[quote=deadzone]I’m sure there are a few “exceptional” cases where it is necessary to hire a foreign specialist. However, I’m tired of hearing the propaganda that we need to bring in more high skilled foreign tech workers because we don’t have enough engineers and scientists in this country. There is absolutely no evidence to support that.
Here is a good article describing this Myth of the STEM worker shortage. http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/03/the-myth-of-the-science-and-engineering-shortage/284359/%5B/quote%5D
There weren’t many people that were willing or able to do embedded mobile O/S when we went on our hiring spree a few years. And take a look at the number of EE/CS graduates, most of them are H1-B… There’s different level of STEM workers, and different skill sets. It really depends…Unfortunately, a lot of STEMs isn’t transferable. For example, you can’t really take a mechanical engineer and stick him in doing RF design, vise versus.. You can’t really take a software apps guy and have him to digital signal processing. And it’s unrealistic to take a firmware engineer to write the most elegant user interfaces and web/mobile apps…
People don’t understand that “STEMS” term covering a huge range of different disciplines. The difference is if people want and are able to break out of their mold and retrain (themselves) into something else. Some have done so, others have not or will not or cannot…
Are some bottom feeder companies taking advantage of the H1-B system? Absolutely…Is there an across the board shortage in every field, certainly not. Is there shortages in some areas. Absolutely yes…Is there age discrimination in tech? Probably, indirectly. I think companies often don’t want to pay for someone 15-20+years of experience when most jobs might only require say 10-12 years…..Maybe more likely that a young(er) person will replace you (that happens to be an H1-B qualified candidate). The output of *most* 20+veterans that has 2x more odometer in tech probably are not necessarily 2x better at doing their job than someone 10 years younger…There are exceptions, in some tech professions, and some superstars ( I know I probably am not )…
