Yes it is. And there are various College/University accreditation boards backing such. In other fields of STEM, like engineering, there is ABET that does the same.
Peaks at 35? With almost no domestic hiring over the past decade, its pretty uncommon to find techies under 35 in the tech sector unless they're foreign.
Tons of people in networks can't find jobs. I know EE's that have lowered themselves to getting mere Cisco technician certificates (ie: CCNA, CCIE) despite having embedded software and hardware development experience (hands-on) in the networking field.
My own resume discloses the development of an IP networked device including its all of its firmware, as an academic project in support of a high energy physics experiment. Thousands of submissions over the past decade later, my efforts still haven't landed me a tech job or even good faith interviews for that matter.
Sure. That's called a Bachelors degree in a specific field (ie: for programmers, a Computer Science degree). Why would a bunch of other tests be necessary?
Then maybe those firms should pay guys what they're worth when they're younger, so they don't have to 'hang on' to a tech job past their prime?
As it stands now, with the decimation of the 2001 crash, the housing crash, and the job insecurity, a lot of those guys who have been around 20+ years would have liked to be retired, but simply weren't able to because of such. And the young find it difficult to impossible to join the sector because of the H-1B's.
Seems pretty clear that the solution to this problem is to shut down the H-1B program as it is not, and never was necessary.
Why not just cancel the H-1B altogether, and only admit people on the O-1 visa who are extraordinary in their field. OPT should be cancelled as well.
Guys like Linus Torvalds and Peter Anvin add a lot of value and there shouldn't be a problem getting either of them O-1 visas. But every other job can and should be done by Americans, with H-1B's only being imported from 1st world countries if necessary (ie: Japan, UK, Germany, France, etc.) if the techie labour pool is truly exhausted..
Absolutely. And candidacy requirements should be based on Bachelors-level requirements so the employers can't exxagerate requirements. For instance, employers will often add extraneous skills to a requirement, specifically to make it harder to disqualify others. Masters and PhD's often are required even for relatively trivial entry-level jobs.
If firms go through the trouble of bringing in all applicants for a physical interview, and find it fit to reject them all with feedback (including a worksheet telling them what training courses would qualify them to take the job), then I'd have no problem with that. But they don't.
Also, it might be useful to have a mechamism where a qualified US citizen could look at a H-1B database, and if an employer is using a H-1B, and the American is more qualified, apply to the DoL for cancellation of the H-1B visa holders' visa (and immediate deportation). This would allow people to get the training (as referenced in those worksheets), and then take the positions that are being held by the H-1B's.
Of course, the O-1 visa still should exist for the true "best and brightest". But guys like Linus Torvalds, H. Peter Anvin, Greg KH etc., - level talent. Not some guy paid $35k/year to write banking software for some TBTF bank, a job that could and should be done by Americans.
$150k is 'pays well'? You know its not hard to make that being a San Jose City Police Officer, plus there's a substantial pension benefit (and probably all you can eat donuts) included?
My experience with this issue -- a top quartile 2002 EE/CS grad from a top quartile school. Sent my resume to hundreds of tech companies in the wake of the 2000-2001 collapse. Nobody was hiring new grads, and the rejections that came in were mysterious "position was cancelled" notifications (if my resume was responded to at all). A decade later, still unemployed.
As far as I can tell, employers have stopped hiring domestic grads, and have staffed their workforces exclusively, at the entry level, with H-1B's. Or simply outsourced/offshored the work. 90%+ of the people in my graduating class were white males, yet you have Silicon Valley tech companies that basically everyone under 35 is obviously an offshore importee.
If firms find they can't find or hire US workers, then they need to start actually treating us in good faith. A typical company will post multiples of the jobs they actually have available -- how about not throwing my resume away if I apply for a position and it gets filled with someone else?
Now someone might be quick to say that I'm dumb or retarded. But if my applications are not being responded to, disclosing completion of 2 degrees in under 5 years, including summer work experience, a substantial completed project in embedded programming, PCB design, and integration -- and consulting experience -- just how am I even supposed to know what skills, if any, I am missing? That is what makes H-1B so toxic; employers have used the program to just hang up on domestic talent, to the point that white males like myself under 35 are a rarity in the Silicon Valley.
Not only that, but leaving money as 'cash', or on deposit with a financial institution, actually gives the bankers more money which they can use to pay bonuses, steal, or do whatever scams they do with it to oppress Americans.
In the products I've seen (including some of the source code), they were loaded with factory backdoors, sloppy coding, and many designs hadn't been updated since the mid 1990s.
Certainly doesn't help that a lot of the operators of these devices hire the cheapest engineers or techs they can find, usually without a good computer eng background.
