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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!
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!
'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 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.
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.
...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
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.
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.
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?
That's ok - he's an executive director. I bet he gets a golden fuck off. It's like a golden parachute except ... well there's no except. He gets paid to fuck off. Unlike any other sector of the work force. He gets paid to be a cunt to people.
'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.
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.
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.
Since he's 100% overhead, think we need to replace him with an H1B
Where's that old Onion article about the CEO outsourcing himself?
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.
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
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/
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.
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.
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.
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).
Last I checked - this week - even young 22 year old university graduates are facing uncertain job prospects these days.
There is no shortage of jobs. There is also no shortage of employees. Mostly what there is is a mismatch in pay.
Companies don't want to pay what it takes to get good talent and good talent doesn't want to take jobs that pay less
than average. There are lots of programming jobs for someone decent if they are willing to work for 50k. There are
also plenty of programmers if you are willing to pay 100k. The perceived shortage on both sides is caused by the spread.
The company I work for is always hiring and can't find any programmers solely because they are unable and/or unwilling
to pay the price necessary to attract them.