Much hubbub has been aired about H-1B visas in the technology world.  In a blog post I wrote more than three years ago, I argued that our jobs are going to India.  That’s even truer today, thanks to government-imposed limits on the number of H-1B visas that can be issued in any year.

I’m frankly mildly surprised that I still have a job.  In the US.  Programming.

You’ll find economists, politicians, lobbyists, and corporate representatives arguing every which way about H-1Bs.  Those defending H-1Bs tend to be corporations that claim to need the foreign work force in order to compete internationally.  Those against H-1Bs tend to give variations of the age-old xenophobic concern about foreigners “taking over US jobs.”  This, incidentally, is why many of these debates feature charts about how many H-1Bs come from India, while no one seems to ask much about the number of foreigners coming in through the lax E-3 visa for Australians.

But hey, I love Australians.  Men at Work.  Paul Hogan.  INXS.  Elle McPherson.  Fosters.  I say we send them all over.

Point is, many people aren’t so sure about Indians (#1 in H-1Bs).  Or the Chinese (#2).  It’s jolly good fun to see Paul Hogan advertising Suburu Outbacks for decades at a time.  But Suresh Patel singing about a place “where women glow and men chunder?”  Or Li-Wen Chen talking about how Tsingtao “is Chinese for BEER!?”  It just doesn’t seem natural.  It seems decidedly un-American, absolutely too much shock and awe.

I’m apparently not alone in this point of view.  The E-3 visa for Australians was enacted as part of The Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act for Defense, the Global War on Terror, and Tsunami Relief.  Australians = Good For National Defense.  Indian & Chinese = Not So Much.

Let’s set aside the issue of race and just focus on raw capitalistic greed.  This turns out to be my fundamental problem with limiting H-1Bs.  As a hiring manager in a US-based software company, I find it crippling in a sledgehammer-directly-to-the-ankle sort of way not to be able to hire more programmers from other countries.  I’m also deeply worried about how this is visibly eroding US dominance in software.  The people are flowing the wrong way.  The money is flowing the wrong way.  In the name of protectionism, we’re wholesale encouraging and enabling, aiding and abetting, international competition.

This year, my relatively small team (~25 developers) is aiming to hire another ~20 developers.  In order to meet these hiring goals, we will likely need to put some of these developers in Vancouver, Canada because they can’t get H-1Bs to work in the US.  Some will accept the offer.  Some, unable to enter the US and reluctant to move to Canada-eh?, will instead stay in their home country.  This is a doubly-bad thing.  Sure, you lose a perfectly fine programmer.  But you’ll get over that.  Ten years from now, that fine programmer is on stage at some huge convention in Bangalore unveiling a breakthrough ad featuring a woman tossing a sledgehammer through some huge screen televising a boring speech by some US-based software CEO about being the ”dot” in dot-bomb, or realizing your potential, or not being evil.  That’ll be the day when the second, far bigger blow is dealt, when we’ll all wish we could rewind Ace-Ventura-style back to The Glory Days when the US Was Software and All Seemed Well.

Limiting well-qualified soon-to-be-American foreign talent from joining us can’t be good.  I’d love for Suresh to come to the US, code on my team, defeat competitors internationally, and buy a huge Cadillac Escalade.  I’d love for him to revel in capitalism with his hard-earned US dollars, spending obscene amounts of money supporting US businesses.  After the pledge of allegiance, he’d fit right in!

And for those of you who are a bit reluctant to trust in Suresh or Li-Wen’s US citizenship and subsequent allegiance to our beloved country, we could always choose to detain them indefinitely in GitMo should we find ourselves on orange alert against India or China.  It’s never too late to renege on habeas corpus!

We need to let these folks in.  Actually, we need to be actively encouraging them to bring their talent to the US.  This is about the long-term survival of US dominance in software, not just about uncle Vinny who's been known to occasionally code in VB.

There, I've said it.  Everything after this is statistics.

Fun Facts About H-1Bs

Currently, 65,000 H-1Bs are issued each year.  10,500 E-3’s are allowed.

