There are no American programmers because the cheap Indian and Russian immigrants work for dirt. I think I might be the last WASP male programmer to come out of an American collage. The programming department was completely devoid of Americans. There were some blacks in the first year of the program, but they all dropped out. There were some WASP women, but they were all “MIS”, not “CS”. MIS is computer programing without the computers or the programming. Mostly it was Russians who smoked a lot and were generally nasty, and Indians who cheated like 5th graders.
I wish they would stop importing the 3rd world.
Which in turn means that the job function has become commoditized, and US companies no longer see business application programming as a function worth spending big money on. Necessary, perhaps, but so are janitorial services.
Microsoft's requirements may be a bit more stringent, but even they aren't willing to overpay for a resource so readily available on the international labor market.
“Officials from Microsoft and a host of other powerful companies say America isn’t producing enough homegrown math and science experts and current laws prevent them from recruiting the best of those experts from overseas.”
I remember Bill Gates complaining about how Americans weren’t going to school for computers anymore - AFTER he pressured Congress to let him import more Asian coolies (threatening to move work to Vancouver, or Asia itself, if they weren’t allowed in). What a POS...
We are already importing tech workers we don’t need; the owners want CHEAP labor (not necessarily skilled). A friend of mine that was a programmer ended up with a Homeland Security job at the airport because nobody wants to pay American workers (and they still want those nasty things called “weekends” and “vacation”)...
What do people with an MIS degree do? Design access control limits, company IT policies or manage projects?