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IT Worker Who Trained H-1B-Visa-Holding Replacement Aims For Congress (computerworld.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Computerworld: Craig Diangelo was an IT worker at Northeast Utilities in Connecticut until he completed training his H-1B-visa-holding replacement. He was one of about 200 who lost their jobs in 2014 after two India-based IT offshore outsourcing firms took over their work at what is now called Eversource. Diangelo, at first, was quiet, bound by severance agreements signed with the company. Then he started speaking out. Now, Diangelo is running for Congress. offering up a first-hand perspective on IT outsourcing that resonates with many other workers in his state. "I've seen the injustices that have been done to us," said Diangelo, who is not optimistic lawmakers will deliver on H-1B reform. "You can't let this matter die down, because when you stop talking about it nothing seems to get done." Diangelo isn't a one-issue candidate or political novice. He previously served two terms as an alderman in his hometown of New Britain and remains involved in city planning work. The 64-year-old has filed the necessary papers to run for office, has a campaign manager, a website and knows he has to raise an awful lot money to challenge Democratic Rep. Elizabeth Esty, now in her third term. But Diangelo has no illusions about his odds. Even so, he may be the only person to run for Congress, at least in recent times, who has trained his replacement. He went to college hoping to be come a teacher, but when that proved difficult, he wound up at Travelers Insurance in Hartford -- in the company's data processing center.
Most likely it is his age. At 62, it is very hard to get hired in IT anymore. There is discreet filtering going on for age at this point.
Not everyone can just quit, especially when they know finding a job will be difficult once it is over.
Or did this guy decide, Fuck that, I took the money but the deal was so bad I'm just going to ignore my end of the agreement?
A man who wants to be in Congress so he can make laws for our country. Hmm...
Sad that so many US State Governors and Legislatures, Federal Senate and House representatives, Federal and State District Court Judges and Magistrates hate "those citizens", the legal USA citizens.
You don't find retail workers crying that they are forced to do hard work for $10 an hour. Nobody deserves a job. Nobody deserves anything more than the amount they are willing to do work for. You can't be in favor of preventing others from doing "your" job for less money than you and still claim to be in favor of capitalism. What you are asking for is welfare. This abuse by workers is the reason companies are going to have to automate as much as possible. If you want a company to pay you because you exist then get it by taxation not by forcing yourself onto a random company's payroll.
IT. not softdev.
So everyone is happier to pay more for goods and services as long as it's made by the USA? You know that's what has to happen if you decide to not allow companies to use cheaper labour elsewhere. The difference is in the past it was just for components/goods now it's possible to do the same with services.
Age.. and it's cheaper to higher younger or offshore in this case.
You must be young. As you get older you'll find that bouncing around will not be such a viable option. And you will get older, even if you think it will be different for you.
Before it requires an angry voice, or automatic weapons fire, or SWAT teams, let people hear from him first.
vote in your primaries. Gerrymandering means that guys like this don't have a chance in the General. But in the primary anything goes. Change your party affiliation to the one that's owns your district if you have to, but vote in your primary. Also, call your representative and remind them you'll be voting in their primary and if they don't put a stop to this crap you'll kick them out.
They're not afraid of losing the general. They _are_ afraid of their primaries.
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Over 30 is as good as dead.
That's an interesting angle I haven't heard before, although I acknowledge there is a fair amount of anti-Indian enmity on this site, perhaps even from some of the /. editors (not sure about that though).
I personally support H1-B because I think it helps keep IT companies afloat with offices in America (as opposed to being farmed offshore). Instead of focusing on the 10-20 percent of the staff that is H1-B, people should think of the 80-90 percent that are American citizens holding jobs that might have disappeared if the office was shut down.
Lower cost of production = improved human condition.
That's only true if the cost of production isn't lowered by moving production to countries that have reduced/no worker's rights.
I'm not that far away (well 15 years).. and my fear is this fear. Your experience and knowledge isn't considered in purely financial IT decisions. Those that make those decisions won't be around when it all goes to H E double toothpick they just pick up their bonuses and move on.
