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The Yin and Yang of Hour of Code & Immigration Reform
theodp writes "The weeklong Hour of Code kicks off tomorrow, with Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates doing their part to address a declared nationwide CS crisis by ostensibly teaching the nation's schoolchildren how to code. But a recent NY Times Op-Ed by economist Paul Collier criticizing Zuckerberg's FWD.us PAC as self-serving advocacy (echoing earlier criticism) serves as a reminder that Zuckerberg and Gates' Code.org and Hour of Code involvement is the Yin to their H-1B visa lobbying Yang. The two efforts have been inextricably linked together for Congress, if not for the public. And while Zuckerberg argues it's 'the right thing to do', Collier argues that there are also downsides to the tech giants' plans to shift more bright, young, enterprising people from the poorest countries to the richest. 'An open door for the talented would help Facebook's bottom line,' Collier concludes, 'but not the bottom billion.'"
telling the rest how it's done.
An iDot? Is this Apple's new next thing to tell you when you're about to expire?
Uses complex offshore shell companies in order to not pay taxes to fund roads, schools, community, civilization.
Wont train Americans (or anyone else) in IT, actively seeking to import labor again that someone else paid for their education
how is this company even got a voice in America? in the old days they would be run out of town or worse
today ? fuck you you i got mine and there is nothing you can do to stop me
Consider the interests of the would-be reformer.
The Mr. Potters of your nation want to train your children to work their machines.
They just don't want to play American wages.
Parasites.
Uses complex offshore shell companies in order to not pay taxes to fund roads, schools, community, civilization.
Wont train Americans (or anyone else) in IT, actively seeking to import labor again that someone else paid for their education
how is this company even got a voice in America? in the old days they would be run out of town or worse
today ? frell you you i got mine and there is nothing you can do to stop me
I taught myself DOS, then Windows, and I'm a rollout, packaging, migration specialist. I get hired to do the hard work and hand it over to H-1B's to do the migration and I'm out of work again. So fuck you guys who'll only pay for quality work for as short a time as possible then dump it to "best shore" people. Fuck you assholes who've screwed over everyone who built America's infrastructure. I'm sick of drinking bitter H-1B tea. /rant
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
I'm just getting off about ten years of unemployment as a software engineer. I'm competent, I graduated from Carnegie Mellon University, and my major pass time at home is programming. For whatever reason I couldn't seem to find a job. I put out thousands of resumes on monster and Dice, but had less than ten interviews in ten years. Thankfully I just recently got a job doing hardware. It is just weird what this world can do to you. No matter how much talent you have, or how hard you work, if no one wants to give you a chance, the world is a rough place. I think lots of people are seeing this today with the lack of jobs for even talented individuals.
Anyway, that is my point. There are plenty of talented and educated people in this country. The tech companies just don't want to pay a fair wage in a regular display of union busting. I know my story might be on the edge of a bellcurve, but I'm just saying I understand personally what it is like to never get a chance at a job. If you don't watch, it can grind into your very self worth.
God spoke to me
That is weird. Maybe you were asking for too much or your specific area of expertise is obsolete. I say that because I don't see many people having that much trouble finding a programmer job. The programmer market is still very on the side of offer. Outsourcing and H-1B are surely pushing into the other direction but we are not quite there yet.
At least Zuckerberg and Gates will be among the first up against the wall, come the revolution.
bizarre. I get a ton of postings and emails from recruiters all the time and my linkedIn profile is not that good.
I find this hard to believe, but I did not post this, so......
CS degrees come with skill gaps and BS / BA is to much class room time.
also IT jobs do not need CS much less 4 years pure class room
Here is how I have been affected by our immigration "policy".
1) needed a tech from a Canadian company to go to Detroit to fix a system. He got turned back at the border. They had to get an American to come in and do the job days later.
2) a friend had her undocumented husband who lived & worked 20 years in the US and had teenage kids deported without warning after a misdemeanor traffic infraction.
3) A Danish family renting a house I own got thrown out of the country because of an H1B mixup, now I am out a few months of rent.
Screw it. I'm for open borders.
Actually, the internets disagree with you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yin_and_yang
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
I have friend with decades of film production experience and he is de facto unemployable. The jobs are outsourced, or filled by 1H-B holders. He can't find work outside the film industry because he is "overqualified". When he applies for retail like Target or Starbucks, they don't want him because younger workers are easier to push around and abuse.
