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IT Layoffs At Insurance Firm Are A 'Never-Ending Funeral' (computerworld.com)
dcblogs quotes a report from Computerworld: The IT layoffs at MassMutual Financial Group will happen over a period of many months, and it's going to be painful for employees. Employees say they are training overseas workers via web conferencing sessions. There are contractors in the office as well, some of whom may be working on temporary H-1B visas. Employees say they notice more foreign workers in the hallways. Approximately 100 employees are affected. The employees are angry but can't show it. A loss of composure, anything other than quiet acquiescence, means risking two weeks of severance pay for each year on the job. But maintaining composure is hard to do. "I know a few people that are probably close to a breakdown," said one IT employee. [A second IT employee described the emotional impact of the layoffs on employees in this way: "It's like a never-ending funeral."] Intel also confirmed major layoffs in April, which will affect some 12,000 employees or 11 percent of its total workforce.
Now you may or may not think Trump will DO anything about it, that is a separate topic...
But a whole lot of people are tired of this and Trump keeps saying he'll do something about it.
At the end of the day, "Acting Presidential" is less important to the average person than not having their job outsourced overseas.
..Is that the company's sales are up 15% from 2015, and "represents the 10th consecutive year of record results".
Greedy bastards, plain and simple.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have backups to corrupt.
Malicious compliance is the solution. The worst thing you can do at a megacorp is doing exactly what your job description requires.
It may not happen to you tomorrow, or next year, or in five years, but it'll happen eventually. Companies will always find someone cheaper.
Most people in tech make good money, there's no excuse to not have money saved up. Strive for an early retirement, because when you're forced to, it won't matter.
You'd think at least one current IT worked would have reported the companies illegal h1b crimes.
Take the email/paper requiring you to train your replacement as evidence and sue for all your owed severance plus damage, as it clearly shows 100% of the talented workers are solely in the US, and 0% of the talent is from the h1b workers. (Training wouldn't be needed otherwise)
Yeah, so I used a buzzword in the title...
I think it's time I look at an exit strategy from IT. I'm starting to lose the appetite I had for it.
I'm thinking truck driving school, then start driving trucks. Pays less, but I imagine it has less bullshit.
I'm also considering it because it would seem the IT Worker is now an Endangered Species.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
Why not simply stop granting H-1B visas altogether?
Why assist your own superannuation for that?
I don't understand why people don't just walk.
What's one's dignity worth?
Employees say they are training overseas workers via web conferencing sessions.
Well I sure hope they're doing a piss poor job at that training. If you want the best, give the best; if you want to treat people like disposable garbage, don't be surprised when you get the results you justly deserve. If the end result of this is their servers become really big expensive paperweights, that's management's problem.
I'll quit first. Why cut your own neck slowly? Frankly though, people keep voting for the same people that listen to business saying they need this cheap labor and please allow them more.
That sounds right at first reading, but then I realise it's not necesarily so. When I started my current job, I had 20 years of experience in the specific field I was hired in. I still needed a LOT of training in this company's product, their procedures, their coding standards and process, their complex infrastructure and networks, etc. If we hired Linus Torvalds tomorrow he'd need a lot of training.
On my last job I needed far less training. A lot of that has to do with the available documentation and following standards or not. At the last job, company network resources were accessible on the network as normal. My current job has multiple VPNs you have to use even when you're in the office.
So anyway, the specific TYPE of training that the replacements needed could be strong evidence either way.
I worked 3 contracts for HP.
Each of them ended the same way. After years of successful operation, and after a few failed attempts, they eventually handed the operations to another group either outsourced or over seas.
The very core of an IT person is employing automation. We work to handle more than we could before. We build systems and procedures that ensure against failure and allow for our obsolescence.
I've never minded it.
But this is no longer an IT thing. Any job can be outsourced and automated.
"Don't fear death... fear not living..." -me
How long until the stress gets to someone that just doesn't care anymore and they make a rash decision?
Don't let companies force employees without saying anything to train their replacements under penalty of loss of layoff benefits.
There are actually half a dozen things that could be done to prevent this kind of BS, too bad the 1% who benefit from this control the asshats who make the laws.
That and, once more companies employ robots, the US will bring their manufacturing from China back to the good ol U S A. But most humans won't be a part of the resurgence.
If I am ever asked to train my replacement i will quit on the spot.
Makes me glad I'm out of IT
You can't be serious. There won't be truckers in 5 years.
