Monday, June 25, 2007

ECONOMY - The High-Tech American Worker Doom to Extinction

"H-1B's are not about finding the next Sergey Brin" by Jill, on Brilliant at Breakfast

They're about lowering the wage base for highly skilled workers in the US

"Google has reminded senators that one of its founders, Sergey Brin, came from the Soviet Union as a young boy. To stay competitive in a “knowledge-based economy,” company officials have said, Google needs to hire many more immigrants as software engineers, mathematicians and computer scientists."

There is no shortage of American high-tech workers. There IS, however, a shortage of American high-tech workers who are under 30 and willing to work 100 hour weeks for pay competitive with programmers in Bangalore. To major in computer science is to commit yourself to a career path in which your top skills today will be obsolete in a year, that requires constant updating of skills, which don't make you any more marketable. Because if your current employer uses skill A, B, and C, and you teach yourself D, E, and F on the side, after you've trained your H-1B replacement, your next potential employer, which uses D, E, and F, won't hire you because you haven't used it on the job.

Who needs this?

American tech workers are going the way of manufacturing workers because the investment in continuing education, just so one can get shafted by employers constantly looking to cut costs while increasing the executive pay share of the pie, hardly seems worth the effort.

When companies tell American workers that the special commitments an IT career requires will be rewarded if they make the effort, and when companies stop deciding that anyone over 35 is too old to learn anything new, and when companies realize that the commitment to continuous updating of skills ought to be compensated accordingly, they won't need to hire foreign workers because there WILL be enough Americans to fill the need.

Sorry Jill, you don't understand. Big-Business only cares about ever-increasing profits (aka greed), workers be damn. And they also have a SHORT-TERM VIEW; quarter, semi-annual, yearly bottom line.

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