[FormerLurker]

To steal a line from Clint Eastwood (I'm such a slave to pop culture): doesn't mean I'm gonna be swapping spit with you in the shower.

Now THAT would be a very unpleasant picture.. Yuck!

So what do we do? Some immigrant labor is a good thing, you get different perspectives, too much (which we have on the coasts, not so much in the heartland but it could spread) is obviously bad. How do we get the right mix?

I'd say that as far as immigrant farm labor, that's always been there and is relied upon to harvest crops, then that's a necessesity.

How do we keep from having the industry sent overseas?

I'd say that it will prove itself to be a faulty process. I've heard many horror stories about the quality of work performed offshore. If it doesn't resolve itself, then perhaps restrictions will need to be put in place in order to stop the flow of work out of the country. I'm not quite sure as to the mechanics of the restrictions, but one idea would be to remove any tax deduction for the costs of any work performed outside of this country. So if it costs $500,000 to get something done offshore, then that amount would show as income even if it went towards development.

Or is it time to read the handwriting on the wall, decide the dot-com meltdown was the beginning of the end and go find real work (I always wanted to be a librarian after I got sick of software, that's where I student aided and it was a lot of fun)?

The "dot-com" meltdown was an abberation. Software development has been a profession for decades. Such things as telecommuncications (phone network, data communications), satellite weather systems, defense systems, medical instrumentation, lab systems, manufacturing systems, entertainment systems and devices, network management tools, home electronics, business systems and applications, emergency response systems, software development tools, operating systems, and of course, home computer software, are going to stay around for a long time to come.

It is here where we have to draw the line. Do we allow foreign workers to come to this country and work in those fields when there is an overabundance of Americans with the education and background to work in those fields that are out of work and can't find a job?

[discostu]

Part of the dot-com meltdown was an aberation, but part was displaying the sick underbelly of the industry. We always said we'd do all this great stuff for society, and it hasn't happened (remember the promise of the paperless office, and what's happened to paper consumption since then), dot-coms were the ultimate "something great is going to happen" and it didn't. With hardware prices dropping it's coming time for the industry to put up or shut up and I'm not sure we've got anything to put up.

And of course all that contributes to the H1B issue. If we didn't have so many out of work geeks running around the same part of the country that's done the most importing of labor the thing is a non-starter. I do think that controlling the dot-com bubble would have helped more people than controlling the H1Bs.

Of course there is always decentralization, the problem areas are in the big tech hubs. Not that the picture is glorious out here in the hinterlands, but the H1B numbers are much lower (you still got that state by state breakdown link? I really did think that was a good link showed where the problem was acute and where there really wasn't one) so the competition's not as ugly. I always thought the way tech centralized in these locations (none of which I was willing to live in) sucked anyway.

I like the tax break idea, though the money shouldn't count as income (that's just rude, and doesn't make sense from an accounting perspective) but some expenses are not tax deductable as cost of goods sold and others are, and it doesn't have to make sense (it already doesn't). Overseas costs could just be considered not CGS, though still expenses.