The job market is booming. Unemployment in the U.S. just hit a 6-year low of 4.4% and there are 150,000 applications chasing just 45,000 available H1-B visas. Whatever the reason, the waters are frothy.
The tech sector in particular seems bent on a hiring frenzy. Our Job and Gig boards are flush with calls for talent. Skillful Rails developers everywhere are reporting full calendars and are turning down offers.
It’s obvious things are a bit crazy at the moment, but that’s no excuse for the rampant, clueless behavior during the recent surge in recruiter activity.
I’ve been increasingly annoyed by the spammy, mail-merged, sugar-laced drivel that passes for “personalized” contact these days. The latest sample came from a major tech company that gave me this spiel:
A colleague here referred you to me as a great Engineer and I wanted to see if you might be interested in exploring job opportunities with us. We have a number of exciting projects in Software Development in locations throughout the world.
What utter laziness. The only two words that are even attempting to be about me are as generic as they come: “Engineer” and “Software Development”. They’re even capitalized in a way that makes you think they came straight off the merge list with my email address. I can vividly imagine this:
David,[email protected],Engineer,Software Development Jason,[email protected],Designer,User Interface Design Joe,[email protected],Sales Person,Sales
At least it said “Hi David”—Jason was recently addressed by the same company as “Hi NAME.” That made him feel real special.
But to make matters worse for this particular pitch: I had received more or less EXACTLY THE SAME drivel just a few months before from the same company. I even wrote the recruiter back to explain why I felt this approach reflected poorly on his parent company. It didn’t seem to matter: The new drivel was at least 25% more spammy and template-y than the first one.
This laziness is spread far and wide. I recently got one from another company for a Rails position because “it looks like you have an interest in this new and exciting framework.” I’ve been hearing plenty of similar stories across my professional network.
Bottom line: The recruiters are making a lot of bad impressions. While the individual recruiters will come and go, the parent companies stay. Their reputations are tarnished. Since the job market is so hot, and so many companies are competing for the same limited talent, each company needs all the polish, shine, smoke and mirrors to look their best. Working with a mail-merge recruiter probably isn’t the best idea.
I’ve walked away with a net negative perception of all the companies that had recruiters target me for their mail merge. While others may just shrug their shoulders and delete the email, it’s still a lost opportunity.
Most people are probably not looking to be hired by a big corp right now, but when the seasons change, and large masses seek shelter in a mega-hire shop, they’ll prime their search with all inputs from prior interactions.
And even if this tactic has some measure of success, who do you actually end up hiring? When all you’re looking for is someone who matches “Engineer” and “Software Development”, you’re going to end up with a lot of warm bodies—not talent.
Gratitude ...
on 11 Apr 07Worry not, with your attitude and language I’m sure the offers will cease soon enough.
John Topley
on 11 Apr 07I remember when .NET was still in beta I came across an advert for someone with four years .NET experience! I don’t think Anders Hejlsberg was interested.
Christophe Porteneuve
on 11 Apr 07Hey David, man, just how many of us got this E/SD mail from… well, should we say it was Google?
AFAIK, anybody Rails- or Rails-Spinoffs-related, including all of Prototype Core, got it. I was so stunned to read an e-mail from them at 7am that I did not ponder the mail-merge quality of it.
I replied, and have got no reply ever since (that’s been over a week; what a nice way to show how interested they “are” in getting me onboard).
I sure don’t like how that reflects on the company. It had this nice aura around them, and Googlers are admittedly generally cool guys, so what’s with these tactics?
Oh, and to the First Poster: gratitude? For what? Sitting on a mail-merge line because of a mailing file you never asked to be in? I’d be grateful if a recruiter actually targeted me, and established actual custom one-to-one contact with me, regardless of whether I’d be interested in their offer or not. I’m not grateful for being treated as one potential prospect out of 10,000.
Khalid H.
on 11 Apr 07Here is an example of what EFFORT looks like:
http://senzee.blogspot.com/2007/02/red-5s-pitch.html
You would definitely notice that recruiting pitch.
Andy
on 11 Apr 07Many of these “recruiters” scrape (manually, most likely) job boards and then send emails to mailing lists they culled from somewhere else. Just because it looks like the job is at a certain company, doesn’t mean that the recruiter is in a position to hire for that job or even take a referral fee. In most cases, I bet it’s just to add a better lead to their list of contacts than a mailing list of “talented developers” provides. And by responding, you may be singling yourself out for further contacts (but this is the nature of spam).
I try to only work with recruiters I know, have worked with before, or that I’ve been in contact with through a personal referral.
