Back on September 14, 2025 I heard an academic make the statement “Americans have been climbing up the value chain.” Pissed me off so much I sent an email to Ayesha Rascoe, host of Weekend Edition. Sadly I had to clean out both Sent and Trash email folders for server space (I get a lot of spam and other email.) Thought I saved it because I spent a morning writing it. Honestly it was some of my better work. Don’t always get the chance to hear Weekend Edition so I will also respond here. Ayesha, if you read this and still have the email please forward it to me or just reply. That was some good writing.
Recently Melba Lara also had a story tease about college educated workers unable to find jobs. Did not get to listen to the story. Given the reporting I’ve heard in the past on this topic, it will have missed the mark. Been far too much reporting on getting H-1B workers jobs when, honestly, they are a gigantic part of the problem.
We will first discuss how wrong the academic statement was, then we will discuss the elephant everyone ignores.
Background
For those of you who do not know me from Adam and somehow landed here for the very first time:
I grew up and still live on a Century family farm. That means it has been in the family for over a century. Honestly further back. First documentation we have is from the Transcontinental Railroad or so I’m told. It’s been in either a vault or safe deposit box my entire life.
I have a CDL in my wallet. That means I can legally drive an 18-wheeler. I have drive cross country for hire in the past.
Went to college for degrees in Business Oriented Computer Programming and Computer Information Systems.
My latest novel is getting great reviews. Might even be turned into a movie some day, but there is a huge difference between someone who makes movies liking your book and it actually becoming a movie.
Spent roughly 40 years writing software on large computer systems for Fortune 500 companies, PCs for everyone, and embedded systems. Much of my embedded systems work was medical devices. In fact I was on the team that brought the first Connex Spot Monitor to life.
Yes, I still work on both sides of what pissed me off in the conversation. We are currently changing the combine over for corn harvest, having just finished soybean harvest a few days ago.
The Statement
What we’re seeing is we saw manufacturing jobs decline last month. They declined the month before, and they’ve been declining all through the year. We’ve lost about 80,000 jobs in six months. That’s not unusual. American manufacturing has been in decline for decades. That might sound worrying until I remind you that what’s been happening is Americans have been climbing up the value chain. We’re no longer screwing the lid on toothpaste tubes. We’re scientists and engineers designing technologies of the future instead.
Wolfers
I hear academics and some wealthy people regurgitate the portion of the quote I put in italics despite the fact it is patently false. That is the bullshit we were sold along with the criminal fraud of globalization.
Technically there multiple groups of people. Group one consists of those who never graduate high school for whatever reason. A token few will start their own business and do incredible. For the rest, until they get a GED, they will work a minimum wage job if they can find paying work at all. Many may try to ride Welfare and/or Disability to the grave. Until their circumstances allow them to get a GED, they cannot really improve their lives. If they have no work ethic they will not improve their drive.
This conversation focuses on the other groups. For the purposes of this discussion we will use the following definition.
Owning a home, raising a family, potentially sending one’s children to college.
The American Dream
Graduated but didn’t like school
Highschool was designed exactly for these people. You have a bell ringing telling you to go to a different class, lunch, etc. There are shop classes to give you basic skills with fundamental tools used in various manufacturing processes of the 1940s through 1960s. Most attending public school have an opportunity to operate lathes, table saws, drill, welders, and grinders. That’s after you have a “woods” class where you get to use hand saws and hammers. If you are lucky, you get to use a power sander.
High school was your key to The American Dream and it is mandated by law the government provide you that key via the public school system . Even a C- student could graduate on Friday and, if they bothered to fill out applications before graduation, start their factory job the following Monday. Most medium sized cities, like Aurora and/or Kankakee Illinois had at least three major factories. Said factories planned expansions based on graduation. The good factories had unions so you had health insurance and a much higher wage. Shit factories paid minimum wage (or less via piecework), provided little to no health insurance and had extreme turnover.
In short, you just had to learn to read and write, do some basic math, have a work ethic, and be reasonably fit. After graduation you would be on the path to the American Dream.