Funny enough, 6,800 H-1B1’s (valid only for Chileans and Singaporeans) are allowed each year.  If anybody can explain this as anything other than the perversion of lobbyists and special interests, please write me.

Fun facts taken directly from the USCIS (what does it mean when the “latest available government statistics on H-1Bs” is from 2003?):

·         Nearly 37 percent of all petitions approved in fiscal year 2003 were for workers born in India.

·         Sixty-five percent of petitions approved in fiscal year 2003 were for workers between the ages of 25 and 34. The average age of beneficiaries approved in fiscal year 2003 was 32 years.

·         One-half of petitions approved in fiscal year 2003 were for workers with a bachelor's degree. Thirty-one percent had a master's degree.

·         Thirty-nine percent of petitions approved in fiscal year 2003 were for workers in computer-related occupations.

·         The median salary was $52,000 for workers whose petitions were approved in fiscal year 2003. For workers in computer-related occupations, the median salary was $60,000.

The spread of occupations, once again from the USCIS’s 2003 data: 

·         Computer-related occupations: 39%

·         Occupations in architecture, engineering, and surveying: 12%

·         Occupations in education: 11%

·         Occupations in administrative specializations: 11%

·         Occupations in medicine and health: 7%

Computer-related occupations had a median salary of $60k.  Interestingly enough, fashion models with H-1Bs, of which there were 592 (0.3%) in 2003 (I am not making this up), earned a median income of $100k.  This, incidentally, is the highest of all H-1B occupations by a big margin.  The closest runner-up was “occupations in law and jurisprudence,” weighing in at $70k.

The top 10 H-1B employers in technology for 2006, according to InformationWeek, were the following:

Note that 6 of the top 10 were India-based companies.  That may be a legitimate thing the protectionists might want to fix.

A 1998 Harris Poll showed that 82% of Americans opposed increases in H-1B visas.  Then again, 47% of Americans aged 18-24 could not find India on a map, and 60% still cannot find Iraq on a map, according to CNN.  At least they know they don’t want more Indians here.

IEEE-USA lobbied against an H-1B increase several years ago.  Presumably, they represent the majority of computer workers in the US.  This boggles my mind.

There’s no “shortage of IT workers in the US,” given that companies like Cisco and Microsoft reject the overwhelming majority of resumes (95% and 98%, respectively – that’s rejected).  However, remember that due to simple statistics, this doesn’t mean there’s a glut of great US IT folks either:  a less-skilled or less-competitive candidate is far more likely to send his/her resume to more companies, thereby inflating rejection rates.  There’s no shortage of people, just a shortage of really good ones.

First, let me say once again, there has been no corporate pressure whatsoever to cut short my previous posting (Broken Windows Theory).  Nobody has said, or even implied, that I need to change anything about what I said.  So conspiracy theorists, please rest assured that The Man is not out there monitoring and censoring the blog world.  Seriously.

I pulled the content of the posting because productive discussion wasn’t happening.  Of the 160+ comments, about five have had any real value from an “open minds, open discussion” point of view.  I also pulled the content (once again, completely self-initiated with no pressure whatsoever from anybody) because there is enough internal debate within Microsoft about the value and ethics of blogging which I’d like resolved.

[Follow-up:  I've restored the original post, after much internal discussion.  Essentially, pulling the content was causing undue attention.]

Internal Debate

Many perspectives have been voiced to me, both publicly and privately, debating the value and ethics of employee blogging.  Here, by “employee blogging,” I mean “blog entries that are openly identified as being written by Microsoft employees.”  The rough gist of internal feedback from Microsoft employees falls in these categories:

• Thank goodness someone is talking about this.  “Kudos for having the courage to shed light on these critical issues.”  “It’s great that we’re having open and insightful discussion about this.”
• You need to put the entire post back up.  Some folks are quite concerned that, with Scoble leaving this week and what not, there will be increased fervor behind conspiracy theories about how I’ve been silenced, shipped to Siberia, etc.  This sort of feedback is much more concerned about posts staying up from a PR/media perspective, regardless of the content of the post.  (Let me say here once again, for those who have deep-seated theories – my original post was shortened unilaterally by me.  I was at no time pressured to remove any part of it.)
• Employee blogs should be an extension of the company message.  Folks in this category would say that the moment I identified myself as a Microsoft employee, my message should be on target with the corporation’s message, building a positive image, connecting positively with customers, etc.

