Re: MIDRANGE-JOBS Digest, Vol 5, Issue 153 -- MIDRANGE-JOBS

Well, as you all have heard from me within the last year, I can assure you I am still an unemployed programmer and see no real opportunities in the future. However, I still respond to listings and opportunities. I do have an interview on Monday, so . . you never know. It is not programming, but I am may get my foot in the door somewhere and work back to an open position.
It is unfortunate that the offshore companies have taken so many "jobs" of all sorts from Americans. It positions are not the only form of offshore shift. Ever try to resolve a situation with Sony, Samsung, AT&T.
The call centers are swamped with people of foreign accent trying to speak to Americans. When they have no idea how to spell Mary or Watkins, I usually hang up.

If I had the answer to the situation I would not be unemployed to date.
This could be debated for the next few years. . .not sure how to bring the jobs back here. . .One thing for sure do not give up the salaries that are deserved. Bank tellers do not have to have 4 years of education to gain employment whereas an IT professional does.

As some suggested on the message board, it is time to be more aggressive and initiate alternative measures to insure that one lands a position here. It is of most importance to fight for our opportunities.
Personally, I think it is time for Americans to let big businesses know how we feel about the current policy of shipping job opportunites to foreign countries. What happened to the land of the free? We are free to do what here? Lately, my fmaily has been going hungry and facing eviction about every 6 months.

Respectfully,
Mary Watkins
309-245-2682
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Today's Topics:

1. Re: Fw: H-1B/offshoring debate at UCLA (Alex Montalvo)
2. Re: Fw: H-1B/offshoring debate at UCLA (Michael Ryan)

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message: 1
date: Thu, 08 Nov 2007 11:55:11 -0500
from: "Alex Montalvo"
subject: Re: [MIDRANGE-JOBS] Fw: H-1B/offshoring debate at UCLA

For those who haven't been subject to constant short contracts and early
releases every time the market hiccups it's easy to judge someone else.

Face bankrupcy while answering ad's from companies sponsoring h1b's
blatently, lawyers all to happy advocate the same and none defending your
cause and see if you come away unjaded pal!

Alex Montalvo
AS/400 Consultant
1(917)442-5450 Cell

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From: "Michael Ryan"
To: "Alex Montalvo"
CC: sjl_abc@xxxxxxxxxxx, cpf0000@xxxxxxxxxxxx,
midrange-jobs@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [MIDRANGE-JOBS] Fw: H-1B/offshoring debate at UCLA
Date: Thu, 8 Nov 2007 11:10:51 -0500

Wow...quite the venomous diatribe. You made your point succinctly. I'm
sure that anyone who reads this can understand you, your employment
issue and your belief system.

On Nov 8, 2007 11:03 AM, Alex Montalvo wrote:

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I am a such a forty something coder who has been given my walking

papers

again from a Jewish owned textile company after 2 months three

H1b

consultants from India have been here for 7 + months are staying!

The

consulting company from India hired me for this all just so the
permanently employed staff can take thier vacations and now that

they are

done so was I. Had to wait 30 days for my first pay check from

India to

get here and wait another five day's for it to clear all that and

still

get left out. This is the fourth time I have been subject to

this. I am

so sick of this senario. who the hell do I have to sue to get

this ____ to

stop?

There is a underlying agenda it has been the case since the

Reagan era and

the undermining of labor unions, The corporate and political

powers that

be are turning a free market society into a kingdom without a

king! Well

there is one, consisting of many crowns(companies) and many

horns(Crooked

politicians and lawmakers & authorities) and many

eyes(surveillance)

Hmmmm! where have I heard that before? No I am not a religious

fanatic but

the simularites were just too obvieous to ignore.

Alex Montalvo
AS/400 Consultant
1(917)442-5450 Cell

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From: "SJL"
To: ,
Subject: [MIDRANGE-JOBS] Fw: H-1B/offshoring debate at UCLA
Date: Thu, 8 Nov 2007 08:08:32 -0600

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*** Recruiters may advertise only permanent employment

positions in

this list.

