Free Republic

The Wall Street Journal has an article this week on the grim job market for computer science majors...Students were told the myths about the great shortage of computer workers and they responded by flocking to computer science programs. Now they are discovering that the shortage claims were a sham when they apply for after-graduation jobs. [Link to WSJ article in Comment #1 - my computer hits a Pay Wall]

SEATTLE - The former CEO of two Bellevue tech firms was sentenced Friday to more than seven years in federal prison for a sophisticated visa fraud scheme that cheated workers out of their wages and cheated the government out of over $1 million in taxes. Pradyumna Kumar Samal, 50, a citizen of India, then used the illegally obtained cash to enrich himself and fund a luxurious lifestyle, court records show. Samal was arrested in August 2018 when he arrived on an international flight at Sea-Tac Airport and has been in custody ever since his arrest. At the sentencing hearing U.S....

I have previously written that no one knows how long legal immigrant workers will have to wait for permanent residency (i.e. green cards) in the United States, particularly from India where the wait times are the longest. But now U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has released the number of applicants for each category, so we can compute rough estimates of the number of years it will take people applying today to receive their green cards. Table 1 provides the data. As of April 20, 2018, there were 632,219 Indian immigrants and their spouses and minor children waiting for green...

As companies try to understand consumer behavior, data scientists are in high demand. Boasting a median base salary of $110,000 and a job-satisfaction score of 4.4 out of 5, data scientist was ranked No. 1 on Glassdoor’s “Best Jobs in America” list in 2016, 2017 and 2018. The report released this week is based on the number of job openings, salary and overall job satisfaction. It was followed by devops engineers ($110,000 a year), which combines development, testing and operations. Nearly 40% of people, including 56% of millennials, are job hunting it added. But data scientists have competition. A separate...

Glassdoor assembles its annual Best Jobs in America list, which is in its fourth year, based on each job’s overall Glassdoor Job Score, a score that is determined by weighing three key factors equally: earning potential based on median annual base salary, job satisfaction rating and the number of current job openings. Here are the top 10 jobs pulled from Glassdoor’s list: Data scientist Job Score: 4.8 Job Satisfaction Rating: 4.2 Number of Job Openings: 4,524 Median Base Salary: $110,000 Devops engineer Job Score: 4.6 Job Satisfaction Rating: 4.0 Number of Job Openings: 3,369 Median Base Salary: $105,000 Marketing manager...

With the debate over immigration to the U.S. as fiery as ever, a new analysis suggests that Silicon Valley would be lost without foreign-born technology workers. About 71 percent of tech employees in the Valley are foreign born, compared to around 50 percent in the San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward region, according to a new report based on 2016 census data.

As college students and recent grads head home for the holidays, first on their minds are friends and family. But the end-of-year downtime is also a good opportunity for career reflection. And while salary should never be the only factor in a career decision, it often ranks high in our consideration set. Careers site Comparably released a list of six entry-level jobs that pay more than $90,000. Entry-level was defined as workers with up to three years’ experience. To create the ranking, Comparably analyzed more than 19,000 anonymous salary reports submitted between March 2016 and October 2017 by employees of...

• IBM, Amazon, SoftBank, and Alibaba all made high-profile pledges to create U.S. jobs • Progress has been mixed, with Amazon hiring the most so far. The first few weeks of Donald Trump's presidency were flooded with jobs announcements with a common theme: bringing jobs back to America. Now, 100 days into the Trump administration, where are those jobs? What positions have been filled and which companies have followed up with real hiring? While some companies were eager to provide big, tweetable numbers a few months ago, progress has been a little slower. For example: IBM. Shortly after the election...

If you’re looking for a company that pays its employees exceedingly well, you’d best start looking at job ads for consulting or tech. Those are the two sectors that dominated Glassdoor’s annual list of the 25 Highest Paying Companies in America.A.T. Kearney topped 2016’s rankings. The Chicago-based management consulting firm offers employees annual median total compensation of $167,534. At No. 5 on Glassdoor’s list, Google GOOGL -1.61% led the tech sector with median total compensation of $153,750. The only company in the top 25 that wasn’t related to consulting or tech was credit card issuer Visa V -0.86% at No....

Marco Rubio probably could have done without the praise from host Jon Stewart during his appearance on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” Tuesday. During an occasionally awkward interview, the conservative Florida senator ultimately charmed Stewart while explaining some of the economic proposals in his new book, “American Dreams.”

In today's knowledge economy, high-tech firms and high-paying, high-tech jobs are key factors in economic growth and prosperity. Some economists have estimated that every high-tech job creates an additional five or so spinoff jobs, a significant ripple effect through the economy.A new analysis by Michael Mandel of the Progressive Policy Institute identifies 25 leading locations for high-tech information jobs. While much research on high-tech meccas looks at the metro level, Mandel's study identifies the concentration of high-tech jobs by county, which offers a closer look at clustering and agglomeration.The map below, by the Martin Prosperity Institute's Zara Matheson, shows the 25...

Being a math geek has never been cooler, at least in Silicon Valley. As Bay Area technology companies ramp up hiring out of the recession, they are in hot pursuit of a particular kind of employee: those with experience in statistics and other data-manipulation techniques. Rather than looking for just plain-vanilla computer scientists, who typically don't have as deep a study of math and statistics, companies from Facebook Inc. to online advertising company AdMob Inc. say they need more workers with stronger backgrounds in statistics and a related field called machine learning, which involves writing algorithms that get smarter over...

The climate is warm, there's no shortage of exotic food, and the cost of living is rock bottom. That's IBM (NYSE: IBM)'s pitch to the laid-off American workers it's offering to place in India. The catch: Wages in the country are pennies-on-the-dollar compared to U.S. salaries. Under a program called Project Match, IBM will help workers laid off from domestic sites obtain travel and visa assistance for countries in which Big Blue has openings. Mostly that's developing markets like India, China, and Brazil. His challenge? Creating open environment for Internet users without compromising information security and privacy."IBM has established Project...

Despite the Senate's failure to act on sweeping immigration legislation, the technology industry still sees comprehensive reform as the best way to get more H-1B visas for foreign engineers and computer programmers, and to reduce the backlog for green cards. Demand for H-1B visas, which allow highly skilled foreigners to work in the United States for six years, dramatically exceeds supply. The federal government received 150,000 petitions for fiscal 2008's allotment of 65,000 H-1B visas on the first day it accepted applications. This visa shortage hurts companies like Google Inc., where H-1B visa holders account for 8 percent of its...

<p>Standing on the veranda in the newly renovated Hermitage Hotel yesterday, Nashville Mayor Bill Purcell and Gov. Phil Bredesen officially welcomed Middle Tennessee's newest corporate resident and major employer — Asurion.</p> <p>The wireless services company is moving its headquarters from San Mateo, Calif. And with the headquarters, the privately held company is bringing the promise of significant growth that could double its size locally.</p>

A thriving downtown necessary to attract GenXers Sunday, March 23, 2003 MARY McDONOUGH FOR THE SAGINAW NEWS How to breathe new life into aging downtown Saginaw is a question many leaders are trying to answer, but there is no easy solution. Still, communities can't attract young Generation Xers to live and work there without a thriving downtown, said Bill Rustem, senior vice president of Public Sector Consultants Inc., a Lansing-based think tank. "In Michigan, we're always looking for the silver bullet, the casinos or the big public development projects," he said, "but we just have not concentrated enough on the...