David
on 11 Apr 07Oh boy, this post definitely sounds familiar. As someone who is “in the market” and actively looking, I too have received similar emails and phone calls. In fact, one day I had 3 different “recruiters” call me. Not so special until you understand that all 3 were from the same company (phone number was the same) and each didn’t know that each of the others contacted me.
So this has pretty much solidified my impression of recruiting companies. Will never work with them. Only if I know it’s a locally reputable company will I take the chance.
Mrad
on 11 Apr 07Nice problem to have.
sandofsky
on 11 Apr 07I got my second job out of college through a recruiter. I was naive. I signed the offer even though it was $10k less than what the recruiter told me. Oh, and health benefits that were supposed to start at day 1 wouldn’t start for 3 months.
A good recruiter cares that the employer and hire fit. But in my experience, hires are treated as upright, talking cattle. Recruiters view success as hires sticking around a long enough for the recruiter to collect the fee.
Every day I get emails about specific technologies nowhere on my resume.
Even if the recruiter finds a relevant applicant, they don’t have the skills to find good ones. I was invited to interview for a Ruby on Rails job at a multi-billion dollar networking company that will remain nameless. In a phone interview, the manager asked, “How many years have you used Rubies on Rails?” Instant turn-off.
Maybe it’s just me, but the job boom seems to be a lot of mediocrity. I see too many Rails positions at Dilbert companies offering the same as a PHP coder. Thanks but no thanks.
Toby
on 11 Apr 07In an effort to present both sides – I am a Recruiter. Like everything else there are good recruiters and bad recruiters, motivated recruiters and lazy recruiters and it doesn’t take long for anyone to figure out the type of recruiter you are dealing with once you talk to them on the phone. And of course these “form emails” are from a lazy recruiter.
I am obviously biased but blanket statements like “Will never work with them” are difficult to understand. Good recruiters do target specific professionals for specific jobs and we are in the business of networking. I scratch your back you scratch mine, you connect me with someone who can help me fill a job and I will keep you in mind when great opportunities cross my desk.
If a recruiter contacts you without “specifics” I recommend you share some of the criteria you would consider for a new position and ask them to only contact you with great opportunities.
I guess all I’m trying to say is that we aren’t the sneaky, fast talking wheel-and-deal jerks that we are made out to be and taking a couple minutes a week to talk to a few of us can be of great benefit to your career.
Anonymous Coward
on 11 Apr 07Toby, you do have this stock photo on the home page of your site though. Nothing says “we’re about people” than a stock photo of smiling people.
Dave
on 11 Apr 07He is a recruiter, not a web designer.
Job Hunter
on 11 Apr 07Mail-merge recruiter-spam is more than I’m getting, alas. I think the polite way of describing my situation is “geographically incorrect.”
I wonder if the apparent increase in tech positions isn’t so much a result of there being more positions, but of inefficiencies in matching candidates to positions? I’ve often seen the same position advertised a half-dozen times by different recruiters with slightly different descriptions, and that looks like six different jobs. Occasionally I’ve interviewed at a position like that, and discovered that the job is really poorly described by all the descriptions. Sometimes it’s even a basic boner like confusing Java and Javascript, or Perl, Python, and PHP. (Fortunately, Ruby starts with R, which seems to inhabit a different space in human resource directors’ brains.)
I’ve had a couple miserable recruiter experiences. One was a few years back, as the dot-com craze was crashing. The recruiter kicked around the number $35,000, and said that the people were looking for a real Perl guru; I thought that seemed awfully low, but I figured I’d interview and see what the situation was like. Great office, great people, but they wanted a webmonkey (not a guru in any sense of the word), and their final offer was $28,000, no benefits for six months. I thanked them kindly, and accepted another job at $50,000 plus benefits from day one. About a year later, that same recruiter found a perfect position for me, or so he claimed; I only bothered to return the call to explain why I wasn’t pursuing the situation.
More recently, I’ve had to deal with a number of geographically illiterate recruiters. One emailed me about a perfect job lead (it wasn’t; it was an ASP/IIS/VB.NET job when I’ve never worked with a Windows box as anything but a dumb client), that was about 100 miles from me. I replied with a polite note, my resume attached, explaining that it was a little bit far away and out of my field, but if they had anything that lined up better with my skills and interests within 30 miles of where I live, I’d be interested in considering it, but I was already commuting to a job 50 miles away and didn’t care to spend any more time on the road. I was corrected as to where I live and told that it was only a 20-minute commute. I thanked them politely and moved on.
I don’t have any objection to working with recruiters in theory, but I’ve had a lot of unpleasant experiences with them, and every job I have held, I’ve gotten without the help of a recruiter.
