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Disney Making Laid-Off US Tech Workers Train Foreign H1-B Replacements
WheezyJoe writes: The NY Times brings us a story on the Disney Corporation laying off U.S. tech workers and replacing them with immigrants visiting the country under H1-B visas. The twist is that the immigrant workers are not your nice local visiting foreign guy from the university who wants to stick around 'cause he likes the people here... they are employees of foreign-based consulting companies in the business of collecting H1-B visas and "import[ing] workers for large contracts to take over entire in-house technology units." The other twist? The U.S. tech workers are required to train their replacements before vacating their jobs, or risk losing severance benefits (excerpts of the Disney's layoff notice are included in the article).
...just what you'd expct from Disney
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
I'm king, and when I'm dead, my firstborn will be king!
Stick them shit peons' noses in the mud where they belong! Who's the boss, shit peons, hunh? Now go cry to your unions or whatever. Oh, too bad, they can't help you. Whatcha gonna do, shit peon, heh?
So how many "nerds" and information technology workers are going to reward Disney by buying tickets to see the new Star Wars movie this December? Wouldn't it be funny if their target audience boycotted the movie out of solidarity and it flopped?
You can toss in So Cal Edison in the same bin
http://www.computerworld.com/a...
Now unless I misunderstand the law. H1-B is supposed to be for jobs Americans can't do. Tell me how a dept that is and has been doing the work is suddenly unskilled and unable to do the job but is able to train their replacements. Also if these people have the "Skills" why are they being trained by those they displace ?
You morons will still be taking your kids to the Disney movies with the Disney Happy Meals and all the Disney toys and bedspreads you can find.
So, we all have heard we have a lack of workers with necessary skills...
Given that US citizens are now training these H1B workers with their job skills, what sort of skills were they lacking in order to justify the "need" for the imported skilled workers?
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Wow. Train your replacements. Bit like making the condemned sharpen the guillotine before they step up.
Can't say I've heard of a dick move like that since FuckedCompany.com was tracking this sort of thing.
And to think I was considering visiting many of your parks this year. With friends and family. I'll be certain to inform them all what a magical place you've become.
Fuck you Very Much Disney. I hope your bottom line feels this shit. Have a Nice Day.
The contracting company can claim H1Bs are required because the current employees are not actually looking for jobs. And of course, quitting en mass wouldn't help because the H1Bs have already been approved.
The employees should trash Disney's systems. Completely and totally cripple them. Using time bombs that trigger after they are certain to be gone. Blame can always be laid at the incompetent H1Bs.
Boycott any Disney business. Spread the word of how they behave and act. Let the people of the US know how this corporation should move somewhere else and never come back here.
Your Congressmen are allowing and extending this.
Fuck you.
“The program has created a highly lucrative business model of bringing in cheaper H-1B workers to substitute for Americans,” said Ronil Hira, a professor of public policy at Howard University who studies visa programs and has testified before Congress about H-1B visas.
By law the H1B should not be cheaper than hiring Americans. They need to demonstrate they are paying prevailing wages and that they have made good faith effort to recruit Americans. But the companies game the system thoroughly. They lobby the congress to create strict dead lines like, "if there is no reply from immigration side for 90 days the application is deemed to be approved" and they the congress cuts the budget and staff of the immig department. They pad up the qualification requirements on one hand, "degree in math/engineering, x years of experience in y technology blah blah blah", then on the payment side they name the positions that have low pay. Naturally they would not find qualified Americans willing to work at that pay.
The way around these issues should be to create some sort of bounty program. Let the government crowdsource it. Make these H1B applications and the documentation supplied by these companies public. Any one should be able to challenge and point out the "gaming". There should be some sort of reward for people who catch them cheating. There should be some safe guards against frivolous challenges, and this program could be revenue neutral by making the cheaters pay for this by fines.
In some fields in some ways H1-B applications are legitimate. People who come to USA, get a degree from accredited US university who work in the field they got their degrees in are not to be confused with these body shopping companies that import people with degrees from diploma mills in India. Indians who came in the early 1990s with degrees from top univs like IITs, IISc, TIFR, AIIMS, RECs and got further degrees in US universities earned the good will and the reputation for Indian engineers. Now all that is being squandered by these cheap body shoppers gaming the system bringing ill-repute to all Indian Americans.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Hedge your bets: keep working/training but look now.
If you get an offer try to negotiate a start date after your release date to grab the severance... but consider that you need to beat your fellow soon-to-be-unemployed colleagues to the remaining jobs in the area, so the few weeks pay is not really worth it.
Too bad all the local employers know what is going on and the well is somewhat poisoned.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Disney Replaces Longtime IT Staff With H-1B Workers
Most of Hollywood's revenues comes from abroad. And it's like that for most big corps - that's one of the reasons why corporate profits are at a peak and there are still 8.5 million people unemployed or underemployed and wages have stagnated. For the average American, the pie isn't growing and is being sliced into ever tinier slices.
When I read stories like this, I hear the sound of guillotines being sharpened.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The 57-year-old project manager and software developer. His boss said he was doing a great job. Now, he's replaced by an H1-B with limited English. Yeah. I can't blame Disney for doing what they need to do to make their bottom line look good, but if this wasn't illegal, I don't know what is. I guess I'm just glad Disney doesn't make software for aircraft or medical equipment, because the quality they're going to get from these H1-B workers is going to be proportional to what they're paying them.
Sing along, former American employees!
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
They keep thinking their jobs are lost due to H1Bs, or due to Indians being hired overseas when the company opens a branch there.
Truth is, that jobs are lost at a much higher level because American management nowadays hires foreign contractors, but this is invisible to blue-collar workers.
Contractors are the easiest way to outsource, because a cheaper price is offered over a proven track record. It's as simple as that.
I run a company overseas that gets contract work from American companies, which recently fired 1000 American employees because they would rather outsource the job to companies like mine.
But even though that is the most common case scenario, you won't see that in the news. If 1000 Americans were fired and replaced by H1Bs instead, then it would be all over the American news sites and everyone would be outraged.
Pretty fucking hard to measure how well I'm training my replacements, lots of opportunity for shenanigans.
It isn't illegal because economic forces trump legal ones. It's the same reason content creators can't successfully use the law to stop illegal copying which hurts their business, buggy whip manufacturers couldn't use the law to stop automobiles from destroying their jobs, factory workers couldn't make robots replacing their jobs illegal, and so on. Industries change in response to market forces.
Read almost any slashdot comment section about any of those topics and you'll see a great many +5 comments all saying the same thing: you need to either compete, or find a new business model that works, but the job of the law is not to make sure your business model is profitable for you. In this case, if you can't compete with cheaper imported labor, either lower the prices you charge until you can, or find a different place to work.
I know there's endless rage about this, but it is NOT going to stop, so you can either deal with the reality, or be one of the people displaced and out of a job. You can no more stop this economic force than the farm hands could stop cheaper foreign labor from taking their jobs.
Times change.
The U.S. tech workers are required to train their replacements before vacating their jobs, or risk losing severance benefits
I'll start by saying, I have no shortage of cynicism and this doesn't surprise me in the least. So I know, "legally" doing this and "no one cares" don't mean the same thing.
But in order to hire H1Bs, I thought a company needs to demonstrate that they have advertised locally for the positions and can't find any sufficiently qualified people to take them. The fact that they have laid off their existing staff (a pool of local people willing to do the work), and the existing staff has sufficient skills to actually train their replacements, seems 100% antithetical to the conditions required for a company to hire H1Bs.
Any IAL's want to comment on how Mickey can get away with this?
Does it say anywhere in the contract that they have to actually teach the replacements useful skills, or just spend X months doing it to receive the severance package?
Sig ?
The problem is that the government is influencing the market by allowing companies to pay these people less by virtue of their immigration status. A H1-B is sponsored by a particular company. They can't just quit and go find a better paying position when they are abused/under paid/etc.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
They don't want added value, they want to pay you as little as possible.
exploit people here training exploited people abroad. Amazing.
I have to train my replacement because they're laying me off. I'd tell them to kiss my fucking ass.
If Disney wants to boost profitablity, they should bring in an H1-B replacement for Robert Iger. I'm sure they could find lots of qualified candidates from India or China who have experience managing an organization the size of Disney and who would be willing to do the job for less than 46.5 million dollars per year. Replacing this one employee would have a larger savings effect than replacing the entire IT staff, while allowing the IT staff to continue innovating and making Disney run smoothly. As a gesture of corporate good will, Disney could allow Mr. Iger to continue working at a theme park as a cast member, preferrably wearing the Goofy costume.
The author of the article is guessing (*) (and presenting it as a fact) that they are on H1-B visas, since they happen to be unpopular... Most likely, though, these are L1 visas, used by foreign companies with offices in US to do intra-company transfers.
The L1 visa has no caps and no requirements for prevailing wages, and makes it much easier to bring in foreign workers into US.
(*) - http://www.computerworld.com/article/2915904/it-outsourcing/fury-rises-at-disney-over-use-of-foreign-workers.html
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
The layoffs happened in January.
Why wasn't this article written in January?
Who really NEEDs Disney? I plan to boycott their products from now on. I can live happily without their movies, theme parks, cruises, etc.
@sycodon - I agree that the H1-B program creates a distortion as you describe. But for those who don't like this situation, there are 2 choices: (1) protect the American workers against the H1-B workers or (2) eliminate the restriction and let the H1-B workers compete without restriction. I would be happy with the second option, but I don't think most of the complainers would agree. They favor protectionism over competition. (Not saying that's your view - I don't know what you think.)
Apply your own interpretation of the words and grammar in this post.
I was laid off from Kohl's in this exact same manner. Had to train my replacement to do my job (nice guy, really), I was literally the last American left in my department. Word from my buddies from the other IT departments say it eventually happened to every IT department over there.
Cheaper, more willing to do the job... this is why the US economy relies on H-1Bs. Oh, don't think "union" like other professional groups. IT skills are not anything that can be unionized anyway, nor nowhere near as time consuming to learn as plumbing/HVAC/electrical work.
Why should this be illegal? Protectionism creates a selective advantage for the protected workers but makes the workers complacent and makes the company less competitive over time.
I'm a freelance tech worker, and I neither have nor want protection from foreign workers. I compete and add more value.
This is funny because the author doesn't realize he's the same as a foreign worker, that is, he's part of the problem. As a freelancer you make it cheaper for companies to hire from without because you don't have the same overhead as an employee. That's fine, your willing to take less it's your prerogative (less than what it costs for an employee or what a outsourcing company would charge). Fact is I've worked for companies that relied on outsourced "talent" and I've discovered that whether native born or imported, neither a particularity good job with software. It's mostly because they think their code don't stink, but they haven't had the pleasure of supporting their own code. You employees know what I'm talking about.
No, by and far the only reason many freelancers get hired is because they claim to be early adopters of new technology and business don't want to give employees the time to learn anything new. Investing in your employees is like a rainy day fund, it eventually pays for itself.
I'm not trying to excuse Disney as such, but we only have part of the story here. And yes, as pointed out by others, it's a dupe. Disney get rid of a lot less workers than a lot of other major employers (cough cough - Cisco, IBM) have done recently. My understanding is that these jobs were basically support type jobs like system admin stuff and they turned them over to an outsourcing company to save money as they opened newer, better paying jobs in IT to do more high tech things. At least that's what they claim. Might be interesting to find out just how many of those new jobs there are, what the average pay is, and whether they went to Americans or not.
