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Carl Pham wrote:
Meh, it's an interesting essay, and I certainly agree that elementary through secondary education in the US is decidedly hostile to the "boy" values of achievement, competition, technological invention and brilliance, et cetera, and that these do not bode well for the future technological competitivity of the Republic. If we become a nation that is merely much more sensitive and multicultural than, say, the Chinese or Indians, then we are going to be a fascinating footnote in history, a dead culture mined by more practical cultures of the future for lovely ideas, like the Athenians.
But I think he's wrong that this is what lies behind the modest numbers in which American students enter science and engineering fields. I think his mistake is right here:
Students respond more profoundly to cultural imperatives than to market forces.
This is a highly doubtful assertion on its face, the kind of thing only a professor writing for an education journal would accept without supporting data and argument. If there's anything history in general shows, it's that people are far more responsive to economic than cultural incentives. That's why black markets, prostitution and pornography and late-night get-rich scam ads on the TV exist. Money triumphs social cues, every time. Why should it be different for young people?
In fact, I think he's got it exactly backward. He and others of the older, contemplative generation wish that more young people would enter science, but the young people are accurately reading the economic signals and realizing, quite correctly, that a career in scientific research or engineering development requires a huge amount of work and delivers meager pay and only modest amounts of social power and respect.
Wood unconsciously supports this when he notes:A century ago, Max Weber wrote of "Science as a Vocation," and, indeed, students need to feel something like a calling for science to surmount the numerous obstacles on the way to an advanced degree.
Any career in which you can only succeed if you have a deep passion for it is by definition a career with meager external rewards (pay and social status). Wood goes wrong in arguing that the hard part is the advanced degree, by the way: the actual hard part in the sciences, at least, is getting a job. Roughly 90% of young people with PhDs in science will never work as a PI, because there are roughly 10 times more PhDs than PI jobs.
Finally, in fact I strongly suspect that the Gates statements, as well as the NSF research reports, are a bit of self-serving deception. Both agencies really want a large supply of highly-qualified young scientists and engineers to drive down the price of their labor. Scientists are used to relying on graduate students doing very technical stuff for peanut wages, and MS and similar big shops are notorious for exploiting interns and young programmers. So their fluff about "not enough qualified Americans" is, I suspect, just meant to support their push for essentially unrestricted hiring of foreign PhD students. I don't object to their efforts to get their labor at the lowest possible cost -- that's just human nature -- and concealing their designs in altruistic-sounding bullshit about "not enough Americans" is the predictable result of a perniciously short-sighted immigration system founded on fuzzy-headed fantasy, so I don't necessarily hold this deception against them, but I'm not required to believe it, or support it with my vote.
I've seen this from the inside. In the mid-90s, the NSF issued a similar report, arguing that there were not enough qualified Americans to fill scientific posts, and urging enlargement of the ability of universities to hire scientists for academic posts from abroad. Being part of the pool of Americans at that time desperately competing for the very few open jobs -- there would routinely be 200-800 applicants per job -- I knew, as did my American colleagues, that this was bullshit. But it served the needs of our senior academic colleagues, who wished to have an even wider pool of applicants from which to choose.
That the NSF and others were bullshitting in the 1990s doesn't mean they are now, but, well, the parameters of the story seem suspiciously similar.
i like your simple readable stile very much-
may be i will do mine in similar way
God Bless USA
Stephen Kohls wrote:
Carl - I agree with you 100%. I know of several extremely talented and experienced engineers who left the field because of poor salaries and/or job advancement opportunities.
Market incentives overcame their desire to work in a field they found interesting.
Carl, I think you and Gates are poking a different part of the elephant. What field were you in that had 200-800 applicants for every available position? I'm pretty sure it's not one of the fields Gates was referring to. My employer develops engineering software for the process industries. We hire chemical engineers and computer scientists with advanced degrees and, usually, several years experience. Whenever I've been involved in hiring I can tell you that about 75% of the resumes are from foreign born candidates, and even at it is hard to find qualified candidates. It is most definitely NOT about driving down labor costs but simply finding someone who can do the job. In fields like ours I'm fully on board with making it easier to immigrate to America and get a green card (not just an H-1B visa).
brian d wrote:
Carl is exactly right. If I had been a senator at the hearing in which Mr. Gates testified, I would have ask him to go back to Seattle and put an add in the Seattle Times offering 1 million dollars a year for qualified computer scientists, then come back and report in 3 months.
