My mom tells me I was reading by the time I was 1 1/2. I would sit in a big cardboard box filled with books, and spend the day reading. I remember being 3 years old, talking to a neighbor of ours who was a nurse, and having long, involved, scientific discussions about the human body. Life seemed like a great big toy that just kept growing the more you worked to uncover it.
Then I entered kindergarten.
Holy CRAP, was I ever unprepared for that! Instantly, I found myself on the receiving end of insults and other cruelties, coming from all angles. It had never occurred to me that something like that would happen. I had no idea how to deal with it. Needless to say, I ended up spending far more time with books (and later, my chemistry set & then my computer) than with the kids my age. I was interested in learning about the world, and the vast majority of them only seemed to care about bullying other people, consuming commercial entertainment products, and breaking rules. Even the other "nerds" acted this way and treated me horribly. I did everything I could think of to solve the problem, which mostly consisted of trying to be more like them, and to share their interests. That never worked, not even once: it's like they saw me coming from a mile away and knew I wasn't one of them and never would be.
Elementary school, middle school, and high school were the same -- major social ostracism. (College was a little better, in that there were more people like me, but there was still a massive contingent of the thuggish types.) I could not for the life of me figure out why so many people chose to act this way. How could they attach so much importance to appearance and social status? How could anyone possibly care so much about meaningless things, especially when there was a huge and interesting world out there to be discovered?
The problem persisted once I was out of college and in the workforce, but there was a new wrinkle. The same thuggish types were now working alongside me, ostensibly with the same qualifications I had, but their focus wasn't on doing their job competently or striving to be better...it was on faking their way through their job, goofing off, and stealing from the company. Worst of all, if they found someone like me who, just by existing, proved that they were bad people, they would tend to employ every low-life tactic imaginable to ruin my life. Four times, it rose to the level of getting me fired. Only once, in my early 30s, did I actually succeed against the thuggish types -- nearly all the people I butted heads with decided to leave the company, and I ended up as project lead! True, the 2 or 3 of us left had to do all the work by ourselves, but at least it got done competently. Unfortunately, the executives at that company were as gullible as the day was long, and fell for every con artist that came down the pike, and even though I and my small team improved our product to the point of creaming our competitors, the business end of things collapsed and took us with it.
Then my industry was hit by the dot-com crash and the offshoring trend...getting fired four times didn't help me either. As of this writing, I've been unemployed for 2 years, I live in the spare room of my mom's house, and earn pittances anywhere I can -- fixing people's computers, "handyman" stuff, lots and lots of painting, and other grinding sorts of work. And that, for me, has been the final blow. Over the years, I've had to give up on popularity, on friendship, on happiness, and on hope, but at least I had my employability. Now that's gone. I worked my ass off and kept my nose clean, and have less to show for it that someone that spent their life partying. All I have left are my brains and integrity, and frankly, they don't appear to have any value in this world.
I've been reading a lot lately, catching up on the books that I bought but never read. Finally, I got around to reading Ayn Rand. I started by seeing the movie version of The Fountainhead, then I read Atlas
Back in my early 20s, compilers and development systems were my primary interest in computers. (My reasoning was that we as programmers spend all day interacting with a development system, but don't seem to spend much time thinking about the development system, and I wanted to change that.) My source code format was going to be structured text, much like XML is nowadays. (Back then, I only had SGML as a reference.) I generated a huge stack of notes and thoughts on the system, but got to the point where I realized I'd need a team to have a reasonable chance of implementing it. And so it remains paper.
The reason I chose an XML-like source code format is that I wanted to allow the source code to be browsed by whatever visual metaphor the programmer felt comfortable with. The vast majority of average programming constructs can be expressed in any language, and allowing language-specific displays of XML-stored information seemed like a good way to allow programmers to use the system without a huge learning curve. It also allowed code written in other languages to be imported & turned into native XML-ish code instantly. That's important for leveraging legacy code.
Of course, the system supported far more constructs than the average language. It seems that most programming languages have some sort of religion they want to whip on you, and the language has a combination of features that tend to reinforce those religious beliefs. In contrast, my language featured every programming construct, and the ability to add new ones -- extending the compiler was intended to be as common as writing a subclass. The logic here was, we're real programmers implementing real projects in the real world, and we need the tools to get our job done, not some religious language-designing ninny forcing us into their dystopia.