I've heard of many other American companies that transferred IT jobs overseas and forced a small number of employees to train their replacements by either bringing the replacements here temporarily or sending the US staff over there to train the locals. Making people stay to train their replacements is rather mean spirited, but this is not the first time it's been done by a US company. However, some people actually don't want to leave and will willingly stay until the bitter end without too much complaint just to put off having to find a new job. My previous job was working in a US office of a subsidiary of a major European telco company. They gave us 6 months notice of an end to our jobs and the fact that they would be moved to a cheaper country in South America. I found a job about 3 months later with another company, but none of my co-workers would leave. In fact, one of them offered to move to the country where the jobs were being relocated at his own cost and to work for local wages and they turned him down. It sucks, but I've heard of other companies doing the same thing. The former employees may not like it, but the reality is that Disney jobs in Orlando have a higher degree of risk than Disney jobs elsewhere. Disney completely closed down the Orlando animation department more than a decade ago I think. They're always making major changes in Orlando that cost people jobs.
Well, actually they want both. And I want to get paid as much as possible. And when I consulted for Disney in the past, their desire to pay as little as possible was offset by their desire to get the value I add. So we reached an agreement. And when that project was done, I could have continued working for them but had better opportunities elsewhere. Pretty simple concept if you take off your blinders.
Apply your own interpretation of the words and grammar in this post.
Protectionism is typically in the form of tarriffs imported goods, not labor. Protectionism also exists today, it just stands to benefit corporations. Harley Davidson is alive today because of protectionism added by *gasp* the Reagan administration. Also, I don't think that protectionism of offshore labor will make India a technical innovation powerhouse anytime soon. Right now, tech people are having their wages pushed down, let's worry about that. If India becomes the world's innovator because of that, lets deal with it then.
If they did this as a group upon being notified of the layoff they could have negotiated a better severance package. It may also have gotten the NLRB involved.
No chance there's other American workers competing for jobs then, eh? You sound like you believe once someone has a job, it's theirs until an H1-B comes along and takes it.
I was replaced by an H1B and told to train everyone in the department not just my replacement. Then I was forced out! And this is in the Financial industry.
"Your investments are now controlled by offshore companies using there workers"
don't forget option three.. Eliminate the H1B program and make companies actually pay the prevailing wage for workers. If you want to go to the USA apply like everyone else, and get in on your own merits and not the fact that you will work for 25% less than others.
The H1B replacements can't be said to fit the requirements of the job if they must be trained.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
In this case, it's unlikely to be the L1 visa. Back when I had one, the L1 was sub-titled as the "executive transfer visa".
It could only be used to transfer an existing corporate-officer-grade employee of the company/wholly-owned-subsiduary, and was subject to a "skills not available locally" declaration and a twelve-page document extolling my own virtues.
I wish I'd kept a copy of that now...
This sig left unintentionally blank.
We could create a GoFundMe for the laid off US workers to make up for lost severance. Then let them walk !!
I don't know what guns have to do with this anyway - just a stupid thing for the parent post to say. But this reply also shows ridiculous ignorance. I own guns and go shooting with techie and non-techie friends regularly. It's pretty laughable how you pretend to have insight into the psychology of a group of people you know nothing about.
Apply your own interpretation of the words and grammar in this post.
Why are these employees not telling disney, "Go stuff it in mickeys rear"? If you are not paying me I am not doing crap.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Disney is enabled by the immigration loving democrat politicians that the slashdot crowd overwhelmingly favors. The democrats have abandoned America's blue collar workers in favor of immigrants both legal and illegal. They are easier to bribe. Do you think Obama's TPP contains carve outs for outsourcing? Do you think you'll do better with Hillary? You should consider supporting politicians like Jeff Sessions, who is on your side.
You can pretend to know something about me if you want, but actually I'm only part of the problem for people who are afraid of competition. And no, I don't get paid less than the employees - I get paid more. Always. Because I'm good.
Apply your own interpretation of the words and grammar in this post.
Cue the smug slashdotter chest thumping about how they are immune from such problems because: 1) they know the business 2) they constantly work at being best in what they do 3) they have incredible social/networking skills somehow insinuating that these employees had it coming...
Rarely are these worth it but sometimes they get traction. Change.org Petition
...whom I'm friends with, they say that of the 250 notified, only about 50-60 left the company because most were able to stay in the same field/department. The reason for the staff change is for a large system replacement being provided by an Indian software company. The people who left were maintaining very old systems that needed replacement...we're talking green screens here. Now, I'm not saying I agree with the concept of the hard push for increasing H1-B employees in the US, but there may be more to the story than what was presented in the article.
I think your option 3 is the same as my option 2.
Apply your own interpretation of the words and grammar in this post.
Ever heard of something called as a previous employer reference ?
problem solved
Businesses claim H1B workers are to fill positions they cannot find American workers to fill and that it's not about replacing high-paid American workers with low-paid foreign workers, right? In other words, they claim it's not about the money. So let's have them put their money where there mouth is and require H1B visa positions be paid the prevailing wage for that position in the US. What objection can US businesses have that won't reveal the true motivation for their lobbying?
This isn't protectionism; this is labor market distortion. When the US labor market dictates an engineer will make X dollars and a foreign worker will do it for 2/3 of that, the normally 'rah rah we're capitalist free market' types try to distort the market in which they reside to their advantage.
The situation is barely better than the asshole they interviewed in Arizona who said "well, I can't find welders to work in my business! We need more welders and that's why I use illegals!".. to which the reporter asked "why don't you raise wages to compete for them or pay for some people to be trained?".. his response "oh, I can't afford that! I can't pay 18 dollars an hour for a welder!".. so.. my response.. then your business model isn't viable and you go under.
H1b visas should be pared down to a couple of thousand superstars for whom NO replacement can be found (i.e. truly unique talents).. saying you don't want to pay an engineer or scientist in the US 75k a year doesn't cut it.
And the crux of it, although you wouldn't know it from our politicians, the US economy is here to serve as a goods, services, and labor market for the US population. The idea that corporations are people is a joke, btw.
As a US tech worker, I am glad to see this getting some attention. But, I am also a little puzzled as to why this is getting so much attention.
This sort of thing has been going on in IT for decades. In recent years, the trend has accelerated significantly. In 2009 Bill Gates sat before the US congress, and explained that the tech industry was suffering from huge shortages, and desperately needed more foreign guest workers. At the same time, Microsoft was laying off thousands of US workers.
BTW: US workers are naive to think they can solve this problem by raising public awareness, or by voting. The only way to solve the problem is to organize and fight back. But, I doubt that will happen, especially tech workers.
These visas are at the center of a fierce debate in Congress over whether they complement American workers or displace them.
If the debate is in congress then it won't end well if history is any indicator.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
"Sure, $manager. Before I start, I'd like in writing that my consulting rate is (10x my current rate)."
Zuckerberg is at the heart of driving these H1-B's too, so if you're using Facebook you gave him the power to fuck you over.
"They trust me — dumb fucks,"
-Zuckerberg
http://gawker.com/5636765/face...
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Why should this be illegal?
Because what Disney and other companies are doing in situations like this clearly violate the regulations around H1-Bs. H1-Bs by law are not supposed to be used to displace American workers or to drive down wages. They are only supposed to be used when NO ONE has the skills needed for the job. Clearly if these IT workers can train their replacements they have the skills to do their job. But since most of Congress are basically the mouthpieces of the rich and wealthy they won't do shit to stop this.
Congress should have required companies to have to pay above well-above market rates to use H1-Bs if they really are as vital as these companies claim. That would have eliminated the clear abuses of the system that we routinely see from these companies.
Except that you missed a few huge points dipshit. The government requires that anyone filing self employment taxes will have to have Form 1080s from at least two different companies. This ensures that the freelancer in question is an entrepreneur, not someone being taken advantage of by an evil company that just wants to pay them less and avoid having to pay employment taxes and benefits for someone who should be classed as an employee.
People do freelance work because they want to and can make a good living at it. It's people taking advantage of natural market conditions to attempt to start their own small business to help control market prices through natural competition. This is a good thing and helps everyone. As a consultant doing freelance work, I actually make more per hour than I do at my day job as a software engineer. Just because you work for a company that hires incompetent domestic independent contractors to try and avoid taxes doesn't mean that all independent contractors are incompetent. I've found a lot of very competent people in my field doing consulting work on the side.
H1-Bs are people imported in from half a world away to perform the same job you do at a fraction of the cost to the company who's replacing you. The H1-B program is artificial and harmful to the market and economy in general. Require them to get regular work permits and/or green cards if they are people who really want to come here for a better life and become US citizens. Even if they don't want to stay they still should be accorded the same fair market value for their work. H1-B is a very specific and restrictive form of work visa that is being abused by a lot of companies. Some, like mine, have a couple of H1-B workers, but I know for a fact we pay them well and treat them with respect. For one, we even sued the guy's previous visa sponsor because he was worth employing and wanted to be here, and his previous company was being total dickbags. I've found that this is an entirely uncommon approach, though.
On the flip side, I've seen H1-Bs that are totally incompetent and are probably being paid and abused proportionally to the shitty work they do. Many companies are catching on to this. It's more expensive in the long run to fix the fuckups, especially for a company in a field where sensitive information gets stored and a data breach can be potentially devastating to millions of people.
(2) eliminate the restriction and let the H1-B workers compete without restriction. I would be happy with the second option, but I don't think most of the complainers would agree.
Why wouldn't they agree? Having to actually pay equivalent or higher wages to their American couterparts would all but eliminate most of the H1-B imports and outsourcing in general. The whole point of H1-B/outsourcing hires is to depress wages and benefits, not actually because they can't find qualified people (outside of extremely rare cases). Clearly if these IT workers at Disney are being used to train their replacements then they clearly were not incompetents who couldn't do their job.
If I had to train someone to "do my job" in order to collect my severance I could easily do it in such a way that I'd technically fulfill my obligation but my replacement would be totally screwed after I left. There is so much institutional knowledge it most veteran IT workers' heads that could never be transferred. As another example there are so many random optimization tweaks or maintenance tasks that aren't documented anywhere that I could just neglect to mention and so as far as anyone knows are not part of my job. Casually remove those and everything works fine for a while but slowly starts grinding to a halt in subsequent weeks and months.
> Oh, don't think "union" like other professional groups. IT skills are not anything that can be unionized
Why not?
Other professions, like medical doctors, are organized, and it works for them. It works like all hell.
Ask yourself why the US has not flooded the market with foreign physicians? Ask yourself why the wages for physicians have not been crushed?
The reason is: doctors have organized, raised money, and lobbied congress. They have become a protected group.
Tech workers could do the same. But they won't. US tech workers would rather, pointlessly, send links to articles to one another; and then gripe that nothing ever changes.
It should be illegal because the point of H1-B is 'we can't find local skill to fill the position, we had to go overseas to get it'. The fact that you already *have* the skills and are laying them off to *replace* with H1-B workers means you are violating the intent of the H1-B program.
With respect to protectionism, having a coporate 'sponsor' for your VISA means handing a corporation unreasonable power over that guest worker. This weakens their negotiating power if the general market conditions suggest they are not as well compensated as other companies do. It's one thing if they would be as empowered to quit their job without fear of deportation as the person they are replacing. This is a factor that makes H1-B holders stay cheaper than their non-H1-B counterparts, even when they should be on a level playing field when working in the same geographic location.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Why should this be illegal? Protectionism creates a selective advantage for the protected workers but makes the workers complacent and makes the company less competitive over time. I'm a freelance tech worker, and I neither have nor want protection from foreign workers. I compete and add more value.
This should be illegal because, as far as I understand the law says H1B's are supposed to be for workers with skills not found in the local population. However, these workers seem to be doing the same job as Americans, seeing as they are being trained by the Americans they are replacing. So I don't see how these people can claim to have some special skill set.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
I honestly can't tell if you're trolling or you're just a fucking idiot....
H1b visas should be pared down to a couple of thousand superstars for whom NO replacement can be found (i.e. truly unique talents).. saying you don't want to pay an engineer or scientist in the US 75k a year doesn't cut it.
