With H-1B workers not exactly rushing to America this year, Uncle Sam plans to spend millions home-growing IT staff
- Reference: 1601323152
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/09/28/h1b_training_staff/
- Source link:
The H-1B One Workforce Grant Program will give up to 30 grants to training organizations to upskill US citizens for “middle to high-skilled H-1B occupations... including information technology and cyber security” and so “train a new generation of workers to grow the future workforce.”
The [1]announcement comes one week before new restrictive visa rules are due to take effect that will greatly reduce the number of foreign workers that will be admitted to the US through the H-1B work visa. The largest recipients of those visas are tech companies and outsourcers bringing in foreigners with high-end computer skills. The new restrictions have been [2]strongly opposed by tech giants including Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Intel, PayPal, and Twitter among dozens of others.
In June, President Trump [3]signed an executive order banning some visa types, including most H-1B applicants, from entering the US, give or take a few caveats. This was [4]slightly relaxed in August by the Commerce Department. In the meantime demand for H-1B visas [5]has crashed .
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses... but not your H-1B geeks, L-1 staffers nor J-1 students [6]READ MORE
The DoL will accept applications from four types of organization: industry associations; education providers like community colleges; companies set up to train the federal workforce; and economic development agencies. It estimates it will hand out 30 awards that will range in value from $500,000 to $10m.
The department stressed that it is particularly interested in training up people that are currently unemployed, part-time workers that want to work full-time and “incumbent workers needing to update or upskill to retain employment or advance into middle to high-skilled positions.” US military veterans and their spouses get priority on the training schedule.
Reversal on the way?
While the desire to upskill Americans, particularly those out of work, for jobs that are in high demand is admirable, it will not resolve a major issue for tech companies facing work visa restrictions: what to do for the next several years while waiting for adequately qualified American workers.
Even if the program does work and DoL-funded programs release sufficient numbers of qualified US workers to cover the shortage gap caused by visa restrictions, it is still unlikely to satisfy tech giants who proudly use their vast resources to pull in the world’s best programmers and then pay them high wages in order to stay one step ahead in the global IT market.
There is also the fact that next month the presidential election may see the policy reversed: the [7]restrictions on work visas and immigration in general have been driven by President Trump and the White House. If Trump loses the election, chances are that come January, the clampdown will be reversed, and tech companies will immediately revert to the previous system. ®
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[1] https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/eta/eta20200924-0
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2019/01/10/us_visa_restrictions/
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/23/white_house_visa_entry_freeze/
[4] https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/News/visas-news/exceptions-to-p-p-10014-10052-suspending-entry-of-immigrants-non-immigrants-presenting-risk-to-us-labor-market-during-economic-recovery.html
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/14/h1b_second_lottery/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/23/white_house_visa_entry_freeze/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2017/04/03/tech_visa_saberrattling_more_sound_than_fury/
[8] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Last week I watched from a safe distance as three goofs from Tata and an outsourced corporate help desk brought down a certain Ag company's worldwide networks for 90+ hours. The 'fix' was to dispatch a human engineer with a serial comms capable laptop, cisco terminal cables, and some PuTTY knowledge. Each major site and gateway required human intervention to reconfigure gateway equipment so that the gear could be remoted into and reset to needed configs that allowed for more competent remote management and final config.
Yup, the goofs managed to wipe not only the primary config, but the backup **and** the locally cached out of band emergency channels. And they did it to every conceivable gateway and network node. >275 of them.
Not my company, but one that I do a lot of business with. And this is not quite the worst of the follies I've seen fly by in the 18 months Tata has 'owed' this particular help desk.
H1-Bs are not all computer geniuses. A lot of them are relatively inexperienced (but cheap, that's the important part) drones.
I'm glad that the first emphasis of this program is turning to training home-grown talent. Hopefully the second part will be restructuring the H1-B program so that visa holders control the visas for until their expiration, and not the companies who they work for. And then that market-rate wages are paid to H1-B holders.
Been there...seen that
Maybe it will work, but I have my doubts. I come from a dot-com generation where software was the new must do occupation. I remember virtually everyone being re-trained and shipped in to ride the gravy train. I worked with history, english lit and social science graduates, who had all been on a 6 month course to write software.
The result?
Pretty awful. Very few had any interest in software, saw it as a 9-5 job, refused to do any training or reading, and most lasted about 4 or 5 months, and the work often had to be re-done because it was so bad. When the dot-com boom ended, most of the rest moved. They were basically cannon fodder, especially in lucrative defense contracts where booking the man-hours was more important than quality.
Its funny that other professions don't get treated the same way. Hey we are short of doctors, instead of shipping them in from Europe why don't we just put the unemployed on a 6 month course?
Re: Been there...seen that
The other problem is to convince the employers to pay a reasonable wage. These days it's always "Times are bad we can't afford any raises." Thing is it happens every year.
well lets hope both in the US & UK governments start training locally. It makes sense.
Paying the private sector to teach people
I'm sure this will be a resounding success: Everybody going through the system will receive a paper. Accredited, no less! If I remember correctly, the current president used to run a university, so he'll know all about how that works.
The US government giving money to colleges so that they teach people?
Seems suspiciously communist.
High end my sorry ass. Basic skills and paid Indian level wages while being shopped out at US level wages plus profit margin. Being an ex-H1B myself I know what it's like if it's done properly - I also see what a significant proportion of the current "crop" is capable of. The good ones are very good and a joy to work with. The majority are subtraction by addition but the bean counters don't care because they fill the gap in the HR spreadsheet.