To combat the obvious problem of bad programmers writing code that no one will be able to understand, I designed the language as two layers: the lower one is called Clay, and the higher one is called Scaffold. The idea is, Clay allowed programmers to do anything their heart desired, whether ill-advised or dangerous or whatever. It was something like a compiler-development toolkit exposed as a language. Scaffold, written in Clay, was an attempt to create a real software-engineering language on top of the free-for-all that Clay offered. Scaffold combined the low-level programming abilities of C++, the design-by-contract of Eiffel, the orthogonal pattern construct of Beta, and the high-level browsing of something like Rational Rose. The GUI would handle programmers writing code in metaphors they were comfortable with, and all of it would be stored in XML. The junior programmers would spend most of their time in a variant of Scaffold, and the senior programmers would write Clay constructs to make the development system more closely match the project, and thus make programming it less tedious and error-prone.
Oh well, it looks like once again, ideas I came up with years ago have been independently discovered, and due to my inadequate promotion skills, someone else will get the credit. I tried describing something like this back in 1995 or so, but got only glazed looks in response. (Want to hear about a neat video game I designed on paper back in 1992? The one I called "Turf"? Where you start out as a thug on the street, get jobs from gangs, and work your way up to more difficult jobs that pay better, and meanwhile you get to wreak havoc in an urban landscape? Sounds like Grand Theft Auto, you say? Damn right it does. I described it back in 1992 and got only glazed looks in response. Being visionary doesn't mean squat unless you can promote.)
Yourdon would have us believe that, if we American programmers want to justify 5x the salary of an Indian programmer, we have to be 10x more productive.
Wouldn't that be nice? The reality is, the programmers that still have jobs evaluate interviewees based on the threat they pose. If you're really the sort of programmer that's several times more productive than average, then the programmers that interview you will consider you a threat to themselves and you won't get a job.
The following is an actual rejection letter I received recently. The names have been blanked out, though they don't deserve such courtesy. They e-mailed me this 50 minutes after I left their door.
ulatekh,
Thank you very much for taking the time out to
come and interview with us here at company!
I hope you had a decent time while you were here.
The programmers all got together and we discussed
the interview process and had to make a difficult
decision to pass on hiring you.
Technically, you have the most knowledge of
anyone we've ever interviewed - you most
definitely know your stuff. But personality-wise,
we couldn't see you fitting with the culture that
we have on our team. I'm sorry it didn't work
out, but I thought you'd like to know why we
reached our decision.
manager and tech lead were very
impressed with your knowledge. I know that
personality-wise, all development teams are very
different due to the people on those teams - we've
spent a very long time building our unique team
and the more people we hire, the harder it is to
hire the next person because we require everyone
on the team to agree with the choice to hire. You
had no idea when you came here what kind of
culture we have and your technical skills are so
impressive that it only came down to
personality-fit with the team.
Sorry for the bad news, but I like to give
feedback on the interview process. Good luck on
any future interviews and thanks again for coming
over.
- creative director
Preserve my job by getting more competent? I don't think that's going to work for me.
All the men will either spend their lives alone or leave for someplace else.
Actually, the sociological research I saw (wish I remembered where, sorry) indicated that having a nation with a large number of unmarried men without real prospects for marriage strongly correlated with that nation going to war.
The Middle East is in a state of semi-permanent war. India keeps butting heads with Pakistan. China may have designed the 9/11 attacks, and in general certainly seems bent on regional domination, if not world domination.
To think that women's rights really are the key to world peace...it boggles the mind...
Why doesn't someone do Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle? Now that would kick butt. I wanna see the surfer smack against the side of the skyscraper!
Will this ITS department support issues with other browsers. Each browser has its quirks, and work arounds for certain things.
But Firefox, being open-source, can be fixed so as to eliminate the need for workarounds. The IT department can coordinate with the project developers and find solutions. Something closed-source doesn't do nearly as well.
As annoyed as I am with Microsoft in general, if they would make the Windows XP source code shared-source, I'd track down and fix bugs I found. I wouldn't mind. I'd be Microsoft's biggest fan if their stuff would just work worth a crap.