Let’s Agree on Goals

From my perspective, it’s not a free speech issue.  I’m employed by Microsoft, so there’s a valid discussion as to what sorts of posts are allowed for me to make as an employee of the company.  Conditioned in my employment can indeed be restrictions on what I should and shouldn’t say – I buy off on that 100%.  (For the last time, though, please remember:  no one has pressured me to change anything.)

Second, the simple case that I think everyone agrees on is that nothing confidential should ever be divulged.  This is where Mini-Microsoft, as entertaining of a read as it is, crosses a line.  That’s also the reason it can only remain up as long as it’s anonymous.

The more interesting debate I’d like to have is not whether employees can or can’t post certain things, but should they.  I have no interest whatsoever in the set of things that are clearly against company policy to post.  I’m much more interested in the spectrum of things where people, even internally in Microsoft, disagree.

So How Does It Net Out?

The bulk of the internal feedback I have gotten falls on the side of encouraging posts like Broken Windows Theory.  The vast majority of emails I’ve received have to do with how the article has opened up important issues for discussion.  Folks in this camp say that Scoble has given a human face to Microsoft, has made Microsoft more accessible to the majority of customers.  The openness, and in some sense, the vulnerability, of both addressing our strengths and discussing our weaknesses has been refreshing, these folks would say.

Another camp would say that blogs are a key part of how a company is perceived, and that they act as a megaphone of both positive and negative opinion.  Part of an employee’s responsibility, then, is to at all times help build and reinforce that positive image.

What’s most interesting to me is that even within the company, we don’t quite agree on whether Broken Windows Theory is a net positive or net negative.  If I take it purely based on numbers, the overwhelming majority of employees writing in say that it’s a positive thing.  But I see merits to both sides of the discussion.

Thoughts?

Tuesday morning, 9:00 AM.  It’s sunny in the flat outskirts of San Antonio.  Wisps of summer’s residual heat serve as reminders that it is, after all, only September.  A child cries loudly on the tarmac.  Strangers – stand, sit, stroll, play – blithely near the child.  Not to worry:  surely its mother is at hand.

Inside the hangar, thousands more.  Standing in lines, sitting in groups, sleeping on cots.  Everywhere the sights, the smells, the sounds, the touch – of people.  Welcome to Kelly Air Force Base, Building 1536.  Welcome to the largest makeshift Red Cross shelter in San Antonio.

Welcome to the aftermath of Katrina.

With the Trust of a Child

Late last summer, I seriously considered a radical career change.  After several great years in the software industry, I began to feel like I needed to put my skills to something that more directly helps people in need.  I was offered the opportunity to head the IT department of International Justice Mission, an ingenious non-profit with the noble vision of saving the oppressed and defenseless throughout the world.  For weeks, my wife and I debated the prospect of quitting my cushy day job, moving across the country, and serving one of the world’s best non-profits.  In the end, for a variety of complex reasons, we made the decision to stay at Microsoft.  However, I set my mind to doing something noble for the world, even here in Seattle.  Microsoft does, after all, have a long history and culture of philanthropy.

I talked with my manager about this decision and my subsequent resolve to support humanitarian efforts at Microsoft.  Little did I know that I would only need to wait a few weeks before the opportunity presented itself.

Barely a week after Hurricane Katrina hit, my vice president and my manager offered me a chance to bring several developers and cases full of Tablet PCs down to affected areas.  I sent out a few emails, placed a few calls, and found out that the San Antonio Microsoft office was helping local Red Cross shelters and needed developers.  My wife and two teammates volunteered to go with me.  Before you knew it, we were on a plane headed to San Antonio, carrying cases full of computer equipment prepared and donated by Microsoft’s Mobile Platforms Division.

