Tuesday, June 16, 2020

Someone's got to take the blame for Windows 10



As some unfortunates may be aware of, the May 2020 updates for Microsoft Windows 10 have been the cause of much pain and suffering.  Personal experience: As usual, despite setting a time of my “choosing” for the automatic (i.e. no choice) update, the operating system still decided to give in to outside pressure and updated on a time of Microsoft’s choosing, and disaster struck. Shortly after the next time the software booted-up, the screen “froze” with no response from any key command, forcing a hard shut down. Twice on power-up it showed a black screen, and then on the third it went into automatic diagnostic/repair mode and then again went blank, and after several more re-starts it finally went to blue screen where you were provided with system restore “options.” 

To make a long story short none of the “options” fixed whatever the problem was, and I was forced to do a complete restore from a USB drive that would completely erase all personal files and third-party apps. Before I did that, in order to save some vital files from oblivion I had to get into the command prompt to gain access to them, which was an aggravatingly painstaking operation, since the files could only be selected one at a time to copy to an external hard drive, and obviously I wasn’t going to waste more time on the less essential files.

But it meant that all of the third-party apps had to be installed again, and drivers updated, and since then I’ve had a few too many close calls—such as on boot-up the hard drive would start and stop spinning, with the keyboard lights inexplicably blinking on and off, and then  just shut down by itself.  Windows 10 refused to boot from the USB drive, and only after playing around with the “F” keys and numerous starting and hard shut downs to no apparent effect, the thing just arbitrarily decided to boot-up, but not without continuing aggravations like unexplained “100 percent” disc use when no apps were even running, and the ever present threat of the next forced-fed “update.”

I ask myself “Who is to blame for this?” It has to be somebody who thinks they are “smarter”  than you and me. Gordon Kelly of Forbes recently noted that beta-testers of Windows 10 updates find that their warnings of bugs are often ignored by Windows software engineers: “Microsoft has missed out on multiple issues that have been reported by the users but were not added to the known issues page”—with the end result “buggy” updates, to be "fixed" by the next "update" with its own bugs the next update has to fix, and so on and so forth. Maybe it is that the software engineers don't understand American English idioms? Not all of the recent “updates” are totally useless, of course; although I’ll probably keep using Firefox, the new Edge web browser is a huge improvement over its completely pointless predecessor, and more streamlined than Internet Explorer. However, what I have noted to my continuing frustration is that with each new update, despite it being a mid-range gaming laptop with plenty of horsepower, my still less than two-year-old machine's performance is getting progressively more and more sluggish. I really do hate Windows 10. 

Ok, but back to the question: “Who is responsible for this?” A few claim it is “know-it-all made-men” from the Gates/Ballmer era, who may be coming up with the ideas for what goes in Windows 10, but they are not the ones who are actually writing the code. Microsoft’s CEO is Satya Nadella, and the fact that Microsoft is one of the most outspoken companies in favor of the H-IB visa program, one suspects that Nadella was selected for that position to make the company more “inviting” to his fellow Indians. From 2017-2019 Microsoft filed almost 17,000 labor condition applications, of which only a handful were rejected, while filing almost 6,000 certifications for green cards, again only a few which were rejected; since H-1B visas are good for up to six years, and spouses can apply for work in the same fields via the H-4 visa program, who knows the real number being employed at Microsoft. Many, and perhaps most, of these workers are software engineers, and while it is matter of conjecture the quality of the work they do,  we can presume that many of them share responsibility for what is going on with Windows 10. 

Companies like Microsoft claim that they need H-1B workers because of alleged shortages of qualified workers, but as the Economic Policy Institute points out, the real reason is because they are paid significantly lower wages—anywhere from 17 to 34 percent below the median—than non-H-1B workers. The Institute suggests that the only real way to know if there is a true shortage of qualified native-born workers is if employers are forced to pay H-1B employees at least the median wage—that is assuming that the hiring manager is not Indian who only wants to work with other Indians, particularly those who are of the same “caste” because of shared “culture.” On the website insights.dice.com, you find comments like this:

You should take a look at all of the Indian recruiters and staffing firms out there. I get anywhere from 25 to 50 emails per day looking to fill American jobs at ridiculously low rates!!!  I also get at least 10 follow up phone calls per day. Most of the emails are for the same roles at the same company. They lowball the hourly rates to the extreme down low. Americans really are getting the sh-t end of the stick with the massively huge list of recruiters and staffing firms.

We really need to get organized into a group and stop the H1-B gravy train. These people have screwed the market hard. All the dirty tricks they use have ruined this field. Fake papers lying. They set people up for bad interviews so they can claim they were not able to find a local candidate. Pure lies! I am Indian I was sponsored here and when I was eight years old and I am a citizen. I have insights on how this shops are operating. They are ruining the local job market most people are able to fill these roles and this is cheap labor for the tech companies.

