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More On the Disposable Tech Worker
Jim_Austin writes "At a press conference this week, in response to a question by a Science Careers reporter, Scott Corley, the Executive Director of immigration-reform group Compete America, argued that retraining workers doesn't make sense for IT companies. For the company, he argued, H-1B guest workers are a much better choice. 'It's not easy to retrain people,' Corley said. 'The further you get away from your education the less knowledge you have of the new technologies, and technology is always moving forward.'"
Don't throw your disposable tech workers in the trash. Recycle!
No, its not easy to retain people with an attitude like that....
...IT people are special! They don't need unions because they are so *valuable* to their company that the company wouldn't dare not treat them well!!
Right until their company dares to do so. And they have no alternatives. Idiots.
I suspect he means "not cheap"
FTFA:
"The biggest slap in the face to all of us here is we have to train all of our replacements," said the IT worker. Once that training is completed, the IT workers receive severance pay. Some employees were offered jobs with the offshore firms, but at lower salaries and with reduced benefits, he said.
There's no reason they couldn't be training Americans to replace those jobs.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Yup...
The almighty dollar wins again
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
No that doesnt sounds like a conflict of interest there.
--- I was far from home, and the spell of the Eastern sea was upon me. -Lovecraft-
'The further you get away from your education the less knowledge you have of the new technologies
*cough*BULLSHIT*cough*
Does this guy think that the ONLY place you learn about new things is in school? Is he one of those pointy-haired bosses that doesn't think you know anything unless you have a "cert"?
Technology is always marching forward. EVERYONE needs to march along with it. In real-time. On the job. Constantly.
(That said, I'm an embedded engineer working in C. I'm "revolutionizing" this codeshop by showing them unit testing. And no Larry, just because we refer to them as "units" doesn't mean the blackbox testing we do is "unit-testing". WOOHOO for being on the cutting edge... of the 1970's...)
I'm still with it, see?
I'm in my late 40s and over the process of 25 years have re-trained myself at least four times to meet the changing nature of IT, and the fact that empires rise and fall.
Re-training is an essential part of a long IT career, not an option at all. To be honest, I paid for my own re-training because nothing concentrates the mind like putting a lot of money into essential skills and vocational training.
The reason why they want more H1-Bs is straightforward - its a lot cheaper. Not better. Cheaper.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
I am laughing at that quote. I'm not sure you could be more insulting to domestic OR H-1B workers with a statement like that.
As it turns out, most workers are human beings, with individual qualities. Some docestic workers may be reluctant to retrain, others may embrace the opportunity and excel. Likewise, some people with H-1B visas may be incompetent, and others may be valuable contributors.
... to write good, maintainable software. Most college kids these days don't even know what a pointer is. I've had recent college grads ask me how to read a stack trace. I've had college kids who don't know the difference between unit testing, integration testing, and system testing. Sure, maybe they could crank out a Ruby on Rails web site as efficiently as someone with 10+ years of experience. But those are entry level jobs. Most things I learned about software development, I didn't learn in college. I learned them first as a hobbyist, and second with experience in industry. In summary, this argument is BS. Yes, you have to work to keep up on your skills, and yes, it can be time-consuming and hard. But companies who are looking to save money by hiring less experienced workers who happen to have the right skills are setting themselves up for long-term failure. Luckily there are companies out there who realize this.
Ahh yes. The "Because, Markets ; Go Die!" school of philosophy. Neoliberalism (aka the I-had-fun-playing-a-hippie-when-I-dodged-the-draft-but-now-I-want-cash) thinking at its finest.
May the Maths Be with you!
If you want to hire young, recently trained people so you can use them up and discard them before they hit 40, go right ahead and do so.
But don't expect any special help to further your goals.
Those people can simply move to america and become citizens if they want to work you. The whole H1-B visa thing is bullshit.
Or here's another idea. Instead of whining about the impracticality of retraining "old" tech people, why not help them keep their skills up to date while they are working?
Its called an investment! Its not just about money. Investments include your people. If you treat them right, and invest in them, you will get better results.
I'm really getting tired of the American mentality of just using up resources and discarding whats left. Its time to stop being the rugged individualists who just consume everything in their path, and start being members of a functional society that works together and supports one another in a conservationist manner.
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
Corley,
You are an idiot. You fail to grasp the difference between knowledge, skills, and experience. Training and education provide knowledge. The ability to apply that knowledge effectively is a skill. Repeatedly applying knowledge and skills creates a virtuous cycle called experience which increases productivity. Productivity is what increases the bottom line. Sometimes that might even take longer than a quarter...
You're a douche with no understanding of the real world.
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
We would much rather pay the cost of having younger workers make the mistakes the older workers learned to avoid. This is the problem we see repeatedly. Younger workers buy into the "Oh look, new, shiny!" Older workers look at this "new" idea and say, "Didn't we try that 5 years ago? and 5 years before that? It didn't work either of those times either."
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
For the company, he argued, H-1B guest workers are a much better choice.