Automated cars are a real ting. They exist right now, and work well. They are still in development, they are not ready for commercial deployment, but the major technological hurdles are overcome at this point. The long haul trucking industry will be one of the first to be very interested in this. Drivers that never get tired, obey all rules they are told to, etc would be of great interest and worth paying for even if they technology is reasonably expensive.
Fact of life is that upper management thinks that offshore programmers are as good as American programmer and ten times cheaper.
With India. You just can't. Their quality of life is so much lower and they have so many desperate people. I can't compete with people who lack clean air, water and food security unless I give up those things.
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Free market is not always good. H1B is not the issue here. The greediness of US investors/shareholders are. CEOs are measured by how they add value to investor, not how they increase value for the whole nation (that is usually in the domain of Govt and regulations) If CEOs are supposed to take care of "share holders" interest, and the majority of share holders (by value) in the market are citizen's of united states. That means US people (read 1% rich) wants this type of free market. Free market is not fair-market. The employees should think about these things, and act in elections.
I agree the H1B program is a farce per "skill shortage," and glad Mr. Trump has highlighted the issue in his campaign, but I'm not a one-issue voter.
I believe Mr. Trump will likely be a train-wreck in foreign policy, offending leaders and countries far and wide, perhaps triggering wars.
USA knows him from TV over the years and we take him with a grain of salt. The rest of the world won't.
I'd rather be unemployed than an apocalyptic zombie.
Table-ized A.I.
Dear IT worker,
They outsourced your job, they force you to train your replacement, and they'll pull your severance if you complain. All that just to save a buck.
Do you wish the whole thing would backfire? Of course you do. Make the managers look like idiots and make some money doing it. You have the network inside and out. You have credentials. Make those jerks pay. Send everything you know about the network - especially backups - and management will get a big surprise a few months after you leave.
(why doesn't this happen more?)
What the fuck do you think? Take your pants of your fucking head.
I think that if the author had actual evidence the employees in question were H1Bs, they wouldn't have had to qualify the accusation with "may" in the article. It is a trend for companies to bring in H1Bs, but it's also a trend for younger IT workers to be more racially diverse than was the case in the past.
Worrying about the immigration status of your coworkers is a great way to get away with being racist.
Muslims did celebrate and partied in Paterson and Jersey City. It is a fact.
Do some research before cracking "jokes'.
Come on guys, fight fire with fire! Everyone walk together! Everyone! Maybe even leave a few fires burning, not that you caused any. Get together and agree on your severance package and demands present it to the company as a group. Make it painful.
They can't do this easily without you. Make them give you a golden parachute.
Folks, we are Americans! Our forefathers sailed the oceans on wooden ships the size of school bus. We are hearty, tough, and are not to be trifled with.
We have to stop getting trampled. This is not who we are.
Get together. Stand together. Fight the man together.
Take it to social media.
Blog it.
Make noise.
These jerks are taking your jobs and your livelihoods. If this company wants to move to India, let them go sell their shit in India, but make sure another American doesn't do business with them.
Make sure TRUMP spouts their name at his rallies and what a disgrace this company is to the USA.
Look outside your tunnel. Get your friends involved. It is time to man up and bring it!
And it would be a total shame if you put up a kickstarter page to help you all stick together through this.
Maybe a sympathetic hacking group would get involved to create mayhem until you are able to get back in the saddle.
It is time to drop the hammer and get tough. They do not tell you what you get as severance, you tell them. You are not a dog being fed scraps.
Knowledge is power. Don't go gently into that dark night!
Spoken like someone that has zero experience outside of a cubicle.
Would you bet your retirement fund that there will be no truckers in five years? I will wager mine against yours.
Butthurt Pajeet detected.
Go poo in the loo instead of on American workers. In other words, fuck off.
Love these cheap toasters, just bonza guys! It's great! and $3 phone covers shipped to my door, USB cables for 4$ it's magic
Wait you want my jo........ oh
After all, they're the only thing that has ever worked against a bunch of asshat employers.
That is all.
Clarence Thomas is the best supreme court justice.
Liberals hate him because he's black. :-)
Have worn a black (under)shirt ever since
Do you honestly believe the teamsters will let that happen?
It is easy for Trump to make promises because he is clueless when it comes to technology. Trump doesn't even know how to use data in his own campaign. He reads donation numbers out loud at a press conference when most people these days would just post the numbers on their website and be done with it. He is telling you what you want to hear to "make the sale," but the actual situation is being driven by economics that are hard to address in a free market.
