CNET News.com has got this formula down pat. Its piece, Can Johnny still program?, laments that in the annual collegiate programming contest held by the Association for Computing Machinery, the best that any American team could do this year was a miserable 17th place. The United States hasn't won a world championship since 1997--"an ominous sign for the U.S. tech industry," News.com fears.
"Oh my god," readers must have thought. "How could the quality of American computer-science students have sunk so quickly in the short time span of just eight years?" It's an absurd conclusion, of course, but readers have been conditioned to believe any claim, no matter how outlandish, about the decline of the U.S. educational system.
But let's see what News.com didn't tell you.
Start with what it means statistically to perform well in this contest today. News.com didn't tell you that the number of teams competing has grown nearly sevenfold from 1994 through 2005. In other words, for a team to finish at, say, third place, in 1994 would be equivalent to finishing 21st this year. So a hypothetical team that News.com would have lauded in 1994 would now be dismissed as having badly "slipped" in 2005, even though it would be of the same quality.
Second, News.com seems to have forgotten the history of the Olympics. Long before Olympic athletes from all countries became quasiprofessionals, the Eastern European countries were seeing to it that training for the Games was their athletes' full-time job, giving them a major advantage over other nations' athletes.
Some nations, or some individual universities, make similar time commitments in the ACM contest. Xu Jun, a public-affairs officer at the school, which fielded this year's first-place team in the programming contest from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, put it in Olympian terms: "All their time was spent in preparation except for their class work."
A faculty colleague of mine who is a veteran coach in the ACM contest estimates that many foreign teams devote at least 10 times the amount of time to practice as do American teams. Xu's statement suggests that the factor is much greater than 10.
As someone who married into a Shanghai family, I congratulate the bright, dedicated members of the winning Jiaoda team, which also took first place in 2002. But it would be wrong to view their victories as measures of general superiority over other schools, let alone other nations. Indeed, a number of ethnic-Chinese universities that are considered far more prestigious than Jiaoda weren't in even the top 10, such as Peking University (11th place), Tsinghua University (13th place) and National Taiwan University (Honorable Mention, below 30th place).
In a companion editorial, News.com Executive Editor Charles Cooper repeated the lobbyists' favorite example, the seemingly poor showing of American kids at the grade-school level on international math and science tests. Yet it has been repeatedly pointed out by education experts that differences in test scores are primarily due to America's struggle to deal with a social underclass.
Consider the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study eighth-grade science test, for instance, and the scores achieved by Colorado, Connecticut, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska North Dakota, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, Wisconsin and Wyoming. Had these states--none of which has a substantial
Biography
Norm Matloff is a professor of computer science at the University of California at Davis. You can read more about H-1B and offshoring issues on his Web page.
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As for US CS being inferior... I never believed it. Math classes do not equal programming superiority, that much I've proven daily at work. Studying to place high in one contest makes them experts... in that contest.
-Remo
1. He said that 3rd in 1994 would be 21st now if everyone advanced the same... However, we know that is not the case because of who continues to place in the top 10 even though we dropped out.
2. He said we don't grill out people who compete like the other countries do, therefor there win doesn't mean much. Considering he is a computer teacher that is so ludicrous. Perhaps AppDev just isn't his thing but anyone who has learned AppDev languages knows that drilling in the concepts is the best way to perfect the trade. Not doing so is lazy and indicative as to why we continue to fall farther behind.
3. He says we perform poorly in grade school on math and science. He is 100% wrong. It is the exact opposite. We perform very well in grade school, ok in middle school, poorly in high school, and terribly in college.
4. I'll stop with this one. He claimes H1B is bad for us as it makes it harder for us to compete. This is where is true extreme left-wing shows. Beyond misquoting facts, claiming to understand the computer world and beleieving we are fairing just fine, here he claims that if we would get rid of the foreigners (i.e. the motivation to excell and improve from competition) we would get better. And then he complains about the concept of educating more engineers as part of the fix.
A true left-coast quack looking to make himself appear intelligent to his extremist friends. For those that live in the real world, we need to make colleges harder and push for more accomplishment while the students are in them. China will pass us by while the Norm Matloff's of the world claim it is a false alarm.