And Bill, to answer your question about what field has 200 – 800 applicants, I will presume to answer for Carl; college professor. My Ph.D. advisor wanted to make sure that I understood that if I received my degree I better be in it for the right reasons because quote “Each time we advertise a faculty position we get about 500 applicants, and some of them are quite good” (holding up a resume of a MIT Ph.D. with a 5.0 GPA and over 30 publication.). I struggled for years to find a research position worthy of a Ph.D. We have far too many advanced degrees for the jobs available. Most jobs in aerospace that are staffed by an engineer could be done by a fairly bright high school graduate. Imagine my frustration to have found myself in one of those jobs for a couple of years. So Bill, I’ll give you the same advice I give Mr. Gates; put an add in the local paper offering 1 million dollars a year for qualified engineering and CS candidates, and you might even find yourself looking at the resume of a Ph.D. from MIT with a 5.0 GPA and 30 publications.
K wrote:
Both agencies really want a large supply of highly-qualified young scientists and engineers to drive down the price of their labor.
BINGO!!!
Right in one. When the Reagan defense build up was going and prices for young engineers were sky high, I was amazed at the quality of the new hires. Of course, after the 90s aerospace depression, they took off for the stock markets and silicon valley. Now a days the kids they're bringing into the big name companies are the best and brightest that Cal Poly Pomona can offer.
Rand Simberg wrote:
When the Reagan defense build up was going and prices for young engineers were sky high, I was amazed at the quality of the new hires. Of course, after the 90s aerospace depression, they took off for the stock markets and silicon valley.
These things go in cycles. One of the reasons that the prices were sky high in the eighties was that there was a shortage of aerospace engineers, not just because of the increased demand from the defense build up, but because so few had gone into it in the seventies, after being warned away by those laid off after Apollo. I was one of those who paid no attention, because I am a contrarian. So I was one of those getting those high salaries back then. It also means that there remains a shortage in my cohort, so when I get work now as an experienced veteran, I can get a pretty good rate. The only problem is that most of the programs suck to work on.
lmg wrote:
I stopped when I read:
... the shortage of Americans holding or pursuing advanced degrees in fields like computer science defies conventional market explanations. The average annual salary in the field is more than $100,000.
I'm in that field, and I was making 2X as much twenty years ago. Wages have been depressed by the very H1-B visa holders the article talks about. I routinely read about minor politicians and school principals making more than that. Friggin' Michelle Obama with zero skills make 3-4 times my salary - when I'm employed.
The reason Americans don't go into the field is because people like Gates have driven them out of it.
Whoa, lmg, you were getting $200,000 twenty years ago in computer science? That's freakin' unbelievable. I've never been paid anything like that much, and I consider myself well paid. If that's your yardstick no wonder you're disappointed with today's job market. There are very few jobs that pay that much in any field, even today. Lots of people would give their eye teeth for a $100,000 a year job. I hope you were salting it away during the seven fat years.
Carl Pham wrote:
What field were you in that had 200-800 applicants for every available position?
brian d is correct, we're talking academic research scientist, PI, the guy who gets the grants from the NSF at the major research university. I recall at the time reflecting on the fact that everyone I knew who was looking for such a job could get one -- provided that no one that I didn't know got one. Nasty odds.
It is most definitely NOT about driving down labor costs but simply finding someone who can do the job.
Er...not quite. Be honest, now. As someone pointed out, if you offered a salary of $1 million, you'd get tons of super-qualified applicants. What you want is someone who can do the job at the salary you're willing to pay. If you're not getting enough qualified applicants in your pool, then pretty much by definition you're not offering enough pay and/or other less tangible benefits. Had you said you could not hire someone at any price, that would be a different story, but that's probably not the case, right?
