The Industry

Salaries plunging? Students shunning IT? U.S. loosing its technical edge?

Job market weirding out?

Maybe there is a pattern here?

When students see that they can make as much or more being a plumber or an electrician or MBA than going into a field that requires more brain power and training, and in which the big companies (MSFT, Google, etc) doing the hiring are bribing [aka lobbying] the government to bring in cheap labor - what do YOU think they should do?

So the kind of students left in Comp Sci are those that do not pay attention [oh great] and those that love the field for its own intrinsic lovable qualities [excellent].

And the blowback is already showing up out there.

The divide between the smart people and the rest [who are also smart but just do not really care all that much] is growing.

Ordinary, vanilla ideas and getting funded and implemented by ordinary vanilla people [playing some kind of game where instead of marketing the companies to the target market, they are marketed to vanilla VCs].

Ordinary companies are hiring people at $15/hour(!), or at 70% - 80% of what they used to pay them in some kind of brinkmanship with their marketplace in the hopes that all H1B Visa’ing by the big boys has driven down salaries [and driven up fear].

What is obvious is that bringing in lots of H1B Visas [and artificially lowering salaries - along with onerous and arbitrary hiring filters…  there are plenty of experience reports out there and makes for lots of vicarious WTFs] is a self-fulfilling spiral down to needing more and more H1B Visas and forces smart people out of the labor market [and into their own start-ups, this being America, and I think this is where Ruby On Rails is going to have its largest impact. The only problem appears to be that smart people may find the Sell To The Vanilla VC Game as boring and unfulfilling as the current labor market].

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Careers/Software-Developers-Taking-a-Starting-Salary-Hit/?kc=EWKNLCSM052008FEA