What an interesting article, with some compelling contrarian opinions about
several things in our industry. Section 8.1 "On-the-Job Learning, Not Formal
Retraining, Is Best"
(<http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.real.html#tth_sEc8.1>) has such nuggets
as:

The fact is that any competent programmer can pick up a new software skill
on his/her own, on the job, without formal instruction... (By the way,
contrary to the claim that most older programmers who have trouble finding
work are old COBOL programmers, most of the ones who contact me are actually
C programmers.) All that need be done is give the programmer (a) two or
three books on Java, (b) a real Java project to work on, and (c) a Java
resource person to contact as a last resort if some question is not answered
in the Java books.

and

Those of us ``dinosaurs'' who have been programming since way back in the
days of punched cards have heard claims of ``abrupt paradigm changes'' many
times as programming languages have evolved over the years. The claims have
always simply been hype. Programming is programming is programming, and it
has always been a straightforward matter to quickly become productive in a
new language.

Greg Stigers
http://www.cgiusa.com

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jim Mc Coy [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Tuesday, June 25, 2002 10:38 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: <<OT>> H1B revisited
> Sensitivity: Confidential
>
> "Debunking The Myth Of A Desperate Labor Shortage"
> http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.real.html
>
> Norm Matloff of UC Davis has been fighting this for a while
> now.  You can get involved by joining the Programmers Guild,
> his email address is on the web site.
>
> Mainly, this amounts to nothing less than organized age
> discrimination.
>
> jm

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