German, Romanian, Vietnamese-American (1st generation immigrant), Chinese-American (1st generation immigrant), Spanish, Iranian, French, Australian, South African, Indian, British, Russian. What's that? The nationalities of the people who sit in my hallway in the computer security department of one of the biggest software companies in the United States. OK, admittedly there also four or five true red-blooded Americans in the hallway but they are definitely a small minority.
We are absolutely feeling the lack of US geeks. They are rare enough in software development but even rarer in computer security. We have several open positions but it's mostly non-Americans who apply. We are basically excited about every application from a US citizen we get. This makes hiring much easier and we do not have to wait until October 1st when the new H-1B visa period kicks in.
Now, I have speculated that maybe the company I work for is just unpopular with US citizens but then I recently interviewed with a Bay Area company with a much sexier public image and it's even worse there. I talked to members of a team of 12 people. 11 of them were not Americans.
In fact, we spent the lunch interview speculating about the causes of this situation. In the end we considered it most likely that the title of engineer is simply not sexy in the United States. In other parts of the world like some countries in Europe and especially Asia the job title of engineer carries a good amount of social respect and commands a respectable salary. That is not the case in the United States (well, the salary is actually good, but not the reputation) where the reputation ladder is topped by jobs like doctor or lawyer. It is not surprising that the smartest students would rather get into those jobs.
Anyway, in the light of all this I keep being amused that the US three-letter agencies are advertising their computer security positions so aggressively. With the current US talent I am seeing in the wild there is no way they will be able to fill these positions in any way that can compete with, say, the Chinese hacker legions. Rather, I foresee national interest waiver greencards for people like those in my hallway.
> That is not the case in the United States ... where the reputation ladder is topped by jobs like doctor or lawyer
That would be a sample of environments where higher education is strongly pushed. In the area I grew up in, the amount parents spent pushing their kids to excel in athletics above anything else is stupid. I know a 6th-grade teacher who complains about kids not having any time for homework because they participate in non-school sports.
It requires education, but not necessarily schooling.
My friend's father worked on some later Apollo missions and ended up leading a Titan engineering group with no college degree. He was a damned good engineer, though. If it were possible to earn mathematics degrees by test taking, he'd easily have had a graduate degree.
In the beginning he was a technician (which didn't require a degree), and once during crunch time he literally fixed a buggy electrical component an engineer was showing to his boss in front of his eyes. In his words after that one lucky break, he never looked back and just kept working his way up, excelling and proving himself in each position. After a point, the fact that he had no degree made his managers take more notice of him. Clearly a man who had to work his way up through several levels he wasn't supposed to be eligible for had something unique.
It's difficult, especially in the defense industry, but sometimes talent wins out over credentials.
Funny. That is totally different in Europe. Engineering very much requires higher education, which definitely includes at least a basic understanding of business, economics, law etc. and of course good knowledge of physics, mathematics and deep insight in some engineering field.
This is usually taught as a bachelor's degree. (Bachelor of Engineering)
That said, there are some able men and women who carry out engineering jobs without a degree (even though IIRC they can not call themselves engineers)
I was referring only to US tendencies to perceive certain professions as more prestigious. Doctors and lawyers have more prestige compared to other professions if you only include those prestigious professions that mandate higher education.
You are getting close: List the characteristics of the usual professions and then conclude that in the US software is not a profession. It's even less of a profession than being a plumber or electrician since can need a license for each of these.
Lawyers? They have a cute professional rule that a lawyer working as a lawyer must be supervised by a lawyer. So, no stuffed suit, business middle manager types need apply to supervise lawyers in an organization.
What's wrong with being international? My parents were once international geeks -- their company sponsored their green card and they've been living in the States for over 50 years. They both received their PhD's from US universities and work in research firms. They consider themselves more American than any other "true" red blooded American even though they weren't born here.
I think the real problem is our immigration policy.
It's not that there's anything wrong with internationals, but rather that when a team of 12 has 11 internationals you know that our country is having issues sustaining it's own tech sector. We may not always be able to ship in brilliant minds from Moscow and Berlin and Bombay to save our butts.
It's simple. We're not short of "brilliant minds", not at all. Instead, the employers want to have a shortage of a simple word, a common, single, two syllable word, MONEY. It's not about brilliant minds but about money, just the money.
The answer is dirty: First, computing is relatively new. So, the 'old power structure' was surprised when people in computing started getting paid well enough to buy a house and more than some not very well paid low level managers.
