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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.
"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.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
If you are doing software at the low end with regard to quality, you are right. For anything good (and that is where the actual savings by automation are, just requires a bit of a longer-term perspective), software can most decidedly not be written anywhere, as the architects, designers and developers need to be in touch with the users and the business the software is supporting. Cultural and time-gaps are a killer and drive cost through the roof and quality through the floor, often both. Developers having to guess about actual functionality desired are a serious problem. A spec is not enough do decide many aspects of software, unless you invest so much effort in the spec that spec creation actually takes much more effort and costs much more than the implementation. The way around that is that architects, designers and implementers must be able to understand what is desired from other cues and that is only possible if they talk to people.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The recently announced layoffs for the few tech workers in New York and California got cancelled (for now). All 100+ tech workers in Florida got laid off earlier this year. If Disney really wants to do the right thing, they would hired back their laid off workers in Florida and send the Indian workers packing.
Software (yes, I know, with some exceptions) can mostly be written anywhere.
If that were true, then how come there is a need for H1Bs? Why not just outsource the work?
No, there must be some value loss from outsourcing, otherwise they wouldn't need to bring people into the US and have exiting workers here train them.
Perhaps a little collective punishment, reducing the cap from 65,000 visas per year to say 40,000 and reducing it by 5,000 every year in which any company employing these H1-B visa workers misbehaves would send the right signal. Also, the H1-B slots should be sold in public auctions so that those companies that really need talented foreign workers when there are no qualified Americans, which strains credulity, can express that desperate need by either paying up for the Americans they need or forking out expensive foreign workers who are "critical to their ongoing business needs". You need skilled workers? Fine. Show me the money and you shall have them, foreigners or Americans your choice.
You say that like it's an unassailable force of nature. It's not. This has been a problem throughout most of human history, and there's a relatively simple solution: tariffs. No, they're not popular in our free-trade embracing modern political climate - but that climate was orchestrated at considerable expense by the wealthiest members of our nation - those who stand to make enormous profits from the arangement while the rest of us suffer. Because one of the truths of free trade is that, as you point out, in a free market all wages must inevitably fall to match those of the lowest-paid workers within the free-trade zone.
Either we must reinstate protectionist measures, or resign ourselves to remaking our country in the image of the worst oligarchies with whom we share free-trade agreements with.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The H1B system was created for a specific purpose - very short temporary workers who should become permanent green card holders very quickly. The problem is that it has morphed into a decade long temporary work program that dangles the green card to make the worker work for longer hours and less pay than a green card holder, under the threat of losing it all after being fired.
What really needs to happen is that US and India should sit down and figure this out. Over 60% of the H1B visa users are from India. US should have a special visa program similar to H1B for Indians but without the exploitative nature of it.
And, the reason why H1Bs are cheaper is because the US doesn't want them to go into the general labor pool but exist in their own special labor pool, not competing with the general labor pool. But, this creates a secondary job market and when corporations see the labor price differences between the two job pools, there will be incentive to do what Disney did. So, US should loosen these artificial restrictions that so that everyone is competing on the same level field.
H1B really needs to be revised so that is does not place so much emphasis on "sponsorship". The employer can dangle the sponsorship for years denying raises, promotions and starting with low wages and long hours.
Ideally, there should be generic visa that gives blanket work authorization for a certain period of time (like 3 years) and a path to green card without an employer "sponsorship". When a foreign worker comes to the US, they should be in the same market as everyone else, commanding the same salary, benefits etc. There is too much power with employers right now and so there is exploitation.
A California utility has not only replaced citzens/green card holders with offshore labor, but they've handed control of critical infrastructure to foreign nationals. ATM, India is a friendly nation, but that is not guaranteed to last beyond their next election.
Legally here's what happened:
Some outsourcing company said it could only fill it's consultant ranks by hiring Indians. Since it knew the paperwork really well (and doing paperwork really well is an Indian core competency), it got them.
Then Disney hired the Indian firm to take over some functions at Disney.
Which means that Disney technically did not replace it's employees with H1B Visa holders (which would be ridiculously illegal). It replaced a business unit with a contractor (perfectly legal), and that contractor happened to use H1B Visa holders (also perfectly legal). Courts could rule that the consulting firm were gaming the system, but that's far from a gimme.
Which means you probably should get a new law passed restricting the use of H1B consultants to replace American workers. And you'd damn well better word it very, very carefully or they'll just maneuver around it some interesting way.
