I'm not suggesting you embellish you experience with linux or OS X, just saying that it's not enough to convince me to give you the keys to those kinds of systems.

It seems you have a couple of different problems related to getting hired that don't have much to do with H1-Bs. You didn't completely make the transition to management so you have neither the training (MBA) nor quite enough experience that would make it easy to get hired into a IT management position.

The other thing (just based on what you've mentioned) is that you have a set of relatively commonly available technical skills that might even be a touch out of date. I didn't see you list a skill that's either in high demand now or that would be in the near future. That's why I asked about virtualization and security. Think about this for a minute. With Amazon, Google, or MS Azure, I can configure a server in the cloud and have it available in minutes. Those services are only going to get cheaper, easier, and more powerful. How does that change what it means to be a sysadmin and are you prepared for that future?

I'm sure you've heard this before, but you need to be able to put something on your resume to help you stand out from the crowd. That's what I would be looking to do if I were in your shoes. I'm not saying that it's easy. I'm at an age that if things were to go South at my current company, it would be a challenge to find a comparable position. I feel relatively secure but I am looking at getting myself a little insurance like an MBA or masters in software engineering.

What about VMWare or Hyper-V?

You may be right about companies like GE and Erie, I guess I don't know. What I can tell you is that if my company posts a position for a Windows help desk or admin position, we get plenty of resumes. Enough that I think that there are just a lot of people available with those skills or at least claiming to have those skills. Good Linux admins are harder to find. Unfortunately when somebody puts "experience with..." on a resume, I take it as code for "I have very limited experience with...".

Whether or not H1-Bs are making it harder for you, I think you would be well served to branch out into other areas and/or start participating in meetups/user groups to network. Given the movement towards cloud services, I think there is going to be less demand for the traditional sysadmins anyway. There will be a need but it's going to be in larger data centers and it's going to require more specialized skills.

If I were a sysadmin today and trying to enhance my marketability, I'd be seriously looking at getting information security experience and certification.

What sort of systems have you been an admin for? Windows Server? Windows Deskop? Linux?, Other?

I guess what I'm trying to get at is whether or not H-1Bs really have anything to do with the trouble you and others have had finding employment. Or is it more of a matter of some IT jobs and skills being in less demand.

My very limited experience with H1-Bs is that for small companies anyway, it wouldn't be worth the hassle. The last time I had an opening for a software developer, I only got a few good local candidates. There was a student who was about to graduate who told me that he would have needed an H1-B visa to stay. I had no real intention of hiring him but I was curious about the process so I checked into it. Let's just say that if you need some help in the next month or two, that is not the route to go. I'm sure large companies have the staff necessary to deal with all the paperwork and legal hoops that need to be jumped through. A lot of companies aren't going to bother.

What kind of tech jobs do you have experience with?

Just curious. Are experienced IT workers with up to date skills really not able to find jobs? What about programmers specifically ("IT Worker" can mean a lot of things)?

I'm assuming that age discrimination is impacting some of these people, but what about relatively young software developers? How many of you are young and talented software developers with at least of few years of experience and are having trouble finding work?

If you have mouths to feed, bills to pay, and no health insurance, one may be coerced into accepting crappy pay and crappy conditions rather than it being truly voluntary.

Also since you feel that negotiating pay is reasonable system you must also recognize that often in negotiations one side has greater leverage or bargaining power than the other. If I feel that I'm in a weaker position shouldn't I be allowed to strengthen it? And wouldn't that include bargaining collectively rather than as an individual?

I don't know how you can say unions are off topic. It's been shown that unionization both increases the prevalence of premium pay for overtime hours and reduces the extent and incidence of overtime hours.

Yes, unions can and did greedy. That doesn't mean that they aren't valuable.

As more workplaces in the 30's and 40's became unionized, the middle class grew. A public and free high school education was enough to get you a decent job, a good work/life balance and a pension. Not only did that benefit the workers themselves, but those workers had disposable income that they could spend on other products and services, which meant more jobs for other people. These same people could afford to send their kids to college which fueled further innovation.

If an employer needed more production, there was a financial disincentive for them to have their employees work overtime, so they had to hire more people. These people also made a living wage, didn't require welfare, paid taxes, and contributed to the economic vitality of their community.

All in all it worked pretty well for everybody.

But employers are always looking for ways to cut costs and labor is typically a company's biggest expense. So then we got more automation, jobs being outsourced, and union busting. Big companies paying low wages came in to displace smaller ones "to create jobs". But the number of new jobs created is never as many as promised nor do they pay as well. Those jobs that do get created often get moved someplace else or cut altogether when the company merges with another one.

Today, outside of the few union jobs left, it takes specialized education, one you have to pay dearly for, to make a living wage. Graduating college students start out in huge debt and are encouraged to start saving now for their retirement because nobody has pensions anymore and social security is expected to disappear. Hopefully they can get a job that allows them to pay off their student loans before they need to start saving for their kids college education. And hopefully they won't find their job outsourced or outdated by some form of automation before they have saved up enough to retire.

I'm sorry, but I much preferred the outlook for joe and jane six pack when unions were actually relevant. And I'm afraid automation and outsourcing has started whittling away at white collar jobs too. How long before only the most specialized and expensive skills to obtain will be valued enough to pay a living wage for ?

Everything is worth exactly as much as someone is willing to pay for it, but they are sure happy to pay a lot less if they can.

Decades ago workers figured out that they collectively they have a lot more negotiating power than individually and companies have been fighting that ever since.

