Should Holders of Degree from Premier US Schools Have a Higher GC Preference

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Originally Posted by sportsfan33

I don't get what produces *innovation*? If you free up an average human mind from *ratta marofying*, you get unlimited facebooking that creates a 100 billion company selling absolutely nothing. Are you saying that somehow people who show a lot of dedication to study and get into highly ranked schools are killing the innovative part of their brain? If so, is there any study/evidence that shows this?

The IIT-JEE exam was one of the toughest I ever took and not only required creativity, but it also required a lot of structured planning, persistence and dedication, traits which translate well into corporate life. The SAT is a similar experience in the US for young kids entering into colleges. The kind of command and grasp you require for languages and math is enough to chafe top quality students from bottom feeders statistically.

I get it that a few of these super job creators are dropouts (however most notably, Gates and Zuck still went to Harvard, Brin/Page are from Stanford and it is a guarantee that we will never see another Steve Jobs), but you have to look at hundreds of thousands of successful Ivy Leagueres who don't feature in mainstream media and who run this country. We implicitly expect them to be from Yale/Harvard. Why do we expect any less from the best and the brightest immigrants?

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You make a great point - the Silicon Valley of today (at least what is covered in the media) is mostly hype based on Wall Street/VC pump and dump bullshit and extremely shaky business models. The stock values are ephemeral and will fall as the bubble deflates. If you look at most startups in the old Silicon Valley, they were nearly ALL created by techies from Stanford/Berkeley/insert prestigious school who had at least a MS. Sun Microsystems, Cisco, all the semiconductor companies (the Silicon!), HP, Adobe, Yahoo, SGI etc. Of the new companies, the ones which have durable business models such as Arista, Google, VMWare, etc. have been created by techies again. Good luck making a virtualization monitor without a freakin' degree. There are a few exceptions to the rule (such as Amazon in Seattle) but even Apple won't have been where it is today without Steve Wozniak. And the world will go on just fine without the Facebooks and LinkedIns but what's going to happen if Intel can't find people to make chips tomorrow? What are you guys going to do? Hire a mechanic without a degree but with 20 years of experience to design your 16nm chip?

It is ludicrous to discount the value of education so severely - especially when it comes to jobs which require technical know-how and a research mindset. Yes, you can probably do your Infy/Cognizant/Wipro jobs without a degree, but are those what ultimately drive the kind of innovation and improvements in the quality of life that have enriched this country in the past fifty years?

I thought you might be interested in this, since it relates to STEM.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft...eneration.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/...ship/MSNTS.pdf

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To be effective in keeping jobs in the United States, we also need targeted high-skilled immigration reform. We believe this should take two forms. First, Congress should create a new, supplemental allocation of 20,000 visas annually for STEM skills that are in short supply. [This refers to extra H1B]

Second, it should take advantage of prior unused green cards by making a supplemental allocation of 20,000 new green card slots annually for workers with STEM skills.

Because education and immigration opportunities should go hand-in-hand, we believe it would be appropriate to require employers to make a meaningful financial commitment toward developing the American STEM pipeline in exchange for these new visas and green cards.

Those funds would help pay for the STEM education investments across the country that would be part of a Race to the Future initiative. Based on our own analysis, we believe that it would be fair and feasible to require an investment of $10,000 for each of these new STEM visas and $15,000 for each of these new STEM green cards. This would raise up to $500 million per year — or $5 billion over a decade — that the federal government could use to distribute to the states where STEM education investments are needed.

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I would summarize all the arguments by abcx13 and sportsfan to this.

They argue/discuss issues in such a way that that people like them stay on top of the rat race. To achieve this they support points system or whatever is convenient for them.

I don't see much meaning in discussing with them.

abcx13,
As for the discussion about IT industry, I would say you are judging a field that you doesn't know really well. IT is the booming field now and will remain so for the foreseeable future. So no point fretting about it.

As for biotech, it is not "the" field yet. Biotech's time may come, but it is not now. When biotech becomes "the" field you will see Indians, Chinese and other foreign nationals flocking to that field. I have been hearing about biotech being the next top filed for the past couple of years. I haven't seen it becoming the top field so far. Let us see whether the hype around biotech remains a hype.

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Originally Posted by gcq

I would summarize all the arguments by abcx13 and sportsfan to this.

They argue/discuss issues in such a way that that people like them stay on top of the rat race. To achieve this they support points system or whatever is convenient for them.

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Really? I suggested PhDs should get priority even over me even though I don't have one.

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Originally Posted by gcq

abcx13,
As for the discussion about IT industry, I would say you are judging a field that you doesn't know really well. IT is the booming field now and will remain so for the foreseeable future. So no point fretting about it.

As for biotech, it is not "the" field yet. Biotech's time may come, but it is not now. When biotech becomes "the" field you will see Indians, Chinese and other foreign nationals flocking to that field. I have been hearing about biotech being the next top filed for the past couple of years. I haven't seen it becoming the top field so far. Let us see whether the hype around biotech remains a hype.

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Yup, Indians will join biotech once it's the "safe option". Meanwhile, Chinese and other foreign nationals are already flocking to it. It's the Indians that are missing - but no worries, I'm sure we'll learn to copy and become the world's low value genome sequencing center or some other such thing once all the hard research problems are solved.

