Bill Gates goes back to Washington DC
Bill Gates goes back to Washington DC
Date: Sunday, March 19, 2006 2:46 PM
JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER
March 19, 2006 No. 1439
Next week Bill Gates will make his second major appearance within 6 months
on Capitol Hill to make his case for raising the yearly cap to allow more
H-1Bs into the U.S. More than likely his strategy will be to try to drum up
support for Sen. Arlen Specter's bill since it contains a major increase in
all guest worker programs, including H-1B.
Gates will argue that there are not enough Americans with the technical
knowledge or talent to fill the jobs at Microsoft. He claims that Microsoft
pays about $100k for its H-1B programmers with the implication that if
Americans were available there would be no price advantage to hiring
foreign workers. Politicians and our corporate loving newspapers are
enamored by Bill Gates so it's unlikely they will spend 2 minutes on the
web to find out whether Gates is telling the truth about the salaries he
supposedly pays.
Let's compare what Bill Gates says with what he does.
***** This is what Bill Gates says *****
As Gates said, these are highly paid, highly qualified
individuals. Salaries for these jobs at Microsoft start
at about $100,000 a year. Their counterparts can be hired
more cheaply in China or India.
***** This is what Bill Gates does *****
Microsoft doesn't pay starting H-1Bs six figure salaries, or any other
programmer or engineer either. To be blunt - Bill Gates is lying, and
Broder of the Washington Post got snookered.
It's easy to check the starting salaries of Microsoft H-1Bs by viewing the
Labor Conditions Applications database. Very few programming and
engineering positions are in the $100,000 a year range, and other jobs such
as accountants are lower still. Bill Gates obviously knows what Microsoft
pays its employees so his statements to David S. Broder of the Washington
Post are deliberate attempts to obscure the truth. It's very disappointing
that a professional journalist of Broder's stature would accept Gates'
statements without verifying them.
Viewing the LCA data proves Gates wrong, but doing so doesn't show the
entire story. Many H-1Bs don't get the salary stated on the LCA, so take
salary figures in the database with a grain of salt - those numbers are
often nothing more than empty promises. When MS or any other company enters
a number on the LCA there is no verification process to match the real
salary with whatever is stated on the LCA. As one DOL employee in the Labor
Certification office once told me, they assume that employers don't lie
because the DOL doesn't have the budget to investigate the enormous number
of applications they receive daily.
To view Microsoft's LCAs, click on either of these two links and enter
"Microsoft" into the search engine to view some of the H-1Bs that Bill
Gates hires:
The newest data available online is available here:
http://www.h1b.info/lca_search.php?PHPSESSID=8eccc271fd713c5bcd84b158c4e6b8ba
Older data is available here:
http://www.zazona.com/LCA-Data/
The DOL search engine can ve found here:
http://www.flcdatacenter.com/
Using the H1B.info search engine I found this position to be one of the few
programming positions close to the salary Bill Gates mentioned:
.NET Developer Evangelist Level 62 $91,210/year
This developer gets paid almost $100K a year, although I don't know what a
".net evangelist" is. Perhaps he says prayers every time Microsoft releases
a new version of their buggy software. Perhaps this position requires the
H-1B to walk on water, or perhaps to be able to minister to religious
ceremonies - all talents that most U.S. ".net" programmers probably don't
have.
Most of the H-1Bs that are listed at $100K are not for engineering or
programming - they are for management or sales positions. I find it hard to
believe that Microsoft can't find an advertising director in the U.S. that
would be willing to work for $169K a year. Most management positions are
listed in the $60-70K range.
Here are a few examples from the H1B.info database:
ADVERTISING DIRECTOR/LEVEL 67 $169,229/year
Product Unit Manager Level 66 $140,000/year
Application Solution Sales Specialist L63 $100,000/year
Business Development Manager 64 $117,000/year
Business Intelligence Manager, Level 63 $106,500/year
Program Manager, Level 65 $128,621/year
Program Manager Level 60 $73,477/year
The technical positions shown below are far lower than Bill Gates claims to
be paying. This is a sampling, there are hundreds more. The first example
shows a developer that makes a six figure salary, but this is the rare
exception. There are many positions with job titles that are deliberately
deceptive - like for instance can anybody tell me what an "escalation
engineer" is? Is that an engineer that works on escalators?
There are many positions that are pure BS. Does anybody really believe that
Bill Gates can't find an artist in the U.S. that would take $55K a year?
Development Lead 64 $114,915/year
Applications Developer 58 $66,000/year
Applications Developer 60 $80,194/year
Applications Developer 60 $95,000/year
Applications Developer L59 $70,760/year
DEVELOPER SUPPORT ENGINEER $72,000/year
PRODUCT DESIGNER $66,000/year
SOFTWARE DESIGN ENG TEST $66,000/year
Database Engineer 59 $74,000/year
Escalation Engineer 59 $69,008/year
WEB DEVELOPER $52,640/year
ARTIST $55,000/year
PS - I rarely send the newsletter to reporters unless they have asked to be
on my mailing list, but I am forwarding this one to David Broder. Don't
know if he will read it though since he is probably one of those starstruck
reporters who think Bill Gates is some kind of deity.
