Reply to Anyone else have concerns over CS major with controversy over H-1B visas / job saturation?

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[quote=Anonymous]IT manager here with way too many years in the industry. There's basically two tiers of people and needs.

The first is what I call corporate IT. It's stuff like building systems for internal use in the company to manage their fleet of trucks or track office assets or whatever, this is vital to each company, but is also not very challenging. You don't need to design this stuff to scale up to 1 million users. You don't need to worry about usability because the company can require everyone to take a training course, and there's no competition. These are companies where IT is vital but it's not their main business. For example, a friend of mine is IT manager at a company that makes doors. They use a lot of IT, but the're a door company first and foremost.

These jobs are not that challenging, but also it's hard to find people as a lot of the work can be drudgery. H-1Bs fill this area well.

Then there's companies where they are software companies, and they must innovate. This is both your big companies like Google and Facebook, but also lots of smaller companies, especially startups, and everything in between like OpenTable and DealerSocket (you probably use them to schedule your auto service). Here you need your people to get real innovators, to design easy-to-use, scalable, and secure systems. This is a much more difficult challenge. These jobs are best for the top 10% of engineers, be they US-born or H-1Bs. At companies, like this, it's a rigorous interview process and only a few % of those who apply will be offered jobs.

I've been in both types of companies, but currently I'm in the second type. We tend to hire more American-raised engineers because the American culture of "independence" also means the engineers are willing to challenge the status quo and think outside the box. That's what I need no my team. We can also find those among H-1Bs (especially if looking at the best of the best), but it's less common, particularly in Asian cultures where for example respecting your elders above all is a big thing. I like someone that will challenge my technical decisions so we can hash it out.

The kind of person I look for in the second category is someone who lives and loves computers. They were playing with them since they were a kid, in a curious way not just playing games on them.

As for the job market -- well computers and automation aren't going away any time soon, and we're on the path to more not less reliance. We'll always be in need of _good_ people.

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