Which Google Should Congress Believe? 428
theodp writes "In Congressional testimony last month, Google's VP of People Operations told the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration that, due to limits on the number of H-1B visas, Google is regularly unable to pursue highly qualified candidates. But as Google stock tumbled in after hours trading Wednesday, Google's CEO blamed disappointing profits on a hiring binge and promised Wall Street analysts that the company would keep a careful eye on headcount in the future. So which Google should Congress believe?"
The two are not mutually exclusive (Score:5, Insightful)
For all we know they hired 10,000 janitors and have trouble finding programmers.
Re:The two are not mutually exclusive (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The two are not mutually exclusive (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The two are not mutually exclusive (Score:5, Interesting)
If Google really want's someone they can offer 50k but they can probably get local talent for cheaper. My guess is H1B's would balance out to around 25K a pop and most Americans would be fine competing on that type of playing field.
Re:The two are not mutually exclusive (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, I think them getting in on this side of the H1B argument goes against their "do no evil" policy. I may not seem so microly, but macroly it hurts everyone except those 70 people they want to hire.
Re:The two are not mutually exclusive (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh... wait... to you, evil means 'slightly less good for me personally, or the people I identify with as a nation'. Being against protectionism isn't evil... in fact, if you're for the benefit of the human race as a whole, protectionist policies are evil. Free trade, without tariffs, may hurt some people, but it helps others... you're just whining because you happen to be neighbors with the people who might get hurt in the short term, and don't care about those other-skin-colored people who get a significant benefit in the short and long term from open border policies.
Personally I'm gonna side with Google. I think nasty immigration restrictions are evil, and I support their push to increase H1B visas.
Disclosure: I'm a white, 30ish male who works in IT and lives in flyover country. I won't benefit from H1B visas, nor do I know anyone who would. But I still think they're a good thing.
Google is evil. (Score:3, Interesting)
You will observe that "Don't be evil" no longer appears in their credo.
http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/tenthings. html [google.com]
Sure, #6 says "You can make money without being evil", but it doesn't say that Google will itself refrain from evil.
Once you go public, you answer to the shareholders, who are usually more interested in money than morals.
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Re:The two are not mutually exclusive (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because some company wants to hire programmers at $35k a year, while staying in a high-cost area, doesn't mean they have some magical right to do it.
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$50k is to the government. G^nP is suggesting that for top talent, the pay differential between Berkeley and Bangalore or Beijing is $50k, and that companies might be willing to concentrate more on finding (and paying for) America's Top Talent (that Silicon Valley reality show) for the same effective cost (lower salary, but auctioned H1-B) as an import.
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The field is already level ,though (Score:2)
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Supposed to be, yes. In reality it almost never is. They cook the numbers as badly as any movie studio.
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Re:The field is already level ,though (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:The two are not mutually exclusive (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The two are not mutually exclusive (Score:4, Informative)
Re:The two are not mutually exclusive (Score:5, Insightful)
Just remember, though -- while 9 women may not be able to make a baby in 1 month, they most certainly can make 9 babies in 9 months, while even the most talented woman would have a hard time producing more than 2.
Re:The two are not mutually exclusive (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:The two are not mutually exclusive (Score:5, Funny)
Not exactly. The Mythical Man Month teaches us that when you're having woman problems, throwing more women at the problem is never the solution.
The formula is n(n-1)/2 ... that is, for each group of women n, the number of channels of communication in the group is equal to n times n-1 (where the 1 is you), divided by two.
Because of this, Fred Brooks recommends that you not engage any baby-producers until the overall system of women is well architected. Note that this process can take an incredibly long time. Another solution is to employ women with off-the-shelf babies, which often come with a third-party support contract.
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As such, Google is finding itself hiring lots of people, some of whom are sub-optimal for the jobs they're doing.
This problem is a good part of why Micr [www.cbc.ca]
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This is why the immigration debate is so screwed in America. Canada's immigration system is not lighter. Canada's immigration system is hard, but if you have the skills you can immigrate! There is a big difference between what America does, and what Canada does. Yet people seem to confuse the issues.
What America has done and this is the da
Re:The two are not mutually exclusive (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The two are not mutually exclusive (Score:5, Insightful)
I love this quote "Investors wanted less spending, more growth".... And I'd like someone to leave a pound of gold on my doorstep every day.... Hmm, ain't happening. I better punish Google stock for it.
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Re:The two are not mutually exclusive (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes that's a pretty generic statement, most likely there were some specific expectations investors had that weren't met.
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Re:The two are not mutually exclusive (Score:5, Insightful)
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Torn (Score:2, Insightful)
(the humorous option) "You just think there's some big conspiracy to keep you down because you're an arrogant substandard programmer who thinks you deserve to be paid six figures"
and
(the honest option) "Yeah... I know exactly how you feel."
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For all we know they hired 10,000 janitors and have trouble finding programmers.
