Life with Uncle Dave

I’m a crotchety old Man living on Social Security and my wits in a trailer in the woods of Alabama. In this Blog you are likely to find ponderings and complaints about medical treatment in America, Stories about my friends and family, Rants about the economy and lots of stuff about J. Edgar Dogg, my best friend and the dumbest animal in Alabama.

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

The Bell Rings No-More

Because I like to keep up with my old career (i.e. Electrical Engineering in the Telecommunications Field) I get a lot of newsletters from various organizations that probably think that I am still an active RF Engineer. I’m not still active, because I am not able to travel or work the kind of long hours that the type of engineering I did required. My brain does, however still work pretty well and I get a little upset when I see some of the information coming out of the companies I used to work for.

I just read an article about Paul Jacobs the CEO of Qualcomm (A major telecom chip manufacturer and innovator) where he laments the lack of quality engineering talent available in the U.S. He and other CEO’s and COO’s complain about how China and India are producing all the high level engineering graduates these days and how the best and the brightest are staying in engineering centers at home that rival anything we have here. He thinks the answer is better engineering schools and more money for scholarships but the wages have gone down considerably since they started bringing in the foreign engineers and sharp students go with the money.

They completely ignore the fact that they have caused this to be the current situation. They complain that there are few gifted engineers coming out of our universities today however they never mention the H1-B Visa Program. That’s the law they all lobbied so diligently for from the 90’s ‘til now that was and is used as an excuse to lay off thousands of talented and capable American workers and replace them with foreign engineers who will work for a third as much as the U.S. Citizens they are replacing. They tell Congress they can’t find engineers at the same time they are laying off talented highly trained and highly evaluated engineers by the thousands. They blame this on needing to save money due to the crimes committed by the top management. The criminals get a severance package and the engineers get a pink slip and the congressmen believe whatever they are told by big business.

In most cases the new workers, while well educated, are not trained in American terminology and methods and present many problems getting used to differences between working here and where they came from. This means that the savings in salary costs are offset by the rising cost in time and poor quality of output that is suffered by companies who brought them in. Needless to say many of these workers are competent and develop into excellent engineers with time. Of course when they do, they expect to be paid the same as the American workers they replaced and after 6 years they, by law, must leave and go back to their home countries taking their knowledge and experience with them.

And still they lobby for the H1-B Program that currently allows 65,000 aliens to get visas per year. Well most years that is, The numerical limitation was temporarily raised to 195,000 in FY2001, FY2002 and FY2003. FY2002 was the year that I and many thousands of my co-workers were laid off by Lucent Technologies 'Bell Labs Innovations.' Oh! By the way, Lucent has now taken this process a step further by allowing themselves to be purchased by a company that is owned largely by a foreign government, that being our staunch ally France.

I think the big Telecom companies are starting to see the light, I get a couple e-mails a month asking if I will come back as a Consultant. I’d do it in a NY minute if I could, $95/hour beats the hell out of Social Security, but I just can’t take the workload. I do miss the excitement of creating something from nothing but I’ll have to stay here for now in the bleachers watching the game forever… unless my health situation changes.

Uncle Dave