All -

Dr. Norman Matloff is a professor of computer science at

UC-Davis,

and is one of the leaders in the fight to keep technical jobs

in this

country - and employ _Americans_ in those jobs...

His opinion (based on much analysis of salary trends in our
business over the last 7 years) is that companies use H-1B

workers

primarily for cheap labor.

In this debate, Ravi Aron confirms this fact. During the

debate,

globalist Ravi says (see full text in story below):

Aron: If you're willing to pay enough, supply will meet

demand.

Let me add:
You should not pay that much.

The idea that there exists an exalted class of
[computer] aristocracy that should be pampered with the

salaries

of their desired level is baloney. We did not do this with
agricultural or steel workers or bank tellers.

- Steve

----- Original Message -----
From: "Norm Matloff"
To: "Norm Matloff"
Sent: Thursday, November 08, 2007 12:42 AM
Subject: H-1B/offshoring debate at UCLA

To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter

On October 23, IS Associates, an industry affiliates program

in the

UCLA Anderson School of Management, held a panel discussion on

the

future of U.S. IT professionals, given the rise of H-1B and

offshoring.

This is one of the few panel discussions I've ever

participated in that

gave everyone a chance to speak in full. Instead of the usual

one

hour,

we actually had three hours (including a break and a Q&A

period) in

which to thoroughly debate the issues. That sounds like

hardship for

both speakers and audience alike, but but the debate was quite

lively

and the audience seemed quite engaged.

Enclosed below is a blog report on the event by Don Tennant,

who is

editor of Computerworld and served as the moderator of the

event. He

posed some excellent questions, and included a couple of small

excerpts

of the ensuing discussion in his blog.

Though Don is correct in stating that much of the debate

consisted of

exchanges between Prof. Ravi Aron and me, it's important to

point out

that there were two other panelists, Jesus Arriaga, Interim

CIO of

Bosley Medical, Inc. and Mitch Stern, Director Human Capital,

Deloitte

Consulting. Mr. Stern, an HR expert, did have quite a bit to

say, and

Mr. Arriaga made some interesting comments as well.

As you will see in his remarks below, Prof. Aron takes the

libertarian

point of view. He admits that the H-1B program is used for

cheap labor

rather than for remedying a labor shortage, and over lunch

before the

event he also admitted that the H-1Bs are mainly brought in so

that

employers can avoid hiring older, i.e. 40+, Americans; indeed,

brought this up before I did. (He also mentioned that to prep

for the

debate, he talked to his former colleague at Wharton, Peter

Cappelli,

whose writings on the non-shortage of labor I've often

quoted.) He put

forth the usual argument, spoken with religious fervor and

mathematical

certainty, that purely laissez faire economic policies make

the world

better.

For my part, I stated that I respect the libertarians because

at least

they are honest about issues like this. However, I also

stated that I

believe most people (including those in the audience) aren't
libertarians. My willingness to participate in forums such as

this is

motivated mainly by a desire to get the facts out in the open;

then

each

listener can apply his own political/economic philosophy to

forming his

stance on the issues.

The nature of the audience, consisting of CIOs, IT managers,

entrepreneurs and the like, made for quite a different type of
discussion than one usually finds in these forums. They KNOW

these

issues. This is the first such forum I've seen in which NO

ONE (if I

remember correctly) challenged my point that H-1B is about

cheap labor

and replacement of older workers. Even Stern and Arriaga,

both of whom

strongly asserted a tech labor shortage, did not dispute these

points,

and as mentioned, Aron did not dispute them either.

One thing that got a big laugh and repeated references in the

subsequent

discussion was that I said, "Paraphrasing Shakepeare, I say

`First

thing

we do is kill all the HR people.'" :-) After the event,

several people

told me some of their own favorite horror HR stories. HR

people tend

to

be zealous gatekeepers, a major obstacle to good

hiring. Stern, a very

personable guy, took it good naturedly.

