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Don't bother learning to code...
[The American Mind] The shotgun blast reverberated across the parking garage of Bank of America’s Concord Technology Center in the Bay Area suburb of Walnut Creek, California.In the front seat of a pickup truck sat the lifeless body of Kevin Flanagan beside a 12-gauge Remington. Behind him were boxes of his personal effects from his office at Bank of America, where the programmer had worked for nearly a decade. In the months leading up to his 2003 suicide, Bank of America had forced Flanagan and his colleagues to train their foreign replacements before laying them off. These transplants entered the United States on the H-1B worker visa. After months of the humiliation of having to train his replacement, a broken Flanagan climbed into his truck and shot himself in the head the day Bank of America let him go. "Kevin losing his job with Bank of America was the defining event in his decision to end his life," said Tom Flanagan, his father. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman characterized the H-1B visa as a government subsidy program the year before. Socialism for the rich. But bad press and picket lines in parking lots fell on deaf ears. Vivek Paul, then vice chairman and president of Wipro Technologies, told reporters he felt confident, despite Flanagan’s suicide, that his business would outlast the outcry. "We know how this movie ends," he sniffed. "If a decade ago we discovered that manufacturing can be done anywhere, in this decade we are learning that knowledge can be learned anywhere." Posted by: M. Murcek 2020-05-31 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=572937 |