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.
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
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."
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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?
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).
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
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.
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!
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."
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
typical NPR.
last millennium story.
Are you saying that it's no longer an issue and companies are welcoming experienced older workers with open arms?
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.
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.
job based health care hurts having older people work for companies.
Bullshit. Corporate greed is what hurts older people.
Be seeing you...
It's just you.
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.
average wages for programmers are still below $40 an hour
Glad I don't live there... (And that's roughly $80,000 per year, BTW, not six figures...)
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
I was gonna say this, but you, AC; have said it. Slavery hasn't really been abolished you see, look inside your wallet, you are a Slave to that Credit Card and Money. It owns your ass, try to break free I dare you.
You know that Job you got? You work for somebody at the top. They own your ass, tell him/her to "take this job and shovel it", c'mon I dare ya. If you live in America, good luck getting a new job, chances are you've already been replaced by a less skilled and lower paid H-1B worker.
Self employed you say, you pay taxes right? Mr IRS owns your a double s. Don't pay your taxes, I dare ya. Ask Wesley Snipes what happens when you're a Slave in the 'Modern' world.
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.
When will american business leaders realize that destroying the country they live in is not a good business practice?
Yeah, sure it is. Hire foreigners to work for less money, and they'll send a fair portion of that out of the country, while hard-working American citizens are left unemployed. Sounds like a great way to ruin a country to me.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
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.
Scott Walker and his ilk are making sure you have no union to go to.
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
Cronus, is that you?
Because the best way to avoid being burgled is to burn down your house.
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.
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/
they settle for lower wages. To them, $50 a week is still like winning the lottery
That would be true if the workers were being paid to work remotely, while still living in their lower-income country. If those workers are using the visas to come to the USA, then the lower wages are nowhere near enough to survive on. What you end up seeing is 8-10 people renting a house together because it is all they can afford.
WTB [sig], PST!!!
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 don't know where you get your information from, but a lot of it is outright wrong. E.g. this:
H-1Bs are required to spend one month every year in their native country. Every single one has to be gone for a month.
There's no such requirement. If someone told you there is, they were bullshitting you.
They're very family-oriented. When they marry, it's for life. They have lots of kids, whom they're clearly teaching better values than most Americans.
That depends solely on the culture from which a person comes from. I am a divorced H1B with no kids.
Understand that they're very religious, generally Muslim. They take their religion far more seriously than any American. I have never, for example, seen a non-Muslim be required to take prayer-breaks during the workday.
Most H1Bs are from India, and they're definitely not Muslim. Many from other, more developed countries (e.g. Eastern Europe) are not religious at all, like myself. In fact, I find American society to be ridiculously religious as a whole.
The H-1B returning to his native country will do so with a veritable fortune. Neither they nor any member of their family will ever want for anything.
Again, it depends a lot on the country. If I compare the wage I get in US (which, by the way, is above average for my position and experience level), it's about 3x higher than what I'd get in my home country. It's a big difference, but it doesn't make me a millionaire back home. Then, of course, the cost of living in US is also more expensive, so a considerable chunk of that 200% difference evaporates right away.
There are over 250,000 H-1Bs in the United States. Send them home, and there will instantly be 250,000 well-paying jobs for voters. Because of the lack of supply, IT salaries will skyrocket. These well-paid voters will then buy things with their money, which will create demand for consumer goods. This will create a demand for employees to manufacture and sell the goods.
Do you think that H1Bs don't buy things with their money while living and working in US?..
You could give those 250,000 H1-Bs green cards and, eventually, citizenship. Then you'd get that much more voters - and also that much more consumers who are here permanently (and whose children will also become consumers in their own term) - thus growing the entire economy by that amount. You keep forgetting that workers don't work 24/7, they also use the result of the work of others. If unemployment were caused by too many people, then it would steadily grow as population increases - but this doesn't happen in practice, because every new pair of hands is also a new mouth.
Whoops. Just re-did the math, you're right. Still, given the current situation in the US a lot of people can't even find jobs. Of course I'm talking about English and history majors but still, complaining about 80K fresh out of college seems selfish. That's my main complaint here. Given that this is still above the average wage (assuming I didn't crap up that math too), it seems silly to complain about 80K. And anyway, isn't the programmer philosophy that if you don't like it you can just make a startup where you're CEO? The article definitely lacked substance for me as well. Only interviewed one person.
"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.
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.