The Iran deal is going to boost up his poll numbers when the US can buy Iranian oil, the first time since Carter allowed the Shah to fall [1]. This means lower gas prices, and maybe a return to a non-sucking economy for a period of time.
As for H-1Bs, it is like immigration. People talk about it, shake their fist about it, but follow the money... and find nothing ever gets done, or will get done. Big companies love H-1Bs because they are loyal (and deported if not), dirt cheap [2], and it follows the historic trend that companies have had since the US was formed... open the floodgates to immigrants (documented or not) to dilute wages.
My recommendation? I tell people to go law, finance, or accounting. You can't hire a H-1B in those fields, and there is no such thing as an unemployed attorney.
[1]: Yes, the Shah asked for US help, and Carter gave him the middle finger. Between this, and Carter establishing a permanent presidential order with a permanent moratorium on any new nuclear power reactor construction, he handed the US's fate to Big Oil/Big coal for generations to come.
[2]: For the most part. There are a few H-1Bs which are true experts in their field. However, usually the H-1Bs I encounter barely speak English, and tend to be at the junior level, if that... but they are cheap.
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.
The USA is an corporatocracy. All candidates are for sale to the highest bidder. It is like that because those that don't play ball that way are filtered out long before reaching that level of power. Bernie may say he's for the little guy and against the current status quo, but Obama had a similar platform and look what happened. Once he was voted in, he just kept on doing what the corporate masters told him to, just like the presidents before him.
They all need to be tossed out of office and the system reworked to prevent money from controlling it again. First step would be to remove campaigning from the agenda altogether. If you get X number of signatures, you get to run for office. All runners get an Internet site of specified size and format, and an X minute TV and radio segment to be aired X times throughout the running period. The information on the candidates and their platforms would be available to all voters. No endorsement of candidates by any corporate entity, any media, or any publication. Just the facts, the vote, and a hard-line enforcement on any who break those rules.
The other problem is preventing candidates from taking bribes from corporate entities, mostly in the form of favors or after-term, do-nothing, highly paid job positions.
Madame Clinton has taken $3Million in donations from Tata and Infosys so if you want to find yourself training your own personal replacement in the near future, you know who to vote for...
Hmmm... First, citizens united merely over turned a restriction that hadn't actually been in place for very long and was pretty much instantly brought to trial where it immediately lost.
Second, there are serious problem with the idea behind restricting political speech. It really is a violation of the first amendment. You either believe in free speech or you don't.
Third, Bernie isn't winning. He's the Left's Donald Trump. Trump is not winning the white house and any republican that backs him is wasting their time and money... and credibility. Bernie ain't winning either.
If you only vote for people with D's after their name, then here are your POSSIBLE chances at the white house in 2016:
Hillary Clinton
Martin O'Malley
Unless someone else throws their hat in the ring... that's all you've got.
I excluded these people:
Jim Webb
Bernie Sanders
Lincoln Chafee
They are not getting elected.... Jim Web... MAYBE... I doubt it because he doesn't have any support that I can see. But Bernie is going no where. If you dominate him, then unless the republicans also nominate Trump... you've got zero chance.
A contest between two crazy candidates is unpredictable. I wouldn't count on either of them getting so much as nominated though.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
...This doesn't just happen in America. We the people all over the world are getting replaced by cheaper workers now. I was replaced myself, and had to train up a couple of cheap trainees that the GOV. had given my former workplace in a so called back-to-work program, with a much lesser salary - plus the GOV. even PAID for the workers the first year.
No employer in the world can afford to say no to such a deal, the trainees actually had 16 years of experience in their field behind them, but where also laid off from a bigger company earlier on - and had been on GOV. wellfare for a long time, this is SWEDEN btw. so it's amazing it's even happening here, but since we're a wealthy country (on the paper, not counting the MASSIVE debt each Swede have since they essentially don't own anything but borrow money), this isn't something you'll see in any newspaper - much less reported in American news.
It's a sign of the new times we're heading for. The outsourcing is massive, the GOV. will attempt to get work back to the country, so the salaries of everyone has to be slashed, but you try to tell the happy fat cat that he has to cut his living costs and you'll get the UNION all over you until you have to file for bankruptcy if you do what they want anyway. There's another agenda too - and that is they're trying to open the borders worldwide, so workers can essentially work and live anywhere. You'll notice MASSIVE unemployment rates as everything you once knew will fall apart right in front of you, until you eventually decide to accept lower pay, less perks, longer hours etc.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
What used to happen is that something was academic, then it became a trade, then it became ubiquitous.
