Not to get off topic, but America has 10 x more people than Japan does and 20-30 million of those people don't pay taxes. America can't afford to foot that bill.

Speaking of Japan, that place has a worse work ethic than Americans. By worse I mean, work too much. As Americans we have our priorities out of order.

I don't give verbal recommendations. I give written ones and have management sign off on it. So if they refuse it, my professional reputation isn't in jeopardy when something goes wrong. When all eyes are looking at me, I politely bring up my recommendations.

The buck should always stop at the top. I never allow anyone to pass the buck to me.

Hahahahaha! It isn't 1996 any more.

If you aren't from India, your precious little "Computer Science" degree and $1 couldn't buy you a value meal at Mickey D's. If you are lucky enough to land an interview with less than two Indians in the room, then you'll simply be undercut by a paper-certified hack or a high-school drop-out who's been freelancing for three years who will under cut you by almost half.

I hate to sound like an asshole but that's the state of affairs in IT at this point. IT is seen as an expense by CIOs and IT managers who are mostly bean-counters at heart. When you interview for a IT position, the hiring manager doesn't give a fuck about your experience with .Net or Java (let the technical guys in the room grill you for a couple of hours), he sees you as an expense. How cheaply can he get you? When it comes to the new CPA in Finance the guy has to be a whiz with numbers, they'll pay him whatever he wants. But the IT guy is just an expense with the rest of the IT crap (why do we need to spend $4,000 a piece on servers every three years any ways?).

I'm a hardware guy (Sys Admin) and I don't have to worry about Indians as much as I worry about paper-certified hacks still in their Applebees outfits who spend 3 grand on a bootcamp and then call themselves "Engineers" (see, their "Cisco Certified" polo shirt proves it). They'll undercut me in a heartbeat.

$40k a year might not be alot of money to a kid fresh out of college with a B.S. in CS and a 3.9 GPA, but it is alot of money when you're used to making $15k waiting tables or you transfer American dollars back to India.

IT as a career is dead. Your B.S. degree is useless. I would suggest that you minor in business because that's the future of the American CS graduates: Business Analysis. All of the programming will be offshored and all of the hardware stuff will be handled by people with vendor certifications. A CS degree alone will be useless.

Expect CS programs to get a major overhaul and be consolidated with Business programs. So instead of a B.S. in CS you'll have a B.S. in Business Analysis which will be a more math and computer-oriented business major.

Get with the program and cast away your obsolete viewpoint. The IT of the 90's is dead...in America at least. In India it's booming.