[eno_]

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.

[Red Jones]

you make a lot of sense in your advice in 186; I'm opposed radically to h1b, but we do have to recognize that change is part of the landscape now. People should also know that it's very hard to change when you've got all these h1b's swamping the market in every field. Lots of people have re-tooled themselves for a good skill and found no opportunity in it.