Aron was personable too. Though the discussion got a bit

heated at

times (even with plenty of time to get my points across, I am

irritated

when offered false choices such as "Who would you rather

believe on

H-1B, Paul Krugman or Charless Grassley?"), I look forward to

another

pleasant chat with him when we bump into each other again.

Yet it's clear that Ravi and I are poles apart in, literally,

our views

of the world. It's not just ideology, but also a sense of
nationality--or lack of one, as the case may be. I get the

impression

that Ravi is a member of a growing class of immigrants to the

U.S. who

consider themselves transnationals, not tied to any particular

country.

Just as many big firms view themselves as multinational (and,

according

to Harvard economist Richard Freeman, even his university

thinks of

itself as multinational), there are now many individuals who

have a

multinational mentality too. The trend has been noticeable

enough for

UC Berkeley anthropologist Aihwa Ong to write a book on it,

titled

Flexible Citizenship.

Before coming to the U.S. for study and later work, Ravi was a
consultant in Malaysia, and for a while ran a software firm in

his

native India. It wouldn't surprise me if Ravi's next job were

to be in

the UK or China, say. This has to color his views of

offshoring and

H-1B.

His stance on those issues is also presumably impacted by his

outside

consulting work on offshoring, which I'm told has been quite

lucrative

for him. (Speaking of which, one of the people writing

comments on Don

Tennant's blog asserted that I have a "vested interest"

against H-1B;

but it ought to be clear that the status of the H-1B program

has no

substantial impact on me one way or the other.)

By the way, I posited three points that I thought everyone

could agree

on as to the desirability/necessity of keeping a major

fraction of this

profession American. Two are in Don's excerpt below--military

work and

the need for innovation. The third one was the point that

whether we

think the importation of foreign programmers and engineers is

good or

not, they're not going to keep coming here in the

future. Tech careers

in the U.S. are becoming less attractive, due to stagnant

wages and a

roller coaster job market, while jobs in India and China are

on the

upswing. Even Mitch Stern, the HR expert, seemed very

concerned when I

mentioned this. Yet Ravi dismissed it, saying that we (he may

have

said

"you") can grow this labor force internally if things come to

that.

Mitch replied, no, this is not a feasible solution, as it an

economy

takes many years to make such adjustments.

In a somewhat comic twist (whether deliberate or unwitting),

all of us

speakers were presented with special clocks, with a map of the

world

and

24 time zones, perfect for the globalist future. :-) I did

notice,

though, that in order to see the U.S. one needs to hold the

clock

upside

down. :-)

Norm

http://www.computerworld.com/blogs/node/6482

Matloff vs. Aron on the loss of U.S. IT jobs to non-U.S.

workers

By Don Tennant on Mon, 11/05/2007 - 11:39am

A couple of weeks ago I moderated a panel discussion at the

fall

meeting of

the UCLA Anderson School of Management IS Associates. The

topic of

discussion was the future of U.S. IT professionals in a global

market,

and

we focused on offshore outsourcing and the H-1B visa

controversy.

Much of the discussion took the form of a debate between

Professor

Norman

Matloff of the University of California at Davis, a long-time

vocal

critic

of the H-1B visa program; and Professor Ravi Aron of the

University of

Southern California Marshall School of Business, an authority

offshore

outsourcing.

The following is an exchange between Matloff and Aron, edited

for

clarity

and brevity. It began with Matloff's response to my first

question:

Is the premise that there is a shortage of IT workers in the

U.S. fact

or

fiction?

Matloff: You can look at it in terms of salaries a** they're

not going

up.

There was a Business Week study that found that starting

salaries for

computer science and electrical engineering graduates,

adjusting for

inflation, are on the downswing. There is no study, other than

those

made by

the industry, that has established a shortage, even during the

dot-com

boom.

The problem is that people are not willing to hire who's out

there, and

largely it's a matter of money. That, in turn, becomes a

matter of age

a**

older people cost more. They cost more in salary, they cost