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Outsourced IT Workers Ask Sen Feinstein For Help, Get Form Letter in Return (computerworld.com)
Reader dcblogs writes: A University of California IT employee whose job is being outsourced to India recently wrote Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) for help. Feinstein's office sent back a letter addressing manufacturing job losses, not IT, and offered the worker no assistance. "I am being asked to do knowledge transfer to a foreigner so they can take over my job in February of 2017," the employee, wrote in part. The employee is part of a group of 50 IT workers and another 30 contractors facing layoffs after the university hired an offshore outsourcing firm. The firm, India-based HCL, won a contract to manage infrastructure services. Since the layoffs became public, the school has posted Labor Condition Applications (LCA) notices -- as required by federal law when H-1B workers are being placed. UCSF employees have seen these notices and made some available to Computerworld. They show that the jobs posted are for programmer analyst II and network administrator IV. For the existing UCSF employees, the notices were disheartening. "Many of us can easily fill the job. We are training them to replace us," said one employee who requested anonymity because he is still employed by the university.
H-1B Visas are meant to cover skills not readily available in this country. I would argue that if the current workers are training their replacements, then the skill set is readily available in this country. To quote Wiki :
The regulations define a "specialty occupation" as requiring theoretical and practical application of a body of highly specialized knowledge in a field of human endeavor[1] including but not limited to biotechnology, chemistry, architecture, engineering, mathematics, physical sciences, social sciences, medicine and health, education, law, accounting, business specialties, theology, and the arts, and requiring the attainment of a bachelor's degree or its equivalent as a minimum[2] (with the exception of fashion models, who must be "of distinguished merit and ability").[3] Likewise, the foreign worker must possess at least a bachelor's degree or its equivalent and state licensure, if required to practice in that field.
Tell the university that you simply don't have the skill set required to train your replacement...
How come Slashdot never gets Slashdotted?
People in India need to eat something, too, and most of them are piss poor in comparison to US standards anyway. It's hard to find a reason why they shouldn't deserve to get work on an international labor market. I bet I'm going to be downvoted for this, and fully understand the personal problems of the workers who get fired, of course, but there is also another side to these kind of stories.
> "I am being asked to do knowledge transfer to a foreigner so they can take over my job in February of 2017,"
I have no idea why employees just sheeplike say yes to doing this shit, instead of taking all your accrued leave and looking for/starting a new job at the same time.
At least dick the company around, phone in sick all the time, and do nothing for your last few months. Certainly never give the foreigner any training or actually true information.
Sorry for the AC posting, but...
My company worked with HCL. Not a bad company in their own right. They took over our tech debt so we could, in theory, focus on building new things. Started off with a big seminar about how indian culture is different from american culture. Uhhh, OK, informative I guess.
It lasted about 9 months before we dropped them. We had to wait a full year for the contract to run out. Their coding was decent, language was decent. Time was the real barrier here. They were working when we were asleep and vice versa. It's just not an ideal setup to try and have people submitting code and doing QA work in the middle of the night. Because if you have a question on why they did what they did, you send out an e-mail, wait a day, get a response, send it back. Everything just grinds to a halt.
It might be cheaper on paper, but it's fucking stupid. It creates to much of a time barrier between you and the people doing the work.
Farm jobs, 1790, 90% of the labor force. Manufacturing took all our hard-working farm jobs.
Dock and rail worker jobs, 1920. The shipping pallet cut 4 days work down to 4 hours.
Manufacturing jobs, 1990. Globalization took away all our jobs.
IT jobs, 2015. H1B foreigners are taking our jobs.
Long-term result has been expansion of population, increase in per-capita GDP, increase in the buying power of the middle- and lower-class families, a stronger job market, people spending less on food and clothing and more on entertainment and HEALTHCARE of all things, and the development of things like IT jobs instead of just a bunch of factory workers and shit shovelers. The long-term result has ALSO been the creation of a lot of retail and service (fast food) jobs, and a lot of domestic shipping jobs.
