[quote]My experience is, H1 people tend to be a bit overpaid for their positions, but more often than not they as professionals are a level or two above the requirements for positions they are holding. It’s quite common to see H1 programmers with MS and PhD degrees and decades of experience. Americans with such credentials just don’t seem to be interested in hands-on programming jobs, while immigrants readily take the opportunity. At least at the beginning.
And – believe you me – one great programmer can easily beat a mediocre software team of 20.[/quote]
Really off topic here. But I sort of have the opposite experience here. More than often, I have found that some of those H1-B developers are the ones to get stuff implemented. Too often than enough, I find some (not all) of the U.S. developers do way too much talking and way too little action, even though they aren’t the ones that are calling the high level shots.
Also, though a fine distinction. Programmer != software engineer. Former might know a language or two inside out, but wouldn’t be able to do a high level system design if their life depended on it.
True software engineers are more versatile, and can figure out the laziest approach that requires the least amount of code to get something done with on par quality. There’s only so much if-then-else and while (x) { } one can do before that sort of work gets outsourced.