Yossef
on 11 Apr 07It’s always great to get something that wrong, isn’t it? That reminded me of a bit from Zed Shaw.
It was only recently that I dealt with recruiters at all, and only because I was trying to move across the country and find work at the same time. It was a hellish experience, but I ended up forming a good relationship with one place (and especially one person) who stood far out of the pack. I’ll continue with them. Mass e-mails either get deleted outright or replied to, pointing out exactly why they’re so wrong.
Tim
on 11 Apr 07“150,000 applications chasing just 45,000 available H1-B visas”
David, this is nothing new and frankly – it’s always been that way.
Every year, the allotment H1-B visas go in 1 day. Of course, it’s a random drawing if you get one.
Maybe the U.S. should use a more capitalistic system of auctioning them off to the highest bidder.
DHH
on 11 Apr 07Tim, as a recent visa applicant myself, it’s definitely accelerated rapidly over the past few years. I just barely missed the H1-B window in 2005. The slots were gone about a month ahead of the October opening. This time 3x the number of slots are spoken for 6 months in advance of the October date.
I ended up going with a O-1 instead.
Natasha
on 11 Apr 07I once got an e-mail from a recruiter that went something like “Hi Natasha, I have an exciting opportunity I think you would be perfect for [...]” and ended with “Hi Jason, I have an exciting opportunity I think you would be perfect for [...]”. I thought it was pretty funny. I did e-mail the sender and told him of the duplicate e-mail. He said it was a copy/paste mistake and thanked me for pointing it out. Nothing says “personalized” like copy and paste!
Andy
on 11 Apr 07Reining. Please. Reining.
It would be wonderful if a company that was so attentive to design would also be attentive to it’s use of language.
Yes, I know. :)
Tom
on 11 Apr 07It’s a shame that so many people are walled into the corporate routine so much that they think business lingo is anything but predictable and tired drivel. The same goes for the copy in mission statements, about pages, press releases, and more.
Rob Goodlatte
on 11 Apr 07I’m a big fan of your products, but your job board has been guilty of posting bullshit too. I saw one the other day looking for someone with a mastery of “Web 2.0 Standards” – what does that even mean?. Completely ridiculous and inauthentic voices should’nt be allowed to post on your job board.
FredS
on 12 Apr 07^nice last name.
B
on 12 Apr 07but your job board has been guilty of posting bullshit too.
The job board doesn’t post. People post on the job board. I doubt 37s wants to manually read, research, investigate, and approve each job. That’s not reasonable. If you don’t like the job description don’t apply.
Doug
on 12 Apr 07Now we just need a script/destroy cranky_old_php_work_at_lower_pay_than_current_rails_jobs.
Rob Goodlatte
on 12 Apr 07Point taken B. Perhaps they could simply add a regular expression check for over-used buzzwords to the job posting form :)
Patrick
on 12 Apr 07Why on Earth is 37signals now pitching for H1B Wh0res!! I think when an esteemed design pioneer like 37signals starts depending on cheap labour, no point in blaming microsoft. I find it very depressing that the ones who have already made it big want to squeeze everyone else at the bottom. Will Jason/David work for 75k a year doing what they are doing??
Joe Ruby
on 12 Apr 07Yawn, jeez, it’s an imperfect world where people try to save time by using mail merge (and Rails too, no?).
Tom
on 12 Apr 07The parent companies may survive, but since most of the recruiting e-mails I’ve received have been anonymous (?!), I’ll never know who those companies are.
Jon
on 12 Apr 07I knew the anti-H1B crazies would come out eventually… hard to believe that there’s a market for these ideas still. This year is crazy… we hired a guy from France in November after months of looking in the US. He couldn’t get a visa, but we figured he could work remotely for a while, and we’d apply for a visa in April. We applied on April 1st, and although we did so early, we’re not clear that we’re going to get him in. It’s crazy.
Imagine you are a US business. With the market so tight, and with no ability to import foreign workers, you can no longer rely on a reasonable supply of labor in the US. In fact, even if you find a foreign worker to come to America, they won’t be able to come for 18 months!
What’s a responsible manager to do? You had better start coming up with an India/China/Eastern Europe hiring strategy, and come up with a strategy to open a development office overseas. I don’t see any other option. So this is good for America?
sandofsky
on 12 Apr 07Jon: I can guarantee there was a US employee available to fill your position. Just not for what you were offering.
Jon Nichols
on 12 Apr 07@sandofsky:
The unemployment rate of IT workers is somewhere around 2%. At that level, salary inflation is a problem.