In fields like ours I'm fully on board with making it easier to immigrate to America and get a green card (not just an H-1B visa).
Sure, me too. Better than filling up the immigration quota with day laborers and gang thugs. Plus there's nothing wrong with getting Americans used to competing with the rest of the world on wages; they do anyway, but usually they're insulated by byzantine immigration and tariff laws, so that the effects take a while to percolate through, leading to some sad boom 'n' bust economic times.
Basically, I'm in favor of getting the bad news as soon as possible, and if American wages for job X are too high -- because J. Alphonso in Brazil will do it for less -- then the sooner Americans get the news and adjust to that economic fact, the better.
Furthermore, if the way J. Alphonso successfully outbids J. Al Citizen for a job in America is not by working for a Brazilian firm that exports to the US and undercuts J. Al's US firm, but rather by moving here himself, becoming an American citizen, and going to work for the US firm, displacing J. Al directly, that has broad advantages to the rest of us. J. Al's going to lose his job one way or another, either directly to J. Alphonso or when his US firm can't compete with the Brazilian firm that employs J. Alphonso, so that's that, oh well. But the rest of us acquire a new, unusually able citizen if J. Alphonso immigrates, who will (we hope) take up our values and help defend them, become part of the nation.
cthulhu wrote:
I have been extremely fortunate in my 24+ years in aerospace to work almost always on interesting projects doing interesting work (flight controls mostly). But when I see degreed engineers doing "supplier management", and keeping spreadsheets in which they track the parts they've ordered for the assembly they're responsible for, and doing CMMI process metrics . . . well, I feel lucky that there are people willing to do those jobs so I don't have to.
"There is no such thing as luck; there is only adequate or inadequate preparation to cope with a statistical universe." - Robert A. Heinlein
Be honest, now. As someone pointed out, if you offered a salary of $1 million, you'd get tons of super-qualified applicants. What you want is someone who can do the job at the salary you're willing to pay.
Well, even that's not strictly true, because it takes years to "grow" new qualified people. If the salary for control engineers went to $1,000,000 tomorrow it wouldn't increase the pool of qualified individuals, although it would encourage any individuals who had bailed out of the field to come back. But that's not the problem. It's the number of people who decided not to go into the field years ago that's the problem. And as any good control engineer would tell you, it's that lag between the signal and response that causes the cyclical patterns Rand mentioned.
But that's not really the issue at hand, either. It's not like we go to China and snatch away practicing control engineers. What actually happens is that Chinese students (and Indian, etc.) come over here to graduate school on a student visa, hoping to get a job here instead of going back home. So based on decisions made years ago by each individual, we find ourselves in a situation where most of the people graduating with a degree in the field are foreign born. If we can't get the H-1B visa we can't fill the job and the qualified candidate goes back to China or whereever, even if he would have preferred to stay here. Or he just stays in grad school and gets another degree until he can find an employer who will hire him on an H-1B, and of course sponsor him for his green card.
Now the thing is, I believe the United States benefits enormously from this immigration pathway. We should be flattered that many of the best and brightest from all over the world want to come here to live and work. They make, collectively, a huge contribution to our society. Some of the smartest guys I know came to this country that way, and they are more industrious and more patriotic that many of us who are native born Americans.
What I actually worry about more, given the current situation, is that the superheated Chinese and Indian economies will entice more and more good people to stay in their home country, or go back as soon as they graduate. We will definitely be the poorer, economically and intellectually, if this stream of talented and eager young immigrants dries up.
I'm not sure any of this is on the right track. It's not the culture of multiculturalism; it's the culture of anti-intellectualism. I'm 27, so maybe I was before the "hey-day" of the stupidest multiculturalist stuff I hear about now, but being thought of as "smart" was the worst thing for my social development I can even imagine. My parents tell me that the popular kids got good grades back the '50's and '60's, but when I was in public school, no one who got over a B- had any friends. The open antagonism to any intellectual accomplishment caused a lot of my friends to pretend to be dumb, to intentionally not learn, just to have some life.
