Canada needs to fast-track immigration to bring in crucial tech talent

2016/07/08 Leave a comment

Another advocate makes the case (Express Entry aims for six months or less) and the messages coming out of recent consultations are of note:

In media coverage and casual conversations with CEOs, investors and skilled professionals, this sentiment is brought up constantly. I’m not surprised. With the state of the European Union after the Brexit vote, and the possibility of a Trump presidency in the United States, it’s easy to see why people might look to Canada as a haven from the uncertainty bubbling around the world.

While some people are clearly exaggerating their desire to pull up stakes, there is evidence that many skilled professionals are seriously considering moving to Canada right now. This offers Canadian startups an unprecedented opportunity.

It’s clear that the startup sector wants access to hire top foreign talent. I recently joined Globe and Mail reporter Sean Silcoff, parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Immigration Arif Virani and co-founder of Blankslate Partners Danielle Lovell at Startup Canada’s Day on the Hill event to discuss the talent-acquisition challenges faced by startups.

The discussion was eye opening for Mr. Virani. He heard about the protectionist and cumbersome hoops that startups must jump through to get skilled workers for key roles. These range from nitpicking on forms to outright hostility from some government officials, who criticize these companies for their inability to find “the right Canadian.”

It’s not because of the startups’ lack of effort. We’re competing with the world for brain power. We’re expecting to have to fill 182,000 information and communication technology positions by 2019. Unfortunately, homegrown talent will not be enough to fill these jobs.

Fast-tracking immigration for startups is a way to solve this.

For our innovation economy to thrive, government and industry need to work together. Canada produces all the right elements, but to remain competitive, we must take the right steps at pivotal moments. Attracting the right talent will determine whether our blossoming innovation hubs succeed or fail.

New Zealand and France are among the countries that have introduced fast-track programs to attract and retain tech talent. Internationally, demand for talent outpaces supply. In the United States alone, there are 1.42 job postings for every skilled technical job seeker. But every country competes fiercely for talented workers. Canada’s Express Entry system usually keeps prospective employees waiting at least six months. In that amount of time, most applicants will have moved on to other opportunities. Our system is broken.

I have argued that Canada’s leaders need to pivot our economy toward innovation. There are many reasons I believe this. For one, foreign labour in the innovation economy functions differently than it does in the industrial economy. In the industrial economy, foreign labour takes jobs away. In the innovation economy, bringing in the right talent from outside can create bigger and better companies, the network effects of which begin a virtuous cycle.

At the panel discussion in Ottawa, Mr. Virani said creating a system that allows startups to bring in the right people in less than a month would be impossible.

I challenge him and Immigration Minister John McCallum to think like the innovation economy leaders who view impossible as a starting point. Together, we can reform this system and give Canadian startups anotherrecruiting advantage.

Source: Canada needs to fast-track immigration to bring in crucial tech talent – The Globe and Mail

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Microsoft reminds us that Canada is still a branch-plant economy

2016/06/18 Leave a comment

Always interesting to see just how sophisticated and strategic large corporations can be:

Inside Microsoft, however, some staffers have been known to cheekily refer to the Vancouver operation as “Ellis Island,” after the historic U.S. immigration entry station. What Microsoft really wants is to import far more foreign workers to its home base in Washington State than it can under the United States’ incredibly restrictive immigration rules. So it uses Vancouver as a staging post.

Foreign workers temporarily migrate to Canada and work for Microsoft here long enough to qualify for an intracompany transfer to the United States, a far less restrictive immigration process. That doesn’t apply to everyone at the Vancouver centre – most of the roughly 425 “core” employees are Canadian. But another 140 or so “rotational” workers are foreign nationals who will be moved after 18 months, presumably to the United States.

Microsoft has been brazen about using Vancouver as a U.S. immigration back door. Then-chief executive Steve Ballmer said in 2007, when the company returned to Vancouver: “We opened a lab because we were having trouble getting visas for the best and the brightest.” Deputy general counsel Karen Jones told Bloomberg in 2014 that the restrictive U.S. rules “clearly did not meet our needs,” leaving the company about 750 foreign hires short of its desired U.S. intake. “We have to look to other places.” Expanding to Vancouver wasn’t “purely for immigration purposes,” she said, “but immigration is a factor.” Mr. Smith acknowledged “the more open immigration system of Canada does play a vital role in our ability to invest in a big way in the future of this kind of centre in B.C.”