I could offer $200K for a mid-level engineer, and I’m sure I could find someone. But at some point, the price gets so high that products simply can’t be built profitably.
Luckily, I have a good overseas team that I work with that I’ve been quite happy with, and will likely increase the amount of work that they do. It’s not what I want to do, but I simply can’t rely on the US for workers.
Does the US really have too many smart people that we don’t want to bring in more? If that’s the case, should we start to reduce the number of college graduates?
Sandeep Sood
on 12 Apr 07Luckily, I have a good overseas team that I work with that I’ve been quite happy with, and will likely increase the amount of work that they do. It’s not what I want to do, but I simply can’t rely on the US for workers.
I am a bit tired of people acting like they are ‘settling’ for overseas work. Global collaboration, outsourced IT teams, etc. are now reality – labor shortages are only one of the reasons this is taking place. Let’s embrace it, get better at it, and lose our misplaced idealistic opposition to it.
Especially on this blog…since tools like Basecamp make global collaboration a bit more manageable.
Chris
on 12 Apr 07Recruiters have always been like this. More desperate to fill their allocation than to help match appropriate people to appropriate jobs. They now have new fangled things called e-mail and the internet to make their life even easier.
sandofsky
on 12 Apr 07If the market says a mid-level engineer is worth $200k, then it’s worth $200k. You may not be able to afford that, but not everyone can afford a Porsche.
If your product costs more to produce than it makes in revenue, don’t make that product.
But you’re welcome to do anything you want, because that’s the free market. Just realize you’re no different than Walmart.
Einar
on 12 Apr 07@sandofsky: Welcome to the global market. If a US company offers a product or service for a very high price because of talent shortage, then another company elsewhere in the world will offer a similar product (made by just as talented people) for less.
I think most people don’t give a rats ass about which country something was made in, as long as it meets their quality standards. In other words, a talent shortage undermines the ability of US companies to compete in the global market.
But who am I to complain, it benefits the rest of us :-)
Stephen L
on 12 Apr 07That’s a naive statement, at best.
The job market (just like the housing market, or the stock market) goes through “boom” periods, during which salaries become artificially inflated due to a number of factors (shortage of candidates, or a general over-optimism in the industry, for example).
If that optimism gets dented by external economic forces, the people doing the hiring decide enough is enough and start resisting the higher salaries, or there is no longer a shortage of candidates, the market will then say that the exact same mid-level engineer is worth $150k (for example).
That’s $50k less for someone whose skills haven’t changed, and whose actual value (his worth, if you will) to his employer is the same.
So yes, the market may currently dictate that you have to pay $200k for a mid-level engineer, but it doesn’t mean that the mid-level engineer is worth $200k (that’s the free market).
And as for the comment about not making the product if it costs more to produce than it makes in revenue, well, that makes sense obviously, but in a market experiencing booming salaries, a once-profitable product can rapidly become a loss-maker through no fault of either the product or the company producing it.
sandofsky
on 12 Apr 07Stephen,
Action Comics, issue #1, cost 10 cents when it was released. A copy was recently sold for $195,000. There is nothing different about the comic. Was it worth $195,000? Yes, because someone paid it.
If you want to resist hiring engineers for 200k, then don't hire an engineer until the price goes down. Relying on cheap foreign labor is no different than resisting real estate prices by hiring Mexican day laborers to build you a house.If your product costs more to produce, charge more for your product. If there’s a watermelon shortage, your supermarket will charge more for watermelons. People will buy fewer watermelons. The shortage disappears.
Jay
on 12 Apr 07The guy who insulted H1Bs buy calling them wh0res must be f_cking stupid or something. He actually just called DHH a wh0re and I bet he didn’t even realize it.
David is not in the US as an H1B just because HE MISSED THE DEADLINE, haven’t you read that idiot?
He had to resource to some other ridiculous O-type visa which I bet was a pain in the ass to get.
We’re not talking about cheap Mexican labor to clean your kids’ asses you moron. We’re talking about engineers, programmers, talented people who eventually become residents and CREATE jobs for short-sighted people like you. Think Google, think Yahoo, for heavens sake.
Under the current immigration policies, Sergei Brin would still be in Moscow scratching his ass. I can’t believe some people don’t f_cking get it.
Job Hunter
on 12 Apr 07See, the problem I have with the assertion that it’s impossible to find qualified American workers, full stop, is that I am a qualified American worker, and I’m looking, and finding nothing. And the only reason I’d consider asking $200K is if I had to move to a place like Boston or the Bay Area where the cost of living is so ludicrously high that I’d need $200K to live comfortably.
