Still waiting for a state's voters to pass a ballot measure that constitutionally prohibits the state or any municipality within it from establishing preferential/discriminatory tax regimes. If you want to put this pandering to bed, it's surprisingly easy to do. Just be sure you're prepared for the corporate money flooding in from all points of the compass to defeat you with scare ads. Megalocorp knows it can't afford to let even one state do this; then their game will be up.
Iowa Spent $50M to Lure IBM. Then the Firings Started
31–40 of 72 posts
Re: Iowa Spent $50M to Lure IBM. Then the Firings Started
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
H1B is not outsourcing. They are full time local workers by definition. It's amazing companies can get away with firing people and then hiring H1Bs, who, by the government requirements, can't take a citizen's job place.
If you read the labor department site on H1B, "not replacing an American job" is actually not a requirement. Highly skilled, yes. But the part about the resume needing to perfectly suit just the H1B application (which, I've heard about for years, and even seen it done) actually I couldn't find it in the law. Seems like it's folk lore.
>>If you read the labor department site on H1B, "not replacing an American job" is actually not a requirement.
It's an implicit requirement. In order for the H1B application to be approved, the company needs to demonstrate that American workers with equal skill were not available to fill that position. The amount of paperwork required for this process is insane. The application needs to show things like job postings on local newspapers, online ads, etc. as well as a list of who applied and why they got denied (or got offers but rejected them).
Re: Iowa Spent $50M to Lure IBM. Then the Firings Started
#33If city officials bothered with a little research (assuming they don't already know), they'd find several examples of Big Co. entering and leaving small cities and towns without creating economic value equivalent to the huge incentives used to lure them in. Very similar to how officials chase Olympic hosting bids, even when history clearly shows that the legacy is additional debt and underutilized facilities (e.g. pu…
Or even just leaving the money in people's pockets. I'm not a person who thinks that all government destroys value, but this is a pretty clear example of a time when the government extracted millions of dollars of productive resources and poured it into an idiotic scheme.
Everyone would be better off today (except IBM's investors) if the city officials responsible for this fiasco had just been given a free lifelong vacation starting the day they started planning it.
Re: Iowa Spent $50M to Lure IBM. Then the Firings Started
#34"Instead, Ross found herself toiling on what she described as a new-age assembly line -- each employee solving a narrowly focused part of a corporate customer’s technical problem and then passing the baton to the next person." Can anyone decipher the above and explain what kind of work IBM employees in these kinds of offices perform?
Mostly operations, I imagine: OS, database & storage administration. While other companies were investing in their employee base, IBM was cutting costs. Much like a farmer who eats his seed corn and then has nothing to plant while others steward their resources carefully and see a bumper crop, IBM is seeing the results of over a decade of underinvestment: who here would choose an IBM cloud solution over AWS, Google,…
> who here would choose an IBM cloud solution over AWS, Google, DigitalOcean or Linode
I'd pick CloudFoundry over any of those at a large enterprise shop, and BlueMix is a legit implementation. (As is Pivotal, if that's your bag.)
Re: Iowa Spent $50M to Lure IBM. Then the Firings Started
#35"cloud computing, which allows IBM’s corporate customers to fix problems online rather than deal with human beings"
That's a new definition of "cloud computing". And you'd think that Bloomberg would have figured it out by now, since the term has been around for years.
Re: Iowa Spent $50M to Lure IBM. Then the Firings Started
#36> It’s a blow to Dubuque and Columbia, cities that spent a combined $84 million on tax breaks and other incentives to lure Big Blue in the hopes of attracting other technology firms and incubating a startup scene. Anyone who would pursue IBM in hopes of 'incubating a startup scene' is, not to put too fine a point on it, grossly incompetent. > Instead, Ross found herself toiling on what she described as a new-age asse…
They were trying to create a tech ecosystem, of which IBM and startups would be parts of. Not creating startups from luring IBM. But yes, this was totally predictable.
