Obama Chief Technology Officer Picks - Does Obama want to promote Outsourcing, H-1B & labor arbitrage of U.S. workers?

Obama's new CTO, or Chief Technology Officer is boiling down to two candidates. Guess what? Both of them are being said to promote offshore outsourcing, wage arbitrage and U.S. worker displacement through the use of guest worker Visas, the most notorious of these being H-1B.

Obama's choice Nears:

They are Padmasree Warrior, the chief technology officer of Silicon Valley networking giant Cisco Systems (CSCO), and Vivek Kundra, who holds the same title in the government of Washington, D.C., the sources say.

The two candidates offer President-elect Obama a clear choice of skills. Warrior, who previously was CTO at Motorola (MOT), represents hard-core technology expertise. Kundra, who was named to the D.C. post in 2007, has held similar government positions in the past and has a reputation for using technology to make government more open and inclusive

On one company, CISCO, I can verify the above claims. Cisco has said it wants to be a Chinese company and is one of the top promoters of H-1B guest worker Visas to labor arbitrage engineers.

Motorola also has literally outsourced thousands upon thousands of jobs. If you are an American, well most engineers don't even bother to try to get a job in Motorola. H-1B preferred.

I cannot find that much information on Kundra, but it appears he has a much smaller technology background, leveraging open source, web 2.0, more application centric, trying to increase technology use in government applications and I see a lot of mention to democratize the government through technology (which is an excellent idea). Yet, as a technology tzar, that opens up a whole other can of worms, national security and being aware of cyber security and more in depth electrical engineering, network engineering technologies.

He has degrees from the University of Maryland. Before he moved to D.C., he was assistant secretary of commerce and technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia, where he set up a Web site designed to maximize citizen involvement in the state's procurement decisions. In D.C., he runs his 600-person staff like a startup, experimenting in cloud computing, open source software, social networking, and other cutting-edge technologies. Kundra advises Obama's transition team on technology issues

Cisco is aware of networking security issues (but obviously could care less since they are wanting to be a Chinese company).

But couldn't one simply hire a few DARPA gals and get around the technology weaknesses here?

But to let the CTO of one of the worse, most notorious labor arbitraging companies influence policy? hmmmm, somehow I do not think the United States wants to outsource to China or insource from India our technology strategy.

One thing to contemplate is the stories from both Motorola and Cisco throwing away their R&D staff, their technical staff for cheaper labor and to offshore outsource, think about the dead bodies Warrior must have climbed over in the corporate ladder to get to CTO. They must be piled mile high and deep.

My vote right now is to try to stop Warrior from getting that position any way one can. The evidence is overwhelming she would promote H-1B, offshore outsourcing and even recommend offshore outsourcing our entire technology strategy to India.

Both corporate track records are positively horrific and yes a CTO would be involved in decisions to slash their workforce, have hires be H-1B preferred and offshore outsource entire projects.

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noo.

Any American programmers or engineers reading this, HANG ON TO YOUR JOB AS LONG AS YOU CAN. Work extra hours. Give 110%. Don't rub any managers the wrong way. Do MORE than the best you can to hold onto your job! Because the way its looking, if you slack off, and get fired (and ohh boy, are they just itchin for reasons to fire these days), you just might not be able to find another job in the tech industry. Those spots are about to be reserved for H1B VISA WORKERS -- for good.

Hope you love your new HealthCare McJobs, Skilled Techies of America!

I'm lucky

They need me to balance out- many workers at my company are H-1bs though for good reason, it's a small consulting company that specializes in internationalization. I can only think of three workers here who are English-only speakers- but that should be EXPECTED, due to the work we do.

I think that's the reason why, when my contract dried up, I got put on a project to revamp their HR databases.....

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Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.