Iowa Spent $50M to Lure IBM. Then the Firings Started • Hacker News Board

Re: Iowa Spent $50M to Lure IBM. Then the Firings Started

#61

Post by acveilleux » Tue, May 19, 2015, 5:52 PM UTC

pacaro wrote: post #49

acveilleux wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

I hear you, and I probably agree, but the entrepreneurial spirit can be found in the most unlikely of places, and whatever the je ne sais quoi is that makes a great founder might well be as common among "help desk or equivalent". Many people with great skills are in unlikely places because other factors in their lives are reducing their choices. I worked for a bootstrapped startup in rural England that made a success…

Unicorns will happen. My partner is working with a PEI-based startup (spun off from local Uni) that has a good many clients, a well established niche and probably more programmers working for them then any other company on the island that isn't a body shop.

Doesn't stop them from being special snowflakes rather than a thriving ecosystem. Contrast with a place like NYC or SF where there's funding, support, mentoring available and a wide pool for hiring. In PEI, the second biggest challenge after finding someone is retaining them lest they leave the island to make 50-70% more in TO.

Re: Iowa Spent $50M to Lure IBM. Then the Firings Started

#62

Post by cmdrfred » Tue, May 19, 2015, 6:30 PM UTC

wtbob wrote: post #6

simonw wrote: post #2

"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,…

With the 100% uptime I have with digital ocean (so far), i'd never go anywhere else.

Re: Iowa Spent $50M to Lure IBM. Then the Firings Started

#63

Post by Geekette » Tue, May 19, 2015, 6:54 PM UTC

djrogers wrote: post #44

scarmig wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 v…

Why do you think any money was actually spent on this? These were tax breaks - a reduction or elimination of tax payments that IBM wouldn't have made is they hadn't moved in anyway. How is that taking money out of people's pockets?

Tax breaks are just some of the incentives. E.g. Dubuque also renovated a historic building for IBM, which cost money upfront.

That said, I think tax breaks ultimately cost money, especially when the locals hired earn less than projected (thus, contributing less in income tax to city and less in spending to local industries) while company enjoys little to no tax, makes money and uses other municipal resources without adequate contribution.

Re: Iowa Spent $50M to Lure IBM. Then the Firings Started

#64

Post by stox » Tue, May 19, 2015, 7:29 PM UTC

discardorama wrote: post #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.

Cloud, as in Blowing Smoke.

Re: Iowa Spent $50M to Lure IBM. Then the Firings Started

#65

Post by kjs3 » Tue, May 19, 2015, 9:01 PM UTC

cwyers wrote: post #27

nova22033 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>reports of mass layoffs Whatever happened to the Cringley reported mass layoffs? http://www.cringely.com/2015/01/22/ibms-reorg-hell-launches-... IBM’s big layoff-cum-reorganization called Project Chrome kicks-off next week when 26 percent of IBM employees will get calls from their managers followed by thick envelopes on their doorsteps. By the end of February all 26 percent will be gone. I’m told this has been in th…

http://www.forbes.com/sites/benkepes/2015/01/28/the-ibm-axe-... https://gigaom.com/2015/01/28/looks-like-those-ibm-layoffs-h...

Those articles are from January, and Cringley said 25% of the workforce would be gone by Feb. It never happened. There have been layoff, and one day in the future it might amount to 100k, but nothing like 100k people in a month, or 5. Typical Cringley "take this little fact, coat thickly with histrionics and invective to drive clicks, and declare yourself a genius insider when the little fact turns out to be true".

Re: Iowa Spent $50M to Lure IBM. Then the Firings Started

#66

Post by kjs3 » Tue, May 19, 2015, 9:05 PM UTC

acveilleux wrote: post #37

pacaro wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

Most of the people in that IBM operation were probably help desk or equivalent.

The IBM help desk (such as it is) is in India.