I'm not your typical slob (well from what I see here). I continually out-pace my younger peers as they are increasingly the entitled millennial generation that put the lunch hour above the coding hour. They disappear when somebody doesn't provide them the coding environment they want (code can be reached from home even though it is proprietary, SVN repository that is consistently reachable from home (again.. even though it is company-private) and other existential resources (I really like this oddball keyboard and software package that I love) and thus you must accommodate my needs.
Your employer sets your boundaries and expectations of performance. Not you.
What makes this comically tragic... is the daily/weekly/monthly news about the need for STEM programs in the U.S.. They continue to betray our children and tell them there are paths to a secure future in the tech industry if they pursue a STEM based career. Yet this is another betrayal of that storyline. How many of our children will finally finish their degrees only to find that the U.S. outsources their skill-set to India/China/world+dog as long as wages for those jobs are well under a livable wage in the United States.
"Cracking down on H-1B visas, which are often used by Indian workers, is really no different from Trump's attempts to implement a Muslim ban."
The H1 program was started in 1952; it was not intended to be the Curry Train from Mumbai. It was always meant to be Neutral as to National Origin, and it was always meant to be temporary until Labor Shortages in very narrowly defined categories eased.
Think on this: The origin of the resentment against the present program is not rooted in resentment against Indians; rather it is directed against the current situation where certain Foreign Workers are encouraged to take lower than prevailing wages for similar work, with _no_ consideration of the effect it has the Domestic Labor Pool.
Now think on this: A Software Guru from Mumbai who is willing to displace a Domestic Guru from Cupertino by working for half those Cupertino wages should check over their shoulders, because there just may be a Guru from Karachi who will be more than willing to work for half of that, and back to Mumbai you go.
Note that I support the intent of the H1 Programs; without it, the US would have lost a damn fine Nuclear Structure theorist from Buenos Aires, back in 1998. These are rare birds, and must be cultivated. It took 18 months of paperwork, and when he finally came back, he was offered top Salary, because of who he was and what he could contribute.
Hmmm... Maybe some keen Entrepreneur really should be checking out Alumni of the Department of Computer Science, from the University of Karachi...
Americans like to bitch and feel righteous indignation and bemoan the evils of immigrants; it's a national pastime. They beat their chests in anger now that tides of the free market dynamics have turned on them, but they used to be all too happy to reap in the benefits when it worked the other way. What happened to meritocracy ? If H1B workers are giving the companies a better bargain then that is what the free market demands. This reminds me of the Gangs of New York and how the locals were beating up new immigrants. It's America just repeating.
Hello fellow /.ers.
For years we've watched this happen over and over again. When are we going to draw the line in the sand? Trump *might* do some things, then again he might not do anything. He has no skin in the game so to speak. Here we finally have a candidate who's been through what many of us have been through. We need to make sure he has the support he needs to win. Hopefully he either knows how to run a campaign, or has people to do that stuff for him (Speaking as an IT guy that has done a TON of campaign volunteering)
To the Indian /.'ers.
This is nothing against you, but the way you've been leveraged to drive down US IT worker wages has been unfair to us. I know you're simply looking for a better life, but when you take that H1-B job, and you're being trained by the person you're replacing, just remember what karma is. This has happened over and over and over again. Besides hurting us, you're not getting any closer to being "American". Your visa is designed to turn you into a low wage indentured servant, it is not a path to citizenship. I've seen how you and your brothers get treated, and I can't imagine why you guys haven't risen up yourself to unchain yourselves from this oppression. My only guess is you come from someplace worse than here, and that fear of going back, and being called a "failure" by your family, your village also weighs heavily on your minds.
Over 30 is as good as dead.
Go fuck yourself
The 64 year old. Good lord. This is what the future is, eh? Maybe the issue is that you can't retire at 63. Maybe the issue is you expect or need the same job at that age. That's kinda messed up. You might as well want the same things as a union at that point. Yet I kind of doubt this guy is pro-union.
"Old man yells at systemd"
go fuck yourself you paranoid slob. ohh ohh proprietary! your code isnt worth shit
I don't need you to tell me. So close! Gonna cum. Urrghhhh.
I know this will probably happen to me one day, and I have money saved for it. When they ask me to train my replacement, I'll say "fuck you very much" and walk out the door.
