Guest Post by Alexander Hagen-Frederiksen
The city of Detroit, Michigan was once seen as a beacon of American industry for being the center of automotive production for the country. As our economy worsened, the “Motor City” felt the unfortunate effects of American outsourcing and downsizing. It has only recently begun showing the flicker of a recovery, as automotive companies like Ford and General Motors have turned to creating cars that can think, and sometimes even drive, on their own. To create these “smart” cars, these companies have needed to recruit skilled software developers to their cause, and for many companies this has been difficult.
It is my sincere desire to provide readers of this site with the best unbiased information available, and a forum where it can be discussed openly, as our Founders intended. But it is not easy nor inexpensive to do so, especially when those who wish to prevent us from making the truth known, attack us without mercy on all fronts on a daily basis. So each time you visit the site, I would ask that you consider the value that you receive and have received from The Burning Platform and the community of which you are a vital part. I can't do it all alone, and I need your help and support to keep it alive. Please consider contributing an amount commensurate to the value that you receive from this site and community, or even by becoming a sustaining supporter through periodic contributions. [Burning Platform LLC - PO Box 1520 Kulpsville, PA 19443] or Paypal
-----------------------------------------------------
To donate via Stripe, click here.
-----------------------------------------------------
Use promo code ILMF2, and save up to 66% on all MyPillow purchases. (The Burning Platform benefits when you use this promo code.)
Stories recently ran on several news outlets about General Motors Co. CEO Mary Barra and her pledges towards technology and education. GM released statements Wednesday, June 28, that they would be partnering with four groups dedicated to coding and the STEM fields, giving the organizations a total of $850,000 to continue their work. The groups include Code.org, Black Girls Code, Institute of Play and Digital Promise.
GM is allegedly giving $200,000 to Code.org for training 1,400 computer science teachers who will teach more than 40,000 U.S. students during the 2017-18 school year. They also plan to give $200,000 to assist Black Girls Code in launching a Detroit-area chapter by fall 2017 with the aim of boosting the number of minority women in tech careers. The goal is to encourage underrepresented women to learn coding and computer sciences. The move doesn’t exactly come as a surprise, as GM has a long history of helping train engineers. Before becoming CEO, Mary Barra received her degree in electrical engineering from the General Motors Institute in Flint Michigan. And in the age of smart cars, coding has becoming more desired than ever.
“A car today has hundreds of millions of lines of code,” Barra said in an interview with CNN. “We do see a shortage if we don’t address this and I mean fully fundamentally. Every child needs to have these skills.”
Lately the headlines have been full of quotes by Silicon Valley CEOs stating they can’t hire workers with the skills they need and there is a desperate shortage of Americans educated in tech. Their solution, if you want to call it a solution has been to hire lots and lots of foreign workers and justify it by saying that “America needs to catch up!” Truth be told, it is not about catching up, it is about money, the bottom line, and the next Quarter’s results.
These companies need to think beyond their bottom lines. It has become a common practice for experienced IT professionals who have been working in their fields for years to be forced to educate their replacements from India and China and then be summarily fired. This is the racket in our H1-B visa program has become.
The H1-B was created to allow companies to bring in foreign talent that could not be found at home. An H1-B used to be referred to as a “genius visa.” While there is a cap on how many applications can be made per year, how visas are distributed is done in a haphazard fashion; Visas are given in a lottery, which means that the most educated and necessary workers can be left behind, while an outsourcing IT firm brings in 200 entry-level foreign workers that have to be trained by Americans before they can even begin their job. These corporations take the hit in efficiency and productivity because they know that they can hire these visa workers for cheaper than an American, and the costs balance out after a period of time. It all comes down to gaming the system for short-term gain at the cost of long-term productivity.
Unfortunately, those “chickens are coming home to roost” as we see when we compare technological innovation of the US with other nations, For instance, 2014, for the first time, US patent applications filed by non-residents out paced that of applications filed by residents. Say what you will about Chinese “junk patents”, multi-national companies are taking great interest in what is going on in China’s Pearl River Delta these days. According to financial writer, David Floyd, “drones and mobile payments are a couple of the areas in which China has pulled decisively ahead of the rest of the world.” China is not achieving these technological goals by bringing in foreign workers. Rather, they are making investments in education and working with industry to create employment opportunities for its skilled workers.