Sure. Why not just take us all out back, put us against the wall, and shoot us? Real responsible attitude, corporate America. What a bunch of fucking jerks. Go ahead, loot and pillage the U.S., what the hell do you care anyway?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Statements like these are all the more reason aging tech workers like myself need to build their own businesses so they don't have to rely on the "good graces" of an employer.
The thing is, they are not better. They are cheaper in the short run but bad for companies in the longer term. The problem is that the people making these decisions are insulated from the impact of them, so naturally the people who actually pay the cost of short term thinking take it upon themselves to try to do something about it.
It should also be noted tat these workers are an excellent example of how poorly "free market" implementations do when they collide with other forces. Foreign workers are cheap for non-economic reasons, employers hold their immigration status over their head, they can squeeze lower wages out of them due to the ever present threat of having to leave the country. Citizens are harder to threaten so you have to pay them closer to what they are worth.
There is also the classic game theory problem here that every industry wants OTHER industries to have well paid domestic workers since those are its customers.
Well, that's what I assume. Because according to his own theory, that's when he was at his best, and it went downhill from then on. After five years, Scott Corley is a bumbling idiot, after ten years an imbecile.
Companies collude illegally to limit wage competition and when that was discovered they started to pay lobbyists to work on H-1B reforms instead. If they want to lower their wage costs let them burn more billions into overseas outsourcing.
Right in both cases. I narrowly avoided a layoff by learning a new skill and jumping at the right time. But the issue in our case wasn't retraining (the company ended up blowing time and money training the H1-B "guests" anyway) it was simply the desire to pay third world salaries.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
It should also be noted tat these workers are an excellent example of how poorly "free market" implementations do when they collide with other forces. Foreign workers are cheap for non-economic reasons, employers hold their immigration status over their head, they can squeeze lower wages out of them due to the ever present threat of having to leave the country. Citizens are harder to threaten so you have to pay them closer to what they are worth.
Which is why H1-B's should come with visa portability. After say, 3 months, they can change employers and keep their visas. That would show if they truly are paid "US market wages" and just how important they are to address a "shortage of US workers with the requisite skills."
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
...accountants, engineers, and all the other professionals who must stay current in their training.
Retaining knowledge of both software and business requirements is the 4th of Lehman's Laws of Software Development, Conservation of Familiarity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
And that law is from 1978. Such knowledge isn't even as recent as the 1980s (a lesson approaching 40 years in age, I was five at the time...), it should be basic guidance at this point in time.
Anyone that doesn't realize how important knowledge of the business and operations are is one that should be ignored completely.
Advice: Always seek to learn as much as possible about the business and how it operates/interacts with the external world. This is the secret to NOT being disposable. It's also a great way to meets VP and C-Level executives.
BlameBillCosby.com
The H1B visa holders have less experience and require equal or more training than the old workers. They just do the job at $50K instead of $75K.
And that's the REAL reason the companies like them.
Eventually, tech workers are going to have to demand pay like sports stars, and for the same reason: you only get an extremely abbreviated career, in your youth, that lasts maybe ten years, and by the time you hit your mid 30s, you're done. During that time, you need to make enough money to last the rest of your life. The only difference is that a tech worker doesn't face the risk of a work-related, career-ending injury in the same way that a pro athlete does.
but if foreign CEOs can do the work better, then surely we should be flooding the market with replacement CEOs who can maximise shareholder value way better than the old, stuck-in-the-mud, golden-handshake-even-if-they-screw-up CEOs who have done very little to deal with the changing world of technology and business and much to feather their own nests.
Surely....
It's great for the bottom line but not so good for the society.
The reasonings that are given mean nothing.
The only reason they want H1B worker is financial benefit. All the rest is spin.
Please don't take this as H1B's are cheaper or inferior -- that argument is a distraction.
Put down the crack pipe. That stuff is bad for your teeth.
The further you get away from your education the less knowledge you have of the new technologies, and technology is always moving forward
The thing is, if you got a quality education, or even a sub-par one but made up for it with natural talent, you never "get away from your education" because technology, like other science, just builds on existing technology. The core of it doesn't change.
Obviously as it becomes more complicated, it requires more specialization, so there is a chance your chosen specialization may get pruned off the technology tree, but again that only means you have to go back to the last branch that goes to something active.
Furthermore, once you're done with school, you start your next round of schooling: conferences, documentation, "nothing we have now will do it right so lets find a new way." It is the very basis of every creative mind out there.
This is about money. More of it in his pocket at any expense to others. Pure and simple.
I've worked at companies where they used temp workers like Kleenix; blow your nose in it once and throw away. Their in-house software is noticeably harder to maintain and lower quality than the rest of the industry. And that's saying a lot since the rest of the industry is shit. No one there knows anything about the company, its business process or anything in-depth about the software. If all you care about is making shit products for people who don't know any better and who probably won't sue you very often if your shit products suck, I guess that's a decent business practice. At least until a company that takes the smallest amount of pride in its work comes along and runs you out of business.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I have retrained myself a number of times - even paid thousands of dollars of my own money for it.
The question: How do you get around the requirement for 'on the job' experience of your new skills?
All of my re-training was worthless because I didn't have any paid experience in those skills. I volunteer and that is not good enough either. It has to be paid experience and at least two years of it - from the feedback I am getting.
