved on to someone else. But from my point of view, this is a major point. I urge all of you to try this "LinkedIn experiment" for yourselves, as it is quite dramatic. Just based on a spot check of the first few dozen people who come up, it would appear that as much as 90% of eBay's software engineer hires are H-1Bs. THIS IS A MAJOR POINT. As many of you know, I strongly oppose what I consider the scapegoating of the Indian/Indian-American "bodyshops" (rent-a-programmer agencies) by Congress, the mainstream tech industry and even some critics of the H-1B program. I've been noting that abuse of the program pervades the entire industry, absolutely including the big mainstream firms. (I am currently preparing an op-ed publication on this.) So here we have a perfect example: The Indian bodyshops are being criticized (including in provisions in the recently-passed Senate bill) as hiring almost all of their programmers from abroad--and yet eBay is hiring the vast majority of their programmers (software engineers) from abroad as well. I've stated this before, and now realize that a good way to confirm it is via LinkedIn. (I must note here that I am not blaming Ms. Wong for this, and indeed she seemed to say that she has been especially sensitive to the age issue now that she is working as a recruiter. I should also note that I personally know someone of about age 60 who is working at eBay in Analytics. That field is business, not engineering, but is still technical, thus relevant.) Now, what about ProMatch? One of the panelists on the Krasny show was from ProMatch, and was something of a dissenting voice on the age discrimination issue. She made some good points (e.g. find a manager, not a company), and clearly ProMatch is able to help some workers. However, I feel that this begs the question of age discrimination in tech jobs. I had a bit of contact with Nova, the parent organization of ProMatch, some years ago. I've looked at their Web page, and it turns out that at least two of my readers have been active (as clients) in ProMatch. From all this it appears to me that ProMatch, for all its good work, primarily does NOT get people into jobs as engineers or programmers. The two featured Success Stories on their Web page involve people in customer service and marketing, for instance, and Ms. Wong is of a similar background. One of my readers did say that he knew of one ProMatch member who got a software engineering job through the organization, but I believe that this is not typical. Of course, there are also managers. I hope to actually visit ProMatch at some point and learn more. But I know of too many engineers and programmers who are extremely well-connected and do know how to search for work effectively but who have struggled to actually get a job. ProMatch's tips are valuable, I'm sure, but they are not the solution to the ageism pandemic in tech fields. I noticed, by the way, the ProMatch toes the industry lobbyist party line that there is a tech labor shortage. They surveyed employers, who said there is a shortage, and that's good enough for ProMatch, ignoring the obvious "principal agent" problem at work here. Norm Archived at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/KQEDAgeDiscrim.txt