You mean, they got 10,000 employees to transfer from Microsoft? Now we know Google is doomed.
Stupid question (Score:5, Insightful)
Duh.
how about believing that this is a false dichotomy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:how about believing that this is a false dichot (Score:5, Insightful)
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Whom are you quoting here? Can we, please, have a link to anything like this and the evidence of it being "embraced by everyone here"?
We do. American programmers are qualified alright on average, but there aren't enough of them.
Re:how about believing that this is a false dichot (Score:5, Interesting)
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You have? That's called "anecdotal evidence". Anyway, those people you met (whoever "certified" them) are already gainfully employed, aren't they? Which means, if Google were to hire them, their current employer would'be short. Which just reaffirms, what I said: "There are qualified programmers, we just don't have enough of them". And I like that personally as a programmer (although Google chose not to hire me for some reason after 3 inte
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But since you're insisting on having a thoughtful discussion of this instead: I submitted a story [slashdot.org] a few weeks ago on what I thought was an interesting response to Google -- auction off H1-Bs. If the issue is *really* ultra-specialized positions that can't be properly filled with Americans, t
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I just thought it was funny that the people who fly into a frothing racist rage at any mention of India
I don't see many actual racist comments on slashdot that aren't modded down beneath everyone's threshold. Perhaps you are confusing resentment over one's job being lost to someone else with racism.
examples:
"Man, I lost my job to some guy in india. Now people I still know at the company complain about 12 hour delays in communications as well as overhead of having to do everything via emails with no face to face." = a complaint that is not racist
"Man, those pakis ought to go back to their mud shacks
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Both? (Score:2)
Qualifications (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Qualifications (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Qualifications (Score:5, Insightful)
I work at a huge company with plenty of H1B holders. The ratio of talented to useless slob H1B holders is roughly the same as "home grown" employees here. It's just that the H1B folks COST LESS.
Re:Qualifications (Score:5, Interesting)
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it is ASTONISHING at the low quality of people you can interview. Degrees are only super-loosely correlated.
BTW, w/ swap two variables... could they use a third place holder, or was it meant to be more clever than that?
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Consider this:
Let's say there *is* a shortage of talented American IT professionals, regardless of income requirements. You are a politician hearing from companies about this shortage. Do you A) Go for the long haul and try to fix the education system to increase the nu
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You are very arrogant if you believe that your company is so special that people will want to work there over other companies just because you pay "enough"
I GUARANTEE you will have all the qualified candidates you want if you start offering 2X the salary that you are offering right now.
Oh, you are not willing to do that? Well, then be satisfied with hiring two people a month because that is all you are
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Jut like people want to but the lowest priced shoes, TVs or oil for the lowest price, companies also want to buy labor for the lowest cost. What is wrong with that? You don't have a right to be employed by someone.
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It's all a boondoggle meant to continue to vest and retain contr
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Re:Qualifications (Score:5, Informative)
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Get a clue.
Outsourcing? (Score:4, Funny)
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Next step from the Pro-H1B Lobby is to get hiring American workers made illegal.
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Looks like (Score:4, Funny)
If they think congress will buy both stories, they lost their noodles!
Upmoderate parent (Score:2)
Maybe (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not defending Google here, I'm just pointing out that the two statements are not totally contradictory. Technically, all the google blog said is "There exist candidates that we can't hire (but would like to) because of immigration laws".
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Two mediocre employees do not equil one good employee, in fact just the opposite.
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I know! (Score:2, Funny)
Obvious (Score:2, Funny)
Google lies (Score:4, Informative)
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Then why do you object to them hiring the best and the brightest, no matter where they were born?
To illustrate: Google's founder [wikipedia.org] used to be a Russian citizen; should he have stayed at home instead of stealing the American jobs (from search.msn.com ?)
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But as the articles you didn't read pointed out, they're not: they're hiring 10,000 drones because they're cheap and interchangable, not because they're smart!
Before you accuse others of something they didn't do, try understanding their point of view. It really works!
Both.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Like any public company - Google's learning to deal with keeping a steady growth in-order to keep its stock healthy. While they may have hired too many people recently - those are too many VERY WELL PAID people compared to what they could get for the same money if they could bring in H1-B workers. The H1-B worker is looking to come to America and start a new life - he/she is willing to sacrifice a few years worth of inferior pay inorder to get settled with a Greencard.
So yes, Google CEO blamed their hiring binge - what he really meant was "We're paying too much in wages and salaries - more than we'd like to anyway".
Well... (Score:2)
Haven't been here long, but... (Score:2, Insightful)
Cheap Labor Lobbyists (Score:5, Interesting)
Google, like other American corporations, wants to hire H1B "guest workers" because they're cheaper than citizens or fulltime residents. Guest workers subsidize their American work time by spending more time back home in their foreign country, which usually costs less to live in than the US. So they can ask for lower pay than their American competition, who have to live here full time. With our higher cost labor protections, environmental protections, and overall higher quality of life - for most everyone - with its higher cost.