And

Many H1-B holders of expired visas assume American names so they can’t be tracked for overstaying the max 6 years allowed by the H1-B program. There is an estimate that there over 1 million holders of H1-B visas that are expired. A research of Linkedin indicates that only 1 in 10 go home. Many work for the worldwide monopoly, Microsoft, this should be resolved using current anti-monopoly laws. They have complete control of I.T. contract consulting. Rarely do I receive e-mails from American recruiters. Still, they will fill the positions with their own people before Americans, because they fear being found out regarding their expired visas.

And

I currently work as a contractor for a 15 billion dollar company who outsourced to the supposed best outsourcing company there is. The outsourcing company is all Indian and they don’t know the hardware or the software, they guess most of the time. There have been more outages in the last 2 years than there where in the previous 10 and they are doing about 70% less work than the previous group.

What does one Indian have to say about these complaints?

This is very sad that how most Americans don’t like Indians through we work hard and try to go above and beyond at work, where are most Citizens I have seen either do not want to work hard or don’t care about work(especially in govt sector). Who do you think handles the work at the time of thanks giving and Christmas holidays? There is no one at work and we are the only ones sitting at office and finish the work. The reason why the young generation is not getting the good jobs are baby boomers don’t want to retire!!... people here just don’t want to work hard, mostly lack the skills!!!! Companies have to depend on H1B talent because we do the dirty work which you refused to do(citizens just leave at 5, where as if needed an immigrant stays longer to finish the work (even work remotely) and do not expect compensation(some companies pay overtime some don’t), and that is what companies like about us!!

Let’s see—Americans don’t want to work hard, don’t want to work on American holidays, won’t work overtime without compensation, baby boomers don’t want to retire—well that’s interesting, because he is suggesting that there is a “younger generation” of Americans looking for good jobs that are being given to H-IB visa holders instead. Oh, and Indians do what he calls the “dirty work” in the office without “compensation,” which is what companies “like” about them. This guy makes it sound like H-1B workers are out there picking cabbages. Meanwhile, the San Jose Mercury News, which reports on the goings-on in the Silicon Valley, prints a story every few months or so about yet another discrimination lawsuit filed against Indian-managed companies and their hiring and employment practices in regard to non-Indians.

Now, I can’t really say who, exactly, is to blame for Windows 10, and believe me I have tried all over Google looking for that information (Google, of course, is also one of the H-1B visa programs biggest customers). One thing I do know is that when I call a technical support number or Amazon customer service, I always come away with the idea that not only was I not “helped,” but that I knew more than the person who was supposed to “solve” the problem. 

I have to confess, however, that I don't say any of this without a chip on my shoulder. There was a 7-Eleven in Kent that I stopped by almost every day for 15 years which employed people who members of community, were generally friendly, and if you were a “regular” they even bothered to know your name. Then a few years ago the powers-that-be shut the place down, demolished the building and replaced it with a new building. When it re-opened, the old employees were nowhere to be seen, becoming yet another casualty of the South Asian takeover. It isn’t this way at all convenience stores, but there must be a franchise rule at 7-Elevens that employees are supposed to treat customers who are nonwhite or non-Indian as second-class citizens or “foreigners” in their own country. I avoid going to 7-Elevens because I don’t want to get so mad I forget my debit card in the machine again.

One other thing: during this pandemic there have been calls to issue green cards to doctors—again mainly from India—to help combat an alleged shortage of medical professionals in this country. But there was a story that appeared last year in the Economic Times that noted the report that there was only one government-certified doctor per 10,000 persons in India, far below the WHO’s recommendation of one per 1,000 persons. Of course, there were those who disputed this “slur” on India’s medical establishment, pointing out that the “actual” number is one doctor per 1668 persons, close to the WHO’s recommendation. A shortage of 600,000 doctors and 2 million nurses was still acknowledged, but India was “working” on rectifying the situation—just as it is engaging in crash program building outhouses after a WHO report revealed that 60 percent of the people in India are so poor they have no access to indoor toilet facilities. One indignant blogger did however admit that the doctor-patient ratio is still bad in rural areas, and the doctors do not like working in poor districts, which is to the greater part of India. 

However, the claim that India is engaged in a crash program to build more medical schools to cover the shortfall was undercut by the confession that India has a shortage of teachers qualified to staff more than a few of them. That is where the 10,000 to one figure comes in; most doctors who received their medical education in India do not have sufficient training to practice what Americans would assume their own family practitioners are qualified to provide—have knowledge of and prescribing drugs and antibiotic medicines. Yeah, that’s right: only a small percentage of “doctors” in India are qualified to prescribe even the most basic life-saving medicines, which come under the term allopathic medicine. It probably isn’t coincidental that the percentage of doctors who are government-licensed and those who are qualified to practice allopathic medicine are about the same. Yet even when a patient has access to such care, most of them cannot afford the out-of-pocket expense to pay for it, given the lack of government-supported health care, near the bottom in the world in percentage of GDP spent on health care.

No comments:

Post a Comment