Road Rage

So I dropped by the subway on kapahulu that advertises "Open 9am till 12 midnight!" for a snack at 11pm today. It was closed. There is something so hawaiian about that...sorry, cannot kokua, not so late...

Changing gears, the purpose of this blog entry is solely to vent on the work visa situation. It seems h1s in academic positions such as postdocs cannot simply transfer to industry jobs. This is unlike the taxi driver on an h1 who can flit from one employer to another, or be wholly illegal pending citizenship by default or amnesty or whatever. Academic h1s have to again go through the annual cap and start work in October. Nor can they use any unused OPT lest by chance the sysem work too fairly. Since this year's visas are finished, nothing can be done until next year. Catch-22.

I've been trying to rationalize that this is nothing. There is a whole world out there caught in the same vortex of American stupidity, but in much worse ways. There are tiny bin ladens squirming out of vaginas across the world, fully formed with vengeful beards because of this stupidity. People are getting their asses blown off in Lebanon and British Pakistanis are one step away from hiding nitroglycerin in their bladders, ready to explode in a shower of urine inside American aircraft. My problems are nothing. And here I am sitting in Hawaii complaining I cannot accept offers to work on wall street. It's so trivial. Yeah right...

So, why does everything that touches American politics have to be so stupid and self-defeating? Hard to believe how much misinformation people here are willing to put up with. Speaking of that, random surfing brought Mr. Kim Berry and his "Programmer's Guild" to my attention. He is leading a jihad to send people like me home. Never mind that top science and engineering graduate programs nowadays have about 70% foreigners, if not more.He has a little propaganda item on his website which says that h1 computer programmers on average earn several tens of thousand dollars less than the median wage among all American programmers. However, h1 visas are valid for a maximum of 6 years which means that the pool of such workers in the survey has an experience level bounded between 0-6 years. Also, government statistics are only published for new h1 holders who have even less experience. The median for Americans does not place any bounds on experience. So, big surprise that one group seems to earn less.

Besides, every h1 from India is not an IIT-ian and neither is every Chinese from Tsinghua or every Korean from whatever is the hot university in Korea. Quite a few are from some mid-level college somewhere with poor english to boot and there is no reason why they should get paid as much as a graduate from a US university.

I suppose Berry will put on his thinking cap and ask, where is the need to hire such "poor quality" programmers then? Well, the answer is that a good fraction of programming jobs are now commoditised, which means that anyone who has taken a single advanced programming course can do them. You don't need a BS in computer science from a good school in such jobs. What people need to do is get their graduate degrees if they really want to differentiate themselves. It doesn't even cost anything - teaching / research assistantships are a dime a dozen.

The Guild in effect says that Americans love math and are dying to get their Masters and PhDs but are "discouraged" by the h1 shenanigans of the likes of microsoft. Sorry, but I have taught in UT's classrooms for six years. The truth is that the overwhelming majority of American undergraduates believe that ignorance is a virtue, especially when it comes to anything scientific. And then, the poor dears have to feel entertained in their courses, you know. This concept of omnipresent entertainment is not unique to the classroom. I was told recently that an a fellow postdoc's wife watches Fox news simply because "they make the news so much more entertaining"(!) . Not so surprising, given that Bush has converted ignorance into public policy. At least I can understand why Berry got fired - I wouldn't hire someone who cannot follow simple statistics.

Anyways, I'm not going anywhere, so ya'll are just stuck with me. And I'm not even a programmer. Ha...