With computers being relatively new everyone still thinks you need a 4+ year education to do some of the stuff when it would be better of as a skilled trade. Not everyone is built for college/university. There are a lot of qualified intelligent individuals that, at the age of 13-14 should have gone into an apprenticeship program for the local IT workers 1010010101.
As technology progresses people dive deeper and deeper into various fields stuff shifts down the educational chain. First it's highly academic R&D and only a few PhDs know about it. Then it moves into the area where a masters degree is sufficient, then BS, then Trade, then it becomes unskilled labor.
The problem with STEM the last ~40 years is people are still convinced that you HAVE to go to college for some of these things and it's no true, we need to have people start specializing around 13-14 like we have always done. It's how Germany operates its educational model. There needs to be a good apprenticeship programs setup.
60 years ago no one had a camera, now kids are walking around taking photos. Everything bumps but CS and IT, for some reason, have refused to do that. You see it all the time on Slashdot "Well back in my day you had to take 4 classes on structures before you were allowed near..." and that's not the case any more. There are children building mobile apps. Sure they aren't always great but the point is that the younger you expose kids to this stuff the more ubiquitous it becomes for humanity. Pushing students that are 'interested in computers' towards an IT trade path at 14 would allow them to then learn enough by time they graduated highschool to then specialize in some realm of IT.
It's already going that way in Engineering. Mechanical Engineering is going to undergo a Mitosis in the next decade because there just isn't enough room for everything in the curriculum. Freshmen level Engineering courses need to be moved down to 16 year olds and then let them decide if they'd rather study fluid dynamics engineering or thermodynamics engineering. There is enough material in both realms to warrant a full degree in both. And if there is cross over there is always double/twin majors like Mechatronics is now (Between ME/EE).
Split CS and IT into 10 different majors each. Teach basic CS stuff to 15-16 year olds and those that are more hands on will just go into it as a trade, those that want to learn more can go to college.
She's not running and is unlikely to run against Hillary.
Note that I'm not endorsing any of these people. I'm just saying some people can win and some people cannot.
The republican field is a complete three ring circus at this point. I think they have something like 20 people officially running. Of those... MAYBE 5 have a chance of getting so much as nominated. The rest are just a giant waste of time. And trump is of course on that list.
He won't be nominated and if he is, he won't be elected.
Bernie is the same. Waste of time.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Our infosys contractors rotated every 6 to 9 months. It was a *selling* point to management. They actually believed that all knowledge was seamlessly transferring via documents to the new people and that the new people didn't suffer 3 to 9 months of reduced productivity because they had no clue about the big picture.
Combine that with the fact that the quality of Infosys candidates has dropped enormously since 2005 and it's a recipe for disasters.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
They are supposed to be highly skilled and possess talents which can't be located in the local market after a reasonable search.
Now, you can write lots of words but lawyers just sharpen their teeth on that kind of thing.
Simply set a dollar amount equal to the current top 10% income in the country. Right now, that's about $100,000.
So you can't bring an H1B in for less than $100,000. Minimum salary in their pocket- not the contracting house.
Right now almost 40,000 of the 65,000 slots are taken up by large indian contracting houses which have been directly replacing existing american workers (which is illegal per the text of the law which is why some companies are walking this back when caught). This means that companies like Microsoft and Google that need genuinely rare talent have less than a 50/50 chance of getting some brilliant mathematician or cutting edge software engineer.
Tellingly, Cognizant (over 9000 H1B's) has no offices in Silicon valley but have offices in most major american cities. Their target is not rare and special but people who simply have a 4 year degree and a few years experience.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I have interviewed and worked with several H1B's, and one thing that I have noticed is that while they're slightly cheaper, there is a cultural problem that is endemic. A lot of these folks are not able to innovate or thinking outside of the box. These are essential qualities in a good software developer (at least in my opinion). I have worked with one H1B whom is VERY good, and is able to think in addition to work.
I do believe that they are hard workers and that they try, I don't know how successful they will be in the long run. Most of the candidates I have interviewed have generally been hard-put to think through problems. For example, I would ask them how would they generally approach a problem (e.g. your users need to do x, tell me how you would do this). Most were stumped by this. I would even try to lob easy questions such as database normalization (You have a table that repeats the same fields like reference name 1, reference name 2, is this correct and if not why?).