If you think that you are immune because you are "a professional", just wait. Get 10 or 15 years of experience and watch that become the reason that you won't be hired.
Meanwhile, Wall Street hits new highs on a regular basis. There is a direct causal relationship going on here. The wealth going to the rich is being siphoned from the rest of society. If things don't change the US will have a economic/social structure like the Spanish speaking part of the Americas. Don't be surprised when this happens, you had plenty of warning.
Why is Snark Required?
There is no shortage.
There NEVER has been a shortage in 30 + years.
We need to keep fighting this corporate marketing
effort that blights the American workforce.
We must remember that industrial efforts to sell this to
people worked so effectively in the late 80's early 90's
that every electronic and computer magazine, as well
as IEEE bought into this oz-land concept.
Please, people, stop buying this supposed shortage crap !!!
The need four-year degree is the issue as well.
Most community colleges don't offer them
Lot's of IT / tech classes are offed non degree and some should be able to take classes and get some for doing that with out having to commit to the full degree time table.
Also the college Tenure system leads to people with little to no real IT skills teaching the classes VS community / tech schools with real pros teaching.
Perhaps you should pay for a background check on yourself -- perhaps there is someone with a dubious history with the same name as you?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I'm just getting off about ten years of unemployment as a software engineer.
How closely were your loss of your job and subsequent inability to get another one correlated with your claims of God talking to you? http://www.goodnewsjim.com/
basic health care plan for all you must pay an added H1B tax.
Couldn't you be more creative than to cite a website that doesn't stop psych ward patients from slinging whatever garbage up on it as they please?
remove health benefits from jobs and that will help with hiring older people.
Sending out 'thousands of resumes' (or even hundreds) is usually a mistake. If you're mid-career (age 30 or above) you need to focus your efforts so you can be genuinely knowledgeable and up to date in certain areas (not just talk a good game, which experienced devs can see through).
There may be thousands of unfilled IT jobs out there, but there aren't thousands of openings for any one individual except perhaps for college interns and (perhaps) freshly minted college graduates with CS degrees.
BTW you misspelled "pastime". That's the kind of simple mistake that can send your cover letter/resume into the trash, so next time make sure someone looks over your resume, and think about hiring a coach.
If you're going to insist that he must be doing something wrong, focus on the fact that he's sending out resumes.
Unless you are very lucky, you don't get jobs by sending out resumes. The only reliable way to get a job is by having friends obtain them for you.
'An open door for the talented would help Facebook's bottom line,' Collier concludes, 'but not the bottom billion.'
By this definition of "help", the only way that the US can help even a small portion of the "bottom billion" is by becoming part of them, which isn't in the world's interests and certainly isn't in ours. This video explains it very succinctly. At current immigration levels, the US population is slated to reach half a billion people by 2070, and top 625M by 2100.
Forget what this will do to our domestic standard of living -- consider what it will do to our ability to continue helping ANYONE in the developing world. With any luck, we will barely be able to maintain a poverty level here at home above that of today's banana republics.
What the hell is so wrong with having a meritocratic immigration system, i.e. an "open door for the talented"? It gives those people who are genuinely pushing the boundaries of opportunity in their native countries a chance to realize their potential, while also enabling them to contribute to developments that will almost certainly benefit those same native countries. Symbiotically, it gives the US an influx of talent that is somewhat less expensive, enabling those developments to take place more rapidly and thus driving commerce both here and abroad.
We can't take in the "bottom billion", and we won't do anyone any favors by killing ourselves trying. They have to, as the saying goes, bloom where they're planted. The best that we can do to help them is continue to contribute to the global economy, which we can do better with an increased talent pool that's achievable in part by being judicious about whom we take in.
Get a better job where you are! All the good jobs are for Americans only.
Signed - Paul Collier. American with a good job
Credential inflation coupled with supply and demand in the market place. If you have more people looking for a job with CS degrees than positions available as an IT administrator, then a CS is a *requirement* as part of the criteria of not having your resume filtered out. HR has to cut the stack somewhere, or so that's their rational. And yes, a CS degree isn't needed to be an excellent IT administrator. Again, just required to get an interview.
Life is not for the lazy.
