Charlotte Observer reports on parent owner, McClatchy, replacing IT dept. with #h1b using contractors

Not sure where you live, but IT is not the same everywhere.

Out west the culture is that everyone loves tech and keeps up on the technology and everyone has the skills. All that Silicon Valley stuff.

East of Kansas City (roughly), IT is an older industry that had origins in clerical work for corporate HQs, who brought in mainframes and minicomputers in the 70s because they were tired of devoting space to file cabinets and clerk desks and put their best accountants in charge of them. The culture is slow-changing and conservative, and as a career it attracts people who are slow-changing and conservative, not visionary Jobs/Wozniak types. Those people are not in it for the tech, they're in it for the money. They do what their jobs demand. They don't work on the latest things because their jobs don't call for it.

This means when their executives listen to keynotes and go to Napa and talk to valley guys and come back to Charlotte or St. Louis or New York wanting to get some cloud in their Hadoop, that the guys in charge of making that happen have no clue how to do it. So they call contracting firms until they find one that has resumes with the keywords in their database, and the H1B firms lie and say they can deliver those skills. Then they coach their candidates and set them up with mentors who do know the tech, who function as a sort of in house stackoverflow.com for other consultants. The H1B delivers and nobody knows he's just cutting and pasting the same code that's been passed down for a hundred projects.

Anyway, it's not all like this, but the point is that west coast IT and east coast/Midwest IT are fundamentally different, and since the west coast gets all the press this gets lost.

/r/news Thread Parent Link - charlotteobserver.com