You can use this if you want to send me the name of your company, so I can fire my resume in/contact you/whatever, without having everyone on Slashdot knowing your identity.
Okay, if I could find your job req on the Internet, then I'd like to send you my resume. Unless your job description was merely hypothetical. That looks extremely reasonable. I hope I haven't annoyed you, but I'll be firing you a msg (I'm new to this Slashdot stuff, so I don't know if there's a way of doing such though!).
Demanding Cisco technican certificates of an engineer might pose a problem. Normally Cisco certificates would be acquired by a technician, not by an engineer.
Maybe over-reliance on vendor certification keywords is your problem? I know that I won't bother to apply to jobs that list/demand every vendor certification known to man, because that shows me the firm is obsessed with vendor technician certifications, not actual engineering credentials, knowledge, skills, or aptitude.
With firms not paying for much training these days, and the unemployeds not having huge money to spend on vendor certifications -- firms that insist on looking for guys with a lot of them, instead of just looking for bright, smart people with good aptitude are going to experience problems.
Sounds a lot like the nonsense that's been unfolding with the less-than-competent H-1B workers that have infested much of the tech industry, rather than best and brightest Americans who apply to tech firms in droves, only to see their resumes to into a black hole, never to be responded to.
Sure, the H-1B's save a little bit of money in the short run, but they're rarely at the top of their classes. Meanwhile guys who truly are at the top of their classes are often told by firms that they would be 'too expensive', or that they're 'under-experienced'.
I've personally watched a lot of lives ruined this way. Top calibre grads in EE/CS, instead of contributing to the economy, essentially sitting on welfare. A classmate of mine, in the top quartile, actually became an ordained priest because he was sick of the nonsensical proposition of sending out thousands of resumes to tech employers not to receive the dignity of a response.
Why not try treating the applicants like professionals, instead of demanding performance of in-depth technical skills during interviews?
The problem, at least from my perspective, is that employers will stick a dozen different languages and tech skills on their job description, and then pick one in particular to test on. How do I really know which one of those dozen to brush up on, if all I have is the job description infront of me? Why can't you just take my word for it, in combination with verifiable credentials like a CS degree, certain prior work experience, personal projects, etc.?
As I said earlier, no lawyer is asked during an interview to discuss, in depth, a particular case. They're hired based on their credentials, their aptitude, and their past experience. We're talking about a field here that is all about learning, and the ability to acquire new skills, after all, because nobody will have the entirety of the specific skills required for a business unless they've actually worked in it.
You really want your programmers to pretend that they have the knowledge to interpret legal contracts and license agreements?
Did you know that the deletion or alteration of even a line or two in the GPL license can materially alter the nature of the license and your ability to use or not use the code in the product?
A good software developer defers issues of contract and license interpretation to qualified legal counsel.
As I told you, if you're having any trouble hiring people, maybe stop playing Trivial Pursuit with them on interviews and start trusting them. An attitude of cynicism isn't going to get you very far in business or in life generally.
Yup, sounds like the calculus faced in the contemporary market.
Google may have 10,000 very qualified engineers applying for their positions, sending in application each. But if they receive 1,000,000 applications in total, and only pull 10,000 of those applications out of the pile for human review -- they will come to the erroneous conclusion that there are only 100 very qualified engineers available in the marketplace. Hence, the cries of such firms, "we can't find qualified workers", or "the universities suck".
Worse, the very qualified engineers tend to not be the sort of types that will send out enormous numbers of applications. So the chances of firms, such as Google, even seeing their resumes, are substantially less.
I've done all that stuff. My name can even be found on various Linux Kernel mailing lists and in newsgroups discussing some fairly technical topics and providing input on certain bug-related issues related to the Kernel. Still doesn't get me the 'time of day' from employers.
Yup, you gotta wonder how/why stupid people ever were able to get their hands on the money to do stuff like that in the first place. Dumb MBA's/JDs/etc. have completely corrupted the system of capital allocation in this country, such that, idiots that don't even understand "Engineering 101" manage to find themselves in charge of significant amounts of capital, both financial and human.
Maybe engineers don't deserve 7 figure salaries, but they'd probably do a lot better allocating excessive salaries within the economy, than many of the abortions (*cough* Groupon *cough* Webvan *cough*) that were funded by the MBA/JD types.
UC Berkeley? Or are you referring to one of the various scam colleges in the SFBay area that exist primarily to supply SV firms with cheap tech labour on student visas/OPT?
The Asians/Indians at UCB, those are almost entirely US citizens. Of course, it doesn't seem to matter to the SV employers, who still leave a good chunk of UCB EE/CS grads unemployed while bringing in non-citizen guest workers by the thousands from India.
