Two months ago, I read an article in the Dallas Morning News about Dallas companies threatening to ship jobs offshore if they weren’t allowed to hire H-1B Visa employees (we’ve reached the annual cap of 65,000).
In the past week, I've read about several CEOs who are making the same comments. The latest is from Ross Mayfield in this blog entry.
What I can't understand is how banning H-1b and L-1 visa emmigration is consistent with fighting against offshore outsourcing.
If you prevent US companies from acquiring good talent on their own soil they have no choice but to go abroad. Further, having the job be here creates jobs around it and local economies benefit from their consumer spending. Sure, additional competition for jobs within the US effects wages and unemployment, but I believe the effect is less over time with the geography of trade.Dr. Norman Matloff’s has written a report that debunks the myth of a software labor shortage. When you read his report, you’ll understand just how far off track some hiring practices are.
Perhaps, in California, all the software professionals are fully employed. Perhaps. When Dallas recruiters, however, post a job, their challenge isn’t finding a candidate, often, their challenge is filtering the hundreds of e-mails they receive for one job opening.
The real point I want to make is: The computer field generates a number of paradoxes that people unwittingly fall prey to, resulting in more harm than good. Let me share one paradox with you.
The computer is a binary machine, it stores values in terms of ones and zeros (two states). People who work closely with computers may begin to mirror these binary states, since the tools we work with shape our minds. They may start to think in terms of yes, no; on, off; hire H-1B Visas, send jobs offshore; give me all your money, or I’ll shoot myself. Oh my, destructive thoughts can be scary.
Was Dr. Matloff’s hand shaking when he penned his common sense report? Let’s peek inside:
Question: The industry claims that if it cannot bring H-1B workers to the U.S., it will be forced to move software operations to where the workers are overseas. Is this true?
This is a bogus threat, an obvious contradiction: Why does the industry want to bring Indian programmers to the U.S. as H-1Bs in the first place? Why not just employ those programmers in India? The answer is that it is not feasible to do so...
Just look at Silicon Valley. This is the most "wired" place in the world, yet those massive Silicon Valley freeway traffic jams arise because very few programmers telecommute. They know that face-to-face interaction is crucial to the success of a software project.WOW! Simply, rock steady.
Guess what? When you shake free from binary thinking and groupthink, you can employ a third option: develop high-performance software teams.
Just as we discovered that many Internet companies produced little value, we'll eventually rediscover that cost cutting is a broken-winged bird that produces limited results. We need to shift our focus to solutions that produce real results, for what we focus on expands.
I hope you don't mind if I borrow a quote from Dr. Wayne Dyer's latest book, The Power of Intention:
"The law of floatation was not discovered by contemplating the sinking of things, but by contemplating the floating of things which floated naturally, and then intelligently asking why they did so."
-- Thomas Troward