Slashdot Mirror
Large Corporations Displacing Aging IT Workers With H-1B Visa Workers
New submitter genericmk writes "NPR is running an interesting story about the unfortunate status of the aging programmers in the IT industry. Older IT workers are opposing the H-1B visa overhaul. Large corporations want more visa, they claim, because of a shortage of IT talent. However, these companies are actively avoiding older, more experienced workers, and are bringing in large volumes of foreign staff. The younger, foreign workers are often easier to control, and they demand lower wages; indentured servitude is replacing higher cost labor."
importing docile labor, the american way !
You have to be able to afford pricey CEO's, CTO's, and any of the C's. To do this you have to compensate by replacing a higher paid employee that know what he is doing with one that half ass knows what he is doing but makes the books like nicer. You can see here (http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/05/03/475952/ceo-pay-faster-worker-pay/?mobile=nc) that companies have spiraled out of control. Heck look at AIG, General motors bonuses paid out when we the tax payers were paying their salaries.
When all else fails, hire me!
"Large corporations want more visa, they claim, because of a shortage of dirt cheap IT talent"
There, ftfy
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Really...
And I really thought I'd be in management by now. But I really hate meetings.
What, you thought only the manufacturing base could outsource? Think again.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Out with off-shoring, in with on-shoring.
And they think the same thing is true of programmers.
Is programming talent perishable? I think so -- at least for many programmers. Maybe it's just me.
Anyone else feel as though they aren't as mentally quick as they used to be?
And does it color your perception of other older programmers?
Indentured servitude is a form of debt bondage, with no wages; it has nothing to do with choosing to work for lower than X wages and less control. Such hysterics don't speak well of /..
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
If they allowed H1B visa holders to find other jobs, then this wouldn't be nearly as much of a problem, because employers wouldn't be able to force them into indentured servitude. If they were able to find other jobs, their salaries would rise to the level of their ability.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
This is capitalism in action folks. Nothing to see here, move along.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
I was in IT a bit over a decade ago. This kind of thing was prevalent back then. I don't find it surprising at all.
I don't respond to AC's.
typical NPR. last millennium story.
news at 11 ... seriously?
I had worked for a major software company that was not Microsoft but worked in the virtualization area.
Over the last few years saw anybody over 50 terminated and then subsequently replaced with immigrant workers for lower wages. The workers terminated had alot of experience and could do the job more correctly and faster than staff subsequently hired -- suspect longer vacation time and higher wages made them targets for termination.
This has happened consistently over 3 years.
This is wrong.
and then went back to India where they had crazy buying power with their US dollars.
Captcha: Wiretaps (echelon is that you?)
It's just a race to the bottom in terms of dollar amount spent on manpower. It's basically outsourcing without having the workforce overseas.
If computers were people, I'd be a misanthrope.
This is the world we live in. We eat our own.
the bonus hunters are paid for this and obviously getting away with it. It seems that cheaper less skilled labour is good enough.
It is ALL US workers.
I have personally seen a downsize where ALL US workers were let go and ALL of the H1-Bs were retained.
This is not a joke or a tall tail.
And Note that US workers were at or even better in the skills that were retained.
I've been observing a downward spiral in quality of web applications, sites and services for some years now. Old school programmers/developers wouldn't make some of the bone-headed mistakes I keep encountering. How can we suddenly have so many incompetant people doing this work? Easy - they know how to write code, but do not have the wisdom to avoid drop-through logic, non-intuitive interfaces, extremely fragile code, etc.
Gotta be a mill somewhere, cranking out code monkeys who are paid by the deadline, not but the quality of their work.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
This is an older video, but it shows just how companies manage to avoid hiring qualified Americans just to flood the market with cheap H1B laborers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCbFEgFajGU
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
being a 50+ year-old IT worker...
Karma: Bad
Crap article which boils down to the same old "he said, she said" without adding anything new to the debate.
I did find the "Enterprise Architect" who commented first at NPR to be funny; Amazon, Google, et. al. don't want IT personnel, they want computer scientists.
M$ and others have been doing this for years. Of course, the Federal Government keeps bringing them in. Once they get a Green Card they get fired and another group is brought in. This has been standard operating practices for years. Of course these people work for sub wages when waiting for their Green Card. This is the economics of the IT industry and has been for years.
Time for a union in IT to stop this BS and more
As in, cost to much to pay older workers. Why? Because with corporations, greed matters I mean, the bottom line matters. Why should they pay people $60k a year when they can outsource it/hire cheaper foreigners in the states for $30k a year?
Corporate Greed, giving your job to someone else for cheaper.
Be seeing you...
I was thinking the relevance of experience in technical fields decays over time, like a radioactive half life.
I worked with a guy that tested software for missiles in the 60's... and didn't know you could use modifier keys (shift, ctrl...) with mouse clicks.
Seriously. Any administration who promises to deal with unemployment, and yet allows this to happen, is just incredibly misguided.
We have enough problems with unskilled citizens unable to get jobs, let alone trucking in some guest workers to now make the skilled citizen IT workers unemployable.
Is there any other business with such an age bias, beyond sports and teen pop idols. You don't see lawyers or accountants being treated like this, nor architects or mechanical engineers. There is no reason whatsoever for a youth culture in IT and programming, experience is more valuable than anything else in this business, moreso than most other businesses.
... the Workers' Paradise.
How many stories like this must happen before workers are compelled to protect themselves?
I thought slavery had been abolished? Hardly...
we need to bring apprenticeships back into the mainstream.
The worker in question here had graduated less than a year ago after a career change. You'll be very pressed to find a H1-B worker who has less than a year work experience.
Also, while I don't dispute that the mean wage for programmers in the US has stagnated, so have a lot of other job sectors. It's the economy, stupid! And the mean wage is a terrible thing to measure here. It could in fact mean that the people that are doing H1-B complicated level work are getting paid twice as much, but also there's a massive increase in less well paid junior positions (which is very likely - we need a whole lot more day-to-day programmers than we did in 2001)
Every person and companies want loyalty. With heavy rotations, and people getting bored at 1 or 2 years of working, H1B proposes workers attached to companies (or the immediate leave of the country). Would it be different if instead of having people with H1B, people would directly get a greencard? Particularly if those are US university graduates?
The cost of living in many countries aren't as high as in the states. Like in the Philippines, most things cost about 3x less except for vehicles and electronics. The cost of rent per month can be much less than $200USD per month but the standard of living is also lower such as not having a hot shower but a bucket of water, rats etc.. The pay there even if you have a college degree can be only twice as much as minimum wage in the US if you're lucky. When they get hired by countries like the US, it helps them live a better life but at the same time it comes at the cost of Americans not having as many job opportunities. The question is, are Americans willing to lower its cost of living in order to compensate for the jobs being outsourced? Would Americans be OK to work for $4/hr. without a college degree and $16/hr with one? In other words, would Americans really be OK to have their taxes increased and their wages decreased, but the cost of most things would be reduced by about 3-4x? I think the answer is no because there's no way to really earn a retirement or go places but at the same time there's no way for Americans to survive with such high standards of living. Corporations need to compete to stay in business, and the people need to buy the lowest costing items to survive. It's always a lose-lose situation unless there's a country rich enough to use the US as its source of outsourcing. Someone always has to be at the bottom and the US is turning belly up fairly quickly.
job based health care hurts having older people work for companies.
What the ... ??? "No, I won't take $100 an hour. I insist of $20 at the most".
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
That and using temp workers calling them contract but not paying contract wages.
Thus avoiding paying for benefits and vacations.
It's like the trucking industry "driver shortage" an illusion promoted around a business model that uses up (abuses) young drivers.
Rick B.
Sometimes I am tempted to think that employers are secretly working on repealing the thirteenth amendment.
Disclaimer: this post was written after the consumption of about 1.2 litres of strong cider and should be take with a few grains of salt (and s shot of Tequila).
This is the plan for companies like Urban Airship! The try and hide it through the use of a Minister of culture.
Sounded fairly spot-on, this whole H1-B mess is a tricky wicket but in the end it's a shit deal for everyone. Interesting to know that my title earns the same as it did 15 years ago in whole numbers, not adjusted for inflation or anything, I knew this already but didn't think about it or what that actually means until I heard the story on the radio today. Talk about stagnating, I'd almost say worse from the stories you hear about the mid-late 90's. Never attributed this to the H1-B crap but who knows. On the bright side the managerial dickwads doing this are the types I wouldn't want to work for anyways so I guess I can't feel bad about competing with what is literally indentured servitude. Though I am ashamed my country is both partaking in it, as well as the fact that they're doing it simply at the whims of corporate execs rather than looking at real numbers of unemployed members in the tech industry.
