Re: Age discrimination

At 05:07 PM 7/6/99 -0700, Roger Boucher  wrote:


>While browsing the ZDNET article (a link posted by Al Barsa) I found this:
>
>A study claiming no shortage of IT professionals and rampant age
>discrimination in the industry.
>

"IT Professionals" is a rather broad term (imho).  The article  mentions
-mainly- people with software background.  And how about the hardware
guys?  In my neck of woods (Miami),  there is a glut of IT personnel.

>Anyone experience this sort of thing?

Age discrimination?  Just don't make me start.
To date myself:  At a very tender age, I started out  programming  in
Autocoder & SPS.  Then all the the 360 Assemblers,  BEST (the beast for the
NCR 315), and RPG. 

(Oh, I also did mainframe, midrange and PC Cobols, Basic(s), all RPG(s), 
Ada, Pascal, most flavours of C,  Databases, telecommunciation, network
and system integration, Unixes, all the MS stuff,  etc, etc)

The end result?  I am "overqualified" for most everything in IT. 

Interviews?  I did have some  funny  and some extremely funny ones. 
(One of them was over 15 hours (!) long, three different sessions
on 3 consecutive mornings. My AS/400 COBOL Interviewer was   dreaming up the
questions openly reading the IBM manual.  An other guy was reading me 
questions from  G.W. Kadnier's NT 4 book -  and I politely informed him 
that I have used the evry same  book to prepare myself  for the MCSE
NT 4 exam.  Finally I was told, that being  European  they just did not feel 
that I could easily integrate  with their local employees of LAtin American
origin. The point being?   I  grew up have lived over 20 years in Venezuela 
my  children were born in Venezuela,my wife is Peruvian  and at home we freely
mix english and spanish)

 
>Any thoughts on what is being claimed here?
>

That the IT Professional shortage is  more artifical than real 
and/or almost non-existent...... - I tend to agree 

That there is a rampant age discrimination in IT - agree

That H visa holders take away jobs from  US employees - I tend to agree

That H visa holders tend to work for less than comparably traiens US
professionals -
I would agree

That foreign IT professional are less well prepared than US counterparts -
I would tend to disagree.  For a guaranteed yearly wage  of (say) $ 30,000,
for 6 years,  one can easily recruit the best of the best from  several 
Continents, beside from  quite a few countries of Eastern and Western Europe


EndreE





>http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.real.html#tth_sEc1
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