[trgv]

> They have almost unfathomable amounts of cash, but complain about the lack of qualified American talent. If there really is a shortage of qualified American talent, then American tech companies should use some of the cash to train American citizens.

You believe that anyone can be trained to be an effective programmer. If that's true, then there's some truth to your argument: why not invest in education and training to meet the high demand for programmers?

But I disagree with that premise. I think "ability to be a great programmer" is generally something you're born with, or at least something that's been determined by the time you're ~18. Therefore it makes perfect sense to import programmers to meet the demand. The US population is just not big enough to meet the demand for programmers and it would be insane/damaging to the economy to refuse to employ non-Americans.

I think the reason for H1B workers is supply and demand. The demand for developers far, far exceeds the supply.

[Apocryphon]

> But I disagree with that premise. I think "ability to be a great programmer" is generally something you're born with, or at least something that's been determined by the time you're ~18.

That's your opinion, but it's far from a majority one. It flies in the face with the continuous education/MOOCs/coder bootcamp industries and the "anyone can be a coder" mantra of the current age. Either you're right, or all of those programs and institutions are hucksters.

Not to mention, "great programmer" is hyperbolic when many many coding jobs these days are really just about fixing broken JavaScript and gluing together APIs. Software has eaten the world, and Sturgeon's law applies to software as much as anything else.

[gozur88]

>You believe that anyone can be trained to be an effective programmer. If that's true, then there's some truth to your argument: why not invest in education and training to meet the high demand for programmers?

We have. We've had retraining programs for decades, where people in declining industries get retrained as programmers or SAs (plus a bunch of other things).

The problem is nobody will hire them without experience. Some percentage of these people could be at least serviceable programmers, but they pretty much just languish on benefits because it's more convenient for companies to hire H-1B people with experience.

Megan McArdle had a good piece on this related to her retraining as a Netware admin.

[biocomputation]

My comment should have been clearer. By 'train' I mean train applicants who are somewhat qualified, but not fully qualified.

There are 2+ decades of anecdotes about poorly qualified programmers from India and China arriving here as H1Bs. The poorly trained Americans should be getting these jobs instead.