The H1-B debate again

Ars Technica has an article about Bill Gates' latest statements regarding the need to raise the H1-B cap.

It is clear the debate is far from resolved, but I think Ars is going in the wrong direction. Microsoft has development offices all around the world. If they want cheap labor, they can hire and keep their employees in their home lands. Their need to hire employees has less to do with wages than their extreme need to hire people for their Redmond office. I can think of many reasons why a large software company would want to do that.

Just consider this as an example: Amazon is hiring more than 500 people right now. Many of the positions have been open for months. Even if you buy the argument that H1-B workers are simply cheap labor, don't you think Amazon would prefer to hire American workers if they could find qualified people?

I've been working for large corporations for a long time as an Oracle DBA and I have interviewed many candidates in my time. My experience is basically the same that Joel Spolsky reports about here and here.

Basically, almost everybody you phone screen or interview is someone who just read that one book and don't know any more about Oracle than what their memory can recall. I once did a phone screen where I could clearly hear the candidate typing some keywords on his keyboard, then pausing before answering my question by reading the Google results. By the third question, I was doing the search myself and even reading directly from the same pages as the candidate. It turned out to be an entertaining experience for me. I rejected the candidate, but gave him high points for his Google skills.

Believe me, it is very hard to find good IT candidates. Maybe you have luck if what you're looking for are Excel macro experts, but the highly skilled candidates necessary to carry out complex software development projects (people who actually understand pointers, recursion, algorithm complexity, etc) are rare. And if you find people who are very good at those things but live in Kenya, Brazil, France, India, etc, why not bring them over?

Having said that, I do agree that the system is open for abuse. I don't think the problem is Microsoft or Amazon or Google, though. I think the problem are some of the hundreds of consulting companies that care only about the difference between how much they charge their clients compared to how much they pay their employees. Some of them really do a good job screening candidates and do bring good people over, but some are just abusing the system.

I think the trick is to improve the quality control of the H1-B approval process. And I don't think this can be done by simply restricting the number of visas granted per year. Whether you think the cap is high, it is actually a very poor mechanism to begin with.

Going to the bottom of things

So this guy whines about Home Depot's credit card receipt. The receipt indicates that the buyer agrees to the purchase terms and directs the buyer to complete an online survey. The blogger complains that doesn't know what he's agreeing to, and doesn't know where to go to for the online survey.

Then Boing Boing picks it up, calling it a "bullshit EULA".

But it appears it was just a case of lack of Google skills (just search for "Home Depot Survey" and you can tell them exactly how you feel about the damn receipts) and a misplaced sales receipt, which would have contained both the details of what was sold and the website for the survey. Proof here, which I found using Google's image search for "Home Depot Receipt".

So the "agreement" is just the sales agreement, a.k.a. receipt.

I think the moral is that we should always take the time to investigate things a little further. I'm not defending Home Depot or attacking Boing Boing. I just think two Google searches is a very little price to tell a better (at least more complete) story.

Suggestions to detect spam

Spam filters have been losing ground lately. I use an Yahoo! account and every day I get more and more undetected spam in my inbox. The Bayesian filter doesn't seem to be detecting all of them.

So here are my 2 cents:

- If the message that just arrived is old (3 months or older), it's spam. Trust me on this one.

- If the message only contains a stupid inline image, it's also spam.

I don't understand spam. I don't know who in their right mind would buy anything being advertised in an e-mail that starts with these lines:

Rocks appearing show series remarks by, sex.
Mentioned being member, brat. Bald failed box office garnered mixed
nude pregnancy famous.

Seriously. How stupid do you have to be?

What's wrong with Microsoft?

Microsoft bribes students and professors.
Microsoft bribes lawyers.
Microsoft bribes bloggers.

A note to Microsoft: Just because you do it all the time everywhere, it doesn't make it less unethical. Quite the opposite.