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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.
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.