arstechnica did a write up on the story
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...t-workers-after-they-train-h-1b-replacements/
The university's decision to hire HCL has been controversial for months and has drawn fire from politicians. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), who has submitted a bill meant to curb abuses of the H-1B program, sent a letter to UC President Janet Napolitano
Senator Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) sent a similar letter, reminding Napolitano that the UC system gets about $8.5 billion in federal support. House Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), whose district encompasses most of San Francisco including UCSF, also asked the UC president to reverse herself later in the month.
necrosis said:I love IT work. It is one of the fields where:
Everything is working; nothing to do: "WTF are we paying you for?"
Crap is broken and not working: "WTF are we paying you for?"
My fourteen year old kid can do that...It's interesting. I don't normally consider myself "old" or one of the crotchety old guys, but there is definitely a large knowledge gap of "traditional" IT skills in younger generations. Those of us that grew up in the 70's and 80's and dealt with the growing pains of PC's, OS development and general infrastructure related stuff have a very different perspective than kids who grew up in the 90's and later. For them most of the bugs were ironed out and stuff just "worked". I work healthcare IT and we still have a ton archaic systems that have never been updated or are strung together with a series of duct tape and various other rigged abominations to keep them functioning. We tried hiring for a level 1 support position and interviewed some mid 20 something's with IT degrees. They couldn't tell me how to find the IP address of a machine or how to browse a network share via a UNC path. It was sort of eye opening. I'd be interested to know what is taught in some of these classes any more.
Ho, who earns about $100,000, told the LA Times that he spent two days training his replacement in a process that UCSF called "knowledge transfer."
"He told me he would go back to India and train his team and would be sending me e-mails with questions," Ho said.
From the comments section of the arstechnica article
That guy going to India to train people? That's me.
I was told by a friend in the tech field that he estimates on average it takes five Indians to equal the work product of one American, so there's a false savings there for companies. Is this accurate?
I called Microsoft once about a weird AD issue we could not solve, you'd think a big company like that would have it's own support techs. Nope. Outsourced company in India. They were basically just googling the problem and troubleshooting like I did before calling. My favourite is how they transfer you to "tier 2 engineering" or other fancy titles and they're just passing you to their coworker lol.
Yeah, I got into IT back in the early 2000's after high school & computer jobs were EVERYWHERE! I went into school for IT administration, partly because everyone was making $100k/yr doing it. By the time I finished school, things had vastly changed & it was hard to even get a job at Geek Squad for $13/hr. As of today, in my area, we don't even have any IT shops locally. Have to buy everything online if you want parts. It's crazy how much it has changed. And I mean, that's the name of the IT game...easier, cheaper, etc. One or two guys can run a big company's IT infrastructure these days thanks to enhanced tools that work reliably with minimal training required...virtual servers, thin clients, great hardware & software systems like Square9, Scrutinizer, Shoretel, Aerohive...powerful, set & forget tools that can be easily managed by minimal staff.
I was told by a friend in the tech field that he estimates on average it takes five Indians to equal the work product of one American, so there's a false savings there for companies. Is this accurate?
Company email administrator gone.... just use google, microsoft, etc. Storage administrator... gone. Amazon cloud, Azure, etc. Enterprises don't even need servers anymore. Eventually if you are an IT admin you will be working for someone like Amazon managing the network of several companies. A large company will only need a tech intern to add toner or replace a thin client.
Sadly so true. Our IT had to upgrade cisco firewall, I was assisting them making sure the traffic was actually going through. In the end we had to involve cisco customer support, based in India, it took them 3 days to come up with a working config and on the last day after we finally got it to work cisco tech pretty much verbatim told us she'd like to roll back some of the changes she just made to the firewall because she wanted to know which one actually did the trick. Afterwards she was like "yeah, that makes sense all of a sudden, here's why". WTF. Your company built the damn thing, why does it take 3 days to solve the problem and why is solution essentially throwing darts and seeing which one hits the target? Makes me sadi had to do the same for a exchange issue last year. i was already frustrated but when the "Tech" started repeating every sentence i said in reply to her questions i snapped. I said a few choice words and hung up. I called one of our local vendors and had a consultant remote in and help us fix it. I then called the credit card company and put a stop to the 500 bucks for the MS call (Services un-rendered). I made the right decision, from the way the phone call was going with the "tech" and from what the consultant had to do, i don't think the MS "tech" could have fixed it.I called Microsoft once about a weird AD issue we could not solve, you'd think a big company like that would have it's own support techs. Nope. Outsourced company in India. They were basically just googling the problem and troubleshooting like I did before calling. My favourite is how they transfer you to "tier 2 engineering" or other fancy titles and they're just passing you to their coworker lol.
Not neccessarily: salaries in California are inflated to match the living costs, that person with $127K/yr - that's ~CDN$170K base salary in Canada, that's very high for IT in my area. And this is Toronto. Ask Red Squirel what kind IT workers make $170K base salary in Timmins, ON.No offense to India or people from India, but if they could do my job for a third of what I'm paid, I'm terrible at my job.
I don't see why there is this idea that outsourced work is any less quality than work done here. There may be cases where this is true such as the cheapest labor but I am sure you can find many talented people in India that will work for less than half what their equals in the US will work for. India has lots and lots of people. Silicon Valley is littered with imports from there but that is only a few million out of 1.2 billion.