Just read the marketing notes from Trump University. . . he is totally playing the segments of the population in the most pain. . . for HIS gain. Except the stakes are way higher than they were with Trump University. . .
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
They only have to be 1/10th as good to break even.
Which branch of government makes laws and provides for funding of issues like changing the minimum wage, providing free college, allowing in immigrants who despise our culture, banning guns, and making America not great?
If they have to do something to earn it, it's not severance pay. In how many other countries, can corporations literally blackmail employees over their last 'pay-cheque'?
It seems the only sane thing to do.
I will Vote for anyone willing to outsource all of the House of Reps and the entire Senate to India.
Where could one sell it?
1 unlock moving to other jobs (give an H1B say 90 days to switch jobs)
2 triple the payroll tax for H1B holders (double for green card holders)
3 audit the qualifications for a job offer (no requiring somebody to have been a beta tester for %program% of stuffing keywords to eliminate local labor)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/03/21/donald-trump-flip-flops-then-flips-and-flops-more-on-h-1b-visas/
good enough is always good enough, especially at 1/10 the price.
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everyone wins
I've work for a fortune 100 insurance company for over a decade. We've been training off shore resources to replace on shore employees for several years now. All while continuing to show large year over year profit increases. When we started outsourcing, (about 5 years ago) the off shore folks were very bright, spoke perfect English and knew their stuff. Over time that bar lowered considerably. Now we tend to have serious communication and cultural issues. Most projects come in way over estimates and months late. The thing is, my company doesn't care. They pay these firms literally pennies on the dollar and overlook quality issues. What my team would have been expected to deliver in two months now takes our off shore counterparts a year or more. If a project is very time sensitive, we'll come in and clean it up after they've butchered the core build. In most cases though, directors seem perfectly happy to accept poor development and missed deadlines in order to show how much theoretical money was saved using outsourced resources. I've seen management doctor budget reports to show cost savings when in reality we were paying more in the long run on clean up and maintenance. It's a shell game and it's disgusting.
It’s just unfortunate that executives will not be affected, though.
Fucked up US foreign policy dates back to the early years of the country, it really hit its stride in the mid 1800s however, between aforementioned Opening, the Guano act, and various annexations of island nations (Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, etc.)
America has been involved in a *LOT* of international meddling taking pages from all the colonialists, be they Western, Eastern, or Oceanic.
Go extrapolate the Guano Act holdings, overlay UNICLOS EEZ rules, then look at the claimed pacific territory of the US. This puts a little more context on the current China/US pissing contest when you consider the US is already claiming huge swaths of the Pacific as its territorial waters, despite most of it being uninhabited (or strictly toxic dump/black sites hidden under the claim of 'oceanic nature preserves', something I will note the UK is doing with Pitcairn and adjacent islands, despite UNICLOS explicitly stating that both uninhabited(/able) islands and artificial islands recieve no territorial waters or EEZ. But those rules only apply to the 'little guys' and only if the big guys don't find resources they would rather take for themselves. Furthermore Argentina (where the current 200 mile EEZ was first allowed before making it global) has now had an expansion of their EEZ range out to 350 miles, including the falkland islands within their range. So for any of you thinking the insanity is strictly US led, it is not, but it is getting worse globally because we the peoples aren't doing what is necessary to deter them from dividing up every square inch of this planet amongst the political and commercial elite.
... but it's an insurance company so "fuck 'em."
Don't people realize that insurance companies are the scum of the earth? They're leaching money out of society to make insane profits for their shareholders. Economically speaking society would be far better off if, instead of paying insurance premiums, people put aside the same amount of money into interest bearing accounts.
It's pretty easy to spot people from other countries by the accent. It's not proof the people are H-1Bs, but that's the way to bet.
