Yes, he did. It did happen to be Cisco in particular. He also did A+ certification. Didn’t seem to mean a lick. Now that he’s 3 years deep in freelance/self-employed territory, who knows if it’s still worth applying. He does anyway though.
Also, I can second the “woefully unprepared” part of learning any CS prior to college. Normal high schools often do not have the resources to teach any beginner classes of this type. I took a “graphic design” course in HS, which was really just a guy saying “we need some Thanksgiving flyers…just use some clipart from Microsoft Word or something”. If there had been any sort of programming course in high school it would have been a joke. However, I do remember putting computers together in shop class in 7th grade so that was actually a bonus. We also did machining and architecture problems. That was a pretty cool class. If there was more of that in schools maybe we’d have more preparation for vocational and tech careers. However, I plainly remember at least half the college semester for Computer Science 101 being “This is a mouse. This is a keyboard. This is a monitor. Who can point out which one of these icons is a printer for me?”. Of course, if we could get that over with in HS rather than waste college credits on it, that would be excellent.
I was laid off my job as programmer in 2011. I spent the last three months training three workers on H1b visas to do my job (they did other jobs as well, I am not saying that it took three people to do my job).
When these visas are issued, one of the requirements is that the specific skills they need are not available here. This was particularly amusing in my case since they were replacing someone with the necessary skillset. Furthermore, they lacked experience in the software tool with which the systems were built.
The visas also specify that they be paid no less than the going rate. While nominally true, they end up kicking back a substantial amount to their employer (a consulting firm) in “fees”. I have no cite for this, it is simply what they told me (they were unhappy about it as well). I have also seen it mentioned in other articles about H1b visas.
I should note that I never resented the workers. Personally, I liked them. They were simply working to support their families, as I was. I did resent the policies that brought them here, and I think of those policies every time I hear about Immigration Reform being stymied by the Republicans. They pretend that they don’t like people coming over to take our jobs.
In any case, this is likely one reason for the phenomenon noted in the OP. However, even before this there was always a substantial Asian and Eastern European presence in the office. As others have pointed out, they were as American as I am.
Because high school students in the U.S. hatemath.
And who can blame them? Throughout elementary school, math is taught by teachers who hate math (IMO). The teachers’ hatred for math is rubbed off onto the students. To make matters worse, parents (many of whom also hate math) don’t seem to care.
And then there’s peer pressure. Excelling at math is considered geeky here in the U.S., and no one wants to hang around with someone who is (or is perceived as) a nerd. If you’re a high school girl, who would you rather go out with… the hunky football player with an IQ of 20, or the bespectacled kid who knows calculus? Talent in math is considered a positive trait in Singapore and Taiwan. But here you will be an outcast.
Nothing new about that. I TAed an assembly language class at Illinois in the early 1970s, long before anyone who write five lines of BASIC thought he knew all about programming, and we used it to filter out people also. The BASIC kiddies were better than kids today who think they know all about CS if they can put together a web site with some tools. My daughter took a CS 101 class at a good university. The only thing close to programming in it was copying a few lines of Javascript near the end of the class.
From interviews with CIOs, the reason for this is not the money, it is that “old” people don’t know all the latest packages, so the CIOs want to hire people who do and who don’t need that pesky training. These are the clowns who yell at colleges about not teaching real world CS, which means whatever software is hot now. Screw the basics - they can hire new people when there is a new package.
You’ve read “those reports”, all of them? Please explain what flaws “those reports” have. I didn’t see anything in your link about other reports flawed methods, but I didn’t read it real closely.
In your linked report, there doesn’t seem to be any comparison between similar jobs in similar geographic locations and the pay between H1B and non-H1B. Just median income in broad categories (e.g. “programmer”).
Look, when people and departments get laid off and then they train their H1B replacements, it’s pretty hard to argue H1B isn’t getting abused.
Interesting… my degree program (pre-internet boom (grad. 1996) used the calculus courses, data structures and assembly language as the weed-out courses.
The intro programming courses were pretty easy- there was very little attrition there, but the 2nd year courses - data structures and assembly were the tough ones.
A lot of it is cultural. Americans, by and large, are lazy, egotistical dumbasses. Success of companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google or Facebook aside, being in high tech is not considered particularly prestigious compared to being a doctor, lawyer or investment banker. In what other industry do they call some of the richest and most successful company founders in the world “nerds” and “geeks”?
Plus, it IS geeky. To be really good at it, you need to spend a lot of time in front of a computer screen, from an early age, playing around writing scripts and apps and whatnot, learning how the damn thing works. Although I assume with Facebook, kids are more into computers in general than they were when I was growing up.
I feel like most red-blooded American boys would rather go into sales or business management than be chained to a laptop 80 hours a day writing code.
If you look at a typical HS class in the U.S., you will find very few who have a genuine interest in math and science. The vast majority of the students are only interested in sports, video games, and… well, that’s about it. The few who have an aptitude and interest in math & science tend to be shunned.