So Google wants to build its brand and infrastructure on the vast, longterm American investment in the Internet and creating most of its indexed content. It wants to tap the PhDs that Americans have invested in producing to make a less-valuable foreigner workforce more productive. And it wants to charge American corporate customers the money with which it pays them, while pitching expensive equity to mostly American investors. All underwritten by foreigner labor, even though there are plenty of Americans available, though at a higher price.
I'm not surprised: that's business. It's also kinda evil.
Re:Cheap Labor Lobbyists (Score:5, Insightful)
Everything that I've see of Google's hiring practices indicates that their primary goal is acquiring the absolute best, most brilliant people possible. I'm sure at some point cost is a concern, but it's not a primary thing that drives the decision of whether to hire particular engineers.
Finding and hiring fantastic people is an astonishingly hard thing to do, and we invest substantial resources into doing it. We absolutely never have as many extremely-gifted candidates as we'd like, and probably never will. But every single hiring process discussion I've heard has been about "how can we find better candidates" or just "how can we find more candidates". I have definitely never heard anything even vaguely like "how can we find cheaper candidates".
If you posit that exceptionally talented engineers are equally distributed among all populations with access to at least a moderate level of technology, then probably about half of them in existence are non-American. (And even if you believe that they are unequally distributed, it's hard to dispute that at least some nontrivial number of them are non-American.) I believe that Google's interest is in getting access to that additional set of exceptionally talented engineers, not just getting more engineers of the same talent for less money.
tough choice... (Score:2)
The one under oath, rather than the one issuing a press release.
New era for Google? (Score:2)
Note to Google top managers: If you are adversarial, you are showing that you are incompetent.
satellite branching? (Score:3, Interesting)
If you think about it....allowing more H-1 visas would actually help to save more American jobs as those foreign hi-tech workers will live here and buy things, eat at restaurants locally (it's not like they will be flying back to their country of origin just to grab a bite to eat), buy services (phone, TV, etc.) locally as well as pay American income and sales taxes which gets pumped right back into the community.
If not, companies will have no choice but to out-source or move those specific projects overseas if they can not find enough qualified workers locally, and that means the govt loses on tax income.
Pursue High Quality Search Results (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm finding that I'm unable to pursue high quality search results.
I propose that Google's patented search technologies be licensed to foreign competitors at fixed rates (far below the current market value).
This may affect Google's ability to earn profits, but all I care about is getting high quality search results.
Thank you,
A Concerned Citizen
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The only country where citizens had such work rights was Soviet Union. You'd like all that here in America?
Believe both (Score:2, Redundant)
Look northward, angel (Score:2)
Where is your thinking? (Score:4, Insightful)
It saddens me to say this but work ethic is sorely lacking in America today. The college professors I interact with on a daily basis confirm that the kids entering college today have not recieved a proper education, their brains are mush. THey aren't stupid, they just have never been challenged and grown and developed their brains. They can tell you about Global Warming, yet nothing about American History. They have been seriously ripped off by an educational system that has constantly lowered standards in order to get everyone passing the standardized tests.
To a large extent, kids these days are seriously lacking critical thinking skills. You want proof? Well, lets just watch the replies to this post and see how this gets moderated.
-joel
There's no contradiction... (Score:5, Insightful)
The two messages can be combined to give the message that Google wants to hire even more people which will hurt their numbers in the near term but lead to a healthier and more profitable company in the future. There's nothing inconsistent about that message.
shakespeare not available... (Score:2)
Cause and effect (Score:2)
That said, I'm a Google stockholder and I think they've been careless in their hiring and acquisitions. Their claim that they've been making only superb hires is dubious at best.
Overseas (Score:2)
Its always in these companies interests to have a larger pool to pick from, so that they can get more qualified workers cheaper.
They don't need more people for search. (Score:3, Interesting)
Google's main search engine doesn't take that many people to implement, extend, and run. About 50-60 smart people really make Google search go. A few hundred more take care of the software systems that support search. It's not that big an operation.
Most of the new hires at Google aren't on the search engine technology side of the business. Take a look at Google's job openings. [google.com] Only a few of those jobs [google.com] are anywhere close to the guts of the search engines.
Believe Both (Score:5, Funny)
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Mod Parent Up (Score:2)
Correction: s/Google/Stanford/ (Score:2)
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That's what happens when you mass-hire Stanford frat boys straight from the classes. The highly qualified programmers have programmed applications in the real world for a number of years and not just applied what-I-just-learned in non-real-world environments.
Google wanted innovation instead of glorified code monkeys. They got it by every sane metric. Seems you're just upset that they didn't hire you.
Get screwed both ways, I hope you get as many foreign developers on your projects as possible. Might as well start the outsourcing.
Have you ever worked at any large company? I doubt there are any projects where most of the developers weren't born overseas.