Take a bridge job, where some fraction of your time can be dedicated to applying those new skills. Presto: two years experience on your resume.
Sometimes a lateral move is not actually lateral, if it gets you resume-fodder that you believe you're going to need to advance your career.
We can't learn new technologies when your whole day is spent working on OLD technologies.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
'The further you get away from your education the less knowledge you have of the new technologies, and technology is always moving forward.'"
I guess that assumes that
1) We, as techworkers, don't learn from our experience.
2) That there is no carry over of concepts from one tech to another.
3) That the technology changes so much that we cannot or do not learn new stuff constantly in the process of working and learning.
4) The technology is the sole thing. There are businesses to be understood and adequately communicated and documented. There is misinterpretation between two engineers who speak the same language, so of course there will be misinterpretation amongst different cultures and standards.
I think there have been plenty of times where I really did things right was after I did them wrong the first time. Other times, one must know a lot to be productive. Yes, we can write 100K lines of code, but if we don't understand how it all interrelates to other components, most of that is not used.
5) That foreigners want to work as slaves for their American masters. I bet within the next decade, we will lose our ability to do any technology here because we will have lost the number of experienced workers to do the design and architecture. I welcome that because it is the only way that the elite will see that tech just doesn't happen overnight. A society that looses its competitive edge will not get it back easily. Look at Germany after WWII. Prior to WW1, Germany was the scientific and intellectual powerhouse in the world. look at the number of Nobel Prizes in physics and chemistry. Since the end of WWII, most intellectuals left to contribute elsewhere. After WWII, there has been a massive brain drain on its economy at a time when Germany needed to rebuild its cities and infrastructure. Another point in fact is that many German rocket scientists went back in the 1970's.
Very soon, you will have major businesses spring up in India and China run by people who repatrioted after learning here. If you ever talk to your Indian counterparts, you will learn that many of them intend to return after their 7 year visa runs out. They know that they are not wanted here, so this will happen from a variety of factors.
make min wage $20 hr so that worker can live on that mcjob they get after being pushed out of tech.
To me, the whole concept of the former "personnel" department becoming "human resources" is a reflection of the mindset that real people with real desires to advance, and real desires to keep up with technical changes and advances, and real desires to feel like we're really contributing to the success of our company are, well, passe. In that mindset, we're all just "resources" that can fit onto a spreadsheet or HR template. A true story from my days at Dialogic - a company that made telecom gear. After finally getting management buy-in to release a Linux version, I was in a meeting with engineering management and they started wondering about getting the "resources" to do the driver and porting work. I suggested looking at working to get some input from some experienced open-source driver maintainers on a contract basis to get some of our existing Solaris versions ported. They laughed and said "Oh, we can't do that! We'll just pull some resources from our Windows team and they'll be fine." Ha! For some reason, they just couldn't grasp the concept that there was experience, knowledge and - ultimately - passion for what you are doing that translates into real achievement.
>> H-1B guest workers are a much better choice. 'It's not easy to retrain people,' Corley said. '
In my experience most H1B guest workers are exactly the ones who need the most training, even just in order to properly perform the job they are already coming in for. Learning valuable skills appears to be exactly the reason many come to the US in the first place.
There is no lack of IT workers in the US, just a lack of IT workers who will work for minimum wage. The only reason companies claim they need more H1Bs is because H1B workers will work for cheap.
to know how transferable this view is. Does it apply to lobbyists too?
You never know...
Right in both cases. I narrowly avoided a layoff by learning a new skill and jumping at the right time. But the issue in our case wasn't retraining (the company ended up blowing time and money training the H1-B "guests" anyway) it was simply the desire to pay third world salaries.
I've never seen an H1-B worker in the U.S. that cost the company a third world salary, rather than a first world salary. This is true for H1-B's at Google, IBM, Facebook, and Apple.
The closest I've seen to an H1-B worker *being paid* a third world salary is an H1-B worker (effectively) indentured to a contracting agency by the contracting agency holding the H1-B registration for the worker, and being unwilling to legally transfer it, and taking a huge chunk of the workers paycheck. I saw that happen for several contract workers at IBM. But in every case, the cost that IBM paid the contracting agency was comparable to, or in excess of, the salary an H1-B hired directly by IBM, or a U.S. worker equivalent, would have cost.
I've seen a similar boondoggle at a primarily Chinese H1-B/graduate student employing company (which was started and owned by a Korean gentleman), but that was basically a way to get MS level people at fairly cheap prices by holding their visas over their heads, and it was seriously atypical of the majority of H1-B workers or companies that hire H1-B workers as normal workers.
So yeah, there are H1-B indentured servants, but they're all pretty much at contracting companies or startups, and they are not the norm.
Instead of whining about the impracticality of retraining "old" tech people, why not help them keep their skills up to date while they are working?
The whole "retraining" attitude is BS.