And as to the part about me not knowing enough about IT, it is undeniable that is lower value than what Microsoft, Google, Oracle, VMWare, etc. do. I have an open challenge - show me some magazine article or news report about Indian IT companies doing innovative world class R&D. I haven't seen it, but since you claim to know the field better, surely you can find something? You want to know how much R&D Infosys does? $0. A big fat zero. Go see their annual report.

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Originally Posted by sportsfan33

Once again, I respectfully disagree. I have received my masters back in 2002, and I have worked for 2 employers for the last 10 years. I have worked in 5 different roles. I have worked with multiple teams. As part of my work, I have also interacted with many clients. I have interviewed about 100 people so far. I interview about 1 person every 3 days nowadays. I have been on many career fairs. I can say safely I am experienced until the mid managerial level.

I can tell you without any reservation: Experience is vastly overrated. Smart people are smart - right out of the school. A person with no formal knowledge of CS has completely blown me away in an interview once. That person was smart and she became one of the most successful core engineers in our team. Within 3 years with our company, she managed to produce 2 patents. She was a PhD in metallurgy. This is not an isolated example either. It holds fairly consistently everywhere.

The craftsmen examples you have given are *menial jobs*. In order to be good at the same repetitive task, obviously experience helps. Experience can also make a genius person even better. Examples - Roger Federer, Sachin Tendulkar etc. However if you just don't *have it*, experience will only make your mediocrity efficient. Honestly. There is a term for that in the IT world: "code monkeys". Trackitt is full of them and they all boast years and years of experience.

The danger we face is if we promote too much mediocrity, it will eventually become industry standard and innovation will just stop. Technological bullies like Microsoft did this for years where they brought out the same cr@p years and years while fleecing the consumers of billions of dollars. No innovation, only mediocrity. It took some rather smart people to upend them. However if it happens consistently all around, eventually, innovative and smart people will have no motivation to succeed and mediocrity and slow decline will rule the day.

I think where we differ is to judge a person's value/smartness from the school he/she went. reputed schools by and large get the best and most talented people. You may have occasional outliers, but there are very few. You can't tell me some smart person in India never dreamed of an IIT or that smart people in the US never dream of MIT/Harvard/Stanford/Yale. If I do not know a person, how do I make a judgment on their abilities? Obviously by looking at their performance in school. Where a person receives his/her education is a big part of that person's aptitude, and it's been that way for quite some time.

P.S. The metallurgy PhD student was from Berkley, which is the second best University for that discipline in the US behind MIT. I would hire her first before I hire a CS graduate with a combination of degrees from India + 14 years of IT experience.

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What I meant by experience is not the experience gained by mediocre people. My point is basically same as yours. It is the talent that matters. Sheer experience or having the label of some US school is not a criteria for brilliance. Smart people are born that way. An experienced person reaching top is through his talent alone. He has no labels (MS or otherwise) to give him a upper hand. Where as most of the graduates of US schools get into places they don't deserve by the label of the school they study in. The PhD metallurgy gal you mentioned blew you away not because of her PhD, but by her talent. Obviously metallurgy is not the field she worked in your organization. If she excelled in a field she did not study, it just highlights her talent not her degree.

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Originally Posted by gcq

Where as most of the graduates of US schools get into places they don't deserve by the label of the school they study in.

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This is a ridiculous statement. It sounds like someone has an inferiority complex. I'm sure all those poor grad students from MIT and Caltech who publish papers in Science or Nature and Professors who get Nobel prizes didn't really deserve them. Nor did the people from Stanford who worked on Google's search algorithm.

It would be one thing to say these things if our own house was in order but given how miserably we fare on most counts (research output, industrial innovation, simple civic sense, social indicators, etc.) compared to Western countries, it takes a LOT of arrogance for Indians to say stuff like this.

And I don't want to get into a nature vs. nurture debate, but I don't think smart people are "born that way".

Thanks Spec. An innovative proposal from an employer. So Microsoft is saying that they are willing to bear an extra fixed cost of 25K (10K for visa and 15K for GC) over the processing fees for visa and GC to permanently hire a foreign worker. This reflects their desperate state and inability to fill jobs with domestic talent. They also only talk about STEM skills with a basic requirement of an undergrad. They do not talk about any preference for a masters, preference for US or foreign Masters, grades in college, number of years of experience or any other thing. Those will vary depending on the different job profiles they will try to fill. They are willing to give the extra money to the government to invest in undergrad and high school education in STEM fields which will increase the domestic supply and reduce the need to hire foreign workers in future (assumption being that the demand for STEM workers will be high in future as well). This is why it is important to leave the hiring decisions to the individual employers. They know the best about what they need and what they value.
Of course this is just a proposal with many open questions that will need to be addressed if it has to be implemented.

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Originally Posted by Spectator

I thought you might be interested in this, since it relates to STEM.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft...eneration.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/...ship/MSNTS.pdf

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Friends - Gentle reminder to stay on topic and not make personal comments.

I agree with with the statement that some of Grassley's amendments will be better for immigrants like us. but I don't the goal is to put pressure on immigration.Degree from Premier US Schools holder should gave little preferred as they surly have some extra skill because of there study background.Skilled people are the valued people.

Finally a sensible voice on immigration. I hope this sparks wider acceptance of high skilled immigrants.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...A0M1P120140123

Nothing new but still worth reading...

Is There Any Hope For Immigration Reform On The Hill?