Buried in a Sheltered Place in this Town

Suffice it to say that I had no idea what I was in for.  I was told they needed manpower, computers, and perhaps some software automation.  I assumed we would arrive, set up shop, and begin coding.

The Disaster Relief Fairyland in my mind goes something like this:

Several hours after the disaster, the military and the Red Cross have restored order.  Shelters have been set up according to Red Cross’ decades of worldwide disaster response experience.  The tired are resting, the hungry are fed, the lost are found, the grieving are comforted.  FEMA, Red Cross officials, the military, and local politicians are doing a rousing rendition of USA for Africa’s We Are The World.  A lone heartfelt tear rests on the cheek of a young audience member as the leading FEMA representative bursts into, “There’s a choice we’re making… we’re saving our own lives…”

The reality, which you by now have guessed or read about but could never truly believe unless you see, hear, and smell it yourself, was that we arrived a little over a week after the hurricane to the deafening roar of 17,000 fans ready to rock.

Hehe.  Somewhere deep inside of me, I tend to indulge the Disaster Relief Fairyland more than I probably should.

We actually arrived at Kelly Air Force Base, where 17,000 displaced Katrina evacuees were housed in two mega-structures.  The larger of the two buildings, Kelly 1536, is a hangar roughly a third of a mile long.  It covers the area of fifteen football fields under one giant enclosure.  You’d get the same effect if you joined four Costco warehouses together, removed all the shelving and merchandise, and invited all the shoppers’ extended families to live there.  Cots were packed so tightly in this space that it seemed you could walk the building end to end without touching the ground.

I Can’t Watch Anymore… No More Denial…

But I’m not here to tell you about the overall experience helping out at the San Antonio Red Cross shelters.  (If you’re really enamored, feel free to read the team’s blog on that subject).  I’m here to tell you how software can radically revolutionize disaster response.

First, let’s talk about missing people.  In ad-hoc mass evacuations, families get inadvertently separated.  When we arrived in San Antonio, there were – this is not a typo – sixteen separate databases tracking missing people (well, fourteen, if you discount “paper” and “by memory” as non-ACID databases).  This meant that separated family members were very difficult to find.  Which database should volunteers search in?  The International Red Cross’?  Wait a minute, I hear the American Red Cross’ is actually the official one.  Then there’s KatrinaSafe.  But the City of San Antonio insists on their home-grown database…

None of the databases supported photographs of missing persons.  A simple enough feature, one that wouldn’t be at all hard to implement.  Why photographs?  Well, some folks can’t identify themselves.  In one of the shelters, a lost developmentally-challenged child was left unfed for a day because everyone assumed he was being taken care of.  The parents, needless to say, had no way of searching for their child.  A database that included photographs of people that can’t identify themselves would be a great way to solve this problem.

Take inventory tracking.  Everyday, truckloads of donations would be unloaded into the hangar.  Inevitably, the donations consisted mostly of toys.  Especially crayons.  I am not making this up.  I saw tables stacked high with Crayola crayons.  Fat ones.  Thin ones.  Mega packs.  Scented ones.  Pastel.  The only thing they had in common was that every last box was unused.

Donated inventory was tracked on legal pads.  Truckloads of goods counted on long yellow sheets of paper written in pencil.  Do we have blankets?  I don’t know – check the pad.  Where’s the pad?  I don’t know – under the crayons, perhaps.  Which crayons?!  There are like a gazillion tables piled full of crayons!  It was ridiculous.  It would have been Seinfeld-scale comedic if it wasn’t so tragic.

Imagine with me for a moment that Dell managed Red Cross donations.  (Give this thought a moment to soak in…  it’s a profound one…  Ok, now you’re ready.)  Donors would be able to check inventories in San Antonio and notice that diapers were in desperate need, instead of, say, vintage crayon collections.  Shortages in one shelter could be offset by surpluses in another.  Donors’ credit cards wouldn’t be charged until the very second that food enters an evacuee’s mouth.  Every quarter, major donors would be called in and publicly spanked in front of their competitors for not having as timely or as high-quality donations.  (Ok, that last bit is probably a dose of Dell-reality that we could do without in the world of humanitarian aid.  But everything else stands.)