Using information gleaned from PFIR’s state-of-the-art H1-B Visa Database, we found that General Motors hires little to any H1-B employees (Only 61 at their largest tech center in Warren, Michigan.) Those that are hired, are of high skill level, and are paid competitively for their fields. What is usually seen is the exact opposite: large amounts of lower skill workers being paid below average to compensate for the efficiency gap. Looking at the gathered evidence, this call for more American coders and STEM workers and put resources into training them appears genuine. As such, we here at Progressives for Immigration Reform applaud Mary’s call to action. America needs more honest corporate officials that don’t say one thing and then do another. It’s why we would also ask Barra to support reform of the H1-B Visa, in order to stop its exploitation by self-interested corporations and the abuse of foreign and American workers.
If you would like to learn more about what companies in your area are hiring H1-B visa applicants, you can take a look at our online visa database at www.pfirreports.org, where you can search by state, city, zip code, and congressional district. You can then access the total annual wages, average salary, the experience level of the employee, and when the visa expires. Ask them why they’d rather hire a foreign worker with less experience than a bright-minded American college student, or a single-mother who worked nights to afford how to learn coding. Ask them if they really care about this country, or if they just care about its money.
As an Engineer / Comp Sci guy: There are plenty of us – the problem is corporations don’t want to pay. Back in 2005-2008 you laid a lot of us off. I personally know some 60-65 yr old engineers that are working as security guards.
At $14/hr ($28k a year) these corporations are satisfied with no-nothing, H1-B dot-heads.
Pretty sure there is a minimm salary for H1-B dotheads, and it is a lot fucking more than that. Total fucking bullshit you are posting.
Minimum H1B salary is $60k, and is reportedly going up dramatically.
The problem is that most programmers are not good at it. And hence struggle to find work. Good ones have zero trouble at all. And get flooded with offers, week after week.
There are plenty of competent programmers without full time jobs who are going from contract to contract, or mostly unemployed. But GM wants 150k talent for 70k, and they aren’t going to get it, especially if they have to live in Michigan.
As an Engineer / Comp Sci guy: Corporations want cheap coders instead of expensive engineers. What is the difference? Coders create apps, engineers create systems. That few are interested in systems, much less secure systems, has given us the world today where the vast majority of software is riddled with gaping holes, incapable of dealing with corner cases, not enterprise ready and hack-able by equivalent low grade talent that created the junk in the first place.
Remember, the “S” in “IoT” stands for “Security” …
@sux: “where the vast majority of software is riddled with gaping holes, incapable of dealing with corner cases, not enterprise ready and hack-able by equivalent low grade talent that created the junk in the first place.”
What’s even worse is the complexity. I recently HAD to buy a new A/V receiver for my home. The Yamaha manual is 168 pages! Loaded with so much complexity and bullshit that does just about nothing.
Get government COMPLETELY OUT of education and kids will actually get an education that is useful both to them and to the marketplace. Socialism NEVER works, and we have been trying a socialist education system for far too long now and the results are visible everywhere.
Absolutely. Public education was created to create compliant factory workers, not thinkers. As Woodrow Wilson said, the Elites will always go to (high quality) private schools, and the heck with the proles….But with teachers unions, the result has also been a financial disaster, while achievement plummets.
They have slit their own throats. The people in high school see how older people in those fields have been treated – and (quite rationally) avoid those fields entirely. No amount of corporate marketing is going to change their perception of how people in the field are treated by employers.
A car today has hundreds of millions of lines of code,” Barra said in an interview with CNN. “We do see a shortage if we don’t address this and I mean fully fundamentally. Every child needs to have these skills.”
This is never going to happen. It’s literally impossible for every child to have these skills. As far as it goes, with a car having hundreds of millions of lines of code – maybe this is the actual problem, rather than an impending shortage of programmers to exploit?
“Every child needs to have these skills.” Not every child is capable of having these skills. Trying to teach every child to code is like trying to teach every dog to ride a bike. Why not focus on teaching the children who want to or are most likely to be able to learn the skills instead of focusing on “Black Girls Code”? You’ll end up with a much lower quality of code with “Black Girls Code” than if you focus on “white/Asian boys code” or even “anybody who’s really interested in coding code”. I can code, but I recognize that it is a rare skill for women to be able to code well.
My ex was experiencing dissatisfaction with her career growth potential so she started to think she would “make the jump” to coding. I studied Computer Science in university and dropped out early because I had a job offer and have been doing it ever since. She was 10 years younger than me and while I didn’t want to discourage her from trying… I knew her well enough to know it would be a futile effort.
