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Fix big software picture

The glitches in the Affordable Care Act enrollment software are normal in the U.S. computer industry now. With this level of technical reliability, we would have never sent astronauts to walk on the moon, and the Soviets would have never launched Sputnik or Yuri Gagarin.

I don’t know who the contractors were who delivered the ACA enrollment solution, but I am sure they were among the biggest companies in the United States. And for big corporations, price is the most important part of information technology solution development. Therefore, all of them have huge IT development centers in India, and their campuses here teem with imported technicians from the same country.

The price of the development is a fraction of the same done by our U.S.-trained graduates, and so is the quality of the products delivered. Not that our young people are greedy, but for reasons well known, they simply cannot afford to compete here: Understandably, computer science is less and less popular in our colleges.

And so the solution is not to roll heads, but to make U.S. software development viable: by tariffs on offshored software, and by stopping the deluge of H1B visas in this area.

Peter Dolina

Veradale



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