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."

Comments

"Shortage"

[v1]

"Large corporations want more visa, they claim, because of a shortage of dirt cheap IT talent"

There, ftfy

Re:"Shortage"

[Darinbob]

Many people like to claim that they lack talent with the relevant skills for the particular jobs. I think some of this is true, but most is BS. What it really means is that they don't want to spend even a minute training anyone. They'd rather have the person with the particulars already on the resume than hire someone who might need some minimal introduction. Ie, any older programmer is going to be able to figure out your new fad language of the year very quickly, and will be able to program it far better than your entry level worker who peppers the resume with buzzwords.

This is where age discrimination comes in, and it's very subtle, and the people doing the discrimination don't even realize they're doing it. Managers want the exact match for a job, HR people are filtering based on keywords, executives want to give out lowest possible salary. It all adds up.

The visa system is up for abuse, and it is being abused. Those execs who disagree about this should be made to step up and prove that no other suitable workers could be found.

Re:"Shortage"

[tftp]

I expect there will be no relief in sight until Americans start electing politicians that put the interests of Americans first

The politicians are already doing that. CEOs are also Americans, isn't it so? Some of the profit is donated to politicians; that's how the feedback loop is operating.

Or perhaps you meant some other Americans, like those peons in IT? How much do they donate to Congressmen?

This political system is the best the money can buy. If you don't like its results then perhaps the system ought to be replaced with something else. It would be otherwise foolish to expect a different result.

From the POV of many CEOs, american workers are overpaid, underexploited, and too pampered with benefits. Foreign workforce - who often comes from countries that we do not associate with widespread wealth - is willing to work on terms of pseudo-slavery. The american worker might just as well curl up and die, he is not needed anymore, aside from a handful of highly educated workers. The american worker cannot even be a customer because he has no job and no income to pay for things. In this aspect a rice farmer in China is a better customer, he has an honest income and can buy a gizmo once in a while. The words "customer" and "employed" are synonyms.

Re:"Shortage"

[CAIMLAS]

The sickening thing is, when your business is an IT business, why would you do this to yourself? It's like a dissonant behavior where "prescribed action" doesn't even reflect upon the world it's being acted in.

Let's say you do indeed get good value out of your Indian H1B workers (you don't, but let's just say you do). Great. This is the best possible outcome of H1B workers. But in the meantime, you're stagnating domestic IT salaries, which means talented people will not look to work for you or will leave the field. And suddenly, your domestic company is 100% dependent on foreign labor, which you need government regulation to acquire.

And you have no hope of hiring a local, talented or otherwise, because you've effectively priced yourself out of the market - all while handing industrial expertise to foreign nationals.

52 years old....

[edmanet]

And I really thought I'd be in management by now. But I really hate meetings.

"Free" Trade, What Did You Expect?

[CanHasDIY]

What, you thought only the manufacturing base could outsource? Think again.

one solution

[phantomfive]

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.

Re:one solution

[cob666]

If H1B visa holders were allowed to find other jobs then there is no point in issuing H1B visas, just issue s regular work visa. The whole point of the H1B visa is to allow companies to hire people for skilled jobs that they are unable to fill with local talent. They are by design short termed and extremely limited in scope so the visa holder must leave the country when the visa has expired.

Widening the scope of the H1B visa shouldn't be an option. I'd like to see H1B visas become even MORE restrictive. Cut the number of H1B visas issued, shorten the term, limit the number allowed per company. In fact, I'd also like to see something implemented where once a visa issued for a company has expired they can't apply for another visa for a certain length of time, also require companies applying for H1B visas to fund programs to train people for the skill they are applying for visas for, something in the ballpark of $50K per year per visa. Would accomplish two goals, would guarantee that there is training for skills that are obviously in demand and would make bringing in H1B workers more expensive, thus possibly forcing companies to hire locally again.

Older IT staff = Higher expected pay

[eksith]

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.

This would go some way in explaining...

[ackthpt]

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.

Cost to much to be old

[Nyder]

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.

Crazy

[Intrepid imaginaut]

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.

job based health care hurts haveing older people

[Joe_Dragon]

job based health care hurts having older people work for companies.

And this is a reason why so much software sucks

[gweihir]

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.

Cue the xenophobia

[moderatorrater]

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).

Re:Not indentured servitude

[kidgenius]

It is a form of bondage though, as those workers have no freedom to move to a different company on that visa. They are tied to the company. Therefore, they have to accept a lower wage because there is no threat of them leaving for a competitor.

MBAs ruining business

[Chemisor]

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.

Experience counts? Depends on the management..

[knoware]

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....

Re:Greedy Upper Management.

[SwampChicken]

Easy fix. Large corporations simply to sack all their high-priced execs and get some H-1B visa ones. They'd save a *lot* more money from there than from IT...

Re:Greedy Upper Management.

[advocate_one]

get yourself into a field where they can't outsource or insource workers. One where you need high security clearance and have to be a national in order to do the work.