Life Musings

The H-1B work visa issue is controversial, to say the least. It's easy for people to blame H-1B workers for the unemployment woes of American laborers. They say that there are plenty of American programmers and engineers to go around, and that companies hire H-1B workers in order to use them as cheap labor.

I think that's a vast oversimplification though, for reasons explained here. In addition, I'd like to reproduce the following quotes that I found from some high-tech professionals on this matter.

My experience is that there are plenty of persons claiming to be programmers but very few who actually have decent skills. I started my bachelors degree in 1993 and everyone was going into computer science but very few were truly passionate about the profession. Combined with grade inflation it makes it very difficult to know from a resume who is worth even talking to. I have interviewed people with excellent GPAs from a computer science program who struggled to explain to very basic concepts. So you spend tons of times just filtering and figuring out how to filter better.

Quite the reverse. What you have is an abundance of "programmers."

The problem is, in the .com boom companies hired far more people with far less skill sets for far more than they were worth.

When the .com bust happened, many of those people got dumped on the open market, and especially the immediately out of college group was left with a false impression about what real salary expectations are and what's really required to build software.

Too many "programmers" think that software development is a drag'n'drop operation of controls or the mere matter of 'knowing' a programming language. Unfortunately, schools aren't teaching computer science with the same depth of problem solving and mathematics as they used to. From that perspective, yes, there is a shortage of _good_ programmers.

The one thing I would like to point out however is that this is something of a self inflicted wound. My company has been in the IT business for over 20 years and a "proud survivor" of the dotcom bubble and subsequent meltdown.

The H1B visa and offshoring were always present on small scale but it did not really take off in a big way until we were into the dotcom bubble. At that point, with all of the cheap and highly available money floating around and startups coming into the market faster than college graduates, IT workers were suddenly in an apparent short supply, and market bubble behaviors grew - signing bonuses, six figure salaries with cars thrown in for new college graduates etc. In Silicon Valley, there were companies going into high schools and paying kids $60,000+ to drop out of high school if they showed any computer literacy [really!]. I recall when we posted a job for e-commerce development, a kid came in [high school paid dropout] who was making $70K and he sat down and said to the hiring manager that he had two requirements before *consenting* to interview: (a) the company had to agree to pay off the $30,000 signing bonus that he would have to pay back to his current company for leaving after just two months [plus of course add more for his take] and (b) he wanted a title of Chief Technology Officer within a year. Basically, my company did not -- could not reasonably -- hire anyone for three years from 2000 - 2003. We felt like we had "fallen through the looking glass."