Globalization has denied these people any chance at the American Dream. Elitists completely ignored the fact a not-insignificant portion of the population makes up this group. It is a large enough group to form a base for Trump and put him in the White House. All he had to do was lie and say he was bringing factories back.
Graduated, okay with school but needs “I made this” satisfaction
Before Apple came out with iMbecile Phones, this was a pretty large group. They enrolled in apprenticeship programs in “the trades” either while in high school or immediately after graduation. They become our electricians, plumbers, auto mechanics, and construction workers. Many upper class scoff at them, but they built the Sears Tower, your home, and fix your car when it’s broke.
Without illegal immigrants, these jobs do not get filled today. This is an almost non-existent sliver of graduating classes and you can mostly thank Apple, Facebook, and TikTok. Your offspring can’t look up from their phones long enough to cross the street, let alone have an actual life.
Graduated and took on massive debt for a high paying job that isn’t there
Academics will never tell you a college education isn’t worth it. The vast majority of people writing software today have no degree what-so-ever and it shows. “Priced right” software development is a major reason you have massive security breaches. Use of Agile is the second. When you don’t have a trained QA team performing end-to-end testing along with breach testing, you throw the public under the bus.
The reporters and business people saying H-1B workers are college educated have no concept of that which they speak. I’ve been in IT roughly 40 years now. Myself and many of my colleagues have worked with the H-1B workers provided by KForce, Tata (TCS), Collabera, et-al, not one has been skilled. Their resumes claim many things and even declare them experts on certain things, yet when you tell them to do something very basic, which you, who aren’t expert, know how to do, you see them cutting and pasting code from StackOverflow. Like students with AI generated term papers, they don’t even know enough to know just how bad what they cut and pasted is.
Companies have rigged the game to hire all-Indians-all-the-time. We will talk about this more in a bit, but this is the reason behind college educated workers not getting jobs. I don’t know conclusion the story Melba Lara teased reach because I didn’t catch it, but this is the God’s honest truth. Any opening requiring a college degree at a corporation of any size is deliberately being filled by visa workers instead of U.S. citizens despite the fact it is illegal. It is illegal to cap years of experience (age discrimination) yet you will see thousands of jobs wanting “3-5 years of experience.” Not a minimum of, they want only that.
Illegal to favor H-1B or any low wage visa worker
Here is the Google AI generated screen scraping
Both the Department of Labor and Department of Justice have been pathetic jokes when it comes to protection of U.S. citizens. That is true for every administration from Obama forward. Disney wholesale replaced its IT workers with Indians and nothing was done. Iger still hasn’t gone to prison for it and he should. Americans keep taking their kids to Disneyland and subscribing to the Disney channel when there should be a national boycott.
Every major corporation has installed a Vendor Management System and blatantly ignored the law.
My KForce experience
Many years ago I was working on the DIA project at Navistar. Our team was looking to bring in one more OpenVMS developer. Two of us were contractors. Given the project was nearing completion they wanted to get an employee in to learn the software and maintain it as more and more dealers were added.
Somehow all of the resumes had KForce letter head. I don’t remember if KForce was running the vendor management system then or just the lowest of the low submitting. Every resume appeared to be custom tailored to the job. Every candidate claimed at least ten years of experience on OpenVMS. Five in a row were spectacular failures. They didn’t just choke, it was obvious to everyone in the room they had never logged into OpenVMS.
After the fifth flame-out I wrote down five questions and emailed them to the team. I told them we needed to ask these five questions before we wasted everyone’s time. Oh, they were simple. For a seasoned developer they were insulting. Yes, my entire team thought I was being an unwashed rectal sphincter . . . until the next interview. Didn’t get one.
The first question
No need to bore you with the list, anyone reading this will understand the first one.
What’s your favorite editor on OpenVMS?
Many of you reading this are non-geeks, but most of you know the name of the word processor you use regularly, right? What? You don’t write actual documents? How about the browser you are using to read this blog? Your email client?