As great a "right-winger" as I am, this isn't about "multiculturalism"; it's about a growing distaste with facts. I've also tried to consult with churches about how to accomplish their missions better; one of the solutions I proposed was looking at attendance trends to see if kids are coming to sunday school regularly, or leaving, or growing; they said, "but we don't want this to be about _numbers_, it's about _people_", forgetting, of course, that they are numbers OF people. I had one guy tell me, after I suggested that we could get more attendance to a museum trip if we ask the church to pay for part of the admission, "people don't really make decisions based on prices". Christian America isn't as monolitically Republican as it's often assumed, and I'm sure most of these idiots are voting for Obama, and I'd love to blame "lefties" for all this, but lefties usually pretend to be more reasonable than facts, not refuse them altogether, right? If it weren't for Mike Huckabee, I'd say it all feels very "leftish", but I don't know anymore.
I'm not sure what's going on, honestly, but I don't think it's that simple.
memomachine wrote:
Hmmmmm.
@ Bill Hensley
"Whoa, lmg, you were getting $200,000 twenty years ago in computer science? That's freakin' unbelievable."
Adjust for inflation.
In 1985 I made $40,000 a year as a junior computer programmer.
Today I'm looking for a job and I'm getting offers of $60,000 - $80,000.
Adjusting for inflation $40,000 in 1985 is $78,862.09 in 2007.
So yes it is extremely credible to have been making far more 20+ years ago than today.
memomachine wrote:
Hmmmmm.
@ Jon Card
"If it weren't for Mike Huckabee, I'd say it all feels very "leftish", but I don't know anymore."
Sorry but, my opinion only, Mike Huckabee is "leftish".
Then again I'm so far to the right that Reagan was a bit "leftish" to me.
:)
Martin wrote:
" Carl Pham wrote:
But the rest of us acquire a new, unusually able citizen if J. Alphonso immigrates, who will (we hope) take up our values and help defend them, become part of the nation."
Yes, you hope. But what if they don't. Why is our immigration policy based on the hope that immigrants will assimilate, rather than enforcing it upon them as a condition of their admittance? Aren't we entitled to do more than "hope"? Aren't we entitled to determine our own immigration policies, rather than have them dictated by foreigners?
And why does your hypothetical case involve Brazil? You are being disingenuous. Are we being inundated by computer programmers from Brazil? Why do you feel the need to substitute the name of the countries we're really talking about here - India and China - with this strawman.
I agree with John Card that there is a creeping anti-intellectualism in our society, but that is not all of it. Young students are able to perceive the job market and respond to it - and they see that Bill Gates and his ilk are looking to depress wages for computer programmers by importing foreign labor. And remember that a green card holder is beholden to his employer - if he get's fired, he loses his visa, which gives his employer a great deal of leverage in negotiating salary and terms of employment.
Economic arguments against immigration only go so far however. America is not some kind of economic opportunity zone. It is a nation, with its own culture. And we americans have a right to determine the character of our nation, and to prevent others from coming here if it is not in our interest to let them do so.
memomachine, there was nothing in what lmg wrote to suggest that when he said he made 2X $100,000 twenty years ago he was adjusting for inflation. In any case, your other data just validates what I was saying. Nobody gets $200K today for programming and nobody did 20 years ago, even in 2008 dollars. lmg is being unrealistic if he thinks our immigration policy is the only reason he can't land a computer science job at $200K/yr.
BTW, Martin, once you have your green card you are a permanent resident, and losing your job does not mean getting deported. However, since it takes so many years now to get a green card (especially from China and India) you can really be stuck for a long time at one job. The solution to that is not to eliminate immigration but to streamline the process. Once we've decided as a matter of policy how many immigrants we're willing to take in each year, it is unconscionable to drag the process out over so many years and thus create "green card slaves." This is definitely something that needs to be fixed at the INS regardless of whether we want to raise or lower the quotas.
lmg wrote:
Bill, in 1987 I was making $57/hour. Twenty one years later I'm lucky if I can get $60/hour in vastly smaller 2008 dollars, and it's not unusual to see jobs paying $40/hour. And yes, it's due entirely to immigrants driving wages down here, and companies off-shoring jobs to India where they pay $5/hour.