It is arguably impossible to find qualified American workers willing to work in a particular area for a particular company on a particular task for a particular salary. That means that one or more of those four things has to change: area, company, task, or salary.
Patrick
on 12 Apr 07Didn’t mean to start a flaming war here. I still stand by my statement that certain types of H1b’s are wh0res(David/Sergei are the exceptions). Do the majority of H1B visas go to denmark or russia?? No! you get the drift. I used to work for the third biggest telecom firm and we did a damn good job maintaining those systems. We were paid decent(more than 100k). Then the H1B mudslide descended on us and within a span of a year stole all our knowledge and surprise! we were asked to move to other departments where of course they squeezed our billing rates. Luckily, I found a better job in telecom systems integrations where I dont run into these low life’s anymore and also pretty much doubled my salary. Of course the standard response is to say, then these jobs will be outsourced right? Wrong! because outsourcing has sucked big time in every place I have worked. I have sat in review meetings chuckling at the mess these “professional” outsourcing firms have made. In fact , I encourage outsourcing because it creates more work for consultants to fix the damage. If H1B’s are truly about getting talent? why not restrict by country? I am sure there are brilliant people in eastern europe and russia etc. Don’t tell me 70% of the world’s intelligence is locked up in one country!
Patrick
on 12 Apr 07Forgot to attach this link. For those unaware of H1b scams, please read http://jimstroud.com/2007/04/11/how-to-hack-h-1b-visas-and-get-paid-big-money-to-do-it/ http://www.nostops.org/faq/faq747/index.php?action=recordview&func=view&recordid=33
I don’t know what world you are living in but to me H1b’s are basically just scams. Easy solution: restrict 10% to each country max. They do that for the greencard.
Ted
on 12 Apr 07Chasing after people in this way is a strong indication of how the company will treat you once you come work for them. If they are spamming you right now and barraging you with BS, what will they do when they have control over you?
Craig M. Rosenblum
on 12 Apr 07I get email all the time, not related to my job skills, because instead of looking at the resume, they use some batch email tool based on keywords.
And that won’t work…
For example, I am a coldfusion programmer, but i have sql server 2000 knowledge, t-sql programming, database designing etc.
But that does not make me a sql server dba.
I get all the weirdest non-related job offers. I reply to them and inform them politely that it’s a mis-match, but either they need better tools, or we need to find ways to better shape our resumes, to be more accurate.
Stephen L
on 12 Apr 07@sandofsky
I think you’re pushing it a bit with the Action Comics analogy. We could get into a semantic debate regarding the meaning of the word worth (I was following your lead by using it), but collectibles like comic books aren’t really subject to the same economic forces as the labour market.
No doubt you could stretch the analogy to encompass supply and demand (rare comic), and employee skills (quality of artwork and condition of comic), but that still doesn’t make it a very convincing argument as far as I’m concerned.
Once again, I’d say that’s a pretty naive statement, as you’re assuming the customer is willing to pay more.Precipitous rises in salaries, blind industry optimism, and a shortgage of skilled personnel, does not in any way equate to a boom in sales for the products all these people are producing. The bursting of the dot-com bubble was proof enough of that.
Geoff B
on 12 Apr 07I’m never happy to see an H1-B pissing match start, especially on a discussion board like SVN.
But since I value the opinions here, I’d like to chime in, as respecfully as possible.
I find it very difficult to be anything bug disgusted with the H1-B program as it is implemented. Very, very good friends and colleagues of mine are working in the United States on H1-B’s. However, their experiences have shown me that many companies use the indentured nature of this visa to manipulate workers and, in the end, coerce people into working for lower salaries than they would have otherwise.
I’m a US citizen with an engineering degree. But if I want to quite my job and go to law school, I’m free to do so. My buddies on H1-B’s can’t. If I’m sick of working and decide to quit, live off savings, and surf for a while, I’m free to do so. An H1B worker can’t. If my girlfriend moves across the country for a new job and says “hey, this is love, just move out with me, you’ll find a job eventually”, I’m free to do so. An H1-B worker can’t. If I have a great idea and want to quit my job, work on a prototype, bootstrap or go for VC capital, I’m free to do so. An H1-B can’t. If I want to join a risky startup without risking my future bid for permanent residency, I’m free to do so. An H1B worker can’t…
Guys, it’s about freedom. I don’t blame the H1-B workers at all. But if you think the indentured nature of this visa is a design flaw, never intended by the big corporations who promote this visa, you’re terribly, terribly naive. This is a design feature. The big corps won’t fix it because they want workers who aren’t free, because those workers don’t do the pesky things I described in the above paragraph. And yet they’ve managed to paint people who are angry about this situation as “anti-immigrant” folks who don’t want Andy Grove or Sergey Brin in the US (both of whom arrived with the right to quit their jobs and stay in the country, I’d add).
