Posted on 09/14/2012 5:34:35 PM PDT by llevrok
SEATTLE -- Several high-tech companies, including Microsoft, say there's a brain drain in America.
They're worried about a shortage of qualified high-tech workers, and now they're asking Congress for help.
Microsoft alone employs 45,000 people in the United States and tens of thousands more worldwide. Officials from Microsoft and a host of other powerful companies say America isn't producing enough homegrown math and science experts and current laws prevent them from recruiting the best of those experts from overseas.
Microsoft owns 120 satellite offices around the world, but it's in the United States where most of the company's innovation takes place. Despite that, company officials say there's a brain drain in this country.
"We not only have a jobs problem in this country, we have a skills problem," said Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith.
Microsoft and several other companies claim they're not finding enough qualified high-tech workers to fill their jobs, and the key word is qualified.
"We simply don't have an adequate supply of workers here in America with the specialized computer science skills and engineering research skills we need to get the work done," said Microsoft vice president of general counsel Karen Jones.
What the company now wants is immigration reform to eliminate green card quotas. Green cards allow foreign nationals to work in the country, and right now the maximum number per country, per year is set at 9,800.
That means for India, which has a population of 1.1 billion and a desirable high-tech workforce, only 9,800 nationals can receive an American green card each year.
Microsoft thinks the limits are flawed.
"If we don't have a system that allows us to bring the talent we need, we as a company, we as a country, are really going to miss out," Jones said.
Microsoft wants Congress to pass a law called the Fairness for High Skilled Immigrants Act, which would eliminate the ceiling on the number of green cards the United States issues.
Why??
Don’t they have keyboards in China and India?
Good reason for everyone to switch to Linux.
Microsoft can shove it up their collective smelly Obamas.
They’ve invented nothing, and they’ve ruined everything they stole.
Shove it Gates, and take your cr*p with you.
what makes companies and politicians do this sort of thing.
that’s why i use linux. using suse 11.4 & firefox.
haven’t hardly used windoze in months. only use it when absolutely utterly necessary. dual boot.
blessings, bobo
Who isn't much better, but at least they're not always in the news agitating for more imported workers.
There are no American programmers because the cheap Indian and Russian immigrants work for dirt. I think I might be the last WASP male programmer to come out of an American collage. The programming department was completely devoid of Americans. There were some blacks in the first year of the program, but they all dropped out. There were some WASP women, but they were all “MIS”, not “CS”. MIS is computer programing without the computers or the programming. Mostly it was Russians who smoked a lot and were generally nasty, and Indians who cheated like 5th graders.
I wish they would stop importing the 3rd world.
They can see the results of a modern liberal college education just as well as any other capitalist.
On the other hand, their desire to use oversea talent is also reflected in the quality of their products which have decreased in recent years as far as I am concerned.
I’d rather export Gates and his ilk instead
The key word is CHEAP.
They want the advantages of operating here while at the same time having convenient access to a cut-rate foreign labor force.
Ubuntu 12.04
I really like it. Sure, there a few things it can’t do but overall I am delighted with it. It is amazingly stable and I was able to fix the few problems I found in the week I have had it installed.
I might consider dropping a few bucks to pick up Windows XP for a partition but I am not in a hurry.
Just don’t let any of them to be over four-oh!
the only reason i use suse 11.4 is that my computer is too old for an update. stuck with it til i get one with a faster processor and more ram.
otherwise, have used linux for probably 14 years or so. always have dual-booted. guess if i would take the time to learn wine wouldn’t have to.
getting old, and what little i do on windows, isn’t really worth my time.
blessings, bobo
Those of us who work in IT know this is BS. These big IT companies know the imported labor will work without complaining, never speak up in meetings and are basically yes men (and women). They don’t really work cheaper, in fact there are laws in place to give them higher pay than many young people trying to get started.
They keep the white folk (and a few blacks) around to correct their english and teach them how our industries work.
Many of the IT recruiting companies are now owned by these same foreigners and we hear many of the staff online with them all day ‘helping’ the people do their work.
It’s amazing what these companies get away with.
No, I’m not a racist, I’m an American who gets the feeling I work in a third world country everyday I show up at the office. I know for a fact we have Americans who can do these jobs.
Not so fast.I,like most here,want to see our borders (particularly the southern one) sealed tighter than the East German border and every single wetback expelled or imprisoned.However,there might be a legitimate need for small numbers of highly skilled foreigners in technology,computers,medicine and maybe other fields as well.So,after having expelled the 20-30 million wetbacks that the Rats have allowed in over the years perhaps we can grant a few thousand work visas for software engineers,doctors and nurses and certain kinds of scientists.Of course,special conditions would apply...no family members,no chance of citizenship,no child a woman might bear gets citizenship,etc.
There is no shortage of American engineers .A very high percentage of American youth go to college. Thousands of engineers are graduated every year
It’s been about a week and I am very pleased with it.
I also have live discs of Puppy Linux and Knoppix around somewhere. It’s amazing how little of my new 250gb hard drive is not being gobbled up by Windows.
There are always games on Facebook, lol. They work in Firefox.
Which in turn means that the job function has become commoditized, and US companies no longer see business application programming as a function worth spending big money on. Necessary, perhaps, but so are janitorial services.
Microsoft's requirements may be a bit more stringent, but even they aren't willing to overpay for a resource so readily available on the international labor market.
Indemnification.
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