You'd be suprised at the sites that promise to protect privacy and don't.
It gets worse -- they may do it without knowing. Their computers might have spyware infections! I remember e-mailing a temp agency about some work, and went from no spam at all to a trickle that turned into a rush. Really high-quality temp agency, huh. (The spam went away after these bungholes got arrested, though. Lucky me!)
But not in any of the ways it needs to, e.g. becoming less fascist and totalitarian.
if the US suddenly faced a problem of overpopulation how long would it be before protesting and ignorance tapered [down] enough for our government to implement an obviously necessary law?
That already happened. The post-WWII Baby Boom was tempered by the Vietnam War, eliminating 60,000 or so American men in their late teens/early 20s. The "obviously necessary" law was military conscription.
No kidding. I can't figure out why it hasn't happened already. They've polluted the heck out of their country. Their currency is pegged to our dollar, and since the U.S. Government is apparently willing to let the dollar fall, that raises the price for their huge raw-material imports. They continue to turn a blind eye to their AIDS crisis; their own government blood-donation centers are responsible for many of the infections. Corruption in the Chinese government is endemic. Their own internal surveys indicate the people are fed up with them. All the money they're generating with exports apparently can't solve these problems, and the problems just go on and on...
How does China do it? Do they? My best guess is that they will implode all of a sudden and surprise the world, much like the Warsaw Pact did in 1989 and the USSR did in 1991. I just can't figure out why it hasn't happened already.
I worked for an ESPN/Sega sub-subcontractor for all of 5 weeks before they canned me. The job interview took 4 weeks.
I was tasked to work on performance issues, since that's what I've mostly worked on in my career. But they didn't seem to realize that that involves reading tons and tons of their crappy legacy code, figuring out why it's slow, then changing large parts of their crappy legacy code in a way that doesn't break the spaghetti. That couldn't be done by their current crop of programmers, otherwise they wouldn't have needed me. (The reviews I saw for one of the games I worked on complained of frame drops, so I know they never solved the problem.) That sort of heavy spaghetti-reading/modifying can't be done 60 hours a week; I need actual rest in order to hold that many details in my head.
Within 5 weeks, I had their project almost running within the limits of the framerate, except for portions of the AI subsystem, and the programmer in charge of that assured me he'd take care of it. So I basically did what they wanted, with no support, no documentation, no source-code comments, no commit e-mails, and no rest. But I still got fired for complaining how exhausted I was.
Stupidly, I thought if I went to the president of the company and told him my plight, especially in light of having met my goal so quickly and proven my value, that he and I could work out some solution that made both of us happy. I even bounced the idea off someone that had worked for the company since the beginning, and had worked with that president before for like 9 years. Instead, the first thing out of the president's mouth was "Well, then, it may be time to end this relationship." I was fired the next day.
I've been unemployed ever since. It's been about a year and a half.
I can only hope and pray that Atlas will shrug soon. Please come for me, John Galt, I'm ready to go!
foreign programmers are brought into the U.S. and paid very little compared to U.S. programmers
Nope. I'm an H1-B myself, and while we are essentially slaves, we are paid exactly the same salary as our US counterparts. This is mandated by law and enforced strictly.
You mentioned you were salaried. Does your boss work you far more than 40 hours a week? That's a net pay cut. And your boss is free to work you as hard as he/she wants, because of your quasi-slave status. Net effect, you're paid less than your American counterpart.
"Enforced strictly"? One of the biggest complaints about the current implementation of the H-1B visa program is the lack of enforcement.
Hardly "bull crap in its purest form". At most, one sentence was half-bullcrap. Mindless hyperbole may work in Russia, but it's a harder sell here.
Outsourced jobs tend to go to countries that emulate the United States with low taxes and deregulated economies, and the foreign companies jobs are outsourced to tend to buy American equipment and services to do the job.
Seems to me that China would be a big exception to your "rule"...
How about instead of naivete in thinking your comfortable job is going to be around forever, you do some abstract though, you analyze trends in the market place, you read, you develop skills in various things.
I did. I didn't sit on my dead ass by any stretch of the imagination.
While you were working for 12 years, perhaps you should have learned how to save money and spend money wisely.
What do you think I'm living on now? And how would your advice have increased my employability?
