Slashdot Mirror
Displaced IT Workers Being Silenced
dcblogs writes A major problem with the H-1B debate is the absence of displaced IT workers in news media accounts. Much of the reporting is one-sided — and there's a reason for this. An IT worker who is fired because he or she has been replaced by a foreign, visa-holding employee of an offshore outsourcing firm will sign a severance agreement. This severance agreement will likely include a non-disparagement clause that will make the fired worker extremely cautious about what they say on Facebook, let alone to the media. On-the-record interviews with displaced workers are difficult to get. While a restrictive severance package may be one handcuff, some are simply fearful of jeopardizing future job prospects by talking to reporters. Now silenced, displaced IT workers become invisible and easy to ignore. This situation has a major impact on how the news media covers the H-1B issue and offshore outsourcing issues generally.
Isn't H-1B the program that allows foreigners to steal American jobs from Americans? Really not sure how I'm supposed to feel here.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Put the heads of Google, Facebook, Apple, etc. in prison for violating 15USC:
Send a few dozen Silicon Valley darlings to prison for a decade over the wage price fixing scandal and I bet H1B interest will collapse.
I mean, I knew slashdot was right wing these days, but this story takes the propaganda to a whole new level.
"We can't find anyone to interview who says they've been displaced by an H1B worker. That said, we need to make up a story about this, so we're going to make a story saying that none of them want to be interviewed."
There's no evidence for these people existing in the entire story, only a statement that they were unable to interview anyone.
that is all
I haven't a shred out doubt that these people are being hushed up, by whatever means necessary.
What I do doubt is the significance of the effect on mass media coverage. Other factors are in play.
Corporate media disdains adverse coverage of the H1B scandal because it is portrayed as "racist" against third-world emigres, and also because hey, business is business, right? (wink, wink).
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
Corporations and billionaires want to drive down the wages of white collar tech workers by importing cheaper H1-B employees. H1-B employees are also much easier to control as well since they can simply get deported if they stir up too much trouble for their employer. This is all done under the supposed auspices of saying there aren't enough "qualified" workers in the US. "Qualified" usually meaning "won't work peanuts like we want". At the same time, these CEOs have net worths that are 100s to 10000s of times the yearly wages of even these "greedy" and "overpaid" US workers.
Most attorneys will tell you that most of these contracts are un-enforceable and this is true. I refuse to sign anything other than NDAs. I can honor an NDA, but not a non-compete or a non-disparagement contract. They cannot make you sign, and if you're getting let go anyway, they can do nothing.
If you want to legally get back at a company that has screwed you, call the BSA and rat them out for software license illegalities. Only do this if you know it's true and it can be proved readily and easily. Most companies cannot and do not have good license practices and this is a painful and expensive lesson if found to be afoul of the license terms. Most businesses run afoul but are never reported. The BSA will descend on a business like roaches to a donut -- usually with lawyers and police. A few million in fines later... The BSA also gives reward money. Something to think about, but make sure if you go this route, you had no responsibility for licenses or software purchasing, that you are just a concerned legal worker disgusted by theft and illegal practices.
Here's the thing. American companies are American in name only. American companies should be required by law to hire Americans first and foremost, not try and save money by hiring some cheap developer from a third world country. I'm disgusted by the nature of business these days, the desire for more and more profit at the expense of the workers. This is why I work for non-profits only now. I'm tired and disgusted by the game. I love IT work, but not the evils that go into running a business for profit.
Yep. The obvious "fix" that nobody seems to be taking very seriously yet is making it much more difficult to get permission to hire an H1-B worker.
Corporations are ALWAYS going to push for a plentiful supply of these as a cost savings measure, but it's ultimately the government who issues them. It's about time they start putting pressure on companies to PROVE they're unable to hire from the talent pool of American citizens before qualifying to go the H1-B route.
If you are made to sign a document against your will? Years ago, I applied to temp agencies for work. I was made to sign a document wherein I could not negotiate employment with a client company directly. A lawyer told me that document does not hold up in court because no one can stop you from looking for work. While references are something you do need and you are at a company's mercy for, a lot of stuff they make you sign is questionable and may not hold up in court. Especially if you are made to feel you have no choice and are made to do it to ensure survival. As a temp worker, I just wanted to pay bills and would have signed pretty much anything if I had to. The lawyer told me that was another factor consider as well, which further weakens such documents under scrutiny of the courts. While the argument can be made, 'just find work elsewhere', in a bad economy our choices are increasingly limited.
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
if company does layoff, it is not allowed to apply for H1Bs
so dcblogs produced stupid text
Almost no one signed a non disparagement clause. To sign that sort of thing you generally get severance. There are plenty is displaced workers available to get interviews from. Tech workers don't get interviewed mostly for the same reason steel workers or book editors don't get interviewed they don't have anything particularly insightful to say.
Moreover H1B has nothing to do with offshore outsourcing those are entirely different programs. H1B is allowing people to come to the USA to work, offshoring is part of having low tariffs, and often incentives.
Come one...
Seriously, we're such ideologues on this issue that we're going to believe that there's some massive, industry wide conspiracy to cover this up?
Anyone making more than $50k a year or so usually gets a severance package. And that's not a benefit to the business, it's a nice thing that comes with the job. Normal people get walked out the door by a security guard and told the stuff on their desk will be mailed to them postage due. The fact that we get a severance package is great... that the company expects us not to defame them after giving us 3months+ pay that they don't have to? That should be expected. That's not going to stop you from saying "I worked for a tech company that I'll not name, and was laid off when they hired foreign workers."
Most Americans don't want temp work. The industry wants temp workers for short projects. H1B's prefer temp work because it generally pays a tad more and they have no particular ties to the area the work isin. There's no mystery here. Hiring 3rd party companies to do short projects always turns out horrible and costs a fortune. Maybe we should address the need for temp work and stop turning this into some evil plot?
I'd get rid of the proof and just use a tax. Require a tax of 50% of the prevailing USA citizen wage for similar technology workers on top of what gets paid to the H1B. Then allow unlimited H1Bs. That makes sure the incentive isn't economic.
The author of TFA is exaggerating and assuming that the clause in the agreement is purposely for those who are replaced by H1B people. Either he or his friends/family members were affected by this. To me, the clause to not disclose any information about being let go is very common. If you are being "fired," there are many reasons. Also, the company will NEVER want you to say anything regardless how you are being replaced. These people will find something to blame on others regardless (and in this case is the H1B people who replaced them). I am not saying that all are legitimated laid off/fired, but I doubt that the "signing" the document is REALLY for the case only.
Then the author pulls in politic which, of couse, a more effective on those who do not like H1B already. TFA has some of the fact and reasons, but over all TFA contains bias against H1B people by using the word "being fired or replaced" to make TFA more dramatic.
Just curious. Are experienced IT workers with up to date skills really not able to find jobs? What about programmers specifically ("IT Worker" can mean a lot of things)?
I'm assuming that age discrimination is impacting some of these people, but what about relatively young software developers? How many of you are young and talented software developers with at least of few years of experience and are having trouble finding work?
I left before it happened but my former company outsourced all of IT to Wipro.
This was on a system with 60,000 users.
Everyone but management was replaced with H1B- workers from India.
Outgoing staff was asked to stay and train their replacements with no severance packages.
Very few stayed and turnover documents were not made (hmm I wonder why) so the incoming Wipro workers had to discover and document the systems themselves.
I hear it was a real nightmare with lots of $$ spent on contractors to help figure things out.
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. --Red Adair
Which I will not elaborate here, not exactly on the nature being discussed. My lawyer told me, this kind of provisions only are enforceable while you work for them by our local laws, and since you are not an employee anymore, this clausule is void. That guy knows what he is doing...
It's about the US taking a similar approach to employment and foreign workers as Qatar does. Not very glorifying to say the least.
I have been displaced on more than one occasion. Atos laid me off so they could hire a cheaper H1B worker. (Not a loss as they are a sweat shop)
Atos has several NO-Outsource government contracts and before my layoff they were discussing outsourcing them and putting one American to answer the phone so the government did not know it was outsourced.
There was a company that was backed by the airlines where the CIO was Indian and the whole IT group was H1B's. I was the only white guy there and I was laid off from them officially for "Not meeting there expectations" and was replaced by an H1B worker.
HP had several H1B workers working 80+ hour weeks and only reporting 40 hours. On the promise that they would "Make it up to them." They replaced me because I was saying it was illegal to do, yep they brought in another H1B to replace me.
Between H1B's and outsourcing work to India, IT has been a crappy field but I still make money at it.
The problem is defining the prevailing wage. The categories are overly broad. The average salary for a programmer includes all of the kids writing terrible PHP after reading a book about it for a couple of weeks and then getting a job in their parents' company. Getting someone who can write decent kernel or embedded C for the price of an average programmer is difficult. Getting any kind of programmer in Silicon Valley for the average salary nationwide is impossible.