More surprising is that our government thinks it’s smart for Canada to become a way station for U.S.-bound global talent (Microsoft isn’t the only U.S. company to do this) and has made it even easier for Microsoft to build Ellis Island Northwest.

In April, 2015, the federal Immigration Department, at the B.C. government’s request, exempted the Microsoft centre from undergoing onerous “labour market impact assessments” (LMIA) when seeking approval for inbound foreign employees, shaving months off the immigration process. Such exemptions are allowed under federal-provincial immigration deals for major projects that result in big investments and don’t displace local workers, among other criteria. Mr. Smith acknowledged the exemption was an “important” consideration in Microsoft’s decision where to locate the centre.

This would be easier to stomach if Microsoft was importing talent to remain in Canada or if the company placed leadership of key products or projects here (other than existing game studios, the new engineers will report to businesses managed elsewhere, such as Skype).

It would be more acceptable if the exemption was available to all tech companies. Canada is awash in fast-growing tech firms eager to import top talent from around the world. But they have to wait six to 12 months as a result of the prolonged immigration process, which submits fast-growing tech firms to the same drawn-out LMIA process as abusers of the temporary foreign-worker program. That is ridiculously long given that they are in a global race for highly coveted engineering and executive talent. Microsoft, a U.S. company hiring foreign workers to ultimately work in the United States, gets to skip all that.

This exemption places the needs of a foreign multinational above Canadian companies, which ultimately puts Canada at an economic disadvantage. “We need to correct these failed policies that unfairly advantage foreign multinationals and instead focus on growing our domestic scale-ups,” said Benjamin Bergen, executive director of the Council of Canadian Innovators, which represents Canada’s top emerging tech companies. “At the very least, Canadian tech companies should enjoy the same benefits and access to talent as foreign branch plants do here in Canada.”

An exemption for Microsoft is dubious policy, as is championing investments by foreign tech companies here that would likely melt away if the U.S. government simply freed up more visas for foreign workers. It makes us look like a branch-plant economy. So do the PM’s attempts to appear innovative by courting foreign tech giants Google, Ubisoft and Facebook, while ignoring Canada’s emerging homegrown tech companies. Don’t think he hasn’t been invited to visit them, too.

Source: Microsoft reminds us that Canada is still a branch-plant economy – The Globe and Mail

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Apple’s WWDC 2016 onstage lineup was more diverse than it has ever been – Recode

2016/06/16 Leave a comment

Changing the public image:

Like virtually all of Silicon Valley, Apple is both extremely white and extremely male in its upper ranks. And for many years, it has been mostly white men onstage at Apple keynote events.

Last year, that began to change. And at today’s Worldwide Developers Conference, it changed some more.

Of the 10 people onstage at WWDC today, there were six men and four women, including one African-American woman. According to 2015 figures on Apple’s website, the company has a 70/30 gender split, and is 54 percent white, 18 percent Asian, 11 percent Hispanic and 8 percent black. At last year’s WWDC, there were two women onstage for the event.

The women onstage were Apple Music’s Bozoma Saint John, Apple Watch software exec Stacey Lysik, software engineering VP Cheryl Thomas and iOS software exec Bethany Bongiorno. Imran Chaudhri, on the Apple design team, was the one nonwhite guy. (Apple iTunes executive Eddy Cue — a regular presenter at Apple events, including today’s — is Cuban American.)

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Canada’s tech startup sector wants easier access to hire top foreign talent

2016/03/29 Leave a comment

Yet some more expected tweaks to Express Entry:

After winning a big concession in the budget on taxing stock options, Canada’s tech startup sector is braced for its next battle: urging Ottawa to fix immigration rules that limit its ability to hire top foreign talent.

The Express Entry system brought in by the last government in 2015 “is fundamentally too rigid” and leaves employers waiting up to six months to discover if they can bring skilled foreign talent to Canada, said Tobi Lutke, CEO of Ottawa-based software firm Shopify Inc. “That puts us at a huge disadvantage for recruiting internationally.”

