Slashdot Mirror
NY Times: Temporary Visas To Import Talent Help Copycats Take Jobs Abroad
ErichTheRed writes: A new article from the NY Times surprised me. It describes what we in the IT industry see all the time — H-1B visas being used way outside of their original purpose. I think this is significant because the article describes the problem well and shows how Tata, Accenture, etc. are offshoring regular office work as well as IT work. I feel that showing the average Joe/Jane that their nice safe middle class office job isn't so safe is the only way to sway popular opinion on this important matter!
Reader theodp notes that Congress is making H-1B visa less costly for India-based IT services providers.
Market Forces do not guarantee optimal, or even beneficial outcome to everyone affected. Just most profitable outcome for decision makers.
This is a clear case where US is bleeding jobs and wealth to other countries, so few individuals can enrich themselves while passing the costs/consequences "downstream".
FTFA it states that the irony is that many who are losing jobs to outsourcing to India via H1B are in fact immigrants to the US themselves. People from all over the world who moved to the US to go to school then found jobs here.
To look at this from a macro perspective, it is the continuing "flattening" of the Earths wealth, whereby the oft used phrase "redistribution" actually means wealth flowing from the First World middle class to a sprinkling(crumbs off the table...) onto the lower classes of the Second World countries, and the meat of the wealth going to the "non-aligned" (for lack of a better phrase) 1%.
The non-aligned would be those who have no loyalty to country, race or religion. Their loyalty lays only to the brutal Social Darwinism, whereby profit isn't enough, where rendering our planets environment a wreck isn't enough, where forcing homeowners onto the street isn't enough, while they themselves get cushy bailouts, tax breaks and special treatment at every turn.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
When I saw this in the Times yesterday, the thing that surprised me was that a major news outlet was reporting on this in very matter-of-fact terms. As we've seen, these discussions get heated, and for the record I'm not one of the "they took our jerbs" people for the most part. What I don't like is the abuse of the system by these offshoring companies, and the erosion of any sort of stability throughout the workforce.
As originally intended, there's nothing wrong with the H-1B and L-1 visa programs. I work for a multinational company and we often use these to bring in very talented employees who just happen to be citizens of another country. The difference here is that most of these people are designing products and providing the exceptional advanced-level knowledge that the visa was originally intended to allow. In the article, and indeed in most IT departments, this is just a flat-out replacement of a low level office job. Tata or Accenture or whoever is just bringing in the few people in their offshore centers who have the capability to learn the target job and teach it to the hundreds of other interchangeable workers they have back home. This is what I think has to be looked at; companies simply don't want to pay for any labor anymore if they don't have to and now we have an environment where they can easily avoid doing so. I like how the article puts it right in peoples' faces -- it's no longer the problem of some anonymous factory worker in the rust belt or an IT worker that makes a higher salary and has a higher perceived degree of stability than the accountants they were profiling.
What bothers me more about this is the loss of economic stability. People are going to avoid buying things if they aren't secure in their jobs, period. The 30-year mortgage was designed around the idea that people would at least stay in the house for 10 or 15 years, preferably for the full 30. Someone who's picking up stakes and moving every five years chasing the jobs around the country to the lowest-cost environments is wasting a huge amount of money in real estate transfer taxes, realtor commissions, loan fees, mortgage interest (since it's front-loaded), etc. It easily costs mid-5 figures when everything is added up to move, but most people just pay for it with their next mortgage and don't think about it. Not to mention the cost -- moving a family with kids around constantly does not make for a stable home life. Ask any military family about that; every military kid I've ever talked to says they hated moving every year or two because they never got to settle in somewhere and put down roots.
It sounds really mean to say this, but think about your average corporate worker. Not management, not a hotshot developer, just a random cubicle dweller producing reports or processing customer records. The jobs in the article, like low level corporate accounting tasks and such, were where the vast majority of average, C-student college graduates have wound up for the last 30+ years. The progression was thus - get into a big state university, party your way through 4 years and get a generic business or communications degree, show up at corporate recruiting events during your senior year, and get hired on for some sort of entry level task. If you kill off all the middle class jobs out there, what do you propose doing with these educated people who previously bought houses, paid property taxes, and felt secure enough in their lives to have a family? If there's no good answer for this, why are we bothering telling students that college is worth it in the long term? These are the questions that need to be asked, and no one is doing it because companies are only focusing on today, not 20 years from now.
The article neglects to report on the end results of this process - making it seem like 'well, this is nasty, but it's what American business needs to do to remain competitive'. Since they mention Cognizant as one of the big players using this 'tape the current workers and then fire them' approach, let me comment as an ex worker that was ultimately fired after surviving a Cognizant outsourcing for several years and working with their devs (technically 'rebadged' as a Cognizant dev myself):
1. Productivity takes a huge hit. I have no idea whether the cost savings are enough to counteract that, but in our case the software products that had their development outsourced, all - without exception - have died on the vine and are now running on skeleton crews in anticipation of being shutdown once all existing support contracts with customers end. That's the endpoint where I lost my job.
2. The Indian developers never get up to speed. Or more accurately, they begin to get up to speed after 9 months to a year - but then Cognizant rotates them out to other projects, and you're back to total green junior guys watching the videos and asking stupid questions again. And yes, this is all by design. Cognizant's big selling point to the US companies is that they enable great flexibility to ramp staff up and down on demand. Why those companies believe that crap is another story altogether.
3. There is no concept of a senior developer. Prior to the Cognizant experience, the senior devs came up through the ranks and had an incredible depth of knowledge and experience about the specific products they were managing. Ultimately, that product-specific knowledge became as valuable as their tech chops. The Cognizant model relies on 'business analysts' who came up through the product design - i.e. spec writers, not through development. So where those folks used to be or have access to senior developers to sanity check their designs, there is now an utter vacuum. So there is no iterative back-and-forth to fix broken designs. Stuff gets built (way late) according to specs with problems that should've been caught along the way. Meanwhile, the offshore dev's spun their wheels trying to build something they didn't understand - often because it didn't make sense. Only to need to have it completely trashed and rewritten.
4. And this is a big one. All that 'knowledge transfer' material (i.e. the videos and any corresponding writeups) are the exclusive property of Cognizant. So that even if you come to realize that the Cognizant outsourcing was a mistake, you have already fired the people who had the original knowledge - and you don't even own the (shitty) materials to train staff to replace Cognizant. They essentially own your operation - at the same time as they drag it down.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...