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VP Biden Briefs US Governors On H-1B Visas, IT, and Coding
theodp writes: Back in 2012, Computerworld blasted Vice President Joe Biden for his ignorance of the H-1B temporary work visa program. But Joe's got his H-1B story and he's sticking to it, characterizing the visa program earlier this month in a speech to the National Governors Association as "apprenticeships" of sorts that companies provide to foreign workers to expand the Information Technology industry only after proving there are no qualified Americans to fill the jobs. Biden said he also learned from his talks with tech's top CEOs that 200,000 of the jobs that companies provide each year to highly-skilled H-1B visa holders could in fact be done by Americans with no more than a two-year community college degree.
I worked in the U.S. for six years on TN visas. I would have loved to have gotten a green card and stayed, and invested back in the community where I lived. Unfortunately, the U.S. immigration laws aren't created to favour those from other countries who come, work, pay taxes, keep their noses clean, contribute to the community, etc. Why do people have to be refugees to get a fair shake?
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Al Gore, March 8, 1999, interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, "I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
Al Gore, March 8, 1999, about 0.2 seconds later in the same interview "...I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth, environmental protection, improvements in our educational system." Wired magazine yanked that quote out of context and it has never been the same since.
You may want to look up the "High Performance Computing Act of 1991", also known as the "Gore Bill". That's the one which, among other things, funded the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation, without which we wouldn't have all of the nice toys we enjoy today.
Don't take my word for it. Why not ask Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, the computer science gurus who did get the Internet up and running? While they had been working on it for some time, the RFCs describing TCP and IP weren't published until 1981, and the "Flag Day" on which the old ARPANET switched to running on Internet Protocol was in 1983.
The internet was up and running before he ever got elected to any office
Al Gore was first elected to the US House of Representatives in 1976 and was pushing the ideas of high speed telecommunications in his first term. Unless you are counting the 57 computers on ARPANET at that time as "The Internet" it looks like you may want to revise that statement.
He kept the tax money flowing to the right rich people and the kept the campaign contributions flowing right back.
That's what tax money does. Taxes pay for things like civilized society, or in this case The Internet. And Al Gore was the guy who paid the bills for the people who created the Internet. He also paid the bills for the initial development of Internet Explorer and letting AOL users onto Usenet, so he does have a lot to make up for, but when he said that he was the man behind much of the US government's support of computing and telecommunication research which led to the modern Internet, he was right.
This cultural indoctrination that you must have a degree must end. I've been programming for 30 years as a profession and I have never had a degree
And I've worked with enough people who were so smart at 18 years old that they decided they didn't need to go to college that I've decided the requirement of a degree has some merit.
Some of these people really are great at syntax and terminology, and a few of them are actually good at coding certain things, but mostly, they do things the hard way, they organize their projects around data when it is process that better defines what they're trying to accomplish, the write overly complex solutions to simple problems, they saddle their employer with unnecessary technology, and there are certain classes of problems that they simply can not solve at all. For one, why do they think it's funny that they don't know math, and that a solution involving guessing, approximation and unreasonable process limitation is an acceptable alternative to algebra?
In short, they suck at problem solving. That's not a surprise since the first adult problem they faced, they took a shortcut.