> Anti-immigration people
Like the author? He wants a tranche of immigration slots to open and for that tranche, indirectly if not directly, to block immigrants from Mexico, Honduras, Nigeria, and so forth. These slots are effectively only open to Indians, Chinese, and a trickle from other countries.
So this H1-B proposal is anti-immigrant. It means immigration only from mostly two countries. Of a certain class of person. In order to cut the wages of US programmers and force them to work more non-FLSA hours.
> Exceptional programmers
This is risible. I worked with a Chinese H1-B hire who told me he had never touched a computer until he got to the US. While that may have been anomalous, research on the H1-B immigration program ( http://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/h1b.html ) shows that it is not the best and brightest immigrating. The millionaire and billionaire angels and VC's want to flood the US with indentured servants chained to their H1-B visa. Look at the top H1-B sponsors - they are for Tata's indentured servants, not for people doing bleeding edge compiler/AI/whatever work.
> you can train people to be competent, you can't train them to be exceptional
Perhaps not, but I've met plenty of people with the capability to be exceptional programmers, but during non-flush times companies want programmers to have a BSCS, and with public colleges become more selective and raising their rates, they never get a chance to do so. The millionaires and billionaires get tax cuts on their capital gains, so the training they require for this work becomes more costly to the worker, and in fact more workers can't afford it, so a shortage develops. So then the parasite millionaires want to suck off of India's free IIT program instead of restoring US education to the level it used to be.
> how many more he'd hire
Yes, times are flush now. How many was he hiring in 2008-2009? How many in 2001-2002? When the economy goes into the toilet again, there will be millions of indentured servants still here on H1-B visas. How many 40 or 50 year old programmers is he willing to hire? Or are we supposed to pay and take out big loans for our college, work 60 hour weeks in our 20s and 30s with the carrot of options while paying San Francisco rents, suffering through the post-dotcom and bank failure recessions, only to be cast aside at 40?
We hear about supply and demand from the oracles of economics all the time, but somehow this NEVER applies to salaries going up. I mean I am open to hiring programmers right now as well - seriously. You'll be paid minimum wage and the output will have to be spectacular. As soon as the economy dips you'll be gone.
We the programmers work. We are the creators of wealth. I have been studying biology recently, including species which have become parasites. As one species becomes more parasitic on another, it changes form completely. It usually gains hooks and suckers to latch on to the working species it is a parasite off of, and the parasite devotes its body to eating and sexual reproduction. In our modern times, the angels, the accelerators, the VC's are the parasites. These "job creators" expropriate the surplus labor time of we the programmers, the network/system/database admins etc. who do all the work and create all the wealth. The LP's of the big VC firms are the type of polo-playing Phillips Andover heirs you can see in the documentary "Born Rich". Something I know the 20-something unkempt dorks who go to Python conferences know nothing about, although they are the ones ultimately being given their marching orders and who are getting profits sucked off their labor. These heirs have set up additional financial hurdles to getting a BSCS at a public college over the years, and the parasites now want to parasitically suck of of India's free IIT universities and turn their graduates into H1-B coolies over here.
> we should train
When the hell was the last time a tech company really trained its employees? Aside from the odd week-long class here or there? What a farce. Companies haven't trained for decades, and the parasites who use companies to parasitically suck off the labor of those of us who actually work have reworked public US colleges to be more financially impossible to get through than they used to - then they whine they can't find more "exceptional" US programmers. What a farce.