Subj : Re: Industry Calls for More Foreign Programmers
To   : comp.programming
From : spinoza1111
Date : Tue Aug 23 2005 04:37 am


topmind wrote:
> > US born techies have never controlled the industry. In fact, in good
> > times, programmers essentially shared the right-wing ideology of their
> > managers.
> >
> > Programmers when employed manifested zero solidarity with other workers
> > and as a result they are today powerless against forces that in the USA
> > have turned against them.
>
>
> Agreed. Farmers get subsidies because they lobbied, NOT because they
> are globally competative. If you think about it, the reasons for our
> higher cost of living than Bangalore is due to direct or indirect
> protections from global competition of some kind. Thus, we have to
> compete on Indian wages, yet pay for US medical care. If we open the
> gates and let IT visa workers flood in, why not also let in doctors,
> lawyers, automechanics, dentists, truck drivers, etc so that our cost
> of living is competative with Bangalore? Why not? Because either big
> biz has not targeted them yet, or they have various political
> protections against visa floods.
>
>
> >
> > I have NO sympathy for US programmers who years ago learned one or two
> > languages without learning computer science and who preferred to call
> > code that used features and approaches with which they were unfamiliar,
> > "Sanskrit". The Sanskrit joke is on them.
>
> But businesses does not demand such acedemic knowledge, mostly focusing
> on specific tools. We are thus giving the capitalists what they want.
> Most of university teaching is out-of-date anyhow in my experience. I
> had tons of training on how to build link lists, but relatively little
> on databases. Now my usage ratio of linked lists to databases is about
> 1-to-1000.

Databases are BUILT, in part, on "linked lists". To know how they work
and to use them effectively, you need to take a class in data
structures.

Absent this deep background, programmers tend not only to think in
terms of separate steps, and "temporary tables", they even think that
this is effective problem breakdown.

Much puzzlement about data bases is based on their confusion with
files. A data base is based (again, that word) on sets and based on
sets, on tuples. But this is university-level talk. Absent the
background, the data bases are used suboptimally as a set of sequential
files.

The business claim that "a computer is like a car, and you do not have
to be a mechanic to drive a car" is idiotic. First of all, a computer
is not a car. Furthermore, MOST people drive poorly, both unsafely and
in such a way that they end up polluting the environment, and this is
because of the illusion that any moron has some sort of God-given right
to drive a car.

>
> >
> > My belief is that "organizing" today against H1B and offshore is a
> > waste of time. Instead, labor needs One Big Union for All the Workers.
> > Until that time, let the competition rip, I say.
>
> Only if the competition is spread equal (per above). Don't throw some
> careers to the sharks of globalism but not others. Fuck all or fuck
> none (or fuck everyone say 10%).
>
> Lawyers cost about twice as much as programmers. It appears there is a
> shortage of lawyers, not programmers. Thus, why not target the most
> expensive first? Let's flood the market with cheaper, more desparate
> and docile visa lawyers rather than picking on programmers. 
> 
> -T-

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