Good. If everyone did that instead of training their replacement, H-1B workers would take over fewer of our jobs.
It's just as bad if not worse in software development or software engineering or whatever title one may have. I have had software development jobs and we were part of IT.
And the attitude in this feild is if you are unemployed, then you are no good. Because if you were any good, you'd have a job. And when you're young and cocky, it feels good to feel superior - even if it's built on a falsehood.
No matter what part of STEM one is in, one day you will be in this guy's shoes unless something really changes. But it won't do any good for the folks whose careers have been ruined.
It can't be that much worse than what we have now. Just saying.
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start with lowering the age of Medicare eligibility. That is what keeps people working.
Also we need up the H1B min wage to stop it from being used to replace us worker with cheap ones chained to the job.
Two sentences worth of reasons for why he's running, a big Donate button, no party affiliation, no link to his stands on various issues, no standard candidate biography I could reach.
he may be a great candidate, but you'd never tell that from his website.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Well at least one part of the government is already doing what he wants - Trump's Administration Just Made It Harder to Get Work Visas
I couldn't tell what party he's with from his website but hopefully not with the Democrats, who have let the H1-B situation worsen for years while they collected huge donations from the companies involved in farming out these workers...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"too many chiefs, not enough indians." IT work needs a lot of fairly junior and midlevel people. the kinds of people who gladly help the moron in HR or legal fix his printer settings.
too much experience is precisely the point. you don't want to hire someone who's overqualified for an uninteresting job. even if you pay the person the junior rate it still makes more sense to hire someone who's actually, you know, junior.
experience and knowledge is needed in low-level and middle management. not front-line grunts. which is where most openings are.
Over 30 is as good as dead.
I was a video game tester in my 30's for six years. I got the old guys assigned to my team, as none of the high school punks knew what to do with a grandfather who Midway arcade machines in the 1980's and an former Army armorer who tested pen-and-paper games in the 1970's.
It's just as bad if not worse in software development or software engineering or whatever title one may have.
Not if you keep up your skillset and don't let yourself languish in any one technology for too long.
Experience is still quite valuable if you can pair long-term development skill with recent technologies...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Your replacement will know how parentheses work.
H-1B is intended to find workers with skill sets you can't find locally.
It was not intended to find workers will skill sets you CAN find locally.
Seniority has nothing to do with it.
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Thank you for displaying your ignorance of reality. In IT, your age is held against you. Age is hardly ever the only factor in determining who to make an offer to, so other attributes may override any particular hiring decision. However, all things being equal, experience and age are a minus in IT, not a plus.
The work ethic of the employee is beside the point. Hiring an H1-B when there are US citizens who are willing to take the job is illegal. Training your H1-B replacement is a situation where, by definition, there is an American who will work the job.
It would be a good idea for you to impale yourself on a rusty spike. You'd feel better. We'd feel better. It's a win/win.
Guess he's not the technical kind of "IT worker" then.
Raise the age! Keep people working longer. It's absolutely idiotic that there is anyone who thinks retirement age should remain the same while life expectancy and medical care for the elderly continue to improve.
+1. When was the last time you hired a programmer in their 60's? The "safe" route is to go into management, but some of us just love programming, and will do so as long as we are able.
There are cultural issues, not just overt age bias. As a total noob in Java working among 20 and 30 year olds right now, I wish I were 22. Then, my co-oworkers, who are awesome in general, would offer to mentor me, teach me, etc. Instead, I have been mostly on my own for two years, and have been given every task that came along that involved C or C++, meaning I couldn't work with my teammates. In my workplace, that means editing code that other teams "own", which is a special kind of purgatory.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
Agreed, and note that in general, I am an H1-B fan. We benefit a great deal in the US from this program. However, no one in the US should be asked to train a replacement with an H1-B. This is not the situation describe in this article: they were training remote replacements without H1-Bs. Frankly, that is at least as bad, even if it does not involve visas of any kind. Also, it rarely works: companies off-shoring their design staff typically are on the financial rocks soon after. This is typically an act of either desparation (the company is already on the rocks) or stupidity (unfortunately, most big companies).
