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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).
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 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.
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.