Under policy changes enacted by the Conservatives, employers now must validate a job offer by getting government approval for a “Labour Market Impact Assessment” – showing it couldn’t find Canadians to do the job. While that approach targeted abusers of the temporary foreign worker program, it meant fast-growing tech firms searching for the best employees globally had to submit to the same drawn-out process, only to be told in many cases by Ottawa that they should just hire a Canadian.

“It was a misguided approach,” said Sarah Anson-Cartwright, director of skills and immigration policy for the Canadian Chamber of Commerce.

Immigration Minister John McCallum wasn’t available to comment. But a department spokesman said the government plans to review the Express Entry program “to see how it can be improved for potential immigrants such as top-level foreign executives. The review will include, likely among other things, the LMIA requirement.”

Tech startup leaders say the rules not only add delays but that the process lacks transparency and consistency, imposes needless bureaucracy and lacks an appeals process. In many cases, would-be recruits choose other offers rather than waiting. Foreign students awaiting government approval for their job offers sometimes must leave Canada when their study visas expire.

Six out of 10 employers surveyed by the Canadian Employee Relocation Council (CERC) last year said the immigration changes under the Tories had hindered their strategy planning and recruiting. One out of six opted to create the jobs abroad instead.

Curious to know the relative competitiveness of Canada vis-a-vis the US, given my understanding of the problems Silicon Valley has in hiring global talent.

Source: Canada’s tech startup sector wants easier access to hire top foreign talent – The Globe and Mail

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Grassroots coding, gaming groups tackle tech’s diversity crisis

2016/03/23 Leave a comment

Striking – but not surprising given Toronto’s (and Canada’s) diversity – the confluence between minority and women diversity:

Hina Mir sees a future for herself in technology. She’s only 16, so it’s not entirely clear what that future will look like. But one thing is almost certain: she’ll be coding.

The Toronto high school student already knows elements of multiple programming languages and has studied with experts working for some of the biggest names in the tech sector.

“With all the things I’ve learned with coding, as well as on the engineering and business sides of technology, there’s so much that I think I could do,” Hina said.

She’s part of an up-and-coming generation of potential programmers, software engineers, developers, designers and entrepreneurs who could help the tech world face down an uncomfortable reality: it is very white and very male.

Companies from across the industry have acknowledged the problems: specifically, that there is both a considerable disparity between the sexes and a troubling lack of diversity in the workforce.

The response from Silicon Valley has been to raise a small army of “diversity consultants” and use more inclusive recruiting and hiring strategies.

Iqra Alam, Tajmim Ahmed, Mariam Sayed Girls Crack the Code diversity

The group has members as young as six and as old as 16. International studies have found that starting to teach coding as early as kindergarten is the most effective way to ensure young people stick with it. (Lucas Powers/CBC)

“But it’s not enough to rely only on what big companies are doing if we’re going to create a tech world that reflects the society we live in,” said Ashley Jane Lewis.

A tech workforce that reflects society

The 26-year-old is a mentor with Girls Crack the Code, the community organization where Mir got her start in coding.

The Toronto-based group, which is funded by its organizers and the local school board, helps girls and young women of colour get a head start in tech, and not just with coding classes. In the four years it has existed, Girls Crack the Code has grown into an advocacy network that connects members with all kinds of tech-related opportunities, such as scholarships and workshops.

Ashley Jane Lewis, right, is a mentor with Girls Crack the Code. ‘I think in 10 years, when a younger generation looks to the tech world and sees women of colour who learned in communities like this, working in the field, they’ll see a trail that has been blazed for them,’ she said. (Lucas Powers/CBC)

“I’ve already been to Google, Twitter, Salesforce and coding camp, and I’m in a technology program at school,” Hina said.

Critically, Girls Crack the Code works out of Nelson Mandela Park Public School in Regent Park, one of the most diverse neighbourhoods in the city and home to Canada’s largest social housing development. Bengali, Mandarin, Urdu, Somali and Swahili are just some of the languages spoken there.

The neighbourhood is undergoing a billion-dollar “revitalization” ultimately aimed at creating a community with housing for families of different socioeconomic levels.