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
"95% of programmers from India unfit for software development jobs -most ‘memorize’ programming codes"
http://www.tremeritus.com/2017/04/30/95-of-programmers-from-india-unfit-for-software-development-jobs-most-memorize-programming-codes/
What could possibly go wrong...
Sure - as long as age employment statistics are kept and monitored and affirmative action like for women is enforced. Nobody wants to employ damaged goods.
The reason you don't see older folk lifting or working in Mac D's is Lawyers.
The cost of backs. RSI, muscle skeletal injuries is higher - the same reason you do not employ someone who has ever reported and injury or got compensation.
Older folk in ICT is rarer, because 'technicians' can be imported cheaper.
yeah, more money for the owners !!!
LOL. Lower cost of production = CEO and cronies get a new summer home. Note, public utility, lots of people in the cookie jar.
"too many chiefs, not enough indians." IT work needs a lot of fairly junior and midlevel people. the kinds of people who gladly help the moron in HR or legal fix his printer settings.
Information Technology (IT) encompasses much more than "desk-side jockeys" and "help desk associates/analysts." This is precisely one of the reasons that I switched to data science and am involved in a startup. Though I anticipate a sudden influx of Indian nationals claiming 15 years experience yet they graduated (cough, cough) only 2 years ago flooding the market.
Approximately 30% of tech jobs are now outsourced / offshored. Over the next decade expect it to hit 50%. It's best to think of a future in tech (if you are bound to the living economics of the developed wold) to be as fruitful a career as a taxi driver.
Approximately 30% of tech jobs are now outsourced / offshored. Over the next decade expect it to hit 50%. It's best to think of a future in tech (if you are bound to the living economics of the developed wold) to be as fruitful a career as a taxi driver.
You don't want to enforce the illegal part of illegal immigration.
You don't want to enforce illegal handling of classified information if its your hoe mishandling.
You don't want to enforce lying under oath to Congress.
You don't want to enforce executive orders against Sanctuary Cities.
Why suddenly are you worried bout enforcing H1-B visa laws?
Either enforce the law or don't. When you pick and choose which laws based on how you feel, you have a dictatorship.
When you can't do, teach. When you can't teach, run for Congress. "He went to college hoping to be come a teacher, but when that proved difficult...."
Thank you for displaying your ignorance of reality. In IT, your age is held against you.
I have only seen this to be true when you cannot show a natural progression of job responsibilities throughout your career. And this seems to be true in most professions. I don't see too many 62 year olds being hired into middle management either. In most careers if you want to stick with a role traditionally held by 25-35 year olds until retirement it is a risk.
I see plenty of IT and soft dev workers employed in their late 50's and early 60's, but they are all in very senior roles. Not necessarily management, but perhaps enterprise architect or a similar role. Their experience is very valuable in leading projects because they have led dozens of large projects managing at least dozens of people (either with direct reports or as a team lead). Any company worth working for treats these employees as very valuable.
But all of that extra experience is not very valuable if you aren't taking on an ever increasing level of responsibility throughout your career. In that case you will have a very hard time finding work at 60, just like in most other industries.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Over 30 is as good as dead.
Ha, over 30 is when the pay starts rolling in. This is when you start seeing 5 figure raises each year. Plateauing should not set in until closer to 40.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Spot on.
Any company that replaces an employee with an H1-B worker is intentionally breaking the law. While the "unemployment rate" doesn't look all that bad, the fact is that we have many technology workers that are out of a job because of this abuse. I caught up with a good friend of mine this week who is out of a 17 year old network engineering job because they are laying people off at Verizon and hiring H1-B folks to do the work. We've seen new stories about Disney doing the same. Com Ed (an Excelon company) has been accused of this in the midwest. The Nielsen company has been doing this for years and signed a multi-year/multi-BILLION dollar contract with Tata Consulting Services and forced managers to replace employees with TCS H1-B workers. Walgreens has done the same with their technology folks claiming to only be "supplementing their staff" when these are full time jobs, not part time or short term "contract" engagements. Time and time again we are seeing this and it is killing our industry.
Here's another story about this just a few weeks ago: https://yro.slashdot.org/story...
