* Bill Gates calls for work visa limit to be raised
A few columns ago, I mentioned that I’m concerned that there aren’t enough engineering and other hard science graduates coming out of U.S. colleges. All technological innovations arising from anywhere on the planet have their start with scientific research coupled with engineering expertise morphing into shipping products. If we don’t have enough engineers to go around, we must either import them, or we begin to slide down the slippery slope of global competition.
Fortunately, a lot of foreign engineers are attracted to the U.S. It is, after all, arguably the best place on earth to live. However, even though a foreign engineer might want to work in the U.S., there’s a limitation on the number of foreign engineers that a company can bring in.
The engineering shortage is evidently even raising the hackles of the big guys like Bill Gates – chief software architect for that tiny little company down the way that goes by the name of Microsoft. Last month, Gates said he’d like the Bush administration to do away with the limitation on the number of foreign engineers U.S. companies can hire.
A Network World story reports: “The stance isn’t popular with technology workers, particularly those who have watched their jobs go offshore over the past few years. According to an Associated Press report, Gates said the government should eliminate the limit of 65,000 for overseas workers who can be hired each year by American firms under specialty H1-B visas aimed at drawing engineers, scientists, architects and doctors to the U.S. ‘The whole idea of the H1-B visa thing is, don’t let too many smart people come into the country,’ Gates told a panel discussion at the Library of Congress. ‘The thing basically doesn’t make sense.'”
He is absolutely right about this. With a program like Windows XP that’s millions of lines of code strong, Gates has to be able to rely on the software engineering talents of his folks to create updates, and engineer new software innovations (such as the much-taunted “new Windows”, codenamed Longhorn). He can’t do this if there aren’t highly-trained, skilled engineers available for him to use.
Could Gates offshore the development efforts? Certainly, but think about the issues surrounding such a proposition. What would he do about security? What if one of the modules being worked on in a foreign country happened to find its way to other people he hadn’t agreed could work on the program? For Microsoft and many other corporations, source code – intellectual property – is the life-blood of the organization. Lose that, and it’s time to close the shades and hang out the “closed” sign. Talk about open source. If someone happened to get hold of a core module for something like Longhorn, decompiling and reverse engineering wouldn’t be necessary – you’d have the code right there on your computer. Not only could copies be easily developed but hackers would have keen insight into how to make things really, really difficult for Longhorn.
Gates doesn’t need more security problems than he’s already got.
So Gates wants to bring more foreign engineers into the country to help him build Microsoft products. Prospective engineers get a great salary, terrific benefits, the chance to work on sexy code and the ability to live in the U.S. Redmond’s a nice place. Gates gets people who know how to craft excellent software and the world’s happy because the new code is shipping.
With Microsoft on 700 million computers worldwide, it seems to me this is a win/win scenario. C’mon President Bush. Change that law!
What are your thoughts? Please drop me a line at mailto:bheldman@emausa.com