You hit the nail right on the head. The tech industry is dominated by two types of people these days, those who abuse engineers, and engineers who are generally too stupid to realize that they're being abused by these sales/finance/'corporate' types.
There's a lot of domestic people who simply want nothing to do with the dysfunctional business models (like money-losing trash like Groupon, or firms like Google that rely upon every tax avoidance scheme known to man to post their earnings, nevermind the extortion racket inherent in some of their practices). So they either withdraw themselves from the tech sector entirely, or they sit around and do stuff, like writing F/OSS software, that destroys the market for paid software.
The way the tech industry pays people these days, even most of its best and brightest participants can't afford garages in which to create the next generation of inventions that might propel a new revolution.
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were able to work summer jobs at HP in the 1970s. The ultimate result; their pussies were wet with the excitement that was microelectronics/software and the rest is history.
The low compensation of tech workers is a real problem out there, as well as the huge amount of risk that tech students take in the courses and in the job market. When top grads often spend years trying to just secure their first job, or when horror stories of top tech grads being locked completely out of the industry occur -- that's a giant problem for the future of innovation. How many best and brightest US tech workers has the H-1B visa destroyed because US tech firms don't even bother responding or treating US tech workers in good faith? Certainly the numbers are numerous.
Just because someone can't answer a non-superficial question on an environment they previously worked with, doesn't mean that they're lying, being dishonest, or not in possession of a skill.
Lawyers aren't tested in interviews on every last point of jurisprudence or point of law. They're tested on their ability to speak intelligently about an issue at hand, their previous legal experience, and their ability to intelligently research the issues at hand or refer such to other professionals (like the legal question about the GPL that was asked -- such should be referred to an IP attorney, not asked of a non-Law-trained SoftEng.). Does anyone call a tax lawyer who may not be able to recall a particular case of, for instance, tax law, off by heart, a liar? Of course not. Why then is the such treatment apparently acceptable when interviewing technology professionals?
As long as "engineering" interviews are essentially glorified games of "Trivial Pursuit", employers are going to be dissappointed. Especially on the leading edges of technology, or when interviewing new graduates who may not be able to fall back on a diversity of experience.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes it is. And there are various College/University accreditation boards backing such. In other fields of STEM, like engineering, there is ABET that does the same.
Peaks at 35? With almost no domestic hiring over the past decade, its pretty uncommon to find techies under 35 in the tech sector unless they're foreign.
Tons of people in networks can't find jobs. I know EE's that have lowered themselves to getting mere Cisco technician certificates (ie: CCNA, CCIE) despite having embedded software and hardware development experience (hands-on) in the networking field.
My own resume discloses the development of an IP networked device including its all of its firmware, as an academic project in support of a high energy physics experiment. Thousands of submissions over the past decade later, my efforts still haven't landed me a tech job or even good faith interviews for that matter.
Sure. That's called a Bachelors degree in a specific field (ie: for programmers, a Computer Science degree). Why would a bunch of other tests be necessary?
Why re-invent the wheel?
The firms already went on a hiring freeze circa 2000-2001, and it really hasn't let up for domestic grads.
Then maybe those firms should pay guys what they're worth when they're younger, so they don't have to 'hang on' to a tech job past their prime?
As it stands now, with the decimation of the 2001 crash, the housing crash, and the job insecurity, a lot of those guys who have been around 20+ years would have liked to be retired, but simply weren't able to because of such. And the young find it difficult to impossible to join the sector because of the H-1B's.
Seems pretty clear that the solution to this problem is to shut down the H-1B program as it is not, and never was necessary.
Why not just cancel the H-1B altogether, and only admit people on the O-1 visa who are extraordinary in their field. OPT should be cancelled as well.
Guys like Linus Torvalds and Peter Anvin add a lot of value and there shouldn't be a problem getting either of them O-1 visas. But every other job can and should be done by Americans, with H-1B's only being imported from 1st world countries if necessary (ie: Japan, UK, Germany, France, etc.) if the techie labour pool is truly exhausted..
Absolutely. And candidacy requirements should be based on Bachelors-level requirements so the employers can't exxagerate requirements. For instance, employers will often add extraneous skills to a requirement, specifically to make it harder to disqualify others. Masters and PhD's often are required even for relatively trivial entry-level jobs.
If firms go through the trouble of bringing in all applicants for a physical interview, and find it fit to reject them all with feedback (including a worksheet telling them what training courses would qualify them to take the job), then I'd have no problem with that. But they don't.