YES, it's cheaper to get an already trained worker than it is to retrain an existing one! You'd have to be stupid to think that a company is going to run a training program itself, rather than contributing towards continuing education. It's about as stupid as believing that there will be a training program at your company that will make you magically competent in a way that your newly minted college degree was not able to. If they don't even have a training program in the first place, what makes you think they are going to start a *re*training program just so they can keep a high salary worker on the payroll while they come up to speed on something that a new college graduate (or someone who took advantage of the continuing education assistance program) is *already* up to speed on?
Practically speaking, every tech company I have ever worked at, including those with fewer than 50 engineers, is willing to pay for continuing education for all their workers. If you don't take advantage of the opportunity, that's on you.
So if you take advantage of ongoing training, great for you. If you don't, don't expect a voucher for retraining in the envelope containing your pink slip: you've already screwed the pooch by not keeping up to date.
We would much rather pay the cost of having younger workers make the mistakes the older workers learned to avoid.
Older workers avoid repeating mistakes -- true... as far as it goes.
I don't think this is an issue when the product your company is building is a social networking web site that you plan on rewriting every couple of weeks anyway in an "iterative process" of getting to the point where Facebook will buy you out. If the old code doesn't work very well, fire the programmers that wrote it, get new bodies in to write the next version, and be done with it. For the parts that actually do work, well, don't fire those guys, unless the parts work well enough that you don't need any more work done on them: "good enough" is the enemy of "better" -- and they can't be thrown over on some other code you need worked on.
If you are working on disposable code, then you're a disposable worker, period. If someone uses the magic work "iterate" in your job interview, take that as a strong clue that you will be working on disposable code.
.... I'm confused as to how this is liberalism???
If foreign workers can do the work better, cheaper, etc then we should be flooding the market with H1-B's. It's the free market principle at work - trying to artificially inflate the value of tech jobs by limiting competition is a fool's errand that will ultimately not work. We live and work in a global economy now, and trying to fight it goes against all the free market principles that this country was founded on and made us great a hundred years ago.
If foreign workers can do the job better and cheaper, and we actually do live and work in a global economy...
Why does 95+% of the world's high-quality commercial software come out of the US?
I don't know how to build a mud hut. I grew up in a place that not only didn't require that of me, but actively discouraged it ("What the HELL did you do to the lawn this time???"). I do, however, know computers like my life depended on it, because realistically, I do make my living knowing them. I grew up in an era when the PC counted as a cool new thing, and transitioned into a workforce that considered my background extremely valuable.
If you want a programmer - You want me, at any price. If you want a mud hut, you'd do well to pass me over. The same applies in reverse.
No they shouldn't. An H1-B is only to be used to fill a very specific gap where someone in already the country for other reasons (citizen, green card etc) could not be found. If the H1-B is free to move around at will, it goes against the spirit of why they are allowed in in the first place. This would be a slap in the face to the people already here. Although I think the way H1-B's are used now is already a slap in the face.
1st, tell the whore that is fucking you in the ass to climb down.
FTFU
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Now if we could keep finding new doctors where each new doctor does the job for 25% less then the old one until the cost is 25% of what it originally cost... hmmm. Then we'd have doctors that suck as bad as new code and outsourced tech support.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
He's kind of half-right, and the part he's right about is why I left the IT industry entirely. I just couldn't keep up, the skills churn was just too much and I couldn't devote enough time to learning the constant parade of new buzzwords just to continue to be able to do my job, while also having to do my job.
I knew quite a few people who were in various IT careers a few years ago, but have universally washed out and are now technical managers or in entirely different industries. The few who did stick around managed to do so because IT was both their career and hobby, and so they had home labs that were always running the latest-and-greatest of anything. Windows 8 was the straw that broke the camel's back, and I quit. Now I'm a technical manager too.
The industry moves too quickly, and requires a level of continuous retraining that's unlike anything else in existence. I'm not at all surprised it's better - for many reasons - to hire a new temp or employee than it is to retrain someone.
The real solution is we admit this experiment in "free trade" is the root cause of the wealth gap. Making the world smaller isn't really such a good thing. I say lets dump the income tax, lets dump NAFTA, shutter the WTO and go back to funding government with import tariffs.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
And if they aren't free to move around, then they aren't being paid a competitive wage. They are being paid a slave wage, even if $150,000. They will be a criminal if they don't work for that wage while in the US. The current H1-B system goes against the spirit of why they are allowed in in the first place. They are here to be paid a market wage for a skill gap that can't be filled by an American. But, in practice, they are used to avoid hiring Americans who demand more money.
Learn to love Alaska
Every time a company treats me as disposable, I treat them as disposable. Quid pro quo, Clarice. Oh jeez I wonder why Microsoft is failing and Linux is exploding... I wonder why Adobe is going to hell... I can't wait to see Google go down in the near future as well.
On one hand, it is normal business practice to maximize profits, though not necessarily for the benefit of the share holders. On the other hand, it is normal for the working class to sell their skill, ingenuity and labor in exchange for money (profit). Furthermore companies expect some amount of loyalty from the employees, valuing it only for so long as it benefits the company. The company on the other hand is under no obligation to have any loyalty to the employee.
This is a workable system so long as the required skill set changes slowly enough for employees to adapt and sustain themselves. This is still the case in certain industries like construction, home remodeling, etc. But in technology, new skill requirements pop up as fast as they can be invented and job experience greater than 3 years is irrelevant.
