"The Bureau Of Labor Statistics has released its annual Occupational Employment and Wages report, and the top-paying industries are dominated by health care professionals. In fact, nine of the 10 highest-paid jobs in America are in the health care industry. The only other group that made the top 10 is corporate executives."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/20/top-ten-highest-pai...
Here's a link to the full report:
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/ocwage.htm
Like a lot of other people here, I'd support a stronger emphasis on skilled immigration to the US, but I don't see compelling evidence of an acute shortage of engineers relative to other fields. In fact, I think the low level of interest in these fields is a rational response to market signals, especially at the elite levels.
A relevant point is the "carrying capacity" for healthcare professionals. The USA can probably double the number of people employed in healthcare (using a handwavy argument that that 40 million [edit: I earlier wrote 40%] of the population is uninsured).
Note the number of people with the high-paying healthcare job titles: all of them were below 100k people and many were less than 20k people.
Given that so few people work in healthcare relative to STEM, I'm not really sure that pointing out high salaries in healthcare is relevant.
Whereas I can easily see STEM doubling employment in the USA, from the already high (10's of millions?) employment base.
I'm also comparing a small field tightly controlled by what I believe is a cartel with a large, generally open market. A PhD in CS is great to have, but there isn't an association of CS PhD's that can bar people with lower degrees (or no degree) from writing code.
Still, I think the comparison is more relevant than you do, because it's a reflection of what people who are academically talented can earn in other fields. If we're going to start talking about how there "should" be more supply of engineers at a current salary level, it does make sense to see what people can earn with degrees that have higher completion rates and often take considerably less time, with lighter undergraduate requirements to boot.
But maybe I'm just cynical.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/ocwage.htm
Developer-related positions(both research and development), are some of the highest paid STEM-related positions available.
Or lower your standards and make a plan to promote in company education, make the specialized work force you need yourself!
If I understand your intent, I would prefer to read this as "widen your standards." You're not deciding to intake less capable people. Rather, you're deciding to intake people of more varied specific experience.
1. A few big wins causes a huge bubble.
2. Tons of sub standard tech workers jump on the bandwagon for the money. In some cases these are outright con artists.
3. Average skill plummets as the market is flooded with cheap beginners and pretenders.
4. Market implodes. Everyone jumps off the sinking ship. Only people who stay are dedicated to the field regardless of market dynamics.
5. With all the pretenders and con-artists out of the way a few passionate geniuses build a few big wins. GOTO:1
Throughout this cycle the same people who support massive layoffs during downturns will wonder why there aren't thousands of engineers with 10 years experience during upswings.
True enough. On the other hand, some people stay beginners much longer than others.
Skilled immigration is valuable for another reason though - the more talent in the leading industry the better it is for the country, and draining other countries of their talent is also a valuable competition tactics.
1) Top performers who are on a fast-track (<1% of workforce)
2) People who can't get jobs elsewhere (30%)
3) People who have families and are tied to Redmond area (40%)
4) People who can get jobs elsewhere but have visa restrictions and are afraid to upset their status (30%)
Everyone else leaves or has already left within 2 years. I joked with a colleague yesterday, "Hey, have you talked to anyone from the old team?" "Yeah, I've been forwarding their resumes..."
Microsoft is working to reduce people in #2 and #3 through its performance review system. They then want to increase people in #4 so they have more people who can't leave them as they start cost cutting when Win8 isn't a roaring success.
I personally find it heart-wrenching to watch friends who would leave their abusive situations and work for a start-up but cannot due to silly visa paperwork. I just don't trust that Microsoft would want more people to come without restrictions to work for a specific company. It does't benefit them at all.
I just wish skilled computer science people could work for whomever they want. Our industry would be so much better off. So long as you pay taxes and are a lawful person, I support anyone living in this country.
I just wish skilled computer science people could work
for whomever they want. Our industry would be so much
better off. So long as you pay taxes and are a lawful
person, I support anyone living in this country.
H1B holders can switch from company to company without problems, there is a small amount of paperwork and a fee. Greencard applications are also transferable.
Build substantially sized outputs in any of: Atlanta (Duke, GT, UNC), Philadelphia (Penn, Penn State), Boston (MIT/Harvard), Chicago (U of C, NU, U of I), Minneapolis (U of Minn.), Austin (U of T), etc, and you'd have access to a large pool of well-educated tech workers. These folks aren't going to leave their families behind and go to the left coast for jobs, but they'd love to work for a big well-known tech company.
Companies like Microsoft are willing to give kids out of school $100k/year to move to Seattle, San Francisco or New York, but why not Vancouver or Toronto? The Toronto-NY connection especially feels like it should be much stronger, with Porter you can fly between the two cities from downtown for well under $200.
- No-one really seemed to be doing startups. More importantly, there didn't seem to be many investors, either. I understand that is changing these days, but it's not surprising that companies don't move to Canada when the support infrastructure isn't there.
- No companies wanted to sponsor me. Most had never done it before and were very nervous about the idea. American companies approached me and offered to sort out a visa for me. The difference was like night and day.
The US has no shortage of eager workers, some quite creative (which is good for such jobs). The crux of this is companies are devaluing people in general, and don't really give much care about it.
Two of the main issues are that employers have been increasingly unwilling to train new employees, even if they're clearly eager, bright and have the proper basic credentials. Everyone wants to hire seasoned veterans, because logically those people reach a higher level of productivity much faster and require less development talent/skill set wise. While there is a specious logic to this, it's extremely short-sided. Everyone starts at the bottom and needs an opportunity to grow and get their initial experience from somewhere.