So can I make money hiring underemployed older IT workers and marketing their labor for top dollar?
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
Every person and companies want loyalty. With heavy rotations, and people getting bored at 1 or 2 years of working, H1B proposes workers attached to companies (or the immediate leave of the country).
Would it be different if instead of having people with H1B, people would directly get a greencard? Particularly if those are US university graduates?
What on earth... "No, I won't take $100 an hour. I insist on $20, if not less".
.. An unnamed woman is documented as asking if the listeners would like a cup of coffee. Maybe the editor of the transcript could have dropped that comment out.
...
And the article itself is a transcript.
BTW, yes please, maybe with a croissant or danish
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
I picked a bad time to get old!
I'm luckier than some because I re-entered IT in '95 and didn't get an AA degree until 2002, so on paper it looks like I'm about 35
-I'm just sayin'
... peaks as the indentured foreign workers bolster their incomes by selling company information. A few well publicize cases will set things right.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Very little factual information. While this COULD be true, I just saw one guy complaining combined with an interesting statistic that average wages for programmers are still below $40 an hour. That's a joke, right? That's six figures a year. Sure, everyone would want more, but it's a perfectly reasonable salary as is.
workers of the world unite -you have nothing to lose but your wages!
-I'm just saying
Aren't the corporations mandated to do this?
I'm irreplaceable!
Who writes these stupid summaries? I've never demanded a lower wage.
All kidding aside, this is the problem - a subtlety like that would not happen with an English speaker;
I can't tell you how (harmlessly) nuts stuff like that makes me when I read it.
And yes, U.S. business are displacing U.S. workers with cheap, foreign labor. Not just the older
professionals, young ones as well. The H-1B visa program has no merit and should go away.
But we have clowns like Gates et. al., who don't to be held accountable to the very populace that
put them where they are today. Ingrates. They're not even secretive about it any more. Very sad.
The U.S. was a place to look up to. Now, China is looking like they're going to push the U.S. aside. Thanks Nixon.
CAPTCHA = dedicate === uncanny how this thing comes up with words...
You get what you pay for. Or in this case, you get less than you pay for. Sorry, but if these H-1B workers would be any good, they'd be programming rockstars in their own countries (China/India/etc) instead of seeking suckers in the US.
I have a blog on the subject, if anyone cares:
It's Time To Send the H-1Bs Home.
Microsoft leads to Bluescreen; Bluescreen leads to downtime; downtime leads to suffering.
Unfortunately this is the case in a number of industries. Academia is one.
By passing the reforms the big contributors want. I long for the days when our politicians represented the people and not the big business interests.
Since when is "public safety" the root password to the Constitution?
for the exact position they will be filling, so they don't have to spend a cent on job training. That plus the usual greed, where they offer bachelors degree salaries while demanding doctoral-level work. From a friend:
"60+ years ago, the American middle class emerged because of the availability of non-skilled jobs paying living wages. Non-skilled: think about that word. It doesn't mean that the job required no skill; it merely meant that the company was willing to pay to completely train the employee as long as the employee was willing to show up.
Non-skilled jobs are gone. And by this, what is meant is that companies are no longer willing to provide much training to their employees. Employees, rather, are required to get extensive, detailed training that matches the increasingly individualized software/hardware packages used to perform a given job before they show up for the interview.
Companies like Microsoft are especially egregious in this regard. The claim is made regularly that we need to open up more H1B visas to allow the glut of better trained Indian workers to fill jobs here for which there just aren't enough "trained" employees. Microsoft won't pay to train those employees themselves, because the fear is once they do, the employee will then leave the job and get a higher wage elsewhere."
What did you thing it was about? A race to the top?
It is illegal to pay a H1B worker less than the prevailing rate.
There might be a case for saying Aging IT Workers are being displaced With H-1B Visa Workers
But this article does not make that case. Basically it has a couple of quotes from an anti H-1 lobbyist, a couple of quotes from a HR manager and a couple of quotes from a 60 yr old WHO HAS NEVER ACTUALLY WORKED AS A PROGRAMMER and is looking to break into the field.
There several better, more insightful articles on the effect of H-1s on the workforce. This article can just be skipped.
Indentured servitude? Really? I can see how this discussion will be productive.
Of course not everybody older is actually better. Older folks that have refused to learn will be on par or worse than the younger people. But older folks that have kept up are invaluable. True, young programmers can generate a lot more lines of code for the same price, but once you take quality into account and things like design and architecture, most code by young programmers sucks badly. Not their fault, but quite a bit of experience is required for good coding. Unfortunately, incompetent management cannot understand that (and most management is incompetent with regard to IT). What would be needed is something that other engineering disciplines have mastered: Qualification levels, and required minimum qualification levels of personnel used to protect you from becoming liable for software failures. While this may sound old-school, there really seems to be no other way. If electricians were the mixed bag that "programmers" are, houses would burn down all the time and many people would die from electrocution.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The irony is that Infosys didn't even have the staff to replace us until a week or more after we left.
And they are basically training their guys in SAP at the former companies expense.
Anyone here on H-1B should be allowed to seek any job anywhere for the duration of their H-1B stay. They just need to negotiate with the new employer during the 3 year visa term to provide pro-rated compensation to the company that pre-paid to put the H-1B through. That eliminates the indentured servitude and opens the free market to the technical talent, as it should be.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
If anything, they are willing to work for less to have a job with wages.
As an underpaid non-American Gen. Y IT worker, we are just absolutely fucked. We have very little opportunity and no resources to fall back on. No newish car to sell or house to downsize. Older American IT workers can demand more money because they have more options. So call corporations unpatriotic bastards all you want, they are, but don't act like you're not massively better off.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
It's been happening to some B.C. mines here too. http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/02/03/hd-mining-reject-experience-miners-unions_n_2612445.html
Basically they ship in foreign workers for cheap and ignore the resumes of more experienced Canadian workers. They do this by telling the government that they can't find anyone experienced enough. Luckily it's been exposed by the union up here.
The difference though is that the mining company wants to run things their way; including lack of safety protocol and environmental protection. This is entirely possible when the miners are all foreign and sequestered away from the rest of the population.
The parallel to IT is that once the projects are 'done', the foreign workers are shipped home and a total mess is left for the remaining people (i.e. YOU) to clean up. It's extremely frustrating, to the point that I'm glad I will be retiring soon. The only jobs that will be left will be cleaning up after cheap amateurs.
Very often the starting salary of visa worker is the same as "regular" worker. The main difference is that the visa worker has significantly more difficulties to find another job once in the country. He is also always at risk of having to leave the country if he get fired. It is not necessary to get people cheap, inflation will take care of that for you.
Visa is a nice legal trap for foreign employees. When you have a job you are almost like a normal citizen, the day you are out of work you quickly realise that it is were you are born that matters, not how much taxes you paid.
test
Government Displacing Aging IT Workers With H-1B Visa Workers
I Googled a bunch of old co-wokers, bosses, and managers that I've worked with in the past. All were in the IT field (as was I) when I worked with them. Out of about 20 people I couldn't find a single one that was still in the industry. Most, like myself, had moved on to other fields like finance, while some were engaged in hobby-type careers doing stuff they enjoyed.
In other words, fuck you IT industry.
IT staff
Support Staff
Customer Service
Engineers
Even some service industry jobs like hotel staff
All being H1-B'ed and frequently subsidized at the taxpayer's expense.
This country's government has no sense of how to do anything but keep
itself in power and fully funded. As long as the corporates support them
financially and politically, expect more of the same legislation that has brought
us to this point.
Why can't we go back to using jumpers to configure slot adapter cards? Why? I say!
The experienced IT workforce needs to unilaterally pull the plug on the internal systems they've implemented over the years for these corporations. Then walkout and leave the low-wage foreign labour to attempt and fail miserably to get those systems back on-line. if the wages of the H1-Bs matched the true market rate most people would not be as concerned apart from the obvious ageism prevalent within corporations about their IT staff. Funny nobody seems to want to replace the 70 year old attorneys and 90 year old senile university professors, much less the aged politicians. Imagine a politician over 35 years old being elected to office...the scandal would ruin the nation. ;)
If "they" are successful in blocking or reducing the H-1Bs, the companies ship the whole programming operation over seas raterh than bring the outsiders in.