With the development of advanced IT management systems, as well as the outsourcing to lower paid foreign workers, American workers and their jobs are being eliminated. This is to be expected because it is normal to think that companies are always going to be trying to lower their expenses. The problem here is that this is creating an imbalance between the demand and supply of skils and labor.
The reason this is a problem is that it is eroding the middle class and it is middle class demand that is the source of economic activity. The reason 3rd World countries have stagnant economies and a lack of economic opportunity is there is no middle class and no middle class demand. Without a middle class and the money it has to spend, there's nobody to sell goods and services to. Sadly this is the direction that America is inexorably headed.
Today middle class jobs are being eliminated by outsourcing and advancing knowledge systems. We're not that far away from AI systems that will much, much further erode middle class jobs. It won't just be IT workers that will get it. it will be bankers, lawyers, workers in the insurance industry, etc.
IBM's Watson is now being used to invent new cuisines and is doing a pretty good job of it.
The demand for human labor and ingenuity is quickly being phased out as technology advances along with the issues of globalization. Therefore the fundamental premise that people can provide for themselves through the exchange of skill, ingenuity and labor is quickly being made obsolete, and this will fundamentally break our economic system. Futurists of the past would speculate that our society would become so rich that humans would only work because they wanted to and that we would have almost unlimited wealth and leisure time. But that isn't the way it's going is it? When there no longer is enough work to be had, there will a permanent underclass of poor in America, just as it is normal in the 3rd World.
I was an MVS sys prog who saw the change coming in the 90s, totally retrained myself at the age of 45 to be a Windows and LAN sysadmin plus knowledge of how to system integrate the old world and the new, apparently was an excellent sysadmin and network guy and got paid top dollar. I then moved on learning all about the Internet etc still keeping myself up to date. Scott Corely may be correct its hard to teach old dogs new tricks but if they really want to do it they can, and so at least give them a chance.
For the company, he argued, H-1B guest workers are a much better choice. 'It's not easy to retrain people,' Corley said.
No doubt this is true - hiring cheap indentured laborers without rights is more profitable. Which is why they must be denied that option.
Corporations would employ sweat shops with child labor here*, if we let them. But we don't because while it would be profitable for the sweatshop operator, it would be bad for everybody else.
If the choice is retraining workers, and not having the workers they need, they will most definitely stop throwing away their workforce.
*Yes, I know they do that overseas.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
"Neo-Liberalism" != Liberalism. Go figure. Liberalism generally means progressive socialism. "Neo-Liberalism" is really just the old "Libertarian" crap Rand Paul and his ilk spew. Basically you're free to do whatever unless you want to eat, or have a house, or health care. "Neo-Liberals" cheerfully ignore the power of money when they calculate freedom. That's more or less what (I think) the grandparent's post is getting at. .
The word's been co-opted by the Libertarian types.
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they're better in the long run in every way. First, they work harder because they're desperate. Yes, they make mistakes, but they'll work 80 hours correcting those mistakes. Second, they lower the overall cost of labor (by increasing the supply of labor).
See, you're thinking like a worker. Start thinking like an _owner_. Like someone who does nothing all day except _own_ stuff, and it'll make more sense. The owners aren't paying attention to how much wealth is created. They're just interested in how much of it is theirs. After a certain amount of money it stops being money and starts being power. When you lose, they gain.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
the replacements are under heavy duress. They quality will drop for a little bit, but they'll work 80 hours a week to catch up since the alternative is abject poverty and starvation. If the first batch doesn't do it the next one will.
:P.
Also, I think you underestimate the cost savings. I can get a programmer in India for $1200 a month tops (that's everything, benefits, taxes, computer. _everything_). The cheapest American is 10 times that. Are you really 10 times more productive? If you are, you should be working for google
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
For quite a long time now it's become clear that the only way to survive retrenchment is to plan for it -- which leaves you faced with options that all suck. Since forever, I've banked 10% of my pay and 50-75% of my annual leave. It seems impossible until you realise necessary > impossible. At 47, I was retrenched, but had the accumulated resources to retrain myself from C++ desktop to C# web/enterprise. I wrote software all day every day, and the interviews where I excelled were the ones that required a coding competency demonstration. I nailed two positions pretty much at the same time with absolutely nil commercial C# experience. I'm presently with a consultancy as a senior dev on a senior consulting track, mentoring work mates and clients in a language I had barely touched two years ago.
My advice is cold call some consulting groups, keeping in mind relocation and travel may be necessary. I've found them much more switched on than the pointy hairs leading in-house teams.
Some of us "wingnuts" wanted to slow down the immigration flood, you know ... but we must just be racists. Yeah, that's it.
That'd be "E" for "Evil"...
The H1-E visa would be used to bring in cheap lobbyists and corporate CEOs from outside the U.S.