And why would you make it a tax? If you can identify the rate that other, similarly qualified people are making, then you can just require that H1Bs get paid 10% more than that. The point of systems like the H1B scheme is (meant to be) to expand the labour pool when there are more jobs for competent people than there are competent people, not to drive down local wages by displacing people who want to work with people who are willing to work for less than the prevailing wage.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
On-the-record interviews with displaced workers are difficult to get. While a restrictive severance package may be one handcuff, some are simply fearful of jeopardizing future job prospects by talking to reporters. Now silenced, displaced IT workers become invisible and easy to ignore.
We aren't like those other countries where citizens are muzzled. Over here, we have the first amendment. Oh wait...Yes, I am referring to the constitution.
We all want to have a monopoly on what we do for a living. We want limited competitor and supply s and be able to charge high prices. As consumers we want unlimited choices, lots of supply, and low prices. A free market will provide the latter and a command economy is required for the former. What we have now is the worst of both. Those with political power use it to restrict start up and small competitors while trying to have unlimited supply of cheap labor.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
What would these fired workers possibly say, that these theoretical severance packages don't allow?' "I had a job, and then I lost it," or something to that effect? Big deal, that wouldn't make it to the front page of the Times or even Slashdot. And isn't there some kind of communication tool out there, which allows people to anonymously relate something that happened to them, and then have it widely distributed by computer?
Sure, losing a job to an H1B worker is no fun. This post is imagining something sinister is being hidden in severance packages, but leaves the sinister happening so vague as to meaningless. Either say what it is or shut up.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
And, well, fuck the non-disparagement agreement. It's not disparagement to post factual information.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
And why would you make it a tax? If you can identify the rate that other, similarly qualified people are making, then you can just require that H1Bs get paid 10% more than that.
Because IT jobs aren't apples, or apples and oranges, they're an entire mixed fruit basket. As you already noted. We're already supposed to be requiring that H1-Bs be paid according to prevailing wages, but they fudge the "prevailing wages" so that the actual H1-B wage is much less.
If you jack up the tax enough, then you can make the H1-B incentive much less attractive without having to argue case-by-case with the number fudgers.
Most (not all) of the H1-B's I ran across as an independent s/w contractor for 20 year in Silicon Valley did not work as employees for what would appear to most people as their "employer" (Facebook, HP, Adobe, Oracle, etc.) Instead, they were actual employees of job shops who were renting them out to the corporations at a mark up. So if the corporation terminated any of them, they were still legally employed by their job shop and, likely, soon sitting in another cheap seat in another corporation in a few weeks. As long as they work for dirt cheap, they get a seat. Meanwhile, those of us who have families to support and live here full time have to charge enough to pay the bills, unlike 20 somethings who dorm themselves up with 3-5 other H1-B's (all arranged by their job shop, I might add), sharing rent, a single car, etc. The whole thing is an insideous insult, IMHO, to American citizens. Those screaming loudest for "moar" H1-B's are corporate overseers who just want cheap labor so they can stuff their pockets with the results. Just my 2 cents. You try doing what I did for 20 years and see what you think. This shit is not theoretical...
Land of the free? Home of the brave? Greatest joke of all time!
Fuck the USA and fuck their corporatist oligarchy.
We have the world's largest prison population. How could we not be the land of the free?
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
60k end users.. We had 250 in IT at the Denver site.. and more on site staff across 19 states.
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. --Red Adair
"Much of the reporting is one-sided — and there's a reason for this."
There is more than one reason. The article gives one reason - and this was news to me.
However the other reason is that for some reason the reporting is very biased in favor of open borders. This is a situation where the well-known obvious liberal bias of most reporters fits perfectly with the often alleged corporate bias of the owners of most major media outlets. Diversity meets cheap labor is the perfect storm.
How often do we here about the need for "comprehensive immigration reform"? The very word "reform" shows the bias. And we already did it anyway, we traded amnesty for increased enforcement. The amnesty occurred but we never go the enforcement. Now the very same deal is being offered again? How often do you hear this outside of right-wing radio and (possibly because I don't watch it) Fox News? Yet it is central to why so many people are dead-set against a comprehensive deal. For a deal you need trust and there is no trust. But you don't see that reported in the Washington Post.
Build a border that can be enforced, then we'll talk amnesty (and I'll be in favor of it too). But we can't make a new agreement until good faith is shown through the fulfilling of the terms of the previous agreement. Would you go back and buy another car from a salesman who never delivered the previous one you bought and paid for?
One we have the trust, we can talk about the H1-Bs too.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
"If you jack up the tax enough, then you can make the H1-B incentive much less attractive without having to argue case-by-case with the number fudgers."
Your "jackup the tax enough" suggestion is almost equivalent to stop issuing H1-B visas. What is enough? You cannot escape the necessity to qualify the "prevailing wages" either way. It is much more better the money goes into the employee's pocket than in the government's pocket. The government cannot pretend to have a right on this money. It will induce distortions in the legistlation in the future if this is seen as a source of revenue by the government.
Achille Talon
Hop!
And no wonder very few H1-B visas are issued for Canadians, I believe it is something like three H1-B visas that were issued last year for Canadian workers. Obviously, the Canadians are not willing to go down USA to become cheap labor, they are looking for something else.
Achille Talon
Hop!
I've worked at a lot of companies over the last 25 years and the ones that went the H1B visa is better route, are all now tail spinning into the toilet, at best they are struggling to stay relevant. There is always room for a good employee, but replacing good ones with unknowns to save short term doesn't appear to work.
It takes about 10 years of promoting H1B yes men and putting them in the food chain in various places. But everywhere I know that did it, is now struggling hard if they survived those 10 years. Just my own observations, but I'd love to see a long term study on the effects to a company when this is the case. Perhaps its an actually a symptom to the problem with management to begin with?
How often have you heard of employers going after employees who ignore that part of the agreement?
The article puts the lie to the idea that these H-1B workers are filling jobs that there are no good American candidates for. The article, and one linked in it, talk about existing workers training their H-1B replacements. So, there are manifestly American workers who can do these jobs. They are doing them right now! The article also says they are often older workers being replaced. You know what that means; these older workers are highly compensated. As usual it's about the bottom line, with humans as resources to be exploited.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
I think the point of the H1B system should be highly specialized skill sets that aren't readily available. For example specialists in an obscure aspect of an obscure technology. The solution to getting more competent people in general should be training and education. As far as why make it a tax, is because the H1B system creates economic dislocation i.e. generalized harm. The tax offsets the harm by creating a generalized good. It also offsets the lower wage incentive.
As far as creating categories of workers, remember with a large tax the government's incentives flip. They are likely to be rather strict in how the tax is applied once this is a meaningful source of revenue.
There are limited advantage to Americans in H1Bs getting higher wages. There is a clear advantage to Americans in taxes being offset. Tax displacement helps boost underlying standard of livings and thus redistributes wealth to the people being harmed.
Depending on the language in the contract, posting factual information could very well violate these agreements. I believe you're thinking about libel or slander (i.e. false statements). Disparagement, however, doesn't have to be false. It merely has to cast the benefited party in a negative light. This can be a huge grey area and given the insane cost of defending a lawsuit, I understand why people subject to these provisions might be very reluctant to speak.
Wait, do they have to sign the agreement? Or are they paid extra for the agreement?
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
For a long time there have been tariffs to protect the importation of cheap goods (lumber, steel, etc.) from foreign countries into the USA. This system allows US companies to compete fairly against goods from other countries where wages and regulations give them an unfair advantage.
I think it is time for wage tariffs as well. If there truly is a shortage of skilled IT workers, as all the big companies are crying about now, then they should be forced to pay a tariff for importing cheap foreign labor. This system would help to protect US IT workers by forcing companies to pay a fair market value for their skills. And if the companies truly cannot find anyone in the US to do the work then the company should not complain about paying a wage tariff. They would be filling needed skills and acting in the best fiduciary interests of their shareholders, which is their legal responsibility.
Personally, I don't believe for a minute that there is any shortage at all. The only shortage is the number of US IT workers that are willing to work for sub par wages. My prediction is that if such a system were in place the number of H1-B workers would be reduced to practically zero. Only in the cases where skills were truly needed and nobody in the US could be found to do a given job would you see foreign workers brought in.
That is the way the system is supposed to work anyhow. An additional benefit is that all of this could be accomplished without the need of unions, which introduce a whole host of issues in their own right.
I think we should consider a "Stat Squish" for wages.
The "Occupy Wallstreet" movement had the right idea, but was not properly organized. However, I understand the overall message.
The CEOs and boards and politicians are largely not held accountable for unethical or derelict behavior. It is time to squish salaries and make a few people accountable for bad judgements.
-SK
Go home Lahey, you're drunk!
If you don't want to be silenced then don't take the severance package. Title makes it sound draconian while, in fact, they're being "silenced" by being given large sums of cash.
You could have a minimum wage allowable. Say, $60K/yr for entry level, $100K/yr for mid career, and $125K/yr for senior...adjusted for location. Allow companies to pay higher wages if they like.
Have a 50% tax on top of that.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
I'd get rid of the proof and just use a tax. Require a tax of 50% of the prevailing USA citizen wage for similar technology workers on top of what gets paid to the H1B. Then allow unlimited H1Bs. That makes sure the incentive isn't economic.
Ooh, I have a better one! Why not require that we pay the H1B the prevailing USA citizen wage for similar technology workers. That way, the workers get the money (they're the ones who should get the money) and it'll still make sure that the incentive isn't economic.
