First, remember that we're talking about hiring college grads for entry level development positions. My statements are not true for seasoned veterans.

So its nice that you can make up lots of things that arent true and try to label them on me, but lets stick to personal experiences or factual items please.

That being said, I do think I should get most of 8 hours of work out of a 9 hour day. A couple breaks are fine, a few minutes here and there on the web is fine. Thats not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the bulk of devs out there who will get away with doing an hour or two of work per day, and reading slashdot the rest, if they can get away with it.

It's also self interest. The more effective a person is at their job, the more money the business makes, and the more money that staffer makes. Conversely, the less effective a person is, the less money the company makes, which puts their own job at risk.

A newly graduated college student, for the vast majority of them, dont have the experience, perspective, or skills to have opinions on anything but things narrowly focused on their job. Ie, code, design, etc. They generally have zero idea about what it takes to run a business, to constantly have to bring in revenue so that everyone gets paid, or how to effectively deal with troublesome customers in a way that builds the relationship and makes the company more money.

There are a rare few that are gems, but in general, college grads are incredibly green.

The grads who arent idiots I hire, or at least try to. They are a small minority.

Did you not read my post which you replied to?

It is NOT about pushing down wages.

It IS about hiring from a better candidate pool.

I'll try to go through it again.

Out of the overall pool of people that will apply for any entry level programming job you'll put up in the states, 10% or less are even worth interviewing. Thats a pretty bad ratio.

The H1-B pool in the US tends to be higher quality, on average, than the general pool of all applicants in the US. So you get to automatically have a selection applied, and the pool is higher quality.

TFA is about hiring college grads, so I didnt think it needed to be explicitly stated.

Based on the responses though, maybe I should have.

This is the last 12 years of hiring software developers and starting up and running a consultancy.

Mind you, its largely a younger person phenomenon (not that Im a greybeard yet, mid-30's).

A classic case is a brilliant developer who cant figure out how to not sabotage their own job, even after getting fired several times in a row. He just keeps doing the same dumb ass things over and over.

Questioning authority is okay, when its appropriate.

But you have to remember, we're talking about entry-level jobs here, about college grads. Most college grads are idiots. They may be decent at laying code, but when it comes to big picture things like client relationship, 'good enough' vs. perfect, and the inevitable compromise that comes when running a business.

What I see alot of though is a college grad who thinks he knows better than the business owner, or director of their department, though they dont have a freaking clue about the bigger picture. Their viewpoints are very provincial and limited. This isnt a slam of anyone in particular, except youth. Youth has good energy and often great attitude, but terriblly limited viewpoints.

In addition, they get pissed of when they cant make $75k their first year out of college (particularly where we live, which isnt a coast).

So maybe we're talking about different things. Questioning authority is fine, but it takes most software devs 10 years to get enough experience to be able to ask meaningful questions, outside of a very narrow coding scope.

The two things are not related.

Corps wanting more H1-B visas are all about qualified applicants. No business can ever get enough of the top 10% of people in a field, you're always looking for more.

A high-percentage of the people coming over in H1-B visas are above average, so its a nice high quality pool.

The unemployment rate will tend to knock off the very bottom rungs of the field. The top 10% never suffer for lack of work, and the top 40% will always be able to find something, if not instantly.

So to summ: hiring fewer H1-B visa staffers wouldnt solve the 10% unemployment rate, as that 10% tends to be the bottom 10% of the field (yes, I know even good people get laid off when businesses downside or close, but they also find jobs quickly).

This process isnt some big evil conspiracy by the evil rich white men.

It's a fundamental phenomenon in (more or less) free market economies.

If a field makes more than the others, and anyone can enter, then people will continue to enter and drive down the price until there is no more inherent benefit to that field compared to others.

It doesnt require black-clad robber barons oppressing the weak for this to happen, it'll happen all by itself.

I think you miss the point of a free market economy. Competition pushes all prices down.

Technology, innovation, and better processes improve productivity, which pushes prices down even farther.

This is what we want, and also utterly inevitable.

The end-result (which will probably require a fairly painful transition point) is when the bulk of the consumer goods are produced for nothing or close to nothing. As this happens, the work moves to creative roles and services.

Do we really want people doing sweat shop manufacturing work? Or do we want them doing creative and innovative work?

This should never have been modded up.

Let me put it in a different way:

What the CEO actually means is that American employees arent willing to: 1. Work 8 hours in an 8-hour day, they want 1.5 hours for lunch and want to spend 2-3 hours per day reading slashdot and the web. 2. Be willing to accept that they dont know everything there is to know, and they arent the best developer thats ever been invented, and actually learn from people who are much, much better at this than they are. 3. Understand that in a real business, not all the work is 'fun' and not all products released are perfectly coded. Sometimes you have to make compromises for valid business reasons, so that we can all keep getting paid.

In short, a great deal of American workers are: 1. Lazy, 2. Arrogant, and 3. Unrealistic and Ignorant.

Not all mind, you but many. At least with alot of foreign workers, they're actually willing to put their heads down, and learn and actually work hard, and get things done, and be part of the business, and not just think that their little corner of the universe is more important than everyone else's.

Unfortunately, your comment here is very close to the mark.

I think part of the problem isnt the education, its the culture. If all you do growing up is watch MTV Cribs and dream about being Bill Gates or Larry Ellison (God help you if so), then you arent very suitable for spending the first 5-10 years out of college being taught how to be an 'average' programmer.

You know, I enjoyed most of your post, but found this section really lacking.