The point is, a software developer on a midrange system is going to spend 60-80% of their time using a text editor writing code. There were only a few editors available for the system unless you had a systems manager who custom built an OpenSource one on the box. We didn’t care which one they named, but a long string of resumes with a KForce banner couldn’t name even one. If you logged into OpenVMS even as a student you knew at least one editor. These candidates didn’t spend even an hour online reading anything about the platform.
Best attempt at faking through the interview answered “Oh, the default one.” Follow-up question “That’s fine. What is the default one?” “Oh, it’s the default one.”
Three questions in
I don’t know if it was a sudden budget change or what, but they didn’t hire the guy who obviously got irritated three questions in. Somehow the phone interview got scheduled while he was gassing up his car too. You could tell from the tone he was getting pissed.
I can tell you are getting upset and that is good. Any seasoned developer should with these questions. In our defense, everybody we interview in front of you didn’t get one unless we are being really generous. In that case the last candidate got half of one.
Me
Dude bust a gut laughing on the phone.
Difference between a developer interview and a seasoned developer interview
Seasoned developers sit in a room trading war stories.
Developers haven’t seen a war and most never went to college so an interviewer has to strain the bullshit.
In it you will find section 12.4 Grade 8 Bolt Syndrome.
What is amazing is that everything has come to pass.
Management viewed IT workers as grade 8 bolts. They were all the same so buy the cheapest ones. Anyone who has ever turned a wrench and bought cheap bolts knows that isn’t true. Just because it says it is grade 8 doesn’t mean it is. Just because they claim the H-1B candidate has a degree and is highly skilled doesn’t mean they are.
Vendor Management Systems were brought in, supposedly, to find the cheapest supplier. Consulting firms, which had traditionally staffed entire projects with a cohesive team were now forced to slam one or two bodies in with a bunch of people who had no idea what they were doing. Firms got away with off-shoring IT because they had seasoned professionals who knew the business writing specifications for the off-shore teams. Those people were forced out for cheaper labor yet it somehow wasn’t age discrimination even though most were over 50.
IT has basically ceased to exist in America today. Kids don’t enroll in college for it. If you look at any given corporation with a vendor management system the technical jobs are all held by visa workers. There is nobody left that actually knows the business.
This was long play organized crime
Rather than make you scroll back here is the pertinent portion of the Google AI generated response.
Since nobody should trust Google AI, you can also look things up with American Immigration Council, and the Department of Labor. The DOL link is hilarious because it contains the following:
In recent years, some employers have used the H-1B program to hire foreign workers despite American workers being qualified and available for work or even to replace American workers.
Initially it was watched
First – Candidate filtering
Vendor Management Systems operated in one of two ways initially.
Blocked all submissions above a posted billing rate/wage
Had a form letter sent via email to the vendor when candidates were submitted above the posted wage.
The form letter typically began
If you do not immediately remove candidate-name it will effect future business. You will be out of compliance and removed from the vendor list.
First part was definite. Second part I only heard from some.
Why?
The Vendor Management System would generate the reports needed to prove no qualified American was available for the job. You see the law doesn’t say you can pay as low a wage as you want. Market rate is determined by what the candidates ask for. Companies wanted cheap grade 8 bolts and were willing to commit any crime to get them.
Second – Firm filtering
Every Vendor Management System weeded American firms out based on “metrics.” In America we have widely known bottom feeders like KForce and Capgemini. We also have some lesser known ones like Zoom Technical. They will slam any biological entity in to any opening for a buck. Industry wide the category is called “Body Slammers.” Quality doesn’t matter, just fill it.
Naturally, bottom feeders provide Vendor Management Systems to corporations. This one and this one to identify two.
Good American consulting firms specialize. They don’t slam just any body into any opening. Companies needing embedded systems and/or medical device developers typically contact:
Each industry has a set of specialized firms. I’m most familiar with the embedded systems firms. The point here is they don’t work or fill forklift driver, personal assistant, HR, etc. roles. Being able to identify quality candidates in this niche requires a high level of industry knowledge and skill. The Indian firms will slam any body into any thing.
