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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.