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To: Wally_Kalbacken
Here's another trick I came across about 12 years ago: Running the job ad in a publication unlikely to be read by the engineer or scientist seeking a situation. A colleague brought to my attention a teeny ad that appeared in the Wall Street Journal, for a C programmer with a PhD in mathematics in fractal analysis. Well, I program in C and I have a PhD in mathematics in harmonic analysis (pretty close to fractal analysis). The ad said $54,000, M-F 9-5 and gave the address of the Georgia employment agency. I wondered why the ad didn't say what company the position was for, but I had a pretty good idea: Iterated Systems (if I remember the name correctly), a company using fractal analysis to compress images. (Microsoft used their technology in their Encarta encyclopedia.) So I placed a telephone call to the company to ask about the position. The woman who answered sounded positively angry that I would call. It all suddenly clicked together: they had someone in mind (probably a graduate student of the professor that started the company), a foreign national, and they had to play this game to "prove" no Americans were available who could do this job.

What was infuriating about this was that at the time, the unemployment rate for US citizens with new PhDs in math was 14% (this was 1992), with maybe 10% underemployment on top of that. This company would have had no trouble at all getting a US citizen for that position -- if they were sincere.

56 posted on 10/29/2005 9:53:29 AM PDT by megatherium (Hecho in China)
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To: megatherium
the unemployment rate for US citizens with new PhDs in math was 14% (this was 1992), with maybe 10% underemployment on top of that

Why the free traders imply that Americans with capacity to get PhD in mathematics should so naive as to chose such "career"? It shows that either the free traders are either stupid themselves or are completely dishonest.

92 posted on 10/29/2005 12:08:56 PM PDT by A. Pole (Out West, the aspens will already be turning.They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them)
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To: megatherium

> Iterated Systems (if I remember the name correctly), a company using fractal analysis to compress images.

I remember them. It was a cool idea. I tried out their stuff. At the time (1995 or so) we went with JPEG for several reasons.

> they had to play this game to "prove" no Americans were available who could do this job.

The surprising thing about the oh-so-intelligent free traitors is that they are not smart enough to understand this inevitable consequence to a market-distorting law such as all special work visa laws. Our immigration policy should be orthogonal to the free market - it should stand on its own to promote AMERICAN values, which extend far beyond pure dollars. Free traitors are fools.


150 posted on 11/07/2005 10:02:15 AM PST by old-ager
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