To be fair, AC's probably too busy with a Ying Yang Twins track whispering in their ear to think straight.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
CS is worthless to an average admin position. Why do you need four years of math and programming for when you aren't crunching numbers or writing code? Four years of classes in business, management, accounting, protocols, standards, and best practices is what IT people need.
In my experience you don't need either. You just need to have your name in any online database and offers will come to you.
Certainly having friends well placed will help you to get better jobs, I do not contend that, but you can manage well even without them.
If you're not getting responses to your resume (happens to most people when they first start looking for a job) you need to rewrite your resume until you get responses.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I thought you wanted kids rotting their brains on your spam network. When would they have time to learn coding? Or you just trying to make it look like you are not just some money grabbing, stop at nothing asshole?
you can not get a job because you are not as competent as you think you are, and demand too much for your level.
OK, I'll bite No way you go 10 years unemployed as a software engineer in the US. Unless:
a. you are lazy
b. you are incompetent
c. you printed the website you have in your sig on your resume
But most likely, it's just all BS.
Agreed both Billgates and Zuckererg are great businessmen, but it is pushing it a bit too hard and too far to make them "exemplified coders", because on both of these characters resides charges (or rumors) of "having built an empire by taking other's codes". So I wonder what kind of good example that would be, "yeah son, steal or buy your friend's code, market it and be rich" :p, sure thing if you want to make your kid into a business man, bad if you want to have a bright kid just for the sake of brag right: "I fork problem solver"!
+$3|v3n
Wont train Americans (or anyone else) in IT
What mindless babble is this? It's posted in the VERY STORY about the "hour of code" designed to train young people everywhere (which includes Amercia!) how to code!
As for not paying anything - the U.S. has the highest corporate tax rate on earth. Lots of companies (and people for that matter) don't mind paying taxes but hate being robbed. Can you blame them? Well I know YOU can, but could anyone reasonable?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Every time an H1B story is posted here, we get a lot of Tea Party-type comments from people
No you don't. I've been reading Slashdot for years and have never seen Tea Party members of any kind post against LEGAL immigration, which is healthy. In fact most of us stick up for H1B guys because we know a lot of them... it's the liberals who cry that H1B are stealing jobs from America and need to be banned.
The problem the Tea Party has is with illegal immigrants, which generally are not nearly as desirable or productive members of society (and who would expect they would be when the very act of coming here starts out by committing a crime?)
It's criminal how you and others cannot seem to distinguish between legal and illegal immigration, which are vastly different things.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"Greenspan provided a list of reasons for increasing competition in the skilled labor force. In particular, he said it would help fix a problem -- the housing bubble -- that grew during his tenure as Fed chair, a position he held from 1987 to 2006."
This has always been about manipulating the labor market for the benefit of people like Gates and Zuckerberg.
You have to remember, companies would rather have an H1B with marginal qualifications rather than a citizen with marginal qualifications. I've seen programmers struggle because they have poor people skills even though they take "people classes". Should they just change careers?
Table-ized A.I.
There's an odd preference for already-employed people, so there's this kind of self-reinforcing phenomenon where, if you already have a job, you can easily get five job offers, but if you have no job, you can't get any job offers. Especially true if you've been unemployed for a non-negligible period of time: 3 months or something is fine, looks like you're just between jobs, but 3 years and employers start to assume there must be some horrible dark reason, and pass on the resume. Basically a variety of "social proof".
I suspect this is large part because companies have no reliable way of actually interviewing or screening potential hires, so they rely on these kind of tea-leaf-reading heuristics instead. Some of it is also that large companies are mostly looking to avoid bad hires, versus to get good hires. They might be passing up a great hire, but what they really care about is not hiring anyone who will rock the boat and cause problems.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Do you realize that some people might want to get a piece of the cake ? USA used to be a land of opportunities, it has merely became a land of privileges for those rightly born. I will not say that US workers are lazy, but if there is someone equally competent want it hard, there is barely anything you can do but toughen and get better. I know, this is pretty damn difficult. Asking question about oneself, accepting that you are not the best for a task is hard, but this is what make you stronger. If you want to hide yourself behind laws to make you life easier, fine, but don't come and whine when you start losing. All these immigration laws are just artificial protection to a way of life you no longer deserve. Wake up sweetheart !