Every time I hear these types of stories I make a note of the company and then I shy away from them if I can...and I encourage others to do the same. I don't like boycotts, but I do like "word of mouth" :-)
Over 20 years ago, I worked in a law firm. I did all the non immigration work. The firm had a huge immigration practice, but they needed a guy who knew where the Civil, Criminal, Family, Traffic and Supreme Courts were located....that was me. 1. Immigrants come in and save their money, often in coffee cans. They know the US will eventually change the laws, declare amnesty, for a price. (When Trump legalizes them for a price, they will have the ready cash...trust me) The only problem arises when someone in the home country really needs you (birth, death) and you can't go, because you've over stayed and can't legally travel back once you leave. 2. H1B was a scam even back then. You write the description as follows "Must know code language A, B and C. Must speak Farsi, Mandarin and Spanish fluently. Experience in VT100 Terminal Emulation to HDMI conversion essential. Ability to repair Peugeot vehicles with a factory certificate required. By the time you are done, you have described your ideal candidate, with a description only your H1B could fill, because you wrote the description for that person. We used to run want ads in the paper of record (I said it was 20 years ago) and all the poor bastards who sent resumes in good faith were used as exhibits to prove "does not speak mandarin and Farsi" or "cannot program in language B", or "No VT100 to HDMI conversion experience", or "VW mechanic only, no French cars". The concept, to bring in unique talent, for narrow positions, is legitimate. Importing folks to replace US citizens at 60% salary with zero rights at the job is the result. I never personally worked on these petitions, (I only played the piano) but I saw enough even in my non tech oriented practice to know it was/is a total scam.
There is no "two-party" system in the constitution, that is just what "politics" devolves into - us-versus-them.
I hope we get a 3rd party choice that wins. They may not be able to do much with the "two parties", but it is a step toward mapping representation back to the people of the republic.
BTW - Winner-take-all is bullshit and should be unconstitutional, with respect to equal representation.
This should be made illegal.
It's like assaulting someone and telling them it will be worse if they cry. It might be true during the assault, but it's straight-up illegal.
I agree that the workers should do more than just take it up the ass with a smile and a "Thank yuh massa!" By holding their severance package hostage, management has workers by the balls. Collective action would be the best way to send a clear message to management, but unfortunately, organizing people is damn tough, especially when livelihoods are on the line. IT workers are pretty much on their own. Government won't help. There's no union to help. In short, stop waiting for somebody to rescue you.
But here's some food for thought: What if people had a second or third source of income? Even if those alternate sources of income were much smaller than their day job's income, the balance of power would certainly change. I think it's imperative that workers cultivate alternate sources of income AKA side hustles.
Over the past 8 years I've been doing dividend investing and putting my money to work for me. Now I make an average of $700 every month for doing nothing (passive income FTW!!). This isn't enough to enable my financial independence, but it is enough to give me more options in life. Ultimately, having F*** You money should be any worker's long term goal.
Weren't you supposed to be our bosses now, hunh? Look what happened instead: we the Cool Kids, the competitive and socially functional crowd went on to have successful lived and you computer geeks ended up slaving on keyboards and now being replaced by the hundreds and hoping McD will have you flipping burgers. So much for your "intellectual superiority", weirdos. :)
Oh, wait you are Americans and union is a dirty word for you. Well, good luck at your next job.
The company I worked for had very close business relations with large range of huge "name" insurance companies and a myriad of smaller firms as well.
I was front line with them for 2000-2015 and watched as "another large insurance company in Boston, named after a US President" first outsourced a lot of their work to US firms while keeping in-house people. Then they got rid of most of the in-house staff and eventually outsourced all of that work to India. A LOT of Americans at several different companies lost their jobs.
The firm I was with went from having about 20 people dedicated to that client to having zero and instead just a client contact when they needed something.
Another firm we worked with in the Boston area did very similar things. First they outsourced within the US. And then they sent all that work to India and not only laid off a lot of their own people, the companies they used for US outsourcing also laid off a bunch of people.
One thing all of us can do to help support some jobs in the US is demand paper statements and bills for everything you can. An awful lot of people are employed to produce and mail those damn bills and statements and it's one area that has not yet been eliminated entirely by offshoring. Some companies are trying to do mail in Canada and have it trucked into the US to be mailed but this is still relatively rare. Right now, demanding a paper bill stands a good chance of helping keep somebody in a job. They don't need a handout. They need YOUR utility bill or insurance policy to print and mail to you.
Sig for hire.
I'm sure some will have nothing left to lose, and take a few invaders with them as they go.
We can't call it a union (although the CWA just won their 6-week fight against Verizon, so there's that..) but a professional organization is what's needed. A professional organization can hire lobbyists, who will pay Congresspersons whatever is necessary to counteract the lobbyists on the business side. There has to be a way to level the H-1B playing field so body shops can't abuse it, and no one company or set of companies gets a huge advantage. If I were king that's the first thing I would do - cancel the entire program temporarily across the board so no one can keep profiting from it, sort out reasonable limits on it, and restart it alongside a professional organization. The organization would act like a combination of the AMA and state licensing boards, ensuring a high barrier of entry into the profession (i.e. no more coder bootcamp yahoos or paper MCSEs.) It would also enforce quality, make members responsible for messes they create, etc.
