[raggedy13]

From today's (Saturday) Vancouver Sun...

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The new home of microsoft in Canada
TECH SECTOR: 700 of the best jobs in the industry will soon be coming to Richmond

Gillian Shaw, Vancouver Sun
Published: Saturday, October 06, 2007

A Canadian software development centre wasn't even a gleam in the corporate eye of the giant Microsoft six months ago.

Today, thanks to a cap on working visas for the U.S., British Columbia's technology sector has been delivered a substantial boost with 700 Microsoft workers slated to move into a new centre in Richmond in the coming year and plans to expand after that.

The Microsoft jobs are in computer software development, requiring the specialized skills of designers and programmers that are in high demand around the globe.

The decision to set up shop in Richmond came when Microsoft ran headlong into a visa shortage.

"There's a cap in the U.S. for all companies, not just Microsoft," said Sharif Khan, vice-president of human resources for Microsoft Canada. "The government cap was hit in the first day of the release of the H-1B visas for the year.

"There were double the number of applications than there were visas."

The H-1B non-immigrant visa category lets U.S. employers hire highly skilled temporary workers for three years, with a provision to extend that another three years. The H-1B visa category requires a post-secondary degree and specialized expertise.

Last spring, the application opening lasted only a couple of days before the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services had 133,000 applications for 65,000 openings. It stopped taking any more.

Microsoft was left wondering what to do with some great young talent it had recruited -- mostly university students who were studying in the States but were not Americans. Once they graduated, and their student visas expired, they'd have to go home taking their knowledge and talents with them.

"These people were in the pipeline to be hired for Microsoft and the cap issue was there so we had to look at an alternative solution," Khan said of the graduates who he described as 'top in their field.'

That's when Canada came in, laying out a welcome mat for international talent.

Microsoft could now hire the top help and move them to Canada -- it only needed a location. The Lower Mainland with its close proximity to corporate headquarters in Redmond, Wash., was a natural. Richmond, with an international airport, and a location two-and-a-half to three hours away from Redmond by car, won the sweepstakes.

Khan said it is taking only two weeks to get a working visa here. The new Microsoft employees are moving into the 6,700-square-metre development centre in Richmond as fast as the visas can be issued. There are 20 people in the new centre so far but soon they'll have lots of company.

"The visa officials have been so cooperative with us and they have really been very supportive in this whole process, basically expediting visas and stuff like that," said Khan. "We are getting people on board quickly.

"We are ready to ramp up; we expect another 50 next months and another 50 after that. We are working on two buildings and we could scale up from a few hundred to 700 hundred in the first 12 months."

Lois Reimer, spokesperson for Citizen and Immigration Canada, said while she can't comment specifically on the Microsoft visa applications, some software developing jobs are among the categories deemed to be suffering a skills shortage.

"If that's the case they would get work permits as long as they meet the requirements of entry into Canada," she said. "We don't have quotas."

Since 2002, B.C. has seen a 91- per-cent increase in foreign workers, compared to a 66-per-cent increase in the rest of Canada, said Reimer. In 2006, B.C. received 36,300 foreign workers, out of the 129,000 who came to Canada that year. For B.C. that was up from 26,500 in 2004.

"It is kind of an amazing opportunity for us to leverage," said Khan, who sees the U.S. visa cap as 'an interesting catalyst.' "If you think about it, six months ago we hadn't thought of doing a development centre in Vancouver.

"We were responding to all inquiries saying there were no plans to do so. It is all happening very quickly, it is amazing."

Amazing, too, for the folks at Richmond City Hall who were so thrilled their community was chosen that they hosted the incoming staff for their orientation day while the office renovation was still underway.

"Right from day one when Microsoft announced it was coming to the Lower Mainland we were aggressively going after them and telling them all the wonders of Richmond," said Ted Townsend, Richmond's senior manager of corporate communications. "There is the proximity to the airport, the border and to Redmond and also a lot of it was about the livability of the community and the fact we have a very healthy, active community here."

