The Contract Programmer

Early March is expected generate a land rush of H1-B visas by US companies.  Personally, I think this is another attempt by US software and consulting companies to garner a new and larger round of indentured servants. Proponents of the process would like to expand the program to include provisions for 180,000 yearly visas for foreign-born workers.  I think that we should offer citizenship to these people so that they can move their families here and earn a good living.  But it seems like the corporations would rather keep them under their thumb.

The US has led the world in coming up with ways to increase workplace efficiency for a long time, but in 2006, it fell to the rank of 7th. Can anyone say “SOX compliance knocked us out of 1st place in global workplace efficiency?” The World Economic Forum’s annual report on leveraging IT effectively put the US in 7th place. Congressional action to the announcement is to increase funding for research, but as an IT person, I can tell you why we lost and it’s because of SOX compliance.  Bill Gates of Microsoft and Craig Barrett of Intel testified before congress that they would like to see increased funding for science and technology education and R&D funding, but neither of those things are going to help the typical public business.  Those are pork-barrel funding requests for the companies that manufacture software; the competitive advantage through the use of leveraging IT effectively is in the domain of large software consumers, such as American corporations.