Btw, yes, I am an immigrant in North America, coming from the old' Europe, currently in Canada, but YES, I *am* lurking hard to move south within the next 5 years. And YES, if that mean being a whore to a big tech company, I WILL be, without any remorse.
Looking back, I should probably have moved to the US first, but well... life...
We really need a -1, Wallows in Wrongness mod.
oh man spare me the "usa! usa!" bullshit.
not one of you "americans" can trace a grandparent to anywhere else but europe or asia or whatever.
maybe the natives. not you.
the great american nation... than why the f**k do you speak english (or spanish) !? ... whatever
tell you what, the american dream was and is a european dream. oh and chinese too. mmm and jewish too
anyone who advocates for more immigration or even advocates for anything less than an immigration moratorium is a traitor and should be tried and convicted of treason, to be punished by public hanging.
Period.
indict, try, convict and hang this traitorous zillionaire zuckerberg for treason.
hang this punk in public. I wanna be there when they stretch this punk's neck for treason.
The stupidest fucking public service ad I ever saw was the Hour of Code video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC5FbmsH4fw on YouTube that Google linked to today on its home page.
It's full of women, minorities, older people, and every affirmative action group that has a lobby or a voting block behind it (with a few prominent product placements).
But it doesn't tell you anything about what code is. (Nor does http://csedweek.org/)
There's nothing in here that would actually appeal to some kid who would be interested in code.
It's like the Richard Feynman critique of physics textbooks. You could replace "Hour of Code" with "Hip-Hop Dance" or "Basketball" or "Porn" and you wouldn't have to change the video.
They're just repeating a slogan.
And that sums everything up right there. They want immigrants to come in as indentured servents, working as hard as possible with whatever pay they decide to give them. It's the dream of every CEO.
Attracting the best talent is good for an organization. The U.S. is an organization. If we suppose "increasing GDP per capita" is a worthwhile goal, then bringing in a bunch of highly productive people isn't a bad way to go about it. Now, "guy who does phone tech support" may not qualify, but "guy who earned a STEM Ph.D. or M.D. at a U.S. university" almost surely does. Those folks should be automatically fast-tracked for citizenship if it's something they're interested in.
The iDot... Apple's new (patent and copyright pending) way to end sentences and provide a break between the integer and fractional parts of a number. According to Apple, it looks better than the old "decimal point" that it replaces, it has more caché, has been designed with usability in mind, and it runs the latest version of iOS.
It is also fully compatible with your web browser and email system, and all such systems will be automatically upgraded to work with the new symbol.
A small licensing fee will be levied by Apple for the use of this incredible and ground-breaking new technology, and their lawyers will be in contact with each and every one of you in due course, to arrange your payment of this licensing fee, along with the pre-defined hourly rate for the lawyers' time spent on the case.
Failure to pay the licence fee and other associated fees will cause a general reduction in your attractiveness to the opposite sex, and infestation of Locusts to descend on your house, you will be afflicted with Cooties, and you will henceforth be referred to by anyone who hears about the failure to pay the license fee for such a useful and necessary implement as "that iDot".
Oh and if you believe the Urban Dictionary, ying-yang is the erroneous spelling of the phrase "yin-yang", which is the simplified form of "ynyáng", the Pnyn (phonetic method of representing Chinese characters in western script) spelling of the Chinese characters which define Yin and Yang. So, it looks like the OP is not the "iDot" in this case...
Or allow employers to offer insurance that only pays out what Medicare doesn't cover first, for employes who are covered by Medicare. If Medicare is on the hook first then the expected health expenditures of an older employee (from the insurer's point of view) shouldn't be that out-of-whack compared to younger employees.
Bah, I hate it when /. blocks characters it knows nothing about... Pnyn should come out to be something like Pinyin, but with a bar over the i's :(
Hopefully the community do not slaughter me for that mistake *prays*...
I don't think you're as smart as you think you are. And I don't think you understand the U.S.
It's a lot easier to get an undergraduate degree in most of Europe.
In the U.S., paying for a degree costs as much as the mortgage on a house. There are a lot of smart kids working at McDonald's, and it's pretty hard to earn college tuition at McDonald's.
I usually hear that "toughen up and get better" line from rich conservative hypocrites whose parents handed it all to them.
How closely were your loss of your job and subsequent inability to get another one correlated with your claims of God talking to you?
