Let me clarify. Usually there's a list of skills an employer wants and the chance of anybody's background matching perfectly is astronomic. There will be some from that list that require learning new tool sets.

If a citizen matches 3 of 6 and the visa candidate matches 4 or 6, is that really a "shortage of techies"? Of course we all want exactly what we want. But there are societal consequences of letting co's be prima-donna's.

Actually, that quote would probably come form the gerbil's description of Rich. Rich apparently had the opposite view.

There must be a million jokes to be made with that title.

A manager's time is typically very limited. They have to deal with technical issues (the domain), office politics, and administrative stuff like budgets, vacation requests, procurement approvals, etc.

Is it better they spend a slot of time snooping on an employee, or discussing known issues with them face to face?

And those not familiar with the tasks at hand for a group will judge employees on superficial things typically, meaning the employee will spend more effort on acting and posing for a domain-ignorant monitor.

Thus, those who do know the details of the job are probably better served with direct old-fashioned communication, and those who don't know are ill-suited to make a good judgement.

Whippings also improve business. Ask Roman ship operators.

The criteria for "no citizen is qualified" needs to be more realistic, especially during busts. These company-specific "tool stack fits" are ridiculous. Somebody who knows Python can typically learn Php in a few months, for example, and not having paid Php experience should NOT be a legitimate reason to discard such a citizen.

Maybe citizens should have a right to protest rejections in court etc. Why should the system just take a co's word for it?

Also, visa workers typically don't (yet) have families or don't bring families to their job city to distract them. Their goal is often to make boat-loads of money for half a decade, relative to their home currency, and then have a nice nest-egg to raise a family etc. later. Thus, they ARE more likely to be dedicated and focused than the equivalent citizen.

Corporations find families distracting.

IT has historically had boom and bust cycles. I have no real problem with visa workers during a boom, but after the dot-com bust in the early 2000's enough didn't go home, and development jobs were hard to find on the west coast. I had to take scrappy contracts from shady agencies to survive. I think I spent more time in court trying to get my paychecks than doing actual IT work.

Nobody can agree on how to measure quality "software engineering". Outside of machine performance, code is really about communicating with other developers more so than communicating with machines. Machines can run anything explicitly defined, whether it's C++, machine code, or Brainfuck; but human grokking is much more sensitive to syntax, organization, etc., and varies per mind. This is the realm of psychology and other "soft" sciences that are difficult or expensive to do practical research in.

the first A.I. yawn

Maybe the new rules can specify that the target (set) must be specified in advanced and that it's possible to cancel the mission after deployment if the deployment lasts longer than say 2 minutes.

So they can grow to Borg-ship size to keep Moores going without shrinking transistors?......oh oh

I'm surprised Moore's Law lasted this long. Other bottlenecks seem to be more of a factor of late such that I thought CPU's would take a bit of a rest due to diminishing practical returns, analogous to a Ferrari stuck in traffic.

I don't know if such would make my PC run faster, but it sounds delicious!

"You broke my rainbow, waaaaah"