I'd bet we can get CEOs and Lobbyists from India and China for even less money than the high-tech workers... after all, there's NO skill required beyond flapping your lips while exhaling. If the program proves to be successful (which is nearly guaranteed) then we can use the same visa program to import politicians, lawyers and judges, who similarly lack, not only any usable skills, but also any accountability standards and/or objective value. Hell, now that things like Skype exist, we do not really even need visas for this, we could just teleconference with the judges, politicians, lawyers, CEOs and lobbyists who could stay in their home countries (where money goes further) thus making the whole scheme even cheaper (hooray!)
Sure, it's all very absurd, but as long as these dirtbags think this is the perfect way to deal with American STEM workers while they themselves feel free from the threat of replacement by cheap foreign labor, this will continue.... and No, unions are NOT a way to deal with the problem (unions in America are almost unanimously allied with the Democrat political party which count lawyers among their most important constituents and wall st bankers as their most important funders)
but not until then
With respect that's just as stupid an idea now as it was in 1200.
30k isn't the pool, dumbass.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
They're required to be paid the going rate for the job. The problem is that the program doesn't check to see if the company is legitimately unable to find somebody to do the job before allowing them to hire through the program.
Nobody is checking to see it's market rate, either.
Learn to love Alaska
New management want to re-invent the wheel. They reckon there's a better way to do it.
If they last long enough they will refine and change their management strategies until
they start looking like their older forbears well tested methods.
Unless they get displaced by the new generation of f___ing know it alls.
It's not just IT.
At a recent induction to a global construction corporation we were all told for increased
safety we all had to have 2 reflective stripes on our pants or we wouldn't get on site.
Remember Dr Seus - The Star Belly Sneeches.
The only thing wrong with Australian workers is f___ing management.
Go well
Tech workers will endlessly bitch and moan about how unfair all of this is. As if that all that griping would actually change anything.
If you want to change anything, you need to organize, raise money, and lobby.
Like it or not, that is how the government works: money talks, and bullshit walks. And complaining, without campaign contributions, is just bullshit.
Doctors, lawyers, and others learned to organize, and protect their careers. Tech workers do just the opposite. Tech workers stab each other in the back so they will be the last ones fired.
Funny thing is: the visa workers are also victims of all this.
Techies are smart in some ways, but not very smart in others.
Why not doctors, lawyers, accountants, engineers, scientists, teachers, etc?
Laws, accounting practices, medical practices, etc. change all the time.
In most professions, you get more valuable as you gain experience. Why do people think it's the opposite in tech?
Why does 95+% of the world's high-quality commercial software come out of the US?
This is a good point. I always laugh that people are so naive to think that outsourcing is a good idea.
If 3rd world countries could build great software they would be first world countries, yet...they aren't.
Silicon Valley is not in India or China or BFE.... That doesn't mean that there aren't talented people from those countries in Silicon Valley..Yet they are in Silicon Valley... My opinion is that outsourcing is mostly a scam, I would never do it in my company.
in my field - (network operations/engineering) - my skillset has to essentially rotate out every few years - a CCIE told me if we weren't learning whole new skillsets, we were obsolete in 5 years -
having said that, being in a huge company with a complicated network gives one a bit of security from knowledge of where things work, but several old timers I knew grinding till retirement let their skills go - and as the legacy technology went out, they became less and less useful till they were basically 1st level techs
RB
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ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
There are many companies and industries that do not have a good reputation among workers for taking care of older or burned out employees. Unless it is a time of very limited job openings it means that younger workers will demand far higher starting wages and better raises to stay with a company. If a potential employee is not smart enough to insist upon fair pay and some very real assurance of doing well then you really do not want to hire him anyway. The old, vague promises of yesteryear will no longer work. One tactic an employee can use is to start a new job by casually asking how many people around him in the business are long time employees. If there are too many fairly new workers it may be time to leave before you even start.
So if the average graduate at age 22, spent 4 years learning the latest and greatest and is obsolete at age 40,
that makes his degree good for 18 years. Couldn't that same person at age 40 go back to school for 4 years,
graduate at age 44 and be good for another 18 years which would get him all the way to age 62 and ready to
retire.
Actually, it depends on where the $20 comes from. I hate to say it, but if it is "redistributed" then no the economy will not inflate.
I laugh at inappropriate times.
No. Refusing to do a task is insubordination and grounds for termination.
See http://www.edd.ca.gov/UIBDG/Ab...
If you have an ethical or philosophical objection to training a replacement on the basis of the company terminating you afterward in order to save money, and they have no other reason (which they could not, given they feel you are qualified to train), then you can refuse, and if terminated for refusal, claim benefits.
This is just wrong thinking on so many levels and it is what drives executives to make bad decisions. Let me give you an example to make it clear.
Let say you are earning a salary of $80K and your company needs someone to come up to speed on "hot new technology". They could hire someone for $100K, if they could find them, but that would take months and you would have to take time to teach them all the company internals, lost productivity etc. Instead of trying to hire said new guy, they could send you to training and up your pay to $100K which is fair market value for "hot new technology". Now in the next year, you use "hot new technology" to create an extra $50K of value for the business. The business, over the next year, come out ahead $30K ($50K value - $20K extra salary).
Win for the business, win for the employee. The problem is that businesses are too stupid to see past the next quarter. They are all chasing lowest cost option even if it does not create long term value for the business.