The other thing that a professional organization can offer is a reasonably standard training progression through an apprentice-style program. The big offshorings I've read about lately have been at utility companies, Disney and insurance companies. I wonder how many of those jobs they got rid of were mainframe-related. I work in the airline IT industry and it is getting extremely hard to find people to replace the retiring mainframers, and these people will be needed for quite a while. If you had a bunch of apprentice-level people working with the older guys and learning that skill set as one of a broad set of other skill sets, you wouldn't have the knee-jerk offshoring reaction. Plus, you could have a mix of "master craftsmen" and apprentices to spread out the salary levels. Yes, people with 25 years' experience and a family to support are more expensive than fresh grads who don't even have a goldfish to care for and can move tomorrow if needed.
I really think this is the only way to ensure that we have a steady supply of new people coming into the field. Not every system out there is built in Web Framework of the Month; I've been lucky to have the opportunity to work in lots of IT subspecialties with a diverse set of systems, ancient and new. I worry that new people aren't going to get this opportunity because Tata and Cognizant are abusing the H-1B program. Mainframes are ancient, but some of the core banking, government, airline, utility and insurance systems have decades of business logic embedded in them. TCS and the like have the perfect sales pitch for mainframe-dependent CEOs -- "fire your senior guys, sign here and we'll put 50,000 coders on the project tomorrow; you won't even know you have a mainframe."
The issue shouldn't be restricted to jobs outsourced overseas but WHY
I am talking as one who runs several businesses and I can tell you that hiring a competent foreign individual actually costs more to the business than hiring an American, at least at the 'wage level'
You see, businesses don't only pay the 'salary' of that H1B worker they have to pay the 'commission' to the middlemen, and when you add in all the red tapes involved (although most of the red tapes are handled by the middlemen) the costs pile up
By WHY businesses are kicking out Americans and hire those Indians/Pakistanis instead?
This goes back to the 'rights' issue --- American workers have rights, clearly defined rights, and companies run the risk of being hammered if they violate those rights
On the other hand the foreigners don't get such protections. Yes, they _may_ cost more, but if you factor in their lack of 'rights' (hence they are easier to handle) the same businesses which hire them can demand 'more', much more than what they dare to ask from their American workers
Although none of my businesses hire H1B grunts we have been approached by the middlemen
Some of my friends' businesses do use H1B grunts and the cost to them is around $165K per person, per year
There aren't more stories of these workers losing it completely and shooting up the places, although their rage is better spent shooting up the CEO and his fellow "we'll make millions personally while screwing more americans out of their jobs!" losers on the Board....
Inflation??? are you nuts? It's running 1-2% right now, it can't get lower.
Not technically true, as it did go negative briefly in 2009:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflation#Minor_deflations_in_the_United_States
Just boycott them. I am pulling my account with those weasels...
Just think, with Hillary we will get even more H-1B's
It is already starting, with the very real possibility that Donald Trump will win the Presidency, companies are already doing everything they can to move as much work overseas as is humanly possible. After all, the threat of Nationalism is real under Trump, so it makes much more sense to move work to free economies like those of India, China, Brazil, Russia, and South Africa, where there are no Nationalist policies to speak of.
but I would walk away if I could. I will NEVER knowingly train my own replacement.
It's difficult for me to understand why a competent IT professional would submit to this kind of treatment. My response would be: "No thank you, I'll clean out my desk. If you need my services after 15 minutes from now, send a proposal at high consultant rates and I'll consider it." I suspect people are sacrificing their dignity for the illusion of safety here- how is the situation they are faced with different from the one they will face at the end of the line? The person may have a bit more money but they will still be unemployed.
I consider myself a good Engineer. I've never been out of work more than a couple of weeks since I got my certs. Part of that is because I am willing to work contract and I consider any work better than no work. I'll temporarily take something at half what I was making just to keep working. That attitude comes with a certain amount of freedom, which I prize highly.
Money or justice?
If you love justice, you will say screw the severance and refuse to train replacements.
And the country is having a national debate whether it's better to elect a liar or a thief. How about neither? It reminds me of that scene in the Blue Brothers. "We got both kinds of music... Country AND Western!"
The latter half of the 2000s was rough for US dev and test employees at the Lexington campus as more and more foreign workers filled the halls and morale took a dive as people saw the writing on the wall. Of course, now Lexmark is in the toilet and being sold to the Chinese, so that worked out real well.