And in the cases of these truly unique people they should be required to pay at market or above wages and benefits. Because if those engineers/scientists/etc. were truly as vital to these companies as claimed then they can more than afford to pay all of that versus having vital positions being unfilled. That would eliminate all of this abuse of the system to drive down wages.
Campaign contributions go a long way to changing US laws to benefit the corporate contributors.
Until there's fly in, fly out, outsourced politicians - they don't give a damn . Cheques will still come in from IBM, HP, Apple, Google or whoever takes on this kind of practice to save a buck.
We're all fucked long term, seriously, globalisation has some great benefits and some utterly horrific drawbacks. Y'all fucked, me included.
(Ok, not "Y'all" - "Y-vast majority of you")
I'm surprised nobody else has asked why this is not illegal.
The H1-B program exists (ostensibly) to fill job vacancies for which native talent can't be found, not to replace native talent with cheap indentured servants. If the native talent has to train those servants, that is a pretty clear sign that they're not bringing anything to the table that isn't already available.
Ok you want H1B then Mickey Mouse is now PD
The government is supposed to serve the people, not the corporations. I do not see the point in paying taxes to a government that gives some of it away to other countries, pander to corporations, spend ridiculous amounts of money on military actions across the globe, overpaying congress to make decisions that are not necessarily in favor of the people, paying millions to defend terrorists, etc. Lobbying(aka bribery), has made it easy for corporations to get congress work for them. They should make lobbying illegal along with other types of bribery. And when they want a raise, the people should vote on it. If their pay was dependant on the people being happy, there would be less H1-B visas
There are multiple problems with competing for jobs with H1-Bs. When you start out, you have little experience and no job history. You will probably have to take an entry level job and work your way up, or at least gain experience and history for your next job. H1-B visas can take those jobs and you can't really compete when the company prefers someone they can control more and you can't offer anything more without a job history. This means less opportunities for people starting out and there's nothing they can do to compensate. Later, the H1-Bs will have more experience because they got those entry level jobs and when they move up they will be in a position to increase the number of H1-Bs for their friends.
Another problem is that senior executives will get bonuses for saving the company money, even if the company loses money in the long run. They can go to another company before the losses begin and the next company will hire them based on their short term track record at their previous company(IE: Chainsaw Al). Replacing a large portion of your workforce with unproven employees is a long term risk. If your current work force is competent enough to train their replacements then you are risking long term disaster. You are replacing something that works with something that might work. A percentage of hires do not have the skills they claim to have and I suspect H1-Bs are even more prone to have fabricated skill sets.
When a corporation performs an action that is hurtful and degrading like this, it proves they are sociopathic in nature. You don't want to encourage a corporation to act like a sociopath. Individual sociopaths can be dangerous, but sociopathic corporations are terrifying.
A few things... 1.) Glib jerks who post jokes about this topic haven't had this happen to them... yet. If you're one of them, good luck to you when it happens, but I hope you recall joking about it when it eventually does. It won't be so funny then. 2.) This practice is old news, like coming up on 20 years old. The real story is that nobody fucking cares!!! See point 1. above: not even many in tech seem to care that this has been happening for years, so much so, it is a joke meme: H1-B's replace indiginous tech workers... LOL. 3.) Go ahead and look into it: There are no laws with actual teeth in them to prevent this or even discourge it: doing so would piss off rich political donors, like Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, etc. Why do that? Enforcement falls to the US DOL, which couldn't give a shit that local tech workers are displaced. The DOL also have no real idea about how many foreign workers are actually in the country working. This is fact. They don't track them. The only governanace is in how many new H1-B's are issued each year (they are allocated usually on the first day of issue). 4.) The issued H1-B slots are almost all claimed by job shops who only employ H1-B's. This is why, when a foreign worker is fired or laid off from a local job they are not deported: they are never employed by the "employer" but by a job shop, so on paper they are still employed, even though they've been terminated by the "employer". The job shop them moves them to another company, perhaps lowering the rate they charge for that worker to make them more marketable. Wash, rinse, repeat. I almost skipped posting this because its been done and done so much its old. But people who joke about this are assholes and, at least, deserve to be informed assholes.
Forget about "raising public awareness" public only cares about issues that affect them directly.
Forget about voting the problem away: about 99% of politicians favor more guest workers.
We need to organize.
Consider the following situations:
1)
Management: train your h1b replacement before we fire you, or you do not get a severance, or a good reference.
Worker: I guess resistance is futile.
2)
Management: train your h1b replacement before we fire you, or you do not get a severance, or a good reference.
Everybody at the company: you try to pull that bullshit and we all walk out right now.
Management: okay, never mind.
This is the same company in charge of Star Wars.
Keep your hopes down.
You can't be good with one hand and evil with the other. You're evil, and any good you do is a psycho's sweet smile to look charming for the cameras. It doesn't work the other way around.
I'm betting that the "severance" pay isn't really severance at all.... rather, it comes with conditions that the recipient won't sue.
Not that it matters... being discriminated against based on such things is illegal, and even if they agreed to accept a "severance" to not sue, that does not in any way waive a person's civil rights. They could accept the "severance" and still turn around and sue, and not be required to pay any of the severance back.
Oh... and if they are laying off a bunch of employees only to immediately hire a bunch of new employees as replacements, particularly from a different demographic pool, I'd imagine that is pretty strong grounds for a discrimination lawsuit. While in most of the cases where I've heard of it happening, the lawsuit would generally be for age-related discrimination, it could just as easily be a discrimination based on race or nationality.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Sorry, but there is no way you can "apply like everyone else". If they scrap the H1B -> GC path, what's left either marry a US citizen, the GC lottery, invest $1M and create 10 jobs, or be a Noble prize laureate. US does not have a points based immigration system like Canada or Australia.
If con is the opposite of pro, is Congress the opposite of progress?
You can pretend to know something about me if you want, but actually I'm only part of the problem for people who are afraid of competition. And no, I don't get paid less than the employees - I get paid more. Always. Because I'm good.
How nice for you. I guess we should all just become superstar consultants and we wouldn't have a problem. Can everyone be in the top 5%? I'm thinking that's not possible.
You come off as pretty arrogant; basically telling people that if they didn't suck so much and were more awesome like yourself, they wouldn't care if people were trying to undercut their wages by making them compete with desperate people willing to settle for much less, because companies would just throw money at their awesomeness. I'm glad companies throw money at your awesomeness, but you seem to have an advanced or rare skill set making your example inapplicable to many other situations.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Not long ago Royal Bank was doing the same thing and there was an uproar but the practice in general continues. Nothing has been done to stop this.
Ironically, we were all afraid of our jobs "going" overseas and we had some comfort in the fact that the time difference was a hassle enough to business to slow this process down. Now a-days it looks like businesses solved this by shipping the oversea workers to work over here!
"If a show of teeth is not enough, bite
Don't be a horses ass!
Disney DID NOT HIRE H1-B workers. They outsourced their IT operations to Tata and Infosys. Many of the workers engaged in the contract work are located in Hyderabad, India; certainly, the on-call personnel are.
Yes, the IT personnel who were dismissed got a 3 month "paycheck continuation program", and then another 5 weeks of severance on top of that as additional consideration, if they trained the contractors employed by the outsource contracting agency.
This wouldn't be an issue now, six months after the fact, if there wasn't a Rochester college professor trying to huckster his next book.
BTW: That college professor? He immigrated to the U.S. from India.
s/based on such things/... based on certain types of things.../
Sometimes I really hate that slashdot doesn't have a window of a minute or two to edit a post...
I even hit preview first... but I somehow didn't see that I had typed that until after submitting.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
comment from a dev who worked on the disney project: http://www.jdunderground.com/o... note: jdunderground is a site for lawyers, or people who have JDs, but many there worked or work in IT.
And since the soon-to-be-replaced Americans are training them, the H1-B hires don't have the skills (yet).
The happiest place on Earth.
Wake up, this is capitalism. Americans won't have access to American jobs next generation because college will cost too much, and they will import labor from less capitalist countries to make up the diffrence. Free market my ass.
If the outgoing American workers are training them then clearly there are Americans qualified for the jobs.
Sure they're qualified. But Disney didn't hire replacement workers, they outsourced their IT. The companies to which they outsourced their IT were responsible for hiring the workers.
Lack of qualified workers is a requirement for H1B visas.
Which would probably be relevant, if Disney had applied for any H!-B's, or had hired any H1-B workers themselves, but they didn't, they just hired a contracting agency to outsource their IT.
If the companies they are contracting with are found to be in violation of H1-B rules -- which normally takes a whistle-blower to prove -- then great, those companies go out of business, and Disney hires a *different* contracting agency to outsource their IT work.
It's not like that IT work is going to come back in-house at Disney; it's too easy to use a contracting agency in order to get on-demand scaling based on the number of bodies you need doing IT this month, as opposed to last month, as opposed to next month.
Outsourcing your IT, if there's not a huge amount of specialized vertical market knowledge required to do it, is a rational cost control measure for a business that doesn't want to carry around extra IT capacity when they really have no work for all of them this particular month.
Face it: the ex-workers were a commodity, and you can get a commodity anywhere.
And why are we talking about events that happened more than 6 months ago again?
I used to work in a big European investment bank. Although we weren't caught entirely off-guard like the folks at Disney were, we didn't realize how bad it would actually be.
We were all invited to the executive floor of our building. Now, this floor was also used to impress any potential investors, so it mimicked the intricacy of those grand European castles. Marble floors, crystal chandeliers, paintings lined with real gold frames.. the works. We were all ushered into a conference room with velvet chairs, and that's where they laid the news on us. We would all be replaced by H1-B workers. It was almost an insult to parade us around the wealthiest parts of the bank, only to tell us we would all be let go.
We were all given a time line. Each of us would be gone after 6 months, 1 year, or 2 years. It depended on the function of our job, and how quickly we could train our replacement. It didn't matter if you were with the bank for 20 years or 20 months. They all gave you a tentative end date. If you decided to quit, you would get absolutely nothing. So, everybody stuck around for the eventual severance package. Oh yeah, and you had to train your replacement.
These replacements were terrible. Firstly, your technical replacement wasn't on-site. This person was somewhere in India, and you had to teach them through a conference call. Secondly, I seriously doubted their technical ability. I supported a system that was full of 100+ batch scripts and Java classes. It wasn't complex at all, mostly just file copies, FTP pulls, and database queries. I documented everything; what each class did, and what each batch script did. But, they wanted me to go through EVERY SINGLE LINE OF CODE. As in sit there, ask me why I declared this variable, why I named it that way, and where it's value comes from. Basically Programming 101, but worse because you knew that this person was gonna be replacing you in a matter of weeks.
Morale was at an all-time low. Projects that could easily take a few days to complete were held off for weeks. Nobody wanted to work. What's the point? You come into work, train your replacement from 9 am - 12 pm, and then they expect you to still complete your assigned projects afterwards? Fuck that, you were gonna be out the door pretty soon anyway.
It was a shitty time, and I'm glad that it's finally getting the coverage it deserves. It's been around for a while, and although I still support the intended use of H1-B workers, it's a system that's easily corrupt, and it's screwing over workers who have been "lifers" at the company. I'm lucky enough to be a recent grad, so I was able to pick up a new job quickly. But for a company to do that to you after you've practically given your life to them.. it's sad, it's awful, and it shows that upper management does not give two shits about what you've done for them. I wish the best to all of the displaced Disney workers. You aren't the only ones.