Sad, I see no solution.
this has nothing to do lack of available workers but everything to do with trying to cram a networking / programming / project manager / client support role into a single job for 30k / year
Those guys must be journalists or something.
Those NPR guys must be journalists or something.
As an underpaid 3rd-world Gen. Y IT worker, we are just absolutely fucked. We have no options, no car or house that can be downsized. We might never have these things. Older American IT workers can demand more money because they have more options, the cost of living is not always less for the outsourced labor. So call companies that outsource unpatriotic bastards, they are, but don't act like you're not lounging in the lap of luxury compared to the foreign workers.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Age discrimination is illegal. You can read the law yourself, where it specifically states:
It shall be unlawful for an employer-
(1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual or otherwise discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s age;
(2) to limit, segregate, or classify his employees in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual’s age; or
(3) to reduce the wage rate of any employee in order to comply with this chapter.
It's very clear language, and there's no legitimate reason that the companies who are doing this should not be in court right now about it.
I am officially gone from
The Maximum Wage exactly isn't a law, like the Minimum Wage. It's just a gentlemen's agreement, that whenever supply and demand drive wages for something out of line with cultural expectations, we can just change the laws (H1-B) or ignore them (illegal immigrants).
We need to scrap (or at least greatly reduce) the whole H1-B visa program. Corporations are using it to exploit foreign workers and keep local wages artificially low. When is Congress going to step up and do something for the American workforce?
Oh, yeah, that's right. It's the same corporations that fund their election and re-election campaigns that are committing the abuse.
The easiest way to shut up anyone claiming that H1-Bs are about "shortages" is to argue that they don't go far enough. It shouldn't be required that people have a sponsoring company. Anyone with a degree from a reputable institution and some proof of experience should get a work visa, and then have the same market freedoms as the rest of us, with the salary bargaining power that goes with it.
And if they can't find an adequate job, or aren't doing what they claimed they came here for, just kick them out, easy peasy.
If it can be proven, this is breaking the lae in two ways. First, it's illegal age discrimination. Second, it's immigration fraud.
You get what you pay for. 'nuff said.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
There is no shortage of IT talent- just a shortage of cheap IT talent
Maybe they should start displacing their crappy HR people that do such a piss poor job of filtering the resumes.
Firing your most skilled employees in a highly specialized and difficult field is beyond stupidity. This will end badly for them. Fortunately for the rest of us this means that there will be some talent freed up. So snatch them up while you can.
"It is better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees." - Albert Camus
See, we want programmers for around $40K, and, damn it, they are asking for more than that! Don't they realize that we consider them a trade now? So what if they went to university for four years to be a Computer Scientist or Software Engineer. We want what we want for the price we want. That's why we want to business school, and slept through all those classes! And what a fine job we have done piloting the US economy! Yes sir, no bailouts or scandals anywhere on the horizon!
New rule: companies may no longer hold a green card over a candidate in an effort to lower their salaries. Immigrants are free to compete with natives, but only on a level playing field. None of this "we'll sponsor you if you act like a good slave for wages 50% of the natives."
I am John Hurt.
Limited supply of skilled workers with bargaining power bad.
I've seen this a few places. Though I where I live it seems like there really is a serious shortage of C#/SQL/ASP.Net developers. Look at the job boards of any major city and those are some of the most proliferated spots that recruiters just cannot seem to fill fast enough (or at all) these days.
So you have probably a few things at play here; the younger generation in the USA not learning the languages/skills/whatever that the market is currently demanding, then you have the older US workers with more experience requesting competitive salaries, as they should be mind you, for qualified top level engineering talent can be scarce, but the bean counters looking at the balance sheets have realized that every time they raise the H1-B cap that is more foreign talent they can hire at a minimum for reasons the summary mentioned. (it's not really a fucking cap if they keep raising it)
Is anybody surprised by this? Dickhole politicians pass laws that benefit their dickhole benefactors.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
I work for a large company that hires based on talent. We can't get enough workers, H-1B or not. We don't discriminate based on age or anything else, just skill. The stories in my area are the same for all companies: we can't get enough skilled programmers.
This headline will just serve as an excuse for people to post rants about how their talent is being overlooked because of the foreigners invading our shores while ignoring the fact that many people who try to work as programmers are just terrible (see: fizzbuzz).
I worked for a small manufacturing company that was acquired by a much larger Fortune 500 multi-national (actually, it was acquired by a larger company and that company was in turn acquired by this F500 corporation).
Right as we were purchased the F500 company hired a new CIO - they'd basically been without a formal C-level IT executive for several months. What was the first thing he did? Outsource the IT help desk. Within 6 weeks of his hire date he had shuttered the entire Austin, TX-based North American help desk in favor of Wipro. Shortly thereafter application support went offshore to Satyam (who some may recall later got embroiled in a major CEO-led accounting scandal).
The company at the same time was also driving its FTEs in IT to telecommute, proclaiming it saved the company money when users telecommuted. When I first went into the IT office building in Silicon Valley most of the people there were FT employees (and, not to be racist but more as a point of contrast, mostly white). About 8 months later when I went down there for a meeting - like everyone else in IT I was by then working 99% of the time from home - the IT building could have passed for a call center in Bangalore. Instead of saving money as they proclaimed they were filling it up with offshore programmers, admins, architects etc. working onshore for different Stateside projects.
It's not surprising in the least that US corporations want to bring in folks they can pay a fraction of the salary and not worry about complaints because the workers know if they rock the boat they'll just get their visa withdrawn.
However, the sadder thing is that, the H1B idiots are frigging Einstein compared to the ones too dumb to get out of India ... the ones who work for various Bangalore Bargain Bin dev houses and continually call me for "you give code please".
Posting Anon so I don't piss off my employer.
Some large fraction of the slashdot crowd enjoys characterizing anti-illegal immigration types as 'racists.' Illegal immigration wiped out meat packing unions. It lowered the wage floor for tens of millions of workers.
Don't bitch about H-1B pressure if you have no patience for textile workers whinging about their 'jerbs.' Your degree doesn't mean shit; now you're just as fungible as Sally Mae and her meat cleaver, and you have less cause to complain; the H-1B guys are at least legal.
So don't be racist. Our borders and your job must be open to all... only racists say otherwise.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
More so than somebody who wasn't even born here? Yes.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Mod parent up insightful! Older workers contribute to both direct salary costs and overhead/benefit costs.
Apparently "Obamacare" does contain some provisions for limiting costs based on age of the insured population. But the predicted trend will be for employers to terminate all health insurance and send all their employees to insurance exchanges.
Visa, its every where you want to be. isn't Visa a debit card company? http://usa.visa.com/personal/cards/debit/index.html Oh wait, not that kind of Visa. was going to ask about Mastercard an American Express. but seriously, i never heard of H-1B before. never knew that younger, foreign workers demand lower wages. learned something new.
job based health care hurts having older people work for companies.
Bullshit. Corporate greed is what hurts older people.
Be seeing you...
This situation became inevitable.
Until new age discrimination laws are passed that actually have some teeth, this will continue.
And even when they are-- automation and robotics are ramping up to replace workers.
We are headed towards a potential paradise which is more likely to play out like hell.
Under 50% of humans will be needed to produce enough for everyone to live well.
But we won't give anything to the 50% who can't find a job producing.
And so it will be hellish and possibly lead to violence.
Should be okay through 2020. Labor is going to tighten up about 1 million a year through 2016 and then 2 million a year from 2017 to 2030. By 2020, enough extra people leave the workforce to completely erase the entire current unemployment rate (12 million).
I've been able to retire at 50.
a) I lived on half of what I made and saved the rest.
b) I got a $150k house instead of a $250k house (actually got it for $68k back in 1998)
c) I did NOT always keep a new car.
d) Despite all that, and a couple good years in the market (+35%), I still didn't have enough until my mom passed. But a lot of us 50+ year olds have parents who are going to pass in the next 10 years.
The weird thing is-- once enough companies lay off people to hire cheap overseas labor, they are going to destroy their own market as no one will be able to buy their products. It should be deflationary on prices at the least. But-- the fed policies are going to lead to inflation eventually. Be interesting to see how those two forces balance each other out.
But seriously... by 2030- you should see many jobs performed by ordinary humans automated.... driving... landscaping... manufacturing... even fast food restaurants.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
well take people from trades / tech schools / bootcamps / and other NON college places.