I'm so smart - I think I'm going to get a patent on my brilliant idea and then see if I can get my congressman to make it a law.
Do you have ESP?
Yes, we tend all to think that things that happen to us are related to the IT industry. However, nothing in "the H1-B debate" restricts this issue you mention to the IT sector.
This issue is not even related to immigration — If a company prefers to hire me to do $foobar because I'm better and cheaper for the job than the guy who did it before me, the company will do its best not to get bad press. It might include paying him a bit extra so you leave happy, or adding judicial clauses to shut his mouth up.
Of course, specific cases can be mentioned to say "hey, this is a specific issue for us techies and it involves them non-USians!". But it's the way things have always worked.
This is all done under the supposed auspices of saying there aren't enough "qualified" workers in the US. "Qualified" usually meaning "won't work peanuts like we want".
I think this is an important point in the debate. They're not exactly wrong when they say that they can't find qualified workers, but the problem is that they have trouble finding qualified workers within the salary range that they've already determined. Given this, there are two different conclusions that can be reached: either (a) there are not enough qualified applicants; or (b) the pool of 'qualified applicants' is being restricted too much by low wages.
Both are true, from a certain point of view. Any time you would say, "there are not enough qualified applicants", there's a good chance that you could still find enough if you were willing to pay enough. But perhaps the "enough" that you'd have to pay is simply unreasonable. So in my opinion, that's really the question that we need to answer: Is the 'enough' that you'd have to pay in order to attract qualified applicants unreasonably high?
How does voluntarily taking a severance package amount to "being silenced"? Don't like the non-disparagement clause? Don't take the money.
Right. You want to live in a free-market economy? Then people like you and me become part of the market. And, it's not like getting a H1-B visa is that simple: For a non-USian, only being quite qualified and skilled can get you a work-enabling visa. Of course, were I to get a visa to work on the US, I would probably be a cheaper hire than you — So, for (supposed) equal skills, I'd be more valuable.
So, if you push for a free market and reduced state, you'd be pushing for me to be hired over you.
Canadians & Mexicans get TN visas, not H1Bs. Australians get E3 visas. Unlike H1Bs, there are no caps on TN or E3 visas, so there're no issues getting people from Australia, Canada or Mexico.
If I were to get a H1B visa, I might want to do the work you currently do for a much lower wage than yours (since I come from an allegedly poor country or something like that). So, is getting a PHP newbie developer who was born in the USA and charges US$100K a year, or getting a good, talented programmer who will do the same work for US$60K a year... Is on the same level only because they will fill the same job position?
(I live in Mexico, and am *not* interested in living in the USA. I have a ~US$25K yearly salary, and live quite well off it. But many colleagues have migrated to the USA, just because of that salary difference)
how often do you hear of companies shit-canning your resume if you are found out (public record) that you sued an employer OVER ANYTHING, even valid complaints?
right, you don't hear of it.
the real shit in this world is never reported. but its been like that forever; its how mankind works (or, fails to work, in this regard).
the one law of the jungle: if you can get away with it, you can get away with it; especially if you are big and can lay down a serious smackdown to challengers.
there is no other justice than this, in the world. those with power, get away with shit and you and I have essentially no say. we take whatever crumbs come our way.
sad, but if you think about it honestly, its what we have in this world.
reporters? since when does the news report real news? since when does the news challenge those in authority? not since the past 20 yrs, since 'news' is now part of the entertainment and profit-centers of tv (newspapers are nearly dead, btw).
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Wait, do they have to sign the agreement? Or are they paid extra for the agreement?
Nobody *has* to sign any agreements when they're being terminated.
However, many tech workers don't know that. Others are more worried about things like how they're going to find a new job if they get a bad reference from this one, so they sign on the dotted line. Still others want the "bonus" that's offered for signing.
You know how in Hollywood they say "Be nice to everyone you meet on your way up, because you'll see them again on your way down?"
IT is the reverse - "Be nice to people on your way down if you want to have any hope of getting back up." Employers are not likely to hire "complainers" because next thing you know, they'll be whining about having to put in 80-hour weeks and work/life balance and overtime pay.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
This is why technical people should unionize, but I'm glad it's happening, all this everyone fend for your self thing that permeates the IT world is just playing itself out, you want a voice and bitch about it, but don't do anything about it, its a wound inflicted upon you but you are the ones pouring the salt on it
What would help level the "playing field" would be to have a REAL sub-contracting system. Very few companies will hire people under i-9, so none are really "contractors" in the end. So not only is there a huge "permanent subclass" who are considered corporate second-class citizens, they cannot even reap the real benefits of being a contractor. Huge Corp Inc might be paying $100 an hour for a help desk tech, but after 3-4+ layers of sub-contractors the tech ends up making $10-$15 for no additional benefits, actually usually far less the other employees who basically are costing the same amount.
The only real barrier I could find (other than corps just not wanting to work outsider their already established ecosystem) is Errors and Omissions insurance, Worker's Comp, etc. Even getting a sales tax license and an LLC / INC is pretty trivial if the end result is going from $10/hr to $50-$100hr. Something like this could be a huge economic boom in the US and would result in hundreds, if not thousands of new small businesses opening up over night. They would probably pay MORE taxes as the huge sub-contracting corps are often huge tax-dodgers as well. This would also stimulate the "exchanges" of the ACA putting thousands of decent-paying i-9 employees on the exchanges. Maybe this should be submitted to Congress under some catchy title like the "Economic Electronic Stimulation Act" or EESA. A combination of H1-B visa re-regulation, overseas contracting policy that really covers the IT industry, and some economic funding for start-ups that will help IT people transition from working for someone to working for themselves would re-invigorate our country like the Tesla / Edison "inventor" days.
They're probably paid extra, in the sense of "you can sign and get the package, or you can not sign and not get any package."
> This is all done under the supposed auspices of saying there aren't enough "qualified" workers in the US. "Qualified" usually meaning "won't work peanuts like we want".
Yes. If you've worked in a company that gradually fired locals to replace them with H1-B employees, you'll see how capable the replacements actually are -- no communication skills, no diagnostic skills, just a frightened willingness to work long hours. And oddly enough, when bad things happen, the company will just accept it if it can be shown that the employee was following a process.
Ostensibly, one of the qualifications that US workers supposedly don't have is following process. The expectation is raised that the job be fully documented -- that everything that happens in the job have a procedure to carry the employee through, and then the employees need only follow the procedure for a given issue. If you've worked in IT, you know how little of the job falls in that category. And so, much of the process becomes "raise a ticket with the vendor", and then when they find out that the vendor is only responsible for what the vendor sells, not how it's used, things get really interesting.
It's the worst of false economics. The company can show an immediate reduction in direct labor costs, but start to lose agility, robustness and reliability almost immediately.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Yep. The obvious "fix" that nobody seems to be taking very seriously yet is making it much more difficult to get permission to hire an H1-B worker.
Corporations are ALWAYS going to push for a plentiful supply of these as a cost savings measure, but it's ultimately the government who issues them. It's about time they start putting pressure on companies to PROVE they're unable to hire from the talent pool of American citizens before qualifying to go the H1-B route.
I'd argue that if they're firing locals to replace them with H1-B employees, they've already lost that argument.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
That was one tough ELA!
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
I know an Indian independent contractor who worked on contract for a large electric utility. He managed six warm bodies provided by some Indian company. His contract came from some company that had a contract with another company and the grand parent company was the vendor to the electric utility. Each was padding up his hourly rate. It was rumoured one of the shell companies that did no work other than to shuffle paperwork and skim 10$ an hour from each contractor was owned by a relative of the top IT manager of the electric utility.
There are perverse incentives in the system to roil an smoothly working system, promise heaven and earth using some powerpoint magic, and deliberately trigger a crisis. Crisis means no bid contracts, crazy decisions and highly inflated costs.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
It's not disparagement to post factual information.
Not true. Disparagement means saying something bad about someone or something, whether you are speaking the truth or not. There is no requirement that the statements be false.
What you can do is to have a bottom on the cost per H1B to the employer. Let us say, you fix an amount Y. If the company pays the visa holder less than Y, they pay the rest as tax to the govt. If they pay more than Y, then they are not taxed. Y has to be the market clearing rate; i..e the rate at which all H1B visas available are taken.
Yep. The obvious "fix" that nobody seems to be taking very seriously yet is making it much more difficult to get permission to hire an H1-B worker.
Corporations are ALWAYS going to push for a plentiful supply of these as a cost savings measure, but it's ultimately the government who issues them. It's about time they start putting pressure on companies to PROVE they're unable to hire from the talent pool of American citizens before qualifying to go the H1-B route.
You are correct in that the reason nobody is seriously talking about making it more difficult is that most of the lobbying taking place is focused on making it easier. The major contract placement companies overseas will in many cases, hold the applicants passport and the company they end up working for will hold the visa. The worker is compelled to do the job and keep their mouth shut at all cost. If the worker is fired or they quit of their own volition, the company reports to the contracting agency and the agency recalls the worker. This could be a devastating blow for the worker so they will do whatever it takes to keep the job. Doing whatever it takes usually translates to "work for peanuts".
