Posted on 07/05/2007 7:33:02 PM PDT by Babu
US software behemoth Microsoft Corp. said Thursday it would soon open an office in Canada, lamenting tough immigration rules in the United States that make it difficult to hire foreign staff.
"It is about recruiting the best and brightest, and right now, the majority are coming from overseas," Marc Seaman, a spokesman for the world's biggest software company, told The Globe and Mail newspaper.
"The United States has immigration quotas and some limitations for bringing in people from outside the country," he said. "That challenge is an opportunity for Canada, in the sense that this will bring the top software developers to Canada."
The development office, to be opened in Vancouver, a three-hour drive north from Microsoft's Redmond, Washington headquarters, will initially be staffed by some 300 recruits from around the world, the company said.
Eventually, it could grow to house as many as 1,000 employees.
Canada is currently the third-largest source of recruits for Microsoft outside the United States, after India and Japan.
Personally, I use Fedora. However, there are many versions of user-friendly Linux available. Ubuntu, Linux Mint, MEPIS, PCLinuxOS, and many more.
If you just want to try some without altering your system just yet, check out the many Live CDs available. They are essentially an OS-on-a-CD. Boot up and you're running Linux.
I have a lot of these students in my IT classes. You are right, they are not usually better, just financed by their country. They go for an education in the U.S. because it will make it easier for them to acquire a permanent job here or to acquire an outsourced job in their home country. They came up with this more qualified/can’t find qualified Americans line around 2000 and have managed to convince many people that majoring in IT is a dead end. I have had many very smart and very well qualified students both new to the field and those updating their education and degree who are already working in the field. It’s all about getting cheap labor, not better qualified engineers and developers.
ping
Thanks! I have been considering this for a long time. I have been to busy at work to investigate this. Also, we use MS applications (Access, excel etc).
Uh-huh. I'm personally acquainted with a young man, former classmate and friend of my daughters who graduated from Carnegie Mellon, one of the most respected computer science programs in the country, with superb grades and an impressive resume.
All of his classmates from overseas (mainly from India) landed decent jobs in their field, mostly before they graduated. My daughter's friend was so optimistic he could do the same that he went ahead with marriage to his high school sweetheart (also a friend of my daughters).
To make a long story short, she ended up supporting him and he worked casual or temp gigs for three long years before he finally got a decent job, partly as the result of the government making a show of enforcement. The kid is pulling down $65K per year now and couldn't even get an entry level $30K per year job before the government decided they needed to sway public opinion prior to ramming amnesty down our throats.
I'm happy for this young couple (good conservatives, BTW) but their story, other than finally landing the $65K job in his chosen field, is the rule for U.S. Citizens who are IT workers, not the exception. Is it any great wonder why so many of our citizens are training themselves outside the computer technology field?
Japan has a sensible visa policy on this issue. Any company who can't find local people with specific skills after showing they made a reasonable attempt to do so can import foreign workers to do the job. The only catch is that they have to pay the foreign workers 10% over the going market rate. As you can imagine, companies understand that if they flood a particular specialty with foreign workers, the market rate will rise and everyone gets paid more. So there is a real push to get more locals trained in skills with market shortages.
There are a lot of IT workers from India in Japan. There are also a lot from the United States. Jobs in the field aren't as easy to get for foreign workers as they used to be, because there are a lot more Japanese trained or educating themselves to take these jobs.
Access will have some trouble porting its apps to Linux, if not downright impossible. All but the most complex spreadsheets and docs should be no problem to convert.
Colgate makes all their toothpaste in China. I went to the health food store and bought new toothpaste. I used to be for tort reform-not now. These companies should have to pay if they injure people while maximizing their profit by producing inferior or dangerous products.
Great-I could keep one computer running Windows in order to run some of my more complicated code.
This is a sensible policy-it stops companies from screwing workers from their own country. Also, we have to consider the threat-the terrorists in the UK were educated just the type of person who could get into the H1B program.
Or you could do what I do--run Windows in a VM and save the hardware.
We are under no obligation to import cheap skilled workers in order to satisfy Mr. Gates excessive greed...some of whom may pose a security risk. While Mr. Gates is entitled to his profits, he is not entitiled to an endless pool of cheap labor foreign labor; the H1H program costs the tax-payers money. Why should we pay to be outsourced?
Good idea-thanks!
I’m not sure people making $60,000 a year can be considered cheap. I guess it depends on what you’re making.
We’ve been forced to hire programmers from overseas.
We have 2 Pakis, a Russian, a Bulgarian and a Mexican (ironic).
The few American candidates expect to make $100,000 and $200,000 a year but they have no additional skills beyond a slightly better grasp of the English language.
Americans don’t seem to want to learn skills.
However, there does seem to be a glut of social science majors, like Women’s Studies or Black Studies majors. And of course there are always the English and Journalism majors.
On the other hand, we’re in the People’s Democratic Republic of Illinois. With the way people are fleeing the state, it’ll take 10 years to figure out what’s going on here.
The U.S. has to draw a line in the sand with corporations which take American jobs and money into other countries, enrich THEIR economies and at the same time do it at the expense of American jobs and American tax dollars.
They are simply and clearly corporate traitors.
Nothing, except that an American icon shouldn't have to step on the backs of American workers to reach his goal. There are plenty of Americans who would love to be employed again.
Wait, you just said in post #98 you were quote "100% Microsoft free". I caught you doing the same thing a couple of days ago too, are you going to admit it this time or cry to the moderator again that I caught you?
>>Americans don’t seem to want to learn skills.<<
I don’t think that is true. US citizens do take, and do very well at undergraduate courses in computer science. I have seen that at the University of Texas, for example. But then, after they have completed an expensive 4 years in a US university, they need to find a job. It seems to me that in the postgraduate programs you will find legal aliens in much greater numbers than US citizens.
How useful are master’s and PHD degrees in computer science in real jobs? I think it depends. I don’t have anything against abstract mathematics, in fact I think it is a wonderful field of study. But some courses are really less useful in most computer science jobs than others, and it is sad that some employers think that a postgraduate degree trumps everything else (I’m not saying that you do).
Some of our best technical people have a four year degree and taught themselves everything else. In fact, Bill Gates himself dropped out of Harvard as an undergraduate. It’s ironic that today’s Microsoft probably would not have hired the 1975 dropout Gates.
>>However, there does seem to be a glut of social science majors, like Women’s Studies or Black Studies majors. And of course there are always the English and Journalism majors.<<
I hear you. There seems to be a bunch of these fanatics who do objectively poor work, even by “social science” standards but give glowing reviews to each other.
This is not just about jobs. If US citizens become a tiny minority in technical fields, China is looking for a chance to surpass us militarily.
Have a better idea.
Have a moritorium on training lawyers and redirect students toward a technical track.
We need to train our own software developers (and engineers in general). We need to export our activists and lawyers. To, say, the PRC.
Just give me some evidence of Gates doing so.
Gates doing what-whining because the feds couldn’t deliver more cheap labor? I am sick of the anti-American worker bias I see in Gates and some of these other CEO’s. You want Americans to buy your products right? It’s all about cheap labor,making huge profits and not having the ability to understand what they are doing to this country.
Gates can do what he wants. It’s a free country. However, it doesn’t mean what he is doing is right in the ethics sense. I am dumping Windows myself and will ask my Senators not to allow more H1B visas that allow businesses to hire foreigners and dump the costs on the American taxpayer.
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