Besides “submissions within billing rate ranges” the biggest way they boot American firms from Vendor Management Systems is percentage of fills. Indian firms don’t specialize. If only 5% of your staffing needs are in the realm of embedded systems/medical devices the American firms specializing in that can have at most a 5% fill rate. The Indian firms will have a 50-70% fill rate, but every candidate will be shit.
Just because it says it is a grade 8 bolt doesn’t mean it is.
Third – Price Fixing
This is probably the most blatantly illegal part of the system. Initially firms just took the billing rates they were paying for consultants and wages they were paying employees, then slashed 20%. That’s what got entered into the Vendor Management System. Some MBAs were so blatantly criminal they demanded 20% per year reduction in wages and billing rates. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to realize that can’t happen.
I’ve worked at client sites where the Indian firms were stacking Indians 4+ deep in extended stay hotels, and not the nice ones either. Homewood Suites and below. The kind of places where you don’t have bedrooms or even a divider between the two beds.
What they do now is conduct a “salary survey” among the “approved vendors” having purged the actual American vendors from the system. Now it is all-Indian-all-the-time. Any American firm wanting to get on the list has to present low wage workers instead of skilled professionals. Americans can’t live 4+ deep in a low end extended stay hotel for years on end.
That’s not the American Dream nor is it any quality of life.
When I last spoke with someone from Black Diamond they told me they were only working 60 openings. Ordinarily, they are working at least 400 openings in September-October as medical device projects staff up. That many customers have installed vendor management systems and are now all-Indian-all-the-time bottom feeding on rates.
This impacts you
You may wish to believe this is just some tech worker thing but, low quality software is both contributing to identity theft and killing people.
My Baxter – Triple Crown Story
Some years ago I used to work for/with Triple Crown Consulting. They had previously worked with a new VP at Baxter in Round Lake, IL. That VP needed a medical device embedded systems consultant. I schlepped up there, saw the bulk of the team was off-shore labor then heard they wanted to use Agile and immediately did not try to get the job. I didn’t get up and walk out, which is probably what I should have done.
Heard back from the recruiter next day that they liked me. I told him the team was going to kill people wholesale and I wanted no part of it. He guilt-ed me into riding out the process because they wanted to get on the vendor list. After a month of the new VP telling the vendor management system to add Triple Crown Consulting to the vendor list so she could bring me in, the VMS operator (think it was KForce, but not certain) sent Triple Crown Consulting a letter/email stating
We aren’t looking to add any vendors to our system at this time. We are really happy with the service and quality of our current vendors . . .
Following week they got an email from the VP stating she hired someone through the system that had more experience and was half the billing rate.
Two weeks later I got a rash of emails and phone calls from “firms” I had never heard of who definitely didn’t have English as their primary or secondary language shopping the exact same contract around at half the billing rate.
Medical devices should never cause patient deaths. It is my firm belief the use of Agile and low wage labor is behind this problem. If you find yourself in the situation where you must use an infusion pump, you might want to demand a different brand.
My Life Insurance Story
My father passed away quite a few years ago. Mom always said he was an easy touch for life insurance salesmen. If they drove up the lane he pretty much bought a policy. Usually it was a $2500 – $5000 whole life paid up policy. That’s nothing today, but in the 1960s and minimum wage under $2/hr it was a lot of money.
You may not know it, but John Deere used to sell life insurance. Another thing you may not know is that life insurance companies get bought and sold on a regular basis. One such insurance company is Jackson National Life. It’s moved around a lot and I think that is where the John Deere policy ended up as well.
The lawyer my mother had handling dad’s death either couldn’t or wouldn’t track down all of these obscure policies. A few years later my mother passed away. We now had her obscure policies and the ones still unclaimed from dad. We got a better lawyer. She had someone working in her office that was equal parts blood hound and pit bull. She created a massive spreadsheet tracking the life of these policies and the companies who had them. I think it took her over a week doing just that. In the end we got told who to contact and how to reach them because we had to file each claim.
I won’t publicly name the owner, you can track that down for yourself. They started replacing all of their U.S. citizens with on-shore and off-shore Indians via Tata. All supposedly “experts” at what they do.
