[quote=deadzone]Speaking of H1B, I’m not a big fan of that either. Does your colleage, for instance, provide some type of unique skill that no American citizen can provide? I doubt it. The H1B program is clearly a scam used by corporations to hire cheap technical labor.[/quote]
It’s a double edge sword. There are companies that do abuse the H1-B system. They tend to be bottom feeder seedy contracting/contractor chopshops, and frankly you probably don’t want to be in a situation to work for those contracts….There was I remember one headhunter that was speaking to me because we needed a contractor for a short duration, and I remember the guy had a company and would “bench” H1-Bs without real work available… Gray area/borderline illegal (and no, we didn’t bother with chopshops like that)…
But there are also plenty of of jobs that college grads without h1-b’s either don’t want to do or aren’t qualify to do. For example, there weren’t too many candidates out of college that were interested in doing embedded O/S mobile development.. Most of the college grads wanted to go work for facebook, linkedin, and to a lesser extend apple and google…
And let’s face it…Also else being equal, a tech company would rather take a younger person than take and older person and retrain them….It’s how it is..The argument about “experience” in tech only works so far. You don’t get “life credits” just for having a lot of miles on the odometer. It’s “relevant experience” that counts…And especially with tech, a lot of skills either becomes outdated or there ends up being an influx of too much supply of a skill very quickly. So the burden of “proving” one’s net worth ends up being oneself in staying current and staying at the top of the game….
Regardless, the H1-B “threat” is not nearly as big a “threat” as a company deciding to move an entire operations offshore, especially as more and more business comes out of Asia versus the U.S….Also, when a US companies start competing strictly based on cost, you know the end is near because a US company will never win based on cost alone… I’ll use my own employer for example.One of our competitors is based in Taiwan. They can easily fly people from Taiwan to China for cheap, where the bulk of the new business is coming from…How many US employees want to fly 15+hours every 2 weeks to hang out with customers in China versus if you had an office of employees in Banglore 5 hours away? How much in operating expenses between the two…
I speak, as I’m turning 40, and acknowledge I’m one of those people that will have a target on my back sooner versus later… It’s not great, but it is what it is. Because when you get older, you have to at some point decide whether you have the time, energy, desire to keep up.. Or if you come to the point in which you think, enough is enough, and decide to do something else….(And yes, that thought process tends to happen a lot more for me these days :))
