What's your field?
Software engineer. Last system I worked on was an optical networking add/drop multiplexer.
You didn't ask me, but I'll answer anyway. I'm a visual foxpro guy. Visual foxpro is a microsoft product, it fills the same niche as visual basic. VFP is an excellent language, but the business world has soured on it. So, the fact that the market's soured on my language is a much bigger problem for me than h1b is.
I'm hanging on in VFP now as I still have 1 good client. But if it were not for h1b I would re-tool myself either in Visual Basic,Oracle or C#. I have an engineering type degree, but not computer related. I'm not a computer geek unfortunately. It took me a huge amount of effort to do the learning curve in foxpro.
So, in my down time (I have mostly down time) I've written my own software that duplicates what I did for my #1 client. I'm planning on selling it, although I've found it is very difficult to sell. If this doesn't work out, then I'll go back to construction management probably.
I'm an example of a person that has been proven to be very talented at programming in that I've completed a couple of projects that were extremely valuable and that numerous others before me had failed on and now I refuse to stick with my programming career because of h1b. I know a guy who is a Microsoft MVP for foxpro, meaning Microsoft gave him an 'MVP' award, a big feather in a person'a cap. And that fellow has spent a lot of the last 2-3 years either looking for a job, trying to sell his services as a consultant or doing nothing. He's one of the very elite is what I'm saying, one of the top 1-2% of all programmers easily. A previous employer of his marketed his work world-wide. Even he had a heckofa time finding a job. Industry says that VFP is outdated, but writing code in VFP results in the same result as writing it in VB, the languages are interchangeable. The industry is all fouled up, otherwise top programmers like me and this other fellow would be kept productive. We should be working constantly because we are the top performers. We've proven it. If you've worked in programming for years, then you know what I mean. Almost all the other guys in our language have been pushed out, and we few left spend much of our time trying tomarket ourselves or plotting our retreat out of the field. Yet we are perfectly suited to building many applications that businesses need. Our language does the job when in thehands of a skilled person just as good as any. So, from my pointof view, it seems industry claims it wants these people, but throws them away when you actually come and provide those skills. It is as much a problem with the managerial people simply wanting a submissive foreigner to dot he valuable work so they can take credit for it as anything.
I came into programming 10 years ago because I had heard there was a shortage of people and I knew I had the talent to dothe job. I wanted a high paying job. I succeeded in a big way. But now it seems all I've doneis learn how rotten my own fellow americans can be in passing laws to take this market away from me. I'll never forget that lesson nomatter what happens to me.