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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
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...
Is there any other business with such an age bias, beyond sports and teen pop idols. You don't see lawyers or accountants being treated like this, nor architects or mechanical engineers. There is no reason whatsoever for a youth culture in IT and programming, experience is more valuable than anything else in this business, moreso than most other businesses.
job based health care hurts 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
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
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).
It is a form of bondage though, as those workers have no freedom to move to a different company on that visa. They are tied to the company. Therefore, they have to accept a lower wage because there is no threat of them leaving for a competitor.
The other day I was thinking. If you want to deal with unemployment, just federally mandate 40-hour workweeks maximum for anybody who is not a partial owner of a company (minimum of 1%). Some employers would instantly have to hire almost double the workforce, because they couldn't force everyone to work 80-hour weeks anymore. Companies would have to hire and train people. Unemployment would go through the floor and the number of people that could afford things would go up, meaning that it should spike the GDP in a very positive way. It would also, take money back from the rich to the middle class...
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
It is a form of bondage though, as those workers have no freedom to move to a different company on that visa. They are tied to the company. Therefore, they have to accept a lower wage because there is no threat of them leaving for a competitor.
The company doesn't have the incentive to increase salary because the barrier to switch jobs for the employee is very high. The employee could grow in experience and skill to be "Senior" while making an entry-level wage (which is still higher than back home). But the employee must work to increase their abilities or the corporation might cancel their visa and hire someone more capable.
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.
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...
That's socialism!
(Yes some asshole will say this and it won't happen even if it makes fucking sense and would 100% without a doubt save the US economy and it won't happen)
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'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!
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