To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter Sun May 11 16:44:15 PDT 2014 An alert reader pointed me to a perfect example of the age issue in the tech industry job market: http://www.crunchboard.com/opening/detailjob.php?jid=18471 A line in this job ad reads Career Level: Mid Career (2+ years of experience) Yes, folks, 2 years of experience is mid-career! This is commonplace, and I have cited various examples of big, mainstream U.S. firms with this attitude over the years. My favorite is a panel discussion on KQED-FM (the main San Francisco NPR affiliate) back in 1998, featuring myself and Warren Leiden, then president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. Leiden was also one of the drafters of the legislation that ultimately was enacted that year to double the yearly H-1B visa cap. (You didn't think that CONGRESS are the ones drafting bills, did you now?) On the show, Leiden defined "mid-level" programmers to be those having only "a year or two of experience." It didn't use to be this way. Programming was a career job. But the availability of H-1Bs, who are overwhelmingly young, changed all that. Norm Archived at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/TwoYrMidCareer.txt