Harsh US immigration rules force Microsoft to open shop in Canada

Breitbart.com ^ | July 5, 2007

[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.

[Myrddin]

Many of today’s best engineers taught themselves without going through graduate school. After 4 or 5 years at an American university, many talented Americans really need to work rather than going to graduate school.

I finished UCSD in 2 1/2 years at age 19 with a degree in Molecular Biology. The following year I was attending grad school at SDSU in pathogenic bacteriology. I decided to do something different. I've spent thousands of dollars at bookstores. That netted an Extra Class ham license, First Class Radiotelephone license, a teaching credential, a pilot's license and extensive experience in electrical engineering and computer science. My colleagues today are people with PhD's in math. We create sophisticated digital signal processing equipment. I design the hardware (so that it is possible to write the firmware) and collaborate in the design of the signal processing algorithms in MATLAB. I then turn the MATLAB models into embedded firmware for the target device. I hand off my hardware designs to EEs to finish glue logic, board layout and fabrication. It pays better than genetic engineering and the lab smells better. Boiling pans of agar laced with beef heart infusion never really did much for me.

[Myrddin]

A certain telecom company in San Diego creates phantom job listings for the express purpose of setting up the H1B hire effort. You couldn't apply for one of those jobs under any circumstances. They are pro forma fluff to grease skids.

[Myrddin]

Linux is worth your effort. I was part of the Bell System UNIX insiders in 1980. My systems had full source code for everything. The "outside" world didn't see much of that until post 1991 as the earliest FreeBSD stuff started dribbling out. I started building with Windows NT in 1991 to satisfy the desire of HP to backend their "SoftBench" product on Windows. That port was shipped off to Belgium in 3 weeks. An easy $40,000 firm fixed price contract. We made a good profit on it.

I try to avoid "new" releases. Vista is too green for me to deploy anything real on it. Still, I have to keep the skillset on the bleeding edge so my company is in a position to bid on future business that depends on the latest technologies. It's an endless rat race. Amazon and B&N make a fortune on my purchases. Still, it's worth every penny to maintain the edge.

DARPA is looking for people to build autonomous robots with 802.11g MIMO wireless and mesh networking to deploy in a combat scenario. The challenge is that the robots must meet at $100 each price point. I have a colleague that is doing the robotics piece. I'm doing the mesh networking and wireless. Chipping away at the costs will be the biggest challenge.

[ding_dong_daddy_from_dumas]

>>I finished UCSD in 2 1/2 years at age 19 with a degree in Molecular Biology. The following year I was attending grad school at SDSU in pathogenic bacteriology. I decided to do something different. I’ve spent thousands of dollars at bookstores. That netted an Extra Class ham license, First Class Radiotelephone license, a teaching credential, a pilot’s license and extensive experience in electrical engineering and computer science. My colleagues today are people with PhD’s in math.<<

Wow, you can’t be a US citizen if you are that smart! (Just kidding.) As I was trying to tell Top Quark, the story of Robert Noyce (which sounds like your story) is also worth reading. It is found in the Tom Wolfe book “Hooking Up” in the essay “Two Young Men who Went West.” Both your story and Noyce’s are great examples!

I got two undergraduate degrees and never got a postgraduate degree, but for me, working at IBM and Apple on operating systems and device drivers was just as “educational.”

[Sender]

$100 each? In government dollars? Good luck with that. Even the micro UAVs are going for over $5K and they are just glorified RC models with a camera.

[Lancey Howard]

"It is about recruiting the best and brightest cheapest, and right now, the majority are coming from overseas."

[Myrddin]

I got two undergraduate degrees and never got a postgraduate degree, but for me, working at IBM and Apple on operating systems and device drivers was just as “educational.”

I redesigned the CPU scheduler for the UNISYS/7000 (Tahoe), fixed the MPCC drivers, X.25 and X.29 link layers and the async device drivers. Previous to that I had fixed up the segment swapper on the UNIX-1100 platform as well as fixing the interfaces to the GCS for async dialup users.

When I moved to my current employer, I was drafted to port the Mentat SYSVr4 STREAMS into the HPUX-7 kernel on the 68040. Mentat provided the original source to the OSF. I also created a tunnel driver between the BSD and STREAMS stacks to allow native applications to pass onto the new STREAMS stack. I back-ported the HPUX-9.0 multi-LUN SCSI driver to work on the HPUX-7 kernel to permit installing the Spider DLPI (mapping X.25 to IP), X.29 and X.25 drivers and ultimately a proprietary device driver for the military to interface to a GE X.25 switch. That was a 6 week marathon effort. Lots of fun, but very tedious to single step the kernel through the device driver code. I had a particularly interesting conflict between the Mentat scheduler and what Spider expected in a STREAMS scheduler. Tracking that down was a 1600 step process to identify an order of execution problem and modify it to be fully re-entrant. Running kdb on a kernel is primitive.

