Patrick Thibodeau, Author at NetworkingNexus.net

Patrick Thibodeau

Author Archives: Patrick Thibodeau

Feds to hire 3,500 cybersecurity pros by year’s end

Last October, the U.S. government began hiring 6,500 new cybersecurity IT professionals. It has hired 3,000 so far, and plans to hire another 3,500 by January 2017, the White House said Tuesday.The government is now trying to improve its recruiting and retention of cybersecurity professionals. This includes finding ways to improve government pay, which can be well below the private sector.ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: 8 ways to jumpstart your career This strategy was detailed Tuesday in a White House memo. In it, officials called for expanded job recruiting campaigns "in order to raise awareness of employment opportunities and compete for top cybersecurity talent," Shaun Donovan, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, Beth Cobert, the acting director of the Office of Personnel Management and federal CIO Tony Scott wrote in the memo.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Feds to hire 3,500 cybersecurity pros by year’s end

Clinton: It’s ‘heartbreaking’ when IT workers must train H-1B replacements

Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, on Monday criticized the replacement of U.S. IT workers with foreign labor but stopped short of offering a plan to fix it. In a videotaped interview with Vox published Monday, Clinton appears empathetic and sympathetic to IT workers who have trained their foreign replacements as a condition of severance. She mentioned IT layoffs at Disney, specifically. "The many stories of people training their replacements from some foreign country are heartbreaking, and it is obviously a cost-cutting measure to be able to pay people less than what you would pay an American worker," said Clinton in the interview.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Boston is nation’s top tech-talent exporter

The San Francisco Bay Area added 120,500 tech jobs in the last five years, for a growth rate of 61.5% percent. Major U.S. cities, generally, all saw double-digit growth in tech employment, according to a new report.There is a fair chance that good number of San Francisco's tech workers came from the Boston area, according this study, 2016 Scoring Tech Talent by CBRE, a real estate services firm.INSIDER 12 habits of successful tech CEO This report puts the nation's tech population at 4.8 million, and says tech employment has grown by about 1 million over the last five years. Of this total, 37% work for tech companies such as Microsoft, Google and Apple. The balance is made up of people employed outside the tech sector, in industries such as banking and healthcare.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Democrats support ‘ambitious’ tech investment

The just-released draft of the Democratic party platform calls for increasing investments in science and technology research. It supports net neutrality and expansion of high-speed broadband networks. But its biggest push is in the areas of clean energy and infrastructure investment.The platform says nothing about the offshore outsourcing of IT jobs and other types of work susceptible to offshoring. It is silent on the use of H-1B visa, similar to the presumptive Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton.Clinton has not discussed the temporary visa program and doesn't mention it in her platform, but does call for "stapling" or nearly automatic green cards for STEM advanced degree graduates.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Democrats support ‘ambitious’ tech investment

Google age-discrimination lawsuit may become a monster

Just over a year ago, two job applicants filed a lawsuit against Google. They claimed they were rejected because of their age. Both were over 40.A federal court in San Jose, Calif., is now being asked to decide whether many others who sought jobs at Google and were also rejected can join this case.On Wednesday, a motion for conditional certification of collective action status was filed. This motion, similar to a class action, seeks to include "all individuals who interviewed in-person for any software engineer, site reliability engineer, or systems engineer position with Google in the United States during the time period from August 13, 2010 through the present; were age 40 or older at the time of the interview; and were refused employment by Google."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cloud computing slows energy demand, U.S. says

Ten years ago, power usage at data centers was growing at an unsustainable rate, soaring 24% from 2005 to 2010. But a shift to virtualization, cloud computing and improved data center management is reducing energy demand.According to a new study, data center energy use is expected to increase just 4% from 2014 to 2020, despite growing demand for computing resources.Total data center electricity usage in the U.S., which includes powering servers, storage, networking and the infrastructure to support it, was at 70 billion kWh (kilowatt hours) in 2014, representing 1.8% of total U.S. electricity consumption.ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Whatever happened to Green IT? Based on current trends, data centers are expected to consume approximately 73 billion kWh in 2020, becoming nearly flat over the next four years. "Growth in data center energy consumption has slowed drastically since the previous decade," according to a study by the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "However, demand for computations and the amount of productivity performed by data centers continues to rise at substantial rates."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cloud computing slows energy demand, U.S. says