One last example of how software could greatly improve humanitarian response:  let’s talk about volunteer tracking.  Every day at Kelly Air Force Base, more than a thousand volunteers would come and go from the two gigantic buildings.  At first, volunteers were tracked on whiteboards with Post-It notes (written in crayon, no doubt).  A thousand volunteers a day!  You can imagine the mess that this was.  (“Uh, Bob, I think Joanne’s Post-It just fell off the board… where was she working again?”).

It’s mind-blowing how much the world of humanitarian aid needs software.

This Place Is So Quiet, Sensing That Storm

Why isn’t there Red Cross 9.0, a shiny little CD that every shelter manager gets on the first day of a disaster?  It’d have all your favorite hits from the ‘80’s, as well as software that tracks missing persons, manages inventory, allocates volunteers, and keeps you connected to nearby shelter managers.  It’d even search for extraterrestrials while your computer is idle.

While in San Antonio, our team wrote software that helped track volunteers at Kelly Air Force Base.  By the time we were done, all volunteers could be registered into one common database from multiple terminals via a simple client-server design.  Allocations of volunteers to different areas could be easily monitored and adjusted.  Data re-entry was eliminated.  No more whiteboards, no more Post-Its, no more blunted crayons.  Similar systems were set up by the great folks from RackSpace who worked day and night to create a web interface based on Ruby on Rails.  (I tried earnestly to embrace Linux, learn Ruby, and extend their system.  But I kept getting odd failures in package installation.  Seriously.  I would frankly love to be able to say at dinner parties that I worked in a language that was “on rails,” but alas, it was not meant to be.)

The volunteers working at the shelters loved the software.  It saved a ton of time and was a much-needed improvement over what was available.  We deployed it at two other shelters, and FEMA also began to use it (hold the jokes, please).  After its success at multiple locations, I was riding high on hopes that the Red Cross would spread the word and start including it as a basic part of running any shelter.

But that was not to be the case.  As dust from the aftermath of Katrina settled, I got in touch with whoever I could at the Red Cross to hand over the volunteer tracking software.  Free of charge!  Ready to use!  Clearly valuable!  I was shamelessly begging the Red Cross to take it and use it.  I contacted the head of IT at San Antonio’s Red Cross.  A disaster-management consultant demoed it to the Red Cross and FEMA in DC.  I tried to find anyone – anyone – that had an interest.

Dead silence.  (Imagine tumbleweed blowing gently across the page)

I’m not sure what it is, but no one at the Red Cross seems to have an interest in the strategic long-term importance of software in improving Red Cross’ effectiveness.  Whither Red Cross 9.0?  How long will shelters be run on paper, and technology be cobbled together ad-hoc after every disaster, only to be discarded after each use?  It’s a waste and a tragedy.

If you’re to remember only two things from this posting:

1)   Software can make a huge difference to the effectiveness of humanitarian response.  I’ve seen it with mine own eyes.  The amount of waste and inefficiency in today’s system is tragic.  We might as well put fistfuls of cash in a 50-gallon oil drum, toss in some crayons, and light the whole shebang on fire.

2)   The Red Cross needs to embrace the strategic importance of software in their mission.  Something is very wrong if developers from all sorts of companies are writing custom software for Red Cross shelters during each emergency.  Something is very wrong if we can’t even give away free software to the Red Cross so that it can be used in the next disaster.

I belabor the point.  Lest we end on a down note:  the experience of volunteering in San Antonio was hugely rewarding and personally fulfilling.  The dedication of the volunteers on the ground was awe-inspiring.  I only wish there was a way to get the Red Cross to understand how truly critical software is to their mission.  In the end, sheer human willpower was able to triumph over a tragedy of process and infrastructure.

Here’s to better use of software in our next disaster.

[From the Random Facts department:  Peter Gabriel was apparently not making it up.  There have indeed been incidents of red rain in parts of the world, the most famous of which was in Kerala, India during 2001.  Read more at Wikipedia.]