College is not for job training but Community Colleges and tech / trades schools are.
And the clueless MBAs strike again. Business school graduates forget that the basis of capitalism is capital, not short term profits. You build capital when you care about the company sticking around for a long time, when you intend people to buy your products because of the reputation of your brand, and when you genuinely care about making the world a better place one awesome toothbrush at a time.
MBAs on the other hand, only care about the company's survival until the next bonus time, believe that people will only buy something if they are tricked and brainwashed into it, and have no interest or knowledge of what the company actually produces.
And when you do not care about the products you make, why would you want talented employees to make them? If quality is irrelevant, all you need is a bunch of cheap warm bodies to make whatever garbage marketing can sell. It is amazing how fast you can ruin the economy when you only intend to stay on your job until the company dies, rather than until you retire from it.
a degree is not a skill where they lack so much hands skills but the non degree experience, training, schools, boot camps, ect are overlooked.
I'll let you decide... I personally am not that old but have the pre-existing condition of cancer.
In the "high risk pool" of Obamacare this year, which already sold out for the year so you can no longer join, the premium is $625 a month with about $5400 deductable before they start covering you. That ends up being about $13k a year out of pocket for minimum coverage provided by the public exchanges if you have a preexisting condition like me. In addition you have to go without insurance for 6 months, paying for everything yourself over that time, before you even qualify to get on. This is without covering a spouse or children, just a single person.
It costs more, and often does a much less efficient job. But it creates head count to justify the existence of *management*, and is far less likely to warn management when they see the drones flying overhead looking for targets in your security or your QA.
When will american business leaders realize that destroying the country they live in is not a good business practice?
Not only are you insulated from the H-1B's, you might get to blow up some of their hovels.
I've seen it up close and personal. They lure people in with promises of high salaries and good working conditions, then they pay them sub-par wages and work them a bunch of hours. If they don't like it, they threaten to have their visa revoked. I would say a lot of these people have NO idea what they are really getting into until it's too late.
job based health care hurts having older people work for companies.
That is grossly incorrect. Perhaps it is partisan statement rather than honest attempt at discussion??
Younger people work harder, longer and for less money because they lack experience in both their job (so they justify working harder to learn things) *and* their social skills (as in to know how much money they generate for their company and hence demand proper compensation).
Perks like insurance, free launch, 401K, etc. are all peanuts in comparison to $$$ on salary. So you can get cheaper salary, and the rest doesn't matter much.
Why would this be surprising? 2001 was the end of the tech bubble when salaries were ridiculously inflated. Why would one expect them to keep up with inflation?
Why not compare 1994 to 2011? That would been more appropriate (although I don't know what it would show!)
After the bubble burst, it was rare to give an employee a pay cut to reflect the new market realities because of concerns about employee retention and morale. Either you laid them off because you couldn't afford them anymore or you didn't give them raises. Of course, workers who were hired to back-fill attrition or for new projects tended to get lower salaries -- but not dramatically so in part because of the salary inequities that would have caused (only unions seem willing to categorically accept dramatically lower compensation for everyone starting after date X than for those starting on or before date X - odd "good old boy's club").
This is a little like saying that housing has not kept up with general inflation -- by comparing 2006 prices to 2013 prices instead of comparing 1990 prices to 2013 prices.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Ever had a conversation with these guys about how they do their jobs? They think in the short term and quantitatively, not quantitatively. They figure if they can get 2 subpar H-IBs at the same price as a 50 year-old, it evens out in the end.
Short story, I had a great conversation with one of these guys years back who was a manager of a chain restaurant. He was explaining to me the glorious logic of shorting ingredients to save money. How, by removing one pickle from a sandwich you could save millions a year. He was wildly enthusiastic about how powerful a management tool that shorting ingredients was. Now, as I listened to this my thoughts were on the long term effects of this policy and the promotion he was angling for.
So, Joe the manager cuts one pickle, saves the company $10 million a year and gets promoted up. Kelly takes his place and wants to move up too. So, she decides to make the buns 1 ounce smaller. She saves the company mad money and gets promoted up as well. And so on and so on until a premier chain restaurant starts looking more like McDonalds quality. But, none of those guys care because by the time the shit hits the fan they're probably cashed out!
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
that is over come 2014 and the exchanges kick and the high risk pool ends.
Bullshit. Corporate greed is what hurts everyone but the 1%.
FTFY
Amazing how companies want to be able to source labor and materials globally, wherever is cheapest, but are dead against customers doing the same e.g. region encoding, or buy local campaigns.
Every one percent in the corporate world seems to aspire to Bill Gates for their model, not that he acted greedy, but now he's so rich he could power the world for the rest of the millenium and supply everyone with balogna sandwiches for a year..
I would take the univeristy because it means they are higher class people who stick with something and have succeeded where 30% fail within the first year or dropoff. Unless the statistics changed since the 1990s?
It shows determination.
http://saveie6.com/
Paul, the PM: "How long will it take to completely redesign that catalog, replace Ubercart w/ a completely custom handcoded Java version instead of that PHP thing?"
Ralph, the 50+ yo: "Based on my experience, N year(s) if you have a functional spec and unit test designs."
Vlad, the 22 yo: " , !" (Russian to English: "not more than a month, sir!")
Paul, the PM: "Fire Ralph! Get me 20 more Vlads! BTW the client is Amazon's remodel!!"
CEO: "Paul, n-i-c-e job! Here's your raise and mine too!"
Note: I see this a lot. A whole lot. Sadly, I'm a PM and I see many PMP colleagues fall for this....
I don't seem to see this phenomenon so much. Maybe because the foreigners who do what I do all command pretty much the same salary.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
and then some hackers so get in and make a mess with the automated systems and it may even end being a win win or win or low risk.
hack and get free stuff and or end in jail / lockup where the state has to cover all of your basic costs.
I've been brainwashed to believe organized labor is bad, because they're run by the mob and the members are all lazy, overpaid, and impossible to fire.
But what about the flip side? Any similarly negative perceptions about "organized business"? Chamber of Commerce?
Is the brainwashing only one-sided?
So how many of you sent this story to your representatives?
To be honest, there is no politician who will take this bullet and risk being labeled as "racists" or anti-immigration, so you might just want to get used to the low pay grade now. It will help with physiological acceptance later once you get out of denial. This is your new life now.
IT columnist/blogger/historian Robert X. Cringely has been chronicling H1B issues extensively.
http://www.cringely.com/tag/h-1b-abuse/
There's also some overlap with his IBM stories.
http://www.cringely.com/tag/ibm/
So when it's IT, it's an outrage. When they want to grant 11 million illegals amnesty, its the right thing to do.
Really means right to be fired at any time for any reason what-so-ever.
Anyone been in a Fry's lately? At least the one in Campbell...
"It's like the trucking industry "driver shortage" an illusion promoted around a business model that uses up (abuses) young drivers."
It's called "churning". I'm surprised dispatchers who run new drivers ragged don't get a tire knocker across the face now and then.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
determination is one thing but the college are not teaching the needed skills why not have stuff like other trades??
and collgle has gone way up in cost from the 1990's with skill gaps getting even bigger.
I think you mean free lunch. Free launch is what you get when they decide you're no longer useful.
Anyone here on H-1B should be allowed to seek any job anywhere for the duration of their H-1B stay. They just need to negotiate with the new employer during the 3 year visa term to provide pro-rated compensation to the company that pre-paid to put the H-1B through. That eliminates the indentured servitude and opens the free market to the technical talent, as it should be.
Anyone here on an H-1B visa has their visa cancelled and they're immediately deported. No further H-1B visas are issued, ever.
Hey, I can fantasize just as well as you can.
I personally know two truck drivers. Both have gotten out of it because of several factors working against them. 1, fuel costs have risen. 2: Demands to meet the schedule as the market is moving to JIT delivery so that warehouse costs can be kept down. Lack of sleep, unsafe driving conditions, not being with their family a good part of the time. Putting other lives at risk on the roadways. It's over all stressful and only suited for the middle aged. Just young enough to have the energy and old enough to have experience. Other then that, it's a real shitty dead-end career.
Life is not for the lazy.
I couldn't agree more. Especially in computer science. An employer does not give a shit about the science. They want someone who can do AD and DNS right away and image 1,000 computers at a time etc.
But the Devry folks are the same ones who couldn't muster university and have the same background as airconditioner repairmen. Not business professional in the sight of Human Resources.
