Earlier this year, two trial attorneys with the San Francisco office of the federal Equal Opportunity Commission invited me and two others to hold a panel discussion on the H-1B work visa. As one of the EEOC staffers described it, As you probably already know, the EEOC is the federal agency responsible for enforcing federal … Continue reading The EEOC — Where Do They Stand, What Can They Do, on Age Discrimination, H-1B?

There is such a youth image of Silicon Valley nowadays that many people take it for granted that only the young are capable of good programming. Indeed, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg publicly said so, and though Zuck later apologized, the image remains. It is, of course, just that — an image. Experience does count in … Continue reading Second Plaintiff in Age Discrimination Case Against Google

Today I was at GTC, a large conference in San Jose on graphics processing units, a form of hardware to do parallel computation.  It is sponsored (not sure to what degree) by NVIDIA, one of the major makers of GPUs.  Part of my research and teaching involves GPUs. While I was waiting to watch a … Continue reading Aargh! I Too Am the Victim of Age Discrimination!

The national engineering accreditation agency requires that curricula provide students with some exposure to ethics.  My department decided to fulfill this requirement by teaching our own, in-house ethics course, and it’s my turn to teach it.  I’m taking the theme of ethical decisions the students may need to address as future engineers, engineering managers, tech entrepreneurs and … Continue reading Some New Perspectives on the Age Discrimination Issue in Tech

Recently I was quite critical of an article in the San Francisco Chronicle comparing the “Intels” (firms that hire H-1Bs directly) and “Infosyses” (firms that hire H-1Bs and “rent” them to other employers) regarding wages paid to their H-1B workers. Putting aside the ethical problems of the article, let’s look at the article’s main theme, … Continue reading Wages of the “Intels”

One of the more obscure features of the recently-announced Durbin-Grassley bill on H-1B/L-1 visa reform is to mandate better data collection on the visa holders, particularly on gender. We really need the gender data, supporters say. Really? I’m concerned about  gender discrimination in the tech industry, but I’d argue that there is far more pressing … Continue reading Gender Matters, Forget Age?

Back in April, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators sent a letter to several government agencies, asking them to investigate apparent abuses of the H-1B work visa program, in which the giant utility Southern California Edison reportedly laid off American IT workers, replacing them by foreign workers, and forcing the Americans to train their foreign … Continue reading The Ball Is in DOL’s Court, and an Age-Old Elephant in the Room

I’ve long emphasized that one of the major reasons the H-1B visa is so attractive to employers is that it enables them to avoid hiring older U.S. citizens and permanent residents. Other key reasons I’ve often cited are a desire for immobile labor (especially if the employer is also sponsoring the worker for a green card), and … Continue reading Facebook, H-1B and Age

Alan Tonelson’s blog post today cites a CNBC report on alleged skills shortages plaguing U.S. employers.  In an employer survey, 13% admitted that the “shortages” were due to their simply not offering a high enough wage. Professor Peter Cappelli of Penn’s Wharton School of Business has written extensively on this point, but I’ll add some comments here … Continue reading Skill Shortages, Hamburgers and Jobs Americans Won’t Do

In the 2016 election campaign, Donald Trump promised to reform the H-1B work visa program. That should have been the least controversial of his plans, as the visa has long been recognized by both major parties as having major problems. Almost all the major candidates in 2016 — Trump, Cruz, Rubio, Clinton and Sanders — … Continue reading Trump Administration Makes Major H-1B Reform