> Visa Status: Must be US Citizen (no Green Cards or H1b visa candidates will be accepted)
Given the recent SpaceX situation[1] about asylees, is this legal? Can MGM claim national security implications more than SpaceX can? And SpaceX even allowed permanent residents.
USCIS says:
> Employers cannot discriminate when hiring, firing, or recruiting because of someone’s citizenship, immigration status or type of employment authorization. U.S. citizens, noncitizen nationals, asylees, refugees, and recent permanent residents are protected from this type of discrimination.
It is perfectly legal to disallow Visa-requiring individuals. I don't believe it is legal to disallow permanent residents as they have the same employment rights as citizens.
That being said, they could just omit the line and discriminate silently. The law doesn't guarantee you a job either so, unless you can undeniably prove you are the best for the job, they'd probably be safe (legally). This is what African-Americans (most prominently, but other groups as well) with obvious nomenclature have dealt with for years.
They're looking for contractors, there are plenty of H1B folks who are sponsored by agencies that contract them out to various companies. The normal term used in job postings is "no visa sponsorship".
There are also cases where government regulations prohibit hiring non-citizens. Given that they're offering $100/hr when they're losing $8m/day, I expect that MGM would LOVE to hire anyone willing to work for below market rates. If a recruiter contacted me, I'd be telling them to triple the rate and then we can start a conversation. I'm sure their attorneys make $300/hr on the low end.
Federal law allows discrimination to deal with other laws, agency rules or executive orders. The Nevada gaming commission is allowed to mandate such a rule and MGM is allowed to comply with it. I don't know if that's the source of the rule, but if so it would be legal
I was thinking the same thing. All I could find via a quick google is:
https://www.leg.state.nv.us/NRS/NRS-463.html
It looks like members of the gaming control board and gaming commission must be citizens. But it seems non-citizens are ok in other situations, e.g.:
2. A county shall not deny a gaming license, finding of suitability or approval to a person solely because the person is not a citizen of the United States.
Not wanting H1b is fine and legal, because you can’t simply hire them. You need to file paperwork go prove that you can’t find the equivalent from local workforce. GC is weird, if they needed security clearance, but security clearance takes more than 3 weeks.
Some positions only require a public trust background investigation, which is technically not a security clearance but people do call it so. You do need to be a "US person", which non-immigrants with work authorization are.
All the more reason why this makes no sense, no? It should be as simple as handing the money over to an entity, they get the job done, and you both move on. No healthcare considerations, or sponsoring of visas, or anything else that a standard employer must do to an employee.
Genuinely curious:
* Why the hard deadline of Oct 15?
* Why only 1x headcount?
* Why would you be putting a complete unknown into such a high profile position?
* This was posted today. How much hiring / background check diligence can you do if the start date is also today?
* What if the person you hired was another hacker? It's not like you've got time to check their references...
This seems like the kind of thing where you hire a crack team of crisis experts, and pay $5000/hr or whatever it is until it's fixed. This doesn't seem like the right time to start hiring the first rando that walks through the front door...
Las Vegas Formula 1 Grand Prix starts Nov 16. I don't know why Oct 15 is the hard deadline, but they absolutely want to be up and running in time for the prix.
No idea on the others. The whole thing looks like it's being managed very poorly. Even the hackers spoke up about how bad MGM was handling the situation and how it was causing the media to reflect poorly on the hackers, lol.
That makes sense. I feel like a federal government policy making it illegal to pay a ransom would go a long way towards making this type of thing less profitable.
If there was any wonder how they got an infrastructure that was so vulnerable and delicate as to be taken out the first time... well, this might explain it.
What do they think they're going to get this time?
Or is this just for the temporary "restore some ops and run on duct tape and prayer" bit. While the real design is carefully considered, and elegantly implemented by a team of relaxed, properly vetted, well motivated professionals who appreciate the gravity of their work and the challenges of the environment that work is expected to face.
Guys, you are allowed to negotiate and ask for more money.
This is supposed to be a business centric forum and you all are taking the list offer at face value!
For a flexible contractor with the experience and a desire to make hay from a desperate client it should be a decent gig. The sort of gigs old timers talk about when reflecting on y2k preparation.
An offer that starts out with a 70-hour workweek and zero days off is not something I'd even consider negotiating further. If they want 7x10 coverage, that's at least a 2-person rotation schedule. The fact that they're only willing to shell out for one person tells me that they're not serious about their IT administration, and therefore not an employer I'd want to work for.