But many are trying to change that. Business Degrees are useful as that is where I decided to focus my energy in the last 2 years. I can now hear the economic news in CNN and understand exactly what they are talking about. I can look at a accounting reports or memos at websites for publically traded companies and understand what they mean and what they talk about when they say things like cost center.
Unfortunately many geeks miss the big picture they play as a result. Most other degrees teach you something in your field and computer science should not be a science. It should be a math major. No one needs to save 32k on their mainframes using algorithms that no one else can figure out in Cobol. That was an important skill in the 1960s but useless today in line of business needs.
http://saveie6.com/
We recently hired a guy in his late 50s. Been a programmer all his life. Boy, I bet he was great at all those languages we used to use in the 90s. He can't do a damn thing with anything we use today. He worked in SQL Server for a while but MYSQL is a mystery to him. And he can't be bothered to read a book on the syntax to catch up. See, he's got this photography business on the side. It was always his dream... he's basically halfway into retirement. All I here from him all day is how he's getting screwed because no one appreciates his "Experience" anymore. He doesn't have any "experience" in anything we do. He's like a wagon wheel maker that's pissed he's not working on the new ford mustang line. He clearly knows more about wheels than anyone else right?
Another false article propagating the myth that H1B workers at the big tech companies are being paid low wages. They are not. H1Bs earn the same as other employees at MS, Google, Amazon, EBay, and the other big tech employers. There actually is a talent shortage, which is why you see these companies paying interns a salary rate equivalent to 80K/year. There's a similar situation for H1Bs.
Posting as AC as some of the following might be considered confidential. I'm surprised at the number of comments that agree with this article. Are any of these posters actually working for one of these large companies that are allegedly hiring H1Bs preferentially to drive down cost? I'd really like to hear their opinion and whether they agree with it, especially if they are American. Personally, I'm working for one of these companies under an H1B and so are a handful of my classmates. We're all new grads and our starting salary was between 85 - 110k per year. If we are indeed being used as cheap labour, how much are American college grads getting paid? 150k? 200k? That's funny because the article said that IT wages have stagnated. Furthermore, I participate in recruiting at my company and I can say that the focus is overwhelmingly on American schools, with two or three Canadian schools also considered. Is my company a special case? Am I an indentured servant without knowing it? Any insight from a more experienced American at these companies would be very interesting to me.
You seem to think that all computer jobs were in the web bubble. They were not. The press focused on the crazy spending and the many people who made off like bandits; however, having known people in the bubble I can tell you that while they were payed highly it was not anywhere near the level of the upper level people were getting. Sure, it would have impacted the averages and if they include the rare extreme cases where some geek became CEO and rich as being tech workers when they were no longer in that position. Not everybody's wages boomed a whole lot back then. Maybe new positions were payed more during that time--- but we are not allowed to know the salary of the young punks are higher than ours; there is no law protecting our right to that knowledge or being able to disclose that without being fired. Since there is no union, when the dot com cuts came SOME people who never benefited were punished and had to bend over as the boss screwed them; not all bosses were that way about it.
One should expect that generally the salaries would keep with inflation and when they do not people should be really pissed - because that means the fed is stealing your money ... more than the usual amount they always steal and hand to the banks and the bankruptcies. Most salaries have not kept pace with the inflation rates that is why the middle class is far weaker today and why families have two working parents instead of one (it is also consumerism but that was rampant back in the 50s too.)
The whole point is that there is no marketplace really going on, there is a government regulated game (reality dictates that, libertards STFU) that has been rigged by powerful special interests. Instead of demand driving up salary we have government putting in backdoors so the wealthy can avoid dealing with the actual market realities. Not to mention how lower skilled and more desperate people are easier to control, er, that is "manage."
I won't go into MBAs and how they are destroying society and their how their religion corrupts society. It is a religion, a believe that their extreme capitalism and medicine men (chicago economists) will take us on a path towards an actually obtainable Utopia (as all religions do. it only has to be an unfalsifiable supernatural belief to be a religion. most dictionaries I've seen are wrong; gods are not required - makes sense that a dictionary author wouldn't be educated in world religions; usually it is an ethnocentric definition.) People are learning the MBA philosophy making all aspects of our life into business and a kind of business that didn't benefit the world like it did generations ago - they like to associate with the success of the past but their kind of business is nothing like what was actually got us to where we are today. (well in many ways it is, but the past one was restrained. long term thinking existed and loyalty existed. not now.)
These things are complex but the big picture is not difficult, a class war is being waged and people are no different today than the serfs of history. It'll take a lot to motivate people to do something collectively about it. Collaboration of the masses by themselves is an incredibly difficult thing to pull off and this is why human history is rampant with stories of horrible conditions with simplistic solutions that the masses could agree upon. Plenty of chaos happens because once the simple problem is solved (king beheaded) the complex problems must be dealt with and that is even more difficult - so the cycle repeats. Even good solutions still results in apathy in the populace until a severe threshold has again been met - the cycle despotism is part of the human condition. I'm in full agreement with Ben Franklin on this.
You are all willing to fight to the death to protect the right of 3rd grade educated people from anywhere on Earth to stream into the United States by the millions to watch your children, mow your lawns, cook your meals, and wash your cars. But as soon as immigrants with skills and education start coming in and competing with you and your children for cushy white collar jobs, you're up in arms.
It's a common theme I've noticed here over the years, in the Liberal echo-chamber of Slashdot's comments section.
See, the native born blue collar Americans have been dealing with this for decades as they were displaced by tens of millions of illegal aliens, and you laughed at them, then told them to shut up and go to college like you did. Well, your chickens are coming home to roost. How does it feel?
Older developers should join together and directly compete with the companies that screw them over. After all - they have the knowledge to make it happen, and happen better a second time around.
Rene Pilon
I was not in the web bubble for some of it. But as a hiring development manager during that time, it was clear that salaries of all decent developers were impacted seriously by the bubble. This was especially true for good "fresh outs". The effect was that we had to pay a lot more for good fresh outs, and then to keep their pay equitable with more experienced and valuable developers, had to give the experienced and valuable developers high raises. It is, of course, true that the founders and VCs always make out better than the rest in successful startup companies - but that's immaterial to the issue of if the rest also saw an increase in salaries.
Do you also think that salary growth should not exceed inflation if supply and demand were to result in that? If not, why would expect them to always keep up with inflation? In fact, how can everyone's salary at least keep up with inflation while some people's salary go up by more than inflation -- the extra money in the pockets of those getting better raises will increase demand and drive inflation up.
This is related to the fallacy that has amused me for decades that "housing would beat inflation in the long term". If housing prices go up at x+1% a year while inflation (and, hence, salary growth) is x% a year, eventually it will be impossible for workers to afford homes -- which will drive demand down and cause prices to correct. Sure, short term, there can be cultural changes that allow housing prices to continue to rise above inflation (such as more households becoming "dual income" or more people sharing houses), but these options eventually thin out.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Without government there are not corporations. They are a legal entity defined by and their existence maintained by the force of government. If you remove them then you still have the "Free Market" confined by LAW. Company X doesn't hire gunman and give new meaning to hostile take over BECAUSE of the government. Companies that break contracts or copy ideas go to the government provided court system which is FREE except for those vile lawyers everybody must pay too much... who also run our government...
I've gotten good traction with Republicans saying nobody should make more than the President of the USA because that is the most important job there is. Since Obama got in, that argument doesn't work so well but it worked great during the Bush years.
One reason Clinton could mess with CEO pay was because it left open huge massive loopholes! Also messing with corps is easier than changing income tax.
The RICH could be untouched by the CEO cap if they'd forgo the legal firewall corporations provide them - maybe they deserve the super high income when they can be executed for crimes their company does... and they can be personally sued for their company...
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
I created a White House Petition for this. Let's try to stop this before it gains more support!
Sign and share with your friends that are not getting calls back from potential employers.
Short link : http://wh.gov/vDc0
Alternate link : https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/stop-legislation-immigration-innovation-act-would-increase-number-h-1b-visas/91t7LHK3
Why? When the job can be done anywhere? And the company can be headquartered anywhere? Compete on the global market, or fail to compete.
Cost of living is going up everywhere you can hire programmers. It's not a race to the bottom (Bangalore is more expensive than many American cities now), it just takes a generation or two to level out.
The exponential growth of the developer workforce is over - all the world's universities with CompSci programs have been producing graduates at a fairly fixed rate for a while now. All the youth culture in coding was a result of that exponential growth - when the workfore doubles in 10 years, half the workers will be under 30.