"Shall we play a game?" -W.O.P.R.
Seems lately that IT job openings are mostly contract positions, when I scan careerbuilder, or LinkedIn.
In the past 10yrs where I work, I've seen the transition. Ten years ago, most of the data center personnel worked for the company. Now they are mostly outsourced service personnel, or contract employees. Most of the hires in EDI for the past few years have been contract workers, too.
My own department used to be 100% company workers, until the past three years or so. Now they hire seasonal contract workers, "temps."
Of course, the Executive that did the big outsourcing push received kudos and promotions, and is now a SVP....
When I discreetly talk to the contact workers in my dept., I find they get no medical or dental benefits. They are just compensated with an hourly rate.
Lastly, during my annual reviews, my mgr never hesitates to remind me I am the most highly compensated person with my job title in the dept. I interpret it as "I will be the 1st to get the boot, when the time comes for further cost reductions."
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
If you have any pride and sense of self-worth you quit without warning the minute they announce this kind of traitor scumbag scheme.
Management who thinks they are saving money this way are filth in silk ties who deserve nothing but the utmost contempt as they are saying
to their employees : "My only flag is the bank note and you can drop dead as long as I make more money. Thanks for the years of service, sucker!"
The only way around this would be to force the participation of employees at the board of directors level and impose one third of net profits sharing
as yearly bonuses for all employees (fuck you money). Unions can't save you as they can be corrupted and often you will be fired if you even try to form one, especially in IT where excessive navel-gazing seems to be abnormally high. Seeing the corruption of Congress by lobbies, it would take a full-scale popular revolt to maybe change things. Sanders seems to have got it but there are so many dumb ignorant people who still vote for Clinton (she was at Trump's wedding ffs!).
They don't care about quality, as long as they get their money and then can run off with it.
Coding is a craft not an industry, no matter what some people would like to imagine.
I'm not trolling at all, but I find it interesting how hard it is, even for us intellectually gifted Slashdot readers, to see this situation from the global perspective.
Some of the richest individuals on the planet (American IT workers) are having their wealth distributed to citizens in much poorer countries.
As shitty as it is for us, at least some needy people are benefiting.
Capitalism cops a LOT of flack, but globalization is sometimes great at redistributing wealth from rich countries to poor countries.
Go team humans!
Transamerica has hired H1B visa employees to replace US workers too. US employees have had to train their H1B replacements under threat of withholding severance just like at Disney.
Chose one: [ ] Hillary - lying, cheating, corrupt politician who will deliver status quo, leaning left. [ ] The Donald - Exaggerating bullshit artist bigot who will deliver status quo (after hiring help), leaning ? (talks right, does left) [ ] A Circus - multiple 3rd party candidates all jump in the race and the election is a free-for-all, winner will deliver status quo...
There. Fixed that for you. And no, don't pretend he is not a bigot. He's a vulgarian version of George Wallace.
Employees say they are training overseas workers via web conferencing sessions. There are contractors in the office as well, some of whom may be working on temporary H-1B visas.
Unless you are living in a small town or city with few IT employment options, if you get caught in such a situation, you allowed yourself to be cornered into that kind of situation. This kind of shit does not happen all of the sudden. The writings are always on the wall for a long enough time for anyone to orchestrate a plan B or C.
Always have your bug-out bag ready, specially if you work in IT. That's your job security. Otherwise, you will always live in angst waiting for years for someone to give you the pink slip (and finally getting it with no options ready.)
We aren't competitive with Indian water! We need to compete with Thai water! The Vietnamese are killing us with their competitive food security!
You want to compete, don't you?
Says the unapologetic (and wealthy) capitalist.
I will shed no tears if/when one these laid off people shoots up the place. It's ok, they're insured.
...
Teach them what your PHBs have told you to teach them. Teach them the absolute minimum that isn't in the PHB's instructions. Don't explain anything about how or why. Collect the severance pay. Go get another job and wait for the panicked phone call at 03:00. Have agreements (made on napkins at bars ; napkins then burned) with other axed colleagues about minimum pay rates and "fire-fighting" pay rates. Screw the bastards, and teach people even less.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Does a company pay a worker to slit his own throat?
Is the check post-dated?
I remember 1980 very well. Jimmy Carter had the nation in:
(1) Double-digit interest rates
(2) Double-digit inflation rate
(3) Double-digit unemployment rates
(4) Record-setting low job participation rates. Obama is now the first president since Jimmy to be incompetent enough to get this one equally bad
(5) Gas rationing. Gas stations did not have enough for everyone and you could only get in line to buy gas in some parts of the country on certain days of the week based on the number on your license plate.