The irony is very amusing, all the more for how so many are oblivious to it. Many of those who join Zuck and Bill in being pro-H1-B visa program, liken those who are opposed to the Know-Nothings. Uh, folks, read your history - the Know-Nothings were primarily anti-Catholic. Meanwhile this sort of bigotry, where someone is made fun of for having religious beliefs, passes almost entirely without comment.
Would you care to make an argument instead of a series of assertions? Otherwise your post is most likely BS.
CS degrees come with skill gaps and BS / BA is to much class room time.
You mean the type of CS degrees that are a primary justification for H-1B's?
I don't see the two strategies as conflicting. They both aim to increase the number of available programmers, increasing talent and reducing wages. I mean, it's evil and manipulative, but unified for sure.
Zuckerberg is typical of his ilk, cheap, doesn't want to pay and has no problem ruining things for others if he gets his way.
Brain draining 3rd World countries so he can get a deal.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Yes! Let's teach all the kids to be programmers! Who needs butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers? With a whole nation of programmers, Obamacare is just a sampling of the good things to come.
I'll make an argument, software development is a profession with logic at it's core. It's inherent in just about everything you do as a developer.
You hence need to be capable of logical thinking that is to be able to make logical deductions.
When you get a job as a developer you'll hence most likely be working with very logical people, people who can deduce when your arguments and ideas don't make sense, and will expect you to back down if you can't logically defend your claim.
GoodNewsJim.com is probably one of the most batshit crazy pits of insanity and illogic I have seen in a long time, hence, it's not surprising that for 10 years he has been unable to fit into a role that requires him to show at least some degree of logical reasoning.
But for what it's worth, his post was full of assertions with no actual argument, he told us he's competent, he told us he had a degree from Carnegie Mellon. He asserts his competence, he asserts his talent, but he provides no actual evidence of any of that. What has he worked on? what has he done? How does he know he is talented? The employers he dealt with obviously did not think so.
I got a job as a software developer before I even had any kind of degree. I can go out and find new development jobs within a couple of months if I wish to change jobs and I see very good payrises every time - even my first development job without a degree was paying well above the national average. I therefore have a hard time having any sympathy for people who claim they're awesome then whinge that they can't get a job given that I've always found it trivial even when I had less qualifications than guys like this, and despite living in a region that isn't exactly stand out for number of development jobs. People like him had every advantage over people like me, yet still couldn't find employment whilst I could. It's for this reason that I'm certain that they are the problem, not the industry. The wealth of listed jobs coupled with the incredibly low levels of unemployment in the industry back this up. If you can't get a software development job in a reasonable amount of time, then you are most definitely the problem. You're the 1 in 50 (the unemployed 2% in the industry) that are just unemployable.
Seriously, if you only average 1 interview a year in this industry there's something very fucking wrong with you - that implies they were rejecting him before he even met them. That takes quite some doing and a pretty crappy CV. Perhaps he plastered his CV with comments about how god spoke to him too?
He's not making fun of him for having religious beliefs, he's making fun of him for being completely oblivious to the fact that maybe he's unemployable because he's suffering delusions.
It's one thing to believe in some god, I think most people have no problem with that. It's not my cup of tea, but each to there own. However, it's a whole other thing to believe he speaks to you. That requires you to hear voices in your head. That requires you to be actually clinically insane.
People who are clinically insane tend not to be the best workers.
You'd have had a point if you'd instead talked about the fact we shouldn't joke about people who have mental health issues, then you'd be right.
And we pushed to many people in to it while at the same time give tech / trade schools a bad rap.
Now the tech / trade schools are hurt by being roped into the old college system
weeklong Hour of Code
How about 'learn to tell time' before 'learn to code'? If they don't know the difference between a week and an hour, I doubt they have much to contribute in the areaof education.
Somewhere between 65-76 million people, most in the collectivization famine of The Great Leap Forward.
"Do you realize that some people might want to get a piece of the cake?"
So you're OK that I get forced out of a job to open a position for an immigrant. Why?
Don't assume it's because I'm lazy. Put myself through college after serving in the military.
Don't assume that it's because lack of skill. Executive came into the company I worked for, for over 10 years, and her first action was to open 3 positions so recent UCI graduates could stay in America on H1-b visas.
In fact if you want to make an ass out of yourself, please leave me out of it.
