Company Spokesman: Especially if it's going to cost us money, and don't call me Shirley.

Nothing motivates you better to go back to the grind of corporate work than 7 years of shitty diapers. I love my kids, but 7 years of diapers was enough. Much happier with a regular paycheck and a nanny.

I remember years ago on /., there was an article where a guy claimed he had done this, but the slashdot pitchforks were raised while chanting fraud.

http://news.slashdot.org/story/02/09/05/1814203/ripping-vinyl-via-your-scanner

There it is.

Nice to know the guy's technology actually worked.

Last time we had this talk, I made this comment
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3620197&cid=43374569
One AC response to my comment was sort of scary...

Yeah, I see a white guy standing in a crowd of filth which probably means now you stink as bad they do. Congrats on being a traitor to your country. It was good of you to post that photo so we know exactly what you look like. After the day the people decide wipe the shit stains off our land, we'll turn their attention to those like you who betrayed their race, for special treatment.

What the fuck? I thought this was a site of thinkers, geeks, not of xenophobic extremists.

Rather than waste time on a lengthy post (I am at work) let me just make one simple point...

100% of H1-B workers that I know wish they could live, work, and pay taxes here. The only issue I take with H1-b is the treatment of said workers. This is a country that once prided itself on harboring the best and brightest from around the world, giving them shelter and refuge in exchange for their knowledge and experience. Now we give them nothing for that.

Just scrolling through the +5 comments, I see a ton of xenophobia...

Can't find an entry level IT job? Where are you? Arkansas? Here in silicon valley, we're experiencing another surge in hiring. I'm pretty low on the skillset, so whenever I get myself back into IT, I consider the economy to be doing well. Case in point... Company I work for. We've been losing a ton of local talent to google who's been on a hiring binge. When a small shop like ours (120 or so employees) can afford to pay great salaries, but we lose out to name brands like google, we have to turn to H1B.

And for the H1B worker, life isn't all cherries and apple pie. Case in point, this big ass march from immigration voice.
http://imgur.com/YKxR6NG

See the white guy with pelican case in tow? That's me.

Let's say you're here from India on H1B and you have a family emergency. You have to go home. So many H1B's are scared to go home, because when they try to return more often than not, they're denied re-entry into the country. I haven't met a single H1B that wouldn't LOVE to be a US citizen, but instead we give them a non-citizen status as an H1B that gives them basically no rights as a US citizen.

I think we should just trash H1B altogether, and allow anyone of decent education (BA or BS) come live here, become a citizen, and pay taxes.

As slashdotters, we shouldn't hate on the H1B people. They are not the problem. It's our policy, the very creation of H1B to sidestep proper citizenship that is.

I have MY PC.. Always locked, and nobody gets to use it. Wife, kids, etc.. Doesn't matter. That being said...

I have several core2duo's setup for the wife and kids for minecraft/office/internet. After setting them up, I resized the partition space so I could keep a clean image on the hard drive (in a separate, non-accessible partition by windows formatted ext3) Whenever their PC's get so nasty with malware that it's barely usable, I boot off a USB stick with clonezilla on it, then restore the base OS/Apps image.

Takes less than 15 minutes to do a restore.

On another note... Watch out for chrome's "Logged in user" I left my daughter logged in with one of my accounts on her PC. She visited the app store and installed a bunch of junk, which when I log into another PC guess what? It's on there, even the nasty stuff.

Oh hell ya there is.

  In the district 8 race there was about a million spent by both sides. Even if I had undercut the robocall competitors by 1/2, I still would have had enough headroom to make a quick 20k for myself for just importing a CSV of numbers into openvbx and doing a few mouse clicks. One flat website against my candidate (flat as in, no CMS,etc) cost that side $5000. 3 pages, straight html, something I could have easily whipped together in less than an afternoon.Politicians in general are not techies.

They have a lot of money thrown at them during campaign season, which if they like you, will throw it at you.

After a 12 year Hiatus (I got laid off in 2001) I'm finally getting back to IT, I start a new job monday, it pays a bundle, wife is happy, kids will have benefits..So what did I do in those 12 years?

I worked at a karaoke bar in San Jose. My friends and I made a karaoke jukebox, tried to market it to karaoke companies (failed miserably, they're like the music companies battling technology in the 90's) It was great, it was fun for a while but no benefits, low pay, and an abusive owner finally made me start taking the steps to get out of it.

2010 I tried running for city council. Lost but it got my foot in the door with local politicians. Last campaign season, I helped one candidate win by using a combination of twilio/openvbx for robocalls (at cost.. $0.02) 40,000 robocalls. Most candidates pay between $0.79 to $0.83 a call, so I consider it to be a pretty huge contribution.

During my interview I was totally open and honest about my last 12 years. Why didn't I W2 for the last 12 years? Why are these gaps here in my employment? Lucky for me my hiring manager had been in a similar situation... The entire company was really impressed with all my political work in the last year. (In my new role, I'll be doing IT stuff in a board room, so knowing how to mind your political p's and q's to make a good initial impression was super important)
When I was first laid off in 2001, I never dreamed of doing any kind of volunteer work or activism. I was in my late 20's, and too self centered to give a shit. I thought my salary was my worth, and working for free/volunteer was beneath me. Took a few years of eating humble pie in a karaoke bar to adjust that attitude.

So my advice, find some local volunteer things to work on that appeal to you. See how you can wrangle your tech knowledge in there. Me? I just happened to love all the skullduggery and drama involved with politics. YMMV.

If I wasn't on rbtl status (I think that's the status they give when they take away mod powers) I'd give a +1 Insightful for you.