The frightening reality of this is that not only are our jobs being taken away, but these companies are bringing on completely incompetent staff through these H1-B programs. Seriously, a program that was designed to bring in qualified individuals when local qualified individuals cannot be found is literally hiring people that are NOT qualified to do the job!
https://developers.slashdot.or...
It is abuse. It is illegal. It is one reason why this country has taken such a sharp turn towards isolationism in this last election and is willing to tolerate someone like Donald Trump as their President. Most folks I know that voted for him are saying "Yea, he's got a ton of faults, but at least we might be able to keep a job."
This issue has got to be addressed and, in my opinion, the senior executives at companies that have made the conscious decision to replace US workers with H1-B workers should have criminal charges levied against them just like those Wall Street folks that lied and cheated their investors. I am fed up with seeing this over and over again with nothing done about it.
Dissenter
"There is no knowledge that is not power."
Government increasing the supply of workers via a guest visa program is the exact opposite of a free market. This is a manipulated market where private industry influences government immigration policy to artificially increase a labor pool and suppress wages.
In a "free market" both labor and capital would be free to go where the most productive opportunities exist.
This fantasy land does not exist anywhere on planet earth. Many countries protect their native industries and workforces. Just try to get an IT job in Brazil or China.
America is not required to look after the standard of living of emerging nations - that is for the people and governments of those nations to do.
The influx of H1B visa guest workers is clearly hurting American workers and enriching a select few. Our current administration is committed to fixing this problem - and I applaud that.
Long story, but I was essentially the first hire towards building a new engineering team, and was put on the group interviewing new candidates for the other positions. We interviewed 6 or so candidates for an embedded SW position, most of them kids fresh out of college, a few somewhere in the middle of their careers, and one guy in his 60's. The guy in his 60's flat out impressed me with his enthusiasm for his subject and his drive to keep his knowledge fresh. My boss didn't like him (literally he told me he was too old), but was not thrilled with the other candidates, so I convinced him to offer a C2H position to the old guy. He's now a full-time employee here (just had his 64th birthday) and the head of the SW team. While the kids under him are pulling their hair out, he's calmly finding me solutions. Probably the best hire I've ever made.
Many countries have mandatory retirement ages around 65 - for one huge reason:
To make room in the workforce for new workers and to give them a path to building a career.
For every 70 year old that is working a job there is, most likely, a young person underemployed trying to pay off education debts.
A sensible retirement age has social benefits far beyond the elderly enjoying their golden years.
Do we really need to work everyone until they are dead?
Agreed, and note that in general, I am an H1-B fan. We benefit a great deal in the US from this program. However, no one in the US should be asked to train a replacement with an H1-B. This is not the situation describe in this article: they were training remote replacements without H1-Bs. Frankly, that is at least as bad, even if it does not involve visas of any kind. Also, it rarely works: companies off-shoring their design staff typically are on the financial rocks soon after. This is typically an act of either desparation (the company is already on the rocks) or stupidity (unfortunately, most big companies).
The problem is that the company (Eversource) did the outsourcing to Indian companies (InfoSys, Tata) that are those who have the highest H1B applications (abuse the system). Even though the article does not say anything about training in detail, one may assume that those Indian companies will eventually get H1B people in to replace the person.
Northeast Utilities did what lots of big companies do -- outsource their IT to some faceless consulting company. It goes in cycles -- a new CIO comes in, promises millions of dollars in savings, it gets done, people are usually disappointed and IT usually swings at least partially back in-house. I've experienced it twice working in a financial services company and an airline. There is very little one can do when the MBA crowd presents the board with a spreadsheet showing 50 or 60% savings on IT.
Those consulting companies should be the targets of any action. I actually think the H-1B as it was originally intended is a good "safety valve" to get a few very talented people into the country. I now work for a multinational company who has their own issues with offshoring, but has also used H-1Bs to move very key people to the US. What these outsourcing companies use it for is not that at all, and this abuse should be what's targeted. I would be fine with consulting companies using contractors, paying a little less, etc. as long as it was done fairly. What I've experienced is that the offshore company will bring in a few H-1B workers for the jobs that absolutely require a physical presence, as well as the "train your replacement" crew. This second group is who collects all the information, procedures, etc. from the soon-to-be-fired IT workers and sends it back to the offshore teams. H-1Bs are supposed to be high-level experts, not train-the-trainer guys.