The short-term result has always been a displacement of workers. 40% of the U.S. workforce turns over every year (which is why there's always Help Wanted signs--no, folks, the 5% unemployed aren't lazy drug addicts abusing the welfare system; there are legitimately just not jobs for everyone), and some 1.5%-2% retire and get replaced by new workers (college graduates), which means a skill replacement rate of some 1%-2% is safe. Still, those displaced workers mean the rest of us get richer, and even they benefit in the long run; but 6 months from now is a distant thought when you've just lost your job.
I get it, really. I don't want to lose my job. You don't want to lose your job. I also don't want to live in 1990 forever. You see all these cell phones, high-speed Internet, and all the cheap food? The sheer buying power of the middle-class, the increase in available health care, and the massive amount of shit like video games and tablets and audiobooks we buy? Netflix, the entire IT industry (which only exists because it can sell things like Netflix), the like? That's the result of people losing their jobs for a little while along the way. What brought us from 1990 to 2016 is this kind of shit.
Yes, it's irritating. It's sad. It's unfair. It's ALL unfair. We either kick a few good people out on the street and wait for the economy to cycle around and get them (or a proportional number of others who were facing terminal unemployment) back into new jobs to enjoy the new economy; or we protect their jobs and make *everyone* suffer a stagnant, decaying economy until, 50 years from now, we look like North Korea. Which is fair?
I keep pushing for a Universal Social Security. No tax increase required. Remediates the welfare system completely. Gives everyone an absolute share of technical progress--the savings these steps forward bring us, the new wealth, has a fraction cleaved off and distributed equally to all Americans. The poorest benefit most; the richest aren't taxed anything more for it; everyone else kind of scales.
It's a contemporary fix. If we did it in 1950, everyone from the lower-middle-class up would have to give up nearly *all* their money and receive the standard stipend; the richest of rich would be barely more wealthy than the poorest-of-poor, and we'd collapse like the USSR. Since 2013, it's been doable without cutting the rich down, and without substantially narrowing the income distribution. This creates a firm, stable basis for the poorest-of-poor and, importantly, for the people who lose their jobs to these things.
No, it's not fair. The system I propose is better than today, doesn't cut into anyone, lowers business taxes, reduces the cost of paying employees (read: more jobs, cheaper products), and lessens the financial damage done to an individual who loses his job. It's still not fair, because that guy is still (temporarily) the sacrificial lamb that takes us all into a better future. It's less-bad, and more-optimal. That happens to be important.
Yes, I found a way to at least give the child of Omelas better food without destroying society, even if we still have to keep him locked up in the basement.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
At this point it's better to actively sabotage the effort while you look for other employment and then quit. I've fought this battle in a different field, it didn't do anyone any favors to go along with it, including the corporate masters who thought they were saving money. The best policy is subtle sabotage: make enemies, say vague things, give wrong directions when someone talks to you without a paper trail then deny or dissemble. The government has sold you out, unions won't work here, so at this point misbehaving and taking their money for as long as it lasts is the best policy.
Getting to see or talk to a senator is dang near impossible. (Unless of course, you've donated large sums of money to the campaign or money-laundering foundation.)
I know this first-hand from when I was starting a company and trying to get support for a particular program. It took us several weeks of trying, and the best we could do was fly to D.C. to meet with a mid-level staffer for 20 minutes.
I'm sure that senators are busy people. Listening to their constituents ranks right up with answering robo calls.
That is why you don't hear of these horror stories of "I had to train my replacement" in the UK - we simply don't have to do that.
Also our companies for the most part aren't farming out work to cheap foreign labour on the basis that locals can't do the work even though they are doing it and have to train the people that are apparently more capable of said work, all while having to pay them the same anyway because that makes no fucking sense. As I understand it that's pretty much the h1b situation. If I'm wrong please correct me.
Wanna buy a shirt?
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Unless you agreed to train your replacement for severance pay when you were hired, they can't make it dependant upon your willingness to do so. If they illegally refuse to pay you what was agreed upon, go file a judgment against the company. Most companies won't try to fight you in court, they'll just pay you off to get rid of you.
