Immigration and guest worker programs aren't the only reason, but they're a big reason. It's been happening since the 90s, when the neo-conservative Bush Republicans and the Clinton "It's the economy, stupid" Democrats really agreed for the first time on making the economy the issue that overrode everything else. Unfortunately, by "the economy" they meant Wall Street and global corporations, not small businesses and workers. So they pushed for any trade deal or migration or in/outsourcing that meant more money for their corporate friends and more graft for themselves. Ross Perot was right, but he greatly underestimated what they would do.

If you've been in the business long enough, you've seen it happening. I've heard managers talking about how they're sick of citizen employees with their unreasonable demands about health care and vacation time, and how those hard-working foreigners don't annoy them with such nonsense. I've seen the gleam in owners' eyes when they talk about how they can hire ten nameless cogs through some company that will bring them in for the same price as one native, and as long as they're at least 11% as productive as a native worker on average, hey, profit. And that's not just in software; that's in everything from construction to food processing to service work.

Several years ago, a client asked if I wanted to join his startup that was going to sell foreign tech services to US companies. I would have been the "face" who sold our services to US executives and collected the money, and then passed the work on to $1/day workers he'd found somewhere. Were they well-trained? Who knows; he didn't care and I wasn't supposed to either. I passed, but that offer was a microcosm of what's been happening to the US software industry for the past few decades, and the US job market in general.

> I dont think immigration is the reason for the job market sucking. theres no jobs to apply to, theres no jobs to take from americans in the first place

Are you sure about that?

Microsoft recently laid off 9,000 American workers while applying for 14,000 H1B visa workers [0]. They are transparently offshoring jobs from Americans to foreign workers.

[0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/microsoft-applied-to...

That article says that isn't rellly accurate for Microsoft.

But where are the job listings that h1b applicants are using. It seems like job availability is just down overall

Universities provide various specializations for the computer related programs: actual computer Science (math and algorithms with focus on research), computer networks and other IT infrastructure stuff, computer hardware, software engineering (the process of designing, architecting and managing the lifecycle of large scale software projects) for those that approach software like engineering project, and of course there is actual programming.

> Isn't computer programing all of computer science.

In the same way accountancy is all of math.