But the start of this was not computing but math, physical science, and engineering during the sudden high demands in such fields in the 1960s due to both the Cold War and the Space Race. There, too, the old power structure was surprised and angry. Technical people were called 'The New Mandarins'. The old power structure, say, Ivy League history majors, were torqued.
Part of the situation is somewhat general: The 'suits' still want to be like in a Ford plant, say, 80 years ago when the suits knew more and the subordinates were there just to add labor, muscle, and sweat to the work of the suits. Then in the technical fields, suddenly the subordinates knew more than the suits, e.g., about Maxwell's equations for battlefield or satellite communications, about the fast Fourier transform and digital filtering, about orbit determination for navigation satellites, and about computers.
Yes, people in law and medicine also know more, but they are in recognized professions set apart from the hierarchy of an old Ford plant, but computing was not, was, say, in the CFO's group or the manufacturing group. Bummer.
So, some suit had a bright idea, "To keep people from wasting so much time learning higher level languages, we will use only assembler and, thus, save lots of money.". Right! "Also, programmers get paid much more than typists. So, we will hire typists for the typing and won't let programmers type.". With the ROFL, soon the suits saw that they were in deep, fuming, smelly, sticky stuff.
So, how can a suit survive? Sure: For each technical job, hire about three technical people. Then none of the technical people can have 'leverage' over the suit. Of course, for this, need MANY more technical people.
Second, the US DoD actually believed that for national security, the US should increase the supply of labor in technical fields and got Congress to agree. Then the NSF started throwing money around to this end and with considerable success.
By the 1970s, US citizens began to see that there was no pot of gold at the end of the picture of a rainbow drawn by the NSF and heavily quit going for those technical fields.
Third, but the NSF kept trying. Their next semi-bright idea was to write into academic research grant contracts that students must be supported. When US citizens wouldn't come, the universities got the students from other countries, at first, heavily Taiwan and India.
Fourth, when the computer industry caught wind of all this, they pushed for the H1-B visa program and got a big supply of essentially 'indentured labor' they could, and did, exploit.
Net, fields such as law, medicine, pharmacy, roofing, carpentry, pizza making, machine tool making, auto repair, accounting, etc. don't get the attention from all of the DoD, big employers, Congress, the NSF, and the universities.
So, net, computing is heavily 'targeted' by all of the DoD, ..., the universities.
E.g,, the targeting pushes for more in, say, electronic engineering. Thus, often there is a better career as an electrician than with a Ph.D. in electronic engineering:
At least in some states, the electrician needs a license and, likely, has liability, and the Ph.D. nearly never has either. So, the electrician is closer to having a 'profession'.
As an employee in industry, the Ph.D. will likely discover that before 40 he has to move into management or get fired. Yes, Virginia, they fire Ph.D. EEs. So, by age 40, only about 1 in 100 is in management.
Fired, the Ph.D. will discover that the electrician of the same age can have a nice business, several employees, a nice house, and take off Friday-Sunday, even if he doesn't bother to have his name in the Yellow Pages, really can't be fired, and isn't vulneable to age discrimination, office politics, industry M&A, Toshiba beating GE, etc.
Really, more generally, with 'globalization', the US citizens who get rich are okay but most of the others need a geographical barrier to entry. E.g., an electrician is not in competition with anyone more than, say, 100 miles away. So, if he does okay in a radius of 100 miles, then he can do okay.
In business, the Ph.D. hss only a very narrow list of candidate employers, heavily the US 'military-industrial complex', while the electrician has a huge range of candidate clients and can do okay as long as the whole economy is not in the tank. E.g., if there is new construction, then he does that. If not, then he does renovations.
Seeing such things, many US citizens are avoiding the fields targeted by the Federal government and, also, fields vulnerable to globalization. Net, at present, for nearly everyone in high school now, they better plan on a career as a Main Street sole proprietor.
Thank you NSF for 'targeting' technical fields and driving out US citizens and Foggy Bottom for 'globalization' as a source economic carrots to try to make nasty foreign countries 'behave' -- e.g,, give away much of the US bath towel market to Pukistan to make them 'behave'. How well are they 'behaving'?
Mo big gumment, Ma!
The less big gumment does, the fewer really big mistakes they make.
But the flip side of this disaster is an historic opportunity and right in the center of HN: Be an entrepreneur much as for a Main Street business but also technical. Maybe get venture funding and maybe not, but in any event be a technical CEO. Then can beat the pants off any competitors run by non-technical suits.
