“That will do more than decimate IT, it will ripple through the economy and lower wages across the board.”
I think there’s a direct correlation between the first year of Obamacare and the 11% drop in Black Friday sales. Doubling or tripling health insurance costs has resulted in fewer purchases of all types. Seventy-percent of the economy relies on consumer spending. Obamacare sucked the wind out of the economy. It will be even worse next year and each year after that. Talk about your ripple-through...
Rolling Stone could have gone after this story hitting upon Silicon Valley billionaires who exploit the 99%.
Republican honchos are big supporters of increasing H1b visas.
This is every bit as much of a problem as increasing the number of low skilled workers ... maybe more of a problem.
Also diminishing the number of American citizens choosing STEM as a career.
We are slowly being cranked back to a feudal state ruled by corporations and the wealthy, where the decimated middle class is corralled in areas tied down by laws and enslaved , and forced by an ever increasing bureaucratic police force. They will beg to become affiliated with the flag (corporation or family) who would take or employ them.
Rural areas become the “Kings lands owned by the wealthy and locked out by the masses. The poor will be enslaved, killed and locked away. But now they are being used to cower the middle class.
Just doing the work that degreed/experienced professionals aren’t willing to do for $9/hour...
H1B workers have been driving wages down and displacing American workers since the late 1970s and early 1980s. It got worse under Clinton and ever since has just kept on rolling.
Americans seem bent on suicide
NO Americans are being hired for IT jobs. Companies decided years ago not to employ Americans.
We can thank both parties for this.
Sounds to me like they need a UNION! /sarc
Massachusetts just deregulated registered the Board of TV and radio technicians. The master’s license that was needed to do/supervise the work has been done away with.
Understandably people in the workforce are frightened. But they need to be constantly updating their skill sets and be ready to adapt to a rapidly changing world.
The good news is that despite the doomsday predictions, the standard of living continues to rise for all. Even the so-called poor in 1st World countries (of which the United States is only one) are seeing their lot improved.
True, a lot of them are out of work but they are not starving. Instead, they are relaxing at home and queuing up the next binge-watching session on Netflix and deciding what pizza joint they are going to go to tonight. Actually their ability to do that is part of the reason we have such unemployment. For the first time in our civilization's history, large numbers of people are sitting idle and having all their basic needs met by the welfare state.
People don't like hearing that but it's true. A quick cure for unemployment would be to eliminate welfare tomorrow for all except those truly disabled. All those "HELP WANTED" signs will start disappearing as people will start taking the jobs they feel today they are too good for.
Getting back to the IT workers. Maybe 20 years ago you could get a high paying job in IT, helping end users navigate a spreadsheet or making sure their mouse is plugged in properly, etc. Or at a higher level, you could be running the network for a small company, backing up and restoring data, partitioning drives, adding storage, writing script files to deploy OS and application updates, etc.
But all that stuff is pretty much automated these days and it is cheaper for companies to outsource the "help desk" function overseas - even with the broken English and hard to understand accents.
That said, it's not exactly a "dream job" to strap on a headset and walk a bunch of cranky end users through performing an anti-virus update or remoting in to update a driver, etc. Let the overseas people do it and let's move on to more challenging types of work. Like building apps for the new mobile OS platform or something.
I love my work, but am nearing retirement and don't feel I want to work any longer than I have to in order to try to hold up the IT infrastructures that have been compromised by incompetents (foreign nationals) sitting in their apartments in other countries with a laptop, a headset, and an internet connection, monitoring a (or more) customers network(s). Note that I've also seen a lot of network issues caused by these people who muck around in things they don't understand and end up breaking the same customers they are being (cheaply) paid to maintain...
I wonder if Sony was using one of these companies...?
/rantOn
What just makes me sick is many people that lost their manufacturing jobs were told by the “Free” Trade advocates that they would need to retrain and learn new skills since their jobs were being sent offshore.
Many trained, got education/certifications/job skills/experience. They did what was asked of them to make it in this new normal, then suddenly the goal posts were moved yet again, because the “Free” Traders want to IMPORT people from other countries to replace them, rather than their jobs being sent offshore, as previously happened to them in manufacturing.
This always has been, and is still nothing more than a two party sell out to those who are writing the big checks. Not many of those bastards give a f#*k about us, and our interests ARE NOT *their* interests, as we no longer have a two-party system. We now have a two-tiered system. It’s US, and THEM; or rather, the ‘Elite Ruling Class’, and the ‘People’.
I used to have ZERO regard for criminals, but now I can’t say I blame someone that makes a good living for themselves on the ‘black market’. Such people are merely operating within the parameters they’re in, given this environment. It’s a form of Moral Hazard, and TPTB are going to reap what they have sown. Particularly when you see all of the financial criminals during the recent years getting bailouts, rather than handcuffs....
/rantOff
It has now moved to HW design.
H1-B is to skilled workers what illegals are to unskilled... its really nothing more complicated than that.. the system is a scam and fraught with abuse.
Bttt