Thanks for sticking up for me Jeremy.

I didn't exactly get bailed out. My principle is the same. Only our interest rate was adjusted (and fixed) So we're still paying the same for our house. Basically, we spent 10 years paying interest on our loan. So the ones that REALLY made out here was the bank.

I gotta disagree with not pointing the finger at wall street though.

I got really giddy the other day when congress told the banks, "NO MORE USING OUR BAILOUT MONEY FOR BONUSES" Remember all the outrageous bonus's those guys got? Bernie Madoff anyone?

I'm not upset for myself, I'm upset for others. I'm pretty happy where I am in life now.

If you're doing good, great, but the majority of folks I know have had to get back to the end of the line. I know some of the guys that used to run the ISP arm of Earthlink here in the bay area. They're worth every penny. (I'm not half bad myself as a network admin that knows my way around routers,bgrp, some light coding) Even these guys though got the axe in 2001. I met a few of them when I did a stint of phone support last year (now I remember why I hated it)

Nobody has outdated skills either. Most of my references died out as 90% of the companies I worked for imploded. Notable examples of places I worked at, Metricom (Ricochet Wireless Modem) and Commerce one. Most of us don't look at the tech as something to make money with either (at least I don't) I learn on my own because it interests the hell out of me. I love building things.

So you got to keep your house that you obviously can't afford

We could afford it at the time. We bought an "as is" house with numerous problems because it was the cheapest one on the market in an area we wanted to be in. We figured we'd just keep working, and fixing the problems as we saved our money along.

We didn't buy a house with 0 down either. My wife and I both cashed in stock options (that we had earned and vested at .coms) and had a $50k downpayment on a $500k house. So how dare you discredit the hard work we did getting to that point.

Why did you refinance repeatedly?

After 2001-9/11 it wasn't just the banks screwing people over. The counties lost a ton of funding (again, went to Iraq) Everyone's property taxes got raised sky high (we're at about $7k@year)

Let's face it man, with every city in the bay area suffering a deficit, from San Jose to Vallejo (who went bankrupt) everyone, everywhere lost funding. Inflation really hit hard. Gas prices skyrocketed.

Guys like countrywide home loans really set up a lot of hardworking folks to fail. We were with countrywide in the beginning.

How can you look yourself in the mirror now that you've taken such obvious charity from the rest of us?

  I'm not the only one in this boat. I am the 99%.

I'm not pimping any skills anymore. I'm perfectly happy where I am, not climbing the corporate ladder. I've gotten enough roots planted now where my future looks pretty solid.

You quote my "fucked" like it's inaccurate. If you had any concept of the world outside of your cubicle, you'd see it's still fucked. Local Silicon Valley cities are tanking. Here's some good reads since it doesn't seem like you see the world outside anymore.

San Jose City Budget Deficit.
http://www.sanjoseca.gov/mayor/goals/budget/BudgetDeficit.asp#impact

In the North bay Vallejo had to declare bankruptcy protection.

http://www.ci.vallejo.ca.us/GovSite/default.asp?serviceID1=712&Frame=L1

City of Santa Clara in Deficit.
http://santaclaraca.gov/index.aspx?page=50&recordid=560

  I live in San Jose, CA.

Our economy tanked because of this stupid war we've been fighting for the last 10 years. Where we were during the .com would have sustained if we had actually stayed the course, just stuck to going after Osama, and not blown trillions of dollars "liberating Iraq"

Another reason our economy is tanking is because of the buzzwords uttered left and right by the 1% as our salvation to creating the ultimate world utopia. "Globalization" IT Salaries are increasing, but are the jobs actually increasing? No, they aren't. China has proven to stand on their own when it comes to engineering. I look at my Android HTC phones in awe. My LG microwave runs circles around any GE (which oddly enough, was made in china, and rebranded as GE)

The investing 1% doesn't give a rats ass about you. At the end of the day, if it's a choice between hiring you or someone overseas to do the same quality of work for cheaper. Guess what? You're nothing more than a sum() function on a spreadsheet to them.

This is what the OWS people have been fighting for. Sure, you might be making good money, but your "cloud" skills are just going to be used until your product is stable enough to get shipped overseas. Cloud means it doesn't have to be here.. Think about that... Corporations shouldn't be allowed to setup shop overseas unless they're willing to provide the same levels of safety, and workers rights that they would get in the states.

So enjoy your time in the clouds anon.

2 weeks after my wife and I bought our house in 2001, I was laid off. After 3 months of searching 9/11 happened, and the shit really hit the fan. Silicon Valley for a time looked like a ghost town. Moving trucks were moving east (getting the fuck out of dodge so to speak)

A year later I wound up getting a crappy job at a bar. 10 years later I'm still here, working on my own software that runs certain aspects of the bar (very profitably I might add) When we bought our house in 2001 interest rates were sky high, and the wife and I thought our futures in tech were pretty secured. I think we were at 10% interest. We refinanced twice over the 10 years trying to keep payments down so we could stay in our house.

In the last 2 years the ARM on our loan got so high we were paying over $1600@mo for the new interest charges alone. We were virtually on the brink of losing our house. Then the "Obama Affordable home" plan was passed. Bank of America didn't make it easy. My wife had to call them every single day for a year. (like calling your AT&T subcontractor when your T1 goes down) At one point they denied us because "We couldn't verify your identity" (one of the loan modders wrote my social security number down wrong)

Despite what you might think of Obama.. He's just doing the best he can. He's no Bill Clinton, but having to clean up after GWB can't be easy. He stopped the banks from bending over hardworking people. Osama was killed during his term. Troops are withdrawing from Iraq.