One of the tasks given to Tata to strut its stuff was to reduce storage and backup costs for the IBM mainframe.
U.S. citizens know that insurance is a heavily regulated industry. Each state has a Director of Insurance. There are rules. When you attend a legitimate college for an accredited Computer Information Systems degree, you learn you never “just delete” something. If you need to free up disk space, you move it to other media.
Define Forever
I published this book in 2019.
ISBN-13: 978-1-9397320-8-8
In it you will find an essay titled Define Forever. You, general readers, may find that a laughable title, but it has serious consequences in IT and government circles. Barring a flood or fire, paper has the longest data retention period as long as it is high quality and climate controlled. Microfiche will outlast most every reader ever made.
WORM (Write Once Read Many) media has various lifespans depending on quality. For you consumers CD and DVD are WORM. Standard quality is rated for 5-10 years. Archival quality claims up to 100 years . . . but nobody has been around long enough to verify that. You also have to keep a drive functioning that long. Properly stored magnetic tape last 10-50 years. Typical hard drives have 3-5 year MTB (Mean Time Between Failure.) Even SSD have a 5-7 year MTB. Some NAS drives last 15 years, others last 15 minutes.
When a U.S. citizen, educated at a U.S. school is told to reduce storage and backup costs for things which need to be stored a long period of time, we create a reference database with the key information, then off-load the, typically document files, to long term media that does not require power. Yes, some people still print Microfiche I’m told. Others write to archival DVD then again to high archival quality tape. You store it in two different climate controlled locations. The reference database identifies which media has the actual documents.
This isn’t rocket science. This is a one day class. To do it properly for multiple DASD (disk drives in IBM mainframe speak) it will probably require 6 months. Writing the database screens and other software could be done in a couple of weeks. It’s getting the drives to write the near permanent media and arranging for storage and finally actually writing the media that takes all the time. When you are done you now have disk drives that never need backing up again.
Tata just deleted it
That’s what Agile developers do. They have a “User Story” and it has to be done in a Sprint. Adding insult to injury most of them didn’t go to college for an actual IT degree no matter what the paperwork says. If they had, the first thing they would have done was ask legal to weigh in. MBAs talk out their ass; legal keeps you out of prison.
Further adding insult to injury, they either immediately recalled and recycled the backup media, or deleted it without telling anyone anything other than “we freed up N-drives of disk space” for a long enough period the backup media was naturally recycled.
What happened after that?
COVID
Those files that hadn’t been accessed in decades contained the policies issued from the 1950s though to something like 1980s. Most of the people were still alive. When COVID hit people were dying wholesale and policies couldn’t be verified. Obviously they didn’t bother comparing against the Master Death File, most likely because they didn’t have any policy information to use? Would be my guess anyway.
Summary
From the early 1980s to the mid 1990s, Americans really were climbing up the value chain. Then corporate greed became an epidemic. Gartner Group trumpeted Right Sizing immediately in front of Y2K where all of those developers who got laid off had to be hired back at much higher wages and nobody went to prison.
At that time, Vendor Management Systems started appearing.
From then on, the middle class was exterminated. Kids graduate from college with a degree for what once was a high paying job only to find every one of those jobs is now filled by a visa worker. Even doctors and nurses are facing this. Corporations believe Americans can exist well below a living wage and still have disposable income to purchase their products.
Stop taking your kids to Disney. Cancel your Disney subscriptions. If you put the company out of business that most publicly and blatantly wholesale replaced U.S. citizens with cheaper visa workers, others may take note.
Jeremy had never been a smart individual. If it hadn’t been for friends helping him and doing his homework, he would have never gotten through college. He had a long list of friends from college who were now successful and his only real asset was his contact list. Combined with…
Oh come on, somewhere in that list of “great book titles you wished you could write” you have something with equal shock value. I used to have a lot of them but I use so many different machines in my travels and work it is difficult to keep them all…
How did an imbecile like Trump become President? Featured image courtesy of The Daily Beast. Bush 43 When Bush 41 was President of the United States I and most of the Republicans I know didn’t think we could ever have a worse candidate presented by our beloved party. We were…
