IT Workers Training Their Foreign Replacements 'Troubling,' Says White House

dcblogs writes: A top White House official told House lawmakers this week that the replacement of U.S. workers by H-1B visa holders is 'troubling' and not supposed to happen. That answer came in response to a question from U.S. Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) that referenced Disney workers who had to train their temporary visa holding replacements (the layoffs were later canceled. Jeh Johnson, the secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said if H-1B workers are being used to replace U.S. workers, then "it's a very serious failing of the H-1B program." But Johnson also told lawmakers that they may not be able to stop it, based on current law. Ron Hira, an associate professor of public policy at Howard University who has testified before Congress multiple times on H-1B visa use, sees that as a "bizarre interpretation" of the law.

Comments

He has a talent for understatement

[mark-t]

"Troubling"... "not supposed to happen".

I'm not entirely sure if he's trying to deliberately understate it, or if it is just that he may be completely clueless as to what it feels like for the people who are put in that kind of situation.

Re:even stopping it won't stop it.

[srichard25]

I've never seen a successful software project where the entire application was written overseas. It's not easy to gather detailed requirements from US workers and throw it overseas and have foreign workers completely build it. The only way the offshore model works is to have American developers gather the requirements, plan out the work, give detailed tasks to foreign developers and then monitor the progress daily to clear any impediments / misunderstands and make sure the quality is acceptable. Then you have the problem of who is going to maintain the software for the next decade? To maintain software, you either need excellent documentation (which foreign workers suck at) or you need the same offshore developers to stick with the application through it's lifetime (good luck with that). At some point you lose that application knowledge and end up having to pay new people to learn it from scratch.

By the time you factor in the oversight overhead, the language barrier, the time lost in misunderstands, the quality gap, and the cost of having to pay new developers to maintain the application, I personally don't think the offshore model saves any money. But trying to convince the beancounters that is a waste of breath. All they see is that they can pay offshore developers half as much per hour.

Building software isn't like building an iPhone. An iPhone has detailed specs that foreign workers just need to reproduce over and over again. Each software application is a unique product that needs to be designed, built, and maintained from the ground up. That fact makes it much hard to just throw specs over the wall and have offshore workers execute it.

Re:Time to Reduce the Cap?

[molarmass192]

I like the idea of an H1B tax. Say 50% of the wage paid to the H1B holder has to be paid by the employer into social security. If H1Bs are paid the "prevailing" wage + the employer has to pay 50% of gross wages into social security, then only true H1B candidates should get hired, since there should be no cost saving involved, in the end it should always be more expensive to hire an H1B. For enforcement, any employer found guilty in court of underpaying an H1B could be subjected to 100% social security back tax for all H1Bs employed by the company for a 5 year period. This helps fund social security, prevents the exploitation of H1Bs from below market wages, and protects American applicants / job holders from unfair wage competition. Companies would get greater access to H1Bs as a result of reduced misuse to acquire the talent they really can't get here. If everyone plays by the rules, it's win-win.