Taking part time classes over 12 years does not build debt, and you could've end up with two or three college degrees in various fields.
Stupid me, I tried to start 2 different businesses, I got seriously ripped off by 2 different con artists (one pretending to be a businessman, one a very former childhood friend), I worked for a company that still owes me 4 months of back pay that I'll never get, etc. etc.
you still should have the intelligence to realize you're obviously not that good and not worth the money. Those who are worth don't lose their job overseas.
No, I'm actually a very good programmer. The problem, as I see it, is that there are so few good programmers out there, prospective bosses don't really believe someone like me can exist, and so I don't stand out. Plus, I tend to prize accuracy over mindless positivism, which somehow means I have a "bad attitude" or something. And that's the real value of work-visa programmers as far as employers are concerned...they'll take tons of mindless $h1t and not complain, for fear of getting deported.
Also, those who aren't worth it but are government employees don't tend to lose their jobs either.
I worked for defense contractors for 5 years.
All in all, I gotta say, you don't have any valid points. Thanks for playing, though.
Stopping the H-1 B program does not make a lot of sense. There are jobs out there for which the only qualified people are not people imported from India or any other country, but bright graduate students from these countries, studying in the US.
Given the ridiculous unemployment rate for programmers in the U.S., I find your assertion highly doubtful.
Isn't the Great American Dream about doing well, irrespective of where you are from?
If you're coming here to immigrate, yes. If you're coming here just to work, no.
Or will you (like so many other bigoted countries), hold a person's nationality against him/her?
As if people wouldn't hold my U.S. birth against me if I tried to work overseas. Hell, I'd be lucky to just live, and the worst part of it is, I'd probably agree with my killers' view of most Americans. I hate our cultural cesspool as much as they do.
if you don't find what you want in your country, move to another country that'll welcome it.
Your situation and my situation are very different. When you moved to the U.S., you got paid way more than you would have back home, and could return home very well off. If I went to another country to work, I would get paid less than I can make here shoveling $h1t in Hell, and if I could one day afford to return to my country, would have nothing to show for it.
Do you see now how your solution is not viable?
I guess I can't fault you; after all, I can't come up with any viable solutions...
...the problem I have is that, thanks to widespread abuses in the H-1B visa program, foreign programmers are brought into the U.S. and paid very little compared to U.S. programmers.
Businesses say they do this because U.S. programmers don't have the skills they need, but with the widespread unemployment of computer programmers, this can't possibly be true.
H-1B made sense during the tech boom, but now that we're in a tech bust, there's no legitimate excuse for it.
If we stopped the H-1B visa program, all those programmers went home, and then software jobs got outsourced to their countries, that'd be OK with me -- at least it'd be honest. Right now, U.S. programmers have the worst of both worlds.
And as for doing something besides programming for a living...you mean to tell me that I spent my teenage years actually studying, getting good grades, and keeping my nose clean, I went to college to get my B.S. in computer science, I worked my tail off for 12 years...and now I'm unemployed and poor? Damn, I could have been doing drugs and partying all that time, and I'd have exactly the same to show for it! I deeply resent that losers, slackers, and lowlifes are better off than I am. Doesn't anyone understand that???
And how the heck am I supposed to afford another college degree, when I'm facing losing everything I own?
Slashdot Mirror
My mom tells me I was reading by the time I was 1 1/2. I would sit in a big cardboard box filled with books, and spend the day reading. I remember being 3 years old, talking to a neighbor of ours who was a nurse, and having long, involved, scientific discussions about the human body. Life seemed like a great big toy that just kept growing the more you worked to uncover it.
Then I entered kindergarten.
Holy CRAP, was I ever unprepared for that! Instantly, I found myself on the receiving end of insults and other cruelties, coming from all angles. It had never occurred to me that something like that would happen. I had no idea how to deal with it. Needless to say, I ended up spending far more time with books (and later, my chemistry set & then my computer) than with the kids my age. I was interested in learning about the world, and the vast majority of them only seemed to care about bullying other people, consuming commercial entertainment products, and breaking rules. Even the other "nerds" acted this way and treated me horribly. I did everything I could think of to solve the problem, which mostly consisted of trying to be more like them, and to share their interests. That never worked, not even once: it's like they saw me coming from a mile away and knew I wasn't one of them and never would be.