Along with the immediate jobs and economic impact, Microsoft's new centre located on Commerce Parkway not far from Sierra Wireless, adds to the critical mass of Richmond's tech sector.

"Those businesses create more business and foster more business," said Townsend. "We think it will not only foster new business creation in Richmond but also such a high-profile employer will give people another reason to take a closer look at Richmond and what we have to offer.

"It is something we were very excited about and we are pleased that they chose Richmond."

Microsoft's arrival has British Columbia's technology industry looking across the border for other potential visa-seeking employers.

"We have strategized as to what other companies we want to contact to make sure they are aware of the issue and how Microsoft has chosen to deal with it and to suggest they look at British Columbia as a destination," said Rob Cruickshank, president of the B.C. Technology Industries Association. "Of the big companies affected now, there has certainly been some strategizing done around targeting other large multinational tech companies -- Google, Yahoo and eBay all jump to mind."

eBay has already located here with a customer support centre in Burnaby.

The new Microsoft staff in Richmond will be part of virtual teams, working for bosses in Redmond or other global centres on projects in which they may collaborate with colleagues from all over the world.

"The people working there are developers, we are talking core development people," said Khan.

And they are discerning about their work surroundings.

"When they looked at the blueprints of the office, they put up a board and started evaluating how much light you get in different parts of the building," said Khan. "They are scientifically mapping out the areas of the office with the greatest degrees of light."

Along with its proximity to Redmond, Vancouver is an easy sell to potential employees as a place to live and work. Khan said the company has also advertised internally for positions at the new centre within Canada. Among the new people at the centre is a human resources specialist from Microsoft's Toronto office who is moving here for a new job.

Khan cites a study in which 82 per cent of Vancouverites said they would not move for a job of comparable pay, compared to 40 per cent of people in Toronto who would be prepared to move.

"I think as a company we need to get the best talent, we need to go to where they want to be, where they are and where they want to be," said Khan. "Where there is a great environment to live -- they are likely to be more creative and more productive at the end of the day."

The pioneering group at the new centre has already constructed a Microsoft sign out of Lego to mark their new quarters.

"There is an incredible amount of enthusiasm around the project," said Khan. "When people arrived, everything was pretty much ready -- computers, desks -- and all the screen savers had big Canadian flags on them.

"There is just a lot of pride around this."

The development centre in Richmond, Microsoft's first in Canada, joins others outside the Redmond headquarters, including ones located in North Carolina, Ireland, Denmark and Israel.

The company also has full research and development centres in the United Kingdom, India, China and the Silicon Valley. It's planning expansions in Boston, Mass., and Bellevue, Wash.

gshaw@png.canwest.com


© The Vancouver Sun 2007

[Hed Kandi]

Lame.

Another potential downtown office tower gone lost to the suburbs.

[osirisboy]

^^^ No its a good thing. Isn’t this what we want, people being able to live close to where they work? With all those units being built in Richmond there needs to be places for employment that are close by. After all, our goal is to reduce commute times and be more environmentally friendly.

[fever]

The location isn't Richmond Centre or near the Canada Line. It's in a business park that is hard to reach by transit and is pretty much on the edge of the ALR. Everyone will get there by driving down one of three congested freeways.

[giallo]

Bitter-sweet. The boon to Richmond's retail sector will be huge.

[Nutterbug]

I wonder if they have any plans to scale it back, now with the high C$.

[Cypherus]

Great news. Truthfully, most high-tech firms settle in high-tech office parks outside of a downtown core, so it's not a loss to downtown Vancouver anyways.

[WarrenC12]

I don't think the C$ means a lot to Microsoft. I have a friend that works there in Seattle, they could easily pay less than the Seattle employees make and it would be higher than average tech wages here.

[cornholio]

^Anything under a $100,000 or $50 an hour is in my opinion not a good senior level tech job unless you made some big mistakes in your career. Though this usually involves contract work and being able to move around the world is a big plus. I say this having family/friends in the fields, and I have a educational background in cis.

