<i>The lady’s husband, a semiconductor engineer, has been unemployed for three years, yet people in his field are being brought in on H-1Bs. She doesn’t think this makes any sense.</i><p>My nephew, an avid basketball player, has been unemployed for three years, yet the NBA is bringing in basketball players from other countries!<p>This article makes the incorrect assumption that if two people have the same job title, they must have the same skills. I was initially surprised that a "leading authority on H-1B visas" would make this mistake, but it turns out he is a professor rather than someone with any experience in the software industry, which explains why his arguments are driven by statistics without any understanding of how the industry works.
<i>To judge from blogs and comment threads, it makes perfect sense to that mighty legion of persons who believe that the nation’s laws should strive to ensure that citizens enjoy no advantage whatsoever over non-citizens; or, to put it another way, that the nation’s citizenship should be worthless and the nation itself a fiction.</i><p><i>Software firms are trading in their 35-year-olds for 25-year-olds as if they were aging matinée idols.”
Countering them were a few retrograde souls who had been laboring under the juvenile illusion that US citizens’ interests should enjoy primacy in the calculations of US policy-makers.</i><p>It's hard to exactly gauge my moral response to this argument, but if you replaced "US citizen" with "white person" throughout that passage of text, you would come close. It's fundamentally evil to discriminate against people based solely upon the circumstances of their birth. This kind of protectionist jingoism isn't even in the best interests of actual US citizens.
<i>So what advantage does a 60-year-old .NET programmer have over a 27-year-old .NET programmer when they both have, at most, 5 years of experience doing .NET programming? Absolutely none.</i><p>Regardless of your age, you do not want to work for companies that believe this.
I'm 36 and after a hiatus and restart (of about 2 1/2 years) I'm just about to really get started again with my programming career. I'm tired of these stories.
> So what advantage does a 60-year-old .NET programmer have over a 27-year-old .NET programmer<p>The advantage that more time on this Earth brings in terms of communication and understanding. "People skills, dammit."
This is basically nonsense.<p>I'm over 35. I work at Google. I got my job when I was over 35. I've interviewed people over 35. Very few of the applicants I've met and/or interviewed have been extended an offer. None of it has anything to do with age. It all comes down to one thing:<p><i>There are a shocking number of people who work as programmers who cannot actually program.</i><p>The industry as a whole is crying out for people who can get shit done. If you can do that age is no barrier. Ageism, at least as far as programmers go, seems to be used as an excuse by those unable or unwilling to get a job as to why they can't get a job.<p>EDIT: the fact that this is Google I think makes my point rather than detracts from it. If at 35 with no particularly amazing background I can get hired at a top-tier employer, why not any employer?<p>You can argue that lower-tier employers are more biased but in my experience they're also less selective (or at least they select for different traits).
tl;dr: "They're all using H1-B visas to take jobs away from citizens! Well, except for me, that is. My case was special. But the rest of them are all job thieves!"
<i>I’d make the case that it’s better to hire the 27-year-old because he is still at the stage of his career where he enjoys the stuff and is therefore more motivated to learn and work harder, while the 60-year-old is surely bitter about the fact that he’s getting paid less than the younger programmers.</i><p>When do you think was the last time the author actually <i>spoke</i> to a 60-year-old?
Well I'll admit I don't have the experience in this area as that of Prof. Norm Matloff, but I've heard this story many times before, and it usually turns out to be the same; if you're complaining about foreigners taking your jobs, it's almost certainly because they do them better than you.
<i>But whatever future lies beyond the next election cycle is of zero interest to any important person in any of the federal government’s three branches, so the band plays on.</i><p>Fortunately, not true for the judicial branch.
I've had interesting conversations with recruiters where they make the point that people who write code are always in demand but demand for engineering <i>management</i> can come and go. I remember one distinctly saying that people my age (early 30's) who moved up to project managers were screwing themselves. This was in 2007 when the economy was in shambles.<p>I've always wondered how big an effect this has on these stories about old engineers finding it hard to find work. The older you are, the more likely your last position had a significant project management component that makes you sound like a PHB.
The thing about age is, when you're 25 and you look at 35 and 45 year olds, you're amazed at how much they don't know. But when you're 45, and you look back on when you were 35, or 25, you're amazed at how much you didn't know.<p>The software profession is plagued by HR practices formulated by people who have zero understanding of software production. They think hiring 25 year olds is cheaper than hiring 45 year olds because they assume the output is the same while the cost is less.<p>Reality is a lot more complicated by that, and in terms of factors that determine the return for a given dollar in salary, age is is a complete wash. I don't think you can generalize on age at all.<p>As for H1B visas, we should get rid of the quotas. I've worked with 20-something Indian programmers. All have been good people. If they beat me out for a job, then so be it. I think companies that don't recognize the value of older engineers are shooting themselves in the foot, but that's their right to do so.
> the USSR was tottering, India and China were struggling out from under the rotting hulks of, respectively, state socialism and Maoist lunacy, Major Medical was the merest notch on one’s paycheck, and young female office workers were wearing sneakers for their commute.<p>Cool. But this article was in no way racist or sexist, right?<p>:-)