In addition, many of these workers are often housed by the contracting company or in some cases directly by the employer. This makes the worker even more dependent. Sometimes the living conditions are cramped to an obscene degree. I personally have witnessed this. 18 "IT" workers were all housed in a 4 bedroom home, just off campus of a large banking corporation in the upper mid-west. I had to go pick these guys up every day for a couple weeks while I was getting my visa processed to go do a migration at our branches in England.
The end result for these workers is that they become indentured after a fashion. Much like the coal and other miners back in the late 1800s to early 1900s. Miners lived in what were essentially settlements owned by the company. Want to buy flour to make bread? Only place to get it was the company store. The store only traded in credit "chits". At the end of the pay period, the miner got his chits and there was usually just not enough pay to cover all the debt. If you still owed the company credit, you could not leave the area and so, back to the mine you went. This created a never ending cycle of indentured servitude (slavery, if you will).
What we are seeing now with our over-zealous attempt to hasten the processing of illegal immigrants and H1B visa applications is a modern day version of the same old game. One mistake that seems to be ignored in this process is the long term, unintended consequences of making 5m quasi citizens. The stick has been removed from the equation for these people/workers. They will rightfully demand higher wages (minimum wage) and the employer can no longer hold deportation over their head as an incentive. The theory is that the company leadership/owners will just knuckle under and start paying higher wages. I submit that they will not. Instead, I suspect they will begin replacing these newly emancipated former wage slaves with newly minted illegal immigrants and the process will simply continue unabated. The last couple of paragraphs have not been strictly on topic but because immigration reform and H1B visa issues have somehow become combined in the public eye, it seemed appropriate to bring it into the conversation.
My thoughts on how to reform immigration and in some degree lessen the impact on the plight of the American worker would not provide for an all inclusive solution. But, perhaps someone else would be willing to take up a challenge to participate in the discussion as well. First, we MUST reduce the red tape required for legal processing of normal immigration requests and requests for citizenship. Note that I am not saying reduce the requirements. From personal experience (my wife is a naturalized citizen) the process is rife with what appears to be a woeful lack of competence on the part of the vast number of government employees that by
Charter Member of The Committee Group For The Elimination And Eradication Of Repetitive Redundancy
Me.
Mind you, this was 20 years ago, but I had made a remark that my previous employer must be having a paperwork problem with their Employee Stock Ownership Program, because it was June, and the plan required annual reports by the end of April, and I had still not received one.
TWO days later, a registered letter arrives from a Law Firm, warning me of the consequences of slandering my previous employer. . . .
I shut up. The Annual Report (and my final ESOP certificate) arrived in September. Needless to say, I liquidated immediately and rolled it to an IRA. . .
Mind you, that was over a CASUAL COMMENT on compliance with a filed financial plan.
if you're a plug n' play IT guy who needs to follow written documents to do your job properly, then yes, you're getting replaced.
I can't tell you how many times I've been in an IT shop where there was NO WRITTEN DOCUMENTATION. Why? Because the information was locked away inside the heads of IT employees who been there for 10+ years. As a "plug n' play IT guy," the first thing I do is write documentation to make sure that I'm doing my job correctly and consistently. Sometimes my documentation lives on after I'm done with the project.
How is that better than a tax? The issue btw is not market clearing the H1Bs but rather that tech companies want the number of H1Bs expanded. You are optimizing the opposite problem.
For example specialists in an obscure aspect of an obscure technology.
Like HR requiring five years of experience in a new technology that came out six months ago? That's a pretty obscure specialist.
Business model...
Its not a business model failure. Its costs failure. The H1B doesn't have the cost structure a US citizen has, by and large.
So, they can work cheaper.
Here is the business model failure. While those "in charge" of the US economy keep chasing cheaper wages, the spending power in the US falls.
The more it falls, the worse that economy will do. Prices will have to fall in alignment with this.
Those prices are on the items those "in charge" of the US economy are selling in the US.
Prices that are higher because people can afford them, having wages in line with those prices.
They are slitting their own throats. But they are not the ones experiencing the pain, they just enjoy the fruits the arbitrage, while it lasts.
emt 377 emt 4
As others have mentioned, employers would weasel out of using an realistic "prevailing wage" for such a system. For example, they'd make programming jobs look like phone jockey jobs and pay based on the phone jockey rate.
Here's an even better idea: Let corporations bid (annually) on the H1B slots, with the funds to go in some displaced worker program or unemployment fund. Have limits set on the total number of slots to be bid on...a limit which could only change by congressional approval (politicians would hesitate to increase this limit...doing so makes them look like enemies of the American worker).
"But perhaps the "enough" that you'd have to pay is simply unreasonable"
The market will decide.
Funny how it is good when the market decides when workers are let go, when their wages "have to" fall, etc, but no, cant let the market decide corporate profitability.
emt 377 emt 4
I recently became friends with an Iranian woman and her family that are trying very hard to emigrate to the United States. She is currently in the process of trying to get hired and sponsored by one of these job shops because she has practically no other choice for employment here. Everyone in her family is very intelligent and hard working and my friend herself has masters degrees in computer science and business administration. She's an atheist, however, and she can't go back to Iran without a risk of being "outed" and imprisoned or executed.
Previously when I thought of "H1-B" I thought of exactly what you described. Young people with nothing to lose dorming up and working for peanuts because it's the easy way out, driving down wages in what should be a very competitive highly skilled job sector. I'm glad I met someone who showed me the other side of the coin. I consider myself a liberal and a humanist and I'm ashamed at myself for having held such a xenophobic view and expressing frustration with the people who are coming here seeking H1-B and similar visa work. Truly the only entities that deserve any derision for the wage depression and unfair labor practices are the sponsoring companies who pay such paltry wages and the tech companies that create demand for cheap foreign labor.
Better yet, make it proportionate to the CEO's wages. Oh, and plug the loopholes so that any financial compensation granted the CEO counts toward this (be it wages, stocks, etc.)
As a contractor, I will always be replaced by someone else. I make 80% more money than someone who stayed in the same position for years and accepts 2% raises as being normal. Hoarding documentation will only make my job harder and add to the corporate dysfunction I was hired to fix.
Union? That's a four-letter word around here - with an off-by-one error.
Ummm.... no.... Two completely different issues.
The H1-B issue with the I.T. field is all about people skilled or trained to perform a job that's in high demand in the U.S. right now, yet getting short-changed in their ability to find employment doing it, because companies are receiving legal passes to hire outsiders at big salary discounts.
In the industries you're referring to, you're talking about businesses who were traditionally free to place big markups on offering their intellectual property to the public while simultaneously slapping numerous restrictions on its use or redistribution. TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCES causes their business models to increasingly become obsolete, so rather than adapt, they spent too much time trying to strong-arm people into continuing to ignore the changes, and keep on doing things the way they were always done. When this (predictably) became a losing battle, they acted like the injured parties.
Welcome to America where you are free. Free, that is, to fuck everybody up the ass in as many ways as you can think of.
The market only decides the market value. Whether that market value is reasonable and acceptable is a different question.
I can see this occurring in the past, but not the present. Everyone complains about everything online. If you really dig into someone's background, eventually you're going to find something objectionable. There would be hordes of people displaced if this was truly going on in significant numbers. A company can go after a worker, but it's going to be Streisand Effect. When they need to hire new talent, their candidates are also going to do a search. Who is going to want to work for a company that's notorious for silencing its workers?
At best, the employer might be able to reverse-direct-deposit the severance if the complainer wasn't smart enough to move the money. The courts aren't going to take a person's house or retirement savings, and that's probably as much "wealth" that the average American worker has at this point. Want to rat a company out? Grab a disposable phone and tweet away.
One former colleague from the USA is right now pushing things around at a big university there to have me hired (I'm Romanian) there for two reasons:
1. I'm very good at what I'm doing (and he knows it, having worked with me for 4 years);
2. I'm much cheaper than an USA-based worker.
Now, I understand that the influx of qualified offshore people is putting a rather painful downward pressure on USA salaries and I agree it's regretful. However, yelling and kicking and protesting won't help in the long term. You could, as a nation (sum of individuals) seize one of two choices:
a. isolate from foreigners (impose laws that make it very difficult to immigrate) or
b. accept the change.
Both choices have their own set of disadvantages.
Now, the idea of "cheap workers from a foreign country are crap from a skills perspective" is an idiotic generalization which stems mostly from cultural clashes. In a work environment, mixed teams are a retarded idea. Combine that with under-skilled liaisons (people who should carry work instructions or projects across) and culture enforcement (Kumar from Bangalore would never get "Cowboy Hat Friday", nor would Florin from Romania be willing to spend two hours in a meeting discussing the right way to represent African-American heritage in a picture for the latest product whitepaper) and you're in for a shitty work environment where nobody would feel comfortable being in.
One example I actually lived (generic names are put in for obvious reasons):
John from USA works in a remote support team and hits retirement age. The company decides to offshore his position and hires Pradeep from Hyderabad. Pradeep brings an impressive resume and is quite skilled at resolving his customer's issues. But Pradeep has a bit of MTI (Mother Tongue Influence) and his new customers and team mates aren't used to talking to anyone with a foreign accent. At the same time, the company is unsatisfied with the way the Indian team (supporting Indian customers) is abiding to the work instructions provided, so they send Jack, who's an accomplished, skilled support team manager, to India to "put things in order".