You seem to be suggesting that you should hire the inferior person, if he's a native of the country you happen to be born in (or are a current resident of), over the superior person who is not a member of the same group.

How is this reasonable? If you do this, then you're just short-changing your company, and putting everyone's paychecks at risk. Thats one of the things that people who havent run a business dont get. The pressure and obligation to keep the business solvent and growing so that everyone gets to keep their jobs and keep getting paid, is quite intense.

Hiring inferior (but American) staffers over superior (but foreign) folks doesnt help anyone, least of all your countrymen. It just creates another marginal business that probably wont last, and will then drive up the unemployment rate.

You pick the best people you can afford, and you ignore things like nationality, gender, ethnicity, religion or sexual preference (assuming the person can fit in with the group). And thats it.

Have you ever even tried to use an x64 windows version? None of what you're talking about exists. 32-bit apps run fine in x64 windows. This is being posted from Vista x64 Business on an HP Compaq 8710w, using 32-bit opera. Works just fine.

MS Office is 32-bit, works just fine. I run VS2008, Oracle Enterprise x86, Eclipse, Tomcat, Apache, MySQL, Rails/Mongrel, and a million other 32-bit apps, they all work fine.

In addition, I have a dozen win2003 x64 servers in the field (they're still a minority) that work just fine with 32-bit apps. Most of them run IIS in 32-bit mode because some app they require includes only 32-bit components.

I think someone may have given you bad information about x64 windows that you took for gospel.

And generally, you dont have to buy x64 windows as a separate product. Most corporate targeted systems that support x64 (like my hp laptop) shipped with both x86 and x64 Vista discs, and driver discs for both. Every server I've ever bought that came with an MS operating system also had that.

'ever changing ribbon'?? What does that even mean?

I know of no applications where the ribbon 'changes'.

It's amazing how much ignorance there is on /., and how well that ignorance gets modded up.

There are many perpetual licenses in the MS world.

OEM and Retail, for starters, which covers probably 99% of consumers and small businesses.

For education and large orgs, there is volume licensing. These also tend to be of the yearly subscription variety, but they also have 'buy out' options to stop paying a subscription and pay for the perpetual license.

Please go at least do minimal research here before posting. It's one thing to say that the MS licensing system is ridiculously over-complicated and hard to use (which is true), you dont need to go making random untrue-crap up.

Care to explain this statement? It doesnt seem to make any sense.

Do some research. At the time Windows was very young, they tried a number of config storage systems, and the binary db was the only one they found that was fast and small enough for the computers of the time.

It was a solution for the situation of the time, and like many things MS, thats now locked into the de-facto standard forever.

This is not to suggest that windows Registry is a great solution, but the answer to 'WTF?' is clear.

Thats garbage and you know it.

Do you go to addons.mozilla.org for your flash plugin for FF? What about for your JRE plugin? How about PDF?

Addons.mozilla.org is for extensions to FF, not system-wide plugins. The .NET ClickOnce is clearly an example of the latter.

I wouldnt describe my point of view as 'optimism' and I dont have opinions about corporations. What really gets my goat in these conversations is how much people get emotionally tied up in these things, and hugely anthropomorphize companies.

I dont see MS in a rosy light, I dont see it in any light at all. I've been dealing with them in a computing environment for 15+ years. I find them to be fairly predictable, even in their less-than-well-thought-out moves (like this one). Sometimes they act in a useful manner, sometimes in an aggravating manner. What I dont get is why anyone thinks they're any different than any other business.

But mostly, on a topic like this, its just because its so damn pointless.

Yes, they made a bad choice of packaging. The rest of it all is generally a 'good thing' for the vast, vast, majority of their customers. I would bet that on the order of 95% of their customers would prefer NOT to have to take any specific action (other than approval of the update in WSUS or their package manager) to get this functionality. Many, many businesses wanted this. For a long time.

But then you get some of the slashdotters, who dont have a freaking clue what they're talking about. Dont know how FF plugins/extensions work. Dont know what .NET is, or what ClickOnce is. Have never had to distribute an update to an extant piece of software used by large numbers of customers in their lives. And yet, despite their gargantuan ignorance, they come on here and talk about how the sky is falling because of this.

It's mostly the rank ignorance of most of the posters, thinking that OMG M$ hacked Firefox! and that sort of emotional and uninformed garbage.

Furthermore, anyone who has worked in a large organization in a position of responsibility can understand how some of these things happen. Nearly all large corporations are somewhat dysfunctional, and its extremely hard to make sure that every single one of your employees always acts perfectly, not only for the majority of your customers, but for the rabid but vocal minority, who will start bonfires and froth at the mouth if you make the slightest mistake, even with the best of intentions.

Lastly, to get back to the matter at hand, all someone has to do is use their common sense here. There is no motive or incentive to do this for MS. There's no secret benefit, and in fact, its only very recently in their history that they did provide interop software like this, to make their stuff work on other platforms (in this case, the browser being the platform).

But a common sense test says to any rational person that there wasnt a malicious intent here, because there's no gain! Despite the promiscuous mob memes that float around here, there really isnt a viral nature to technologies like .NET, where MS somehow magically gains if they can slip the software into other platforms. In fact, given how many people have been clamoring for ClickOnce on other browser, and how long they've been asking for this, this was a rare good-move by MS to give their customers what they asked for. The only downside was they made a mistake in distribution that blew up in their faces (at least did so for the tiny, tiny percentage of people who would get upset over this).