> wants $250k, but will perform at the level of a $75/hr

So... literally what we've been saying about the H1B visa program for decades? That Americans _are_ available with the skillset you need, but not willing to work for the wages you're offering, so you bring somebody from overseas, which is actually illegal per the H1B rules that never get enforced?

Nope. A $75/hr contractor makes less than a fast food assistant manager.

Where I’ve worked in the past, the preference was to get students and grow them into the company. Longer term contractors were for work nobody wanted… it’s hard to attract anyone interested into churning out J2EE and COBOL.

It’s pretty hard to transition senior people purged from big companies into these roles. Your purged assistant director from a fortune 50 is unlikely to take to being an IC in legacy tech. They transition well into pre-sales and program management roles, especially if they have ___domain expertise in a vertical.

> The trap with the older worker is a guy wants $250k, but will perform at the level of a $75/hr body shop guy.

Casual ageism as if it won’t be you one day

It's not a matter of age itself, but variance and experience. You can find the issue already at 5 years: Some people have grown and have used those years wisely, while others still are going to get experience raises, while they don't bring the improved performance.

Already there bro.

Engineering is traditionally boom/bust. The baller tech dudes in 1973 were designing parts for F-15’s and making bank. By 1993 the movie “Falling Down” had come out and thousands of those folks were discarded. A big feel good stories were a bunch of aerospace engineers who applied their skills to designing low flow toilets.

It happens today in tech. How many high dollar Storage Administrators are deployed in your company? The highest paid contractors in many companies were the high priests of the SAN.

The vicious cycle in tech is you get trapped in a bad specialty or pulled up into middle management and purged. It mostly timing and luck. Nobody gives a shit that you were the man with some old semiconductor process. Likewise, nobody is going to pay a premium for some dude whose been a manager for a decade to sling Java.

Haha, you're so wrong, Spooky23. Older workers love doing "boring" work that younger workers do not enjoy. What's more, a 1337 definition of "senior level" that I used back in the day was the ability to walk into a project and not have the urge to begin rewriting everything, something virtually every non-senior level worker (and many senior idiots) may have the urge to do. Here in the (dystopian) future (from my perspective), you can go on YouTube to watch a video about "How to write the clean code, by Uncle Bob" (cringe) and "My life as a Senior level Dev" (uber cringe). Please make a note of it.

While here, adding that we need Executive action to ban H1B workers and tariff BPOs at 250% from countries that have not ratified the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. I speculate that even Elon Musk Actual will approve of this restriction.

Lastly, to avoid posting a response to another comment, going to mention that there is nothing quite like having a head-hunter with an accent that sounds roughly like he is talking with a rotary egg-beater jammed into his mouth call you up and ask you a series of disqualification questions for a position that he already has sourced from offshores labor pool (so as to check the box that he personally certifies there are no American workers qualified for the work). Their customer doesn't want to know how the sausage is made, they just want cheap bodies for unimportant low-level work and this is what it takes under the current Law. I actually have a friend who was paid very well to let an H1B follow him around for several months learning his job before he was let go and lost his home, wife and wound up moving in with his parents. He went to the US Government to complain and ended up at Google for a while before moving on to a Unicorn.

If the H1B have side-hustles like starting Zoom, doing what Satya did, or their spouses create incredible non-tech businesses, that's really great..but what about all the American peeps (AND THEIR KIDS) that were jipped out of that opportunity by lax enforcement of America's laws, only to ultimately hear "See, we need to keep letting so many H1B people and their criminal recruiters warehouse them in apartments and work for dog food because so many of them have gone on to create such tremendous economic activity for America" (ie, a self-fulfilling prophecy).