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About this Entry
This page contains a single entry by Rand Simberg published on August 6, 2008 12:00 PM.
Meh, it's an interesting essay, and I certainly agree that elementary through secondary education in the US is decidedly hostile to the "boy" values of achievement, competition, technological invention and brilliance, et cetera, and that these do not bode well for the future technological competitivity of the Republic. If we become a nation that is merely much more sensitive and multicultural than, say, the Chinese or Indians, then we are going to be a fascinating footnote in history, a dead culture mined by more practical cultures of the future for lovely ideas, like the Athenians.
But I think he's wrong that this is what lies behind the modest numbers in which American students enter science and engineering fields. I think his mistake is right here:
Students respond more profoundly to cultural imperatives than to market forces.
This is a highly doubtful assertion on its face, the kind of thing only a professor writing for an education journal would accept without supporting data and argument. If there's anything history in general shows, it's that people are far more responsive to economic than cultural incentives. That's why black markets, prostitution and pornography and late-night get-rich scam ads on the TV exist. Money triumphs social cues, every time. Why should it be different for young people?
In fact, I think he's got it exactly backward. He and others of the older, contemplative generation wish that more young people would enter science, but the young people are accurately reading the economic signals and realizing, quite correctly, that a career in scientific research or engineering development requires a huge amount of work and delivers meager pay and only modest amounts of social power and respect.
Wood unconsciously supports this when he notes:A century ago, Max Weber wrote of "Science as a Vocation," and, indeed, students need to feel something like a calling for science to surmount the numerous obstacles on the way to an advanced degree.
Any career in which you can only succeed if you have a deep passion for it is by definition a career with meager external rewards (pay and social status). Wood goes wrong in arguing that the hard part is the advanced degree, by the way: the actual hard part in the sciences, at least, is getting a job. Roughly 90% of young people with PhDs in science will never work as a PI, because there are roughly 10 times more PhDs than PI jobs.
Finally, in fact I strongly suspect that the Gates statements, as well as the NSF research reports, are a bit of self-serving deception. Both agencies really want a large supply of highly-qualified young scientists and engineers to drive down the price of their labor. Scientists are used to relying on graduate students doing very technical stuff for peanut wages, and MS and similar big shops are notorious for exploiting interns and young programmers. So their fluff about "not enough qualified Americans" is, I suspect, just meant to support their push for essentially unrestricted hiring of foreign PhD students. I don't object to their efforts to get their labor at the lowest possible cost -- that's just human nature -- and concealing their designs in altruistic-sounding bullshit about "not enough Americans" is the predictable result of a perniciously short-sighted immigration system founded on fuzzy-headed fantasy, so I don't necessarily hold this deception against them, but I'm not required to believe it, or support it with my vote.
I've seen this from the inside. In the mid-90s, the NSF issued a similar report, arguing that there were not enough qualified Americans to fill scientific posts, and urging enlargement of the ability of universities to hire scientists for academic posts from abroad. Being part of the pool of Americans at that time desperately competing for the very few open jobs -- there would routinely be 200-800 applicants per job -- I knew, as did my American colleagues, that this was bullshit. But it served the needs of our senior academic colleagues, who wished to have an even wider pool of applicants from which to choose.
That the NSF and others were bullshitting in the 1990s doesn't mean they are now, but, well, the parameters of the story seem suspiciously similar.
very nice blog
i like your simple readable stile very much-
may be i will do mine in similar way
God Bless USA
Carl - I agree with you 100%. I know of several extremely talented and experienced engineers who left the field because of poor salaries and/or job advancement opportunities.
Market incentives overcame their desire to work in a field they found interesting.
Carl, I think you and Gates are poking a different part of the elephant. What field were you in that had 200-800 applicants for every available position? I'm pretty sure it's not one of the fields Gates was referring to. My employer develops engineering software for the process industries. We hire chemical engineers and computer scientists with advanced degrees and, usually, several years experience. Whenever I've been involved in hiring I can tell you that about 75% of the resumes are from foreign born candidates, and even at it is hard to find qualified candidates. It is most definitely NOT about driving down labor costs but simply finding someone who can do the job. In fields like ours I'm fully on board with making it easier to immigrate to America and get a green card (not just an H-1B visa).
