CEO of SeaMicro: "We're going for younger engineers..."
The fact is that executives have reduced their recruiting efforts, reduced their investments in interviewing, relocating, educating and training STEM workers, especially US citizen STEM workers who have a few years of experience. They don't want to send you to classes, train you in-house, or even purchase current reference materials, but expect you to extrapolate from the reference materials from several years and several versions back.
At the same time, they want you to engage in continuous learning, they also want you to focus only on the current project, and be there 16 hours a day 6 or 7 days a week, and those 16 hours better include the ones that are convenient to them, because any others don't count in their reckoning and you will not be paid for them.
One of the posters incorrectly mentioned the 1990s. Actually the cut-backs and increased demands took place about the time the H-1B was hatched.
I can't think of more than 1 or 2 US citizen STEM workers who was not always engaged in learning new things in their field... but not always the things their B-school bozo bosses somehow psychicly expected them to have known to learn after coming back from their latest tax deductible vacation/conference. That's ironic because there is so little and shallow in the way of learning that goes on in B-schools; the B-school profs and students both actively resist actually digging into any subject beyond surface appearances.
All this creates additional problems for knowledgeable, creative, industrious but impoverished unemployed and under-employed STEM workers who don't have the cash to be buying the latest gadgets and software and books and subscriptions to developer materials or traveling to conferences anymore.