[raggedy13]

From the Globe and Mail a few days ago...


Canada: A UN of tech talent

PATRICK BRETHOUR
Globe and Mail Update
November 9, 2007 at 9:31 AM EST

VANCOUVER — Parminder Singh thought he was a Canadian when he applied for a technology-worker visa to the United States in the late 1990s - and with good reason.

He'd lived in Canada since he was six years old, built his career here, and had long since renounced his Indian citizenship in favour of Canadian credentials. But when it came time to line up to get into the U.S. job market for tech workers, immigration officials took one look at his birthplace, New Delhi, and lumped him in with applicants from India. With a low ceiling set for H1-B visas, Mr. Singh didn't make the cut.

"I felt kind of cheated," he recalled in an interview this week. To make matters worse, his kid sister Amrit applied and breezed through, since she had been born after the Singh family immigrated to Halifax in the 1960s. "As a result, she got preferential treatment!" he exclaims.

Eventually, Mr. Singh made his way into the United States using a NAFTA visa, and landed at Microsoft Corp. The sting of that unhappy visa experience might linger, but it will come in handy at Mr. Singh's new job: Running the new software development centre that Microsoft is opening in the Vancouver suburb of Richmond - and recruiting workers from around the world.

Mr. Singh, whose appointment is being officially announced today, is careful not to directly criticize the U.S. government, but the plain fact is that protectionist sentiment south of the border has meant a hard cap on technology-worker immigrants at a level far lower than what the industry needs. In just one day, U.S. immigration services received 150,000 applications - more than double the total annual quota of 65,000.

So, Mr. Singh has lots of company in the I-didn't-get-an-H1-B club. Microsoft gets the third-biggest slice of H1-B visas, but the software giant didn't even come close to meeting its needs.

While Mr. Singh is diplomatic, the company's government affairs director, Jack Krumholtz, was much more blunt in comments late last month, saying the Richmond software centre was motivated in part by the H1-B cap, and that it could be the start of a bigger move.

"We currently do 85 per cent of our development work in the U.S., and we'd like to continue doing that," he told Associated Press. "But if we can't hire the developers we need, we're going to have to look to other options to get the work done."

Faced with the hard cap, Microsoft has come up with a way to cut through the knot of anti-immigration sentiment by setting up a satellite campus in Richmond. Up to 300 employees, software programmers for the most part, will work at the development centre. They will start off with relatively low-grade testing work, but Mr. Singh says he has no doubt that his new hires will be working on major software projects before long.

Canada's more lenient immigration policy has just become a major competitive advantage in attracting high-paying, brainy jobs. The proof is on the office wall of the development centre, still under construction in the south of Richmond. Tacked on the wall is a world map, with dozens of coloured stickers, each pointing to the home town of one of the newly hired software programmers. There are a smattering from South America and Africa, a generous dusting through Europe and clusters in the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia and China. There are none in Canada or the United States.

"It's a United Nations of talent," says Mr. Singh, whose own sticker, of course, points to New Delhi.

But there is something else that the Lower Mainland has going for it in the battle to attract international talent. Any immigrant from China would feel right at home in Richmond, where Chinese-language signs are common and fabulous Asian cuisine is easy to come by. Similarly, nearby Surrey would ease the transition for any recent arrivals from South Asia.

It is a far different experience for immigrants than that of, say, Mr. Singh, who grew up as one of a handful of Sikh families in the Halifax area.

"Clearly you stand out as an individual," he says.

These days, he jokes, when he visits his brother in Surrey, it's the guys without a turban who are the standouts.

pbrethour@globeandmail.com

[Bert]

There have been a couple economic-friendly developments in Canadian immigration policy that make me think Microsoft's arrival is just the tip of the iceberg.

First, Bill C-50 (letting Immigration Canada prioritize immigration applicants where there are labour shortages) would make it even easier for Microsoft and others to get the skilled workers they want and retain them for longer, since I'm sure many workers are not willing to come under the uncertainty of a work permit.

