90 Miles From Tyranny

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Logic Puzzle: Birds Of The Same Feather...

This IT worker had to train an H-1B replacement

Computerworld - This is the story of an IT worker who was replaced by a worker on an H-1B visa, one of a number of visa holders, mostly from India, who took jobs at this U.S. company. Computerworld is not going to use the worker's name or identify the companies involved to protect the former employee from retaliation. For purposes of this story, the worker has been given initials -- A.B. (They're not the person's real initials.)

At A.B.'s company, about 220 IT jobs have been lost to offshore outsourcing over the last year. A.B. is telling the story because, initially, there was little knowledge among fellow employees about H-1B visa holders and how they are used. They didn't know that offshore outsourcing firms are the largest users of H-1B visas, or exactly how this visa facilitates IT job losses in the U.S.

"I think once we learned about it, we became angrier toward the U.S. government than we were with the people that were over here from India," A.B. said, "because the government is allowing this."

The IT workers at this firm first learned of the offshore outsourcing threat through rumors. Later, the IT staff was called into an auditorium and heard directly from the CIO about the plan to replace them. It would take months for the transition to be completed, in part because of some new system installations.

Many younger IT workers found jobs and left. Mainframe workers were apparently in demand and also able to find new jobs. But older workers with skills in open systems, storage and SAN faced a harder time. About half the IT staffers, mostly the older ones, would stay to the end.

Training the replacement workers involved holding morning-long WebEx meetings several times a week with offshore outsourcing staff based in India. The sessions were recorded as details about the environment, including diagrams and scripts, were shared.

As they moved closer to the termination date for the U.S. workers, the overseas employees would follow or shadow, via WebEx sessions, everything an IT worker did during the day. The outsourcing firm's onshore staff helped to coordinate these efforts, but also worked to untangle the meaning of some of the questions.

The overseas workers did not appear to have much practical experience, and the same questions were asked repeatedly, A.B. said.

Before they lost their jobs, A.B.'s co-workers decided to made a subtle and symbolic protest over what was happening: As the H-1B visa workers gradually took over the offices once occupied by U.S. workers, one employee brought in a bunch of small American flags on sticks.

The flags were retrofitted so they could fit into the walls of the cubicles.

(Computerworld viewed a photograph of the cubicle flags, but decided not to publish it to protect A.B's identity.)

The flags were displayed, cubicle after cubicle, much like way flags are hung on homes in a residential neighborhoods on the 4th of July. They were visible to anyone walking down the hall. "That was the only thing that we.... read more

Hot Pick Of The Late Night

Monday, June 16, 2014

Girls With Guns

NASA Says Pluto's MOON CRACKS must be PROBED for mystery ocean

Pluto and all its moons lie in a bitterly cold environment,

Mosaic of pics from the Cassini spacecraft show cracked surface of Saturn's moon Enceladus. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

orbiting the Sun more than 29 times farther out than Earth does. The surface temperature on the one-time planet (now characterised as an a "dwarf planet") is about minus 229˚C (-380˚F), far too frigid to allow any liquid water.

Charon is in the same icy environment as its brothers, but the inside of the moon could be a different story and NASA scientists are hoping that the agency’s New Horizons spacecraft, which will be the first to visit Pluto and Charon in July next year, will show them if they’re right.

"Our model predicts different fracture patterns on the surface of Charon depending on the thickness of its surface ice, the structure of the moon's interior and how easily it deforms, and how its orbit evolved," said Alyssa Rhoden of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre.

"By comparing the actual New Horizons observations of Charon to the various predictions, we can see what fits best and discover if Charon could have had a subsurface ocean in its past, driven by high eccentricity."

The cracked surfaces of both Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus are evidence of oceanic interiors – a similar pattern at Charon could show the same thing.
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