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.
So GTFO and move to Russia or China or Mexico
Gates could have funded his own hi-tech university, and hand picked the cream of the crop. Just follow the money......all that seems to matter anymore.
They could easily hire Americans. They’re just trying import cheap, educated labor that they can have total control over thru the force of a H1B visa. Increasing the H1B quota will only serve as more disincentive to American students to pursue technical fields. This is a PR move only.
This is probably the truth since Microsoft got busted a few years ago for classifying employees who had worked full time continuously for more than a year or two for Microsoft as "temporary" or "contract" workers and when the long-term temporary workers sued to receive the same benefits as permanent employees, they won.
There's plenty of US workers available. Microsoft just wants to go the cheap route. I just loved having a 3 hour conversation with their call center in India recently.
Is this supposed to be just more "jobs that Americans won't do", or is Microsoft now using the mantra "jobs that Americans can't do"?
Never thought about that but you are absolutely right. One billion dollars + the Bill Gates name and it would have been a slam dunk success. Depending of course that the university hired good people
But instead of that look what Gates is doing via his foundation. Blowing money on AIDS and other nonsense in the 3rd world
Gates Foundation check out its priorities and interests
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_and_Melinda_Gates_Foundation
It seems to me that one improvement would be that tax money paying for illegal aliens’ tuition would be applied to tuition for US citizens. But what do I know?
“The Gates Millennium Scholars fund, according to its official website’s frequently asked questions section, only provides scholarships to African American, American Indian/Alaska Native, Asian, Pacific Islander American or Hispanic American applicants.[7] Because the program focuses on racial and ethnic minorities, it has been criticized for excluding Caucasians. However, such grant programs are argued to be necessary to counteract more broadly occurring trends of systemic racism.”
I wonder if “Hispanic American” includes illegals?
“But instead of that look what Gates is doing via his foundation. Blowing money on AIDS and other nonsense in the 3rd world”
I suspect this is a toy for his liberal wife to play with : )
Worse than I thought......sheesh!
“I wonder if “Hispanic American” includes illegals?”
Of course!
Very well said. This is it exactly.
Thank you- I am so sick of hearing everything American bashed by these pseudo-sophisiticates-the worldly ones. They are much to cool to have any regard for their country or for the American people.
Thank you for your courteous manners and advice.
The direction you point to is one of the ways to proceed, to be sure. It is not acceptable for me.
Another way is to work towards changing this country back to what it once was. A little tiny step in that direction is letting people know that we do have a problem, and it is not necessarily the Democrats or the government in general.
Thank you again for the fruitful discussion. It's good to see you, DennisW, after a long time.
Dead on. Why spend $40,000 getting a technical degree when your employer can hire a cheap foreign import and throw you on the street? I was appalled to find out that my own company had "acquired" a small business in Ohio. The employees were relocated to the Los Angeles area. There was a 5 year contract to deliver a product to the customer of the former small business. One day a group of H1B hires arrived. The existing employees from the acquired business were required to train the H1B employees, then terminated with a small severance. I thought that was urban legend until I spoke with a few people who actually had the experience.
I had to work on a recruitment team to fill positions for a contract my company was doing in Denver. We took 400 applications. All of the them were 4 year CS grads. We whittled that down to 8 candidates. Only 4 of the 8 were actually capable of doing what they claimed on their resume. It's pretty bad when only 1% of the college grads are good enough to actually do the work.
I really enjoy working in C#. I've had to stick with C++ and ANSI C over the last couple years, so .Net 2.0 took a back burner. I simply didn't have time. The new .Net 3.0 stuff just arrived on the scene. I grabbed a CTP of the "Orcas" release of Visual Studio. It requires .Net 3.0. The bad news is that I can't load it on Windows 2000. You must have XP Pro or later. I only have that on my company laptop. My Windows 2000 machines are at the end of the line without an upgrade. I'm now torn with the prospect of having to put Vista on some machine so my skills aren't made obsolete by the march of technology.
I have to keep on the leading edge of Linux anyway. The C++ project must compile and run on Windows XP and Linux. The project shifted to a Java based GUI to dodge the Windows GUI lock-in.
I've worked in Windows for the last 16 years. The Win32 API has been a mainstay. That is about to be replaced by a new WCF/WPF API. The next generation Microsoft systems will have a whole new OS API to master. In this business you must remain competent or watch others take opportunities that you aren't qualified to handle. My UNIX system programming skills date back to 1980 and continue to serve me well in the Linux world. Still, you can't leave all your eggs in one basket.
I have exactly that situation. I make my living doing DSP and embedded systems. My paycheck is very good. My oldest son is half finished with a geology degree and working in a minimum wage job. He doesn't really have the ambition and drive to succeed. My #2 son is like me. At 24 he has earned a BS in Business Administration, a CA real estate broker's license, a CA lenders license and currently employs 60 people in 3 offices. He has just completed his 6 year enlistment with the USMC as well. Number 3 son dropped out of school in 8th grade. His work habits are poor. He's had 3 minimum wage jobs for periods under 3 months each. Three very different people.
Vista has brought me much pain and gnashing of teeth, partly due to its newness. Drivers aren't ready, apps aren't compatible and Microsoft is the ice princess.
MS pushes out Vista updates almost daily and they cause unexpected problems elsewhere. We had one MS update that caused our hotkey driver to stop working on June 7. So we had to come up with a fix for that. Our power manager driver and others weren't compatible when we started releasing machines anyway.
Combine that with a public rushing to upgrade without reading the instructions, and it's been wild west city. I wish I had a dollar for everyone who has begged to go back to XP. And we find out that Vista is constantly reporting system and installed apps data back to the mothership, and it randomly decides that your copy is no longer genuine.
I am going to learn this Linux stuff. I can do it.
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