Three months later, it's becoming quite clear that both Pradeep and Jack have failed achieving their assigned goals. Pradeep is miserable at work, customers complain about him being "dense" and unintelligible and his team loathes him. Jack can't understand why his team doesn't like him, can't seem to get his orders across properly and hasn't managed to have them respect the corporate rules.
Lessons learned (in theory, practice sucks and we all know it):
Don't mix teams. Don't outsource the wrong jobs. Don't impose your culture over others.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
The point of systems like the H1B scheme is (meant to be) to expand the labour pool when there are more jobs for competent people than there are competent people, not to drive down local wages by displacing people ... NOT! The poitn was always cheap indentured servants no matter what BS the lobbyists spewed to get the laws passed.
I'm having a bit of trouble feeling sorry for the 'victims' who chose to sell out here. If they are taking hush money, then they are complicit here.
Bingo - echos my experience exactly.
If your employee wants to kick you out they can, but once they fire you why would you ever sign anything they put in your hand?
This. Every time I hear "we can't find enough employees" I substitute "... at the lowball pricepoints we're willing to give out". It strikes me as odd that the laws of supply and demand somehow are allowed to disappear when it comes to people/employees. If demand is so high, wages should be pushed up. They're not. Over a course of years, the tools for people to fight a more fair fight have been peeled away. As a kid I still remember the PATCO strike. Government intervention against workers collective bargaining, and then all the way to Wisconsin and governmor Walker. Suppliers can't be squeezed. Profits should never be squeezed. Lets squeeze the employees.
That and the fact that employee wages are inputs to the system. Even Henry Ford, hard right capitalist, realized you can't squeeze wages so much that people can't afford things.
Posting as anonymous for obvious reasons.
I managed a team of developers at a shrink wrap software shop for ~3 years. It was actually a really solid place to work from a cultural and technical point of view. Unfortunately, the CEO was a bit of a hot-head and injected mass drama every time he came out of his office.
I had a quarterly check in with him, and give him an accurate description of my active projects and my thoughts on the direction he wanted to move in. I expressed my concern about the quality of some of the 10+ year old code that was at the core of the features he wanted to expand on. Turns out that negative feedback was not what he was looking for.
Next thing I know the CIO is stopping by asking me what it is that I actually do day to day. Then my lead architect mentioned that the CEO stopped by and talked about taking a "more active role" in the team.
Not long after that, I was given marching orders and a severance package. The severance was predicated by the signature of a pair of contracts covering confidentiality and behaviors.
About a month and a half into my severance, I get an irate call from the HR director claiming I've violated my severance agreement and that they will be seeking recomp.
I hired a lawyer, talked it out with him. Either we ignore them and hope they don't come after me, we call their bluff and threaten a counter suit, or we pay them off and nullify the contract. At this point I was tempted, ooh so tempted, to just say, "OK". Because with no contract, there is no confidentiality agreement, no non-disparagement agreement, no non-compete agreement.
As soon as my lawyer pointed out that if the employer broke the contract that they wouldn't have standing to come after me for the other aspects of the contract, they backed off and paid out the rest of my severance.
It's nice to get the money that was owed to me, but the annoyance of the contracts sucks, and I will definitely avoid any such contracts in the future.
In the end though, I will never put a review of that company on Glassdoor. I do not talk about my separation with my friends from the company. And the details of my severance package will never be shared. Because fsk are lawyers expensive.
The problem is defining the prevailing wage.
And why would you make it a tax? If you can identify the rate that other, similarly qualified people are making, then you can just require that H1Bs get paid 10% more than that.
You answered your own question. It's next to impossible to define the prevailing wage. It's much simpler
to say that we don't care what you pay them but you must pay 50% over whatever they are willing to work for.
A combination of you must pay the "prevailing wage" and half again as much to the government might be a
good solution. The point is to make it so that H1B1s are considerably more expensive than hiring locally.
If you have an important position that you REALLY need someone and can't find someone local then you'll
be willing to pay the premium. It doesn't make sense to give that extra to the H1B1 holder. Why should the
H1B1 holder get paid more than local talent? It does make sense though to make H1B1 holders more
expensive than local talent. The other advantage of having a 50% tax on H1B1 wages is that then instead
of driving local wages down they drive local wages up as it's much cheaper to give a local a 25% pay increase
than it is to pay the H1B1 tax.
The "no quality candidates" problem can be more easily seen in the trucking industry. The complaint there
is that there are not enough truck drivers. The truth is that they just don't pay enough. Almost anyone can
drive a truck with only minimal training. If you doubled the salary of truck drivers then you could easily find
plenty of candidates. You actually see this from time to time. As truck driver salaries start to increase then
factory workers start quiting their jobs and becoming truck drivers.
Both are true, from a certain point of view. Any time you would say, "there are not enough qualified applicants", there's a good chance that you could still find enough if you were willing to pay enough. But perhaps the "enough" that you'd have to pay is simply unreasonable. So in my opinion, that's really the question that we need to answer: Is the 'enough' that you'd have to pay in order to attract qualified applicants unreasonably high?
There is also the difference between the individual company and the economy as a whole.
As an individual company (i.e. google), I could easily get enough employees if I paid double what
facebook paid but if there are truly not enough employees then this will cause an upward spiral of
scalping from each other until someone can't afford it anymore. This may or may not be a bad
outcome.
A lot of tech companies aren't even doing reference checks anymore. The last few companies I worked for did not. They're somewhat pointless. Many companies don't allow their employees to answer reference checks at all, other than to verify that the person was employed. Same reason, a person's former employer doesn't want to be liable should the candidate not get hired by the new company.
Well - the cagier employers out there will say your final pay won't be disbursed until you sign.
Don't forget the caste system, an Indian gal I worked with said a lot of problems hiring Indians comes down to us not understanding that part of their culture. She said "If an American spots a problem with a project the American will speak up and the Indian won't, even if this problem dooms the project if not corrected. The reason why is that your superiors are usually from a higher caste and one simply doesn't "talk back" to one above you, it would be like a black man in the 40s correcting a white man, its just not done".
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Most severance agreements are signed under duress. Being terminated can be very stressful, and the future looks bleak. You don't know when you will receive your next paycheck, and must start a job search. Most states have laws which prevent signing contracts under duress. And accepting a termination (severance) package may meet those standards. One should not be afraid to tell the truth. Just be careful not to say anything "nasty" about the company or its executives. Simply state that you were replaced by a low salaried individual with an H1B visa - if you know that this is true.
Well - the cagier employers out there will say your final pay won't be disbursed until you sign.
I don't want anyone who would fall for that working with me.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
At least once. I had to defend my separation pay because I stated the factual reason for my dismissal, and the company called to verify employment and reason for dismissal. they sued. It cost me half my separation package to keep the other half.
Reason for termination was the company was taken over in a hostile buyout, and the new owner replaced all upper management with his own people. New owner did not want it to be general knowledge that the buyout was hostile.
The rehire question is not neccesarily a work around in some areas. The laws would treat it the same as blackballing someone. Its also likely to not work well with large companies and large HR departments. You are likely only going to get some policy of not rehiring people within a certain timeframe.
Of course all this is sort of negated if you were fired. Its obvious they do not want you working there if they fire you. The real problem is that a lot of people work in a lot of different places. These people become management and "shop talk" at various hangouts where old friends who happen to be your new prospective employer also hang out. This is more of a problrm in smaller locations but still an issue.
| I believe it is something like three H1-B visas that were issued last year for Canadian workers.
Source ? I know more than 3 Canadians on h-1b, didn't census their year though.
You are right, after checking on the DHS website stats for 2013 are 59 451 H-1B visas were granted to Canadians. I stopped searching for the original source where I read only 3 visas were granted to Canadians. It was a newspaper and second hand information. However, the column beside Canada is showing 3 visas granted and me be this was a mixed up. Anyway, bottome line it is more encouraging than I believed.
| Obviously, the Canadians are not willing to go down USA to become cheap labor, they are looking for something else.
I'm Canadian on h-1b, making above 250k. I would not get comparable pay in Canada.
My point, Americans should stop seeing everyone asking for a H-1B visa as a job stealer or someone exerting pression to lower the wages. I'd like to get such a visa and surely not to work as cheap labor. I have relatives in USA with American citizenship and would like to seek for permanent status eventually.
Achille Talon
Hop!
Yes. If you've worked in a company that gradually fired locals to replace them with H1-B employees, you'll see how capable the replacements actually are -- no communication skills, no diagnostic skills, just a frightened willingness to work long hours.
None of which matters if you're only running a support shop. The delta difference between what they're paid and what the company charges for their labor = PROFIT! I doesn't matter if it's sustainable. Close shop, open a new one under a different name. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Life is not for the lazy.
Canadians & Mexicans get TN visas, not H1Bs. Australians get E3 visas. Unlike H1Bs, there are no caps on TN or E3 visas, so there're no issues getting people from Australia, Canada or Mexico.