But now every source of cheap labor is fully tapped, and getting less cheap every year. The turbulance is rough, but the industry is slowly maturing, both figuratively and literally.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Look at HP, look at Google and see which strategy works. I think it is quite clear that "cheap Indian" is inferior.
http://www.vacos.de
dirk.vialkowitsch@vacos.de
We are mainly working for the automotive industry in the Stuttgart area. Business is doing fine. as high-quality products are in high demand everywhere, especially China. Afaik, Americans don't need a Visa to work in Germany. VBA, C#, C++, Java - all welcome. Send your resume in English, don't worry too much about German, as most people will perfectly understand you and will be able to communicate in English. You will pick up German quickly, as most-used German and English words have exactly the same roots. We also have an Irish pub here, where all the Americans and Britons meet, so you can even hang out with people of your very own culture.
People who are trained to be ignorants will go for "cheap" workers. Other people know that "cheap in the short run" also means "very expensive in the long run" or "opportunities missed in the long run".
The truth is, experience and good education cannot be supplanted by "knowing all details of MFC" or the like. Indians, including premier education institutions (IIT and the like) have not yet grasped that they should not slavishly learn western technology, but invent their own. Learn about What Really Matters by inventing something on their own.
European and American engineers often graduate from universities who are at the forefront of technological innovation. They know what works well and what does not On A Conceptual Level. Knowing concepts, having massive experience under the belt is what matters for the design and implementation of anything innovative.
Look at HP, run by MBA idiots. Hiring cheap, brown people. Now look at Google, run by Computer Scientists. Hiring very expensive people, mostly white. Look which one thrives.
To be perfectly blunt, I've been sick of being the youngest person on my team for the past six years. Not that I want to be surrounded by H1Bs either, but having a few coworkers who are at the same stage in life as you isn't a bad thing. A young single is going to want coworkers to get a beer with after work and maybe chat up some ladies, not a bunch of old timers who are raising families or coasting into retirement.
On vit, on code et puis on meurt.
ever hear from the Indian perspective? overbearing whip masters hiring them to replace lazy ass carbon sequesters on legs
hard-working? hard wanking?
Hint, they speak English, search one of their IT worker's forums
Let's not get facts get in the way of a good whine fest. This is 60,000 jobs we are talking about, That's a mere drop in the US tech job economy.Slashdot needs to need a perspective. It can't even have a tenth of the impact folks here are whining about.
So you want the upsides of globalazation but cannot even take a 60000 job downside, typical entititled mentality. Global free trade benfits the USA. It has upsides for the US multinationals at the cost of local industry. If everyone started whining there will be disproportional hit on the US economy and jobs. Can't have it both ways
I couldn't agree more. Especially in computer science. An employer does not give a shit about the science. They want someone who can do AD and DNS right away and image 1,000 computers at a time etc.
If all you know is do AD and DNS and image 1k computers, then that's what your employer will be hiring you for.
There's a reason why employers like Google are have these infamous algorithm heavy interviews. They don't want monkeys that can do AD and DNS. They want to hire people who can write systems to do it better than 1000 monkeys.
Don't quote me on this.
Bullshit, I can't speak for Mechanical Engineering but Electronic Engineering is moving at a break-neck pace. I started out taping out designs for TTL logic, I'm now using a ultra-sophisticated CAD system and IDE to design embedded systems...in 15 years!
And yes, I see companies making older engineers redundant and hiring younger replacements...the future looks black TBH!
... I wonder what other people of my age have been doing so wrong that they still need employment - they've had careers with salaries and conditions that noone is ever going to get in the future and ought to have been banking that while the going was good.
On the rare occasion I stray back into a "real" business to do a bit of consulting, I feel like I'm walking into a kindergarten: it's all competitive attention seeking and fingerpainting (sorry, Powerpoint).
I would feel desperately sorry for a younger generation if they thought they were going to have to be in that environment all their lives - but mainly because it would demonstrate a lack of ambition and foresight. You really ought to have some control over your own destiny by the time you reach your 50s. If you haven't, you've wasted the last 30-odd years.
Am employment website where US IT unemployed professionals could all register would be useful here.
A big headline like: 60,000 Currently looking for work - would make it harder to pretend they can't find people.
Visas are a Trojan horse. Workers will scream about visas, employers will simply keep all the jobs in Asia.
Nothing. Companies who give a rats ass about their employees are going to not do this. Companies who do are going to be sending people with tons of experience and training out the door so they can hire people who need tons of experience and training... Putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage.
Sounds like the douche bag companies are shooting themselves in the foot... Let the free market punish them!
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
This time, Occupy ranks should be of 50-somethings, turned out of well-paying positions for the crime of giving their best years to an employer and daring to prepare reaping what was promised them when humans ran the place. *This* would be an Occupy movement that would resonate throughout all countries.
Sounds like classic marxist economic analysis (not that it is or isn't true): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour
job based health care hurts having older people work for companies.
Technically true, but it's a incomplete argument being used to prop up an incorrect implication as it doesn't take into account one of the largest consumers of healthcare: Dependents.
While an older worker, meaning any worker over 50, may begin to use more healthcare themselves, they have far fewer dependents using that healthcare actively, specifically pregnancies, infants and young children. A worker who has their last child at 35 may begin using more health care at 50, but their 15 year old child would begin using far less. According to Peter Capelli of the Wharton Center for Human Resources, this shift in who is actually using the healthcare balances out any increased usage by older workers and, in fact, may sometimes actually save the company money.
Couple this wash of healthcare cost usage with the fact that older workers generally outperform younger workers and any company using this incorrect notion to trim their books of older worker salaries for younger worker/H-1Bs short term profit games is setting themselves up for IP failure in a few short years.
I see such insanely specialized skills in job postings. No wonder there is a shortage of skilled workers...!!! Companies are using vertical-market packages and want people with an alphabet soup of skills. I've never heard of most of them (Lawson, X++, etc). Everyone wants experts, usually in the 5-10 year range. Maybe 3-5 for things that haven't been around long (like Android). No one is hiring straight-up technical people who know industry standards like Java or SQL. No wonder they can't find anyone. I doubt there are many people on the planet who have both the domain expertise to understand the vertical-market package in its industry, plus the technical expertise to run the software and customize it. So more and more companies are chasing fewer and fewer people. Eventually, some company will get desperate and train people.
don't know how else to put it. These are the rank and file IT jobs they're replacing, not the high end google coders. They guys they bring in from India can hack it just fine. And yeah, it takes a bit to get up to speed, but when the cost of failure is deportation you'll put in 80 hours/week until you do.
This argument that it costs more to bring in H1-B's is the same sort of silly 'American Emotionalism' that was used to kill our manufacturing industry without complaint. It's OK, right. We don't have to worry. The jobs'll come back as soon as the Job Creators realize how great we are. It doesn't work that way man... it just doesn't. I'm sorry...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Don't follow the crowd. Have skills that aren't a dime a dozen. I'm coming up on 34 years in IT, two jobs (16 years in one and 18 in another), and no HTML coder is going to be able to do the job of a zOS Systems Programmer.
I remember a few years ago here on Slashdot the subject of "Just sue them for discrimination" came up and a real lawyer (yes, we have some) weighed in on the subject. He basically said that employment discrimination cases are almost impossible to win and he will almost never take them because of that. They basically get into a "he said, she said" kind of thing and that rarely results in an outcome favorable to the plaintiff. He said that when clients came to him wanting to sue their employer his advice was that they would be better off to just accept the job loss and find another job.
The top 10% isn't all in Silicon Valley. Only whatever percentage has the mobility and desire to live there. If companies want to really access the whole of the top 10%, then they have to explore telecommuting options.
Sounds like we need more government involvement in capitalism. The government just isn't doing it's job when it involves protecting Americas interests. More taxes for more regulation for more oversight for more support for a stronger secure America.
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns/polinaut/archive/2013/02/poligraph_klobu_4.shtml?refid=0 Unfortunately, most of the media and legislators are ignorant about the subject (as with many other subjects), so they accept whatever press releases they get from the executives, immigration lawyers and their lobbyists.