(6) New businesses failing faster than being created. This is another parameter Obama has now matched.
(7) A military so underfunded, relative to the demands placed on it, that morale was bad, hardware was falling apart, and many ships and aircraft were not fully armed. I was in the Navy at the time and saw this first-hand.
Reagan turned all that around so quickly that he was re-elected in a 49-state landslide in 1984 based on a campaign whose slogan was "it's morning in America". A slogan that did not seem silly because it really WAS that much better and brighter. EVERY demographic group in America saw their economics improve under Reagan, something nobody since Reagan has achieved.
The people back then who were stomping around mad and using the phrase "trickle-down" which you alluded to were hard-core fringe lefties and their buddies in entertainment and journalism. The nation as a whole, as reflected in the massive landslide defeat of Democrat candidate Mondale, was very happy with Reagan no matter how much political mud his opponents hurled at him.
Contrast that with Obama, who I'd bet you support. Under Obama most people have become worse-off with the average American family now earning less, having higher health insurance costs, and having a smaller net worth than the day Obama took office. Obama has never managed 1/2 the economic growth of the Reagan years despite collecting and spending more tax dollars than any president in US History AND borrowing and spending more money than every previous president in US history COMBINED!
Go back to your drugs, or stay in mommy's basement - whichever explains your rank ignorance or total dishonesty about the 1980's
This one's a WHOPPER: "There's no denying that the country has been tilted sharply to the right since Reagan got in."
Actually, it's EASY to deny.
In 1980 NO significant politician in any party was so far left that he/she would self-identify as a"progressive" or a "socialist". If anybody suggested such a thing, even the most-liberal Democrat politician would strongly deny it. Today, Hillary is running around calling herself a "progressive" and Bernie is self-identifying as a "socialist" - there IS no traditional/normal Democrat running in the 2016 election cycle.
In 1980 NO significant politician publicly supported ANY homosexual/bisexual/transexual/transgender etc policies. Even the most left-wing Democrat would not support gays in the military or gay marriage etc.
In 1980 ALL significant politicians were for a strong national defense including a massive nuclear arsenal. Democrats used to appeal to the "no nukes" part of their base by claiming to be for disarmament, but the Democrats who ran the congress back then by huge majorities were fully funding the arsenal that was then something like 10 times larger than what we have now. Thee most-famous US Democrat presidents, FDR, JFK, LBJ had all been for a super-muscular foreign policy that would make many modern Republicans blush.
In 1980 NO significant politician was for unlimited abortion, including so-called "partial birth" abortions. Bernie and Hillary are both in that camp and as a state senator Barack Obama supported,/a> post-birth abortions (kill the kid AFTER it's born). In fact, the 1970's push to legalize "the pill" was promoted (by Democrats) as making the whole abortion thing (which ALL politicians used to treat as tawdry) unnecessary. Even Roe v. Wade which was shocking to many in legalizing abortion had not made it as unlimited as Hillary and Bernie now casually promote.
In 1980 all significant politicians agreed that illegal immigration was bad, the arguments were over how to stop it and what to do with the people already here as it was stopped. The 1986 Reagan amnesty was part of a deal to secure the border and was a promise to the American public that it would never happen again. Even a decade ago almost all Democrats were campaigning against illegal immigration, including Hillary. Now Bernie and Hillary are both campaigning on promises to not enforce the nation's immigration laws - funny given that upon taking office they would take a solemn oath to uphold the laws...
The entire nation has been shifted VERY far to the left in the past 30 years as even many modern Republicans now support stuff not even the most liberal Democrat used to support. As a nation we are paying a price. Our economy is now crap for most younger people, and the federal government last week produced a report saying this is the "new normal". The nation's economy has a severe case of left-wing regulatory arteriosclerosis, and socially we are becoming bestial, with people viciously attacking people they disagree with politically.
After 9-11, then mayor of NYC said he was told by his staff about muslims celebrating and he recalls that there was some incident that was significant enough to require a police response.