That said, I'm really hoping I don't wind up like this guy, a few years away from retirement and unhireable. The covert age discrimination in IT and software dev is what needs to stop. Every other proper profession values experienced people -- newbie doctors aren't considered experts until they've seen a lot of things, and frankly had their egos checked by having a few patients die on them unexpectedly. Yet, in the Silicon Valley startup world, and corporate IT in general, 25-year-old "rockstars" who work 100 hour weeks to make up for inexperience are celebrated. Now, it is true that there are older people who have not kept current with things and basically done the exact same job for 20 years. The problem is that as I age, and continue to keep my skills current because I really like what I do, I'm lumped in with the same "too old, too expensive, can't hang with the bros" crowd.
I think that's one of the crappiest things companies do -- kicking out someone in their late 50s/early 60s to save money, knowing that they're never going to find a comparable job to bridge the gap between now and retirement. I've seen it happen many times...and people should save to defend against it. But at the same time, IT work or development is not like being a professional athlete, where you have a 10 year career at most and have to make all your money then.
I feel your pain. I was also relegated to the particular realm. To top that off the work that I was qualified for was relegated to 10 Indian off-shore who I had to manage (I was purported to be a technical lead instead of a Senior Developer which was NOT was I was hired to do). The biggest issue I had was I was the only permanent employee on the project relating to the actual code development. All others were either H1B or off-shore for the same companies (TCS and HCL). I basically became a technical manager. I ended up leaving because of this situation.
Of course, the liberals on here will strenuously DENY that fact, but face it, the big IT firms are all run by loyal (and rich) Democrats. Money talks. Democrats are the true panderers to the rich and the American economy has suffered for it.
But hey, you libtards are still in denial of truth, which means more election losses for your failed ideology and that suits me just fine.
So workers who get paid to build homes don't count? The fact that banks can give out loans when people store their money there doesn count?
At least in the US, it's precisely because of education debts that people will be working into their 70s.
When student loans are eating into your paycheck as much as they are now, who could actually afford to save up enough money to retire by 65?
If the US provided a better social safety net or dealt with the ridiculous skyrocketing of student loan debt, then maybe we wouldn't be getting into a position where we have to keep working until we die unless we'd rather stop working and starve.
They should be careful with lowering the age. And this is coming from a left-leaning millennial.
The reason that I'm somewhat cautious about this is because my family comes from Taiwan where you are allowed to retire earlier and start collecting benefits at a younger age (as low as 55) as long as you accept a reduced payout until you reach the traditional retirement age. Many people, including some of my family members, rationalized it by thinking that it's better to retire early and take care of yourself, especially since retiring late is more likely to cause wear and tear that lead to an early death. This resulted in a loss of taxable income for the country for people that should have been working an additional 10-15 years and has greatly destabilized the system. This year, the benefits have been slashed upwards of 30%, even as far as 50% for certain cases, in order to keep the system sustainable.
This is somewhat reflected in the US social security system, where it used to be 10 people paying into the benefits of one recipient in the 1950s-1960s and how it's a ratio closer to 2 people paying into the benefits of one recipient today. Lowering the age needs to be balanced fiscally. It's one thing to socialize in order to help everyone, but it needs to be handled responsibly so that it doesn't end up screwing everyone when the system spirals into collapse.
Talking about Medicare not SS.
Keep the SS age at 65 but lower the Medicare age so that older people are less tied to the job and can take some more part time stuff / not be chained the office at 60+ with little hope of getting an new office job at that age. So they can F* boss I don't need this job you can take your H1B and shove it.
It's only an "injustice" if the company didn't offer you to keep your job at the rate the Indian company was offering. If you refused to work for so little, then that's on you. Nationality does NOT make one person better or more entitled than another!
Damn, Thought for a second that he would outsource congress with Visa's after training them.
From the US perspective what is so good about H1-B?
It depresses wages and takes a career US citizen and puts them on the dole.
The taxes paid to the US government are far less since the payroll is smaller and the visa worker does not pay taxes here.
In most cases the stockholder sees no long term value as any savings are soon eaten up by ballooning executive compensation and the value of the product or service takes a dump as most of the H1-B are incompetent.
