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Gimme a break! Do you think the reason we are in this mess is because we lack talented engineers? I have a buddy who's got a Bachelor's degree in EE from MIT and a Master Degree from UT. He designs FPGAs and ASICs. His last design was a 20 million gate ASIC. He's been out of work for 8 months. Nobody will hire him at his age and salary history...nobody will hire him for even 2/3 his salary range!

This is all about corporate greed. CEOs didn't want to play by the rules of supply and demand, and coerced Congress to INTERVENE in the talent market. But the market always wins in the long run - unfortunately by the time that happens America as a country will be non-existent. Corporate CEOs and management, selling out loyalty to the country for a extra buck...

It's bad enough that they shipped many factories to Mexico in the past. But when that wasn't cheap enough, they decided they'd move the facilities to CHINA in order to use virtually free slave labor forced to work 18 hour days. That is what they apparently would like to do here, where they would want to get away with practices that are in league with that of Red China. This is going to be one seriously bad mess if it continues in the direction that it is heading...

Your friend is out of work because all the router companies that went bust all hired ASIC designers at wonderful salaries and had them do ambitious designs. It's as if brain surgery became fasionable for 24 months and after that you get brain surgeons driving cabs. Getting rid of H1-Bs will not help at all at the high end of the scale because anyone doing a 20 million gate FPGA/ASIC will hire only the elite to do it, pay whatever it takes, and will go anywhere on the planet to get them - trouble is the supply of elite ASIC people is 1500% of the market size.

I know EVERYTHING there is to know about speech recognition. I'm a freakin' genius at it. Show me any 10 ASR companies/technologies (do 10 still exist?) and I'll tell you how they could all improve 100% in both technology and business model. And yet, I have not done a lick of work in speech reco for five years. Why? The industry sucks. It sucks in so many ways. It will never make money and will not produce a useful product in the foreseeable future. So what if I outclass every CEO and CTO in that industry if the industry itself is pathological. I have an inventory of several other obsolete and useless skills. Get used to it. It's the way the world works now. Look at the way technology books are published: 4 month market window and 8-16 month shelf-life, which is why they all have 6-10 authors (the 9 mothers giving birth in one month theory of book writing). The speed of obsolesence is about twice as fast as when I got out of school.