Carl is exactly right. If I had been a senator at the hearing in which Mr. Gates testified, I would have ask him to go back to Seattle and put an add in the Seattle Times offering 1 million dollars a year for qualified computer scientists, then come back and report in 3 months.
And Bill, to answer your question about what field has 200 – 800 applicants, I will presume to answer for Carl; college professor. My Ph.D. advisor wanted to make sure that I understood that if I received my degree I better be in it for the right reasons because quote “Each time we advertise a faculty position we get about 500 applicants, and some of them are quite good” (holding up a resume of a MIT Ph.D. with a 5.0 GPA and over 30 publication.). I struggled for years to find a research position worthy of a Ph.D. We have far too many advanced degrees for the jobs available. Most jobs in aerospace that are staffed by an engineer could be done by a fairly bright high school graduate. Imagine my frustration to have found myself in one of those jobs for a couple of years. So Bill, I’ll give you the same advice I give Mr. Gates; put an add in the local paper offering 1 million dollars a year for qualified engineering and CS candidates, and you might even find yourself looking at the resume of a Ph.D. from MIT with a 5.0 GPA and 30 publications.
Both agencies really want a large supply of highly-qualified young scientists and engineers to drive down the price of their labor.
BINGO!!!
Right in one. When the Reagan defense build up was going and prices for young engineers were sky high, I was amazed at the quality of the new hires. Of course, after the 90s aerospace depression, they took off for the stock markets and silicon valley. Now a days the kids they're bringing into the big name companies are the best and brightest that Cal Poly Pomona can offer.
When the Reagan defense build up was going and prices for young engineers were sky high, I was amazed at the quality of the new hires. Of course, after the 90s aerospace depression, they took off for the stock markets and silicon valley.
These things go in cycles. One of the reasons that the prices were sky high in the eighties was that there was a shortage of aerospace engineers, not just because of the increased demand from the defense build up, but because so few had gone into it in the seventies, after being warned away by those laid off after Apollo. I was one of those who paid no attention, because I am a contrarian. So I was one of those getting those high salaries back then. It also means that there remains a shortage in my cohort, so when I get work now as an experienced veteran, I can get a pretty good rate. The only problem is that most of the programs suck to work on.
I stopped when I read:
... the shortage of Americans holding or pursuing advanced degrees in fields like computer science defies conventional market explanations. The average annual salary in the field is more than $100,000.
I'm in that field, and I was making 2X as much twenty years ago. Wages have been depressed by the very H1-B visa holders the article talks about. I routinely read about minor politicians and school principals making more than that. Friggin' Michelle Obama with zero skills make 3-4 times my salary - when I'm employed.
The reason Americans don't go into the field is because people like Gates have driven them out of it.
Whoa, lmg, you were getting $200,000 twenty years ago in computer science? That's freakin' unbelievable. I've never been paid anything like that much, and I consider myself well paid. If that's your yardstick no wonder you're disappointed with today's job market. There are very few jobs that pay that much in any field, even today. Lots of people would give their eye teeth for a $100,000 a year job. I hope you were salting it away during the seven fat years.
What field were you in that had 200-800 applicants for every available position?
brian d is correct, we're talking academic research scientist, PI, the guy who gets the grants from the NSF at the major research university. I recall at the time reflecting on the fact that everyone I knew who was looking for such a job could get one -- provided that no one that I didn't know got one. Nasty odds.
It is most definitely NOT about driving down labor costs but simply finding someone who can do the job.
Er...not quite. Be honest, now. As someone pointed out, if you offered a salary of $1 million, you'd get tons of super-qualified applicants. What you want is someone who can do the job at the salary you're willing to pay. If you're not getting enough qualified applicants in your pool, then pretty much by definition you're not offering enough pay and/or other less tangible benefits. Had you said you could not hire someone at any price, that would be a different story, but that's probably not the case, right?
