Slashdot Mirror
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.
Those "agreements" are unenforceable. You can say whatever you want. Take the money and run. That is what the executives do. Don't be dumb.
Age.. and it's cheaper to higher younger or offshore in this case.
So everyone is happier to pay more for goods and services as long as it's made by the USA?
Funny how this restaurant that charges $150+ for a dinner for two is just one block from McDonalds in my town. Yet somehow they haven't gone out of business. Pay for crap you get crap. Pay for quality you get quality. The only problem is making sure that the crap salesman isn't trying to pass his shit off as top quality, which is what happens nowadays.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I am in full support of people on welfare, but only because it is the next bast thing to UBI. Considering some of the crap that the world throws at these people. It's not like they are handed invitations by the working world. Yeah life is supposed to be rough, blah blah, but working could be better and easier to obtain.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I've worked with software developers from India, Israel, France, Mexico and the U.S., and each group has run the gamut from excellent to atrocious.
Funny how this restaurant that charges $150+ for a dinner for two is just one block from McDonalds in my town. Yet somehow they haven't gone out of business.
You are comparing apples to oranges, my friend. Does that expensive restaurant serve McDonald's-quality food simply jacked up to a higher price? I sincerely doubt that. Now I'm not saying that paying more always gets you more, but your example is obviously flawed.
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
Do Better.
Train your replacement to know his legal rights and a sharp lawyer.
Have him keep a dairy of unpaid overtime, and where he gets direct instruction from the company. Let him/her know unenforceable contract terms will be written off.
let him know that even H-IB's get churned without notice and sent back to home country.
Net result: A legal time bomb and back pay, even if he is sent home.
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.
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.
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.
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"
It can't be that much worse than what we have now. Just saying.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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
Funny how this restaurant that charges $150+ for a dinner for two is just one block from McDonalds in my town.
Supply and demand comes into it. If many restaurants started charging like that a good deal of them would go out of business, even if the the quality is good.
Yes *some* people will buy USA and pay the premium for it. That doesn't change the fact that the majority of shoppers are still cost sensitive.
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.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
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.
+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
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."
It's certainly harder than sitting down and clacking on a keyboard for a few hours a day.
I have worked fast food and retail before I began my software development career, and those jobs were far easier. They may have included more physical labor, but it's not like it was construction (which I did for one summer and realized I wasn't cut out for it). These jobs take very little effort, even for model employees, and have little to no stress (other than the stress of not being able to pay your bills). The only two reasons I wouldn't go back to those jobs are the lack of pay and lack of intellectual stimulation. But as for how relaxing the standard work day is, I would choose a retail job in a heart beat.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
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?
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.
Funny how this restaurant that charges $150+ for a dinner for two is just one block from McDonalds in my town.
You don't always get what you pay for, but you always pay for what you get.
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.