Yes, it puts me in company that I find uncomfortable, but I’d support a moratorium on H1B visas until this trivial “Freedom” issue is worked out.
Anonymous Coward
on 12 Apr 07Geoff B, H1B visa owners aren’t US citizens. They are here for work. They aren’t here to take a vacation or decide to go to law school later or anything else. They are being granted temporary access to the country to work. That’s the deal.
If they want to come here for school they can get a student visa. If they want to come here for vacation they can do that too.
But to suggest that someone who get a work visa should be able to do something other than work seems like an odd request. They are guest workers in our country, not citizens that can roam as they please.
Geoff B
on 12 Apr 07Anon -
You’re right. This is why I’m opposed to a work visa that is, in reality, a first step toward a green card:
The majority of H1B holders do wish to stay in the US, and their employers are allowed to sponsor greencard applications. While applications are technically transferrable, an H1B holder does put his or her greencard hopes at risk by changing jobs. This means that an H1B worker is in a much weaker negotiating position with the employer than a free and full member of the workforce would be.
So why do I care? Well, sympathy for my H1B buddies aside, I do have a self-interest here. If an H1B who depends on an employer-sponsored green card application will stick around for market rate, why would an employer pay me above market rate? And if that happens, wouldn’t that lead to wage stagnation for all developers, regardless of their right to work?
All in all, I don’t think that an employee should ever be beholden to his or her employer for the right to live in the US. This seems like a very obvious civil rights issue to me. I understand that others don’t see it that way, but if you don’t stand up for the rights of others, eventually your own rights will be eroded.
And trust me, if the majority of of programmers in the US are eventually indentured servants, the standard for employment will drop for everyone in this field. And those with a choice (ie. permanent residents) will probably slowly leave the field. In fact, this may already be happening.
Free markets don’t work without freedom.
sandofsky
on 13 Apr 07Stephen, Your company could go out of business, or you could hire substandard developers. Maybe your product cannot meet both your price-point and desired quality.
Geoff, I completely agree with you. H1B should be abolished, and in its place we should put a program for faster citizenship.
Chris Carter
on 13 Apr 07The assertion that H1-B visa holders are somehow sub-standard workers, or generalizing that companies are trying to undermine the labor market by hiring H1-B workers at lower rates is ridiculous.
As someone who is evaluating several new positions, I’ve found that the candidates available to me from the various recruiters range from crap to great. Oddly enough, the “great” ones all have MS degrees, 10 years in the industry, and boat loads of experience in the position we’re looking for. They’re all also H1-B holders from various countries. The 3 US citizen candidates I interviewed couldn’t speak proper english, couldn’t speak intelligently about the technology we’re hiring for (they kept speaking in circles with a bunch of buzz words but no real meat), and didn’t have nearly the experience we were looking for.
Some of you say that there are plenty of great US applicants out there. That’s great, where are they? We’re a small company, we don’t have an exhaustive HR department to screen candidates so we rely on recruiters to help us weed out the freaks as much as we can. We also don’t have the time (in terms of operational tempo) to take 6 months to find the “perfect candidate”. We match as much as we can based on skills and cultural fit.
Frankly, as a businessperson I’m getting sick of this nationalistic bullshit. Our country is so obsessed with “shop American” that we’re rapidly becoming irrelevant in the global marketplace. Our educational system can’t seem to spit out more than 1 in 100 truly great workers, and we get pissed when desperate companies look outside the country for help.
I can think of another company which is running into problems because of this mentality, and oddly enough their getting beat by an American company which has chosen to embrace the distributed workforce and global economy. The first company made a gigantic monstrosity of an airplane with a nationalized labor force, and the second company chose to go distributed, relying on global manufacturers to produce their parts.
Take a guess which company is which.
The lesson? If you can’t handle the global economy, you’d better learn how to damn quick or your going to be left behind. And no amount of bitching about it is going to turn things around. The bullet has already left the gun.
Geoff B
on 13 Apr 07Hi Chris,
One reason that you find so few Americans in technical and engineering professions may be that there are more attractive options. For instance, starting salaries for newly minted lawyers straight out of the top schools often clears $150K – and goes way up from there. The US produces lots and lots of great students – and many of them do major in engineering. How much are you offering for someone with 10 years experience and an MS in engineering? Is it as much as someone straight out of law school or an MBA program would earn? Perhaps it isn’t that Americans aren’t competitive enough for your jobs. It’s just as likely that your jobs aren’t attractive enough to attract the members of our workforce who are truly free to choose their career path.