No, Canadians are getting both types of visas. The TN visas are more restrictives on the admissible professions. They can replace a H-1B visa in some cases, but not in all.
Achille Talon
Hop!
Whoosh.
In case you missed it, I just described the law as it currently stands.
Do you have ESP?
Yep this is true. I have stood by this and been harassed by corporations for doing this but said 'If you are going to sue, do it... but you can't be calling me up every night at 3am and not call that harassment'. No one ever sues because they are afraid of those facts being raised before a court and scrutinized. But as long as you stick to FACTS and show no opinion in those facts (treat it as journalism), you are fine.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
In the late 90s I worked for a place that was rumored (internally) to be involved in several lawsuits against past employees, with several of those being countersuits. The internal word of mouth was that they'd try to screw with you after you left. They also pushed out an abitration agreement to all employees, of the typical sort that have an "I Win" clause in it. Not forced on us but we got no more stock options w/o signing it (I refused and the finance vp thought I was insane). On the other hand a lot of those execs ended up in jail later (though for different reasons) and earned an Ignobel award.
True about the reporters. A clueless bunch of people who don't know how to investigate or fact check any rumors. Most of Silicon Valley is treated like a mythological place by the news media, where everyone is an entrepreneur and talks business deals at cocktail parties, everyone is gainfully employed, everyone is involved in a web based startup, etc.
For politics (which includes immigration) I just look at the liberal media, then the conservative media, then discount both of those stories since the truth is something completely different.
In my current job they did a background check through an external agency on new hires. They actually told us about this and gave us the results of the check (credit as well as criminal).
Stock related though. Companies take that stuff very very seriously. It's the *only* think they take seriously, they don't understand the technology, the operations bores them to tears, but say anything about the stock and they sit up and pay attention. All-hands meetings usually involve 45 minutes talking about stock, 5 minutes talking about sales, and 10 minutes of sports analogies.
Somebody needs to explain why anyone would sign a "severance agreement". If you're going to fire me, then fire me. If you want my ongoing loyalty, then respect me and pay me (which really means continue to employ me).
If you force me to sign a "severance agreement", then you've not actually got any contractual agreement, since it was signed under duress. Of course, there's always the point about consideration. I might be interested in waiving the duress; for a price.
TN visas have a lot of restrictions on them, and there are several restrictions on your life if you are on a TN. Any move that may make it look like you want to stay in the US permanently can get a TN revoked. This can include buying property, getting engaged to a US citizen, applying for a green card etc.
If there were only 3 H1-B visas issued to Canadians, then my employer is responsible for 2/3 of them which seems a little skewed to me.
IT workers have the power to stop this sort of abuse. But they don't.
If we want to change things, we need an organization that can raise money, lobby congress, and launch an effective information campaign. The abuse will not stip while we hold to the belief that griping about the situation will change things.
I donate to NumbersUSA. They are not the ideal organization to represent IT workers, but probably the best we have. If more IT workers donated to NumbersUSA, and let NumbersUSA know that we would donate more, if NumbersUSA would fight harder for the interests of IT workers; I think that might be somewhat effective.
The abuse of IT workers will not stop unless we make it stop.
Post an article on the dice forums that references an article that does not praise visa workers, and/or cry about the shortage of IT workers; and they will delete all of your posts, and ban you from the forums. It happened to me, among many others.
Of course, there are ways to get around it, but why bother. The Indian moderators that work for dice will not allow anything that does not conform to the official story that tech companies want the public to know.
I think dice owns slashdot, so it's interesting that stories like this can still be published on slashdot.
Most illegals come to the US for jobs, or social services. Deny them that, and they will stop coming. Simple right?
Have a worthwhile ID system. Make it a criminal offense, with mandatory jail time, to hire an illegal. Make it practically impossible for illegals to go to school, have jobs, get social services, rent an apartment, buy a house, cash a check, or anything of that nature. And no more anchor babies either.
Watch how fast most illegals self deport. Watch how fast they stop coming.
At that point guarding the border would be much easier.
except it doesn't work like that. People tend to side with the rich and powerful. Most people will side with the employer over the employee for the same reason they consider themselves capitalists, and are eager to throw their neighbors under the bus for whatever social witchunt might show up? Satantic rock'n'roll brainwashing your children. you wouldn't be scared of this if you thought people actually liked your culture. Red Scare, communist/socialist takeover - you wouldn't be scared of this if everyone in society was treated fairly, and no one was exploited. dangerous hip hop music/black people - you wouldn't be scared of the men of color unless you knew they were mistreated. drugs and terrorism - you would not be scared of either, if you actually thought society was good, and people weren't being repressed, and no one ever got unfairly fucked over in life.
My friend is a software developer that was being discriminated against. After acknowledging, then ignoring him, the HR department screwed up pretty bad. He had no choice but to threaten a lawsuit (he had a lot of solid evidence) and they offered him a pretty sweet retention package (nearly a year's pay) that came with a promise not to sue. He took it and quit. He is white, his VP, manager, and most of his coworkers were Indian. The company was Verisign. He has had several good paying jobs since and hasn't been "blacklisted" whatever that means.
I'm a US citizen living in Australia and I have often been contacted about working in the USA under and H1-B visa for very good pay. When they find out that I don't need the visa to work for them, they aren't interested so something else is going on.
The expectation is raised that the job be fully documented
Sysadmin here.
Back atcha.
This should be the case anyway.
At least the H1Bs will fucking follow the instructions, unlike rockstar brogrammers.
Routine stuff should be. If it isn't, we've failed in our jobs. Moreover, we collect lore as any employee does in a complex environment. Trivially, if you've run into a sticky problem six months ago, you'll need to review how you fixed it when it happens again this morning. Documentation is key.
I'm talking about stuff that requires some diagnostic skill to deduce, and the ability to quickly adapt to changing circumstances.
As a sysadmin, you *know* the difference between sysadmins and operators, and why we have both. And why an operator can not do a sysadmin's job. But companies think they can hire procedure monkeys and put them in senior sysadmin positions -- and the first time they run into something new, they're lost. This is the root problem. When it happens, the excuse is invariably that the outgoing admins did not document their work well enough. This completely ignores the key bit of information that this problem had never happened before or this requirement has never come up before. There is no procedure to cover it, and you'll have to fall back on diagnostic expertise, the ability to put together a plan of attack, devise tests, understand the results, and come to a conclusion. Or in the case of a new requirement, accurately pull together the requirements, devise a plan of attack, learn whatever new skills are required, and implement the plan. And this is precisely where things fall apart.
There will always be cowboy admins, and I detest and avoid them as much as I suspect you do. But to expect the job we do to be so well documented that a taxi driver can step in and do it adequately for fifty pasie a day is unreasonable. That's not documentation, that's learning and experience. And you can't train a green recruit to be an experienced admin in a couple of weeks. Or by handing them a shelf of paper and saying "follow these, good luck".
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Oh, you right, Whoosh. You got me.
That hits the top of the market pretty hard. You'd have lots of H1B executives, lawyers, doctors... That just eliminates H1B below a certain threshold.
Obvious a guild / professional association like the bar association or AMA would be great. I'm just solving the smaller problem.
I know that in the bay area, employment is HARD to get (if you are not an h1b, not young and you were born here). they really look for any reason to not hire you, at that point. and if they did do some research on your name and a suit came up against a company, for any reason at all, I'm 100% sure that you'd not hear the reason, but you'd be marked as 'not a cultural fit' and you would not get that job. or the next. or the next.
is it worth that risk?
do you want to leave your field? I don't. I'm too old to start all over again and have too much invested in my field.
they have us.
the simple fact that we are not union and we have no collective power means we are at their mercy.
if you don't see it, its because you are probably still a 'golden child' and are in demand. once you get over 35, things change and you are no longer the GC. if there is any dirt on you, you won't get the jobs you want.
they know this. most of us know this. and it won't change for as long as we stay independant and refuse to be a collective (ie, union). I understand unions have a bad rep but the alternative - in the IT field - is having essentially no power.
I was cocky when I was young. boy did I learn, though! wish I knew then what I knew now (isn't that always the case?)
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
It allows those genuinely in need of rare skills to use the system as intended. On the other hand it discourages whole sale replacement of the local work force.
I'm with you on the Mozilla incident. That was absolutely out of bounds and I will never look at Mozilla the same way again. But that was different. Vocal opportunists saw an opportunity to make an example of a CEO and they took it. The guy already had the job. Someone mentioned that he still does code submissions, which further points to the position being the target and not so much the individual. If he was so reprehensible, they would still be complaining that he contributes to the project. All I hear now are the handful of people still expressing outrage at OkCupid, Mozilla, and the other malicious malcontents.
I know of which you speak, as far as ageism. After interviewing an overqualified Engineer in his early 50s at my last job, my manager literally replied to my recommendation to hire with: "Meh. He's just too old to fit in." I was pretty shocked, especially since part of my argument to hire him was that our team had too many young inexperienced people and could use some balance. I'm 34.
Leaving your field is an option. But there are other viable options out there. Moving to a different job market, expanding your search to the rest of CA or even out of state is another one. I'm praying some company makes me a manager in the next 5 years so I don't end up fighting for individual contributer jobs against people half my age.