Unfortunately reforming immigration policy is not a very popular issue and neither party has any intent to solve it. It's a much easier to get votes by saying we want to protect US jobs than to say we are protecting US interestes by making it a more attractive destination for international talent.
I've heard there is an oversupply of lawyers, and if you look at bay area wages compared to many lawyers/doctors, they can be close, and we're not stuck in overpriced school for a double amount of time.
Yeah, I think the high hourly wages belies the fact that the lawyers must be underemployed, unless they're manufacturing work for themselves. That latter part is a pretty chilling thought, actually...
Beware: I've done some of the world's best work in computer security, e.g., nicely beyond
David J. Marchette, 'Computer Intrusion Detection: A Statistical Viewpoint', ISBN 0-387-95281-0, Springer-Verlag, New York, 2001.
Yes, my work became peer reviewed, original research published in one of the better Elsevier journals of computer science,
And I have a long background from Yorktown Heights and in DoD work.
Still I discovered that I was absolutely, positively, permanently unemployable in anything having anything at all to do with computing. Period. In business, on Wall Street, near DC for national security, for anything. Why? I was over 45.
So, I'm starting my own business. My target customers won't care that I'm over 45.
For a physician or lawyer, being over 45 is a great advantage -- they know more, and the target customers want the gray hairs. The knowledge is, in principal and can be in practice, e.g., my work in computer security, a big advantage. Still in computing gray hairs are worse than a felony conviction, literally.
This issue of age discrimination is a big reason you see so many immigrants in computing. Then, seeing so many immigrants, US citizens commonly sense that there's something wrong in that field and stay out.
So, why so many immigrants? Sure, it's easy, just as in, say,
where the drum beat (as recently from Mayor Bloomberg,
on AVC.com, in some banker before a committee of Congress, etc.) is for a big 'shortage'. The same was true during The Great Depression: Growers in California circulated posters in the rest of the country claiming a big 'shortage' of farm workers in California. The sheep came and got fleeced.
Then, with the drum beat for 'shortage', as you notice, the drum beat will be for more immigration to meet the shortage.
This got started when the NSF decided to flood computing with immigrants and did this by writing into university research grant contracts that so many students had to be supported. Then the H1-B situation came along and filled whole departments with immigrants and, often, implicit signs "No US citizens need apply".
Computing? The US Federal government 'targets' the field and tries hard to manipulate the supply and demand. So, well informed US citizens stay the hell out.
For my business, what the US Federal government is doing to computing does not hurt. Actually I will have opportunities to exploit immigrants but will refuse to do so. Instead, I can hire some gray hairs! Okay by me!
But generally, young US citizens should stay the hell out of computing unless they can see their way clear to owning their own, successful business with a wide, deep "moat" (see Buffett).
The only way to be sure gumment doesn't make a mess out of our economy is to be sure our gumment stays out of our economy. E.g., The Great Recession, started by what some selected members of Congress told Fannie and Freddy -- back any junk paper. So, bubble, crash, wipe out the ability of the US banks to play their role in the US economy, bring on The Great Recession, and run up the national debt by a few trillion dollars. Yup, gumment in action again.
Computing and gumment? Drive US citizens out of computing.
Semi-, pseudo-, quasi-great: Computing is an 'essential' field especially for US national security, so drive out US citizens. Yup, gumment's best again!
We are absolutely feeling the lack of US geeks. They are rare enough in software development but even rarer in computer security. We have several open positions but it's mostly non-Americans who apply. We are basically excited about every application from a US citizen we get. This makes hiring much easier and we do not have to wait until October 1st when the new H-1B visa period kicks in.
Now, I have speculated that maybe the company I work for is just unpopular with US citizens but then I recently interviewed with a Bay Area company with a much sexier public image and it's even worse there. I talked to members of a team of 12 people. 11 of them were not Americans.
In fact, we spent the lunch interview speculating about the causes of this situation. In the end we considered it most likely that the title of engineer is simply not sexy in the United States. In other parts of the world like some countries in Europe and especially Asia the job title of engineer carries a good amount of social respect and commands a respectable salary. That is not the case in the United States (well, the salary is actually good, but not the reputation) where the reputation ladder is topped by jobs like doctor or lawyer. It is not surprising that the smartest students would rather get into those jobs.
Anyway, in the light of all this I keep being amused that the US three-letter agencies are advertising their computer security positions so aggressively. With the current US talent I am seeing in the wild there is no way they will be able to fill these positions in any way that can compete with, say, the Chinese hacker legions. Rather, I foresee national interest waiver greencards for people like those in my hallway.