These are all well and good valid points, but allow me to respond from the perspective of an Executive, as I'm privy to quarterly and yearly financial reviews at the company level. Labor is the single biggest cost driver of most any American company. And it keeps growing year over year. At one IT company I worked for, labor costs grew anywhere between 6 and 10% per year, and that was with relatively high turnover in entry-level jobs. The drivers of these costs were the experienced senior personnel who are with the company for years, who negotiate for and get the bonuses and raises they arguably deserve. They also tend to manage to negotiate to be at the top of the pay scale for their profession/age/region. All good, right? No--because of wage creep. Wage creep means that because salaries must always go up for retained employees, labor costs must always go up. And companies are forced to decide between increasing labor load per employee to unmanageable levels, raising their product/service pricing above and beyond an acceptable level of inflation that the market will allow, or finding any legality/loophole they can to reduce headcount through layoffs, outsourcing, and bringing in H1Bs. As overworking employees tends to lead to poor morale and people leaving for greener pastures, increasing headcount means increasing COGS and OCOGS beyond what current revenues and profit margins will allow for, often the only alternative is to go to the Indian contracting houses and outsource IT personnel because middle-aged experienced native IT people are a massive cost center to the company. And that's not even taking into account the "good enough" expectations of clients who don't need perfection in their expectations of the product/service being delivered, or the banks who monitor the company's EBIDTA because they provide the operational cash flow, or the Wall Street analysts that work for momentum stock-preferring investment houses and watch expenses like a hawk, and whose recommendations or condemnations can trigger hordes of angry calls by shareholders straight to the CEO--and let me tell you, the REAL power in America is concentrated in the shareholders. You, me, everyone who has a 401K or stock options or owns stock, we demand growth at all costs. There's a poster downthread who talks about how legal laws will bow to economic forces and that this cannot be stopped. That poster is right--this process CANNOT be stopped. The days of American IT workers commanding above-average salaries for their work are numbered and fading away. This change is coming, it cannot be stopped, and it doesn'lt matter that many of the big employers lied to get this. This would have come regardless. Change IS happening, but it's not necessarily the fault of big bad CEOs and faceless Mr. Smiths--it is the turbulence of the world at play.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
My family is botcotting Disney products and services. Also if I'm ever in the predicament of having to train my H1-B replacement, I'll just quit instead.
If the workers who were laid off united, this strategy would not work. Simply refuse to train the replacements. That would be severely damaging to their operations. I know that many people can't afford to give up their severance, but when workers take this kind of crap with barely a whimper, that makes it a successful management strategy.
> Tech workers could do the same. But they won't. US tech workers would rather, pointlessly, send links to articles to one another; and then gripe that nothing ever changes.
I think tech workers tend to be more wary of unionization for various reasons. They tend to focus on the unions everyone knows - auto workers, service industry, that sort of thing, and scoff. They ignore that there are defacto unions for professional engineers, architects, doctors, lawyers, that all serve to regulate, license, and thus protect their industry. Those people are all unified within their professional groups, whereas a software developer might look at a designer or sys admin as not really on the same team - so why would they band together?
I also get the idea that being part of a union is something that tech people generally are afraid of. They fear that the union leadership will saddle them with bullshit, or they'll get drawn into debates/arguments that they're not part of. They might feel that a union is out of touch, or would be too unwieldy.
Then there's the idea that unions are old school. We have computers, we're tech people, why go old school with a *union*? After all, if you're making a decent wage, do you really care if someone else is getting the shaft? It's a shortsighted position, but stories like this make it a little bit more obvious that things may change relatively quickly for anyone.
I think these issues could be addressed if the union was redesigned. No elections for union "leadership", but more direct democracy. Representatives could be chosen via sortition, and then the randomly selected would be tasked to figure shit out, with the membership eventually voting on any and all proposed rules. All of this would have to be done online, and would require complete transparency. It would require quite a bit of tech that hasn't been built yet. If only we could get some people together to figure this shit out..
I worked for a major aerospace company back in the early '80s and at least part of the IT operation there was unionized. So it can happen or at least it could before money equaled speech.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Americans can't do the job.......because they are too expensive. They expect a wage they can live on.....*gasp*
So if I understand you correctly... H1-B workers are dying in droves because they can't afford to live on the wage they are being paid?
Cool! So the problem is self--solving, isn't it? Eventually all the H1-B workers will all be dead, and U.S. IT workers will be able to go back to work.
A subtle mistake in a script. A few well placed words in some documentation that nobody will read for a few months to a few years and POP goes the server security. (*Cough* SONY *Cough, cough*).
Plausible deniability. It's what's for breakfast!
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Unless you'd be just as outraged by Disney replacing their current tech workforce with a bunch of white kids fresh out of college, you're just being a nativist douchebag.
The special skill is being more humble to their master and thus more easily controllable by employer. That's the skill missing in local population.
Exactly. So who is approving these H1B applications and why are they doing it?
> Ask yourself why the US has not flooded the market with foreign physicians?
Obviously I don't know where you live, but in my neck of the woods (in the US) the overwhelming majority of our MDs come from India. And I don't mean their parents immigrated here and raised children that were motivated and determined enough to become doctors, I mean born, raised, and educated in India. Got their medical degrees in India. Then they move here and set up practice.
My primary care physician is Indian, my dermatologist (and her husband, also a dermatologist) are Indian, my allergist is Indian, and my gastroenterologist is Indian. I haven't been to a non-Indian doctor for 11 years.
Obviously I believe they are capable, otherwise I would intentionally seek out non-Indian doctors, and I have no idea if they have had any impact on what a doctor is paid locally, just pointing out that being "organized" appears to have had no affect on the ability to bring in foreign doctors.
These people will have no motivation to train their reliefs, so the training they deliver will be absolute minimum, zero effort stuff. Just enough to get their severance pay. Disney will spend far more in retraining them properly later on.
That and tech workers in the US generally are anti-union and worker protection because "they" think they'll never be the one to get outsourced or that they're irreplacable rock stars...
Once again the bony fingers of Uncle Walt reach out from the grave and grab as much gold as they can rip from the hands of people who have been good to Disney. In the beginning Disney built an image of loving children and doing wonderful, gentle things for children. Maybe they should have told those children that greed was not a good thing at all and that when those kids grew up Uncle Walt would seek ways to ruin their lives. Compared to Disney a child molesting priest looks great to have as a neighbor.
Don't worry! We all know that the Obama Administration is dedicated (heh) to faithfully (snigger) upholding (heheh) all our immigration lawHAHAHAHA!
Sorry, I just couldn't keep a straight face while typing that...
You leave out the other obvious alternative. Accept that your long-time developers are adding something irreplaceable to your company - and instead of thinking of them as an ever-growing drain, consider them your partners and accept that they deserve to be well compensated for the depth of company-specific knowledge they've acquired over the years. More, probably, than you - who were probably brought in to manage the company well after many of them.
H1-B workers are good only to the extent that they are treated the same way your existing long-term workers are. And that they themselves become long term - and gradually more expensive. Training these cheap workers entails a productivity hit. And if you don't keep them and grow them, you will never have a next generation of senior developers to carry your company forward. This system of 'managed, intentional turnover' may keep development costs down, but it is suicidal for the company. And it only works for managers that themselves plan to move on before the whole house of cards collapses. But if you must, blame 'the turbulence of the world' if you think that justifies your sociopathic view of it...
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
When US corporations were invading the world and destroying local economies, they all said: It's globalization, competition, capitalism, deal with it! Now that the global workforce is starting to compete with US workforce by offering better quality and lower cost (not always, I understand there will always be shitty techies that think Java = Javascript but that's not my point, I am talking about skilled people) now it's discrimination, communism, bla bla. How quickly we forget...
Scripted script-writing script writes scripts! Scripts!
http://insights.dice.com/2015/...
Quartz combed through Negri’s LCA database and came up with a list of the average salaries for H-1B holders at a number of tech companies. Topping the list was Netflix, where the average H-1B holder could expect to earn $214,693 in 2014, followed by Box ($143,318), Etsy ($135,595), Twitter ($134,221), and Airbnb ($134,039).
Searchable database: http://data.jobsintech.io/
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Salaries may go up every year, but that increase rarely even exceeds inflation and the increased cost of living year over year. In addition to that, productivity has steadily increased well in excess of wages for the last forty years.
The real problem lies here: "we demand growth at all costs". Throwing the citizenry under the bus may work out in the short term, but that strategy doesn't work in the long run.
Why do tech workers think they should be immune to market forces? If someone else is capable and willing to do the same work cheaper, they should get the job. That is how the free market is supposed to work.
We complain about, for example, region-locking and resultant price controls as similar manipulation of the market. Yes, that is harmful and we should be applying political force to the task of putting an end to that crap. But nothing about that justifies introducing price and supply controls to the labor market.
If you want a robust economy in America, your biggest enemy is the corporate monopoly (and equivalently the corporate cartel). The absence of competition is what really eliminates jobs, drives salaries and quality down, while simultaneously driving prices up. That is the root cause of economic woes, and that is where we should assign our focus.
The best option? Tear down ALL the borders. Everybody has a right to move and live where they want.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
... we can figure out something tangible that we can do about it.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Reed-Elsevier has been dangling the "no severance package" carrot to laid-off IT workers (replaced by Philippines workers), for many years now.
It is illegal to lay off a US worker for the express purpose of replacing them with an H1-B replacement. In fact, it is illegal to even HIRE an H1-B until all avenues to hire a qualified US Citizen or Permanent Resident Alien worker have been completely and utterly exhausted.
Well the bureaucrats who are likely regulating this are probably overworked and understaffed. So it's unlikely they can effectively regulate it.
Ask yourself why the US has not flooded the market with foreign physicians?
Um...how long has it been since you've seen a doctor?
My cardiologist is Indian, and my GP is Colombian.
Driving down "Medical Row" around here, you pass dozens of signs, and very few of the names are Anglo.
Also, the few doctors around here that are American-born often attend med schools outside the US, because the US schools are packed with foreigners (mostly Chinese, these days).
Because the native worker can legally own a gun.
And do what with it? Do you have a point or are you just being belligerent? Do you make a habit of insinuating hints of bodily harm to others?
The whole point of H1-B/outsourcing hires is to depress wages and benefits, not actually because they can't find qualified people (outside of extremely rare cases).
Yes, if that isn't the elephant in the room, I don't know what is. It really is so simple, and people waste all their time arguing meaningless little details.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I think you are missing the point: those immigrant doctors cannot practice until they have satisfied the union (medical council in your jurisdiction). The union limits their numbers anyway by refusing to give all off them a license to practice. The union will stop the licenses the minute a local doctor can't find employment.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Maybe he is a professional troll. Lots of that going around you know...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
If you can't keep up to your labor costs as a company, capitalism indicates you should dissolve and that other companies fill your place. If this happens with regularity and the economy is properly healthy, the people who used to work with you will not have trouble finding other jobs because many other companies will fill your place. These new companies may even form in other locations and distribute themselves where the workers are. Instead, the government insists on creating loopholes to keep you going which benefits less and less people over time. I don't really blame you for taking the handouts you are getting, but let's just call a spade a spade.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
The U.S. tech workers are required to train their replacements before vacating their jobs, or risk losing severance benefits
SOOOooooooo.....
They can obviously find Americans who can do the jobs.
So why do they need H1B workers ?
Only takes one disgruntled employee to burn the whole place to the ground.
Just sayin'...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
We're a small company and have hired 2 H1Bs with a total of 10 workers. They are 2 out of 4 engineers except for myself (head nerd). Firstly, as a small software company located in a area with a ton of HUGE tech companies, its been damned hard to find workers that fit the bill. Understandibly people here go big for the names, security and resume building. The rest we get seem to often be the chaff. We went through a total of 3 US citizen engineers and all failed in some spectacular way. From lack of productivity, entitlement, instability and not meshing with the culture here. Culture is super important in a small company since there is no way to hide a productive yet bad egg from others.
We've had non stop government oversight and intrusion making super sure that we're paying our H1Bs exactly on par with US citizens. We've also had to provide history and justification for their hire multiple times as well. We don't regret our decision but its very frustrating that a small company like us has to jump through so many hoops and have to fully prove our H1Bs are equals while large companies can get away with murder it seems.