This isn't about immigration. It's about lowering wages to increase profit for a few. How about addressing my comment instead of spouting flame bait?
That requires you to be actually clinically insane.
Provided, of course, that he is wrong.
Hear, hear! We don't need no more stinking niggers, kikes and wetbacks in this white country, God bless it!
zuckerturd doesn't care how it's done he just wants to pay wal-mart wages.
CrazyJim is literally crazy.
It doesn't come across as well on Slashdot, but I'm sure anybody he's interviewed with in person picks it up in a fraction of a second.
Comment of the year
And a "-1, Whooosh" one.
The financial services company I was at got bought out by a Dutch Company. Apparently they've survived a higher tax rate and still had money -- go figure.
And that's where you are wrong. The U.S. company had HIGHER tax rates than that dutch company! So in fact larger taxes killed the company YOU worked for.
And yet you are still for the very thing that has led to your own demise. Astounding how powerful self-deception is, that it works right until the very end.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There is a huge variety of programming jobs. The vast majority of them are dumb as rocks programming. Web pages, phone apps, etc. And you MUST know the latest fashionable scripting languages, know all the latest buzzwords, have a stack of certificates (college education not necessary, possibly a hindrance), etc. None of those people could build a computer or operating system from scratch even if it was from Ikea. The side of programming jobs that requires some real knowledge is smaller, small enough that it can also require a lot of experience, and requires knowing skills that are uncool like C, assembler language, networking, mathematics, or knowledge in other areas like hardware definition language. mathematics, cryptography, electrical engineering, etc.
I do not doubt that a 50 year old C programmer has an extremely hard time finding a job in Montana for example. Retraining for Javascript in a browser won't help because the companies would still rather hire the 18 year old, or a 50 year old outsourced in Mumbai. Now silicon valley or Boston may be better places for those 50 year old C programers, but not everyone can live there.
This is definitely true. When I was out of work after grad school in the 90s there seemed to be a lot of bias against me. They see this gap in the resume and assume something is wrong. I even had one phone interview flat out tell me that I seemed to be a good fit but that because there was a 6+ month gap in the resume that there must be some other reason I wasn't getting hired, and I never got a callback for a real interview.
Essentially the longer you go without a job that harder it is to get the job. I even find myself looking at a person's resume and seeing if there's a gap, and I should know better. I am extremely confident that any of you reading this would have an immediate bias if they received a resume from someone with a five to ten year gap of no employment.
So the advice here is to get a job even if it's not the dream job, just so that there's no gap in the resume. Maybe even try to change jobs before the current job blows up, just to avoid that gap.
This is somewhat true. It's the best way to get a resume out there. Many places get a huge stack of resumes that never get off of an HR desk, whereas a referred resume goes straight to the hiring manager bypassing the filters. Almost all of my jobs came from referrals.
But if you've run out of recommendations from friends then you're stuck to doing it the hard way just like the recent college grads.
It's also a two way street: if your friend says it's a decent place to work and you trust the friend, then it encourages you to apply there as well. Whereas the friend who says "you would not want to work here" is a good warning. I have had a friend say I would never want to work in his department but he recommended other departments with reasonable managers where I should apply.
As for calls coming to me... I get calls from recruiters. I've never followed up on them though. Somewhat that's because they only ever call when I don't want to change jobs, and because they're hard sell and pushy, and because I like to find out about a company and a job before applying and recruiters will never give you that information. Recruiters are never looking out for you and your best interests, and are not looking out for the company's best interests either; they just want a commission.
IT is not CS, and are we really talking abouty IT jobs here? For a programming job then CS is very good, and there is no such thing as too much classroom time! Maybe you don't use those classes in your first job but they will usally come in useful eventually. Even if they never come in useful, the fact that class room time was spent means time was spent learning how to learn, learning how to think abstractly, learning that you don't know everything already, all of which are very useful skills. As for skill gaps, a good degree means that you will overcome any skill gap.
Not having a four year degree can very often be a career limiter. Maybe it won't kill the career outright but it will stop the promotions after awhile.
What if the admin job is just a stepping stone to something better?
If that can reassure you, I have strictly no legacy in North America, even in Europe. I come from a middle class family which sunk. I was indeed lucky to get my education in Europe, but my MSc is bs. It is a piece of paper which say I am an engineer. By European standard, I was a pretty bad student, not that I did not study a lot, but I wasn't giving a frack about what was taught at school (outdated bs). Yet, I was technically more competent than most of my classmates right out of school.