Khadija was one of about 30 girls who visited Twitter Canada’s headquarters earlier this month. (Lucas Powers/CBC)

In many ways, Girls Crack the Code is trying to build a tech industry informed by all of the voices, perspectives and experiences found in a place like Regent Park.

It’s part of a growing grassroots movement to cultivate talent in places where diversity is woven into the fabric of everyday life.

A ‘powerful’ message

Earlier this month, 30 girls from the group visited Twitter Canada’s trendy downtown office to listen to a talk by Helen Zeng, a 25-year-old software engineer who grew up in Windsor, Ont., and now codes for the tech giant in San Francisco.

Zeng says that while many companies are trying to hire more women and people of colour into tech jobs, there is a “very loud” effort to push back against built-in biases and attitudes that can’t be undone with corporate policy alone.

Source: Grassroots coding, gaming groups tackle tech’s diversity crisis – Technology & Science – CBC News

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Intel Discloses Diversity Data, Challenges Tech Industry To Follow Suit : NPR

2016/02/04 Leave a comment

Intel_Discloses_Diversity_Data__Challenges_Tech_Industry_To_Follow_Suit___All_Tech_Considered___NPRAn ambitious approach with clear, quantifiable goals, publicly available that provide accountability:

Intel set a goal last year: of all new hires, 40 percent have to be women or under-represented minorities (black, Latino, Native American). The company had never hit that level in the past. So for Intel, it was an ambitious goal. And the company reports today: it managed to exceed it, hitting 43.1 percent.

Intel CEO Brian Krzanich shares some of his motivation: “I have two daughters. They’re both technically very bright. I want them to come into a workplace that’s a better place than the way the workplace is today.”

To do that, he says, Intel has to open up about how it’s doing inside. “There’s nothing here [that’s] top secret or should not be shared with the rest of the world in my mind.”

Other tech giants don’t agree. Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft — companies that value metrics so much — have not publicly stated any measurable goals when it comes to diversity hiring, or the retention of employees. They haven’t disclosed the numbers of new hires or of exits from their companies, by gender and race.

Facebook, Google and Microsoft say their goals are not publicly available. An Apple spokesperson says the company has purposely decided to not set goals.

Intel is now an exception. Today’s report gets in the weeds. The company aims to increase its external diverse hiring rate to 45 percent this year, and it’s establishing a new target within this goal of a 14 percent hiring rate for underrepresented minorities.

There’s a sense of urgency. By 2020, Krzanich says, Intel must reach “full representation.”

By that he does not mean the company will look like America or its global consumer base. He means it’ll reflect the available talent pool. Intel has a long way to go — currently at 75 percent male and a combined 86 percent white and Asian.

Source: Intel Discloses Diversity Data, Challenges Tech Industry To Follow Suit : All Tech Considered : NPR

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How Billionaire Techies Hope To Reshape The US Immigration Debate : NPR

2015/12/11 Leave a comment

Needed antidote to much of the rhetoric in the US, and a natural for the tech industry given their need for talent:

The immigration-reform advocacy group founded by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg — FWD.us (pronounced “forward U.S.”) — and funded by fellow Silicon Valley entrepreneurs including Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer — is rolling out a plan for the 2016 election that will include “substantial” investments in battleground states.

This primary campaign season, the immigration conversation has been dominated by hard-line rhetoric about border walls, mass deportations and birthright citizenship, and now Donald Trump’s Muslim immigration ban. FWD.us says it’s trying to refocus the conversation on comprehensive immigration reform.

“We are making the case over the next year that immigration reform needs to be something that gets done right away under the next presidency,” said
Todd Schulte, president of FWD.us. “That starts with making clear the awful and absurd policies of mass deportation that we’re hearing.”

FWD.us won’t be targeting a particular candidate. But with a focus on mass deportations, it’s clear one immediate target for these tech billionaires is a fellow billionaire — Donald Trump, and the immigration rhetoric his campaign has sparked this primary season.

“The stakes are incredibly high,” said Schulte. “Embracing this mass deportation agenda is absolutely toxic.”

