Roundabout with H-1B

Are we being underbid? - Pic courtesy of Wikipedia

by Trebor Snillor

Today I’m in Starbucks, during a holiday week. The temperature is plummeting outside and the throng has moved indoors.. I’m composing this in an easy chair next to the front door. Burrr! Today’s blog topic is one I’ve touched on in other blog entries (“Oink!”, “Stratus World”). I’m speaking specifically this time of the controversy surrounding H-1B visas granted to immigrants in the United States. Most of such immigrants come from India and China though many other countries also indulge. H-1B visas were conceived as a way to fill specialty US jobs (in science, medicine, engineering, accounting) with foreign brain power. The idea was that the jobs were unfilled – why not answer the call with 3-year visas?

This Road to Hell was paved with good intentions; limits were placed on duration and number of people. Politicians didn’t want to horn in on American jobs did they? (Or did they have something else in mind?).. The law is now a labyrinth of codas, exceptions and dangling participles – it makes the tax code look simple. The Fortune 500 companies of America were smitten with this mother lode of cheap white collar labor – how could they not exploit it? The issue has been conflated into a political issue, but I have to say it’s one that mostly pits populist Republicans (anti H-1B) against rich, patrician Republicans who are vested in the Fortune 500 (pro H-1B).

LOSE-LOSE SITUATION

Note -- the following discussion uses software engineering as an example, but it is equally applicable to accounting, medicine and other areas.

I have a good friend in human resources at a large accounting firm. He tells me that a newly minted American computer science graduate programming java commands $90K/year nowadays. That same job can be filled by H-1B Outsourcing firms for $65K/year. Software engineering isn’t controlled by organized labor – it responds directly to market pressures. Indians and Pakistanis have effectively underbid Americans for the same work assignments.

The cost to American citizens: We shrink the “specialty employment” pool dramatically. The only American grads commanding $90K will be the top 2% of the class. Otherwise the form letter reads “all jobs are filled at this time – thank you for your interest”. A question to Americans might be: have we bid the price too high for what we do?

The cost to employers: In treating software design as a generic commodity you get high turnover, buggy code and a serious lack of standards or continuity in your whole operation. A permanent employee can better understand history, strategy, business rules and overall company direction. A contractor is less likely to feel like a stake holder when a 3-year egg timer ticking away in the background. Throw in some language and cultural barriers – you have a situation that evokes the Neiman Marcus slogan: “Quality is remembered long after price is forgotten”..

The cost to the United States of America: The list of “specialty fields” has expanded to include basically any middle class occupation that is heavily dependent on computers or internet connections. Doctors’ jobs are even at risk as it becomes easier to farm out tests and x-rays to a Pakistani clinic halfway around the world. America’s middle class is hit by a wrecking ball of “friendly” outsourcing.

Where do we go from here? Some of the same people vehemently opposed to H-1B are also free market apostles who would be mortified by wage controls, hiring restrictions or unionization. Politicians tend to engage in double-talk and leave the status as quo.

CONCLUSION

If we do nothing, we will end up with an odd sort of America. Sanjay and Priya will make $65K a year which is still enough to live a middle class lifestyle. They will have a new Toyota Camry and a nice starter home. American-born John and Karen will be struggling to drive a used Yaris and will live in a dumpy apartment. It seems they can only find work as a car wash manager and a restaurant hostess. The America I describe isn’t so far away or ridiculous – it’s already under way. Something needs to be done, the question is “what?”

© 2014 Snillor Productions

A Looking Glass Universe?

It came from Inner Space - Pic courtesy of Wikipedia

by Trebor Snillor

“You tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart.” -- Francis Church, contributing editor of the New York Sun, 1897

Today’s topic is in the area of “weird science”. I’m neither a chemist nor a biologist so I’ll serve up these ideas as speculation. The reader can hurl it to the trash bin as necessary. 

Mainstream Christianity and “mainstream” atheism are uncivil enemies toward one another – the unkindest of adversaries. But they oddly share something in common. Both areas of thought tend towards reductionist thinking. The idea is that humans are the “summa” product of all creation – that anything smaller than us is merely a mindless constituent ingredient in our biological bill-of-materials. Darwinists and Christians are both egotistically infatuated with human-kind – just differing on how we got here.

Religion uses the sky as a metaphor to God – He and the angels reside in the Heavens. Atheism also looks to the sky.. Cosmic rays and solar radiation are thought to cause biological mutations to the DNA. The SETI projects looks skyward and beyond for intelligent life. Both ways of thinking share a similar “bigger is better” idea. Be it God or some ultimate scientific Truth – it looms much larger and higher than us.

Conversely, we look at small things with an odd sort of disdain. Cells, molecules, prions, atoms and even sub-atomic muons – are seen as mindless mechanistic wind-ups. They follow a rote, robotic ritual with no intelligent guidance. Much like a tether ball circling a school yard pole, electrons are seen as thoughtless orbs that obey some simple orbit. In fact, we may even conjecture a smallest particle or time slice – a simplicity that defies all simplicity.

I would like to suggest that we are looking in the wrong direction for anything of substance. The sky gives us nothing but the stellar byproducts of a formative event – gas clouds and nebulae that are lifeless in any way we think of life.

INSIDE JOB

I am proposing something else very different – intuitive on my part. I think we were created by a masterful intelligence but the act of creating was done entirely from the inside out. Something manipulated the bonding properties of atoms and molecules to build living systems – from inside the atoms themselves. The creative capacity here is mind-boggling, it would be like humans aligning stars by gravitational manipulation. There is also some implicit idea that whole civilizations or sub-universes could exist at a micro-molecular scale. “Absurd” you say.

REDUCTIO AD COMPLEXITY

There is much about our thinking that is arbitrary and even well, blinders-on. We know only an alphabet that starts with “A” not “Z”. A globe that would show Australia on top would be all wrong – primarily because of our concrete, conventional mindset. Humans are in a technological infancy.. Of all that is real and relevant we probably know about one tenth of one percent. We don’t know what causes aging or cancer. We don’t know the origin of life and we don’t really understand dark matter. This is not to denigrate science or philosophy – only to say that the journey has barely begun. We aren’t there yet, nor are we even close.

LOOKING GLASS UNIVERSE

Moving beyond the laws of mere physics or chemistry – is there some advanced sub-universe where people are thoughtful and today’s pressing problems have been solved?

There might very well be “somewhere over the rainbow” – a futuristic world where people treat each other decently and priorities are set right. But that rainbow is contained in a dew drop, a tiny smattering of nothingness that just happens to contain all of reality. We humans are lumbering giants full of pride, ego and pre-programmed fallacies. At some point we need to slow down and see what obviously is, even if it’s very small and not directly visible.

© 2014 Snillor Productions