There is also another problem, they aren't really that much cheaper ! The U.S. is an expensive place to live, and you can not really cut corners that much. We are talking about a difference of maybe 10-15k a year (at least in the ones I've spoken to). Most of the time, if you take the additional meetings that need to take place to re-review the requirements due to a little hiccup (see point about not being able to think though problems) and the costs could actually go UP. If you have to have an additional hour of meeting per week (very generous) with a PM, 3xDevelopers, BA (average if you have multiple dev streams). That's 52*5=260 hours. Average of $55/hour across all three roles, that is $14,300 for a single meeting hour long weekly meeting for the year. So the potential savings you got from one of the developers could be a wash. I have also noticed that non H1B programmers tend to work faster (again see point about working more independently).
So my point is that this maybe a situation of self correction. The trend might re-balance itself as more companies realize some of these realities; however, that would assume that the companies take such things into account instead of being penny wise and pound foolish.
Hard to do well and can be insanely counterproductive, so not so simple in some cases.
Look at the cane sugar industry - the tariff just meant local sugar priced itself out of it's market and everyone is getting fat twice as quick on corn syrup that costs more than the global cane sugar price but less than the local cane sugar price.
Look at what the tariff on steel did to manufacturing. A lot of it moved to where higher quality steel (since local general purpose stuff got frozen at 1970 quality) is cheaper. In the end US steel was so carefully protected that it couldn't compete even after a tariff was applied to imported steel made cheaper due to improvements since the 1970s that were seen as not needed by US steel producers with a captive market.
There's others still in place that were not such a disaster - beef etc, but two ongoing disasters are enough to show it's not simple.
Before you consider the action "must reinstate protectionist measures" it's worth considering the ones that were never removed.
There's plenty of US companies bent on doing that without any overseas influence.
The spirit of the current employment rules is not too bad, it's the loopholes that run contrary to them that are the problem. Various scarcity clauses are being shamelessly gamed and I strongly suspect that plain old corruption (under the guise of donations) is the reason why the gaming is not being stopped and the laws are not being enforced. When few recent engineering graduates could get a job the pretended "scarcity" was still being used as an excuse to import indentured workers.
I kind of want to agree with you that stopping it would be difficult due to market forces, but then why hasn't Eastern Europe become the new home of Google, Microsoft, et al?
They have a large and pretty well established educational system with lots of trained people from high quality educational systems that are not terribly unlike the US and have overall technical accomplishments similar to the US in terms of general engineering and science. They're physically close to Western Europe where so many of these companies already have significant business presences. The physical infrastructure is on par with the US (roads, electricity, housing, etc).
You might even argue that culturally they're more compatible, or at least less different, which could make for better social and organizational interfaces with US organizations.
The four stage strategy of government:
In stage one we say nothing is going to happen.
Stage two, we say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.
In stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we *can* do.
Stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it's too late now.
Not going to dispute anything you said but many feel that in-house/on-shore projects have the same problems of "throwing it over the wall" where the business side may or may not get what they want, that may or may not be made with duct tape by a developer who also didn't document shit and is about to jump ship for a better position elsewhere. Some of it is just that offshore workers are willing to use any hack today, screw tomorrow as either it won't be their problem or it'll be more billable hours.
Though I've also seen internal IT get caught up in a lot of internal bureaucracy and inefficient processes but since they're a "monopolist" the business side has no choice but to suck it up and hope that IT will deliver some day. Particularly one place I worked a person got sick so they hired a consultant to do his job, but nobody could find what he was actually doing. It was like straight out of a Dilbert cartoon, his manager was a PHB who couldn't tell a worker from a hot air balloon. I've also met Mordac, preventer of information services who upgraded to a platform where I couldn't do any work.
So it's not just the bean counters. I've been at places where the business side seem to jump on the chance to move to the cloud or run SaaS or offshore because fuck you internal IT. And sometimes it's not entirely unjustified...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Oh, I thought you were talking about, "soap box, ballot box, jury box and ammo box. Please use in that order."
The real problem for these companies hiring from India and others, is that they ARE paying low wages for the workers. That makes them susceptible to being bribed by other corporations and nations.
If anybody takes a look at the major companies (target, home depot, nemum marcus, etc) that were cracked over the last couple of years, nearly all had windows, and all had outsourced to India. Indian coders are paid around $8K / year. That means that China or Russia can easily bribe somebody for 80K, which is 10 years worth of salary there.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.