Google pleads with politicos for more foreign labour
Goolag understaffed
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Google has added to calls for immigration authorities to allow more skilled foreign labour into the US, as the Mountain View firm struggles to keep pace with its own expansion.
The Googleplex despatched Laszlo Bock, its VP of People Operations (HR manager), to a congressional hearing on Wednesday to plead for more H1-B visas. The federal government caps the number of H1-B visas annually to 65,000. In the early 2000s it was as high as 195,000.
Bock said the restrictions had meant it had been unable to get work rights for 70 overseas candidates in the last year, and that it wouldn't have achieved its global dominance in search without significant input from immigrants, including co-founder Sergey Brin. There's video of the testimony at Google's official blog here.
The issue has been a tech industry cause célebrè for a while now: in his congressional testimony in 2005, Bill Gates called for the cap on H1-B visas to be removed altogether.
He said: "You can't imagine how tough it is to plan as a company where we say, 'let's have this engineering group and staff it'...we'll have Canadians waiting at the border until some bureaucratic thing happens where a few more [visa spots] get opened up. That's just wounding us in this global competition."
Recent surveys have shown that both US and UK graduates are queuing up for a spell in the Goolag, rating the ad broker at the top or near the top of their ideal employer lists. ®
COMMENTS
Move to Michigan
Google can realistically do it job from anywhere in the world. The fact that they reside in California. one of the most expensive states to operate a business from, is meaningless. Build a server farm in Michigan, or Tennessee where unemployment is high, and wages are lower.
Of course the politicians will likely listen to the money, not common sense.
Re: Google should pay more in wages to the hire the right workers
"The google billionaire boys are asking the US to let in high tech workers to depress the wages of the current workers."
I don't know about "depress the wages". I am an Australian IT professional who was hired to do some work in the US (Chambana) for 6 months back in '98. And I *guarantee* you that I was well paid. *WELL* paid.
And why was this? Because the skills I had were not available locally. It's that simple. Yes, Universities can turn out .Net or Java developer like cookie-cutter factories - it happens here as well. But most of them, and here I speak from experience, couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag. I make most of my money now providing an "after-care" service to clean up the crap left behind by these "experts".
Perhaps Google should eat its own dogfood
and search on the phrase, "skilled tech workers in who will accept starvation wages and live in a cardboard box at the curb in Mountain View." Seriously, everyone and their brother is lining up to work for these guys. Surely many of them are US citizens with the requisite skills. I think george and Morely Dotes have it right.
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