Honestly given the circumstances (emergency short term contract to get them back up) the 10/7 schedule doesn’t bother me that much. It’s also not clear to me that they’re only looking for one person.
The pay though… I don’t know what Sys Admins make but that seems absurdly low for what they want. 100-110/ hr seems like it would be a decent long term rate for the skill set, not the “all hands on deck super overtime emergency” one.
If it was my skillset I’d probably reach out to see if they were willing to move a lot on the rate and pass if they weren’t
My first thought for a counter is $1,000 an hour, fully comped room, food, and beverage in their very best high roller gambling addict tier accommodations. I mean the kind that comes with a butler.
And then some residual fully comped stay credits for use after the job is done.
100 dollars an hour seems like roughly the perfect amount of money to get spammed by unqualified people but get basically no one qualified... I mean maybe people already in Vegas who aren't working it makes sense? If they were paying flights/hotels/food maybe? But I assume they'd mention it if they were.
This just seems very sketch overall. The hourly pay is different in the 2 places referenced, the “dates of service” to stand up an enterprise level security infrastructure is 3 weeks, bad grammar…would take this as phishing if it came through an inbox.
They are in luck - the person they are looking for is already working for their company. I mean, whoever determined that the job can be done in exactly 70 hours must know the system inside out and it's only a matter of putting in the work.
Honestly, $1K/h is a rounding error compared to how much they will lose otherwise. It's that instance where the ad should say "money is no object, we want the best, name your price".
My guess is the ideal candidate is mid 20s and recently left the armed forces in an IT role so they're used to making peanuts for this kind of thing, and hey, a month in Vegas sounds fun. Plus they have a recent security clearance so you can kinda skip the background check.
As per a different post, archeologists are only just discovering that tools thought to be made by humans a few thousand years ago were in fact built by monkeys
The ad says 10 hours a day, 7 days a week. It's a 1099 contracting position so there are no labor laws around maximum hours per week (I'm not sure those exist even for full-time employment positions, anyway).
They do exist for full time positions, assuming the position is less than ~$110k/year and does not pass exempt employee test. But it’s not maximum hours, it is just maximum 40 hours before the payrate has to be 1.5x the hourly rate.
I am wondering how they will avoid classifying this person as an employee when they are dictating work hours.
I think you are confusing “citizen” with “legal resident”. It’s illegal to hire someone (in the US) who is not legally able to reside there but there are many options (citizen, permanent resident, i94 visa, federally recognized tribes, refugee visa, and a bunch more)
Casinos are notorious employers when it comes to IT. Imagine a less competent Amazon and you're getting close. IT is an afterthought. IT staff work in the casino, but they work underground. There are secret doors that lead to poorly arranged underground data centers and cramped cubicle farms.
So, like every other business that's not tech itself? I remember visiting one of the world's biggest advertising companies, prime NYC real estate with a vast marble-and-brass foyer as an additional flex ... then a door leading down to the dim dark rat-infested basement where the IT folks were. The "creatives" were many floors up, with their cafes and lounge areas and foosball tables like engineers at a FAANG. I saw lesser versions of this in finance, retail, and many other industries plus academia. I can well believe casinos are worse than most, but not necessarily in terms of physical accommodation.
Hackers and ransomware folks are accepted predators. You've just got to build assuming they exist. It's a pity, and things were much better for just trying out stuff when it wasn't so sophisticated, but now every open port physical or virtual is a risk factor.
Can't stand these hackers, but what are you gonna do? If the government can track and incarcerate that's great, but they can't do that for everything. Hopefully, we'll get up to a state where only the most sophisticated can operate and then it becomes worth it economically for the US Gov to capture them.
Though one wonders if there is a threshold economic cost where additional security would be so costly over the economy and where the damage is so large that the US Gov would just choose to terminate other state actors. Very sci-fi.
This is such a bad deal that I can't see how this can turn good.... as others pointed out... you really have to pay the people, at least 250/h and room and then people might show up.
Probably this is indicative of how this problem came to first place...
"The MGM Grand is looking to hire a Red Hat Linux System Admin willing to work 10 hours per day 7 days a week to completely rebuild its IT environment from the ground up and get the slot machines working again."
I was thinking it sounds way below average, especially for someone who just lost $8m/day in a cyber attack. I would expect them to hire quite a bit more than just one.
