To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter Sat May 4 10:45:53 PDT 2013 As most of you know, my writings about H-1B and green cards center on the use of foreign tech workers as cheap, immobile labor. Cheapness comes in Type I and Type II forms, the former meaning paying a foreign worker less than a comparable American and the latter accruing from hiring younger H-1Bs in lieu of older Americans. During previous waves of attention to the foreign tech worker issue, there often were articles on Type II salary savings. This resulted in Congress commissioning the NRC to investigate (among other things) the problems of older American tech workers in 1998. As always, I must point out that these problems begin at about age 35. (NRC used the legal definition for age discrimination, age 40.) The NRC study confirmed that older tech workers have trouble finding work in the field. Older workers were more likely to be laid off, took longer to find a new job after being laid off, and had to accept a pay cut in the new job; younger workers got a raise. As I have written extensively in the past, it's not an issue of up-to-date skills. As even Vivek Wadhwa has said, the older engineer with modern skills is still older, thus still more expensive than a younger one. See my University of Michigan paper for a very detailed analysis of the age and skills issues. The comments by older tech workers in the articles below tell the story well too. So, for those of you reading this on the Hill, please don't point to the provision in Gof8 to use H-1B user fees to fund retraining. It was tried in 1998 and failed, as the Dept. of Commerce later determined. For the reasons given above, it was BOUND to fail (which I said in 1998). But we haven't see much of the press coverage lately. I think the attention to the age issue in 1998-2000 arose largely through the efforts of IEEE-USA, including their excellent Web site, The Misfortune 500, which profiled 500 older engineers who were having trouble finding work in the midst of the Dot Com Boom. But in 2000, the IEEE parent organization, dominated by industry and academia, forced IEEE-USA to back off regarding its criticism of H-1B, and the latter organization then dismantled the Web page, and stopped connecting the age and H-1B issues. (IEEE-USA has been pushing the notion of granting automatic green cards to foreign STEM grads since 2000, which of course just exacerbates the age problem, since the new grads are young.) In that context, I welcome the pair of articles in Computerworld/IDG: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9238883/H_1B_reform_debate_pits_tech_firms_against_iT_veterans?taxonomyId=70 http://www.techworld.com.au/article/460898/veteran_tech_workers_see_themselves_locked_job_market/ One of the articles links to a critique by a major industry lobbyist Robert Hoffman of the recent EPI paper by Salzman et al. I had not been aware of it before, and will counter it in a separate posting to this e-newsletter later on. For now, though, I would point out that even Hoffman only claims that there is a labor shortage in SOME areas of STEM. So even his statements show that the Gang of 8's proposal to give unlimited green cards to foreign grad students in all possible areas of STEM is unwarranted. Of particular interest are these examples in one of the articles: *********************************************************************** Modus Operandi, a semantic search software vendor based in Melbourne, Florida, has had "a hell of a time trying to fill these positions," said Rick McNeight, the company's president. The 80-person company has six open positions, three for Java programmers, with those positions open for months, McNeight said... For McNeight, of Modus Operandi, more foreign visas would, at best, have an indirect impact on his ability to hire workers. Because his company works with the U.S. military and intelligence agencies, most of his programmers need security clearances. More H-1Bs might fill open positions at other companies, making it easier for him to recruit, he said. Within the last two weeks, DataStax, a San Mateo, California, big-data applications vendor, had about 15 open positions, including Cassandra engineer, QA engineer, and product manager. The 80-person shop wants to hire 160 people in 2013. CEO Billy Bosworth said he's turned to recruiting foreign workers and offering them telework jobs in an effort to close hard-to-fill positions. More H-1B visas would be helpful to companies like DataStax, he said. *********************************************************************** McNeight can't fill a Java position? Bosworth says a QA (software testing) job is hard to fill? Are you kidding me? As usual, let's call them on those claims. McNeight's firm's jobs page is at http://www.modusoperandi.com/Careers.html He's got two Senior openings, and one Intermediate. I looked at the Intermediate position first, and right away noticed that "intermediate" means just 3 years of experience! It's not surprising, then, that one of the "senior" openings defined that level as 5-10 years of experience, and the other 5-7 years. Compare that to my age-35 cutoff, and you'll then understand the problem. McNeight and/or his HR people are likely rejecting those of 35+ years of age as "overqualified" even for the "senior" jobs, let alone the "intermediate" one. For those of you nontechies out there, I should point out that Java is hardly a new skill. On the contrary, back in 1998 when the industry was (successfully) pushing Congress to expand H-1B, employers said they needed H-1Bs because they couldn't fill Java jobs. McNeight wants a little more specialized knowledge than that, but not much. What's especially troubling is that he lists "Working knowledge of Eclipse IDE" as a required, not just desired, skill. For you nontechies, Eclipse is simply a work tool, providing the programmer with things like a handy index to the various parts of his program. It can also provide components for the program itself, which is a little more involved, but McNeight is leaving jobs open for MONTHS, for lack of something that takes just a week or so to become productive (not necessarily 100%, but productive) in. At the end of each job req at McNeight's firm, it says (emphasis added), "E-mail Human Resources (tbaerst@modusoperandi.com) your resume, SALARY HISTORY, and SALARY REQUIREMENTS." And THAT is the likely reason that McNeight is letting job openings lie vacant for months. The DataStax example is interesting for other reasons. The article mentioned a QA opening, which is awfully generic, raising a question as to how this position could possibly be hard to fill. The opening is posted at https://www.smartrecruiters.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/frontoffice?fp1=58166039&fp2=779269914 It vaguely asks for some knowledge of cloud computing, not clear just how much. Again, this is not deep stuff, and refreshingly, the job req even includes a criterion "History of learning new technologies on the fly"--exactly what people used to take for granted in the pre-H-1B era. Similarly, there is an item "Knowledge of Python scripting a strong plus, but we offer this as an opportunity for a seasoned programmer to pick up a new skill." Well, wait a minute. Just how "seasoned" a programmer is this employer willing to hire? Remember, "senior" means 5-10 years' experience at McNeight's company, and this is typical. (See my University of Michigan paper for a number of examples.) Indeed, I suspect that "seasoned" may be closer to "intermediate" in DataStax's mind. I see that DataStax already has an LCA (H-1B hiring form) for a senior product manager; I expect to see one on the QA job coming soon. Norm Archived at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/Older.txt