Yah, good tactic "advocate_one", but there are dysfunctionalities even there. It used to be that employers planned on flying in US STEM workers for interviews, relocating them, 2-12 weeks of new-hire training, 2-4 weeks of retained employee training, and sponsoring a citizen new-hire for a clearance (at a cost $10K to $50K) and giving them some training and productive work to do during the 2-8 months that could take. Since H-1B, the process is more about fabricating excuses/pretexts on which to declare all US candidates "unqualified" regardless of intelligence, knowledge, and experience while avoiding genuine interviews. They don't want to fly people anywhere (and, besides, who wants to with all the ridiculous, unconstitutional non-sense related to air travel these days), they don't want to provide relocation assistance let alone actually relocate people and provide temporary housing. They want you to "hit the ground running" and do your own continuous learning on your own dime and time. And even contractors at Dept. of Energy, NSA, etc., try to avoid sponsoring new security clearance applications. Why? Because of the glut of STEM talent. We've got literally millions of unemployed and involuntarily out of field US citizen STEM workers these days. But just a few million unemployed and under-employed US citizen STEM professionals is not enough to satisfy those who yearn for ever more cheap, young, pliant labor with flexible ethics.
In many countries the government pays for college education.
In the US the average student graduates with around $25K in loans, and it's fairly easy to end up with $100K or more just for an undergraduate degree. That's a mortgage right there... but you can get a cheaper interest rate on a mortgage.
It seems that human nature hasn't changed much. prejudice against older people seems to be almost acceptable these days. And the notion of allowing people to work in our country under different wages and conditions than American workers is little more than a desire to have slaves. In essence you take a guy that you would not want to marry your daughter and allow him to cross a border as it fills your pockets. Then you go to church and pretend that you are some innocent creep who is only trying to build a company and support your family which in reality you would love to get rid of.
Great! I'll just wait a few generations, and I'll be rolling in money!
Anyone with talent should be given a green card, so they aren't treated as indentured servants. I don't mind the competition as long as it is a level playing field, and recruiting talent permanently into the country makes us better. Get rid of the H-1B program.
This is well-trod ground. Whenever there's a remote possibility of cutting government blubber, they whine and wail and scream about "massive cuts", and then trim not the fat, but the things which will most severely impact large, more or less precisely targeted sub-sets of the public. They'll trim a bunch of the people actually effectively inspecting imports at the ports, the Border Patrollers who are actually actively guarding the borders (but not the less-productive support personnel), the embassy and consulate guards, but not the first 3 tiers of political appointees who regularly dine on lobster, steak, pate and champagne with the corrupt foreign dictators. They'll skimp on armor and ammunition to front-line troops (so that they will write home to relatives about the terrrrible cuts), but not skimp on the plush office suite remodelings of 3-4 layers of generals over-populating certain bases (don't get me wrong, good generals are to be prized and praised but too many these days are purely political sycophants). They'll send out press releases about cross-training the former Twinkie bakers... in classes operated by the union bosses' cousins, but shut down or cut repairs on the interstates to try to get the public to cry "Uncle Sam". This is often called the "Washington monument" gambit or scam after the "park service's" penchant for threatening to shut down their most popular tourist sites every time there's any threat that they won't receive the full desired increases in funding. (It is also telling that many of those very sites were initially funded by voluntary donations, but now from tax-victims and increases in federal government debt.)
Aging programmers do not keep up, they write stuff in C and VB6, and they refuse to get retrained because it's too hard. As far as I'm concerned, they're wasting the company's time and money to get paid more than me. I can program twice as quickly and at superior quality with modern standards but slightly less wise overall design but still acceptable and superior to average software. If I had a dollar for every time a programmer over 40 couldn't properly define object oriented to me, I could retire. I think I had a grasp of that in week 2 of semester 1 of college. The older programmers are just lazy! That's all there is to it.
But foreigners can get the fuck out and that is a completely different story. They have no business taking my job at a lower wage in my own country. My family paid for K-12 and I paid for extensive college training and now someone else who fast tracked it quick and cheap in another country skips in and demolishes it? Maybe I just should have dropped out of school if I can't compete by going "by the books" because companies ship in some asshole from another country to undercut me. At least their code and UI design is universally crap compared to mine since english is rarely their first language.
especially when grants are dying and banks are cutting back on credit.
Somebody must be thinking that it doesn't cost any money to start a business. If you do find an example let me know. AFAIK all business is like a gamble, you need to risk capital to get rewards.
I don't have that capital, all I have is a business plan.
New Economic Perspectives
I'm surprised at the lack of publicity that the L-1 Visas get. That is a far easier route than the H1.
What is the L-1 Visa? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-1_visa
An L-1 Visa will allow a foreign worker of a company, like say TCS, relocate to an office in the US for up to 7 years. This is a longer limit than the H1, but something that an L-1 will allow that an H1 will not is that the spouse of an L-1 holder can also get an L-2 Visa and work anywhere as long as the originally granted L-1 is valid. Another key difference to the H1 is that there are no wage restrictions attached to the L-1 or L-2 Visa. In 2010, there were 74,719 L-1 Visas granted, which is more than the H1s. I'm not sure how many L-2s were granted, but this is a far larger immigration hole, and a lot of the Indians I know in IT are on L-1/2...more than H1s.
I think many here are missing the forest for the trees: As an information worker you own your capital (your knowledge). There are plenty of ways that you can utilize that capital and your skills are constantly in demand, and will be more so going forward.
Although getting fired for being too expensive does not reflect well on a company, and is especially difficult for the worker as we age, there still remains plenty of opportunity in the marketplace for those with superior communication skills and more experience.
I know where I work we have quite a few open heads for competent C++ or Java devs.
However most fail at the interview stage.. They can't describe data structures they claim to know.. They can't implement some pretty basic problems in a working manner.. They can't decompose a problem into a workable design.
It's fairly rare that we get older people on the interviews.. But the few I have interviewed they tended to fall short in data structures or coding.. They could usually decompose the problem into a workable design.
My guess is that older workers end up in psuedo manager positions.. They design and tell all the underlings what to do.. They spend so much time designing and answering questions from above and below that their dev skills get rusty. When they find themselves looking they don't brush up those rusty skills.. And of course no one ever tells you why they are saying no after the interview.
-Jerry :)
PS: If you looking for a job Amazon in Seattle is definitely hiring
Sometimes I think how much it sucks that I can't keep doing what I like ("actual work") as I get more experienced, and I'm forced into supervising other people doing things I don't particularly care about ("managing"). But that's the point of gaining experience. For programmers, you've experienced umpteen languages, software architectures, programming models, etc. You can see how they relate, and that permits you to solve problems faster. The fresh IT import/grad doesn't have the experience, so when they are faced with that "totally new" problem, they can waste weeks. You-as-manager can fix it in 5 minutes by conveying your experience, possibly without writing a line of code. As an "aging IT worker", you're not worth much as a code monkey, and even though you might like to be paid like a manager with the responsibilities of a code monkey, that's of no particular value to the ones signing your paycheck. Get into management. Or, start a company where the coding is incumbent on you (along with the managing, budgeting, fund raising, accounting, insuring, ...). But whining about having to move up in the world? Not going to work, I doubt.
...
Thank you for admitting that you're a newbie.
"there is most certainly a shortage of local talent at a realistic price and reasonable attitude."
If you really invested some effort you could throw in a couple more weasel-words.
Thank your for corroborating that it's about cheap, young, pliant labor with flexible professional ethics, and for corroborating the gimmick of refusing to relocate able and willing US citizen talent but jumping straight from your tiny neighborhood's talent pool to foreign labor imported from thousands of miles across the seas, rather than tapping the vast pool of US citizen STEM talent of all ages available (unemployed or involuntarily out of STEM fields, as NSF refers to it) within just a few hundred miles.
Before H-1B, employers would fly in US citizens hundreds or even thousands of miles for interviews. Before H-1B, employers would relocate US citizen talent from one part of the USA to another, and provide temporary housing while they searched for apartments or homes. Before H-1B, employers would invest in 2-12 weeks of new-hire training, and 2-4 weeks of retained employee training; now they bodyshop.
Thank you for corroborating that, for many "IT" employers it's about finding people willing to implement your unethical schemes.
Before H-1B, a "reasonable attitude" was, "Let's make great software products that do good things!... even if we have to work around the clock once in a while to meet management's unrealistic release schedule despite what we told them in the planning phase.", not "How can we violate millions of people's privacy and leverage that information to get money for ourselves?"