Elizabeth Warren's work on "The Two Income Trap" has shown the government's figures on the cost of living to be genocidally wrong. When I say genocidally wrong I mean the absence of children that contributes to "the labor shortage" is due to income redistribution from the middle classes to the increasing centralization of wealth among the upper 1%. Ricardo's "iron law of wages" was formulated in a time when "subsistence" could not cut into replacement reproduction due to the lack of birth control. The conscientious fraction of the population will respond to a lowering of real family income relative to the cost of replacement child rearing by ceasing to have children. This is what Warren's work shows is exactly what happened to the Baby Boomers when it came time for them to plan their families. To further import foreign workers to fill the "labor shortage" when it is already demonstrably the case that lowered _real_ wages has resulted in quasi-genocide of the populations being replaced is no longer excusable as mere ignorance by policy planners, if, indeed, it ever was excusable.
Seastead this.
You sound as if you are under 30... If not, I would guess that you grew up in a very middle class to upper class household and have not suffered much in this life.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Absolutely, I have seen this in the past numerous times, in fact many Indian workers come to me with their concerns and I relay that information to their managers as if it were coming from me.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
No it doesn't. The fixed cost auction system doesn't do either. It encourages replacement at the high end because the fixed cost isn't going to be big enough to be a discouragement and doesn't allow for rare skills at the low end. A percentage based system does both.
At least one company also told the people being laid off that they wouldn't get their severance pay and back vacation pay if they didn't sign the release. My contact signed, having had a good relation with management, and nearly regretted it later.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Works fine as long as "the prevailing USA citizen wage" isn't defined as "low enough so we don't get any qualified applicants so we can offer that pay to an H1B". The issue with "similar technology workers" is that it's really hard to define, and there's nothing to stop companies from coming up with new job titles with different qualifications.
It's really hard to distinguish "there are not enough qualified US workers" from "there are not enough qualified US workers willing to work for what they want to pay".
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The market solution is that the higher salaries will attract additional people into the field, and companies will find ways to get by with fewer high-cost people and more lower-cost people, and a new equilibrium will develop. This pushes things towards a state where people are about as productive as they can be, and people as resources are allocated efficiently. Naturally, this is bitterly opposed by large companies who want to keep labor costs down.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
At least one company also told the people being laid off that they wouldn't get their severance pay and back vacation pay if they didn't sign the release.
With smart phones all over the place able to surreptitiously record such illegal threats, hopefully these tactics will become less as time goes on (esp. since any agreement signed under such circumstances is nullable by the employee, though it still binds the company).
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
See "whoosh" above....
Do you have ESP?
How about this as a disincentive?
* allow no more than 50% of the workers in any department to be H1-b's
* make the minimum wage of those H1-b's be the average of all workers in that department.
This way the H1-b's cannot skew the average pay within a company, and since they are "so much more qualified" they are required to be paid as such. This would also keep them from being used as expendable labor which can be abused without consequence, making the work environment better for them and everyone else.
I bet there would be less than ten applications a year for the entire country.
They do something like that in India - in many types of companies, you're not allowed to have your foreign workforce exceed a certain percentage of the company's body count (it's much much lower than 50%, too).
Additionally, foreign workers are required to earn above a certain threshold, and thus, pay a certain amount of tax (The minimum salary works out to about US$25k/year or so, which isn't too bad, even in Mumbai).
In my case, I'd probably need to hire about 50 or 60 more local workers before I would be allowed to recruit another foreigner.
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)
That's pretty strict. I can imagine a situation where a company needs a skill set... That's why I just like the tax and be done with it. No need for complex balancing.
It gets better (or worse) -- in our industry, we also have to buy domestically manufactured equipment as well (IIRC the minimum is 30% of our annual spend). Of course, we don't use it (because it's the shittiest shit that you can imagine - if you think a Comcast STB is bad, crikey, some devices I've encountered are just atrocious), but we still have to buy it. It either goes in to the trash or gets re-sold.
In any case, personally I'm OK with *some* restrictions on foreign workers - I am one myself, I have immigrated to a few different countries over the past few years, and I am even currently in the US. I prefer the idea that a foreign worker should have to provide some actual value, not just be a warm bum in a chair.
Of course it also depends on the industry, too - the software industry is a cut-throat one (one of the reasons I stopped bothering with it nearly a decade ago - I'm not willing to compete on price when it means competing with folks willing to work for $5 an hour). Sure, if I was living in some random country in SE Asia or something like that, maybe I might once have considered that kind of money, but otherwise, no.
At the root of the problem America(ns) seem(s) to be facing, there are two mindsets at play, I think: one is the American mindset of "maximize profit" and the other is (in a lot of cases) the Indian mindset of "how can we circumvent/ignore/re-interpret/bend this law/regulation?" especially when we're talking about TCS, Infosys and that lot.
There are probably a lot of ways the H1B "problem" could be solved, but it will require a change in how you think about the problem in the first place... the rules will need to be explicit and the penalties swift and severe, for a start - maybe "prevailing wage" isn't the right term because that means so many different things to so many different people, but maybe an H1B should be required to earn as much as the local worker s/he replaced; or if the position is new, it has to be paid according to some similar position, and there is a significant tax at least on the first year (from year 2 the tax could "normalize").
Or it could be like Europe where there would be some kind of waiting period whereby the company has to try and fill a position with a local worker first OR someone who has a visa already OR someone who doesn't need one (and be able to show documentation of interviewees), after which the search is allowed to extend to countries which don't require such visas (Canada, Mexico), then the rest of the world can follow. A possible exception to this rule might be if the worker is world-renowned in his/her field (in which case they're probably going to be coming in on an O visa or something anyway).
Hell, could even require that the company pays for settlement costs (house, car, tickets etc) as well... basically make it sufficiently expensive (either monetarily or in terms or paperwork) to get workers that they have to *REALLY* want the workers and not just some cheap labour.
Food for thought, anyway.
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)
Why do you think H1B people will work for below market wages? H1B visa are fully transferable - holders who feel they are underpaid start looking for a new job the day their H1B is approved. As such from the employer's point of view it is not easy to take advantage of the H1B holder.
Very few companies will hire people under i-9, so none are really "contractors" in the end.
Because it's illegal thanks to onerous government regulations piled on by well intentioned idiots screaming and howling that The Government needs to do something which is prevalent all over (and in full display here). The government says if you go to the same place every day, and have one client, you are NOT an independent contractor. And by doing this THE GOVERNMENT created higher wages for I.T. people because now they work for "Contracting Houses" which is another way of saying greedy pimp in many markets. So instead of making yet another law... can we repeal the one that caused this mess in the first place?
Murphy was an optimist
You are absolutely correct and there is another side to this too...
.vs. conservative it's corruption and pay to play .vs. being fair and treating people equally...
Although I have no PROOF (except life experience) the companies getting put first in line for H1-B's are the companies that are owed the most political favors by the party in power... So once again we see corporate fascism on display, which is the real problem it's not liberal
It's incredibly hard to get an H1-B unless the sponsor is one of the F100, even harder to immigrate here... Which is exactly why anything remotely looking like Amnesty makes a lot of people really, really angry...
Murphy was an optimist
With all due respect, Sir, you are dead wrong. It's not that H1-B's are cheaper if you look at TCO, they are not that much cheaper. They don't quit to get $1 an hour more next door. They don't make the kind of demands American workers do. Instead of walking around with a "The Company... owes ME" attitude they walk around with a "Thank GOD I got this job and can support my family" attitude. Oftentimes the H1B is the primary means of support for a large family back home.
I helped sponsor folks, and managed them as a hiring manager. Your view is very typical of a person who has never been in a management position. The H1B's working for me, when I was doing this, were dedicated, hardworking, honest, decent guys. Frankly many of the comments here have to do with American's inability to accept other cultures, and just plain old ugly racism.
I don't mean to be insulting. Business does what it does. Government does what it does. They are both evil, and they are both good. But don't fault business for doing exactly what it is supposed to do.
Murphy was an optimist
I am ( and have been ) in a management position, and I have worked with a large number of programmers.
Including a good number of people from other cultures, and many here on H1B's.
I don't see a "The Company... owes ME" attitude from US citizens.
And most were/are the primary means of support for a family, large or small, right here.
They were/are hard working, honest decent people. No different from those abroad.
And if they *are* "less complaining", why is that? It looks to me like duress.
Why is that a good thing?
I reject the inability to accept other cultures or racism angle, personally.
I have not seen it in those who work around me. I have seen lots of acceptance.
Comments here, perhaps some are racially motivated. Perhaps they are not.
I don't know what is in their hearts and minds. I suspect you don't either.
As to business doing exactly what it should, what exactly is it that you say it should do?
Hire only compliant workers? Or cheap?