If you email Broder expect a standard auto-reply.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
A current Microsoft employee sent me the following comment today concerning
salaries there, his thoughts on the Washington Post article:
I can guarantee you that the salary mentioned above is well..let me repeat
well above the salaries being paid. Most managers are lucky to get 90,00.
Most PM's get between 70,000 and 80,000. The biggest complaint at Microsoft
is and has always been the low end salaries that they pay. The balance,
especially when I was a full time employee six years ago, was the stock
options. The stock has not moved out of the 23-28 dollar range for almost
three years and therefore they cannot attract any American citizens
especially here in the Seattle area (the cost of living is the worst in the
nation including New York City). They are getting very very desperate as
the visa flow has visibly dried up and the work keeps piling up. There have
even been murmurs from hr about having to 'get real' about salaries. This
is why Bill is taking a personal interest in the visa grab. He has never
really had to attach himself to the issue in public before because of its
inherently bad PR. Everything he will say has a history now and the
American people are more apt to listen as they have never been before.
I look forward to tagging Gates to Abramoff to McDermott and throwing them
all in the same cell for 50 years.
-- 'a close on-campus friend of Complex Numbers'
http://www.complex-numbers.com/
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/17/AR2006031701798.html
For Gates, A Visa Charge
By David S. Broder
Sunday, March 19, 2006; B07
When the Senate comes back to work next week, it is scheduled to take up
the issue of immigration. And that is what brought Bill Gates to Washington
for a rare visit last week.
The Microsoft billionaire does not love this capital, but he decided to add
his personal voice to his Washington office's lobbying effort to expand the
number of foreign-born computer scientists allowed to work in this country
under a special program known as H-1B visas.
In an interview sandwiched between his meetings on Capitol Hill, Gates told
me the "high-skills immigration issue is by far the number one thing" on
the Washington agenda for Microsoft and for the electronics industry
generally. "This is gigantic for us."
Since autumn 2003 Congress has limited the number of people admitted
annually on H-1B visas to 65,000. To qualify for such a visa, an applicant
must have at least a bachelor's degree, specialized knowledge and a job
offer from a U.S. employer. The visa is generally good for six years, with
the possibility of applying for extensions.
So great is the demand for such skills in the burgeoning high-tech world
that in August 2005 the last of the visas available for fiscal 2006 were
issued. That means a 14-month shutdown of the program, until October of
this year. "It's kind of ironic," Gates told me, "to have somebody graduate
from Stanford Computer Science Department and there's not enough H-1B
visas, so they have to go back to India. . . . And I have people who have
been hired who are just sitting on the border waiting."
The draft bill that Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter has
been preparing for floor consideration would expand the annual H-1B limit
from 65,000 to 115,000. By excluding dependents (who now are counted
against the cap) from the total, it might mean the entry of as many as
300,000 people a year -- one-tenth of 1 percent of the U.S. population.
As Gates said, these are highly paid, highly qualified individuals.
Salaries for these jobs at Microsoft start at about $100,000 a year. Their
counterparts can be hired more cheaply in China or India, he said, but
Microsoft does 85 percent of its research and development work in the
United States because it wants its computer scientists interacting directly
with its program managers and its marketing people on its own campus.
Gates said he has a hard time understanding the logic of those who decry
the outsourcing of American jobs yet are reluctant to facilitate bringing
the high-skill people who are catalysts for economic growth to this
country. "People just shake their heads at what kind of a central planning
system would say having 65,000 smart people come in, that's okay, but
70,000 smart people, no."
President Bush and his administration support the expansion of H-1B visas.
And Gates, in turn, is enthusiastic about the White House and bipartisan
congressional efforts to boost the teaching of math and science in American
high schools with the long-term goal of expanding the supply of qualified
Americans for these jobs.
He is backing that effort both with gifts of technology from the company
and grants of $300 million a year from his foundation for innovation in
high schools. "But the benefit of things like that has got a fair time
lag," he said, "and the next four or five years, it really hangs in the
balance: how many of these talented people we want to hire, and who want to
come here, can we hire?"
The answer is by no means certain. Opposition to the H-1B program grew
during the dot-com bust, when groups representing domestic electrical
engineers and computer technicians argued that foreigners were taking away
their jobs. In 2003 they succeeded in cutting the quota by two-thirds, from
195,000 to 65,000, and they continue to oppose its expansion.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that unemployment among computer and
mathematical operators is less than 3 percent. Gates said, "If you're
graduating from a reasonable university in this country, with a degree in
computer science, you have many job offers."
Still, there is reluctance -- especially in the House of Representatives --
to lift the ceiling on H-1B visas in an election year.
The House has responded to public pressure to close the borders to illegal
immigration and seems incapable of distinguishing that problem from the
value of encouraging high-skill workers to bring their talents to the
United States.
That's why Bill Gates comes to Washington.
davidbroder@washpost.com
www.ZaZona.com
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