Because the term is "society" or "guild", not "union".
Unions are for low-skill jobs where workers can be replaced by another from the union hall on a moment's notice. Companies can contract with a union to provide interchangeable laborers from a pool, but all laborers must be paid according to the union's requirements, not the companies' low-ball offer. (Examples: Teamsters, IBEW, UFCW, UAW, and any others that may have merged with the AFL-CIO.)
Societies are for engineering jobs, where workers are individually responsible for some of the finished product of their work (such as when a building falls down and the engineer gets slapped with manslaughter charges). Typically, a professional's society will not deal with matters of pay, but will provide assurance of skill or ability above and beyond simply completing an education program. (Examples: SAE, NSPE, ASCE, AES, ASHRAE)
Guilds are for creative jobs where workers can gain personal notoriety for their methods or results of performing their trade. Patrons can put out bids to a guild for a work of art, and members of the guild can audition for those bids. The guild controls bid parameters to ensure that the selection is at least partially based on the merits of the art, not just the lowest price. (Examples: SAG-AFTRA is the only one I can think of...)
The distinctions between these are all muddied by the fact that US labor laws have bundled them all under the legal term "union", treating them all the same way. But they serve very different purposes to their members.
IT would ideally be covered by an engineer's society (hardware) or a guild (software). A true labor union would not be necessary, except maybe for call center jobs or something. And I'm pretty sure there's already a union for that.
For Christ's sake, Walt's only been dead since 1966.
At one IT company I worked for, labor costs grew anywhere between 6 and 10% per year, and that was with relatively high turnover in entry-level jobs. The drivers of these costs were the experienced senior personnel who are with the company for years, who negotiate for and get the bonuses and raises they arguably deserve.
This appears to be a very short-sighted way of looking at the cost drivers of this company. The real cost driver is that your labor requirements have been increasing each year, and instead of hiring more entry level workers you have invested in experienced staff that can improve company efficiency. If done well, these experienced workers can reduce your hiring needs by far more than the meager 6-10% raises they have been given. If done poorly, you are wasting those raises on ineffective senior level employees.
Wage creep means that because salaries must always go up for retained employees, labor costs must always go up.
Wage creep is similar to scope creep; a small amount is inevitable but proper management can keep it mostly at bay. If someone's wages are going up faster than inflation, they better be bringing more value than they did last year. Paying people more just because of seniority is idiotic. But seniority usually comes with increased knowledge of a company's business processes which does make them more valuable, so increased seniority usually comes with deserved raises above inflation. But your total wages should only go up if your total labor requirements go up. If labor requirements don't go up, and your senior employees are getting better at their jobs, it means there should be corresponding terminations to lower wages because you don't need as many employees anymore.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Disney doesn't hire H1-B. They hire a consulting company for a flat fee and the consulting company needs cheap warm bodies to replace local workers. On small projects, they just take the risk and "bend" visitor visas. On larger projects, they abuse the H1-B program.
Disney doesn't know and doesn't care where they are getting workers from. They could be actual slaves.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-02/chasing-the-american-dream-in-india
Except that you missed a few huge points dipshit. The government requires that anyone filing self employment taxes will have to have Form 1080s from at least two different companies. This ensures that the freelancer in question is an entrepreneur, not someone being taken advantage of by an evil company that just wants to pay them less and avoid having to pay employment taxes and benefits for someone who should be classed as an employee.
You are misinformed. First off I don't believe there is a 1080 form. You probably mean a 1099. And there is no requirement to have multiple employers if you are a contractor. It is quite common for a contractor to only have one client at a time, and to have those clients for multiple years. The IRS does spend effort cracking down on companies who abuse the difference between employee and contractor, but the requirement you invented above is not accurate.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
You are right that doctors are a "protected" group and were able to make more money as a result, but be careful what you wish for. Since the government now "pays" about 1/2 of the doctor bills, they are squeezing payments to doctors. This will not end well for doctors.
This whole globalization crap is a race to the bottom where corporations exert political influence to basically decide they don't like the costs the market has decided on, and instead we'll get someone from a third world to do it for a fraction of the cost.
Do you actually think that is anything new? Production ALWAYS tends to move to the location where the costs are lowest and always have been. Companies that fail to recognize this fact will be replaced by ones that do. Governments can pass protectionist laws but those are demonstrably self defeating in the long run because it raises costs to consumers. If you are making a good that is labor intensive you are going to get it made in the location where labor is cheapest. You would be insane to do otherwise. It's not a "race to the bottom", it's merely the physics of economic playing out exactly as you should expect.
If you don't want to be replaced by an H1B then it is YOUR responsibility to be valuable enough that it isn't a problem. If your skill set is fungible such that someone can be hired to do the same job for half the price then it shouldn't come as a shock when it happens. Folks here on slashdot are constantly arguing that IT makes it unnecessary to be tied to a physical location. What they fail to recognize is the full consequences of that statement. It means you are competing for that job with people from around the globe.
This is corporate interests manipulating the "free" market on their own terms to change the playing field in their favor. This is the exact fucking opposite of a free market.
Exactly what did you think a "free market" actually is? If you want an actual free market then this is EXACTLY what you are arguing for. Take away oversight of corporations (or allow them regulatory capture) and this sort of H1B scheme is exactly what you should expect. Free markets are by definition markets without regulation. They aren't manipulating a free market, they are capturing a regulated one.
Change the rules, change the behavior.
Your elected representatives are the first step.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
All they have to do is strike. They can't be fired while striking, and if there's any hint of punishment for striking they'll get a much bigger payday than their severance package.
As a freelancer you make it cheaper for companies to hire from without because you don't have the same overhead as an employee.
I have yet to run into an independent contractor who was hired because he was cheaper than in house staff. They are usually closer to twice as expensive. Employers generally use these contractors because of labor requirements than cannot be handled by current employees, and that is specialized, short lived in nature, or immediately needed so new hiring or training is not an effective solution. The overhead you mention is baked into the contractor rates.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
... since Disney donates almost exclusively to the Democratic party.
You know, the party of the "little guy"...
There's a poster downthread who talks about how legal laws will bow to economic forces and that this cannot be stopped. That poster is right--this process CANNOT be stopped.
I can't disagree with this statement more. Business is about competition. Companies play these games because if they don't, their competitors will. If you make it illegal, and enforce it, the competitive landscape remains level. Everyone's costs go up. Sure, the costs will get passed on to the consumer. However, the company won't lose business, or market share won't be impacted.
The only downside is the risk of imported "goods" (I use this term loosely as it could be a service as well) from a competitor based overseas. We saw this in the manufacturing sector in the past. However, I'm not sure that would apply to other fields.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
lol @ you stupid cablemonkey losers on your little racist "dey terk er jerbs" kick.
So it can happen or at least it could before money equaled speech.
Now that money equals speech, it's imperative that it happen. It's the most straightforward way to amass enough money to "say" anything.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Yesterday I was lazy, today I'll include the TFL. Might as well link all the comments too.
Mr. Injury? Mr. Insult on line one...
"The days of American IT workers commanding above-average salaries for their work are numbered and fading away. "
If it was TRULY the case, then company would not need to use tricks to bypass the law and outsource outside. What would happen is company STOP hiring worker at that price, forgoing the task to be done, and would let wage drop down and would yell "too many worker ! Too many worker!". But this NOT what is happened. At the same time as they are yelling "not enough worker !" to get H1B, they pretend like you that local people are too expansive. And this is where they show their true reason. The *SOLE* reason is that US worker are too expansive, and they perfectly know very well there is no shortage of them.
And by abiding to the company having lot of H1B and not showing the door to the company asking for more H1B, the US government show perfectly clearly who they are doing governance for : not for the people, but for the companies. Well thanks for clarifying that to us.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
They are serving the people. And the chattle than follow chain of obedience.
Defense Contractors have no such cushy atmosphere, you are confusing a contractor with the bureaucracy they are subject to. As a contractor.. you can expect pay freezes, pay cuts, and layoffs regularly (unless you are an Exec. that is). Constant threats about how they want to offshore your job and are fighting congress to allow it.. etc...
You have obviously never worked at a Defense contractor...
some people are just paranoid control freaks. I worked with a guy who was always worried about losing his job-which he was quite good at--and getting him to share knowledge, passwords, etc could be excruciating. And this was a unionized, government position, he was about the last person who should be worried about getting canned.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Doesn't solve the problem.
You're just slitting tires and pissing in the wind.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
The whole point of H1-B/outsourcing hires is to depress wages and benefits, not actually because they can't find qualified people (outside of extremely rare cases).
Exactly. And it's not the only wage suppression going on in the US right now - it's a highly orchestrated long-term plan, and it's working flawlessly. Expenses have been going up and wages stagnant for many years. Decent paying wage jobs are simply not available anymore as anything but a short-term step to starting your own business, which is the only way to improve your income over the long term these days. The big problem is that small businesses are being squeezed so hard by taxation, rent-seekers, and protectionist regulations it's very difficult to start one.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Labor is the single biggest cost driver of most any American company. And it keeps growing year over year.
That's funny, because wages have been pretty stagnant for more than 20 years.
At one IT company I worked for, labor costs grew anywhere between 6 and 10% per year, and that was with relatively high turnover in entry-level jobs.
How does the labor cost compare to revenue? You can't just look at it in isolation like that. Also, if you have high turnover in entry-level jobs, you're doing something wrong. What does the retention policy look like. High turnover is very expensive for most companies. You should be looking at that, now how to get more out of low-level labor for the same pay.
The drivers of these costs were the experienced senior personnel who are with the company for years, who negotiate for and get the bonuses and raises they arguably deserve.
"Arguably" being the key term. If you're not getting a return on the investment for those bonuses and raises, why are you handing them out? If you are getting good ROI, then what's the issue?
They also tend to manage to negotiate to be at the top of the pay scale for their profession/age/region. All good, right? No--because of wage creep. Wage creep means that because salaries must always go up for retained employees, labor costs must always go up.
Why? As mentioned, retention is cheaper than turnover. There is no reason to continue to keep your employees "at the top" if they are not providing good value for the company. If they are at the top working for you, they will probably have a hard time getting more at other companies coming in off the street, so you can limit those raises, or at least make sure the increase are justified by increase value / revenue.
increasing headcount means increasing COGS and OCOGS beyond what current revenues and profit margins will allow for,
Why are you increasing headcount? Is it because the company is growing? Then why do you complain about sharing increased profits with the workers that are generating it for you?
often the only alternative is to go to the Indian contracting houses and outsource IT personnel because middle-aged experienced native IT people are a massive cost center to the company.
What a short-sighted bunch of bullshit. You're an executive? Well you suck at your job, and doing this is going to hurt your company, whether you are too ignorant to realize it or not.
You, me, everyone who has a 401K or stock options or owns stock, we demand growth at all costs.
So now you have growth, but it's better to cut your employees (who are doing the work) not only out of the growth, but out of any compensation at all for helping you get there. Then you hire these young, inarticulate buffoons to run the front lines and, guess what? Now you're bleeding customers.
The days of American IT workers commanding above-average salaries for their work are numbered and fading away. This change is coming, it cannot be stopped, and it doesn'lt matter that many of the big employers lied to get this. This would have come regardless. Change IS happening, but it's not necessarily the fault of big bad CEOs and faceless Mr. Smiths--it is the turbulence of the world at play.
Actually, from your description of your management style, it is absolutely your fault, because you can't see how harmful these practices are to your company's long-term survival. Today you're replacing US working with cheap foreign labor. Tomorrow your (now shitty) company is replaced by cheap foreign goods and services.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Then we should burn up the bill of rights, throw out all our environmental regulations and go "full capitalist". We will demolish China, who while strong, could not withstand us (at this moment). We will have kings at the top of the smogheap that rule the world, and those kings may let us work their lands.
