Creative Class

The H-1B’s spousal complement, the dreaded H-4 or “dependent” visa, means if he wants to stay and work in America, his brilliant, cheerful and pregnant wife Samvita Padukone, 27, would be chained at home by work restrictions. “The H-4 is out,” he says, sitting next to Padukone in their Toronto home. “Because there’s no way that I would be comfortable – I mean, I don’t have the right, to tell my wife `You have to sit at home and be barefoot and pregnant.’ No one has the right to tell anyone that, let alone someone who studied in Singapore on scholarship.” …

The couple’s situation isn’t unique. Mavinkurve, who works on digital mapping and was recently promoted to head a team at Google’s California headquarters, says he is one of several Google employees stationed in Canada because of American visa restrictions. Noting that Alberta has targeted H-1B holders, he says “Canada is already showing signs of capitalizing on America’s misguided `walls.’” …

“It’s hard for me to know what `from’ means. I was born in Bombay and I have a lot of family there. But I grew up in Saudi Arabia, because that’s where my dad was working for a long time. And then at the age of 14 I went to America,” he says. “The baby will just, kind of, be born whenever, wherever we are.” Living here and working for a company in California presents its own, uniquely modern challenges” …

This past Saturday we went to a party in Miami hosted by a young gay couple who are planning on having a family – one’s a Canadian with long experience in financing sustainable investments in emerging economies, the other an American with strong ties to Miami. They’re looking at houses in Toronto – because it’s a great place to raise a family and because of the economic crisis.

Crises are times when the relative positions of nations and cities can, and frequently do, change quickly. The closing of European economies during the late 20s and 30s causes a massive movement of top scientific, entrepreneurial, and creative talent to the United States. I’m not saying anything like that will happen to the U.S. But when it comes to top talent, the margin can really matter. If talented people or their spouses face obstacles to working and living in the U.S., they will go elsewhere: some will return home, some may go to Canada.  Enterprising companies will open up facilities where needed to attract this talent. Over time, these sorts of places can develop a self-reinforcing cycle of growth, developing greater abilities to attract talent.

Microsoft laid off 1,400 workers on Friday, en route to as many as 5,000 – the first layoffs ever at the company.

Less than two years ago, Microsoft couldn’t find enough qualified software engineers in the United States that they were begging for H1-B Visas to import them. They also opened up a development center in Richmond BC, just outside of Vancouver (and only two hours drive from Redmond, WA) to take advantage of more skilled-immigrant-friendly Canadian government policies.

What’s going on? Anyone know? Have thoughts?

Is Microsoft really struggling enough to shed talent so fiercely fought for?

Is America now over-supplied with software developer talent?

Or is Microsoft taking advantage of a crisis to shed unproductive workers or corporate divisions?

Steve Ballmer does mention that Microsoft expects to hire 2,000 – 3,000 people over the next year or so (suggesting things are not that bad).

In the wake of financial turmoil, the globalization of research goes on. IBM is set to open a major new research center in China, while Microsoft plans three new research centers in Britain, France, and Germany. The global serach for talent continues. My hunch is that the combination of financial and economic instability plus immigration restrictions will make the U.S. a slightly less attractive or viable location for global talent. Even though the effect is likely to be modest, companies will continue to redeploy where the talent is or wants to be.

An article in the latest New Yorker talks about the effect the big investment banks going public has had on the Wall Street collapse. By putting themselves at the mercy of the stock market, they surrendered a lot of freedom and autonomy. They were pushed to keep leveraging their bets by shareholder demand for profits. And when the profits fell, so did the companies. Gone are the days when JP Morgan could assemble a few bankers and save the economy. Aside from the irony of the titans of Wall Street not understanding the market, what does this say about modern capitalism?

In a related vein, I heard an interesting interview recently about the rash of IPO’s in the dot-com heyday. The speaker said that the old purpose of going public was to raise capital for expansion, but the new purpose became for founders to cash out. As a result, capital formation didn’t go into new production but private fortunes. The result didn’t add value to the economy.

Google, perhaps the most successful company of the new millennium, held off on going public during the dot-com years and instead depended on private investors. As a result, the owners were able to plow profits back into growth and keep the company’s income and assets out of the public eye. By the time Google did go public it was much bigger than anyone thought – too big for Yahoo to catch up, too big for Microsoft to squash.

So, I’ll throw this out to the economists among us. Has the way the stock market handles new offerings outlived its purpose? Are companies going public too soon, or perhaps totally unnecessarily? Are there problems that are deeper than simple regulation can solve? And what would a better model look like?

Microsoft’s new TV ad launched Saturday night during the NFL opener. Crispin Porter & Bogusky, the ad agency behind the $300 million campaign, has garnered much press about the odd partnership.

Many think the ad was a flop, but there sure has been a lot of buzz about the partnership, the campaign, and Jerry Seinfeld’s $10 million celebrity endorsement. Is Microsoft successfully changing its stale image compared to its creative rival, Apple? What do you think of the teaser ad?

Ask Rana for Advice on Work, Life, and Play

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Michael Malone argues that we are rapidly becoming one:

The most compelling statistic of all? Half of all new
college graduates now believe that self-employment is more secure than
a full-time job. Today, 80% of the colleges and universities in the
U.S. now offer courses on entrepreneurship; 60% of Gen Y business
owners consider themselves to be serial entrepreneurs, according to
Inc. magazine. Tellingly, 18 to 24-year-olds are starting companies at
a faster rate than 35 to 44-year-olds. And 70% of today’s high
schoolers intend to start their own companies, according to a Gallup
poll.

An upcoming wave of new workers in our society will
never work for an established company if they can help it. To them,
having a traditional job is one of the biggest career failures they can
imagine.

Hmmmm… to a certain extent or for a certain segment of society.  However, Google, Microsoft, Starbucks, Toyota, Wal-mart, the health sector, the defense-industrial complex, the public school system and the government still really do exist. In fact, education and health are the largest single employers in many large cities.  Honestly, while people change jobs frequently, I wonder to what degree the profile of the entrepreneurial and self-employed has changed over the past 2 or 3 decades. There are many people who prefer the security of a “job” to the risk of an entrepreneurial venture.  Our own personality studies, as well as those of others, substantiate that.  I could go on, but what do you think?