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H1(b) Go Home!!
Seriously. There is no longer a "shortage" of "qualified" American tech workers. Massive numbers of qualified, current American workers are unemployed, costing the state money in UI benefits, losing their houses, becoming homeless, or working at Starbucks. All this while the high flying H1(b) people are still employed. This is just plain wrong.
I don't think there ever was a "shortage", frankly. Sure, people might not have met the hideous laundry lists that the companies "required". (Secret - neither did the H1(b) candidates that got hired, either, but the body shop/H1b pimps faked up their resumes!) But most of those people that are often turned down in favor of high-tech carpetbaggers have been older, with transferable skills and THE ABILITY TO LEARN. Really, even if you have the laundry list, you still have to learn that company's specific implementation and development system, so there's no time savings in hiring the H1(b).
So why not hire and train seasoned American workers? Oh, yeah, they want to be paid what they're worth. 10 years experience is really worth more than 2, people. Sure, you can get an H1(b) with under two years experience for cheap, rather than an overqualified, but not fitting the laundry list, American at a higher wage. But the American actually has a track record, and has just maybe (read probably) seen a similar situation before.
You ever wonder why MicroSoft and other companies have crappy software? Because they hire primarily RCGs and H1(b)s without any seasoning, and discard them when they have 4 years experience.
Seriously, people, we produce plenty of fine engineering talent right here. A little investment in keeping it current, and you avoid the overhead of H1(b), and are doing something for the country that gave you birth and the people that actually buy your products. Face it, if all of the American technocrats are reduced to working low wage service jobs or signing on the street corners (or eventually rioting), there won't be any around to buy your nifty new toys.
If I had my own company, I would hire only locally, and only hire citizens or green card holders. No "national" searches, no relocation, no immigration, no visas or visa sponsorship. I would hire as much for the ability to work with a team as I would for purely technical matchup. OK, so if they didn't know Java, I'd hire someone who knew C++ and send them to a Java class, or vice versa. If I wanted a php programmer and they knew perl, but fit with my team, I'd hire them and send them to a php class. Either way, I'd get the better long term employee, for a small investment.
But most of these quarterly profit driven, short sighted, idiots miss that.
I don't think there ever was a "shortage", frankly. Sure, people might not have met the hideous laundry lists that the companies "required". (Secret - neither did the H1(b) candidates that got hired, either, but the body shop/H1b pimps faked up their resumes!) But most of those people that are often turned down in favor of high-tech carpetbaggers have been older, with transferable skills and THE ABILITY TO LEARN. Really, even if you have the laundry list, you still have to learn that company's specific implementation and development system, so there's no time savings in hiring the H1(b).
So why not hire and train seasoned American workers? Oh, yeah, they want to be paid what they're worth. 10 years experience is really worth more than 2, people. Sure, you can get an H1(b) with under two years experience for cheap, rather than an overqualified, but not fitting the laundry list, American at a higher wage. But the American actually has a track record, and has just maybe (read probably) seen a similar situation before.
You ever wonder why MicroSoft and other companies have crappy software? Because they hire primarily RCGs and H1(b)s without any seasoning, and discard them when they have 4 years experience.
Seriously, people, we produce plenty of fine engineering talent right here. A little investment in keeping it current, and you avoid the overhead of H1(b), and are doing something for the country that gave you birth and the people that actually buy your products. Face it, if all of the American technocrats are reduced to working low wage service jobs or signing on the street corners (or eventually rioting), there won't be any around to buy your nifty new toys.
If I had my own company, I would hire only locally, and only hire citizens or green card holders. No "national" searches, no relocation, no immigration, no visas or visa sponsorship. I would hire as much for the ability to work with a team as I would for purely technical matchup. OK, so if they didn't know Java, I'd hire someone who knew C++ and send them to a Java class, or vice versa. If I wanted a php programmer and they knew perl, but fit with my team, I'd hire them and send them to a php class. Either way, I'd get the better long term employee, for a small investment.
But most of these quarterly profit driven, short sighted, idiots miss that.
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It goes both ways, I think.
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I recently had an extremely bad experience with a QA guy we hired. Totally all-american. Just... had no clue. No clue about computers, no clue about TCP/IP, no clue about unix, no clue about anything really. He survived here as long as he did because of an unfortunate culture where apparently, as a QA person, you're not supposed to know anything, you're just supposed to crank out Excel spreadsheets full of "test plans".
We kept paying him for *six months* while he was doing absolutely nothing. Management thought everything was fine because *on paper* it looked like he was doing work. I think a lot of the bad H1bs (the ones who are cheap, and incompetent) survive because of a similar culture. Someone at some level of management does a cost/benefit analysis and thinks "we can squeeze X amount of work out of these people, and it's better than hiring smarter people because we can pay them less". Which royally screws up everyone else who then has to continually walk behind those people and clean up their messes.
I dunno. To me that seems like the bigger issue, and people like Stephen seem to me like they actually help by contributing in a real way to the GDP. I *like* the thought of the US having lots of genuinely smart people working here, and innovating here!!!
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As it stands, H1(b) is used to screw older American workers *and* foreigners who want to immigrate.
Most other countries aren't that kind of stupid - they have tech based immigration based on hiring. We have job-stealing wage suppression via guest worker.
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But, for argument's sake, let's look at the human side of the equation.
Say one of those awesome, smart people decided that he really wanted or even needed to be compensated at a level more in line with his awesomeness and intelligence.
What are his options? He could say, "Hey, you know, I'm not being fairly compensated. What can we do?"
The almost universal (and lawful) response would be, "You have two options. You can get back to work, or you can get on a plane."
Now, a citizen or green card holder could go play the free market (remember, an unregulated free market is good for everyone... well, for certain values of everyone). If he found a better package, he could just say sayonara to $JOB. Not so for the H1(b). Not only does he have to find a company willing to compensate him more fairly, said company must also agree to sponsor his presence here... and his search must be done in even more secrecy than the citizen or green card holder, because it's not just his job he could lose if he's found sniffing around on the other side of the fence, it's his ability to remain in the country.
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saw enough of that shit in gradskool. Same game. professors used em like kleenex. and threw em away after they'd used em. ugly.