re: #83 ckkatz

Ooops…

Sorry about that.

So basically, he is willing to try and relax covid mandates if that will help get more hires?

And it sounds like he is not going to play the game of raising salaries for the new hires, but screwing the current employees.

I suspect that your folks have already looked at adjusting other things like telecommuting, satellite locations, productivity tweaks, etc.

In the DC area, it was generally throw more money, hire a third party group snd temp workers, or move the project outside the the area. The third party companies and temps were usually inexperienced green card holders. (I never did figure out how some of them managed to get clearances.) And temps brought in were generally not able to become productive by the time their contract ended.

When I worked as an IT contractor in DC in the late ’80s at the USDA, FSLIC, and FDIC a lot of the IT contractor companies were essentially working by bringing over programmers and analysts on green cards* in shifts. And this is before the internet and networks got good enough for proper outsourcing or remote work like it was by the early 2000s.

They could compete very effectively with the domestic companies (like the one I worked for) since on a salary basis they were underpaying their employees compared to the local market, but said salary was very good compared to working in India. And they competed very well for contracts since most of their employees had bachelor, if not masters, degrees from universities in India in computer science and their bids looked very very good on paper.

Downside of using them, as the government found out, was that if there was any visa issues they might have an important programmer or analyst for a target deported suddenly (or not allowed back in after going to India for something.) And the English skills of some of these workers was lacking as I heard more than one supervisor bemoan.

The company I worked for decided to handle this competition by *lying* about their own employees’ qualifications. Without telling us they had done so until they got tripped up.** So we had a meeting and they showed us our doctored resumes for 15 minutes so that we could learn what they had lied about and parrot that information if asked. I, for one, had been given a masters degree in Computer Science and three more years work experience than I really had. And within a week of them doing it I was job searching in the Pittsburgh area since I was not going to be a willing participant in such a fraud.

** - One of the analysts I worked with had gone to Marshall University. It turns out that one of the supervisors where we were working had also gone to Marshall. And the doctored resume for this guy had pushed back the listed years he had been at Marshall to overlap the supervisor’s attendance there. And the Computer Science department at Marshall was not so large that you wouldn’t generally know or recognize the people who’d been there when you were. (I saw that in Pittsburgh when there was a new contractor and he and I were both “I know you from somewhere.” It turned out we were both at Pitt at the same time in the same major.)

* - Or possibly playing games with tourist visas.