To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter Sat Nov 16 16:38:52 PST 2013 Many of you probably think I strongly agree with the Computerworld article, "Professors Warn That Grads Could Face Competition From H-1B Workers," at http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9244106/Professors_warn_that_grads_could_face_competition_from_H_1B_workers But actually, I find it to be quite inaccurate, which should be no suprise to those of you who read my writings carefully. (I'm not scolding the rest of you, of course; we all have limited time to peruse things.) First of all, as I've often mentioned, the job market for new computer science graduates has actually been excellent in the last couple of years, at least in the urban, tech-heavy regions, such as California, Illinois, Massachusets, New York, Texas, Washington, and so on. (There actually is a somewhat subtler aspect in that new domestic grads are often shunted into the "talking" jobs rather than development, but though this disappoints some of them, others are OK with it.) The impact of the H-1Bs on the older, 35+ workers (including new grads of that age) is huge--it makes it much easier for employers to avoid hiring the older workers--but this article is discussing impact on new grads. Second, we see yet again the espousing of a fallacy I've exposed, and which really is obvious. The claim is that the major U.S. firms are not abusing H-1B, because they are paying more than the Indian bodyshops. But the U.S. firms are GETTING more; they're hiring people with master's degrees or higher from generally good CS programs, whereas the Indian firms typically hire at the bachelor's level, from typically weaker foreign programs. So the article's conclusion that the U.S. firms are using the program responsibly is unwarranted; the U.S. firms are paying bargain prices for their level of worker, while the Indian firms are getting bargains at their level. Again, this is for what I call Type I salary savings, paying an H-1B less than a similar American would be paid (same experience, education etc.). Type II salary savings, hiring younger H-1Bs in lieu of older Americans, is just widely practiced among the U.S. mainstream firms as the by the Indian ones. I do like the Panetta quote in the article: "We can't solve the problem unless we have all the parameters and variables of the equation." Indeed. We're getting a lot of incorrect parameters and variables, sadly. Norm Archived at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/NewGradsAffected.txt