Hey, thanks for being the first well thought out response. I don't have much time right now but let me give a few quick thoughts regarding your analysis:
I don't know what you mean by the fact that the source doesn't work - the website works fine. Here's a google cache of the page: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://... And yeah, most LCAs are approved but not every approved LCA turns into a visa. The visa itself can be denied, or the company can decide to not file for a visa, and in this regard we don't know what we don't know in terms of how often this happens.
I am skeptical of the table you show from computerworld.com, but it is top /approvals/ not applications. Which points to the endemic issue even more of IT consulting firms doing the spray-and-pray approach of making a billion applications. But even then, facebook being #25 means nothing - they account for approx 1% or less of all applications, even when you count approvals only.
And again, 31 to 35 is not the young part of the software engineer group. Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc have a HUGE presence in college career fairs, especially in top schools, where they poach 22 year old new graduates. That's the young end of the market likely to be willing to work for cheap, not the 30 year olds. And besides, there's exogenous effects - why would an old person move to a different country? Of course it's the youngsters that leave their country to move to silicon valley, the mecca of tech. You could hypothesize that, for example, youngsters in the US don't need to move as much because they already live near other tech centers like NY, Boston, Boulder, etc. Whereas when foreigners move to the US, they tend to move towards a place with a brand name like Silicon Valley.
PUMS is an interesting source for this - I think recently Web Developers are being classified separately in NAICS - have you accounted for that?
> I am skeptical of the table you show from computerworld.com, but it is top /approvals/ not applications. Which points to the endemic issue even more of IT consulting firms doing the spray-and-pray approach of making a billion applications. But even then, facebook being #25 means nothing - they account for approx 1% or less of all applications, even when you count approvals only.
As I said, however, I don't believe that the data shows how many H-1B contractors are be working at Facebook. I rechecked and the LCAs posted online only seem to list the employer and the city in which the employee will work. If they are contracted out, the company to which they are contracted is not shown. In any case, my problem with Zuckerberg is not the number of H-1Bs that he's hiring. It's that he's using the phony issue of a shortage in STEM skills to push for a higher cap. The great majority of commentaries at http://econdataus.com/skillsgap.html , including an editorial by Paul Krugman, suggest that the STEM skills gap is a myth. On that topic, an interesting article was just posted at http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2014/09/15/stem-gradu... .
> And again, 31 to 35 is not the young part of the software engineer group. Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc have a HUGE presence in college career fairs, especially in top schools, where they poach 22 year old new graduates. That's the young end of the market likely to be willing to work for cheap, not the 30 year olds.
30-year old H-1B visa workers are beholden to the companies for which they work. This is one reason that companies like them. Also, I saw another part of that problem when I was working for a company that had to move out of Silicon Valley. They took just about all of their H-1B folks with them but laid off most of their employees who were citizens. Now, I didn't really mind myself since I wasn't planning on moving with them anyhow. But I believe that they kept their H-1B employees partially to be "nice", because the H-1B visas would be in jeopardy if their jobs ended. It made it more clear to me that, if you have two tiers of employees where one tier is beholden and the other is not, it will negatively affect all employees.
> PUMS is an interesting source for this - I think recently Web Developers are being classified separately in NAICS - have you accounted for that?
Yes, I added a list of the job classifications, including Web Developers, at http://econdataus.com/h1bage.htm . As you can see, they are included in the "All Computer Workers and Management" numbers. By the way, I did a quick check and there were 3,485 Web Developers in Silicon Valley in 2013 versus 62,600 Software Developers, Applications and System Software. In any event, the graphs show that the hiring of H-1Bs is much higher in Silicon Valley making the bias toward youth especially severe. I wrote a letter about the problem here to my representative and posted it at http://econdataus.com/h1bletter.htm . If you have any comments on that, feel free to share them.
I don't know what you mean by the fact that the source doesn't work - the website works fine. Here's a google cache of the page: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://... And yeah, most LCAs are approved but not every approved LCA turns into a visa. The visa itself can be denied, or the company can decide to not file for a visa, and in this regard we don't know what we don't know in terms of how often this happens.
I am skeptical of the table you show from computerworld.com, but it is top /approvals/ not applications. Which points to the endemic issue even more of IT consulting firms doing the spray-and-pray approach of making a billion applications. But even then, facebook being #25 means nothing - they account for approx 1% or less of all applications, even when you count approvals only.
And again, 31 to 35 is not the young part of the software engineer group. Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc have a HUGE presence in college career fairs, especially in top schools, where they poach 22 year old new graduates. That's the young end of the market likely to be willing to work for cheap, not the 30 year olds. And besides, there's exogenous effects - why would an old person move to a different country? Of course it's the youngsters that leave their country to move to silicon valley, the mecca of tech. You could hypothesize that, for example, youngsters in the US don't need to move as much because they already live near other tech centers like NY, Boston, Boulder, etc. Whereas when foreigners move to the US, they tend to move towards a place with a brand name like Silicon Valley.
PUMS is an interesting source for this - I think recently Web Developers are being classified separately in NAICS - have you accounted for that?