And that skill set they cant find locally is people willing to work for third world rates obviously. Americans expect to much... living wage... I came up with the name of my company and the work wouldnt exist if I didnt do that... You worker do nothing but still from my earning...
At 62 years old, one would expect to have legacy knowledge of some significant skills that a company would want to keep..... I'm no spring chicken myself and have trained plenty of folks.... including H1-B employees. We've kept the real fireballs that learn fast and have plenty of motivation. I also recommend having a string of certifications running off the page in your signature. It also doesn't hurt if you can speak multiple languages. When I turn 60, I'll be getting ready for another CCNP level test toward another certification. Did I mention that I thrive in the IT environment? Honestly some of these International headhunters take terrible advantage of their H1-B consultants. We can definitely use the specialists that we've found via H1-B..... especially since we often have need for specialists who do not seem to be available locally. As they say (both about workers and spouses); "All the good ones are already taken".
I am 40 years old and my degree is slowly becoming what its initials aso get called amongst my friends at least.
bsit I call it my bullshit degree. I got a Bachelor of science in information technology focusing on security or "infosec". I have several certifications that got me more work than my degree. A simple comptia linux+, mcse, and ccna, those 3 minus the degree had me in early 2000s as a data center manager making damn good money before it went belly up in late 2000s. I had worked my way up from a good network monitor job into network operations department, then up to managing the data center, with purchasing power, design, interviewing for netops etc.
Miss that job, after that I did sql programming for Qualcomm then in 2013 that got outsourced. We were straight up told foreign programmers were cheap and a dime a dozen, American programmers are too expensive...My simple retort was "just like with any products, you get what you pay for". Since their outsourcing, I've kept up on CSV's specifically for the area I was in on my rss reader as passing interest, and its funny the amount of bugs, exploits, security issues that increased after they outsourced programmers.
But now Ive hit 40, I was working in IT before internet went everywhere as it has. Before Prodigy, CompuServe, AOL glorified BBS services offered true internet access I worked for the very college I graduated from as they had also offered dialup shell, slip, and ppp connections free to computer science students, but charged all other students a small amount, but it was actual paycheck, building experience, and also getting to experiment with new technologies and software. From Gopher/Archie/Irc/Newsgroups servers to setting up an intermail cluster, Apache's early webserver, etc.
I burned so many CD's for students with 'trumpet winsock' preconfigured lol. Then the days of linux 2.0.30 kernel "teardrop" bug was fun ðY.
But sucks that today I actually make more money self employed doing crap below me , "local town repair guy/upgrades, and getting hired by local companies to design their network, or repair their network (usually after hack or virus filled ), I do have a contract with library, school, and hospital for security, and consulting on upgrades which if they approve then they pay and I purchase parts needed and install giving my own warranty on top of manufacturer.
It's not close to what I was paid as a data center manager or programmer at Qualcomm, but it pays the bills and gives me a little extra for savings or occasional luxuries.
But I've been trying to get "back in" as an employee at the level I was, but its becoming near impossible at my age even now at 40.
agreed. which is why I'm going back to school. I'm already starting to experience the difficult of transitioning to other positions. So I'm going back to get my Master's, then off to a management style position.
Have to post anon here. The India H1b scheme is a disaster. I currently work in engineering support for a major software vendor for the emea team. I'm basically the support escalation engineers , escalation engineer.
What these large Fortune US companies are doing is outsource / offshore the IT to a 3rd party H1b shop. They then turn around and buy the most expensive enterprise support contracts with the vendors. This is their parachute, the amount of fuckery these H1b do to the systems is utterly mind blowing. It is all very clear , anfter the most fundamental of support cases they need that root cause analysis within the next hour , because you know they can't figure it out themselves and need to answer to mr x. This is saving these fortune companies $, this is how they downsize tco and still have the latest & greatest kit & software.
The way Tata uses H1-B is a negative, depressing wages, and exploiting workers, IMO. However, H1-Bs when used properly (as has been the case in most places I've worked) is beneficial to everyone. When we get the best/brightest talent from abroad, the results include:
- Making the US more competitive, while hampering our competition
- More job creation: the highly talented H1-B users I've worked with have started many companies, creating more jobs than they take.