She took a few online tutorials and kept getting annoyed… not *quite* blaming coding for her frustration but not quite realizing that her mind just isn’t built for it. Keep in mind she got her bachelors in art. What comes easy to her with certain visual concepts I’m entirely blind to… and what is alien to her regarding math/logic is like breathing to me.
The most interesting part of her foray into that world was when she started to look into programs for assistance. She said it was actually a bit embarrassing how overwhelmingly biased all the financial and other benefits programs are geared toward women and minorities.
She hasn’t gone back to it… but yeah… we will just pump ever increasing amount of money and energy into a black hole of no reward if we keep trying to “elevate” everyone outside of arenas they show a specific interest in and demonstrate a knack for fairly quickly.
I realized early in the 80’s that coding wasn’t mine to master. I was able to get one line of basic to work, but the second and subsequent lines failed. On the other hand my son, aged 12 at the time, jumped right in and mastered it. He now makes a fine living fixing the broken code his clients purchase from those dot-heads.
+1 on all you said, Annie and razzle (razzle as in the build system?? If so you are totally dating yourself. But I still author sources files too…)
I teach coding to kids… and even amongst those who are likely to be able to learn there’s a lot of variation in capability. It’s definitely a pyramid-shaped reality and to get the people in the top rungs of the pyramid – those who have the capability to build systems, not just hack stuff together – you have to work hard to find them and train them for months and years.
The training needs to look a lot like the hackathons – or well-run starter projects – that companies put together for new employees: Get them in the same room with the experienced systems grayhairs and let them all cross-train each other, the grays in the latest computer languages and tech-of-the-moment (which will be entirely different within two years – one of the worst things about tech, your knowledge ages faster than you can learn it), the noobs in how not to just throw stuff together but instead to apply engineering principles and patience.
I have only faint hope in the local school districts to be able to do anything here. Those who know it well enough to teach will only rarely be able to afford full-time teaching when compared to the salaries they can draw from industry. TEALS – a program where tech people teach in the mornings in high schools – is a big step up, but it’s early to determine if it’s effective enough.
Great post, Annie. Ditto, Razzle
I sure as shit do not want Loquitia Taniqua Shabazz and her average IQ of 83 programming any of our so called autonomous vehicles. We should have picked our own cotton.
Coders have to be smart, and good at math. That’s 5% of the population, tops.
In 2001 I personally met several of the coders and other STEM workers at GM who were imported with work visas from a variety of countries. Corporations should have their charters revoked for sedition and treason.
Why does this cry from them saying they need more American STEM workers seem duplicitous to me? No, what they really want is for more starry-eyed dupes to enroll in college and take out huge loans to learn this “most valuable skill” as a way to enrich their academic and banker friends. And then they can proceed to hire foreigners on the cheap per usual. A win-win for the elites.
Though you don’t learn these coding skills in college. You learn them in specialized and intensive programming schools, some of which are excellent.
By and large, the “We have a serious STEM shortage” is a load of crock by employers not willing to pay the available talent market wages.
But what’s worse is the job description demands on each job posting. Often companies are asking for people with 10+ years experience, and expert level mastery of 3 different programming languages. All this while offering new grad salaries.
So after 4 years of advanced calculus and physics, and hearing people bleet on about a STEM shortage, that is what most people can look forward to.
I was fortunate to have secured a job before graduation after applying to nearly 1000 positions. I had 2 offers, both for the department of defense. So if you want to be a STEM worker in the US, often that means being a hired geek for TPTB.
If they had any sense, they’d move to Greenville SC and take advantage of all the tech 2 yr schools that furnish all the hi tek cats that make the auto industry work down here
Tha article above says “As our economy worsened, the “Motor City” felt the unfortunate effects of American outsourcing and downsizing”.
What horseshit. Detroit disintegrated when blacks moved in.
In 1950 there were 1.7 million whites, effectively no blacks. Today there are 700,000 blacks and truly zero whites. That is why Detroit is fucked.
Black Girls Code?
Racist pieces of shit still virtue signalling.
The problem isnt quantity, its paying them.
It also has to do with skills, if you are a strong engineer, speak english and have interpersonal skills you get put into jobs fixing shit the h1b fucktards screwed up.
Or they get sick of getting laid off so some get into management or different fields altogether.
This is about the h1b glut failing and now they want the supply side to be goosed so they can get cheap labor when demand is high.