Anyone using the ACM as an example of how the US is falling behind in the computer science industry, is an idiot.
If the ACM meant anything, than China should be the #1 destination of out-sourced American IT jobs and the #1 source for IT people coming in on an H1-B visa.
India is the #1 source and destination, where did they finish in the ACM? somewhere in the 20's, well behind the US.
The loss of jobs to India has nothing to do with, quality, capability, worker competitiveness.
It has everything to do with the high value of the US dollar relative to the Indian rupee.
The US dollar is gradually falling in value, this causes all the costs of resource inputs into out economy (like oil) to become more expensive.
I think most of us will have to give our gas guzzling SUV's and pickups (that should be enough to scare any Republican).
Frankly if the H1B program were limited to just PHD's, we would never hit the limit. I have seen too many H1B'ers (with Masters or lower) assigned to be the build engineer or QA engineer to believe any lobbyist hype that we need more H1b'ers at the Masters or BS level.
Half my engineering friends (most (95%) with Bachelors degree of higher in computer science) are enemployed (some with 10+ years of experience).
I think most of them will be able find work, when they lose their mortgage, take a huge cut in pay.
Frankly I think trade imbalance is the main cause of stagflation.
The issue isn't whether Johnny can program. And it isn't whether the Chinese cheat, like East Germans in 1976. And the issue isn't visas.
The issue is that the American public doesn't know which side of the bread the butter goes.
Look around. Everybody who is anybody has completely forgotten about tech. THEY ARE ALL BUYING REAL ESTATE to sell to foreigners.
It's not that Johnny can't program. It's that Johnny's father has his head up his ass and is morgaging his kids future to get a plush retirement.
Oh, and by the way, we live in a world of litigious patent process. The lawyers and the patent holders are winning this game, HANDS DOWN.
And how many patent LAWYERS does CHINA have?
The MBA sees programmers as commodities and will do whatever they can to reduce the price. This is no more true than, say, singers or screen-writers as commodities but they don't understand that. They do understand when they offshore and their sales tank from poor products, but don't usually acknowledge the correlation.
I'm hoping the rise of the India Institute's of Management -- and that great sucking sound we hear from the job availabilty finance types who push the offshoring (finance really is a commodity) -- will put some common sense into them.
That is such an ignorant comment it defies belief. Assuming that the 1994 team is the same quality as the 2005 team(which is a strech), you think that is a good thing? These things should not be looked at an absolute point of view, but from a relative one. You inadvertantly proved what you were trying to disprove, that the US is slipping in CS. If a runner keeps at the same pace, but is falling behind the leaders, he is slipping.
The contest, of course is not the sole indictator, of whether CS education is falling behind, but it is one good indicator.
The second is the constant falling behind in mathematics. Anyone who thinks programming is not inexerably linked to math is clueless. Programming is built on mathematics. You don't need to know math to learn a language, but learning a language does not make you a programmer, nor does it make you a professional. You have to learn the underbelly of data structures, algorithms, hardware, the theory that computing is based on, ect and that requires a solid understanding of what mathematics really is.
From the article:
"Congress, openly admitting that it was responding to industry campaign donations rather than the popular will, complied by increasing the H-1B cap in 1998 and 2000, the latter action coming at the time the mass layoffs began. This past December, despite a continuing abysmal tech labor market, Congress enacted another expansion of the program."
The facts:
The H1B cap (which covers not only computer professionals, but also foreign workers in a wide variety of fields, including sports, and fashion model) was 65,000/year in the early 90's. For those who remember the situation in the IT market in 1997-1998, it was clear that there was a shortage of qualified computer specialists, especially in areas away from the major IT centers like the Silicon Valley, New York City, Boston, etc. The raise of the H1B cap, if I remember correctly, was done only once - in 1998. It was temporary, and in two stages, with initial raise to 120,000, then to 195,000 (in 2000), and then it went back to 65,000 in 2004, with the additional rule that the number is not for the visas issued, but for the visa applications - i.e., if a company applied improperly for an H1B visa, they used one of the allotted numbers even though they were refused the visa. This is far from the implied continuous expansion that Norm Matloff wants you to believe.