- Increasing wages: by increasing the demand for coders and engineers, they've helped fuel a pretty nice wage increase curve in Silicon Valley
There's tons of evidence that the H1-B program has created lots of jobs around here. Immigrants who started on H1-Bs are over-represented as company founders, including many of the ones fueling the tech recovery. Of course, when abused, H1-Bs do exactly what you said. I'm all for ending the abuse, while protecting the program overall. It would be a mistake to reduce the number of top-talent H1-Bs issued at this point in our economy. When the economy goes south, that's a different story.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
It would be a good idea for you to impale yourself on a rusty spike. You'd feel better. We'd feel better. It's a win/win.
You kiss your bosses ass with that mouth?
Yeah, it's extra awesome that he was let go right before he was eligible for retirement. Is your goal to have companies dump older talent and be subsidized by the government by having welfare, unemployment and other benefits paid by the tax payer? We need to find a way to automate most management and HR functions so they finally understand our plight. The almighty shareholders will appreciate the cost savings.
Time to start thinking about what this brain drain will eventually do to our readiness with respect to national security. If a large portion of our tech talent is foreign, what happens when it decides to move against us? Will we be ready for the next world war? We're already getting our butts handed to us in the cyber realm. What about trade secrets and personal info? it's nuts, we're in the Tech dark ages right now with mindless management drones recklessly hurting our long term economic and national security prospects. Look what that buffoon did to Yahoo and she stands to sail away with almost 200 million USD after the acquisition.
"experience and knowledge is needed in low-level and middle management"
Management are the people who get in the way of the talent. Experience and knowledge is needed in the talent and nobody is talking about the junior level windows admins. Any kid with a high school diploma or GED can do that. We are talking about the resources designing and implementing and admining your networks, server farms, storage farms, programmers, and other senior technical resources. In many organizations these people are though of as management but they normally don't have direct reports. If you are smart most of your project management comes from these ranks but these are self-directing resources, their managers only exist to push the latest HIPAA module and make sure everyone knows how to enter their hours. If they start to actually get involved in the work in some way instead of just gathering the details of what will happen from the talent they'll make decisions which aren't technically sound. That will cost your organization far more than any manager would gain you cracking a whip and demanding broom pushing.
It's easy for a white collar programmer who probably lives in an urban area with higher life expectancy to say "raise the wage".
What about the blue collar workers who are struggling to make it to retirement, the lower working-class whose bodies are falling apart? Many of them already die before or shortly after retiring.
Cheap storage VM.
"But Diangelo has no illusions" - allusions is the correct word
TV-MA - the Beginning: "Ward, don't you think you were a little hard on the Beaver last night?"
Sounds like BAU horse shit for the business community and even the government. My entire department lost their jobs to outsourcing, replaced by IBM workers in Kishore, on Jan. 1 this year. That "laid off right before retirement" thing is right out of the USAF playbook too, they did that to thousands of people in the late 70s/80s.
That H-1B workers don't pay taxes is an urban legend. They absolutely have to. Federal taxes, state taxes (if applicable), FICA taxes. And so do "pre-H1B" workers on OPT.
I hate to say it again, but a union is the keyword. I work IT and I am in a union with the other non-IT employees. When the company looked at possibly outsourcing us the union stood by us and threatened not only legal and public relations actions, but a full strike which would have cost the company lots of money in losses. They quickly decided to ditch the outsourcing idea and they have never looked back. I used to be against unions and thought they weren't good for anything, but they saved my job at a time when my age would have made it almost impossible to find good IT work. I fully support them now and even joined on as a union steward. I take pride in my work and work hard every day for the company. I'm here to support my fellow union workers as much as I am the company.
Unfortunately, just because some CEO bought a visa for them does not make them the best and brightest.
Most H1Bers are outright idiots and all seem to be incompetent since there CVs are a complete work of fiction.
If they do start a company in the US it is to take advantage of affirmative action and other handouts and hire more H1B visa holders or outsource.
Most of the flann you think is "science" is nothing but propaganda paid for by groups looking to continue the maggot trade.
There is plenty of real research that shows how much damage H1B has done to STEM and the middle class.