I am not interested in understanding the U.S., I am interested in living in a land where, as a libertarian and weapons enthusiast (and yes, this include the possibility to conceal carry a handgun), I can be left in peace and not ostracized as I have been in France, and again in Quebec. For the privilege to be left in piece, I am ready to be a whore, even if this end up costing you your job.
Why am I OK to get you out of your job ?
For the sole reason that you are currently privileged, by your birth, in living in a land where I want to live. Go back a few generation, and the simplest thing your ancestor had to do to enter the US was to take a boat. The US is a nation of immigration, build by immigration. I want the same right that your forefather granted the People in the Bill of Rights. I want your privileges. Nation and border as strong as today are a fairly recent concept existing for the sole purpose of keeping the privileges of a group intact. To some extend, it might be argued that the harder and the tougher is the difficulty to join a group, the weaker is that group in that it has become afraid of losing. Though, trust me, I do not want to harm you or your family, but if that is my only way to immigrate to the US, you are in my way.
You are seeing this as a wage problem because you have lost the sight of the privileges you are granted and the plentiful cheap resources you have access to. Being born in the wealthiest country in the world is blurring you vision. You will not see what I saw, you will not lived the ostracism I have lived merely because I did not want to have my ass cleaned and pampered by a centralized bureaucratic Government. I stood up and abnegated my own culture because I longed for something better.
I would like to ask you a rather simple question. For this question assume that there is no immigration law, the US government is doing nothing but to protect the security of the people who are paying their taxes.
Why do you believe that American should have the priority in IS job ? To some extend, why should the destiny of a man be predetermined by who his parents were, or where he was born ?
Which given that there's no known or provable physical phenomenon by which some god could exist or speak to you is the rational assumption to make.
To start entertaining the irrational in discussion makes all discussion meaningless as you can argue against anything and can never reach a logical conclusion about anything at that point.
One way that seems to work in tech is just to "do a startup". This can be basically any idea, no matter how stupid, and doesn't need funding to count.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Go back where you came from.
The US doesn't need people like you. (It sounds like Canada and France don't, either.) You don't want to contribute anything to society. You can't get along with people anywhere. You don't want to cooperate with your fellow workers. You're willing to bring everybody's wages down, in order to advance your own selfish interests.
Why do you think you're being "ostracized"? You're doing something wrong.
I hope you're just going through an Ayn Rand stage and you'll get over it. But unless you learn how to be a normal social human being, I don't want you in the country.
As doubtful as it may turns out I met quite a few people in my travel who are thinking as I do. You are obviously not one of them. The question is whether you can accept difference of opinions. At first sight, you do not. Some would call that narrow mindedness. As I already mentioned, if accomplishing my goal lower your wages, well, too bad for you pal' (and maybe you did not deserve these wages to begin with).
ps: I don't see the point following the flock. Being a "normal" social being... it is so.... boring.
I have never followed the flock.
But there are benefits to cooperation (as any evolutionary biologist will tell you). It's necessary to get the job done. It's necessary to get ahead. If you try to get ahead by screwing everybody else, you may find out that it comes back to bite you.
But it's all moot. You're not in the U.S., and you may never get here. You can't make up for bad grades by working cheaper. If you're willing to work for less in a free market, that means you're worth less.
Ayn Rand died alone, without friends, attended by a paid nurse. That's where the virtue of selfishness gets you.
Even assuming society *not* a free market (which it is not). The system is biased by gain that are not of a monetary nature. While I may be paid less, I can gain culture, opinions and opportunities I would not have gained the other way. You can also consider that my worth is not a matter of how much I am paid, but how much I bring. Your strategy is shortsighted and anti-cooperative (if not just aggressive and competitive). Even if tomorrow I replace you, I can bring enough value and innovation on the long term to increase, the day after tomorrow, your standard of living. Though, by forbidding me to come, you choose the easy risk-avoiding choice of . I strongly believe that a true capitalist system would evolve to a thriving balance between cooperation and competition
As for dying alone don't think I will, all in all, does it really matters ?
Btw, I shall thank you for getting me to take some interest in Ayn Rand. I will have to read much of her stuff. I owe you a beer.