American IT Workers Increasingly Alleging Discrimination

An anonymous reader writes: Some U.S. IT workers who have been replaced with H-1B contractors are alleging discrimination and are going to court. They are doing so in increasing numbers. There are at least seven IT workers at Disney who are pursuing, or plan to pursue, federal and state discrimination administrative complaints over their layoffs. Separately, there are ongoing court cases alleging discrimination against two of the largest India-based IT services firms, Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services. There may also be federal interest in examining the issue.

Comments

Re:Unionize

[TWX]

I don't know, I think it makes more sense to attack the Work Visa Program (or whatever it's actually called) since so many states are so anti-union right now.

There needs to be sane rules on the conditions that must be satisfied before skilled foreign workers are sought. There needs to be a demonstration of prevailing wage. There needs to be demonstrates increases in base salary after posted positions remain unfilled. There needs to be a rule requiring equal pay and benefits for Guest Workers based on prevailing wage and the treatment of others in the company, such that there is no cost benefit to using Guest Workers.

My experience with Infosys

[UnknowingFool]

Here's my experience with Infosys: Their tactic is to always be the lowest bidder. When they get the contract, the staff they send generally is untrained with many of them learning the skills they need on the job on the client's dime. We had a contract with a client and were replaced by Infosys. So we had to hand over all of our functions to them; it was apparent that only one person in a team of 12 had the skills to do the job. After a year, the client fired them and came to us. But they wanted Infosys rates; we declined.

Re:My experience with Infosys

[ranton]

But don't underestimate their competence with technology once it's about 3 years old. Unlike most U.S. companies they pay for continuous formal training and certification for their staff. They DO catch up.

And from a business perspective, it's great to be able to "turn on" and "turn off" resources without paying unemployment and without spending 17 hours interviewing candidates over three months. Instead the new person is there-- next week.

My problem has rarely been Infosys's technical competence. Their staff is rarely as good as a quality senior developer, but they are usually as good as a generic mid-level developer.

My issue is with the companies that use Infosys as a core of their IT development staff, instead of just as staff augmentation. I have never witnessed a company whose core IT staff was contractors who ended up liking their IT systems 5 years down the road. They may like it on day 100 because they have new flashy websites and mobile apps, but then the technical debt starts creeping in.

I currently work at a company where about 30% of our IT staff is contractors, and it works out great. We can double our manpower on a project in under a month, and it allows our steering committees to make decisions based on the needs of the company instead of the capabilities of our IT staff. But our systems architects, lead developers, and most importantly our skilled project managers are all in house making sure these IT systems benefit our company instead of just fulfilling some poorly written SOWs.

Re:My experience with Infosys

[gstoddart]

This is what happens when management becomes penny wise and pound foolish.

They say "hey, we can save 20% here". They don't factor in the other costs, like increased downtime, longer times to get stuff done, or the sheer amount of time wasted "helping" them do their jobs.

I was in a situation not long ago in which an out-sourcing company was being brought in. In my opinion, they were largely incompetent.

You'd submit a request to get something installed on 4 machines ... they'd make a hash of it on one machine, and then send you the instructions to install it on your remaining 3 machines and ask you to do it. Sorry, your job is to do all of this, we don't own it. If you can't do it and you expect me to do it, what value do you bring? Once people started refusing to pick up their slack it became apparent they really couldn't do the job.

The problem is the people who make these decisions do not have visibility into how much the associated costs go up as people have to do their own job and the job of the outsourced people.

To then come back after several years and say "we're getting shitty service, can you do this as cheap as the people giving us shitty service" says they have no idea of how they caused their own problems. If you want shitty service, pay the shitty service rates.

The decision makers and accountants are removed from the actual ramifications of their own decisions. Which means they evaluate their own decisions on faulty and incomplete information, pat themselves on the back, and give themselves bonuses for saving money.

In fact what they've really done is fuck up things which worked, make the system work terribly, failed to account for all of the new problems, and then they act as if they've saved the world.