* A great product in those times might be CAD/CAM/CAE software to design, pre-test, and manufacture higher quality products (cars, cranes, cherry-pickers, back-hoes, power tools, baby baths, tanks, diesel truck engines, toy trucks, sky-scrapers) while holding the line on expenses. It might be simulating a building to test it's resistance to earth-quakes or strong winds, or simulating a rocket to minimize costs of launching a communications satellite into stable orbit, or simulating various kinds of gun-powder grain to optimize performance and reduce schmutz. It might be analyzing and designing data-bases as tools to help optimize getting soldiers and everything they need to trouble spots as rapidly and safely as possible. Or it might be examining whether early adoption of steam engines increased or decreased productivity in manufacture of sugar and rum on plantations in Jamaica as compared with places which did not adopt the engines. Or it might be software to examine migration patterns in response to tax and regulatory changes in each state (yes, people do "vote with their feet" to flee power-mad politicians).
Yeah, that's Google.
But your regular-old, boring company that produces paper clips or something run-of-the-mill like that isn't looking to invent something like MapReduce.
They just need some monkeys that can do AD and DNS.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Perhaps it is because I and most of my friends are over 50, but we have seen this happening for more than 10 yrs.
There is a confluence of two major trends: 1) get rid of the expensive older people who have been around enough to know just enough labor law to be annoying, and 2) bring in lots of H1B workers because they not only are cheaper but are, in effect, indentured and less likely to complain about unreasonable or illegal work conditions.
Win, win. For the corporation person, yes. For the worker person, no.
And that's what Marshall Brain's novella _Manna_ examines:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
http://wh.gov/dGwS
Casteism
To get around the laws they eliminated my "position" (i.e. title) thus not opening themselves to a lawsuit. They kept the two Indian programmers that I was training. In addition they also cover their asses by making you sign an agreement not to pursue legal action.
You know those ridiculous job ads that want everything and the kitchen sink? They are usually designed to eliminate all applicants to justify extending the visa of a low-paid programmer. I discovered this after a "displaced" (outsourced) coworker applied for a job that fit her *perfectly*. No call. Tried 4 times and finally her headhunter asked a person at the company what was going on. They had a Pakistani programmer they paid $15,000/yr they wanted to keep. By law they have to post the job but nothing says they have to hire anyone - just make a "good faith effort".
Bah! Ayn Rand was just clueless about the modern "Atlases" running industry these days.
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All programmers are aging programmers. What has changed with the advent of H-1B is that, now, a 35-year-old is considered "over the hill".
I've taught 70+ year old engineers how to program, FCOL! Age has little to do with the ability to learn yet another programming language, operating system, design methodology, IDE, etc.
The problem is that government regs make older people geometrically more expensive to employ... while the visa programs (the flood of cheap, young, pliant foreign labor with flexible ethics)` undermine their careers from the other end.
Technically true, but it's a incomplete argument being used to prop up an incorrect implication as it doesn't take into account one of the largest consumers of healthcare: Dependents. While an older worker, meaning any worker over 50, may begin to use more healthcare themselves, they have far fewer dependents using that healthcare actively, specifically pregnancies, infants and young children. A worker who has their last child at 35 may begin using more health care at 50, but their 15 year old child would begin using far less. According to Peter Capelli of the Wharton Center for Human Resources, this shift in who is actually using the healthcare balances out any increased usage by older workers and, in fact, may sometimes actually save the company money. Couple this wash of healthcare cost usage with the fact that older workers generally outperform younger workers and any company using this incorrect notion to trim their books of older worker salaries for younger worker/H-1Bs short term profit games is setting themselves up for IP failure in a few short years.
To all of those who are bemoaning the hiring of less costly non-American workers over USAers: unless you have an actual argument that involves value to the company and not just an appeal to nationalism you're not going to have any luck.
Question: what gives the most value to a company: US citz or foreign hires?
If the latter: then you're just asking for corporate funded welfare.
If the former (as some have intimated): then where's the data? Lots of people (many actually quite smart) look at these issues. Where's the data that older or domestic hires give more value for the companies dollar?
(And no: whether or not CEO's, etc. are overpaid isn't relevant. Even if they are, paying them less wouldn't change the value difference between a foreign or domestic hire.
My opinion: hire as many foreigners as companies want, *but* give them an easy route to full citizenship. This country is made stronger by bringing in bright and hard working citizens. I'm happy to invite them here.)
To all of those who are bemoaning the hiring of less costly non-American workers over USAers: unless you have an actual argument that involves value to the company and not just an appeal to nationalism you're not going to have any luck. Question: what gives the most value to a company: US citz or foreign hires? If the latter: then you're just asking for corporate funded welfare. If the former (as some have intimated): then where's the data? Lots of people (many actually quite smart) look at these issues. Where's the data that older or domestic hires give more value for the companies dollar? (And no: whether or not CEO's, etc. are overpaid isn't relevant. Even if they are, paying them less wouldn't change the value difference between a foreign or domestic hire. My opinion: hire as many foreigners as companies want, *but* give them an easy route to full citizenship. This country is made stronger by bringing in bright and hard working citizens. I'm happy to invite them here.)
I sense the Ayn Randian in you. You do understand that the Pentagon will also be cut, right? This is slash and burn, crackhead right-wing politics by those who want to eliminate the rights of workers. Yes, and those public parks - such a waste of money. Who started them? Teddy Roosevelt - who deserved to be on Mount Rushmore. Yet the current crop of Republicans charged up two wars on the credit card - one based on complete lies, and now want to cut what they have termed "entitlements" but not increase tax rates back to the 1950's when this country was building the interstates, schools, and infrastructure - now who did that? Why another Republican - Dwight D. Eisenhower. So while I am a complete supporter of the Obama Administration, I can also see the good that can be done when a party puts country above itself. I consider it a privilege to pay taxes in this country, if you don't want to pay them, poor pitiful tax victim, then the IRS will come a knockin. Bet on it.
"Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair" - George Washington
The Media (such as NPR counts as The Media) is just now figuring this (#)%@ out? Regular buncha @)(%)@% Sherlock Homies, ain't ya?
But then who would pay healthcare costs!? The government? Ha! That wouldn't make any sense, its not like they run it for the benifit of the people anymore. The only reason they take care of the roads is so you can get your ass to work for the man all day for your whole life, and then get canned before they have to pay out any retirment.
Maybe I'm a bit cynical?
Yet the current crop of Republicans charged up two wars on the credit card - one based on complete lies
Don't forget the Democrats who voted for the those wars too. You know, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden also voted for the Iraq war.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Hi
I was part of a team from India which to take a huge chunk of work out of a US company and these guys actually were told that they were losing jobs. It was so sick to take KT from a guy who is getting fired because of you.Some sadistic bosses both companies had. Some guys literally spat at us in anger and our stupid boss would advise us to be tactful in getting information. What tact can you use with a guy who knows you are stealing his bread and butter? These were people who had spent minimum 20-30 years with the company and now they had to find a job in a worst economy because they stayed loyal in good times!
Inexperienced programmers can write code as per your requirements.
Experienced programmers can write code as per your expectations.
Casteism
Do you also think that salary growth should not exceed inflation if supply and demand were to result in that? If not, why would expect them to always keep up with inflation? In fact, how can everyone's salary at least keep up with inflation while some people's salary go up by more than inflation -- the extra money in the pockets of those getting better raises will increase demand and drive inflation up.
I expect my salary increases to beat inflation. It's called experience. Not taking bubbles and inflation into account, I should be making more money when I'm older than when I'm younger. When I retire, a young person can have my slot. With a lot of people doing this in a staggered way, it all balances out.
So they knew that WMD was a lie, but still voted for it. Don't buy that. Colin Powell pushed many to vote for the war.
You're rationalizing.
Are you really suggesting that the party that couldn't keep Todd Akin from talking like a dumb-ass about rape was able to orchestrate an international conspiracy to fabricate evidence of WMDs in Iraq and keep it quiet for a decade?
Either the Republicans who voted for the war were just as misled as the Democrats or they all were in cahoots to push unnecessary wars.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
As someone stated above
Many American businesses hate their workers.
American workers are too stupid to hate them in return.
Here we are being actively screwed by others for their own personal gain and your response is not only to submit, but to defend them.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Australia has the same problem with the 457 Visa. We constantly here their is a skills shortage. Yet thousands are skilled employees are out for work, in favour of these loosely called engineers who struggle with the basics. The only thing that matters to C level management are the books show a saving, who cares if the business suffers. One of the largest telcos let go off 450+ staff today and sited the reason that in places like india they have greater technology and innovation. The fall for this crap hook line and sinker