Also, it might be useful to have a mechamism where a qualified US citizen could look at a H-1B database, and if an employer is using a H-1B, and the American is more qualified, apply to the DoL for cancellation of the H-1B visa holders' visa (and immediate deportation). This would allow people to get the training (as referenced in those worksheets), and then take the positions that are being held by the H-1B's.
Of course, the O-1 visa still should exist for the true "best and brightest". But guys like Linus Torvalds, H. Peter Anvin, Greg KH etc., - level talent. Not some guy paid $35k/year to write banking software for some TBTF bank, a job that could and should be done by Americans.
$150k is 'pays well'? You know its not hard to make that being a San Jose City Police Officer, plus there's a substantial pension benefit (and probably all you can eat donuts) included?
My experience with this issue -- a top quartile 2002 EE/CS grad from a top quartile school. Sent my resume to hundreds of tech companies in the wake of the 2000-2001 collapse. Nobody was hiring new grads, and the rejections that came in were mysterious "position was cancelled" notifications (if my resume was responded to at all). A decade later, still unemployed.
As far as I can tell, employers have stopped hiring domestic grads, and have staffed their workforces exclusively, at the entry level, with H-1B's. Or simply outsourced/offshored the work. 90%+ of the people in my graduating class were white males, yet you have Silicon Valley tech companies that basically everyone under 35 is obviously an offshore importee.
If firms find they can't find or hire US workers, then they need to start actually treating us in good faith. A typical company will post multiples of the jobs they actually have available -- how about not throwing my resume away if I apply for a position and it gets filled with someone else?
Now someone might be quick to say that I'm dumb or retarded. But if my applications are not being responded to, disclosing completion of 2 degrees in under 5 years, including summer work experience, a substantial completed project in embedded programming, PCB design, and integration -- and consulting experience -- just how am I even supposed to know what skills, if any, I am missing? That is what makes H-1B so toxic; employers have used the program to just hang up on domestic talent, to the point that white males like myself under 35 are a rarity in the Silicon Valley.
Not only that, but leaving money as 'cash', or on deposit with a financial institution, actually gives the bankers more money which they can use to pay bonuses, steal, or do whatever scams they do with it to oppress Americans.
In the products I've seen (including some of the source code), they were loaded with factory backdoors, sloppy coding, and many designs hadn't been updated since the mid 1990s.
Certainly doesn't help that a lot of the operators of these devices hire the cheapest engineers or techs they can find, usually without a good computer eng background.
Hmmm. My PGP public key is at:
http://pastebin.com/x57SCXNq
You can use this if you want to send me the name of your company, so I can fire my resume in/contact you/whatever, without having everyone on Slashdot knowing your identity.
Thanks..
Okay, if I could find your job req on the Internet, then I'd like to send you my resume. Unless your job description was merely hypothetical. That looks extremely reasonable. I hope I haven't annoyed you, but I'll be firing you a msg (I'm new to this Slashdot stuff, so I don't know if there's a way of doing such though!).
Demanding Cisco technican certificates of an engineer might pose a problem. Normally Cisco certificates would be acquired by a technician, not by an engineer.
Maybe over-reliance on vendor certification keywords is your problem? I know that I won't bother to apply to jobs that list/demand every vendor certification known to man, because that shows me the firm is obsessed with vendor technician certifications, not actual engineering credentials, knowledge, skills, or aptitude.
With firms not paying for much training these days, and the unemployeds not having huge money to spend on vendor certifications -- firms that insist on looking for guys with a lot of them, instead of just looking for bright, smart people with good aptitude are going to experience problems.
Sounds a lot like the nonsense that's been unfolding with the less-than-competent H-1B workers that have infested much of the tech industry, rather than best and brightest Americans who apply to tech firms in droves, only to see their resumes to into a black hole, never to be responded to.
Sure, the H-1B's save a little bit of money in the short run, but they're rarely at the top of their classes. Meanwhile guys who truly are at the top of their classes are often told by firms that they would be 'too expensive', or that they're 'under-experienced'.
I've personally watched a lot of lives ruined this way. Top calibre grads in EE/CS, instead of contributing to the economy, essentially sitting on welfare. A classmate of mine, in the top quartile, actually became an ordained priest because he was sick of the nonsensical proposition of sending out thousands of resumes to tech employers not to receive the dignity of a response.
Why not try treating the applicants like professionals, instead of demanding performance of in-depth technical skills during interviews?
The problem, at least from my perspective, is that employers will stick a dozen different languages and tech skills on their job description, and then pick one in particular to test on. How do I really know which one of those dozen to brush up on, if all I have is the job description infront of me? Why can't you just take my word for it, in combination with verifiable credentials like a CS degree, certain prior work experience, personal projects, etc.?