Even with experienced individuals, companies often don't want to pay the premium that substantial experience in a field will confer. There were some interesting news stories (don't remember the actual links, but they're easily google-able) about the large numbers of former NASA engineers laid off in the last year having tremendous difficultly finding new employment. The interesting part is that it wasn't that they weren't getting job offers, on the contrary many employers seemed to be eager to hire highly qualified individuals with 20+ years of high quality experience, they just didn't want to pay for it. These people were getting offers that were literally a fraction of the salaries they were commanding previously.
You can't have it both ways. If you want experience, pay for it. Or else invest in less experienced, but otherwise qualified talent.
But MS might be a tougher sell. ;)
I won't challenge your opinion about Steve Ballmer, though.
I moved out of the Midwest because, while there was work, it was sparse, and frankly, not interesting. There are decent paying jobs but I found the ceiling was low compared to other places. I would have preferred to stay. I saw many excellent friends that have languished there because it's culturally unpleasant for many Midwesterners to move away from their families.
EDIT: I appreciate the responses. Raising the fee is probably the wrong idea.
Up until recently, I've worked for small companies and startups on my H1B. They would never be prepared to spend $50k just to hire me, especially when I can leave a month later if I want to. If the fee was that high, companies would demand security that their employee isn't going to leave- understandably so, but that basically results in the employee being a wage slave for x years.
As someone going through the visa transfer process as we speak, it isn't quite so bad once you're in the country. Not easily being able to bootstrap something on the side of my main job is an annoyance, and the transfer process itself is irritatingly time consuming, but it does at least let me transfer.
I think thats pretty unrealistic and I'm hoping that $50k was a typo ... my first h1b was by a small firm who would most definitely have turned me down at that price point.
An important change that I think could be made with the h1b would be to allow people to get into Green card status after 2 years of being in continuous h1b status ... irrespective of company. That way h1-b hires aren't used as pawns in lowering wages and abused because they can be forced to do things that an American hire would never do.
This is a good idea. My wife has been on H1B for four years and is no closer to a green card via the H1B path than when she started. It's a joke. She has a Ph.D. in CS, she's been in the USA for 11 years, and her only realistic path to a green card turned out to be marriage. Meanwhile, she's been used and abused by employers and seeing her mentally and emotionally break down due to H1B abuse is difficult to watch.
This would do a lot to level the playing field between U.S. and H1B workers: if employees can't easily switch jobs, their employers can pay them low salaries for long hours. From the employers' point of view, however, captive workers are a feature, not a bug. If they had to pay H1B workers salaries that were competitive with domestic workers, they'd stop lobbying for more H1B visas and start hiring and/or training domestic workers.
I just don't really want to move across the country for a job, especially one that I probably wont have for the next 20 years.
Yes, I could move across the country for a job (let's say in SF), but then someone wants me to move to Austin or North Dakota or Seattle... Rinse and repeat. Kind of turns me off.
It feels a little strange to me, since I don't really think "should" is a useful question. But I can see why/how the government would want to get involved - markets aren't perfect, and engineers are particularly valuable, as they tend to create wealth rather than just shuffle it around.
I'm probably not the greatest guy to ask, because I have an MS in engineering and I've seen how brutal the PhD programs are. I see that the nine of the top ten professions ranked by pay are medical specialties, with CEO as the only non-health related one there. I understand that law isn't as great at the middle and low level, but at the elite level, I do think it pays very well with more career stability than engineering - and with a degree program that has a vastly higher completion rate than almost any form of graduate study in STEM fields (and much easier undergraduate preparation as well).
So how high should wages be? I guess I'd say that wages should go high enough that getting a grad degree in engineering is a good way to get on that top ten list.
But of course I'd say that, that's my degree. You shouldn't be asking me, but you shouldn't be asking the people who want to hire engineers either. Ideally, we'd butt out and try to let the market handle this.
I'm not fundamentalist about it - truth is, I would support a general skilled emphasis in our immigration system. But specifically targeting a narrow band of the workforce, under the notion that there is a "shortage"? That smells. And after digging into the evidence, I think the "shortage" is really just a rational response to market signals.
The US generally has higher salaries for tech positions and, as someone else pointed out, salaries in Canada are 60-70% of the salaries in the US. Yet, a competent new grad from a top-tier US school or a competent new grad from a top-tier Canadian school can still effectively make 90-100k working for Microsoft or other big companies in Seattle or Silicon Valley. 90-100k for a new CS grad at Google? Seriously?
To me that definitely seems like market forces are driving up the prices of new hires. And let's not forget, we're talking about hiring someone with technical programming chops and not just your run-of-the-mill computer technician here. The fact of the matter is that truly skilled Software Engineers are in short supply and an infusion in STEM education to move people towards being competent Computer Scientist and Software Engineers is what Microsoft is saying with this.
They aren't giving pay cuts to foreign workers (or even people like me). We're getting paid the same salary because we have the skills. If the unemployment rate in the US is so high, it's simply because the unemployed simply do not have the skills necessary to do the job.
or...
"Shortage of tech workers who don't have kids or a mortgage in the US..."
Yeah, I'll get downvoted for this, but it's true.
In high school I wanted to be a CS major in college, but a shitty CompSci teacher completely killed my interest in the subject and I ended up taking a 10 year detour before returning to software engineering as a career. Plus, as a kid there were like no adult role models around to help me out and Win3.1 wasn't exactly the ideal system to get involved with programming. The 80s was a much better time to grow up if you were a kid interested in programming and had access to a computer.
How convenient for Microsoft, they're trying to kill off competition for foreign engineers from Startups in SF, NY and Boston that are starting to realize that they can get some really good H1-b hires to work for them
Maybe lowering the O1 visa requirements...