Or workers that get the job done, and provide the revenues to the economic system they depend on?
emt 377 emt 4
Your reply is a bright spot in an otherwise crazy busy day. Thank You. I do see "The company OWES me" from a few people, mostly younger folks who have never been managers. These are the guys who get promoted to management and think that by barking orders things get done... and then they inevitably crash and burn, blaming everyone else for their failure as a leader. And then they write bitter postings on slash dot about evil corporations LOL
Good developers - really good ones - are in short supply the world over. Just because they don't live in the U.S. doesn't mean the distribution of exceptionally good, exceptionally bad, and mediocre is any different. I've got some awesome guys here in the states, and some awesome guys in Ukraine, and they all love each other. Which is why the "We hired a bunch of guys from ______________ and they all sucked" hits a nerve.
Truth is, the days of the $12 an hour offshore programmer disappeared about ten years ago. Try $30 - $70. MOST web sites are built using global teams, because web site production has become an assembly line operation. A creative guy builds a layered PSD, an IA builds a wire frame, a front end guy slices the art and codes the HTML/CS/JS and a programmer marries it to a framework. Each of these people can be in a different country, it doesn't matter for 70, 80 percent of the sites out there. This happened years ago, and one either followed the herd... or starved. That's why we went offshore. Fortunately I had friends in the Ukraine. I need to eat and pay bills, all my competitors did it, and I couldn't compete using all U.S. guys. It's not personal. it's not Anti-American it's just the way things are. If you're in Digital Interactive, you're managing a global team or you're unemployed. Yeah, some small agencies have in house developers. But none of the major accounts do, and in this business the big brands are what make your portfolio.
Murphy was an optimist
Missed a point. Business operates to return the maximum value to the people who took the risk. This is either the owners, or the shareholders.
The greater the risk, the greater the reward. If you put your life savings at risk to start a business, you get a higher reward than the guy who just has a job.
Of course some people believe if you do this, and are successful, you need to be punished and your wealth confiscated. To them, I say "Go start a business and get back to me"... You'll discover that treating customers like gold, and watching costs is how you get rich - not ripping people off and screwing employees. This is the big surprise....
And yes. the bigger the organization, be it business or government, the more fucked up it is. Which is why the Federal Government is the most fucked up entity on planet earth!
Murphy was an optimist
"The company owes me..." types. They are not everywhere.
"We hired a bunch from...and they sucked". I didn't say that.
"Distribution of talent". Yes, quite. Which is part of why the "Americans cant program" strikes a nerve. We can and do. They can and do.
"Have to offshore". Not totally against it, personally, but the increasing "Americans cant program"/"Cant find programmers here" so "they" can justify offshoring is nonsense. It is about costs. Maybe not for your organization, but in general.
"Business operate for profit". Never said otherwise. But profit on what time scale? When the US middle class is gutted, who will these businesses sell to? At what prices?
And is this migration good for everyone?
( I would argue that we are looking at a decrease in worldwide "good" as America gets economically weaker ).
"Punishment and confiscation". Not a good thing, But paying reasonable taxes and reasonable costs is acceptable and necessary.
emt 377 emt 4
Agreed on all. What happened in my business is that the rate I could charge my clients per developer hour went from $70, $80 to $50 -- Because that's what my competition (who went offshore first) was charging. That's a blended rate for a U.S. based PM and a developer. Digital PM's cost me $90-$110K a year, plus burden so that's $130-$140, and of course Healthcare costs went up 30% with Obamacare. So at $50 an hour, four developer hours for 1 PM hour, I'm looking at paying a 5-7 year developer $55K with burden $70K. And guess what? NOBODY WILL TAKE THAT JOB. So if I can get offshore guy with same experience and English for $30 an hour, that's $60K a year total and I stay in business.
.vs. 20 years ago. The cost of insurance - not just health - has skyrocketed. I'm really fortunate, I'm going to retire in six years, but the poor people today who dream of starting a business I really feel sorry for... As a country we're anti-entrepreneur, anti-small business... which is exactly why all the specialty stores are gone, and we have Wal-Mart. And why we have Mega-Corp instead of mid-corp. It's not that Mega-Corp is evil, it's that all large organizations are evil compared to smaller ones.
That's reality. I can't change it. Now there was a time when you could get slicers in India and South America for $15 to $20 and hour. But it just caused problems, because the developers ended up having to rework the HTML/JS as it wasn't very good.
Reasonable taxes, absolutely! But as one who worked 80 hour weeks for three years to build this business, putting all of my income, savings at risk.. and then being told I should be taxed at 90% of my income.... Sorry, it really makes me angry. I still work some 60 hours a week, every week, have taken 1 week off in four years. This is what business owners DO. Rich people... 99.9% of them.... are working their asses off.
The Middle Class is being gutted because we're killing the small business owner with paperwork, regulations, one size fits all, mandates for benefits, lawyers, the whole lot of it. You wouldn't believe the hoops we have to jump through today
Murphy was an optimist
The tax works well with maximizing profit. If the company can get an H1B for less than 66% of the cost of domestic then fine, they pay a large tax and we get the benefits from the high rate of taxation. The Indian companies don't need to be complaint, blatantly cheating the tax systems gets the Americans involved tossed in jail.
A tax is just one way to look at removing some of the incentives for companies hiring H1Bs. Ensuring the wages can't be suddenly dropped to damn-near-slavery is another.
It's not really that we want to stop it - overall, immigration is a good thing - but we should want to create a more level playing field and have the companies actually look at local talent first, rather than going to H1Bs as the first step which **seems** to be how they go about it now - short term savings and share gains.
This is one of the reasons I hate MBAs and try not to hire them: they can't see past the next dollar, and it leads to some stupid decisions.
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)
The court held the agreement binding. I didn't get any more details than that.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
http://wh.gov/iCfVS will save the world from Oligarchy
Casteism
Wealth Inequality Is MUCH Worse Than You Realize http://www.businessinsider.com...
Casteism
Map Shows Most Racist People On Earth. http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Casteism
You would then have companies that had a 50/50 hiring policy with 50% being low end jobs for Americans and 50% being higher end jobs for H1Bs. There are enough janitors, restaurant staff, retail staff.... to allow for effectively infinite IT hires. And even if you required IT that means the domestic workforce gets stuff like helpdesk or call answering.
sounds good, whatever way is the most efficient! The original source of the law probably links back to some pre-Colonial English law in favor of the East Indian Tea Company or something ridiculous and ancient that in no way is REALLY related to the modern IT job market
It's a fascinating story. Microsoft had a workforce made up almost entirely of contractors - because it was cheaper for them, and because so many developers wanted to work for Microsoft the developers happily paid the self-employment penalty (Schedule C FICA contribution which is normally split between you and your employer, self employed folks have to pick up the other half.
Over the years we have made it really difficult for companies to fire people who don't perform... and big companies, that have big money, are huge targets for lawyers, who tell clients "Microsoft? They have huge piles of money! I can SUE them, and if I win, we'll split the money and you'll be set for life!! They didn't fire you because you sucked as a developer, no, it was because you were black/white/christian/muslim/gay/whatever!! But a "contract employee" hired from a contracting house can be let go in a heartbeat with no reason given. Saves HR having to "build a case" to prevent a lawsuit.
I believe it was the Bush Sr. administration that got the law changed - not sure - Essentially it says "You aren't an independent contractor IF you have a single client, and are expected to go to the same place to work each day. It was a good idea by well intentioned people... Microsoft should pay their fair share of taxes - and it should give these folks good benefits, because as everyone knows Microsoft works people really hard for insane hours. As does Google, Apple, Facebook, etc.
But as almost always happens when well intentioned nice people decide that passing laws is going to solve a problem, that nasty law of UN-intended consequences came into play...
So guess what happened? Everybody got fucked except the very entity that the law was targeted towards. Overnight the contract house industry got a HUGE boost, all these people became contract house employees. The contract houses operate under the laws that affect temp agencies, they don't have to offer a pension, can give you the bare minimum health insurance benefits, etc. Microsoft didn't have to pay any more taxes... You, the developer, now works for sleazy Joe headhunter, who is a legalized pimp. Turnover went up - because Joe is going to place you where he makes the most profit. Quality went down. An entire layer of administrative crap was created - that now has a vested interest in self perpetuating itself.
So you hire a guy in another country, where they haven't spent 200 years building a mountain of crap regulations... He costs what the developer used to cost, before we built all these roadblocks into the system... and if he sucks you can fire him on the spot. And you don't have to pay ANY taxes on this guy, or give him benefits, or a pension.
There is a very important lesson here. Trying to micromanage behavior through legislation fails most of the time because there is this fallacy on the part of the legislators that people as a herd are stupid.... But the truth is that people are actually damn smart, and you pass some law that involves taking something away (e.g. paying more taxes) people will work really hard to avoid paying them, and you'll get some completely unexpected result. And the "fix" is ALWAYS another micromanagement attempt, that causes yet another set of unintended consequences, and after many years you end up with exactly what we have now, a completely crazy stupid system that is a big fucking mess....
So let's pass a law that you can't hire the offshore guy, and add another layer of insanity. This is why everything the government touches turns to shit eventually. Politicians have to "do something" and most of the time, it's wrong...
The solution is to start over. Start by abolishing the IRS and implementing a flat tax. It's not the best system, it has many faults, but it's simple... Then you wipe out whole agencies and the associated CFR sections, and start over, one by one. The alternative is that we go the way of all other empires that came before us...
Murphy was an optimist