Patrick Thibodeau, Author at NetworkingNexus.net

Patrick Thibodeau

Author Archives: Patrick Thibodeau

Trump’s tariff threat may speed cloud adoption

President-elect Donald Trump’s threat to impose tariffs on goods manufactured in Mexico and offshore may accelerate the movement to cloud computing, analysts said.IT managers may seek to protect their companies from higher hardware or capital expenditure costs by shifting more of their IT spending to services. This shift is well underway, and the new administration may push it along, even before Trump takes office next month.At this point, industry analysts are uncertain as to what Trump has planned. His statements regarding tariffs are short, vague and sometimes delivered by tweets.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Despite risk, 1,000 in tech pledge not to help Trump’s data efforts

As President-elect Donald Trump met with high-tech business leaders in New York on Wednesday, some of their employees were affirming, in tweets, a decision to join the resistance.The Neveragain.tech pledge passed more than 1,000 signatures, it announced late Wednesday, hours after Trump had wrapped up his meeting with a dozen tech executives. Participating in the pledge means agreeing not to help the government create a database that can be used to target people based on race or religion or "facilitate mass deportations."[To comment on this article, visit Computerworld's Facebook page.]To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Rick Perry, climate change skeptic, soon to oversee U.S. supercomputing

President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for energy secretary, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, will also have charge of the nation’s largest supercomputers. These systems are used to investigate “national challenges,” which includes climate change. But Perry is a climate change skeptic, as is Trump, and believes the science is unsettled.Perry’s skepticism about the science of climate change may be a problem for the department he's been tapped to run; the Department of Energy (DOE) considers climate a major research focus.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: 26 crazy and scary things the TSA has found on travelers “DOE plays an important role in climate change research -- a very large role,” said Cliff Mass, a professor of meteorology at the University of Washington.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Rick Perry, climate change skeptic, soon to oversee U.S. supercomputing

Disney IT workers, in lawsuit, claim discrimination against Americans

After Disney IT workers were told in October 2014 of the plan to use offshore outsourcing firms, employees said the workplace changed. The number of South Asian workers in Disney technology buildings increased, and some workers had to train H-1B-visa-holding replacements. Approximately 250 IT workers were laid off in January 2015.Now 30 of these employees filed a lawsuit on Monday in U.S. District Court in Orlando, alleging discrimination on the basis of national origin and race.The Disney IT employees, said Sara Blackwell, a Florida labor attorney who is representing this group, "lost their jobs when their jobs were outsourced to contracting companies. And those companies brought in mostly, or virtually all, non-American national origin workers," she said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IEEE-USA wants Trump to end H-1B lottery

The IEEE-USA intends to urge President-elect Donald Trump to quickly replace the random H-1B lottery with a system that gives priority to companies that pay the best wages.This proposal would also move large H-1B users to the back of the visa distribution line. For this to happen, all it would take is an executive order by the president, the engineering group says.Separately, the IEEE-USA also wants Trump to prod the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate what it claims is discrimination against U.S. workers by H-1B visa-using companies. This discrimination occurs when U.S. workers are replaced by visa-holding workers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Trump’s plan for protecting IT jobs raises hopes, fears

President-elect Donald Trump is showing a willingness to wage an economic battle with firms that move jobs offshore. He's threatening tariffs and promising H-1B visa reform, but may be offering carrots as well, namely tax incentives.These actions may be raising hopes among some IT employees who have lost jobs, or are losing them, that the incoming Trump administration is serious about keeping IT jobs in the U.S. But Trump's proposals -- particularly the tariff -- are also raising much uncertainty.Trump, in a series of tweets this weekend, reaffirmed plans to impose a 35% import tariff on "cars, A.C. units etc," on goods made by offshore U.S. firms but sold in the U.S.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Some tech firms welcome Trump’s H-1B reforms

IT services firms that hire U.S. workers and don't offshore work are looking forward to President-elect Donald Trump's crackdown on H-1B visa use.This includes firms such as Rural Sourcing Inc. (RSI), an Atlanta-based domestic software development company. RSI employs about 350 people and doesn't hire workers on temporary visas. It has four development centers in Augusta, Ga.; Mobile, Ala.; Jonesboro, Ark.; and in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where a new center opened this year.These are places "not widely known as big IT markets," said Monty Hamilton, the firm's CEO. That helps to keep costs down and makes it easier to compete with offshore firms. The locations appeal to developers who don't want to relocate to coastal tech centers, he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Sanders launches new attack on offshore outsourcing

Former presidential candidate and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders will introduce legislation to discourage companies from relocating jobs offshore. The legislation would punish offshore decisions with loss of tax breaks and government contracts and impose an "outsourcing tax" on firms that proceed nonetheless.The proposal, announced this weekend, singles out United Technologies for its decision to close its Carrier Corp. manufacturing plant in Indianapolis and relocate operations to Mexico.[To comment on this story, go to Computerworld's Facebook page.]To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

U.S. says cybersecurity skills shortage is a myth

The U.S. government has released what it claims is myth-busting data about the shortage of cybersecurity professionals. The data points to its own hiring experience.In October 2015, the U.S. launched a plan to hire 6,500 people with cybersecurity skills by January 2017, according to White House officials. It had hired 3,000 by the first half of this year. As part the ongoing hiring effort, it held a job fair in July.At the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), "We set out to dispel certain myths regarding cybersecurity hiring," wrote Angela Bailey, chief human capital officer at DHS in a blog post Monday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

U.S. says cybersecurity skills shortage is a myth

Trump to attack visas that ‘undercut the American worker’