I'm telling you this as a Father of an 11 year old daughter and a 15 year old son. First off social conditioning is real and there are pitfalls. It's disturbing that a lot of people don't seem to recognize that. At the same time I wouldn't be overly concerned that your daughter wants to be a princess. If pretending to be a princess is fun for her, let her enjoy that. At the same time you should be introducing her to things that she wouldn't find through targeted advertising or in the girl's section of a toy store.

There are lots of science activities she can enjoy while dressed up as Ariel. As she gets older, involve her in your hobbies. Kids love to be included in adult activities. At the same time, don't get her toys she's not old enough for. That will just make her frustrated. Also don't try to talk her out of doing the girly things her friends like, but be vigilant about exposing her to other stuff.

Here's an example of where I very nearly missed the boat. I got a Lego Mindstorm set for my son and I to play with. The only mistake I made is not getting it sooner. He now thinks of himself as too old for Legos so he won't do anything with it on his own though he gladly helps me with building and programming the robots. My daughter never showed any interest in it. She is not in any way a shrinking wall flower. If she wants to do something she will typically ask.

But recognizing that the window for this might be small, I just decided to ask her if she wanted to help me one day. She was soooo happy to help. She's pretty good at it too. The sad thing is that if I were to have never asked, she'd never gotten into it.

The beauty is that there's no wiring, you don't need a contractor. The kind of system I'm looking at use devices that communicate wirelessly using zigbee or z-wave protocols (not wifi). There have long life LED bulbs with built in wireless capability today. You just screw them in like any other bulb. Yes they are expensive, but costs will come way down.

I agree these are not something most grandmas are going to use anymore than they would have used a smartphone in 2005 or even today. That doesn't mean there won't be a huge market in the coming years as costs come down and ease of use improves. My mom died 5 years ago having never really used a computer let alone grasped the Internet, but the Internet was still huge and impacted her. Further, one thing that have could have helped her independence later in life was an Internet connected pill dispenser. She had a pill dispenser that we paid a service to keep track of. It would know for example if she hadn't taken her pills on a given day and call one of her family if she didn't. Let me qualify that. It would sort of know. A much better system would have allowed the family to monitor it directly and leave the service out of it. The thing was a bear to program because it had a clunky interface. A web interface would have been much nicer. Incorporating a camera that would capture her removing the pills would have been another improvement.

That's just scratching the surface. There are all kinds of automation related things that could be done to help people with various disabilities stay in their homes.

Then there's security. Think about it. People today spend good money on complex and expensive security systems that aren't very user friendly and don't provide near as much convenience as the newer "smart home" products that are becoming available. Home security is where many of these systems will get a foothold. Once they're in the home there is so much more potential.

Back in the 90's when the public first started venturing out on to the Internet, I doubt many of us realized the potential it had and the ways in would change the world. Think about what something like twitter alone has done.

No, but you might want to know that your sump just quit working while out of town on vacation. Or you might want a little alarm to go off on the phone next to your bed if it's midnight and the garage door has been left open since 10:00 pm. Even better if you could shut it via the phone rather than having to get out of bed.

Personally, I'd want to know if 10 windows in the house are open and somebody turned on the AC, or a closet light has been left on since morning.

I work in the energy efficiency industry and our ability to collect data remotely from sensors monitoring the performance of HVAC and lighting systems in large buildings has saved us a ton of money and time.

At my kids' K through 8 school, they had 1 hour a week of Spanish class just so the school could say they taught a second language. I'd just as soon they didn't have it. Not because I don't think a second language is valuable, but because I don't think one hour a week accomplishes much. Middle school kids had no recess. I think they'd be better off using that hour and lengthening the school day a bit to get some recess in there.

Further, the kids spend much less time on music, art, and gym than when I was a kid. Personally, given all the time that was devoted to practicing cursive, I'd say there are more important things that kids can be doing with their study time. It's not that I don't think it has any value, but to me it's less valuable than things that are already lacking.

I have no idea how many models of cars of trucks are available in my area but I imagine it's quite a few.

Just a wild guess, but I'd say anywhere from 40 to 80% of them would be unsuitable for our family due to cost and features, yet they still exist and many are very popular. What I'm saying is that the fact that an e-Golf wouldn't work well for everyone doesn't mean it couldn't work very well for a large number of people.

My family might be a good example. We live in a city and are are fairly close to everything that we need to get to on a regular basis. In fact, I ride my bike to work most days (about 6 miles each way). We have one small fuel efficient car that's getting up there in age and one mid-sized SUV we use when hauling more stuff, more people, or when the roads are bad.

We don't put a lot of miles on either vehicle but the small car is driven less than 8,000 miles a year, - under 22 miles per day on average. We very rarely drive it over 90 miles a day and could easily avoid it.

So essentially ENIAC is lost.

What's left is only a quarter of the original machine that's been turned into some light show. The other 3/4 of the panels are owned by other people or are gone entirely. While I'm not saying it wasn't worth doing or that it wasn't hard work, it's not what I would call "refurbished".

It's like digging up a skeleton and having someone rig up a motion detector to play recorded phrases and move the jaw as people walk by it.

Unfortunately there seems to be a period of time where things are just old and past their usefulness, - their historical significance takes more time for people to appreciate. I understand that a true restoration would be hugely impractical, but it would be cool.

When it came to the iPhone, Apple wanted control over the safety, and to a limited extent, the quality of the 3rd party software available. That protects the consumer and Apple. Concentrating all the 3rd party software in one place also made it quickly appear that there was an abundance of it. Further, it's an additional revenue stream for Apple.