Re: Iowa Spent $50M to Lure IBM. Then the Firings Started

#67

Post by Yhippa » Tue, May 19, 2015, 9:22 PM UTC

meatysnapper wrote: post #54

beambot wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm at the biggest "software" company in the city, and we can't find quality talent... > the average pay at IBM was $46,000 I think I can solve your talent problem, and I won't even charge you for the insight: Pay more. Presumably you're in a high-margin (software!) industry. If revenues are reasonable, then you can afford to pay higher salaries. Given the untethered lifestyle of younger generations, you're effecti…

Exactly! There is not an engineering talent shortage- if you paid as much as medicine, you'd get plenty.

"Engineering talent shortage for cheap developers who have high skill levels"

Re: Iowa Spent $50M to Lure IBM. Then the Firings Started

#68

Post by Yhippa » Tue, May 19, 2015, 9:24 PM UTC

at-fates-hands wrote: post #18

darkarmani wrote: post #12

I can't believe no one mentioned this gem: "Grassley, a Republican, wrote to Rometty on April 16 to express concern about “reports of mass layoffs” even as IBM requested H-1B work visas to allow 5,800 foreign employees to be authorized to work for the company in the U.S."

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…

This sounds like Cargill warped back to 2004.

Re: Iowa Spent $50M to Lure IBM. Then the Firings Started

#69

Post by 15155 » Tue, May 19, 2015, 9:29 PM UTC

Killswitch wrote: post #13

I live in Dubuque Iowa, and I'll say this, everyone knew IBM was only coming for a short period of time. This was expected from everyone here. Dubuque has a long history of trying to lure people here, and it's horrible. First it was luring blacks from Chicago with free housing and prepaid credit cards to up the minority count so the city could qualify for grants. Then it was IBM. Not much smart people here.

> Not much smart people here.

I hate to break it to you..

Re: Iowa Spent $50M to Lure IBM. Then the Firings Started

#70

Post by zaroth » Wed, May 20, 2015, 4:17 AM UTC

enraged_camel wrote: post #60

zaroth wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The requirement is that the alien must be paid a prevailing wage. I'm not sure what an "implicit" requirement is, but if you can find anywhere it actually says "you must try to hire an American first" I would love to see it... [1] - http://www.uscis.gov/eir/visa-guide/h-1b-specialty-occupatio...

You are looking in the wrong place. The requirement I mentioned is enforced by the Department of Labor, not USCIS. It's part of the "labor certification" process, which is a pre-requisite to the H1B application. See this page: http://www.dol.gov/compliance/guide/h1b.htm Specifically: >>H-1B dependent employers and willful violator employers must attest to the following three elements addressing non-displacement and r…

Thank you so much for pointing that out! So these requirements apply specifically for "H-1B dependent employers" and "willful violator employers".

I found this flier [1] defining "H-1B dependent employers".

  An employer is considered H-1B-dependent if it has: 
  
  • 25 or fewer full-time equivalent employees and at least
    eight H-1B nonimmigrant workers; or 
  • 26 - 50 full-time equivalent employees and at least 13 H-1B
    nonimmigrant workers; or 
  • 51 or more full-time equivalent employees of whom 15 percent or
    more are H-1B nonimmigrant workers.

So I take that to mean if you are a large company, you just need to keep H-1B below 15 percent of your TOTAL FTE (not just your engineering FTE) and the requirement to take good faith steps to recruit U.S. workers for the same job does not apply. Would you agree?

I have to believe the requirement must not apply... because any good faith effort to hire a U.S. worker for the 95th percentile H-1B job would result in a U.S. worker being hired. If it actually did apply in most H-1B cases, then I want to sign up for the class action suing basically every tech company there is that has ever hired an H-1B.

EDIT: Thinking more on the 15% threshold for large companies... that is incredibly high. Seems like it's off from where it reasonably should be by more than an order of magnitude!

EDIT 2: Also, there is this: "H-1B dependent employers who wish to hire only H-1B workers who are paid at least $60,000 per year or have a master's degree or higher in a specialty related to the employment, can be exempted from these additional rules."

[1] - http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/FactSheet62/whdfs62C....