http://www.zdnet.com/intweek/stories/news/0,4164,2573353-7,00.html


Inter@ctive Week News
I Hate The Net
Alan Ezer, Albany, N.Y.
By Louis Trager, Inter@ctive Week
May 22, 2000 9:27 AM ET

In 1996, Alan Ezer had to quit graduate school in neuroscience after
four years because his savings had run dry. He found himself plunged
back into the job market for software programmers.

But he was like Rip Van Winkle: His 10 years of experience before grad
school had been in now-ancient languages such as COBOL and Fortran. So
he learned the hot new language, Java, and posted an applet on the Web
for the benefit of potential employers. Despite his initiative, more
than two years and "like 180 responses to carefully selected
advertisements" later, Ezer had netted exactly two unsuccessful
interviews and despaired of ever finding work in the burgeoning
Internet industries.

"I only got a job when I abandoned my plan to get a job in Java in the
so-called hot Internet field," he says bitterly. "I just thought it
showed that what the industry said about being desperate for
programmers was baloney."

Ezer, now 47, strongly suspects he was a victim of age discrimination.
Both his interviewers, he notes, were in their 20s. "They could see I
had a brain in my head. I had a demo. They didn't even look at it. It
didn't mean anything to them. So it seems to me the only factor could
be I had too much experience or was too old."

Even now, Ezer apparently does not fully appreciate that his
experience may have related in part to the way he conducted his job
search. One interviewer, for a help-desk position, asked where he saw
himself in five years.

"I couldn't give them a good answer," he says. "I sort of stuttered,
'cause I thought it was a really stupid question. I had been out of
work for over a year, so what I would be doing in five years was the
last thing on my mind. I wasn't being considered for my technical
skills. I just didn't have a 'nice personality.' "

The proof of the injustice of his treatment in the market, in Ezer's
mind, was what happened when he turned to a more objective hiring
process: New York's state civil service exam. He earned a perfect
score on the programming test, he says, and quickly attracted 10
interviews. He now does object-oriented work in PowerBuilder and
Structured Query Language as an associate programmer/analyst at the
state's Office of Real Estate Services.

Meantime, however, Ezer has generalized his experience into a sweeping
indictment of the Internet industry. "They're not interested in
creative people," he says. "They just want cheap programming widgets,
in the sense of a tool to be used and thrown away at their
convenience."

Industry efforts to boost immigrant intake constitute "a cold,
efficient plan to staff the entire software development industry with
foreign indentured servants," Ezer charges. "I think it forecloses the
opportunities of some citizens - kids in college and high school - to
make the kind of salaries they could.

"But it falls most heavily on people who are older and more
experienced. It's not only that we're more experienced, but we're less
prone to be manipulated. Citizens are more resistant to intimidation
and pressure from employers to work under lousy conditions."

The industry's persuasiveness with Congress and the White House, Ezer
says, is testimony to the eagerness of politicians "to line their
pockets with money from big Silicon Valley companies at the expense of
ordinary Americans,'' a circumstance he calls "really despicable."