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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!
"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 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.
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.
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...
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.
How many stories like this must happen before workers are compelled to protect themselves?
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.
So can I make money hiring underemployed older IT workers and marketing their labor for top dollar?
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
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'
It is illegal to pay a H1B worker less than the prevailing rate.
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.
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
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
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
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).
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!
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...
Move to an area with a drastic shortage of IT talent like California (LA, Orange County or Bay Area). Every company I know has open reqs and can't find anyone to fill them. If you are any good at all, you could be making six figures within 5 years.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
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!
I actually happen to agree with the theoretical basis for the H1-B. Which is to allow foreign workers to supply skills that we have in short supply. Although being in short supply would imply that someone, somewhere is failing on the job.
But if that's really what H1-Bs were, the laws of Supply and Demand would mandate that people with these allegedly rare skills would be in a buyer's market and demanding a premium income. Instead we see H1-B wages routinely less than their domestic counterparts.
If we closed just that one loophole it would make a world of difference.
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
Because the best way to avoid being burgled is to burn down your house.
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.
Please do not equate number of job postings with actual job availability. Many postings are headhunter duplications. Some are false postings to present the appearance of meeting legal requirements or for PR purposes.
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!
Bullshit. Corporate greed is what hurts everyone but the 1%.
FTFY
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....
Move to an area with a drastic shortage of IT talent like California (LA, Orange County or Bay Area). Every company I know has open reqs and can't find anyone to fill them. If you are any good at all, you could be making six figures within 5 years.
...and even with that six figure income still not be able to afford to buy a house within a decently short commute of where you work.
I looked at moving from Colorado to the Bay area a few years back. We would have had to sell our nice 2400 sq. ft. house in a nice suburb and move to a 650 sq. ft. fixer upper in a not so nice neighborhood that costs 3X what we could get for our current house. We decided not to move. I lived in the L.A. area from 1980 to 1994. I knew people then who had two hour (one way) commutes in order to actually be able to afford a house (e.g., in Riverside or San Bernadino counties).
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
Or 6 months, if you get hired working in your field. But 6 figures doesn't buy you much of anything in the Bay area; it's tight, and you'll be hounded by your utility and fuel bills after the huge amount you'll be spending on property taxes, etc.
No, the only way you can make this work is if you do it for a short period of time in your early 20s. But of course, you'd be making half that, and would have to dorm up with half a dozen other early-20s people to make it work..
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
... 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.
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.
We are all being enslaves by the international bankers.
Despite the name, the international bankers are monolithic, monoethnic, and monoracial.
New Economic Perspectives