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.'"

Comments

Recycle!

[Culture20]

Don't throw your disposable tech workers in the trash. Recycle!

Re:Recycle!

[gtall]

Hear, hear!! I suppose to the boneheaded CEO, institutional memory means nothing. It is hard to quantify, but without it, your company has no staying power.

Biggest load of

[HeckRuler]

'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...)

Old dogs, huh?

[DiamondGeezer]

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.

Idiot

[Bodhammer]

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.

Too much trouble to teach older workers new tech..

[Attila Dimedici]

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."

Aging Business

[ChristopherMcGinnis]

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.

Re:Not easy?

[khasim]

Yep. It's always about money. If a company THINKS that it can get a cheaper worker to do the work that you do then that company will try to replace you.

From TFA:

In an interview, Papademetriou said that the literature on this issue "has become comfortable with a consensus that basically says that high-end immigration produces more jobs than it takes." However, he didn't put a number on the number of jobs created.

Maybe they do. After all, SOMEONE has to work at the company providing the "guest workers". But there are really TWO issues here:

1. Are the "guest workers" driving down the pay of the workers that they're replacing?

2. WHAT jobs are being created by hiring "guest workers" that would NOT be created by hiring regular workers?

Slaughter said restrictions on H-1B use have cost the U.S. economy 100,000 new direct jobs over the past year, a figure that rises to 500,000 when indirect jobs are added.

Again, TWO items:

1. WHAT are those jobs?

2. WHICH companies are trying to fill them?

He shouldn't have any problem showing tens-of-thousands of job openings that have been open for months IF WHAT HE CLAIMS IS CORRECT.

Re:This is true.

[jythie]

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.

Re:Not easy?

[roc97007]

> "The biggest slap in the face to all of us here is we have to train all of our replacements," said the IT worker.

I saw this happen in person, during a huge outsourcing of which I was one of the few survivors. This "training our replacements" thing... the problem is, it's difficult to quantify, the "trainers" have little motivation to comply, and the trainees don't have any way of knowing if they're receiving adequate training. So you cutover, and, well in our case it had all the elegance of driving a tour bus off a cliff. But I'm told that in many cases, if the outsourced team was good, things might trundle along for a little while on inertia. Until things start to go wrong, and you suddenly discover, you don't know exactly what has failed or where it's located.

Re:Not easy?

[jafac]

Corporate America is DIVESTING from America.

They seem pretty happy to avail themselves of our extremely expensive military when they need their foreign assets protected. And they also seem happy to invest in lobbyists and campaign contributions.