Elementary school, middle school, and high school were the same -- major social ostracism. (College was a little better, in that there were more people like me, but there was still a massive contingent of the thuggish types.) I could not for the life of me figure out why so many people chose to act this way. How could they attach so much importance to appearance and social status? How could anyone possibly care so much about meaningless things, especially when there was a huge and interesting world out there to be discovered?
The problem persisted once I was out of college and in the workforce, but there was a new wrinkle. The same thuggish types were now working alongside me, ostensibly with the same qualifications I had, but their focus wasn't on doing their job competently or striving to be better...it was on faking their way through their job, goofing off, and stealing from the company. Worst of all, if they found someone like me who, just by existing, proved that they were bad people, they would tend to employ every low-life tactic imaginable to ruin my life. Four times, it rose to the level of getting me fired. Only once, in my early 30s, did I actually succeed against the thuggish types -- nearly all the people I butted heads with decided to leave the company, and I ended up as project lead! True, the 2 or 3 of us left had to do all the work by ourselves, but at least it got done competently. Unfortunately, the executives at that company were as gullible as the day was long, and fell for every con artist that came down the pike, and even though I and my small team improved our product to the point of creaming our competitors, the business end of things collapsed and took us with it.
Then my industry was hit by the dot-com crash and the offshoring trend...getting fired four times didn't help me either. As of this writing, I've been unemployed for 2 years, I live in the spare room of my mom's house, and earn pittances anywhere I can -- fixing people's computers, "handyman" stuff, lots and lots of painting, and other grinding sorts of work. And that, for me, has been the final blow. Over the years, I've had to give up on popularity, on friendship, on happiness, and on hope, but at least I had my employability. Now that's gone. I worked my ass off and kept my nose clean, and have less to show for it that someone that spent their life partying. All I have left are my brains and integrity, and frankly, they don't appear to have any value in this world.
I've been reading a lot lately, catching up on the books that I bought but never read. Finally, I got around to reading Ayn Rand. I started by seeing the movie version of The Fountainhead, then I read Atlas
Back in my early 20s, compilers and development systems were my primary interest in computers. (My reasoning was that we as programmers spend all day interacting with a development system, but don't seem to spend much time thinking about the development system, and I wanted to change that.) My source code format was going to be structured text, much like XML is nowadays. (Back then, I only had SGML as a reference.) I generated a huge stack of notes and thoughts on the system, but got to the point where I realized I'd need a team to have a reasonable chance of implementing it. And so it remains paper.
The reason I chose an XML-like source code format is that I wanted to allow the source code to be browsed by whatever visual metaphor the programmer felt comfortable with. The vast majority of average programming constructs can be expressed in any language, and allowing language-specific displays of XML-stored information seemed like a good way to allow programmers to use the system without a huge learning curve. It also allowed code written in other languages to be imported & turned into native XML-ish code instantly. That's important for leveraging legacy code.
Of course, the system supported far more constructs than the average language. It seems that most programming languages have some sort of religion they want to whip on you, and the language has a combination of features that tend to reinforce those religious beliefs. In contrast, my language featured every programming construct, and the ability to add new ones -- extending the compiler was intended to be as common as writing a subclass. The logic here was, we're real programmers implementing real projects in the real world, and we need the tools to get our job done, not some religious language-designing ninny forcing us into their dystopia.
To combat the obvious problem of bad programmers writing code that no one will be able to understand, I designed the language as two layers: the lower one is called Clay, and the higher one is called Scaffold. The idea is, Clay allowed programmers to do anything their heart desired, whether ill-advised or dangerous or whatever. It was something like a compiler-development toolkit exposed as a language. Scaffold, written in Clay, was an attempt to create a real software-engineering language on top of the free-for-all that Clay offered. Scaffold combined the low-level programming abilities of C++, the design-by-contract of Eiffel, the orthogonal pattern construct of Beta, and the high-level browsing of something like Rational Rose. The GUI would handle programmers writing code in metaphors they were comfortable with, and all of it would be stored in XML. The junior programmers would spend most of their time in a variant of Scaffold, and the senior programmers would write Clay constructs to make the development system more closely match the project, and thus make programming it less tedious and error-prone.