While the cap was up there, close to 200K a year, the supply and demand equilibrium was achieved and not all available visas were used (obviously the bubble burst had a great impact on that). In the fiscal 2004 (Oct. 2003 to Sept. 2004), the 65,000 visa application were exhausted in about 4-5 months. In the fiscal 2005, all 65,000 applications were submitted in a single day (Oct. 1, 2004) since that number included the applications filed in fiscal 2004 after the cap was reached. This meant that high-tech companies had to wait for an year to offer a job to a non-citizen, regardless of their qualifications. This is why there were an additional 20,000 H1B visas allocated in December, restricted to MS and PhD holders from US universities.
Quote:
"Government data show, for instance, that Intel, which claims that its H-1Bs have master's degrees and Ph.D.s, pays them far less than the national medians for engineers with these degrees."
The H1B visa regulation require that the salary of the visa holder is comparable to the local level of compensation, and not to the national median, and for a very good reason. The IT and CS professionals in California are probably skewing the average and median values nationally to such an extent, that companies in Tennessee or Alabama, for example, would have a hard time hiring someone at or above these levels of compensation, since it will make their local costs too high, and make them less competitive in their local markets.
If Norm Matloff (or anybody else) has credible evidence that Intel, or anyone else, is paying their H1B employees less than their US counterparts, he should file a lawsuit - it will bring them the gratitude of current and future H1B employees around the country. BTW, HP tried this in the late 80's - early 90's, and got slapped very hard with fines. I haven't heard of anything comparable from a large corporation since then.
Quote:
"Contrary to these parties' putative goal of maintaining American technological competitiveness, H-1B has brought great harm."
What "great harm"? The scandals at Enron and WorldCom? The Internet bubble? In my opinion, clueless and arrogant executives, who believe that they are above the law, or that they can manage in areas about which they have no understanding, have brought much greater harm to the US economy than a million H1B workers will ever do.
Of course there are problems with the H1B program. There are employers that abuse it. Unfortunately, it is the only viable way for companies to bring highly qualified specialists in the US. If a permanent resident program was available, where a person could start working in 1 to 6 months after accepting an employment offer, and their status was confirmed in under a year, the H1B path will be abandoned in a second. This is the solution to H1B abuses, not the fairy tales that Matloff wants to tell...
Norm Matloff has hit it on the head. That guy Foley, whoes so "scared" we are falling behind said not to long ago that "..it does not make sense to become a programmer...(because) programming jobs will continue to go offshore."
What does it say about Foley's position? Or News.com's as well? What is YOUR AGENDA News.com?
Point 1: #3 in an earlier competition is of the "same quality" as #17 or lower in a later competition which has more teams. Sure. I guess we all agree the US sports team that were #1 in the STOCKHOLM Olympics (28 nations (or more accurately, NOCs) participated) were about as bad as #7 in Athens Olympics (201 nations participated). And sure, in ACM contest, if only they had allowed more people to participate, the gold medalist would for sure degrade to silver, bronze or just honorable mention! It's just simple math isn't it?
Point 2: Peking Univ., Tsinghua Univ. are far more prestigious than Jiaoda. Now where did that come from? I know far more about Chinese Univs than Norm and I can emphatically say that it's not true. Peking, Tsinghua are better, but no way by a lot. More importantly, by arguing that one Univ. is generally better than another, then its ACM team should also beat the other univ's, it just doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Just where is the logic in this guy's blogs?
Point 3: TIMMS shows that even some U.S. STATES are better than some NATIONS. Now this is so misleading - picking a group of better performing states and compare them to whole nations. Now I can easily pick a good class in any country, and say even just this one class in (fill in your favorite country name) can beat the United States handily. Would that be fair? Again, a clueless "professor" provided ridiculous logic in his arguements.
Point 4: How can American engineers compete with cheap, imported labor? Well, offshoring and H1B issue are not just because they're cheap labor. It's because it's proven that techies in other country can do the same/similar job at lower total cost. That's not gonna support this "Johnny can program" statement.
It's very disappointing that a college professor from a well-known university is so confused in logic and so obssessed with H1B issue such that he totally forgot to put forth (even just) one valid support for the title of the article - "Johnny can program".
This article's nothing more than a perversed version of the author's hidden aversion towards H1Bs and foreigners. I'm no supporter of "Johnny can't program" mentality, but if the supporters of "Johnny can program" are so dumb, maybe that claim is true.