The simple fact is that Trump probably recalls several nearly simultaneous events from that traumatic time: As 9-11 has happening in real-time on national TV, and as SOME number of Muslims in NYC and NJ celebrated (while others presumably may have even been mourning) as has been actually documented though not in large numbers, news outlets in the US intercut stories or responses around the world including large celebrations in places like the west bank and gaza (which I recall seeing televised). As a man with many important facilities and many employees and friends in Manhattan, who knew people killed in the attacks, and who probably was glancing at TVs in between taking other actions he probably was taking to safeguard his business empire in those horse of uncertainty he probabaly absorbed some of the media confusion. This makes him as human as everybody else and less delusional that the average liberal who thinks Sarah Palin said she could see Russia from her house (a claim of a comedian made on SNL at a time when most people watching were not in a hectic moment like 9-11)
There should be HUGE regulatory differences between private companies which are run by their founders and heirs, and companies that have "gone public", cashing-out to a bunch of investors who care nothing for the business and its employees.
Companies run by hired-gun CEOs and boards who are all planning their luxurious "golden parachutes" and doing everything they can to drive-up illusory short-term profits to meet the requirements of their benefit packages before they bail-out leaving the remaining employees and less-attentive investors with smoking ruins deserve hyper-regulation to protect the public, employees, "main street" investors, retired pensioners, suppliers, and creditors from the reckless and unaccountable wrecking balls with MBA degrees. Companies run by the people who had the vision to found them and who struggle to make them succeed and nurture and grow them and build successful teams of employees deserve as much latitude and freedom from regulatory burden as possible.
Everybody knows full-well that "going public" enables gaining more money to grow a business and has long been a normal business activity, BUT it is also one of the best-known ways for people to slap together a business, make it look great in the short term, and then cash-out and leave the illusion in the hands of suckers. It's the primary business model that supported internet bubble 1.0 of "Pets.com" fame (which made the late 90s look like a boom-time but burst during the 2000 election cycle) and is part of the current situation which I believe is an internet bubble 2.0 where many businesses run by new billionaires-on-paper are generating illusory gains by using the internet to enable massive out-sourcing and other labor manipulations. In the old days, companies using slave labor actually had to be on-site personally dealing with the slaves and risking being seen doing it. Nowadays these rotten scoundrels can use slave labor,child labor, and prison labor half way around the world with plausible deniability and no chance of being photographed doing it.
fought against this stuff.
He is Senator Jeff Sessions, a Georgia Republican who is hated by Democrats and by bought-off crony Republicans alike.
He is one of Trump's trusted advisers.
I am not associated with him in any way, and I'm also not a Trump backer (I have a LOT of issues with him, but he is better on the issues that matter to me than Hillary or Bernie are and nobody else is possible), but when people whine about things like the H1-B abuses and wonder why nobody does anything about it, I end up wondering why so few people care enough to get behind people like him.... which in-turn makes him such a lone voice. It is very significant that his voice in the congress, which is supposed to be a body that represents the American people, is so drowned-out by the voices of those bought-off by the multinational businesses and their bankers and big unions that pretend to be for middle America but are actually big backers of all the imported cheap labor.
If H1-B visas are an issue to you, Trump is the only candidate in 30 years to even offer a hope of stopping this stuff. If you cannot support him on this because of some other issue, then you are simply saying that this is less important to you than that other issue and you need to stop pretending this matters. Pretending that there is some other imaginary political scheme to help you with this dilemma is just psychological wallpaper.
Maybe if the civilization-ending asteroid strikes Earth. Otherwise, they'll be truckers in five years. They'll still be truckers in ten years. After that, it starts getting a bit iffy, but I bet they'll still be some people driving trucks even in twenty years. Even if not, I'd still say you'd have better job security than IT.
Hi, I worked at a Bank in Midrange Services. Once the Bank started to divest itself from it's parent bank, upper management got greedy. Instead of keeping the great paying internal IT jobs local they decided to outsource to IBM Global - India. We were forced to train IBM Global or leave and sacrifice our stipend. Please.. if you are faced with this the best thing you can do IS LEAVE! If you must train them be as vague as you can possibly can be. Do not set them up for success. Set them up for failure. Also contact your State's Department of Labor. Even though you are not technically laid off you are getting displaced. MA DEAPRTMENT OF UNEMPLOYMENT Informed me that my employer must update the Department of Labor how many jobs were lost by Trade. If they do not it's a violation of Federal Employment Law. MA Mutual and any other employer that outsources will be faced paying higher unemployment insurance. I'm focusing on finding my next opportunity. I have not ruled out on writing a "Hacking for Dummies" book.
Let's not forget how Bill Clinton was constantly saying that there was a severe shortage of STEM workers in the USA, and that we needed more H1B visas. Think Hillary's different?