At least with a lot of immigrants from .mx, they may have been living worst that the 8-10 rented house, but they would not work around here! No wonder the could not achieve enough food, but for some reason migrating changes their mind and sudenly they can work, and hard... That is kind of weird for most of those who wouldn't go to USA easily.
I'm positive, don't belive me look at my karma
Yeah, sure it is. Hire foreigners to work for less money, and they'll send a fair portion of that out of the country, while hard-working American citizens are left unemployed. Sounds like a great way to ruin a country to me.
But you see, the time line is very short. Maximization of profit as soon as possible, is the goal. The biggest lazzaise-faire capitalist I knew wanted to maximize his own money,and anything that stood in the way was bad. His mantra was "Fuck future generations". I kid you not
Capitalism is a very good form of economy, as long as it can be steered away from it's weaknesses, which is the drive to monopolize and destroy competition, and to sacrifice long term stability in the name of immediate profit. All forms of economy/government end up in a good approximation of dictatorship unless their weak points are managed.
You are correct however , if enough Americans are put out of work so that a small group can profit, eventually things fall apart.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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?
Or go start your own IT company. You can do that here, you know. You're not in North Korea.
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.
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
H-1Bs are required to spend one month every year in their native country. Every single one has to be gone for a month.
There's no such requirement. If someone told you there is, they were bullshitting you.
There might not be anything on the books but my company does this as well. It has to do with the fact that they are paid as contractors and doesn't really have anything to do with being on an H1B. But all of them that I work with, which is many...do have to take a month off...but so do native(yeah I don't mean native americans) contract workers.
Giving them a path to citizenship certainly would improve things but I believe the biggest factor here is that they are not allowed to shop around for jobs. If they could then they would be less likely to bring down wages.
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.
Probably not always true but then that is the trade - most tools we use are the same everywhere. Switching a specialist on a drilling platform is a bit more complicated because the technology there is very special so getting a cheap worker from India is possible but not as easy as 'python coder'. This trend of replacing expensive 'experienced' (admit: often overpaid) folks with cheap imports looks almost like cause by a law of nature...
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.
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.
... 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.
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.
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.
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.
But the real question : how much are the CEOs at HP making, compared to google? Upper management count give two shits how the company is perceived, or actually performing, so long as their next yacht purchase isn't impeded. If the company performance is tanking, they'll just hire more H1Bs to offset the loss.
This signature is false.
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.
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
We are all being enslaves by the international bankers.
Despite the name, the international bankers are monolithic, monoethnic, and monoracial.
New Economic Perspectives
if enough Americans are put out of work so that a small group can profit, eventually things fall apart
Gee, didn't that already happen, say, about 6 years ago?
"Fuck future generations"
I know you're not kidding, because I've worked for bastards like this. In my case they were Australian bastards, which made it even worse, but that's besides the point. It also used to be that you could get on with a company, do a good job, and work there the rest of your life if you wanted to. Not so anymore, the average lifespan of a job is, what? 3 years? Then you're getting the boot, unless you've already made arrangements, because they'll find a reason to get rid of you rather than pay you more money and benefits. The Arab Spring has brought much violence into the Middle East, but also much change. There needs to be an American Spring, I think, that will bring change to to the 1st World countries, but not violent change -- business change. I live in the U.S. and always will, but I am here to tell you that capitalism is out of control and there needs to be reform.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
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
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.
...
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.)
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
Don't worry, technological advances will soon make this CEO dream come true and allow workers to work remotely, effectively acting as an egalizer between western countries and the rest of the world and thus demoting everyone from the status of spoiled slave/worker to the status of "frugal" salve. ;-)
Nobody is saying that capitalism is good for the country. It only profits the capitalists. Nationalism is hopelessly outdated.
The truth hurts?
Is that why everyone is in denial about the simple fact that over 90% of the population are slaves?
Everybody is having grandiose fantasies after watching too many Hollywood movies and thus unable to face the hard, cold truth?
Of course, if everybody would cooperate in ousting the masters the whole charade would be over in one day.
Of course, divide-and-conquer has proven to be super-effective since the dawn of humanity...
The Media (such as NPR counts as The Media) is just now figuring this (#)%@ out? Regular buncha @)(%)@% Sherlock Homies, ain't ya?
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
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.
I may have taken a decade or two, but I'm thrilled NPR covered this.
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.
Another reason everyone should walk out from their mortgages....
New Economic Perspectives