I just hope the government keeps their promises that family/reunion/refugee immigration classes won't suffer. If there is one immigrant class that I think we need less of, it's the investment immigrant. Even though they need to invest $400,000 to enter Canada, these ones often seem to just be rich and lazy, simply coming to Canada to leech off the public purse. Sure, they benefit our retail and housing sectors a little, but that's pretty much all many of them do, while doing all they can to pay as little tax as possible. That's just what I've seen, but I very well could be over-generalizing here.

The second new development is that work permits for foreign students are being relaxed so they have been extended to three years long now, don't require a job offer, and let the students work in any field (New Rules Let Foreign Students Work Here (http://www.canada.com/windsorstar/news/story.html?id=a37701ca-6f03-4259-b4ff-22e9241ca090&k=58516)) - this will help enormously since it was very difficult under the old rules to convince a potential employer to go through so many extra hoops to hire you. This will also tie in well with the upcoming Canadian Experience Class, allowing immigration for acquiring Canadian experience. Really, Canadian-educated foreign students are pretty much the perfect candidates for immigration - young, bright, able to communicate in English, having Canadian qualifications, accustomed to Canada's society and environment, and possibly having international business ties.

SFU is in an incredible position now with their well-established dual degree in Computer Science program with Zhejiang University in China. UBC also has an International MBA program with the Antai College of Economics and Management at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Although UBC's is pretty much in China, both these programs give these schools high visibility to attract Chinese students to study here in any program. Both UBC and SFU are already highly regarded schools in China, likely owing to the disproportionate number of popular Hong Kong stars graduating from them.

I'd expect to see more dual degree programs with India too to further enhance our schools' visibility to potential foreign students, especially with the recent designation of three more universities in BC (Kwantlen, etc.). The benefits will trickle down through to all Canadian post-secondary institutions, public & private.

All-in-all, the future looks pretty bright for Vancouver & Canada's economy, in my eyes.

[Yume-sama]

Anybody who has $400,000 cash to invest in Canada, to be allowed to stay, is probably paying more taxes every couple of years than you do in your life time. So, I wouldn't complain too much. It's also very unlikely they'll be using our slow public health care very much, or using many other social services that their high tax dollars will fund.

[quobobo]

What Yume-sama said. Also keep in mind that the rich tend to send their children to private schools (while still paying provincial/municipal taxes to support public education) - investment immigrants are awesome.

[Bert]

Alright, I'll retract that comment on investment immigrants. My personal experience with them has been negative, and clouded my judgement. But the taxes I've known some of them to pay are very low through a combination of complex tax sheltering and having minimal income in Canada (i.e. they make their money somewhere else and conceal that).

Still, I think the number should not be increased (relative to other immigrant classes) due to the inequity it causes in our society, and the problems which come with that. Keep in mind that these people are not just able to buy their way Canada, but do so for roughly only $50,000 to $60,000 (given the $400,000 investment is a 62-month interest-free loan to the government, which would probably only fetch roughly 3% at market rates, as it's provincially-backed so extremely low risk).

[SpongeG]

where is the microsoft office located?

was driving through richmond the other night hoping to come across it

[204]

where is the microsoft office located?

was driving through richmond the other night hoping to come across it

It's in this area: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=microsoft&sll=49.172053,-123.070736&sspn=0.075419,0.159988&ie=UTF8&t=h&z=13&iwloc=A

[Stingray2004]

/\ Yeah, when I first heard that Microsoft was locating into the Metro Vancouver area, that general location was the first that came to mind.

MacDonald Dettwiler and its various subsidiaries are also located in that same area.

Good strategic location with direct access to north-south links (Knight/99 fwys) and east-west links (91 fwy).

[deasine]

^Not good in terms of transit. Many of the workers are from overseas right? A lot of them should be used to transit. I prefer the old False Creek Flats location better [if that was ever considered].