Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage

I think one of the points of the article was that companies are not willing to take someone not fully qualified AND train them proves there is no shortage. If there was shortage, a company will be willing to go out of the way to hire someone. It's much cheaper to hire someone with the just the right skills, and since a company can do that (even with some work for the hiring manager) and get someone further supports the argument.

Regarding your last point, you don't seem to have an email address in your profile.

Is this job on the east or west coast (or somewhere in between)?

Especially considering that job applicants submit resumes to lots of firms. I think Joel has an article about this, how every firm thinks they hire "the top 2%" because they get 50 times more resumes than they actually hire. But a lot of job applicants and recruiters are spamming their resume to lots of different employers in the hope of just getting one "hit." So it works both ways.

> an aspiring entrepreneur reading Hacker News might like the idea of having a cheap labor pool to hire from some day

You mean an aspiring exploiter and member of the parasite class?

There is a false dichotomy between balancing for cheap labor and demoralizing the Average American Joe. First, I don't want to hire cheap labor. My first boss did just that (especially with the foreign kind) and his company is now under water. Cheap labor doesn't work for programming.

My last job, the company's still doing quite well, beat Q1 expectations by 50%, and we did something like fifty to a hundred phone screens a month for an average of 1 hire a quarter. That's up to three hundred phone calls for ONE goddamn programmer. Do you know how frustrating that is?

What I don't buy about the argument of the Average Joe becoming cynical is that I just don't see a lot of hard work. Binary search is something that you should have learned in freshman year of college, and yet it's still a staple of programming interviews because people regularly fail it.

There are bad apples all around and the situation remains the same with foreign programmers. There are actually very few good foreign-born programmers, just as there are very few good American-born programmers. The catch is that they've all been spoon-fed all the algorithms knowledge so you have to pose your questions in other ways, see if they can creatively apply their knowledge to real world tasks like flipping through a phone book, etc.

In all, I think the problem is more one of PR. We need to get the word out that if you are good, there Will Indeed be a job for you out there. If you love doing it, then stop being so scared of the hordes from India.

Are those startups lobbying for higher H-1B quotas?

This article, and the one in the thread you linked to, are talking about large corporations, not startups. There will always be a shortage at the high end. That's what makes it the high end.

Incidentally, the article you indirectly linked to quotes a Duke professor whose opinion largely agrees with the opinion of the UC Davis professor. Last I checked, Duke was a pretty well-regarded university, so I guess that means he's right. Or is there a flaw in that logic?

What is your basis for saying this?

There are a lot of arguments, citing a lot of studies, in this document. If nothing else, he has thought about this issue pretty thoroughly. If you disagree, something more than a snide remark about the quality of a UC Davis degree would be more convincing.