- Joined
- Aug 18, 2009
- Messages
- 47,438
- Reaction score
- 20,861
hi pan,
alright.
i've gotta read up more on H1B visa holders...and i appreciate your reply, Pan. i've mostly been trying to understand the net positive/negative effects of hiring illegal immigrants.
i don't want to seem argumentative on the issue of H1B visa holders, but i'd like to ask you a question;
i can see how a tech company would benefit if they feel that the necessary expertise isn't available domestically.
the company gets a high skilled employee, and its fortunes would rise as the result.
but what about the US born IT?
his skills may not be up to par (but i would imagine he's trainable). doesn't that guy lose his job to some fellow from India?
bear with me here...if you would.
the company loses if it has to hire an American who isn't sufficiently skilled at his job, but wouldn't the US born worker gain?
presuming that the US born worker is not incapable of being trained to sharpen his expertise, couldn't US tech companies hire these "not-quite-ready-for-prime-time" players and bring'm up to speed?
- IGIT
In short, not really.
I think MD's make a decent parallel. You can choose between a top end surgeon or you can choose the surgeon who went to a lesser school and got lesser grades. Sure, the second surgeon might be trainable but you need surgery now. Are you willing to wait however long it takes for the second surgeon to up to snuff?
Essentially, companies cannot afford to wait/train guys to reach that next level - whatever it might be. The industries are evolving too rapidly. Now, there's an argument there about how to incentivize companies to train new hires but I don't know how successful it will be. In too many fields, if you sit out for a year you're going to be badly out-of-date with the latest developments. And we can't predict what they'll be.
At the extreme end of that spectrum, you can graduate college and have your freshman coursework no longer be relevant to the job market. So the time a company spends bringing you up to speed is kind of lost because by the time you get up to speed...you're already out of date.
And at the higher levels, not everyone is smart enough to get up to speed in the 1st place so that's another risk. You hire a guy to train and it turns out he can't handle the upper limit difficulties of the industry. But that's not just a U.S. problem, it's international. The difference is that the mid-level U.S. guys don't apply to jobs outside of the U.S. where they might be more competitive in the job market. Of course, they're losing out to higher end international labor.
I suspect that mid-level U.S. labor grossly overestimates it's quality advantage over foreign labor.