Or, we accept that there is a price to our freedom, a price to having nice things, and protect those things to the exclusion of those outside of us. If we have a real need for workers, we let their very best in and we give them green cards, and we do everything we can to encourage them to stay.
When they notify the victims of a layoff, they give them a pittance of a severance package.
Then they offer them a much larger additional severance package if they sign an agreement that indemnifies the corporation against the individual participating in future lawsuits against said corporation.
This has happened to me on several occasions.
If you keep your skills up to date, you can get a raise, and a nice vacation out of the deal.
Other professions, like medical doctors, are organized, and it works for them. It works like all hell.
Ha. Ask the UAW how that worked out for them in the long run.
Ask yourself why the wages for physicians have not been crushed?
You pretty know nothing about what the market is like for physicians, do you?
Except that you missed a few huge points dipshit. The government requires that anyone filing self employment taxes will have to have Form 1080s from at least two different companies.
This is false. You seem to have just pulled a bunch of bullshit out of your ass, because nothing you said is correct. Just to start, there is no IRS for 1080. And, no, you don't need to report earnings from more than one company, there is no such requirement. I won't bother pointing out all the rest of the errors in your post, just a link to the IRS instructions for self-employed individuals and small businesses.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
All good, right? No--because of wage creep. Wage creep means that because salaries must always go up for retained employees, labor costs must always go up.
They do not always go up(I wish!). Most companies have a range for each position. When you hit the ceiling for your position, you do not get a raise. Also, even if you are not at the limit, your raise will depend on how close you are to the limit. The ceiling is usually based on what the current market value is for that position in the geographical location you are in. Bonuses are not guaranteed, the company usually has to be doing well, and if it is doing well, why not reward those responsible?
There is additional value in having employees who know the company well and are loyal to the company. They have a vested interest in not just doing their job, but doing it well. But if you treat them as a commodity, they'll treat you like a nameless chump with money. They might do their job, but if they see something that should be fixed, they won't care unless it is their responsibility. A loyal employee will point it out or fix it themselves, even if it wasn't their responsibility. It makes a huge difference, I can tell when loyal employees made a software product. It's the one where software support knows it well and actually help you as opposed to going through a useless checkless!
H1B worker's are free to quit and go to work for a new employer, but it rarely happens.
I wouldn't be suprised if some immigration attorneys require that employers using thier services look up a new hire in the Federal H1B database and not hiring that person if he "belongs" to another company. After all, the immigration attorney needs to look after his customers.
A good way to fix the H1B system would be changes to the regulations which make it harder for these attorneys to stay in businees.
I meant checklist!
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
I really don't know what else to say. I guess I could boycott Disney but since I never ever give them money anyway I doubt they'd notice. It's not like they really give a damn or anything will meaningfully change. A couple of congress critters will wring their hands, promise committee reviews and then ultimately bump the number of visas up a bit more and call it a day.
I agree, however, I see no reason to give them any more courtesy than I receive. Moreover, there isn't any real solution to the problem as long as the world is moving to it's final form (i.e. transnational oligarchy), prior to the world's inevitable resource collapse (hydrocarbons, phosphates, water). This will "solve* the problem, but not in a good way.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
8.5 million? There are about 30 million in the USA that are functionally illiterate.
I'm worried about the 21.5 million with jobs. What if someone fucks up and lets them do something responsible?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Let me start my reply by stating the clearly obvious facts: 1) nothing I say will change your mind because you've already made up yours; and 2) you're a better master of rhetoric than I will ever be. You'll chew me up and spit me out in this debate. That's fine, I accept that. I'm now going to make an educated guess and say that you've never sat in on executive-level financial reviews of an entire business because if you had, we wouldn't be having this particular debate. I reserve the right to be wrong about this, of course, because I don't know who you are or what your experience is. I do know you're a very loud, vociferous, and opinionated veteran of /. as I've seen you rampage through here throughout the years I've been on. And you're always, always right, no matter what. I have never once seen you admit that you are wrong, Curunir_Wolf, and your posts are brazen and detailed enough that any admission would be startling.
Now, allow me to attempt to rebut you (and, I should also note that I don't have the experience with html tags that you do either, but we've already established that I've lost this in advance... you can feel free to dismiss everything I write from here on out and stop reading if you like).
Wages have not technically been flat. Even though NeoMurphy below pointed out that wages tend to freeze at the top end of their range, we still give out 1-3% raises to decent-to-top performers because we need to give them -something-. That tends to add up over time. Now, consider Lean initiatives, Six Sigma, and all those other corporate philosophies. They don't just affect production and manufacturing, they also affect how companies perform their governmance of their financials too. No executive worth his or her salt is going to sit there and say "I've got a pool of experienced senior employees who have all collectively maxed out on their pay range, refuse to go into management, refuse to cross-train or hop into a whole new program or new job skill set, and who are obstructing any possible career progresss for less experienced employees, thus necessitating high turnover amongst our low-level employees." No, any good evil bastard of an exec is going to be working hard on how to figure out how to either crank up productivity to justify those continual, never-ending salaries. But you can only push people so far, only push productivity so far per person in whatever job they do before you hit the inevitable diminishing returns. And damn good senior employees tend to hit that point pretty quick.
You brought up turnover--there are two big reasons in my anecdotal experience (did we mention I'd lose this debate? We did, so if you're still deigning to read this, Curunir_Wolf, please crow about how anecdotes are worthless and we'll get on with it) for why turnover happens. First, entry-level employees tend to leave because they realize they don't want to do what they are currently doing. Happens all the time... financial analyst is miserable at her job and realizes she's happier being a personal trainer after just a year and a half on the job and is out the door, having cost her employeer a lot in terms of fees, training, salary, benefits, etc. That goes into the COGS bucket as a hit to the budget of the department. Or, said employee leaves because senior employees are camping out in their positions and refusing to move upward or onward (because hey, who wants to be a stupid management goon, amirite?) and go to greener pastures. That hit also goes to the salary budget.
Now add to that the bank covenants providing your cashflow which are tied to EBITDA, necessitating that you either hold all your costs flat or reduce them year over year (or sometimes quarter over quarter depending on the terms of the lines of credit that the executives have had to bargain for), plus all the corporate initiatives coming out that the Board of Directors or the new CEO is mandating because surprise! your company isn't that special and is nowhere near perfect in terms of governance nor of complying with all the laws nor in terms o
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
Medical Doctors ? ask a doctor or better yet tell 'em you work in IT, they know all too well.
Wow a long description describing.... inflation.
Yes, CEOs have a lot to do, but it's all relative to balance inflation vs. profit. And we all know the 'demand' for [the highest] profit is somewhat inflated or self-feeding in itself.
Tech workers are anti-union because they all believe they are above average and that having a union will drag down their wages to the average. They don't realize that employers are taking advantage of their pig-headedness.
News Flash: Unions can bargain working conditions and leave salaries to individuals. Working conditions can mean no more exempt employee bullshit, no more arbitrary changes to 401K programs, no arbitrary changes to vacation policies when a company is bought out, etc. etc. etc.
As long as we tear down all social programs for immigrants the same day. Make them only eligible for their home countries welfare. Make the home country pay it.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Also that pesky requirement of having a license in the US to practice medicine... which requires a fairly hefty investment in education etc
(IT also requires education, but there are no "licensed" IT people... generally because nobody dies if a server goes down).
There won't be a 'home country'. Home is where you live. Better to make the social programs global. There's plenty of money locked up in the financial industry to do it.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The problem with that is in the long run they're shooting themselves in the foot. The strength of the US economy is in a strong middle class that is able to spend money. 70% of the US economy is consumer spending and the bulk of that is by the middle class. How can they expect the economy to remain strong if people don't have the money to spend in to it.
Surely this is just a symptom of market economies? Why hire expensive resources when cheaper ones will do? American world power was built on this ethos. Given I'm a contractor happy to compete against other humans in my specialisation...what I'm really worried about is the AI. Hard to compete against a species significantly more intelligent (ultimately) than me. Over n out Waddy.
Disney deserves negative publicity for this, but let's be honest -- if the employees have been laid off, then nobody's making them do anything. Personally, I would tell them to piss off. Or train them wrong.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
If the wages are so high. Why is a pay reduction across the board never mentioned instead of total dislocation by laying off long-time employees. At the worst, these "high priced" people will leave which will allow the company to higher less experienced "lower priced" people -- problem being solved.
I'm now going to make an educated guess and say that you've never sat in on executive-level financial reviews of an entire business because if you had, we wouldn't be having this particular debate.
Only for non-profits, and while they were even more focused on limiting expenses (I would think), no one ever suggested getting rid of skilled veterans and replacing them with code monkeys. In fact the one outsourcing attempt (to a foreign company) was such a failure it had to be reversed.
And you're always, always right, no matter what. I have never once seen you admit that you are wrong, Curunir_Wolf, and your posts are brazen and detailed enough that any admission would be startling.
I have been wrong (really, really wrong) more than once, and while I have admitted so in some cases, I've found it's best to shut up and let the correction (often, multiple corrections from many folks) stand on their own.
I should also note that I don't have the experience with html tags that you do either
Then you should change your posting settings to "plain text", so that at least you can put in line breaks. The first post was wall-of-words enough but this one is really painful to pick through.
Wages have not technically been flat.
This is what I had to respond to. I thought it was well known and well-established. 1-3% raises, to only a few, is part of what is keeping wages flat. And while some like to point out that "well inflation is very low", they use only the latest modified CPI, which ignores things like food, energy, and housing costs which have all risen even faster than CPI. And even CPI shows price increases between 2 and 4% for the last 20 years. That means a 1-3% raise is actually falling income.
You can Google the results of wages over time on your own to educate yourself, but for your edification, I will also provide some references. The first is from Pew Research, which studied wages from 1964. It clearly demonstrates the issue of stagnant wages throughout that period. The most marked trend, though, has been the stagnation of wages since about 2000. An interesting report on the trend comes from the Economic Policy Institute. Of particular note in that study are several very troubling trends:
The last point is interesting. What is basically means is that as productivity grows, the company executives compensate themselves, while replacing their workers with cheaper foreign labor. The company declines, goes into bankruptcy, the executives bail out with their golden parachutes, and everything from a small block to an entire town ends up in dire financial straights.
I don't know what the answer is for resolving this spiral into a country in decline, but I do know what happened to the leaders of France when it happened there...
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
I hope your bottom line does not depend on American sales of your product. Your line of reasoning is that Americans are too expensive to employ and thus do not deserve a job. Once you left with only foreign workers who will buy your product? American's wont be able to afford it.
Maybe you should look at WHY your employment costs are going up. Hint: look at the rent for a 2BR apartment around where your company is. If it's anywhere near SJ CA, I bet you'll be shocked at what you see: $2100 to $3000.00. There's the real reason: the cost of living keeps gong up. Another word for it is greed.
Yes I especially love the part from parent where he says I'm an official manager/executive and I'm hear to tell how I most certainly didn't fuck this whole thing up!
Wage creep
That's a funny way of spelling "inflation" and "normal cost-of-living increases".
The IRS is the one organization that you don't want to fuck with. Remember, these are the guys who took down Al Capone.
I am approving them and I am doing it for the lulz.
At one IT company I worked for, labor costs grew anywhere between 6 and 10% per year ...
How can that be when raises are not coming in at 6 and 10% per year? Where is all that money going if it is not going into the workers pockets?
Furthermore, money is losing value at roughly 4% per year... that means someone who is only getting a 6% raise is barely keeping up with inflation.
Where is the value going?
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Please use paragraphs, or something to split up your logic. I have to change my fonts just to make your post readable.
I am in no way commenting on your content, rather it's presentation.
I'd like to read it, it just hurts.
Thanks,
Actually there have been several attempts to unionize IT workers over the past two decades. Each one has been shot down by state and federal governments thanks to lobbying efforts by employers.
