IT Worker Who Trained H-1B-Visa-Holding Replacement Aims For Congress (computerworld.com) 134
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.
Re:2 years? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: 2 years? (Score:3, Insightful)
Age.. and it's cheaper to higher younger or offshore in this case.
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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.
Re:2 years? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:2 years? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:2 years? (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
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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.
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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.
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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 f
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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 re
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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 comp
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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
Re:2 years? (Score:5, Interesting)
+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.
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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 m
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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
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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 g
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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...
Re: 2 years? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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 manageme
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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.
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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.
Re: 2 years? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:2 years? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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I can totally see Trump doing something that goes against the interests of big business. For sure. Totally.
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Government increasing the supply of workers via a guest visa program is the exact opposite of a free market.
H1B Indians are growing in numbers exponentially not because the government is feeling charitable and deciding to rescue them; this is not a refugee resettlement program. The number of H1B programmers is increasing because corporations are heavily lobbying Washington to increase quotas. The driving force is the free market. Nobody likes brown immigrants, i know because I am one, but at least the H1B ones are here because there is a demand for them. Not every brown person in America is here purely on the ba
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regards,
Terrified H1B programmer
Re:Did the non-disparagement clause expire (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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A good man does not follow unjust laws. He violates them and ruins anyone who attempts to enforce it.
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Re: Free market (Score:1)
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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 intellectua
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How's it going there with your night shift job at the 7-11?
Re:Just Checking (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
Re: Just Checking (Score:1)
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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.
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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.
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What the fuck does cheaper labor elsewhere have to do with H1-B visas? You are an ignorant fuck, and you deserve a pain-filled existence.
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YES!!!!
More power to you sir, and good luck (Score:1)
Before it requires an angry voice, or automatic weapons fire, or SWAT teams, let people hear from him first.
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Nobody has any sympathy for what constitutes "destitute" in the US because anybody with any reasonable upward mobility knows people in other countries that make their trials and tribulations look trivial.
If you want these abuses to stop (Score:5, Interesting)
They're not afraid of losing the general. They _are_ afraid of their primaries.
We need to donate to his campaign (Score:5, Interesting)
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. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
start with lowering the age of Medicare eligibilit (Score:3)
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.
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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.
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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.
Talking about Medicare not SS (Score:2)
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.
I think we should totally outsource Congress. (Score:5, Funny)
It can't be that much worse than what we have now. Just saying.
His Website Sucks (Score:3)
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.
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And who decide it was a good idea to put a hamburger menu in the bottom right?
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Starting to see why he got H1B'd.
Trump is already delivering (Score:3)
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 [bloomberg.com]
I couldn't tell what party he's with from his website [diangelo2018.com] 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...
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Except for the H-2B expansion included in the 2017 Omnibus bill Trump signed last Friday. Good news however, no timeline. Still though, fucking sellouts in Congress!!!
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/05/09/h-2b-expansion-hits-dhs-roadblock/
When you can't do (Score:2)
..."When I'm 64"... (Score:3)
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.
Whine, whine, whine... (Score:2)
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!
Grammar alert - word use (Score:1)