In fields like ours I'm fully on board with making it easier to immigrate to America and get a green card (not just an H-1B visa).
Sure, me too. Better than filling up the immigration quota with day laborers and gang thugs. Plus there's nothing wrong with getting Americans used to competing with the rest of the world on wages; they do anyway, but usually they're insulated by byzantine immigration and tariff laws, so that the effects take a while to percolate through, leading to some sad boom 'n' bust economic times.
Basically, I'm in favor of getting the bad news as soon as possible, and if American wages for job X are too high -- because J. Alphonso in Brazil will do it for less -- then the sooner Americans get the news and adjust to that economic fact, the better.
Furthermore, if the way J. Alphonso successfully outbids J. Al Citizen for a job in America is not by working for a Brazilian firm that exports to the US and undercuts J. Al's US firm, but rather by moving here himself, becoming an American citizen, and going to work for the US firm, displacing J. Al directly, that has broad advantages to the rest of us. J. Al's going to lose his job one way or another, either directly to J. Alphonso or when his US firm can't compete with the Brazilian firm that employs J. Alphonso, so that's that, oh well. But the rest of us acquire a new, unusually able citizen if J. Alphonso immigrates, who will (we hope) take up our values and help defend them, become part of the nation.
I have been extremely fortunate in my 24+ years in aerospace to work almost always on interesting projects doing interesting work (flight controls mostly). But when I see degreed engineers doing "supplier management", and keeping spreadsheets in which they track the parts they've ordered for the assembly they're responsible for, and doing CMMI process metrics . . . well, I feel lucky that there are people willing to do those jobs so I don't have to.
"There is no such thing as luck; there is only adequate or inadequate preparation to cope with a statistical universe." - Robert A. Heinlein
Be honest, now. As someone pointed out, if you offered a salary of $1 million, you'd get tons of super-qualified applicants. What you want is someone who can do the job at the salary you're willing to pay.
Well, even that's not strictly true, because it takes years to "grow" new qualified people. If the salary for control engineers went to $1,000,000 tomorrow it wouldn't increase the pool of qualified individuals, although it would encourage any individuals who had bailed out of the field to come back. But that's not the problem. It's the number of people who decided not to go into the field years ago that's the problem. And as any good control engineer would tell you, it's that lag between the signal and response that causes the cyclical patterns Rand mentioned.
But that's not really the issue at hand, either. It's not like we go to China and snatch away practicing control engineers. What actually happens is that Chinese students (and Indian, etc.) come over here to graduate school on a student visa, hoping to get a job here instead of going back home. So based on decisions made years ago by each individual, we find ourselves in a situation where most of the people graduating with a degree in the field are foreign born. If we can't get the H-1B visa we can't fill the job and the qualified candidate goes back to China or whereever, even if he would have preferred to stay here. Or he just stays in grad school and gets another degree until he can find an employer who will hire him on an H-1B, and of course sponsor him for his green card.
Now the thing is, I believe the United States benefits enormously from this immigration pathway. We should be flattered that many of the best and brightest from all over the world want to come here to live and work. They make, collectively, a huge contribution to our society. Some of the smartest guys I know came to this country that way, and they are more industrious and more patriotic that many of us who are native born Americans.
What I actually worry about more, given the current situation, is that the superheated Chinese and Indian economies will entice more and more good people to stay in their home country, or go back as soon as they graduate. We will definitely be the poorer, economically and intellectually, if this stream of talented and eager young immigrants dries up.
I'm not sure any of this is on the right track. It's not the culture of multiculturalism; it's the culture of anti-intellectualism. I'm 27, so maybe I was before the "hey-day" of the stupidest multiculturalist stuff I hear about now, but being thought of as "smart" was the worst thing for my social development I can even imagine. My parents tell me that the popular kids got good grades back the '50's and '60's, but when I was in public school, no one who got over a B- had any friends. The open antagonism to any intellectual accomplishment caused a lot of my friends to pretend to be dumb, to intentionally not learn, just to have some life.