Schulte said the rules of the game have changed since the 2014 midterms, and this election cycle, there’s a whole new side to the immigration debate.

FWD.us would not disclose its spending plans, but it is considered the most well-funded immigration reform group in the country.

In 2013 and 2014, FWD.us spent $10 million on digital, radio, tv and cable advertising, according to a spokesman with the group. Schulte said the group intends to spend similar amounts of money this election cycle. Records indicate it also spent $1.3 million on lobbying activities in 2013 and 2014.

“One role that FWD.us did is put a big voice out there on TV, with a serious amount of money behind it, to fill a void that otherwise exists on the campaign airwaves,” said Elizabeth Wilner, who tracks campaign ads with the research firm Kantar Media. “It’s not typical of something we’ve seen in the past,” she added. “It’s only fairly recently that business has made it their business to take a side.”

The group’s current mission this election season does not focus on huge ad expenditures; instead, FWD.us is working on voter education through research, engagement and polling, with just one lofty goal in Schulte’s words: “Pass immigration reform right out of the gate under the next president, plain and simple.”

FWD.us launched in 2013 with a splash (and an estimated $50 million). It was considered an ambitious big-money venture with the potential to legitimately move the dial on comprehensive immigration policy overhaul.

“In a knowledge economy, the most important resources are the talented people we educate and attract to our country,” Zuckerberg wrote in an op-ed announcing the group. “A knowledge economy can scale further, create better jobs and provide a higher quality of living for everyone in our nation.”

Source: How Billionaire Techies Hope To Reshape The Immigration Debate : NPR

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Can’t Put Down Your Device? That’s by Design – The New York Times

2015/12/07 Leave a comment

Next time you can’t stop yourself looking at your various social media feeds and other apps, consider how companies are engineering such stickiness:

Tech companies tend to present these feedback loops as consumer conveniences. A new Intel TV ad, for instance, shows a young girl in the back of a car growing sad because the laptop on which she was watching a singalong video suddenly runs out of power. The company’s new battery-preserving processor, though, ultimately saves the day, “so you never have to stop watching.” T-Mobile has just introduced BingeOn, a feature that offers subscribers on certain plans unlimited high-speed access to popular streaming video channels.

An image from “Network Effect.”

There’s even an industry term for the experts who continually test and tweak apps and sites to better hook consumers, keep them coming back and persuade them to stay longer: growth hackers.

“How do you drive habitual use of a product?” said Sean Ellis, the chief executive of GrowthHackers.com, a software company specializing in online growth techniques. “It’s not just about getting new people. It’s about retaining the people you already have and, ultimately, getting them to bring in more people.”

As an example, Mr. Ellis described how he recently started using a free meditation app, called Calm, which has a calendar feature that gently nudges subscribers to use the service more. Every time he finishes a session, the app “shows me I’m doing one every three to four days,” Mr. Ellis said. “But it’s clear to me that I should be doing one every day, based on the graphic.”

Yet technologists like Tristan Harris, a design ethicist who is also a product philosopher at Google, warn that growth hacking, taken to its extreme, can encourage sites and apps to escalate their use of persuasive design techniques with potentially unintended consequences for consumers. He compares online engagement maximization efforts to the so-called bliss-point techniques some food companies have developed to hook consumers on a stew of fat, salt and sugar.

“The ‘I don’t have enough willpower’ conversation misses the fact that there are 1,000 people on the other side of the screen whose job is to break down the self-regulation that you have,” said Mr. Harris, who emphasized that he was speaking only for himself and not for Google.

Mr. Harris is also the co-director of an effort called Time Well Spent, which encourages tech companies to provide more choices for users who would like to limit session-prolonging techniques like autoplaying one video or song after another. He said he envisioned alternative app designs that might measure success not in followers, connections, endorsements or likes accumulated, but in meaningful relationships developed or desired jobs offered.

“Right now, many company leaders and designers would like to do these things differently, but the incentives aren’t aligned to do this,” Mr. Harris said.

Certainly, it may be difficult for efforts like Time Well Spent and art projects like “Network Effect” to sway companies that find themselves in increasingly heated competition for online users’ attention.

Source: Can’t Put Down Your Device? That’s by Design – The New York Times

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