Posted on 10/02/2023 10:28:00 AM PDT by zeestephen
After a seven-year legal battle, technology industry icon HP and its spinoff Hewlett Packard Enterprises have agreed to pay $18 million to settle a class-action lawsuit accusing them of purging older workers...Several researchers and labor advocates have stated that technology companies seek to replace older, American IT workers with cheaper, younger workers that are freshly supplied through the H-1B program in order to lower costs...
(Excerpt) Read more at cis.org ...
$18 million is chump change.
$18 billion would have gotten their attention. Better $180 billion.
If you dug deeper into Silicon Valley you would find a bunch of high tech companies doing the same thing, this has been happening for a long time in the tech industry I saw it happen to a friend of mine working for Burroughs back in the mid-80s
H1B = rip off American workers
If these tech companies are so brilliant why do they hire engineers that get their degrees through cheating and bribery?
I’ve made a pretty good living FIXING these barely educated and very inexperienced HIB visa holders. I swear they are giving away comp sci degrees with 3 cereal box tops.
Just because someone learned how to code (minimally) does not mean they can write GOOD code.
And bad code means you pay 3 times. Once to have it written (poorly), a second time to hire some more competent workers to try to figure out what it does, and then a 3rd time to fix or re-write it.
I’ve told many a client that they were not hiring me to lie to them. I could spend 9 months trying to figure it out and then fix it, or I could spend 3 months doing it over.
I fought long and hard my last 17 years of my 42 year IT career. Lost some and won some and now retired with SS, RRRA and state pension.
Never give up!
IBM did the same thing in Boulder, Co. 1200 over the age of 55. If you didn’t sign a contract that you wouldn’t sue you didn’t get your severance.
Tech workers: Keep voting liberal it is working great !
3 years left for me. Been hanging in there. Including HP/HPE then spun off again to DXC.
In other words, going into the IT industry means accepting the responsibility of having to keep up with the changes. Most of us 50-somethings could see the changes were big in our teenage years when we were programming our TRS-80's and Commodore 64's before we were old enough to drive. So when we later made careers out of it we knew we were getting into a field that required us to keep up with whatever future changes came down the pike. If we don't commit to that, we chose the wrong industry.
All they need to do to recover the $18 million is to pack their PCs with even more bloatware.
I am not a tech guy.
However, I have been a software, chip, and computer stock investor for 50 years.
When I study the Artificial Intelligence (AI) issue, the first thing I see is a technology that can analyze trillions of lines of computer code and find the fastest and most efficient path between Point A and Point B.
I am thinking that the market demand for software engineers is going to slowly but steadily decline for the next 10 years.
Carly Fiorina came up with this back around 2000.
You could train your replacement and get 6 month pay or be terminated NOW.
I know this as I had several friend who had the virtual gun put to their head.
This is NO secret in Silicon Valley.
And the GOP-e tried to get this Witch on the ticket twice.
I was a Programmer for 42 years. Today is my first day of retirement
AI expects that the person making the request knows what to request. That is rarely the case. It’s why many H1B’s don’t make it. They can’t handle the need for flexibility.
Nah, AI code is crap. It can be handy for finding APIs you didn’t know about. But it can lie too and say an API exists that doesn’t. The fastest most efficient path is only about 10% of coding. The bulk of it is error handling, what do you do when the user screws up, because they will, oh will they ever. And of course in this modern world security is a big thing, and a big hit on your most efficient path. Because the most efficient path almost never involves things like user verification, keeping special characters (ie web scripts) out of input fields, and verifying the attached documents don’t have malware. AI is going to replace searching MSDN, but it won’t replace engineers.
Congrats
Yes you def got to be someone who can change with the times and current tech in IT.
I learned Data Processing (no IT back then)in the basement of the Empire State building (Empire Tech School).
Keeping up with skill’s doesn’t matter.
It’s salaries.
You could be the leader in your field and a genius, but you command too high a salary and will be replaced by three Indians for the same salary.
Those CEOs with their MBAs and HR department heads with their gender studies degrees don’t know or care about technical skills and competence.
The good news?
I made a twenty year career fixing the lousy work of those cheap H1Bs.
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