As great a "right-winger" as I am, this isn't about "multiculturalism"; it's about a growing distaste with facts. I've also tried to consult with churches about how to accomplish their missions better; one of the solutions I proposed was looking at attendance trends to see if kids are coming to sunday school regularly, or leaving, or growing; they said, "but we don't want this to be about _numbers_, it's about _people_", forgetting, of course, that they are numbers OF people. I had one guy tell me, after I suggested that we could get more attendance to a museum trip if we ask the church to pay for part of the admission, "people don't really make decisions based on prices". Christian America isn't as monolitically Republican as it's often assumed, and I'm sure most of these idiots are voting for Obama, and I'd love to blame "lefties" for all this, but lefties usually pretend to be more reasonable than facts, not refuse them altogether, right? If it weren't for Mike Huckabee, I'd say it all feels very "leftish", but I don't know anymore.
I'm not sure what's going on, honestly, but I don't think it's that simple.
Hmmmmm.
@ Bill Hensley
"Whoa, lmg, you were getting $200,000 twenty years ago in computer science? That's freakin' unbelievable."
Adjust for inflation.
In 1985 I made $40,000 a year as a junior computer programmer.
Today I'm looking for a job and I'm getting offers of $60,000 - $80,000.
Adjusting for inflation $40,000 in 1985 is $78,862.09 in 2007.
So yes it is extremely credible to have been making far more 20+ years ago than today.
Hmmmmm.
@ Jon Card
"If it weren't for Mike Huckabee, I'd say it all feels very "leftish", but I don't know anymore."
Sorry but, my opinion only, Mike Huckabee is "leftish".
Then again I'm so far to the right that Reagan was a bit "leftish" to me.
:)
" Carl Pham wrote:
But the rest of us acquire a new, unusually able citizen if J. Alphonso immigrates, who will (we hope) take up our values and help defend them, become part of the nation."
Yes, you hope. But what if they don't. Why is our immigration policy based on the hope that immigrants will assimilate, rather than enforcing it upon them as a condition of their admittance? Aren't we entitled to do more than "hope"? Aren't we entitled to determine our own immigration policies, rather than have them dictated by foreigners?
And why does your hypothetical case involve Brazil? You are being disingenuous. Are we being inundated by computer programmers from Brazil? Why do you feel the need to substitute the name of the countries we're really talking about here - India and China - with this strawman.
I agree with John Card that there is a creeping anti-intellectualism in our society, but that is not all of it. Young students are able to perceive the job market and respond to it - and they see that Bill Gates and his ilk are looking to depress wages for computer programmers by importing foreign labor. And remember that a green card holder is beholden to his employer - if he get's fired, he loses his visa, which gives his employer a great deal of leverage in negotiating salary and terms of employment.
Economic arguments against immigration only go so far however. America is not some kind of economic opportunity zone. It is a nation, with its own culture. And we americans have a right to determine the character of our nation, and to prevent others from coming here if it is not in our interest to let them do so.
memomachine, there was nothing in what lmg wrote to suggest that when he said he made 2X $100,000 twenty years ago he was adjusting for inflation. In any case, your other data just validates what I was saying. Nobody gets $200K today for programming and nobody did 20 years ago, even in 2008 dollars. lmg is being unrealistic if he thinks our immigration policy is the only reason he can't land a computer science job at $200K/yr.
BTW, Martin, once you have your green card you are a permanent resident, and losing your job does not mean getting deported. However, since it takes so many years now to get a green card (especially from China and India) you can really be stuck for a long time at one job. The solution to that is not to eliminate immigration but to streamline the process. Once we've decided as a matter of policy how many immigrants we're willing to take in each year, it is unconscionable to drag the process out over so many years and thus create "green card slaves." This is definitely something that needs to be fixed at the INS regardless of whether we want to raise or lower the quotas.
Bill, in 1987 I was making $57/hour. Twenty one years later I'm lucky if I can get $60/hour in vastly smaller 2008 dollars, and it's not unusual to see jobs paying $40/hour. And yes, it's due entirely to immigrants driving wages down here, and companies off-shoring jobs to India where they pay $5/hour.