President-elect Donald Trump on Monday sent out the strongest signal yet that the H-1B visa program is going get real scrutiny once he takes office.Trump listed five executive actions he plans to take on his first day in office. They include asking the Department of Labor to investigate "all abuses of the visa programs that undercut the American worker."Trump did not get into details and didn't specifically mention the H-1B visa, but his intent is clear. During the campaign, he was critical of the H-1B visa program and invited displaced IT workers from Disney to speak at his rallies. He said the visa is being used to undercut workers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Trump’s election sets stage for H-1B reform

President-elect Donald Trump gave laid-off IT workers something his rival, Hillary Clinton, did not during the campaign: Attention and a promise to reform the H-1B visa program.The IT workers that Trump wanted to appeal to don't work for startups, Google, Facebook or Microsoft. They run IT systems at insurance firms, banks, utilities and retailers. They live in Rust Belt cities and in New York City, but are too spread out for pollsters to measure.Trump recognized that IT workers are aggrieved and so did Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), who worked with the president-elect on this issue. Sessions, after being appointed in early 2015 as the chairman of the Senate immigration subcommittee, set out to become "the voice of the American IT workers who are being replaced with guest workers."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What will Trump do with the H-1B visa?

President-elect Donald Trump, working with Congress, may try to make it harder and more expensive to hire H-1B workers. His intent would be to change the economics of visa usage and encourage employers to hire U.S. workers.Trump could do this by working with a bipartisan group in Congress committed to reform. But Trump also has executive power levers and could impose changes on his first day in office. He also can prod various federal agencies to launch investigations into visa use.Ron Hira, associate professor of public policy at Howard University, said it’s too early to predict what a Trump administration will do, if anything, about the visa programs. Republicans and Democrats have splits on this issue in each of their parties, and “business interest groups will be out in full force trying to stop any sensible reform.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Trump tapped the viral anger over H-1B use

President-elect Donald Trump realized early in his campaign that U.S. IT workers were angry over training foreign visa-holding replacements. He knew this anger was volcanic.Trump is the first major U.S. presidential candidate in this race -- or any previous presidential race -- to focus on the use of the H-1B visa to displace IT workers. He asked former Disney IT employees, upset over having to train foreign replacements, to speak at his rallies."The fact is that Americans are losing their jobs to foreigners," said Dena Moore, a former Disney IT worker at a Trump rally in Alabama in February. "I believe Mr. Trump is for Americans first."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

At campaign’s end, Trump takes a swipe at IBM

In Minnesota on Sunday, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump added IBM to the list of companies he criticizes for moving jobs offshore or to Mexico. Trump's line was a one sentence throwaway at the Twin Cities rally, but it may have resonated with this rally crowd.In Rochester, Minn., IBM created a massive operation. In 1956, it broke ground on what would become a 32-building, 3.5-million-square-foot complex that employed 8,100 workers at its peak in 1991. It made punch card systems and later became widely known for its AS/400 system development work.IBM created a stable workforce, and by 1988 was able to point out that the average Rochester employee was 39.5 years old and a 14-year IBM veteran. Nearly 40% of those workers were engineers or programmers, according to IBM's official history.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Grassley criticizes university over its IT offshoring

A political backlash is growing over a plan by the University of California, San Francisco, to shift IT jobs overseas. The school is hiring an India-based IT services contractor, and IT workers are expecting to train their foreign replacements.Several lawmakers have written letters questioning the university's plan, including Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which oversees immigration."It is clear that the University is seeking to replace American workers with lower-cost foreign workers abroad and potentially also in the United States," wrote Grassley, in a letter to Janet Napolitano, the president of the University of California system. The letter, which was sent in late September, has not been made public, but a copy was obtained by Computerworld.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

CEO’s message a jolt to IT workers facing layoffs

IT workers in the infrastructure team at Health Care Service Corporation (HCSC) were notified recently of their layoff. They expect to be training replacements from India-based contractor HCL. The layoff affects more than 500 IT workers, according to the insurance firm.This familiar IT story began a little differently. A few days before employees were notified in mid-October of their layoff, HCSC CEO Paula Steiner talked about future goals in an internal, company-wide video.Steiner's comments weren't IT-department-specific, but the takeaway quote by one IT employee was this: "As full-time retiring baby boomers move on to their next chapter, the makeup of our organization will consist more of young and non-traditional workers, such as part-time workers or contractors," said Steiner in the video.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IT spending on ‘innovation’ is now a priority

Businesses are increasing their spending on technology, with cloud services as the big beneficiary. Hardware and software spending is declining as spending on cloud services rises, particularly on SaaS, according to the most recent annual survey from the Society for Information Management (SIM). Analytics/business intelligence and cybersecurity are the top two IT spending priorities, something that has been true for the several years. But marching into this mix now is "innovation" spending, an IT category signaling business expectations for IT.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Gartner: By 2020, you’ll say more to a machine than to your spouse

ORLANDO, Fla. -- The message at Gartner's Symposium/ITxpo is to prepare for a fast move to augmented reality, the decline of mobile apps, and a major shift away from web browsing to voice interaction.Many users will expect businesses, universities and governments to respond to these shifts, the market research firm said at its annual conference.Here's what Gartner sees arriving soon:1. By 2020, 100 million consumers will shop in augmented reality environments.A.R. will be "overlaying data on top of environments," said Gartner analyst Daryl Plummer. For instance, when you walk into a grocery store, "all the data about the different items will be floating in the air in front of those items," he said. The bulky and boxy glasses that customers need to see the augmented reality at the store will get more fashionable and will be easier to wear. A.R. also will be used in online shopping.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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