As I said earlier, no lawyer is asked during an interview to discuss, in depth, a particular case. They're hired based on their credentials, their aptitude, and their past experience. We're talking about a field here that is all about learning, and the ability to acquire new skills, after all, because nobody will have the entirety of the specific skills required for a business unless they've actually worked in it.
What are you talking about?
You really want your programmers to pretend that they have the knowledge to interpret legal contracts and license agreements?
Did you know that the deletion or alteration of even a line or two in the GPL license can materially alter the nature of the license and your ability to use or not use the code in the product?
A good software developer defers issues of contract and license interpretation to qualified legal counsel.
As I told you, if you're having any trouble hiring people, maybe stop playing Trivial Pursuit with them on interviews and start trusting them. An attitude of cynicism isn't going to get you very far in business or in life generally.
Yup, sounds like the calculus faced in the contemporary market.
Google may have 10,000 very qualified engineers applying for their positions, sending in application each. But if they receive 1,000,000 applications in total, and only pull 10,000 of those applications out of the pile for human review -- they will come to the erroneous conclusion that there are only 100 very qualified engineers available in the marketplace. Hence, the cries of such firms, "we can't find qualified workers", or "the universities suck".
Worse, the very qualified engineers tend to not be the sort of types that will send out enormous numbers of applications. So the chances of firms, such as Google, even seeing their resumes, are substantially less.
I've done all that stuff. My name can even be found on various Linux Kernel mailing lists and in newsgroups discussing some fairly technical topics and providing input on certain bug-related issues related to the Kernel. Still doesn't get me the 'time of day' from employers.
Yup, you gotta wonder how/why stupid people ever were able to get their hands on the money to do stuff like that in the first place. Dumb MBA's/JDs/etc. have completely corrupted the system of capital allocation in this country, such that, idiots that don't even understand "Engineering 101" manage to find themselves in charge of significant amounts of capital, both financial and human.
Maybe engineers don't deserve 7 figure salaries, but they'd probably do a lot better allocating excessive salaries within the economy, than many of the abortions (*cough* Groupon *cough* Webvan *cough*) that were funded by the MBA/JD types.
UC Berkeley? Or are you referring to one of the various scam colleges in the SFBay area that exist primarily to supply SV firms with cheap tech labour on student visas/OPT?
The Asians/Indians at UCB, those are almost entirely US citizens. Of course, it doesn't seem to matter to the SV employers, who still leave a good chunk of UCB EE/CS grads unemployed while bringing in non-citizen guest workers by the thousands from India.
You hit the nail right on the head. The tech industry is dominated by two types of people these days, those who abuse engineers, and engineers who are generally too stupid to realize that they're being abused by these sales/finance/'corporate' types.
There's a lot of domestic people who simply want nothing to do with the dysfunctional business models (like money-losing trash like Groupon, or firms like Google that rely upon every tax avoidance scheme known to man to post their earnings, nevermind the extortion racket inherent in some of their practices). So they either withdraw themselves from the tech sector entirely, or they sit around and do stuff, like writing F/OSS software, that destroys the market for paid software.
The way the tech industry pays people these days, even most of its best and brightest participants can't afford garages in which to create the next generation of inventions that might propel a new revolution.
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were able to work summer jobs at HP in the 1970s. The ultimate result; their pussies were wet with the excitement that was microelectronics/software and the rest is history.
The low compensation of tech workers is a real problem out there, as well as the huge amount of risk that tech students take in the courses and in the job market. When top grads often spend years trying to just secure their first job, or when horror stories of top tech grads being locked completely out of the industry occur -- that's a giant problem for the future of innovation. How many best and brightest US tech workers has the H-1B visa destroyed because US tech firms don't even bother responding or treating US tech workers in good faith? Certainly the numbers are numerous.
Just because someone can't answer a non-superficial question on an environment they previously worked with, doesn't mean that they're lying, being dishonest, or not in possession of a skill.
Lawyers aren't tested in interviews on every last point of jurisprudence or point of law. They're tested on their ability to speak intelligently about an issue at hand, their previous legal experience, and their ability to intelligently research the issues at hand or refer such to other professionals (like the legal question about the GPL that was asked -- such should be referred to an IP attorney, not asked of a non-Law-trained SoftEng.). Does anyone call a tax lawyer who may not be able to recall a particular case of, for instance, tax law, off by heart, a liar? Of course not. Why then is the such treatment apparently acceptable when interviewing technology professionals?
As long as "engineering" interviews are essentially glorified games of "Trivial Pursuit", employers are going to be dissappointed. Especially on the leading edges of technology, or when interviewing new graduates who may not be able to fall back on a diversity of experience.