The consulting / recruiting companies won't leave me alone, but all their jobs are half my current payrate...
Right as I was getting laid off from IBM, they came out with this idea were they would transfer Americans to India, and pay you an Indian wage! Then they used it as PR saying "well, we offered EVERYONE the chance to 'keep their job!'" even though it required uprooting your entire family and leaving the country. Now, if your single and adventurous it might be fun, and even at an "equal wage" in India an American can have a colonial England lifestyle (maids, butlers, etc) but still...to me it sounded like an idea cooked up by a bunch of drunk frat-boy marketers.
people like him often don't even stay at a company for five years...they come in, fire all the real workers, bring H1-B's in, drive up stock prices, then bail before the whole thing collapses.
Dee: You're saying that your life is so terrible because you eat rat cheese and cat food and huff glue all day long?
More worrisome is our recruitment of workers from the same area we're "fighting terrorists" in. When I was at ATnT, we had a "scandal" were some contractors in Malaysia were funneling money to Al Queda, the FBI was involved and such. It's awesome to have a contractor from some place who is contracted to some Indian company, who is then contracted to IBM, who is then contracted to National Grid, who runs the power system in a large chunk of the northeast US. They don't need to hack anything, we just handed them a laptop with VPN access into various production servers. I wouldn't be surprised if right now there is some sleeper code on various systems no one realizes is there, because there are too many vendors to watch everything. NG has 20+ domain controller clusters in the US alone...someone could darken 1/4 of the US just by kidnapping a developer over there and forcing their password / VPN PIN out of them (if it's not written on a post-it stuck inside the laptop).
if...if...if they take my stapler I'll...I'll set the building on fire
Are Foreign Guest Workers Preferable to Retraining?
No, since their existence is to undermine citizens with a supplicant labor pool. To agree with their existence is un-American in the most possible way.
The only way to fix it is to rip out every single immigration law down to pre-1965 statutes and regulations. Then "handle" the lobbyists that defend a practice that has invited fraud and abuse for as long as it ever existed.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
The guest workers can be paid whatever wage, but their lower level of freedom makes them desirable to businesses.
That, and some companies will link severance to non-disclosure of the offshoring/guest worker programs.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
make the executive rethink the idea or try to figure out ways to avoid the previous mistake
Precisely. This is the flip side of the equation. Often older workers forget that there might have been a simple, single reason why their previous effort failed. A reason that perhaps we can avoid or has been done away with advances in technology.
As a manager I always appreciated a comment such as "last time the difficulties in that approach were A, B and C" over the comment "impossible, we tried it it didn't work". The former allows the team (we always discuss things such as these as a group) to evaluate if we want to call the whole thing off or if we can forestall those issues somehow and its worth a second attempt at grabbing the ring.
It is cheaper to host the company abroad than import executives to run a company that is mostly on the other side of the planet.
Because good people are hard to find and great people are rare as hen's teeth.
"Aw, screw it we'll hire a bunch of new h1bs" is the thinking of someone who's accepted mediocrity as his standard. And it makes sense to encourage others to adopt that attitude too.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
shh. you'll be telling those executives that do this that their jobs are safe while they destroy yours. That's not the idea behind my post.
I do wonder what the market would be like if only foreign H1B workers were allowed to be corporate officers in America. Of course, fat chance.
Since you can't change employers under an H-1B, it's not a free market. Which is why the employers love them. It's not a lack of talent that they're trying to fill; it's a lack of CHEAP talent.
I always read complaints about the "disposable tech worker" but never the "disposable tech company". There's almost no company loyalty these days. Which is fine, since obviously there's not a lot of loyalty to employees either. That's the world we live in. But it cuts both ways. My company might lay me off rather than retrain me. Okay. But I might leave my company for another job if it happens to involve some cool new technology I want to learn. Or if they have beer in the break room. Or if they pay me a couple thousand more a year. Or if my manager looks at me funny one day. And, in doing so, I could totally leave my employer in the lurch in a way they, to be honest, can't do to me. If a tech worker has marketable skills (which is not true of every tech worker) then he's really in the driver's seat. Laid off? No problem; he can get another job inside two weeks. If he's an integral part of his current employer's team, though, then the potential for him to damage their bottom line by leaving suddenly is much bigger.
so Neo-Nazism is not Nazism? Who'd a thunk it!
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Any consulting company worth working for will be paying substantially more than the same job would get as an in-house resource. They may try to offer you less but what they will really pay should be more. Try negotiating.
... I've learned a few things. 1. Technology is continually changing. 2. It is up to me to be continually learning; no one else can, or will, do it for me. 3. The underlying principles and concepts remain the same, so someone with a good grasp of them will be useful IF THEY WANT TO BE USEFUL. 4. The best employers try to help employees keep up to date (but DO NOT RELY ON YOUR EMPLOYER FOR THIS).
linquendum tondere
But then the liberals can say they've closed the poverty gap between the rich and poor.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
The tech work that Americans don't want to do. If you are designing a new ASIC chip, then the design work is what gets you the new job, and the stuff that gets you to the next job. The boring work is writing the verification tests.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Your numbers are so far off that I can see where it is effecting your conclusions.