Oh well, it looks like once again, ideas I came up with years ago have been independently discovered, and due to my inadequate promotion skills, someone else will get the credit. I tried describing something like this back in 1995 or so, but got only glazed looks in response. (Want to hear about a neat video game I designed on paper back in 1992? The one I called "Turf"? Where you start out as a thug on the street, get jobs from gangs, and work your way up to more difficult jobs that pay better, and meanwhile you get to wreak havoc in an urban landscape? Sounds like Grand Theft Auto, you say? Damn right it does. I described it back in 1992 and got only glazed looks in response. Being visionary doesn't mean squat unless you can promote.)
- - - - - - - - - -
Think The Fountainhead is just a book? Check this out.
Yourdon would have us believe that, if we American programmers want to justify 5x the salary of an Indian programmer, we have to be 10x more productive.
Wouldn't that be nice? The reality is, the programmers that still have jobs evaluate interviewees based on the threat they pose. If you're really the sort of programmer that's several times more productive than average, then the programmers that interview you will consider you a threat to themselves and you won't get a job.
The following is an actual rejection letter I received recently. The names have been blanked out, though they don't deserve such courtesy. They e-mailed me this 50 minutes after I left their door.
Preserve my job by getting more competent? I don't think that's going to work for me.
Actually, the sociological research I saw (wish I remembered where, sorry) indicated that having a nation with a large number of unmarried men without real prospects for marriage strongly correlated with that nation going to war.
The Middle East is in a state of semi-permanent war. India keeps butting heads with Pakistan. China may have designed the 9/11 attacks, and in general certainly seems bent on regional domination, if not world domination.
To think that women's rights really are the key to world peace...it boggles the mind...
Why doesn't someone do Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle? Now that would kick butt. I wanna see the surfer smack against the side of the skyscraper!
I think you're right...
But Firefox, being open-source, can be fixed so as to eliminate the need for workarounds. The IT department can coordinate with the project developers and find solutions. Something closed-source doesn't do nearly as well.
As annoyed as I am with Microsoft in general, if they would make the Windows XP source code shared-source, I'd track down and fix bugs I found. I wouldn't mind. I'd be Microsoft's biggest fan if their stuff would just work worth a crap.
It gets worse -- they may do it without knowing. Their computers might have spyware infections! I remember e-mailing a temp agency about some work, and went from no spam at all to a trickle that turned into a rush. Really high-quality temp agency, huh. (The spam went away after these bungholes got arrested, though. Lucky me!)
But not in any of the ways it needs to, e.g. becoming less fascist and totalitarian.
That already happened. The post-WWII Baby Boom was tempered by the Vietnam War, eliminating 60,000 or so American men in their late teens/early 20s. The "obviously necessary" law was military conscription.
At least according to some viewpoints I've heard.
I don't know if you realize it, but you basically proved what your parent article claimed.
No kidding. I can't figure out why it hasn't happened already. They've polluted the heck out of their country. Their currency is pegged to our dollar, and since the U.S. Government is apparently willing to let the dollar fall, that raises the price for their huge raw-material imports. They continue to turn a blind eye to their AIDS crisis; their own government blood-donation centers are responsible for many of the infections. Corruption in the Chinese government is endemic. Their own internal surveys indicate the people are fed up with them. All the money they're generating with exports apparently can't solve these problems, and the problems just go on and on...
How does China do it? Do they? My best guess is that they will implode all of a sudden and surprise the world, much like the Warsaw Pact did in 1989 and the USSR did in 1991. I just can't figure out why it hasn't happened already.
I worked for an ESPN/Sega sub-subcontractor for all of 5 weeks before they canned me. The job interview took 4 weeks.
I was tasked to work on performance issues, since that's what I've mostly worked on in my career. But they didn't seem to realize that that involves reading tons and tons of their crappy legacy code, figuring out why it's slow, then changing large parts of their crappy legacy code in a way that doesn't break the spaghetti. That couldn't be done by their current crop of programmers, otherwise they wouldn't have needed me. (The reviews I saw for one of the games I worked on complained of frame drops, so I know they never solved the problem.) That sort of heavy spaghetti-reading/modifying can't be done 60 hours a week; I need actual rest in order to hold that many details in my head.