The US is still lobbying around the world for open markets. But wants to protect its own interests by imposing severe restrictions on what other countries can export to it.
Another example of the US's double standards is the NPT. The US has enough nukes to decimate the world and do it over and over again several times. Is the US willing to defuse all nuclear weapons it has? (Oh! I forgot, the US is the saviour of Planet Earth from aliens and needs nukes to fight them.)
Why the hypocrisy, Uncle Sam?
US was great because it imported a lot of talent from all over the world. Nowadays they just find it easier and cheaper to go abroad
Who's bright idea was it to start shipping call center jobs there? Prior to 2002 had anyone ever tried to talk to someone in India or China? It was like talking through tin cans. Indian business people routinely would give me 4 numbers to call to try and reach them, it was like the party lines of the 60s and 70s. Still today I deal with support people who don't have a conversational grasp of American english and cannot discern what your problem is because they simply don't understand you. Instead, they are trying to anticipate or guess what your problem is by replying to keywords in your speech. For example, I mentioned "firewall" in a conversation that explains a problem with something unrelated to a firewall problem. I then began to get instructions on how to troubleshoot my firewall. ***. I come from a very diverse background and education, but I know that people I have dealt with from the midwest and south would NEVER put up with a conversation like that, let alone pay for that type of service.
In any case, can anything be done to thwart the blatant greed in corporate america. Does anyone with a conscience really believe that this is not exploitation? The middle class is disappearing before our eyes, which is just fine by the upper class. It gives them greater separation and more power to manipulate the government. I have a Bachelor of Science degree which I earned in 2001. I was lucky to find work just before it all went bad. I trained a Singapore team to do my job, then moved to daylight, then was moved out.
I took the job to get my foot in the door to a great up-and-coming company with the hopes that my work would allow me to move into development and design. I applied 5 times, each time being beaten by an eastern european, indian or chinese candidate. With a friend in HR, I was able to discern the REAL reason for my failure. I had more experience with the company and all of their products, better relationships with the customer contacts who submit requests for improvements, and I had high merit in my job at the time. No, I failed to land the position because the offer they gave to each one of them was equal to what I was making at the time. Mind you, it was already at the low end of the nation's Help Desk Support III salary range according to salary.com. That position was a lower level position than the one I was applying for. I understand that it is simple economics and business, but if we are going to preach "buy american", we should also chant "hire american".
with cheap, imported labor?" His answer: make sure they don't
have to. That reflects a grossly distorted and utterly
counterproductive attitude. The only way to make American
engineers competitive is to make them compete. Visa
restrictions must be ended. Every engineer we import makes us
a stronger country. Every job we send offshore makes room for a
new, more valuable job here. Protectionism has never worked
because it can't work. Protectionism makes American labor
unnaturally expensive, which drives ALL jobs away. Open
competition is how America became strong, and it's the only way
to keep us strong.
- Tell Lou Dobbs that we Want Matloff
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by robsaz
May 12, 2005 1:07 PM PDT
- Lately Lou Dobbs and his crew have gone way overboard pushing the education button and there is only one way to straighten him out. We must demand that Dobbs debate Dr. Norm Matloff about the education issue. I have credible evidence that Dobbs has been trying to evade Matloff, so to make this debate happen all of us must contact CNN and demand that Dobbs face the music once and for all.
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Reply to this comment
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See all 68 Comments >>WE NEED A DEBATE - AND SOON!
Don't expect Dobbs to agree to this debate without a lot of public pressure. I have talked with some of his people and they are all convinced that education in the US is inferior. Dobbs has been great in publicizing the horrors of outsourcing and H-1B, but he still doesn't see the big picture. The education myth is used to justify American job destruction.
Contact the Lou Dobbs show and demand a debate.
The Lou Dobbs contact page is at:
http://www.cnn.com/feedback/forms/form5.html?9
Email him at: LouDobbs@cnn.com
And just so Dobbs can't hide from the CNN execs, you can send comments to them on this page:
http://www.cnn.com/feedback/forms/form1.html?35
To keep up with the issues, subscribe to Matloff's newsletter, and also to my "Job Destruction Newsletter". Find out more at
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