Goodbye American Information Technology Worker

organizationsandsocialchange ^ | 4/26/2020 | An American IT worker

[NobleFree]

No one is entitled to a highly compensated career for 38 years.

Nor is anyone entitled to pay less than the American market price for labor by getting foreign-labor welfare. As our President said, "Hire American!"

[TheCipher]

Is it a good idea to have non-citizens from third world countries running our American computer systems?

Don't know if this has changed or not but back in the early 90's the code that controlled the south eastern electrical grid was outsourced to India. So in effect, the grid was controlled by India. I wrote to my congressman at the time complaining about it ( Thurmond and Hollings were my senators at the time ) All I got was form letter lip service back from them.

[libh8er]

The Mumbai programmers had nothing to do with the MCAS system. MCAS was fully developed and tested at Boeing’s Seattle center by US workers, per Boeing. Some sites had been pushing the connection because it makes for sensationalist clickbait headlines. But that’s all it is. Sensationalism.

[nwrep]

Yes but you still need Design Engineers to design the computer chips using the 🖥 computers.

[Svartalfiar]

In an age of modern information technology and communications, you can work with someone in India as easy as you can work with someone in the next zip code.

Outsourcing something like IT to India isn't as easy/smooth as people think it is. To start with, it's around 10pm in India, when it's 0800 here. The entire workday, when most short-notice IT issue occur, is overnight there. Sure, it's easy time-wise for them to do maintenance during the day (nighttime here), but that's only for minor software patching and stuff. Any hardware access obviously requires someone onsite here.

Also, I work in AV and we've done some events for companies that use Indian groups for some services. In order for us to set up cross-streaming video, requires an easy, small setup on our end, and a team of 5-6 guys with us just for the foreign connections, and a team of several guys on the Indian side as well. What 1-2 of our techs can do, takes 5-6 of their guys. We have much more complicated gear for switching multiple sources and sending multiple places, while each of their locations was simply a laptop with a webcam. That they could barely get working. Indians are very step-by-step workers, who generally expect someone under them to handle the issue so they don't have to do much. They have little to no creativity / out-of-the-box thinking. They're terrible at troubleshooting, and unless they see you as an equal or higher caste, they tend to ignore what you tell them.

Some buddies who are in the programming world tell me similar stories. Indian coding tends to be very copy-n-paste, cobbled together until it works for the exact situation you're testing. But in the real world, the code is many times unusable, inflexible and unable to handle changes, scaling, or even the normal idiot user.

[Grey182]

I was a STEM specialist for four years, and got laid off very late in the dot bomb carnage. No degree and spending $$$ retraining... and who do I hear on the radio? Lindsey Graham saying how there weren’t enough programmers for all the jobs, how we had to import 50,000 programmers, my own Senator. I could have spit lead right then and there. It still burns me up today.

[libh8er]

Indeed. There are plenty of jobs available in IT if you have the right skillset. In fact there were far more jobs available (pre Covid) than there were candidates to fill them and many with salaries comfortably in the 120k to 130k plus range and beyond. But companies are looking for dynamic motivated people with current/ 2020s skills ( Data science, cloud, devops, AI, modern programming languages..etc), not unmotivated people with 1980s/1990s skills who bolt from the office at 5.

[NobleFree]

GOPe are the whores of their corporate globalist johns. And some FReepers are giving Lewinskis for free.

[Grey182]

No, companies keep advertising for jobs they have already filled. They keep looking for better trained or cheaper employees non-stop. It also has the effect of making H1B visas appear needed.

[Starcitizen]

Indians all fall under as minorities. How can they be minorities when they dominate 99% of IT and computer science in the US?

[madison10]

Close family member worked for HP. Terminated after working her butt off for them for 20 years. She had a dual major in computer science and accounting. Fantastic grades. Did her no good in the end.

Jobs went to India.

[Grey182]

The irony is these Indian programmers had children, who now cannot get a job in IT, because they are US citizens.

[TheCipher]

See post # 62

[x]

Wack your own weeds. How hard can it be?

[grey_whiskers]

In other words you're a lying troll.

So are you a dot or do you just import them?

I've regularly seen, from H1-Bs, grammar and spelling mistakes on emails -- to managers or to entire teams -- which would get a US employee fired on the spot.

But with H1-Bs, you're not even allowed to notice.

[grey_whiskers]

Every Cisco CCIE in the world that wants to work, is working. All of them. And making $100+ per hour in the US.

How does one transition to this? Is there "we don't hire Americans" / "we don't hire over 35" in this area?

[grey_whiskers]

Stuff it, troll.

[grey_whiskers]

Companies want the prospective employees to shoulder all the risk of investing hundreds of thousands of dollars up front for a computer science degree, for a job which may or may not be sent to India on a moment's notice.

Good luck with that one.

I think the mere possession of an MBA should be a criminal offense in most cases.

[Fai Mao]

The only place that H1B visa is needed is a place like Guam that has a real problem getting people to move there

[Freedom56v2]

The importation of cheap labor is a completely bipartisan undertaking.

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Sad but absolutely true!