My DSP work today is focused on special compression techniques. The railroad contract includes DSP aimed at vibration signature analysis on railcar bearings. The key objective on the railroad task is to drive all the electronics down to board level custom embedded systems that are dirt cheap and rugged enough to handle the pounding that comes with the rail environment. The vertical accelerometers are rated +/- 80g @ 50 KHz. I'm going to try to save money by sampling 2 channels with a stereo DAC connected with the SPI bus to a TI DSP chip. That approach will be much cheaper than the current Diamond Systems DMM32 at $750 a pop. The DSP chip will do the FFT of the samples far more efficiently than the general purpose PII on the CPU board. Cheaper too.

Don't fret about missing the postgraduate degree. Every green college grad has to learn the ropes at a given employer. Everyone has a different focus and set of expectations. It is important to keep your skill set current so you are marketable as the next big processing fad comes by. AJAX and SOA are hot buttons right now. They useful arrows in the quiver, but my customers are paying for quality DSP ahead of flashy "pop" technology right now.

[Myrddin]

I'm really chafing at the $100 each number. The selection of 802.11g with MIMO is also a tough sell. It takes a lot more power for 802.11g to do OFDM and the enhanced WPA crypto. I can see avoiding 802.11b because of the unfixable defect with the sensing of a clear channel. It is just too easy to jam.

I have the SmartCharger element of the railcar optimized down to 1.9 mA of current draw attributable to running the microcontroller. I'm pushing to see if we can switch the fast 4 MHz oscillator off and keep the controller relatively idle on a 32 KHz watch crystal. The would be a big power saver. I'm waiting for feedback from my hardware fab house to see how that compares to the actual power requirements of the 4 MHz oscillator before burning labor hours to further "gold plate" the current consumption aspects of the device.

[mjolnir]

Good posts!

It’s great that there are highly capable Americans capable of filling the kinds of jobs Gates is talking about.

But anyone familiar with the situation of most American grad schools knows that the engineering and computer science programs in said schools are disproportionately filled by foreigners.

That’s a fact, and facts aren’t anti or pro American-— they just ARE.

To train people from other nations in skills that could add to our domestic economy, yet then keep them from doing so is dumb.

[dennisw]

You are welcome

[dennisw]

Thank you again for the fruitful discussion. It's good to see you, DennisW, after a long time.

You come here every few years to post a bit.
As far as what you posted about the American people I have a great idea. Keep it to yourself and your friends and don't put it out here

[dennisw]

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.

So you teach a lot of foreign IT students who want to stay here long term after graduation, maybe become Americans
Aren't they being pushed aside by H1-Bs who will work for less? And if not pushed aside immediately then 5-10 years after graduation

So an Indian fellow studies IT here but gets lousy pay, can't pay his student loans after graduation because tons more Indians are coming in on H1B visas

[fmkl]

Well, the only way the foreign student can stay as you describe is through..........H1B

[dennisw]

Well, the only way the foreign student can stay as you describe is through..........H1B

So an Indian fellow who studies  four years at MIT can only get an IT job with an H1B visa? I find that hard to believe

[dennisw]

“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 : )

No way. Gates believes in this 100%. Same for Warren Buffet who has pledged to kick in billions to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation over some years. His name is on the foundation and I'll bet he discussed his legacy/foundation with wife before they got married

[nyconse]

I know about IT because I work in the field. There may be other abuses. I do know that Mirant fired their accounting staff and hired Indian workers. This happened while Mirant was in bankruptcy. Also, the top brass voted themselves raises, had special lunches, expensive bottled water and all kinds of perks during this time while their stockholders were taken to the cleaners.

[nyconse]

There have always been students who remainined in this country legally-before H1B visas even existed. This program is not needed except for very rare cases where a certain expertise is needed. I think I’ve seen one or two case like that in my entire working life.

[nyconse]

Most of the Indian students I knew had no student loans. They were subsidized by their families or by their government.

[johnthebaptistmoore]

So, this is why Bill Gates is no longer the richest person in the world and now a Mexican man is?

[nyconse]

I saw it happen at Sprint and Mirant-American workers pushed out by H1B visa holders who were not even supposed to be hired unless there were no Americans capable of doing the job. It’s not just about cheap labour. These companies have an anti-American bias. America is somehow inferior in the eyes of these free traders.