[ale] New website for H1B [Slightly OT]

[George Carless]

I would have thought it would be clear that there are good and bad
programmers everywhere - and, unfortunately, at all salary brackets: it's
quite amazing how far some *very bad* programmers can get.  This is
especially the case in a job climate where potential employers - and, more
often, headhunters and the like - are more interested in "years on the
job" and nebulous concepts of "experience" than they are in quality of
work.  I am not saying that experience isn't an important thing -- far
from it -- but I do think that there's a mistaken belief amongst those
hiring that all of the traditional means of evaluating an applicant hold
true for many developers; accordingly, the individual who has spent
several years building his own servers, writing hobby code and getting too
little sunlight is overlooked in favour of the guy who stumbled into
development because he figured it'd make him money, can cut-and-paste some
dodgy VB code and has a brace of MS certificates.

It might be noted, though, that this situation has come to light partly
thanks to the dollar-chasing of the .com boom - a boom whose epicentre was
the United States, and which has accordingly perhaps led to a glut of
developers on the market - and developers of wildly differing skill-sets.
I must say that I've encountered more dreadful code over here than I ever
did back home, and more people passing themselves off as programmers when
they didn't have so much as an understanding of a loop or a control
structure.  But that's not to say that there aren't talented American
coders (nor that there aren't useless Europeans), and I think it's
foolhardy to get too embroiled in a discussion about the relative merits
of American developers versus foreign ones -- any such discussion can only
be shallow, at best.  By the same token, however, I think it's
reprehensible to take a blanket "down with H1-Bs!  Up with Americans!"
attitude, which simultaneously belittles many hard-working non-immigrant
workers, and suggests chest-thumping xenophobia and nationalistic pride -
never this country's finest feature, I'm afraid, despite all of its
fabulous merits.

At any rate, I'm fairly convinced that most really *good* programmers over
here *are* finding work, and - I'm afraid - that most of those whining
about not being able to find work are in their position either because
they're too proud to work at their actual reasonable market wage (after
much moddicoddling at inflated boom prices), or because they're just *not
very good*.  And the anti-h1 site recently posted was a fine example of
the latter trait: it was poorly written, poorly coded, intellectually
lacking and just generally rubbish.  And, incidentally, most of us H1-Bs
are paying the same taxes as are the rest of you, but often without the
concomitant job or lifestyle security (i.e. we're really screwed if we get
fired), social security benefits, etc.  And often we're doing a lot of
good for American companies - which in turn helps the economy, yadda yadda
yadda.  And there are fairly strict guidelines to prevent H1-B workers
from being paid at less than a fair rate, so generally we're neither
"slave workers" nor providing unfair competition for American workers;
indeed, I would suggest that some of you have a good hard think about why
many reputable companies do go through the expense and hassle of bringing
in H1-B workers, if there's such a ready supply of "equally talented"
workers just out there in the community..

Before this gets too much longer, I would just say: yes, there are
talented American programmers.  No, there is no universal 'difference'
between American and non-American programmers, either in attitude or in
ability.  But what's also true is that there are lazy, or bitter,
developers both here and elsewhere, and that those people would do better
to spend more time in learning how to write English, how to write code,
and how to market themselves better - rather than in whining and in
blaming "foreigners".

--George
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