If H1B’s were as free as US citizens to choose their career path, I think there’s a fair chance they’d drop out of technical professions, just like many Americans have done.
Forcing people to choose technical careers as a condition of living in the US is no solution to this problem. Give people freedom, and let the free market work.
Rahul Sinha
on 13 Apr 07Given what I’m responding to, I feel I should mention that I am a US citizen, and was born in this country.
That having been said, Patrick, you are being quite racist.
“Do the majority of H1B visas go to denmark or russia?? No! you get the drift. ” ... “If H1B ’s are truly about getting talent? why not restrict by country? I am sure there are brilliant people in eastern europe and russia etc. Don’t tell me 70% of the world’s intelligence is locked up in one country!”
I would point out that India is twice the population of all of Europe combined. Europe does, of course, have a more educated population, and so probably has a better talent pool per population, but also has a far more compelling internal economy to work in. Indians will (ought) make a significant proportion of visa-seekers.
The much less racist way to approach visas would to let people compete for spots via qualification, and companies compete for work visas via bidding. Desiring a country restriction just means you prefer Estonians to Bengalis; this is your prerogative, but I’d keep it to myself if I were you.
FWIW, I agree with Geoff and others; we should have a work visa program that recognises that people often want to come here to live (or at least will after spending years working here, and building lives here in the meantime). People competing for green cards openly would mean a stream of incredible people who would enrich our society through their contributions. To the extent that this wouldn’t deal with our labor shortages, companies bidding for H1B permissions would allow them to get labor in an organised, predictable fashion and through the cost of the auction H1B visas would be prevented from completely undermining healthy wage pressure. Ideally because this program presents much less threat to American workers, perhaps the total number of visas released would be increased to allow us to truly capitalize on the brain drain opportunity we have.
-RS
Rahul Sinha
on 13 Apr 07Given what I’m responding to, I feel I should mention that I am a US citizen, and was born in this country.
That having been said, Patrick, you are being quite racist.
“Do the majority of H1B visas go to denmark or russia?? No! you get the drift. ” ... “If H1B ’s are truly about getting talent? why not restrict by country? I am sure there are brilliant people in eastern europe and russia etc. Don’t tell me 70% of the world’s intelligence is locked up in one country!”
I would point out that India is twice the population of all of Europe combined. Europe does, of course, have a more educated population, and so probably has a better talent pool per population, but also has a far more compelling internal economy to work in. Indians will (ought) make a significant proportion of visa-seekers.
The much less racist way to approach visas would to let people compete for spots via qualification, and companies compete for work visas via bidding. Desiring a country restriction just means you prefer Estonians to Bengalis; this is your prerogative, but I’d keep it to myself if I were you.
FWIW, I agree with Geoff and others; we should have a work visa program that recognises that people often want to come here to live (or at least will after spending years working here, and building lives here in the meantime). People competing for green cards openly would mean a stream of incredible people who would enrich our society through their contributions. To the extent that this wouldn’t deal with our labor shortages, companies bidding for H1B permissions would allow them to get labor in an organised, predictable fashion and through the cost of the auction H1B visas would be prevented from completely undermining healthy wage pressure. Ideally because this program presents much less threat to American workers, perhaps the total number of visas released would be increased to allow us to truly capitalize on the brain drain opportunity we have.
-RS
Chris Carter
on 13 Apr 07We’re actually offering mid to high range salaries for the jobs we’re seeking. We also have a much better benefits package than most other companies our size.
Here’s what doesn’t add up for me – first people start talking about how they’re sick of American companies hiring foreign workers, but then we hear that the reason those of us doing the hiring can’t get good candidates is because all the good “local” candidates have chosen other professions.
Do you see the disconnect here? Frankly, I think there is a serious problem with the perception of value in this country. This reminds me of the opening clip for the Onion News Network where the Mexican immigrant “takes” the executive’s job:
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/immigration_the_human_cost
Geoff B
on 13 Apr 07Chris -
I absolutely do see a disconnect here, but I’m coming at it from a very different angle.
Getting a graduate degree in math, physics, or engineering is very challenging, and the people who are capable of doing this are capable of going into almost any profession. So when you offer a salary “at the top of the range”, it isn’t enough to compare it to what other comparable jobs would pay. You have to compare it to what someone of comparable talent would earn in a different field. This is where software development has fallen short.
If you offered a higher salary, one that was competitive with what US citizens would earn in, say, law, then you’d get your applicants.
