[nylug-talk] Does this situation in any way mirror what is happening in the tech sector?

[Chris Knadle]

On Friday 21 September 2007, Mark Halegua wrote:
> On Friday 21 September 2007 12:49, Chris Knadle wrote:
> > On Friday 21 September 2007, Kevin Mark wrote:
> > > http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7004581.stm
> >
> >    It's hard to speak for the entire tech sector, but it does appear that
> > at least certain companies want to hire foreign workers and are having
> > trouble due to the cap on H1-B visas.  At the same time this is becomming
> > less attractive for foreign workers due to the weakening value of the US
> > dollar and the various hassles and privacy concerns with flying in and
> > out of the country.  Getting a green card takes a long time, and in
> > between it's quite a battle to keep up an H1-B which now requires
> > periodic visits back to the native country for a period of time.
> >
> >    Overall I'm not sure if I know the answer to your question, but there
> > are at least some limits placed based on market forces and legal
> > bounaries concerning this issue.
> >
> >    -- Chris
>
> One of the problems I've noted is the requirements or some jobs are such
> that no one can fill them, or the salary for the job is lower than any
> citizen will accept.  Then the company goes to the govt and says they can't
> fill the position with citizens, so can we hire a foreigner, who will
> accept a lower salary.  This is one way the company can say the advertised
> the position, and no one accepted locally, so they justify going with H1B.

   Yeah.  One of the practices I've seen used in order to KEEP an H1-B is to 
specifically make the requirements for the job so specfic that only that 
particular person that the company wants to keep can fit.  Unfortunately 
that's gotten to be a general practice from what I can tell.

> It's a game to get people to do a job at lower wages.

   In relation to I.T. work companies generally expect to get a lot without 
paying a lot these days since the dot-com bust.  Lately companies I've 
interviewed with seem to have requirements and expectations that are 
somewhere between rediculous and dangerous.
   An example of what I mean by "dangerous" expectations: during a recent 
interview I went on to an IT job, I was told that the company has 14 
locations and a datacenter with a SAN, with a mixture of various OSes 
(several commercial Unices, several Linux distros, Windows, etc), a lot of 
tunneling of various processes over ssh even by people on their desktops, and 
that all of this was being administered by...  /one/ network administrator.  
Naturally the network admin had trouble getting approval for taking any time 
off from work, so it was very difficult to actually spend vacation time.  And 
forget taking off more contiguous days than a Friday to a Monday.  There was 
clearly no backup person for the network admin, whom oh-by-the-way already 
gave two weeks notice.  I got the impression that documentation was light 
(because everything is "simple", and no documentation had been written in 
months) and that there wasn't much concern for making sure that someone 
stepping into the job would be given much of a clue before already being in 
the fire.
   That much responsibility is *unsafe*, both for the employee as well as the 
company itself.

   When I try to talk about this in person with experienced admins, they seem 
to glaze over as if to silently explain that this is the norm of today.  I 
hope that's not the case.

   -- Chris

-- 

Chris Knadle
Chris.Knadle at coredump.us