A ‘Brexit’ may have a sunny side for tech

The tech industry mostly opposes the prospect of the U.K. exiting the European Union -- a view that's supported by polls and in statements.Ahead of Thursday's vote on the idea, London's mayor, for instance, joined 140 representatives of the city's "leading tech and creative firms" to release a letter urging a vote for "remain.""Our capital has the potential to be the Los Angeles, New York and Silicon Valley to the rest of Europe -- and fuel the creation of new jobs across Britain. Let's not put that at risk," London Mayor Sadiq Khan wrote in the letter today.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IT workers at Tennessee insurer on edge amid outsourcing rumors

The IT employees at Unum Group, a Chattanooga, Tenn.-based insurer, are alert to the possibility that their employer may shift work to an offshore outsourcing firm. The employees don't know much yet, but they know enough to be alarmed -- and a letter sent out last week by the CIO did little to change that.The news about Unum, which reported nearly $11 billion in revenues last year, originated in a recent blog post by Sara Blackwell, a labor attorney in Florida who represents former Disney IT workers in a lawsuit after that firm replaced them with offshore outsourcer workers. Some of the replacements were on H-1B visas.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

U.S. to have 200-petaflop supercomputer by early 2018

The U.S. plans to have a supercomputer by early 2018 with roughly double the performance of China's newest and most powerful system. The Chinese system, Sunway TaihuLight, was announced Monday in the latest release of the Top500, the biannual ranking of publicly known supercomputers.Sunway TaihuLight can reach a theoretical peak speed of 124.5 petaflops, and has achieved 93 petaflops on the Linpack benchmark, used by the Top500 to assess the performance of supercomputers. The latest ranking of the world's publicly disclosed supercomputers was released Monday at a supercomputing conference in Germany.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

U.S. to have 200-petaflop supercomputer by early 2018

China claims exascale by 2020, three years before U.S.

China has set 2020 as the date for delivering an exascale system, the next major milestone in supercomputing performance. This is three years ahead of the U.S. roadmap.This claim is from China's National University of Defense Technology, as reported Thursday by China's official news agency, Xinhua.This system will be called Tianhe-3, following a naming convention that began in 2010 when China announced its first petaflop-scale system, Tianhe-1. The first petascale system was developed in the U.S. in 2008.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

China claims exascale by 2020, three years before U.S.

Laid-off with a non-compete? Bill would guarantee salary

Non-compete agreements are controversial for many reasons, but what may be worst of all: Even if you are laid off from your job, a non-compete agreement may still apply.California has made non-compete agreements unenforceable, but Massachusetts has not. Some opponents say that's partly the result of lobbying by EMC, which has considerable clout as a major state employer, headquartered in the Boston suburb of Hopkinton.But the pending $67 billion merger of EMC with Dell, and the prospect of merger-related layoffs, is spurring a new attack on non-compete agreements.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Automation, not cheap labor, is reshaping outsourcing

The offshore outsourcing of IT grew because of the cost of offshore labor. A software engineer in India is paid but a fraction of what a U.S. worker earns. Payscale puts the median salary for a senior software engineer in India at $10,000.When IT services firms bring in H-1B visa workers, these workers earn substantially more than their overseas counterparts, but often significantly less than American IT employees.This labor cost advantage has been a powerful lure for U.S. customers, but analysts see labor costs diminishing in importance. Customers want more automation, whether it's infrastructure management or business process outsourcing. IT services firms can no longer complete exclusively on lower cost labor.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What’s going on with IT hiring?

CompTIA, an industry group, said about 96,000 IT jobs were lost last month across all industries, not just the technology sector. That figure includes the impact of the approximately 37,000 telecommunications jobs sidelined by the Verizon strike, which was settled this month. But it was a rough month, by some estimates.Analysts have been generally cautious this year about IT hiring trends. Although the unemployment rate for IT professionals is about half the national average of 4.7%, said CompTIA, some analysts use terms ranging from "modest" to "pre-recession" to describe IT hiring.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Texas goes big with 18-petaflop supercomputer

The Texas Advanced Computer Center (TACC) has received $30 million in U.S. funding for a new supercomputer that will roughly double the performance of its existing 9-petaflop supercomputer.The new system, named Stampede 2 after its predecessor, is being funded by the National Science Foundation. It will be available for scientific research by June 1, 2017.The Texas supercomputing center occupies a unique niche. The U.S. government owns the nation's largest and most powerful supercomputers. The national leader is Titan, a Cray XK7 Opteron-based system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, running at a peak performance of about 27 petaflops.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Texas goes big with 18-petaflop supercomputer

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