If your expensive staff all have to devote 35% more time to make up for the slack of the cheaper workers .. what the hell are you saving?

If you can't measure your own productivity and effectiveness, and the other costs created by hiring the incompetent out-sourcing people, you have no way of evaluating your own decision. The problem is management frequently has no way of evaluating their own decisions -- and I often suspect that is by design.

And the shortsightedness of this says people are incapable of realizing if you are sacking the cheaper company because they gave terrible service and poor results, you can't go back to the original vendor and expect them to give you good service for the new lower price.

That kind of stuff is at best wishful thinking, and at worst completely delusional.

But then again, many of us think that's what management is for.

Age discrimination is obvious

[Notorious G]

I interviewed with 2 companies last year that were very up front about my being mid-40's was a problem. In one company, 5 of the 7 people I talked to brought it up and a couple clearly had problems with it. The recruiter that flew me out congratulated me on putting up with it - what an asshat.

Over 40 in IT, hold on to the job you got because the next one won't hire anyone over 40.

Direct experience

[choke]

I've worked with at least two employers where an indian (sorry, not intended to be racist but they were both indian), person from an agency who was converted to perm was put in place in a hiring position and then every single hire afterwards was indian, and exclusively from the contract agency that placed the individual.

I am aware that there are also incentives for these individuals, and that their relationships with the contracting firms are ongoing.

It's so obvious that I can't imagine it's not a known quantity.

It's not really racial discrimination, it's just a moderately biased business practice.

Natural effects of a maturing field?

[ErichTheRed]

I really like working in IT - it's good to have a job where you're using your brain every day instead of just churning out reports or something similar. The major complaints I have are:
- Age discrimination -- I haven't been looking for work lately, but I'm sure getting more paranoid about keeping a job when I see stories of people who are basically unhireable after 40. I just crossed that magic threshhold and although I have tons of experience and a solid reputation behind me, I do worry about companies just not even bothering to interview me because of a stupid set of unfounded beliefs.
- Work visa program abuses -- I have absolutely no problem with companies using H-1B, L-1 or other visas to bring in super-intelligent people who are providing a key service to the company. I have a big problem with Tata, Infosys, Accenture, IBM, HP, etc. using them to bring in a cheap run-of-the-mill developer, DBA or sysadmin who could easily have been sourced locally if the company would pay reasonable rates.
- Clueless employers -- This isn't something easy to solve, but outside of Silicon Valley and extremely high-tech or enlightened companies, IT is considered a janitorial-level service. This is why the Tatas and Infosys's of the world are called in. Everywhere I've worked that has done this has had IT productivity slow to a crawl because of change management paperwork, dealing with absolutely clueless remote employees and other factors.

The only long term solution I see is a guild system...heaven forbid you call it a union in front of Libertarian IT workers. If we want a career that continues to pay off and be enjoyable to work in, education has to be standardized in at least the fundamental level, and a career progression needs to be put in place. We need to fund some lobbyists to give Congress the brown paper bags full of money they need to pass limits on work visa programs, and most importantly it needs to be done as a group. Doctors have the AMA, and it keeps their salaries high by limiting the number of medical school graduates and lobbying for favorable insurance rules. Musicians, actors and writers have their guilds that ensure they don't get screwed by studios and keep getting royalties for their work. I just don't see why it's taking so long for people to realize they have no power against any of these forces we're seeing. No one is going to win an age discrimination suit against a corporation and their well-funded legal team. It's nice that people are trying, but it will never happen. At most they'll get a small payout and be blackballed from working in the industry ever again.

This is why we can't have nice things

[jcadam]

The concept behind the H1-B program sounds reasonable. Bring in highly skilled experts from overseas that we can't find here. However, since it's now been thoroughly demostrated that:

1) Employers can't be trusted to act ethically and honor both the letter and spirit of the law, and
2) The government has been steadfastly failing to monitor the program and enforce the rules

The entire program needs to be scrapped. No H1-Bs, period. We apparently can't handle it, so employers need to find the talent here, or do without (or, you know, invest in employee development/training again).