I saw some comments about me on another blog that made me laugh. Just for the record, I'm not in any way affiliated with Harris Miller, Jim Webb, or George Allen. I'm certainly not an "apologist" for any of them. As with every other topic I write about, I'm just thinking out loud. (Also, I've been blogging off and on since about 1998!)

I've skimmed over Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage, by Dr. Norman Matloff, a link given to me by The Modern Patriot in the comments. Dr. Matloff is an old-school Unix guy and a computer science professor at the University of California at Davis. His paper is basically about how the industry prefers to exploit H-1B programmers rather than hire American programmers. I've found it to be a well-written, thoughtful analysis of the industry. I haven't had a chance to read every word of it in detail yet, though, because, well, it's really long. :)

I agree with most of Dr. Matloff's points so far. I agree that talk of a "programmer shortage" is bogus, but on the other hand, based just on my own meager experience, good programmers, foreign or domestic, are pretty rare. (Fortunately, the industry works hard to dumb down programming tools for everyone... but that's another story.) Age discrimination among programmers is indeed real, but I think some of the blame for that lies with young programmers. For some strange reason, all the ones I've dealt with seem perfectly willing to work 80-hour weeks without any overtime.

While I have no doubt that the industry (from the big corporations all the way down to small businesses) tries hard to exploit programmers, I also think programmers should have some burden of responsibility for "checking out" the place they intend to work. One shouldn't just blindly accept an offer from any company unless they're willing to accept the consequences. I think the IT industry is somewhat like the recording industry in this regard. Young artists will often accept any recording deal just to have a shot at stardom, then find out later that they've been screwed out of their life savings. To me, this shows two things: That record executives are greedy and exploitive, and that young artists are gullible and impatient. If the young artists weren't gullible and impatient, though, I think there would be less exploitation. The solution for that, it seems to me, is education. Not necessarily school education but just a general "awareness" of the problem.

With regard to the Virginia Senate race, so far the H-1B issue doesn't have much of an impact for me. George Allen voted against the immigration bill last week, which increases the H-1B limit from 65,000 to 115,000, but that's about the only good thing he's done in the last six years, so it doesn't mitigate his basic evil-ness. Harris Miller probably would have voted for the bill, but then again he's said that he favors a "meaningful law that penalizes employers" of illegal immigrants, which I agree with. Jim Webb is conspicuously silent on immigration, so I have no idea how he would have voted. In any case, it seems unlikely the Senate will be revisiting the H-1B issue again for quite some time, so I don't see how Miller or Webb could make things any worse at least in the next six years.

The offshore outsourcing issue is a whole different story, though. I certainly can't compete against a programmer in India making 45 cents a day. So I'll be investigating that next.

P.S. I ran across an interesting page, A Legislative History of H-1B and Other Immigrant Work Visas, which shows that even the proposed new 115,000 cap on H-1Bs is still less than the 195,000 cap that was in effect in 2003.