ajaxian
Hell, it would also make the pat-down a lot more interesting!
Thanks for the detailed answer.
Of course my original question was somewhat facetious, but I do think it's farcical that, nine years after 9/11, in order to fly within the "land of the free and home of the brave" one has to be subjected to these humiliating so-called security measures. Military-industrial complex indeed! It would be interesting to trace the political donations given by the companies that make these machines...
Given the possibility that you have to leave the US if you lose an H1B job (unless you can find a new one immediately), that makes you less likely to buy a house or a decent car that you will have trouble unloading if you have to leave on short notice. And I have deliberately shifted savings into cash vs. a 401k plan because I can take the cash with me when I leave.
I making more at my current job (~$130k/year) than I ever have and likely will for a while. However, in many other ways it's a very poor fit and long-term I believe it's a professional dead-end. But since I am currently applying for a green card through this job, I am stuck in it until I get the green card which could take anywhere from 2 - 5 years. If I get another job in the US (which I would have no problem doing w/ my skill-set) or lost this job I would have to restart the green card application process, losing at least 1.5 years. On top of that my wife cannot legally work in the US until I have my green card. She is a high-school teacher with 10 years of experience in international schools in Asia and, ironically, has a master's degree in education from an American university (although the course-work was done in Asia).
So I can definitely sympathize w/ Americans who feel that H1B workers like myself are undercutting the American IT job market--because we are! H1B jobs hold out the eventual promise of a green card, but in the meantime if you're in my situation you have to put up w/ a lousy job and pass on better paying and more interesting jobs. For some that promise of a green card is worth it, but for me it is not, so we're pulling up stakes so that I can practice my craft as a free man.
Corporate IT in the US is fast becoming a wasteland of foreign graduates desperate for green cards, outsourced consultants and offshoring. IMO the only options as a programmer in the developed world are to go very high end, do a startup where you sell directly to the end user who doesn't care what kind of programmer you are, or get out of the programming field altogether.
That seems to be a primary concern of the Arizona state legislature: http://www.google.com/search?q=arizona+sb+1070
"If you have a low skilled job there is a higher chance of your job being outsourced but if you are a software developer developing complex software you are very much in demand."
The fact is that most new CS graduates are "low skilled" as real-world, industrial programmers. A CS education can realistically only provide them a grounding in the core theory of the field; it can't, and shouldn't, be teaching them how to work within the context of massive, old, crufty programs that are the norm in the real world. This is the responsibility of employers, and IMO when employers complain about a lack of "good" CS graduates it just shows that they have abdicated their responsibility to train their employers in their own industry niche and somehow expect cheap programmers who are subject matter experts with years of experience in a dozen hyper-specific tools to drop from the sky.
But of course the outsourcing shops are perfectly happy to peddle the lie that their own people are programming geniuses who are also subject matter experts--and look at all the money you'll save! The IT managers get suckered into hiring boatloads of consultants or sending everything offshore, their own good employees, if they had any to begin with, get fired or jump ship, and the cycle accelerates.
Sure I'm cynical, but I've seen it happen often enough, and heard the same from friends who've experienced the same, to justify it.
What I had in mind was that for anyone who is technically capable of maintaining the core Oracle DB code base, there are more interesting and rewarding things they could be doing instead.
The people who have the budgetary authority to buy Oracle's very expensive products very likely haven't been doing anything technical for many years, if they ever did. Programmers in organizations that use Oracle aren't asked if they want to use Oracle, they're told they're going to use Oracle...
Unless you get your kicks from working on a 30-year-old database written in 80's style C, I don't think there's much appeal to working for Oracle as a programmer.
It's common for folks in finance to have undergrad technical degrees (e.g., physics, math, CS) and graduate degrees in something more closely related to finance such as an MBA or MS in quantitative finance. (Although the pure quants will usually have a PhD in math or physics.)
But frankly if you're a technical person IMO finance is a ghetto: once you're in, it's hard to get out. In no other industry can you make as much money to do work that generally speaking is substantially behind the curve technically (e.g., pre-STL C++ is the standard development language and mindset, and most of the time you're just moving stuff to and from CSV files and databases). But if you're disciplined with your spending it's a great way to save seed capital if one day you want to jump ship and try a startup.
Here's a summary of the work environment:
- no office (hah!) or cubicle, just a space on a long desk, hardly conducive for concentrating on programming
- dress code is shirt and tie, but on Fridays you can drop the tie, and every quarter or so you can wear "jeans for charity" if you pay $10 (yes, I'm serious)
- C++ is the standard language, but it's C++ as written by physics PhD quants who have obviously never taken any classes in software engineering, and have no interest in doing so
- hours are long, 10 - 12 hours a day
- as much as possible technology is done by contractors or is outsourced
Generally speaking the attitude is nobody got fired for buying Oracle, so "awesome and seriously hard core projects" are few and far between if non-existent.
On the upside, the pay is good, so if you're disciplined and don't get stuck in the trap of living the Wall St. lifestyle you can save a lot and at some point take the money and run far, far away from the financial industry.