Let's look at the training costs. It does not take $60k (six months of lost productivity plus $20k in training) to train someone on a new technology. More like $5-10K plus 1 month productivity loss to be up to speed on said technology. It could be 1 month at 100% or 2 months at 50% if that employee is still doing is old job. If it takes longer, you should fire them for being a dumb-ass. I have learned new technology in a week at a conference for only $1K so is possible that is may cost less. There is also an opportunity cost for that first month while that employee is becoming proficient.
On the other side, you have to find the new hire with this hot technology skill while every other company is looking for him too. This is not going to be easy or fast. It can take 3 or more months to find someone like that maybe longer. You also have to train him on the company, systems, environment, team, duties, adminstrative proceedures. This also takes time, usually much longer than training on hot new technology takes. This can be as much as 1-3 months depending on the complexity of your organization. All of this searching for, hiring and training of new employee comes in the form of lost productivity and lost opportunity costs.
Let's run the balance sheet for both scenerios.
Current employee, training - $5-10K, lost productivity - $100/12 = $8.3K, opportunity cost - $50K/12 = $4.2K. Total = $17.5K - 22.5K
New employee, training - $0K, lost productivity - $100/12 = $8.3K (for 1 month, could be as high as $25K), opportunity cost = $50/12 * 4months = $16.7K (3 months candidate search + 1 month productivity, could be as high as $25K). Total = $25K - $50K.
That fallacy of your argument is that some new hire with the hot new technology skills can be instantly found hired and brought up to speed. This is never, never the case. Also, the training costs and lost productivity with the current employee is not $60K. If your employees, are that bad, you would be better off firing them all and starting over.
This guy is a short-term thinker whose horizon is no further than the next quarter, the kind of idiot the bix schools turn out in droves. He has no idea of the complexity of knowledge needed to run most tech operations or develop them. Not to mention the risk to national security of teaching some developing world worker vital technology he can take to a nation that might become our foe tomorrow.
I cringe when I think that somehow some tech worker is regarded as just a commodity in the world economy when I know that many essential skills are hard to come by and to maintain. Technology is still changing fast so while you may know some fashionable technology that the ability to augment your knowledge or to get to some older underlying knowledge are both important.
Other businesses.
I think he's mixing up american vs european liberalism.
In Sweden at least, neo-liberals are ultra pro market people. (as are traditional liberals)
I've worked at companies where they used temp workers like Kleenex; blow your nose in it once and throw away.
It's one more reason that temporary work (or any similar third party) should not be a condition of accepting/continuing a job.
That is, if you want to be temporary, the company has to make it a competitive advantage (and by virtue of that, greater expense) to go the third party/contractor route.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
If you're treating someone that badly that money would not prevent departure, not training them only makes things worse.
You think that the employer is entitled to perfection while the people working for them have to do all the heavy lifting. That is, the employer gets a pass to make arbitrary decisions on requirements while you expect the workers to forgo economies of scale that could be attained through employer-sponsored training.
You are part of the problem and deserve whatever comes your way.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
The real reason is that the employers can keep them from moving from one employer to the next - without any thought to morale beyond threats of pulling their visa.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Not everyone is more suited to running a business than working for one. Taking your advice would be worse than taking Corley's.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
true, but very few match the benefits and vacation I currently get...plus I just sit in a NOC all night and only do "work" a couple of times a month...and my job exists because they want to be ITIL certified so they HAVE to have an ITSM team 24/7.
Right as I was getting laid off from IBM, they came out with this idea were they would transfer Americans to India, and pay you an Indian wage! Then they used it as PR saying "well, we offered EVERYONE the chance to 'keep their job!'" even though it required uprooting your entire family and leaving the country. Now, if your single and adventurous it might be fun, and even at an "equal wage" in India an American can have a colonial England lifestyle (maids, butlers, etc) but still...to me it sounded like an idea cooked up by a bunch of drunk frat-boy marketers.
I was laid off from IBM at I presume the same time (after boom.dot.bust) and can confirm that they were indeed making that offer. But from a little investigation and having been there a couple of times, I have to disagree with your assessment that an IT professional's wages could buy you the life of a lord there. IT professionals in India get paid much less than you imagine. You might be able to afford a small apartment but you may have to share a bathroom. They may *charge* a substantial wage, but most of that goes to the contracting company. (So someone is getting rich, but it ain't you.)
At about the same time, IBM tried another tack: 3 to 6 months after massive layoffs, they offered to hire some of us high five and low six figure employees back to jobs in the US at $16/hour. I don't know how successful that was.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Terrifying thought isn't it.
Not even upper management jobs and execuative jobs will be safe.
I think this is what is called a trickle up policy (off shoring or out sourcing wise) as more execuative jobs get shifted to the countries in which the work is actually done (to better integrate with the culture and workflow don't ya know). So that leaves who left in the incorporated company? The board, The CEx's and who else?
Perhaps the Boards will start shopping for the most cost efficeient CEO and CFO. I am shure in a world of 7 billion people there are many that can do a much better job for a lower cost. Thier shareholders may welcome that.