I teach math & physics in the evenings for a local university. So I get to see firsthand what the high schools are producing. And it ain’t pretty.
So, two questions come to mind when thinking about this.
First, in all the talk about education–are we actually teaching what is needed? And I don’t mean “whatever programming language is hot this month” so much, but how much are they being prepared for the general requirements out there. My perspective is from a Cisco networking guy, and while I can’t say I’ve looked particularly hard at what colleges are currently offering, I don’t recall ever hearing places that have much in the way of learning how to work in operations or network design, outside of perhaps some after-hours type classes for specific vendor certification.
Second, and perhaps more important, are the companies claiming that “there are no qualified people” actively working towards getting already-employed people qualified? Again, in the case of my company, a few years ago we hired H1B person or two, because we were looking for “Senior Engineers” and for whatever reason, upper management wanted to plug in an “expert” instead of, say, elevating one of the Engineers and then taking one of the NOC techs and elevating him to the then-open Engineer spot.
That flamed out pretty badly, and with some other org changes, there’s now a much clearer upward path–and while the actions of upper management cannot always be predicted, I don’t see too much of a need for further H1B “experts” if and when positions come open.
Yyyyyeah, but… some manage to be completely computer-phobic at the same time. I’m still trying to get over the shock of my Translation postgrad young classmates being on Farmville all day long yet despising computer games and those who played them. Their reasoning went like this:
Those who play computer games = geeks, nerds and freaks
I = cool
therefore,
What I play on a computer <> computer games
FTR, these people were mostly from the UK and China.
This is an issue in my opinion; way too many companies want a plug-and-chug personnel solution instead of hiring right, training, and then fostering and growing talent (leadership, technical or other) within their employees.
Instead, they say… “I want a mid-level JAVA guy…” so they go hire a guy, and lay him off when there’s no need for JAVA, instead of retraining him, or otherwise investing in their employees.
I say fuck 'em. Eventually companies who rely on H1B visas will get what they pay for.
But wait a minute, because of information from that trial about H1B abuse, now there are criminal investigations by:
State of Texas
The State Department
Homeland Security
Department of Justice
Internal Revenue Service
And then there’s this thing about the top guys of this company arrested due to H1B fraud:
I thought JThunder read all of those reports and they are all flawed, how could this be?
Maybe I just grew up in a different area than the average, but nobody I knew of got picked on in high school for being smart, geeky, or nerdy. The only people who were picked on or shunned were the art students because they were “weird”. The guys who wanted to go into a physics career had girls practically lining up to jump their bones. I don’t recall anyone pretending to be dumber than they were to fit in or anything - not even the girls.
Probably my school was just an outlier. Some of them are now successful, others got masters degrees in stuff like microbiology but still work at places like teen jewelry stores. Who knows. Kids are getting the message today that going to college isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. They see all the kids who were pushed into college in 2003-2007 by parents and school counselors get blamed for “their” choices, as though the students made choices in a vacuum and without social pressure. And with a bachelor’s degree taking anywhere from 3 to 5 years to finish, who even knows if what’s “good” now will be the new “how could they major in something so STUPID” in the future? It starts looking like a lose-lose proposition.
The plug-and-chug atmosphere of companies today also does not help foster confidence. If the companies are hiring 90% non-americans, what incentive does an american have to study for that field?
It is never fun, but sometimes a person can’t hack it, and sometimes that person’s fellow employees are really glad to see him go. The only person I had to fire in a RIF was on the way out anyhow, and this gave him a good package and no black mark on his resume. But I’d hate to have to lay off good people in a big purge - but it happens.
This is a worldwide phenomenon. I have worked in Asian, European and the US market and it’s the same everywhere. Everyone is lazyass and no one wants to train, groom and retain talent for the long-term. Some companies have a blatant hire-and-fire policy and are unapologetic about it, while others will be more respectful of employee sensitivities, but in the end you were hired to fill a role and you are not wanted after the job is done.
Job security is still around in government jobs, though. Since they do not pay very well and therefore find it even more difficult attracting people in the first place, most of them have more long-term plans to keep you around, retrain and redeploy you, especially in flexible IT-based jobs.
Whether you want to get lowballed for the rest of your life for a tiny pension and job security is your call.
Besides, there is no guarantee someone trained and groomed carefully will not jump ship to a company that offers more bucks and stock options. They cannot stop you leaving, they are not obligated to train you and keep you around for life. It cuts both ways. I once worked for a company that diligently trained fresh grads in SAP ABAP programming and paid them a salary while they were learning. As soon as they were done, they would resign and join a “real company” (one of them actually said that :D) Needless to say, after a while the company wised up and ordered new hires to sign legally enforceable employment bonds. Many would still jump - some would pay up and leave, while others left just the same, no worries.