Re: Iowa Spent $50M to Lure IBM. Then the Firings Started
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Anyone who would pursue IBM in hopes of 'incubating a startup scene' is, not to put too fine a point on it, grossly incompetent. Indeed -- and just one of the most painfully obvious illustrations of why the "high taxes with favored big companies getting tax breaks" strategy is a lot less fair and efficient than the "medium-low taxes for everybody" strategy. (Of course, the latter doesn't give the politicians any ch…
The city should just embrace sunk costs, I mean, double down, and invest in helping the laid off workers create a startup scene. That at least has a hope in hell of achieving something
Most of the people in that IBM operation were probably help desk or equivalent. There's not the base skills to create a startup there. If they had the skills, they'd have moved, not taken a 46k/yr (mean) jobs from IBM.
That's the recurring story with just about any small rural place. You need a critical mass to get going and it's just not available locally. Maybe given a large university with a strong tech program you can jumpstart that but Dubuque has got only small liberal arts university run by churches...
I say this as someone living half the time in a rural place (PEI)... I work remotely for a Montreal company however when I'm there.
Re: Iowa Spent $50M to Lure IBM. Then the Firings Started
#38> It’s a blow to Dubuque and Columbia, cities that spent a combined $84 million on tax breaks and other incentives to lure Big Blue in the hopes of attracting other technology firms and incubating a startup scene. Anyone who would pursue IBM in hopes of 'incubating a startup scene' is, not to put too fine a point on it, grossly incompetent. > Instead, Ross found herself toiling on what she described as a new-age asse…
Dubuquer here. This was totally the City of Dubuque's attempt to grow (establish?) a tech scene. Dubuque doesn't have enough computer science graduates to support it. I'm at the biggest "software" company in the city, and we can't find quality talent within an hour commute.
As others in the thread have stated, this place was a glorified call center. No research or development going on. I have friends who still work there, and I've watched their careers completely stagnate.
In Dubuque, IBM was where you went when you couldn't get a tech job elsewhere in the city. Not anymore. The article says that the average pay at IBM was $46,000 but I don't know anyone who actually made that much. IBM said they'd bring 1300 jobs, but they barely cracked 1000.
Anyone who thinks they'll still be here in 10 years is kidding themselves.
Re: Iowa Spent $50M to Lure IBM. Then the Firings Started
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Anyone who would pursue IBM in hopes of 'incubating a startup scene' is, not to put too fine a point on it, grossly incompetent. Indeed -- and just one of the most painfully obvious illustrations of why the "high taxes with favored big companies getting tax breaks" strategy is a lot less fair and efficient than the "medium-low taxes for everybody" strategy. (Of course, the latter doesn't give the politicians any ch…
There's a multitude of interpretations there, but to me the obvious(TM) takeaway is that corporate taxes should be zeroed out for everyone, and income/consumption/environmental taxes (take your pick of weighting) increased to make up for it.
>>corporate taxes should be zeroed out for everyone
I'm probably stepping into a pre-existing argument, but forming a corporation allows me to gain benefits that would be difficult or impossible to obtain as an ordinary person. (e.g. limited liability, special tax treatment) It's not unreasonable that a corporation's owners pay additional taxes.
Re: Iowa Spent $50M to Lure IBM. Then the Firings Started
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
I saw that too and was going to comment on it. I'm starting to see a lot more companies who are starting to outsource their work to H1-B's and even moving a lot of their work to India. My sister worked at Cargill for 20 years and just recently found out her entire department (enterprise application development) with all her developers were being canned and the jobs sent over to India. Hell, the current project I'm on…
H1B is not outsourcing. They are full time local workers by definition. It's amazing companies can get away with firing people and then hiring H1Bs, who, by the government requirements, can't take a citizen's job place.
The problem with H1B is that it is half-sourcing. Sure, they are full time local workers, but they also lack the ability to quit and stay in the USA. So they aren't truly part of the local job scene either.
The system needs to be changed so that a tech worker who gets pulled over can quickly get residency and a path to citizenship.
I'd also make sure that anyone graduating from an decent American university gets permanent residency. If we are going to let Stanford or UIUC charge these people 40k a year to go to school and become some of the finest engineers, they should be able to be American Engineers.