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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."
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!
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.
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.
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
The other day I was thinking. If you want to deal with unemployment, just federally mandate 40-hour workweeks maximum for anybody who is not a partial owner of a company (minimum of 1%). Some employers would instantly have to hire almost double the workforce, because they couldn't force everyone to work 80-hour weeks anymore. Companies would have to hire and train people. Unemployment would go through the floor and the number of people that could afford things would go up, meaning that it should spike the GDP in a very positive way. It would also, take money back from the rich to the middle class...
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
I don't know that it's a race to the bottom. A news story this morning mentioned that wages had remained stagnant since 2001. Except 2001 you could be trained chimpanzee that knew HTML and make $100k a year. So maybe we're just finally purging all of the bullshit employees from the dot-com employment orgy.
All together I don't have that much sympathy. Most of those graybeards are libertarians who don't believe in any protectionism so... welcome to the free market.
You're out of date and off the mark. The dot-com drones long ago left the building. IT wages have actually been rising (modestly) and the IT unemployment rate is half what it is for most other professions.
Hardly the heady days of pre-Y2K. but things have been on the uptick for some time and it's a rare day when I don't get calls and emails from headhunters.
Mod parent up. Yes this is a very old problem. Pre Y2K and years prior to my 40th birthday I saw the writing on the wall. I saw how friends with H1Bs were treated as indentured servants, sometimes earning little more than 1/2 what their US-born colleagues earned. I saw how people from certain countries were assumed to have magical mystical IT talent and how people with dubious certificates and knowledge of hot software products (VisualBASIC, DBase 3...), were given the same "irreplaceable" specialized H1B treatment as brain surgeons and PhD level scientific experts.
I saw where US IT jobs were going-- so I followed my outsourced IT career out of the country. And no, I don't particularly miss the short vacations, high taxes, high medical costs, high education costs, long drives and terrible job security many US workers have to put up with. If US companies continue to abuse the H1B system as a cheap labor pool, American workers should consider emigrating to countries where real IT experience is still valued as being worthy of more than a living wage. (e.g. all of Europe, Brazil, most of Asia, Canada, Australia, New Zealand...)
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 problem is, if you're a lawyer or an architect, what you learned in school is fundamentally going to be the same as what you need to know 30 years later. People don't perceive IT that way. New languages, new paradigms, new hardware. There is a common thread, if you stick with it long enough. Like the way apps have bounced between central and distributed systems over and over through the years. But superficially, it looks like all that old tech is "obsolete". Much of it isn't. It just resurfaces in a new form.
Yes, a shortage at the nice price. That is what this has always been about.
Industry groups have been bellyaching about shortages since the 70s. Dire predictions of shortages are regularly made. Only now, they may finally be right. So many citizens have been displaced for so long, the H1-Bs may be the industry's best source of technical talent. It's a self full-filling prophecy. They may have run off so many older citizen engineers, developers and what have you that the young ones see that and opt for a more stable career path. So they may have produced the shortage they've been predicting for so long.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor