George, have not heard from you in a while.
On 2025-07-03 13:13, George Toft via PLUG-discuss wrote:
I would like to add...
1. From a paper posted at work as required by the Department of Labor.
Tata Consultancy is providing H1B Visa workers to be Database
Administrators for $66K/year. Tata is well known to take 1/3 off the
top, so that means H1B worker gets $44K/year. That's $22/hr. In
Phoenix. That is what we - as IT workers - are competing with. My
children with no college education make more than that.
Who allows this? The Washington Uni party that is more interested in
their wealth tan ours.
2. Oh, it gets better with AI. I went to an all-day AI conference (it
was actually three days, but it made me physically ill, or maybe it was
something I ate). The presenters demonstrated how Generative AI can be
used in social media posts and on Instagram. The presenter admitted he
hadn't made a post in six months - he had AI generate a video of him
talking, lip-synched to his AI-generated voice, making hand gestures.
He also demonstrated live how to get ChatGPT to make LinkedIn posts
that sound like him. And then, he told us how he was able to avoid
hiring an executive assistant by collaborating with three AI
Generalists for two days. So eight labor-days of AI Engineer salary was
expended to avoid the recurring annual cost of a person's job.
I'm aware of all of this. Trying to learn how to use ChatGPT coupled
with Canva to do what you described. I hear it might be a 3 week
learning curve.
3. Microsoft laid off 6000 last quarter and announced 3000 more, with
AI stepping into many of the roles.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdxl0w1w394o
4. Even in my own web-hosting, the host switched their live chat to a
chatbot. I had to migrate one of my sites from one type of account to
another about two months ago, and again on another site last week, and
needed guidance both times. In the first migration, a human on the chat
helped me. On the second, it was some Agentic AI. The chatbot was
faster than the human and gave me perfect answers, going so far as to
weave in parts of my question in its answer. It felt like it was
straight out of ChatGPT. And that's a problem - the AI gave me better
customer service than the human.
I use chatGPT a lot. Most questions I would ask here, Chat can take
care of (and much more).
Regards,
George Toft
On 7/2/2025 12:28 AM, David Schwartz via PLUG-discuss wrote:
I think H1B visas for programmers and engineers should be FROZEN for 5
years.
AI is going to be transforming both the programming world and many
engineering roles. As a result, I believe there are going to be more
software people dumped on the market over the next 5 years than we had
after Y2k.
Unfortunately, most of these folks are going to be US Citizens rather
than H1B visa holders, for reasons I alluded to earlier.
Congress should block all further H1B hires and demand companies spend
that money on retraining their existing US workers rather than dump
them into a rapidly shrinking job market and replacing them with
foreigners.
Unfortunately, most of the 25 wealthiest billionaires in America also
happen to run companies that have huge staffs of software and hardware
engineers. So given the current political climate, what’s the
likelihood that there will be any significant change in current
policies?
-David Schwartz
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