Slashdot Mirror
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).
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?
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.
Somebody need to report the replacements to the authorities.
H1B is for skilled workers. Since they come for training, and are not skilled, they may be in the US based on fraud.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
We could create a GoFundMe for the laid off US workers to make up for lost severance. Then let them walk !!
Okay, I retract my original statement... they were L1 temp workers, not H1-B, so it's not the same thing. Their wages were a lot lower for one thing.
I was in the position of being trained by such a person once. I wasn't an immigrant, but the guy had been demanding more and more money over the years and they decided to get someone cheaper in, which turned out to be me. He really wasn't interested in training me at all, and it was a nightmare. I hated it because I wasn't good at my job, because I had no training or knowledge of the company's systems. Lots of jargon and stuff outside my normal field to learn, which would have been fine if it were possible to learn. There wasn't even documentation to refer to.
I left in six months. It's a shitty thing to do to both the old person and their replacement, and it never ends well.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
This is not a honest argument where lower taxes are associated with slashed services.
In USA, probably 50% of federal tax dollars are wasted (remember bridge to nowhere in Alaska and countless other http://www.heritage.org/resear... instances).
Add to it all other taxes and inefficiency, and the pattern will follow to the state and local level. In NJ policemen in a bunch of counties were making $122K before overtime 5 years ago, that is not counting 20 year service to get guaranteed pension and medical care, which, converted to corporate job salary level equivalent make it a $200K job (when defined benefits are accounted for).
Lastly, the government itself is telling that there is so much waste and inefficiency in healthcare in US, however, according to the law, healthcare payments are legally a tax. Another tax, which is about to increase because insurance companies calculated so.
And If i am not convincing enough, why don't we listen to the owners and managers of the companies that choose to transfer manufacturing and to outsource. Truth to be told outsourcing also takes place even within USA, jobs go where there are skilled people and to the places with the lower cost of living, which highly correlates with the taxes.
Sticking head into the sand, and pretending that tax and regulatory burden is not part of the problem is very shortsighted.
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.
I've trained my replacement before. Or I should say I trained my replacements before. My sysadmin job was sliced and diced to be done by multiple "teams". User account management? Separate team. Storage? Separate team. Backups? Separate team. You get the picture. Another admin and I conducted more than one online training session for each of these teams and those were followed up by two (count 'em!) in-person visits by several members of each of the teams. After my end date came around, the outsourcing company hired me on as a contractor (at about the same as I was making but I actually made out pretty well since the contract work was entirely remote and I had zero transporation costs). For the better part of four years I was still doing most of the work that was supposed to have been farmed out to these teams. Everything these teams were supposed to be doing was taking 2-3 times longer as tasks would sit and sit and sit in the queue until some manager got me involved. It was rather pathetic. Cost savings? Where? Well, I guess my previous employer didn't have to pay out my bonus anymore and I wasn't taking paid vacation time.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
How is Disney worse? I think Disney only fired about 130 Americans.
My former co-workers said it mostly affected the QA and Load Test teams (I left a few months before it all went down while workload was up and morale was already low). Which is a shame, since those were things Disney really did well. There were a lot of times that someone from those groups would catch issues in a deployment before a release, or even help reassure us that things were working properly in production.
Disney was on a big automation and accountability binge when I left, though. I can see why they'd want to outsource QA/LT to another company that they can point their finger at when things go wrong. When QA/LT is in-house, then (as TFA mentions) it's a big overhead and they only "save money" when things go right (but not in a way that actually hits the books). With an outsourced QA/LT firm, they can probably arrange things so they can charge the external vendor penalties when things go wrong and bugs slip through. Disney is clever like that.
Anyway I feel sadly for my fallen comrades, but with all of the experience and grinding they did at Disney I'm sure they'll fall someplace better. I'm actually more worried about the health and sanity of the H1Bs. As TFA mentioned, it was the outsourcing company that was responsible for hiring and bringing on the H1Bs. What they didn't mention is that a lot of the in-house Disney QA and even Devs that we worked with are already in completely foreign offices in the Philippines, Mexico, and Argentina, working US office hours. So this isn't exactly news... just SOP after moving their new website from development/hypercare to sustainment.