That doesn't scale linearly unless the employer is exploitative. An employee on a 40-hour contract would receive 150% for all hours above 40/week. So $4k4 for 40 hours would be $9k4 for 70 hours.
"We would like you to fix our money-printing machine and we would like you to do it alone, on the cheap, with no days off, while completely burnt out".
Yeah, good luck not getting hacked again. This entire team of upward failures they call "management" needs to be fired immediately.
I can't comprehend it, even if the data was already public, why not pay to unlock everything? How will they get their DBs back? Brute force? Sunk cost.
Incentives don’t align. The casino needs speed, but the slower the contractor is the more they get paid. You could say all employment is like this but would anyone take a $100/h
contract for just 7 days? Then look for another job? Might as well drag it out for a month or two.
TBH, Absolutely NO. BIG NO NO.
Contract worker mean no 401K, and you need to bare the risk of getting fired,
when either you get in trouble (like another attack), or when they finished rebuild their system.
“Must be US citizen” - huh, is this some weird casino-related regulatory thing? I wouldn’t have thought it generally made much difference vs permanent residents.
Migrations are the best kind of work in the sysadmin space. It's where you get to do actual engineering work instead of doing boring maintenance tasks.
I'd do it, but not for the money they are offering unless they'd fully pay for hotel and food.
Arganteal seeks an onsite Red Hat Linux System Admin "RHEL SysAdmin" in Las Vegas, Nevada for immediate work starting 9-21-2023. This role will be helping the MGM Grand Casino to build its net new IT environment after the recent ransomware hack.
Candidates must be willing to work everyday until the new IT environment is fully stood up.
We are open to people who will only work a grand total of 7 days!
Higher Pay for those willing to stick it out until the job is done!
Expected Dates of Service 9-21-2023 through 10-15-2023
Hourly Rate: $100.00 per on 1099
Location: Onsite at MGM HQ in Las Vegas (absolutely no remote work)
Visa Status: Must be US Citizen (no Green Cards or H1b visa candidates will be accepted)
$100/hr! BWAHAHAHA. I clicked onto the story thinking "I bet they're willing to back up the truck for this!"
Nope; they're willing to pay you an entire black chip every hour (pre-tax). Get bent.
> no Green Cards or H1b visa candidates will be accepted
This (specifically blocking Green Card holders) may also be illegal, absent a bonafide reason (which I can't readily think of, but I'm sure the EEOC will be happy to inquire about).
Yeah, that's laughable. If they want seriously qualified people to drop everything, go to Vegas and work for over three weeks straight with no days off basically cleaning up someone else's incompetent clusterfuck, the offer's gonna need to be a lot better than that...
Throw in a suite (not a room, a suite) in the hotel, and unlimited room service food, and that might start to be a little attractive. Still a no for me personally, but like, I'd start to tingle a bit. 12-16 hrs a day @ $100 for a few weeks is... a decent chunk to someone without Bay Area comp.
They need to up that by at least 4x lol that's wild. I charged 350 as a casual security contractor and I was working a couple days a week in a low pressure environment.
I wouldn't touch this shitshow for less than $500 an hour personally (plus expenses obviously). Or a really sick perk like free high status room/board for life lol
Hourly Rate: $100.00 per on 1099
...
Higher Pay for those willing to stick it out until the job is done!
...
Working Hours: Expect to work 10 hours per day 7 days a week
I charged $150/hr in 2006 for basic sysadmin consulting work.
There are PC repair shops that charge more than $100/hr.
Cheap, fast, high quality - pick two. If I was the hiring manager I would just go with a prominent firm. Would satisfy Wall Street and move the issue to them, and the liability. $1000 an hour, who cares. You took billions in stock losses already.
How unlikely is it that some agency already has people in place for these types of jobs, only to have that person plant an inconspicuous backdoor that can be resurfaced several years later. I mean, if they're giving him access to the entire IT infrastructure, I'm sure it can be done in a way where it can't be pinned back.
Given the recent SpaceX situation[1] about asylees, is this legal? Can MGM claim national security implications more than SpaceX can? And SpaceX even allowed permanent residents.
USCIS says:
> Employers cannot discriminate when hiring, firing, or recruiting because of someone’s citizenship, immigration status or type of employment authorization. U.S. citizens, noncitizen nationals, asylees, refugees, and recent permanent residents are protected from this type of discrimination.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-space...