Anyone considering "getting into" IT in the US today is a fool.
Not just no. Fuck NO!
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The respectful reply will also merit a respectful response--thank you for that, Curunir. To your last point... businesses have life cycles too. They start, grow, mature, and then die. The point that you should be, in my opinion, focusing your rage on is that most business execs don't want to admit when their company is in true decline and denying. The valid reasons are that if a CEO comes out and says that, then all the shareholders immediately dump stock, all the banks immediately withdraw their credit lines, and all the good employees immediately make plans to jump ship. What results is that a whole lot of people are suddenly out of work, customers are without product/services, etc. Because they lie, corporate raiders and private equity firms come in and find the liars, and mount hostile takeovers. Or, (and this is the best possible outcome) the CEO asks the Board quietly for recommendations of other, healthier companies to sell to and then negotiates in secret the terms of the buy-out, allowing extra time for people to remain hired. Usually in those deals, an acceptable lead time is agreed to by all parties to give employees time to prepare once official word leaks out. But, speaking to the execs with golden parachutes you talk about? Well, those guys are rotten apples. Almost all execs at the C-Level get the golden parachutes... it's the ones that choose to go down with the ship and were there through the good times and bad that are the worthwhile good guys. The rats will always leap first--and they do leave a trail of evidence if you know what to look for. America isn't in decline, Curunir, it is simply changing. We were here before with garment workers and auto workers, and it will happen again. Also, thanks for the advice on switching the format to plain text. I didn't know I could do that.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
Of course not! You're scared of things you don't understand. You were taught to be scared by your TV set. Freedom is scary... to some people
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
This thread has been surprisingly civil given the subject matter. One thing to note well is this -- the scope is changing. Usually, most wholesale IT outsourcings/offshorings have traditionally been done by three types of companies:
- Extremely thin-margin companies that are trying to squeeze every nickel out of every process...because of the execs and shareholders mostly. Examples I can think of are retail chains, airlines, or professional services companies like law firms. These companies have labor costs as a very large chunk of their overall spending, and since good IT people are still expensive, it's a huge Target.
- Companies who don't understand IT, don't do anything useful with it other than keep the lights on, and treat it like the janitor or the cafeteria staff.
- Generally, just incredibly cheap, tight-fisted companies. Banks are a perfect example here.
Disney is neither of these:
- I have two little kids - Disney makes tons of money off of our family, most of it profit. Except for maybe Vegas, I'm assuming Disney World/Disneyland has a larger daily cash inflow rate than any location on the planet. They seriously must need Uncle Scrooge's money bin to store it all. They're like Apple is now -- pretty much immune to market forces given the vast sums of money they take in.
- Disney also does cool, if scary, stuff with IT. Their queue management systems, payment systems, etc. are good examples of taking cheap technology and using it to maximize revenue. Someone has to design stuff like this, _and_ a team of smart people need to be able to take care of it and fix it when it blows up.
So, this should be a wake-up call for the last of the holdouts who think this will never happen to them. I've had it happen to me twice, and I'm pretty decent at what I do. Yet, I constantly hear people say they couldn't possibly be affected by this because they're so super-brilliant or work for a solid company that would never pull something like this. It can happen to you, and $deity help you when you reach the magical age of 40...then you'll be dealing with two threats to your stability.
It would be interesting to hear from an actual employee (current or former) about what roles are being replaced. From what I've heard, Disney also enjoys slightly lower labor costs in many areas because people enjoy(ed) working for them, wanted the company name for the resume, etc. So, I would be really surprised if this is targeting anything other than run-of-the-mill DBA, coding or sysadmin work.
What's wrong with protectionism? Do you dump your children and get new ones if they are cheaper? No, you don't because your children are valuable to you. The fact that the American government wants to throw way their workers who are loyal citizens and replace them with foreigners who are cheaper proves that it does not value its own chidlren. The whole purpose of having a an elected government is to protect its citizens rather than to treat the citizens as disposable commodities.
The workers are not a commodity, they are real people. Protecting real people should be considered a virtue. There are more important things in the world than profits, and congress needs to learn this. The whole point of protectionism is that they should be protecting me, even if I'm not a CEO, and if they won't protect me then why should I vote for them?
Why should this be illegal? Protectionism creates a selective advantage for the protected workers but makes the workers complacent and makes the company less competitive over time. I'm a freelance tech worker, and I neither have nor want protection from foreign workers. I compete and add more value.
Firing your local employees and bringing in foreign workers to do the job is far more destructive to the company than protectionism. After you get rid of all of your employees and hire temporary workers from overseas at lower wages, who is going to buy your product? Not your ex-employees, they can't afford it. Not your temporary workers, they are living stacked like cordwood 6 people to a one bedroom apartment and sending all of their money home so they can live like kings when they return. So , in short, NOBODY is buying the product anymore and the company goes out of business, so now there is no company, no employees, no cheap replacements, no people living like kings in India.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Freedom? You don't know what the word means.
I am free to _not pay_ for every social program, worldwide. You are proposing turning every working person into a slave of the worlds bums.
Of course they should be free to continue not working, they should also be free to starve.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
This is what I don't understand. Why do they want to pay as little as possible? Why don't they want to pay for the best deal. When I go to the grocery store, I don't compare prices, I compare prices per ounce. When you buy a tractor, one with a bigger bucket, or more carrying capacity, or more power, is worth more than one with less. Airlines don't all fly 1950 Cessna 150s even though those are cheaper than A380s and 747s. So two guys are in front of you. One is an American software developer with many years of experience and huge projects under his belt, but he demands the prevailing wage. The other is an unknown H1b with language barrier and most likely entry level skills, but is willing to work for 10% less. Is that really how stupid companies are? That they would pay 10% less for half or less of the skillset?
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
If it is too expensive to do business in America and an executive feels the need to hire cheap workers from emerging countries which allows the firing of expensive Americans, the they should move their damn company to India along with all the executives. Is their loyalty to the profits or to their nation? Why isn't our government cracking down on these treasonous and disloyal activities?
Legally one should be paying the H1-B workers equivalent pay to the displaced workers. Which is why Disney is skirting the rules and using a third party company who can then underpay the workers instead. The rationale and reasons for the existance of the H1-B program had NOTHING to do with saving money, and companies continually go to congress and beg with crocodile tears that they need more and more H1-B workers because no one locally can do these highly technical and highly skilled jobs. If your analysis is correct that this is about getting cheaper workers rather than the lack of qualified owrkers, then this means that these companies are LYING to congress. In my book that's immoral and unethical, but sadly those are considered virtues in business.
So I don't really blame the companies here for being bastards, everyone should know by now that they're all bastards. Who I blame is the government, they're elected by the people to represent and defend and protect the people, and instead they're selling us out. They need to enforce the spirit of the H1-B program and jail those executives who lied in order to higer H1-B workers who did not meet the requirements of the H1-B program.
Well the bureaucrats who are likely regulating this are probably overworked and understaffed. So it's unlikely they can effectively regulate it.
If they don't have enough people to help, maybe they should consider some H1B's to augment the staff?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Ah, okay, you're one of those... never mind
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I certainly hope you are trolling, cause otherwise you are an idiot.
Your "solution" that makes a cute sound bite but is obviously unworkable on any number of levels. Who would "tear down the borders? Which social programs would be provided? Which government would be in charge? How would you resolve the vast social, cultural, religious and historical differences among the populace?
Even if we magically managed to resolve the above, there would still be huge issues of disparity between resource rich and resource poor areas. i.e. this would cause all sorts of new problems and not solve any of the existing ones.
BTW, the US financial sector was worth about $6.2 trillion in 2014. The US spends about $3.8 trillion on healthcare annually. There is not "plenty of money locked up in the financial system to pay for it"
Hell, Canada spent $214.9 billion on health care in 2014.
I was working at Intel and they did this. I got part way through the training with them, then quit after having a better paying job lined up. I was a contractor at Intel at the time. We were training people in Indonesia to do out job. They could higher 3-4 people for the cost they were paying for just one of us.
I don't have a TV set. I read books. Books have taught me to be scared of idiots.
You scare me.
Bla bla bla, imaginary numbers belong the the classroom and the derivatives market. Tear down the walls and tell me how much the global financial sector puts out. By the way, it's the financial sector that is causing these problems with their puppet emperors in place. Borders exist for the sole benefit of human traffickers and the financial sector, and that is what this H1-B crap is about. Tear down the walls and we can drive everybody's wages up, not down, with more benefits, not less. And when it comes to resources, all the 'technical' issues wind up being purely political in nature, always a disagreement over the price. We throw away over half of what produce. Abundance is definitely the elephant in the room, big and nasty, and stinky! The entire idea is such an anathema to the financial sector that it must be put down quickly and definitively. You are proving yourself to be quite useful :-)
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
:-) The propaganda comes in many forms, and apparently it is working quite well... a wave of the hand, standing for the queen, and voila!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Given that salaries in general haven't kept up with inflation, I'm not sure how in your situation they managed to rise faster than your prices. Also not sure why you didn't offer raises and bonuses that you could sustain and simply let those unsatisfied with it choose to leave and fill the vacancies with less experienced workers. Did you hire any entry level trainees from the U.S. (since you had to do training either way)?
I note that management is another area that historically demands bonuses and annual increases. How much trimming was done there?
When the massive savings were realized by bringing in the H1-Bs, how much did your prices get cut?
> The other twist? The U.S. tech workers are required to train their replacements before vacating their jobs, or risk losing severance benefits
This is hardly a twist. More like standard operating procedure. At other companies it may be called "stay pay", (to avoid the legal entanglement of threatening to deny what might be required exit benefits) but the mechanism is the same -- as an exiting employee, you are required to train your slave-wage replacement or lose some compensation or other. The typical employee will grasp at anything to improve their chances to ride out the coming period of unemployment, so at least a visible attempt to train one's replacement is highly likely.
This goes along with the perception of IT revealed by outsourcing -- that IT isn't hard, doesn't require thought, and any store clerk could do it with a couple weeks of training and adequately documented procedures. That IT is merely a matter of pressing this button when that light goes on, and pressing this other button when that other light goes on -- anyone could do it, so let's hire a bunch of H1-B "contractors" at slave wages and,,,, $$profit$$.
In three to six months, highly unpublicized, Disney will be asking the outsource company why the environment is so unstable and it takes forever to get stuff done. The answer will be "your exiting employees didn't document their jobs well enough", which will buy the outsource company another six months or so. In actual fact, they're sorta right, because exiting employees know it's an impossible job to pass on years of experience and insight to a very junior worker in a couple weeks, and will most likely be doing the minimum necessary not to lose their benefits, secure in the knowledge that Management won't be able to tell the difference, else they'd see through the outsourcing sham in the first place.
A year or two down the road, Disney will realize that fixing the situation by insourcing is no longer practical, as all their former employees have moved on, taking thousands, maybe millions of man-hours of tribal knowledge with them, never to be seen again. The outsourcing company will be in a strong position to bully Disney into paying more money for better caliber contractors in order to salvage something out of the deal. Over the long term, they'll end up not saving much if anything, and IT will never again be as responsive or as stable as it was pre-transition. As a steady state, the outsourcing company's strategy is to continue to make insourcing as impractical as possible, while maximizing profits.
Had I stock in Disney, I'd note that announcement of outsourcing usually causes a stock jump, so hang on for a few more months, then dump the stock before it becomes common knowledge that Disney is not meeting their milestones. If they're still around in 3 to 5 years, cautiously pick up some shares at a new bargain basement price.
Not that I've ever seen this happen before...
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
WheezyJoe is completely uninformed! "employees of foreign-based consulting companies" and "U.S. tech workers are required to train their replacements" are definitely NOT twists, they are standard procedures for utilizing H1B "resources".
That's just an ignorant statement. Most freelancer charge more and make a lot more money than employees if they are good and there are jobs.