Three things. Karma to burn. Going off topic.
First off, you're absolutely correct that the lizard people have been lying through their teeth about Trump and twisting his words around and taking shit out of context. It's cringe-worthy many days, because I want to actually talk about shit that matters rather than needing to constantly get mired down in "Un-Correcting the Record" as it were. (i.e. After the lizard people Correct the Record* so that the version presented in the daily moon matrix [CNN, WaPo, etc] bears very little resemblance to reality it can use a little un-correcting.)
Second thing. I'm changing the subject because I have nothing to add about H1Bs. Clinton is sure to roll TPP and TTIP into some other package that will probably also include TISA. I think there's going to be a serious push in the next few years for a half-world government that includes the USA, Canada, Japan, Australia, and Europe. And we're all going to lose fucking bigtime.
Trump believes that trans women have authentic identities and you clearly do not. You won't have any MRI evidence I could post showing that yep, it's how folks are born, physically so that's a moot point. Trump seems to be all for gender equality outside of overhyped locker room banter. We've got Thiel and Milo over there as well. There's clearly something going on here I'm missing.
Here's the question: how much do I have to worry about President Trump signing legislation and using executive orders to enforce your backwards understanding of gender and sexuality? Will I wish I had voted for Clinton^H^H^H^H^H^H^HFEMA concentration camps and Nuclear Armageddon 2016?
I'd like to be clear. I was doing just fucking fine before Obama decided to make a fucking federal policy out of that area as well. I was doing better than I currently am. Obama didn't help me one fucking bit, but the retaliation sure as hell hurt me. (Go figure, how the hell could the federal government possibly help in this arena? I'm not surprised, but I'm angry nonetheless.) But if the "pendulum" swings at the federal level the way it has at the local level, I'm going to lose even more. It won't fucking matter to me what jobs there are if the pendulum swings. And I see no reason to vote against my own best interest.
Third thing. Oh, and any chance you think, despite everything I've read that the alt-right views ending the drug war, closing the DEA, and massively shrinking the size of government and the prison-industrial complex as some kind of politically correct nonsense, that Trump would also support ending the drug war? (I heaven't really heard much of anything on that front and time's coming and gotta make a choice!)
As is hopefully apparent, my political positions are more clearly in line with the Libertarian Party.
* Correct the Record is Clinton's social media astroturf campaign for the extra-dense in the peanut gallery. Pretty sure we've got a few members here and even one on the other site.
He's a businessman, he plays by the rules the politicians set up. Now he will be a politician, who states he will fix the system. Considering how many are stomping sand in the Rep party, I believe him. Gravy train is ending for some, and they don't like it.
What he doesn't know about the Swiss is they regulate the crap out of everyone. Health Insurance must be not for profit and the Gov't have price controls on the fees doctors and hospitals can charge insurance. The Swiss are the most capitalistic lot in Europe and even they recognize when you're injured or hurt you're in no position to negotiate. I don't see conservatives (or Scott Adams) lining up behind gov't mandated price controls.
Florida has some of the country's best roads, and way too many of the country's worst roads. Roads that have gotten demolished and rebuilt from scratch within the past 15 years are generally pretty good. Roads that haven't been touched since they opened to traffic as interstate highways back in the 60s and 70s are awful.
On the other hand, Texas has roads I'd classify as the gold standard of kick-ass excellence (the Dallas Central Expressway south of 635 is borderline erotic), while California seems to have the most uniformly good & adequate roads (individually, not quite as over the top as the best Texan roads, but almost universally adequate and generally quite well-maintained).
From what I recall growing up, Ohio's roads were generally good, except they got beaten up so badly every winter by ice, Ohio spent literally a third of the year scrambling to fix the previous winter's damage before the next one. I also remember that driving from Ohio into Pennsylvania was kind of like driving from Alabama into Florida... one minute, you're on a wide, freshly-paved road... 3 minutes later, the shoulders are gone, the asphalt is a half step above compacted gravel, there are potholes big enough to trash a lifted monster truck, and the road itself looks like it hasn't been improved since the 1950s.