To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter Mon Jul 22 22:50:17 PDT 2013 Here are some comments on today's Computerworld article, "Software employment rises 45% in 10 years, as angst in engineering grows," http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9240854/Software_employment_rises_45_in_10_years_as_angst_in_engineering_grows Last year President Obama had an online townhall meeting. The first question floored those of us with keen interest in the foreign tech worker issue. Jennifer Wedel of Texas asked why the government continues "to issue and extend H-1B visas when there are tons of Americans just like my husband with no job?" Mrs. Wedel's husband Darin, a semiconductor engineer, had been laid off by Texas Instruments some time ago, and he had been unable to find engineering work in the Dallas area since that time. Obama looked startled, remarking "the word we're getting is that somebody like that should be getting work right away." Obama promised to look into it, but nothing came from it, as far as I know. Nothing even came of it politically, in spite of speculation that it would become an election issue (see "Obama's H-1B answer in forum may haunt him," Computerworld, Feb. 8, 2012). In retrospect, it's clear why it didn't factor in the election--both major political parties strongly support H-1B and employer-sponsored green cards. In other words, no one wanted to touch the issue. And sadly, the press never asked Obama or Romney about this during the election campaign. Pat Thibodeau's article today, at the above URL, brings up a very important point: For all the hoopla on an alleged STEM labor shortage, the only real job growth as been in software development. There actually is no software engineer shortage either; just look at the wage growth, which is very mild, countering the claims of a shortage, or look at the really sharp people I know who can't get work. In any event there sure isn't a general STEM shortage, but the industry lobbyists are shrewd, and they call it a general STEM shortage, as that gives them much more leverage. These guys have no conscience. Their false claims are causing lots of college kids to go into electrical engineering, only to find 10 years from now that they suffer Darin Wedel's fate, more than a year of unemployment. The article reports that Wedel has now found a job. It's apparently not electrical engineering, but at least it is using the quality assurance skills he had used at TI. I'm glad to hear that, but it--the article--misses the point in terms of unemployment. As I've mentioned before, unemployment rates don't tell the real story, because people are forced to leave the field. They then become UNDERemployed. As Gene Nelson once put it (with a slight modification from me), the former electrical engineer who is now a sales clerk at Radio Shack counts as an EMPLOYED sales person, not as an UNEMPLOYED engineer. The article's main point misses the boat too: Yes, Stan Sorscher's statement that "Engineering work follows manufacturing," and Wedel's own remark in the article, are quite true. And it makes for a good hook for the article, "Ah, we can't just keep engineering but let manufacturing go overseas." HOWEVER, that all misses the central point, in my view, which is that Dallas-area tech employers such as TI have been hiring H-1Bs for work that Wedel could do. In my Feb. 2, 2012 posting here on J. Wedel vs. B. Obama, I noted that in one of Vivek Wadhwa's statements extolling the virtues of H-1Bs, he had pointed to a foreign student TI had hired as a Test Engineer. I countered that Darin Wedel could do that job. I am sure that TI has hired a number of H-1Bs for jobs, in Dallas, that Wedel could have done well. Norm Archived at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/WedelUpdate.txt