I say if these companies can form in India and China and compete against American businesses, then let them. America doesn't have to be an incubator for those companies.
old news... 'citi' did this in 2006/2007 when they closed the Citicorp Development Center LA facility and used an india based company Polaris (that they owned) to move development for the most part offshore. We all know what happened to citi stock since (-> 99cents from 57 dollars a share). Obviously since the bail-out citi and all other banks doing 'better'.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/05/us/politics/senator-bill-nelson-seeks-inquiry-into-disney-world-immigrant-hiring.html
Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, a Democrat, called on Thursday for the Department of Homeland Security to investigate a temporary visa program for highly skilled immigrants after a report in The New York Times that technology employees at Walt Disney World in Orlando and other companies lost their jobs to immigrants and had to train their replacements. In a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, Mr. Nelson asked him to examine “potential misuses” of a visa program known as H-1B.
If everyone refused to train their replacements and filed class action suits what a difference that would make. Sometimes you have to stand up as a group against tyranny at a personal sacrifice.
NO smartass. He said that's what they NEED to do. IT workers don't have unions in most places. They get shit on. I am in the IBEW and I am only out of a job when I want to be.
As an American worker, I say FUCK YOU.
I'm not a fan of polticians or politics in general, however if Bill Nelson is willing to look into this and expose Disney for this I'm a new fan. We need this type of thing to get exposed more and stop this nonsense from happening in the future! http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/05/us/politics/senator-bill-nelson-seeks-inquiry-into-disney-world-immigrant-hiring.html
Dude, Disney is printing its own money. They have BILLIONS in profit. They could absorb increased labor costs. That's what's bothering people. When companies that print their own money are firing workers, the end is here where no one can have a career any more.
It's actually a little more complicated than that. The ability to get state licensure for a foriegn medical graduate (FMG -- which also includes US-born students that attend international medical or Caribbean medical schools) is more rate limited by the ability to obtain the requisite post-graduate (e.g. residency) training required for licensure. Residency spots in general are limited by the ACGME (American Council of Graduate Medical Education) and ultimately by congress as post-graduate medical education is funded through Medicare. The number of residency spots for a particular specialty vary, but in general the more desirable the residency, the fewer number of spots (e.g. dermatology, opthamology, etc...). FMGs have a very difficult time matching into competetive residencies and most will match to less competetitive and more plentiful primary care fields.
Once an ACGME accrediated residency is finished (or technically at least one year is finished -- which is enough to qualify to sit for and pass USMLE Step 3 licensure) then state licensure is not an issue. It is a pain in the ass, but as long as you haven't had a criminal record, disciplinary actions, etc... then you just need to shell out the $60 - $800 (depending on the state) and jump through bureaucratic hoops for an unrestricted state license.
So really the states have little to do with supply. The ACGME and congress (through funding allocation) perform more of that function.
-- The Genesis project? What's that?
I hope your bottom line does not depend on American sales of your product. Your line of reasoning is that Americans are too expensive to employ and thus do not deserve a job. Once you left with only foreign workers who will buy your product?
I think it depends on what "Americans" we are talking about.
Where I work we haven't outsourced anything overseas *yet* but it seems
like we have almost weekly discussions on how to offload anything and
everything possible from the IT department to another non-technical department.
The reason being is that our IT employees average $35-$45 dollars per hour
while our non-technical staff averages $15-$25 dollars per hour so anything we
can move out of the technical realm into the non-technical realm saves
the company a ton of money. I don't see Americans getting pushed completely
out but I do see programmer salaries dropping to be on more on par with other
4 year degrees instead of the 200% or more they currently command.
However in this and many cases, there is no problem at all keeping the company going with the current labor costs. The problem is management wants to keep more of it for themselves. Cut costs now, get more money for yourself; doesn't matter if the company is viable long term, you got your money now.
Such b.s.
You get raises each year, don't you? You get bonuses and other perks, and certainly you consider them due to you, but for the people who make your business run, you call them a drain. How about trying this, you stop *your*, and other executives, "wage creep", and honestly approach your employees? You don't get raises or bonuses, they don't get raises or bonuses, until the business earnings justify it. There will always be cheaper, but at some point you'll realize the cheaper option has no value.
You might think this can't stop, but at some point, CEOs and other executives will rise in the ranks that understand that there's more of a difference between a skilled employee here whose vested in the success of your business and an overseas temp worker than a 25% cost of labor decrease. It will show in your products, services, customer satisfaction, etc.
And it is the fault of CEOs. *YOU* know that by reducing the cost of the labor by importing temp workers will only provide a temporary bump to the bottom line, and in the long run will damage the company. You are lying to your shareholders if you get in front of them and tell them this is a good plan, Every Disney shareholder should be up in arms over this as it's a clear "race to the bottom" decision, or at best, a bad decision that will just end up costing them more money when Disney figures out it was a bad idea and has to undo all the damage.
America Should Stop Issuing Visas To Indians, The Most Racist People On Earth;
https://petitions.whitehouse.g...
https://www.change.org/p/indep...
Casteism
Just what you would expect from from Disney Lame and the Tragic Kingdom !!!! So much for loyalty to American workers, the H-1B is suppose to be for limited implementation of hard to fill jobs. Not complete replacement and removal. Not doing anything Disney for quite some time now, and this just sealed that I won't spend a dime if they are associated with it.
Unions cannot help professionals. They exist to level and cap wages and benefits to the common (low) denominator. And, the members pay for the priviledge. If you have ever been in a Union, you would know. The workers never benefit. The politicians and Union leaders do.
So long as weas a people are afraid to stand against Corporate America, this will continue to be the status quo.
And it will only get worse, until we're slaves of the very rich.
and screw all those that fuck over people
Disney isn't the only company doing this. This happened to myself and several co-workers in 2009, when our company opened a software development center in India. I had to train my replacement and work for 6 weeks to get severance. I had just reached my 10th anniversary with the company. As someone commented earlier, it is soul-destroying.
Better to make the social programs global. There's plenty of money locked up in the financial industry to do it.
Here in New Zealand we're being displaced by the Chinese, especially so in our largest city; Auckland is now 25% Asian. They come here with 0%-interest government loans to buy up our houses. It sounds a bit dramatic but this has driven housing prices so hard that poorer people are ending up on the street.
Do I have a problem with Asians? Not especially. Am I anti-immigration? Not really; I quite like Germans, for example, but I'd be similarly concerned if they were changing the entire dynamic of my country by arriving in great number.
I can't fault Asians for wanting to move here, we're pretty lucky in this fairly-unspoilt country, but it's so damn small (pop. 4M) that if we threw the borders open we'd be extinguished as a nation within six months. We'd end up as overcrowded as Singapore and I and many others would be bloody miserable.
If we had to pay welfare and pensions to them all as well..
I'm all for immigration but I fear that whatever it is that someone finds attractive enough to consider emigrating to another country would be lost in this situation.
I do see the sense of a universal welfare system (maybe it should just be a guaranteed basic income) such as you suggest, but first we really need the robot revolution to put most of us out of work in my not-terribly-informed opinion.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
" The drivers of these costs were the experienced senior personnel who are with the company for years, who negotiate for and get the bonuses and raises they arguably deserve."
Yes and the reason they are able to ask for more remuneration is because they can get it else where if they leave for another organisation. As you become more experienced you become more valuable. If wage creep is an issue at your company then not giving raises to everyone fixes the issue. People who the company feel deserve the pay raise get it, people who don't leave for other companies.
When people stop going to Disney due to the broken systems/rides they will realize the importance of trained professionals. Very sort sighted if tou
"You can run this whole park from this room with minimal staff for up to 3 days. You think that kind of automation is easy? Or cheap? You know anybody who can network 8 connection machines and debug 2 million lines of code for what I bid for this job? Because if he can I'd like to see him try."
And we all know how that worked out in the end....
that when companies lay off expensive workers and hire cheaper newbies who are not H1bs to replace them, they don't bother with the training part.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Even engineers in the real nonsoftware sense have to be certified. credentialed, licensed, whatever. You can't just spend all your highschool spare time in your room designing bridges and then get a job as an engineer. So the field has credibility.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Most techs I know are just plain stupid when it comes to long term planning and understanding the consequences of their actions.
So many time I've encountered on the job management demanding work and the learning of skills from techs to do shit they simply were not hired for, as if it's an expectation of us, because, well, we're the tech guys.
And while this is absolutely true, there are very few shills I can not pick up either on my own or by taking a few classes or reading a few manuals. the issue is COMPENSATION for all that.
Management simply does not compensate you for the skills you pick up to do the jobs you were not hired for, and that's how management LIKES it. Techs are stupid. They'll let their personal pride trump the simple economics EVERY TIME.
Frankly, most of you assholes DESERVE to loose your jobs, your houses, your retirements. You fucked us ALL over by being such tools and being the first to turn on other techs when what you SHOULD have been doing is organizing.
So suck it up, you helped create this mess, and clearly you STILL have zero integrity, you still don't see what created the HB-1 problem. You did it to yourselves by being such tools.
why? foreign companies can hire american contractors such as IBM, Oracle or Microsoft.. but if an american contractor hires a foreign contractor it's bad? The problem is simply that the world is globalized and Americans are too expensive.
Boycott Mickey.
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You might have something worthwhile to say, but can you please make it readable?
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But of course, reducing the expense of the executives who are getting 10s to 100s of millions of dollars a year is not a solution, right?
Prick.
No, kids. We can't go to that new Disney movie or the theme park because dad is an IT worker and Disney screw over IT workers.
See how that works for you and your kids.
These are all well and good valid points, but allow me to respond from the perspective of an Executive, as I'm privy to quarterly and yearly financial reviews at the company level.
Thanks for your insight.
As overworking employees tends to lead to poor morale and people leaving for greener pastures, increasing headcount means increasing COGS and OCOGS beyond what current revenues and profit margins will allow for, often the only alternative is to go to the Indian contracting houses and outsource IT personnel because middle-aged experienced native IT people are a massive cost center to the company. And that's not even taking into account the "good enough" expectations of clients who don't need perfection in their expectations of the product/service being delivered, or the banks who monitor the company's EBIDTA because they provide the operational cash flow, or the Wall Street analysts that work for momentum stock-preferring investment houses and watch expenses like a hawk, and whose recommendations or condemnations can trigger hordes of angry calls by shareholders straight to the CEO--and let me tell you, the REAL power in America is concentrated in the shareholders.
I highly doubt Disney is in a cash crunch considering their CEO receives $29 million in compensation as of 2009 with a base salary is $2 million, and as of last year, receives $45million. How many IT workers is that?
Disney’s net income rose 22% last fiscal year to $7.5 billion and revenue rose 8% to $48.8 billion, driven by the blockbuster success of “Frozen,” as well as significant growth in theme parks and consumer products, along with an end to long-running losses in the company’s interactive unit.
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
This definitely needs to happen. And the companies need to KNOW, so that they realize there are consequences for being assholes.
As an executive, YOUR costs easily dwarf any other employees below you, and therefore YOU are the real drain. Take a pay cut and put your money where your mouth is. You clearly don't care about the future of your company if you overlook that very difficult to overlook fact, and YOU are the problem. Realize that when the pitchforks come, your head will be the first one staked. And you have NOBODY but yourself to blame for it you greedy monster.
See subject "Forrest" & this -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
See subject "Forrest" & this -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
See subject "Forrest" & this -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
See subject "Forrest" & this -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
When the fences come down the water will seek its own level. We are extremely productive and prosperous, enough for all of us to live like kings. Self motivation is key. I'm not into this identity, cultural purity bullshit about the 'dynamic' of a country. That is a major source of the problem right there. The people living there now are hardly what you would call 'indigenous'. The place has been overrun probably four or five times. It is time to accept the fact that we live on a single planet, and that we all have rights to access any part of it.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”