Within 5 weeks, I had their project almost running within the limits of the framerate, except for portions of the AI subsystem, and the programmer in charge of that assured me he'd take care of it. So I basically did what they wanted, with no support, no documentation, no source-code comments, no commit e-mails, and no rest. But I still got fired for complaining how exhausted I was.
Stupidly, I thought if I went to the president of the company and told him my plight, especially in light of having met my goal so quickly and proven my value, that he and I could work out some solution that made both of us happy. I even bounced the idea off someone that had worked for the company since the beginning, and had worked with that president before for like 9 years. Instead, the first thing out of the president's mouth was "Well, then, it may be time to end this relationship." I was fired the next day.
I've been unemployed ever since. It's been about a year and a half.
I can only hope and pray that Atlas will shrug soon. Please come for me, John Galt, I'm ready to go!
You mentioned you were salaried. Does your boss work you far more than 40 hours a week? That's a net pay cut. And your boss is free to work you as hard as he/she wants, because of your quasi-slave status. Net effect, you're paid less than your American counterpart.
"Enforced strictly"? One of the biggest complaints about the current implementation of the H-1B visa program is the lack of enforcement.
Hardly "bull crap in its purest form". At most, one sentence was half-bullcrap. Mindless hyperbole may work in Russia, but it's a harder sell here.
Seems to me that China would be a big exception to your "rule"...
...I appreciate it.
I did. I didn't sit on my dead ass by any stretch of the imagination.
What do you think I'm living on now? And how would your advice have increased my employability?
Stupid me, I tried to start 2 different businesses, I got seriously ripped off by 2 different con artists (one pretending to be a businessman, one a very former childhood friend), I worked for a company that still owes me 4 months of back pay that I'll never get, etc. etc.
No, I'm actually a very good programmer. The problem, as I see it, is that there are so few good programmers out there, prospective bosses don't really believe someone like me can exist, and so I don't stand out. Plus, I tend to prize accuracy over mindless positivism, which somehow means I have a "bad attitude" or something. And that's the real value of work-visa programmers as far as employers are concerned...they'll take tons of mindless $h1t and not complain, for fear of getting deported.
I worked for defense contractors for 5 years.
All in all, I gotta say, you don't have any valid points. Thanks for playing, though.
Given the ridiculous unemployment rate for programmers in the U.S., I find your assertion highly doubtful.
If you're coming here to immigrate, yes. If you're coming here just to work, no.
As if people wouldn't hold my U.S. birth against me if I tried to work overseas. Hell, I'd be lucky to just live, and the worst part of it is, I'd probably agree with my killers' view of most Americans. I hate our cultural cesspool as much as they do.
Believe me, I'm way ahead of you on that one.
Your situation and my situation are very different. When you moved to the U.S., you got paid way more than you would have back home, and could return home very well off. If I went to another country to work, I would get paid less than I can make here shoveling $h1t in Hell, and if I could one day afford to return to my country, would have nothing to show for it.
Do you see now how your solution is not viable?
I guess I can't fault you; after all, I can't come up with any viable solutions...
...the problem I have is that, thanks to widespread abuses in the H-1B visa program, foreign programmers are brought into the U.S. and paid very little compared to U.S. programmers.
Businesses say they do this because U.S. programmers don't have the skills they need, but with the widespread unemployment of computer programmers, this can't possibly be true.
H-1B made sense during the tech boom, but now that we're in a tech bust, there's no legitimate excuse for it.
If we stopped the H-1B visa program, all those programmers went home, and then software jobs got outsourced to their countries, that'd be OK with me -- at least it'd be honest. Right now, U.S. programmers have the worst of both worlds.
And as for doing something besides programming for a living...you mean to tell me that I spent my teenage years actually studying, getting good grades, and keeping my nose clean, I went to college to get my B.S. in computer science, I worked my tail off for 12 years...and now I'm unemployed and poor? Damn, I could have been doing drugs and partying all that time, and I'd have exactly the same to show for it! I deeply resent that losers, slackers, and lowlifes are better off than I am. Doesn't anyone understand that???
And how the heck am I supposed to afford another college degree, when I'm facing losing everything I own?