I live east of Seattle, literally in the heart of Microsoft country.
Last time I heard, 50% of the programmer jobs in this area are held by foreign born workers.
The Center for Immigration Studies did a survey in 2012 and discovered that millions of USA born STEM graduates were unemployed or working in a non-tech job.
In spite of that, Bill Gates never misses an opportunity to beg Congress for more STEM work visas.
Just as crazy, when he speaks at the UW Computer Science Department, the kids treat him like a rock star, even though he is avidly working to crush their pay scale and job opportunities!
Thank you.
I live east of Seattle, literally in the heart of Microsoft country.
Microsoft gets mixed feelings from me; on one hand they've been very good at getting things standardized, they've put out some good stuff (Win 98SE was excellent, especially when you consider it's minimum requirements). -- On the other hand they're really bad at presenting a stable platform {MFC, WPF, lack of Dotnet on Win8, etc} for people to use. {This is especially true for users of MS Office [full] who depend on Access.}
Last time I heard, 50% of the programmer jobs in this area are held by foreign born workers.
Mixed feelings there; some foreign-born guys are absolutely brilliant -- others not so much.
The Center for Immigration Studies did a survey in 2012 and discovered that millions of USA born STEM graduates were unemployed or working in a non-tech job.
That's really puzzling: the reason you get an engineering or math degree is to be ever-employable. -- The hard-sciences aren't easy, but they should confer some benefit.
In spite of that, Bill Gates never misses an opportunity to beg Congress for more STEM work visas.
Gates has done some dumb things; but he's also done some great things too. I expect that, should I ever become rich & famous for above-average competency people would have complaint against me as well... So I won't say much there.
Just as crazy, when he speaks at the UW Computer Science Department, the kids treat him like a rock star, even though he is avidly working to crush their pay scale and job opportunities!
... Wirth would be better treated as a rock star, IMO. While he gets a lot of name recognition for Pascal, he also developed entire systems, the latest to my knowledge being Oberon.
And on that tangent: I heard that the 1.0 version of Windows was written in Pascal; I also heard from a fellow freeper who audited Windows between 3.11 and Win95 and his company advised the codebase be written in Ada. I do wonder what the state of computing today would be if either of those had stuck [Windows would likely never have gotten the unsecure/buffer-overflow reputation, for one].
“Last time I heard, 50% of the programmer jobs in this area are held by foreign born workers.”
From the local demographics that is probably close. Why is that? I know Gates is always bemoaning the lack of education, but there has to be more to it than that.
Tax credits?
Benefit rules?
Harder working?
I’m pretty sure it isn’t because they can pay them less with all of the twenty-something foreigners driving their fancy cars around here.