The only reason you actually get H1Bs at this salary point is that our immigration system makes it very difficult for people with these visas to make dramatic career shifts. Otherwise, like I said, those people would probably migrate out of the profession as well.
Eventually, a shortage would occur, and software salaries would rise. People with choices and options would take notice and choose development careers.
I don’t think that the presence of H1B workers would hurt the salaries of US citizens if H1B workers were free and full participants in our economy. But the terms of the visa keep them pinned to particular jobs in particular industries, depressing those wages.
It’s sad, because we could solve this problem while expanding freedom for everyone.
Employers seem to want just enough freedom to bring engineers into the US, but not so much freedom that those engineers would be allowed to do something else.
If you can’t pick your career path, you aren’t free. It’s a fundamental civil right in a capitalist democracy. And if you take it away from some people, you end up hurting everyone.
nakliyat
on 13 Apr 07thank you veryy much…veryy veryy much nice…..
Chandrapratap Singh
on 13 Apr 07sandofsky, Patrick, stop worrying. You can flip burgers at a McDonald’s anytime.
Max
on 13 Apr 07Be sure to include the 2.2 million people incarcerated in the prison system in those unemployment figures. Kind of bumps it up from 4.4%.
Hat tip to Bruce Western.
Sophie Dennis
on 13 Apr 07Andy beat me to it! “reining” as in horse, not “reigning” as in regal.
Though if we reigned over the recruiters could we terminate their drivel with a quick “off with their heads” do you think?
DHH
on 13 Apr 07Max, unemployment numbers are calculated as “people available to the workforce”. If you’re in prison, I can’t hire you, so you don’t count before you’re released. Just as people who are retired don’t count.
You may well also list a “not working a salaried position” number, which could include people in prison, but it wouldn’t be of much interest as an economic indicator.
Greg
on 13 Apr 07David, seriously, apply to that job. I want to know how the guy reacts to you, of all people, applying for a Rails job.
And make up some stuff about 37Signals being a horrible workplace, and see how long it takes to wind up on ValleyWag.
Chris Carter
on 14 Apr 07Geoff, first of all I’ve got issues with the legal profession and just how much money they make, but that’s an argument for a different time :)
The salaries we offer are generous for ANY profession, regardless of the degrees you have or not. I know this because we employ more than just software developers at our company. We actually employ mathematicians, operational researchers, and many other disciplines. Additionally, I really don’t care if you have 3 masters degrees, or a Ph. D. What I care about is how well you can do the job, and whether or not you want to build my company, and in return build your own success. We’re a small business in the grand scheme of things. We’re not intent on hiring a bunch of faceless drones, or snapping teams together like legos. We approach our hiring practices like a sports team approaches theirs – each member is an integral, yet independent part of our success; when the team wins, we all win. The people we hire have to fit that model.
I’m not arguing for or against H1Bs here. In fact, I agree with you about the absolute travesty of how the system works right now. Nor am I arguing about salaries. What I AM arguing about is the assertion that business are bad because they hire H1-Bs, or that businesses are bad because they’re looking outside the US for help.
Geoff B
on 14 Apr 07Chris,
Well, you are probably right about legal salaries. Hard to think of any profession that doesn’t seem underpaid compared with first year associate salaries at top firms (though I can’t say I’d want that job).
I should also add that I don’t blame all companies for using H1B’s, just like I don’t blame the individual workers who apply for the visas. I definitely understand that you have to work within the system available to you, not the one you wish you had. No doubt there are a lot of very ethical people who sponsor H1Bs who aren’t out to manipulate anyone. They just want to hire someone talented who isn’t a US citizen, and the H1B is pretty much the only way to do it.
Andy Kant
on 14 Apr 07I can relate to this article as I get quite a few generic recruiter emails (even from multiple recruiters within the same company contacting me simultaneously). It got so annoying that I just started treating it all as spam and won’t respond to anyone who doesn’t give me a concrete job description, name of the company, and a personalized email or direct phone call.
Spongefile
on 16 Apr 07Regarding H1B visas-I had one while I was teaching high school at a boarding school the US. Getting the visa cost $4,000, which no school could pay-I suspect this is more than most small companies could pay, which means the one sector that really NEEDS cheaper labor can’t get it.
My yearly salary was $12,000, ridiculously low but that’s all I could get because as a non-citizen I wasn’t allowed in the national teaching job pool, despite the teacher shortage. I graduated from Yale with a teaching degree. Given the chance, I’d have worked for the going wage, believe me. Immigrants take lower-paying jobs because those are the only jobs they get to choose from. Hoping the web will change that, at least in the tech sector.
This discussion is closed.