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Fury and Fear In Ohio As IT Jobs Go To India (computerworld.com)
ErichTheRed writes: A company called Cengage Learning now joins the Toys 'R Us, Disney and Southern California Edison IT offshoring club. Apparently, even IT workers in low-cost parts of the country are too expensive and their work is being sent to Cognizant, one of the largest H-1B visa users. As a final insult, the article describes a pretty humiliating termination process was used. Is it time to think about a professional organization before IT goes the way of manufacturing?
You mean "union"? No, thanks. I can take care of myself. I don't need someone to hold my hand.
If by that, you mean "union", then I doubt it. You'd never get enough support from the folks that are still getting paid very well (like me, who lives in Ohio), and aren't being outsourced. There's no business case to do that for anything but level 0 and 1 helpdesk jobs, and not even all of those.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
any more successful than unions at "saving American jobs"?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
If a "professional organization" means some sort of stupid union, then no. Unions did not prevent outsourcing of US jobs, and cannot. The reality is, if you want substandard work on the cheap, you're always going to get that in India. As my boss says of our products, "(software) products without revenue are built in India, products that make money are built in the US".
We do all the design work in the US, because our 250+ Indian counterparts cannot design anything correctly. They code by trial and error. You'll never have a best-in-class product that way. We just give them menial coding tasks, and even then 1 US engineer is as productive as 3 in India.
- Vincit qui patitur.
Right, look how bad Apple's doing.
Our politicians don't care about the American worker. Our corporations and their willing yes-men lackeys don't care about the American worker.
But the American worker cares about the American worker, and together our shared interests can at least give us a "bargaining stick." Of course we need to be ready to swing the stick if need be to show that it's a real stick and all.
Holy tracking link Batman! Try this one instead:
http://www.computerworld.com/article/3002681/it-outsourcing/fury-and-fear-in-ohio-as-it-jobs-go-to-india.html
When the career path people are looking at the choice between McDonald's or Wendy's, there is going to be an American version of a brain drain.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
In context. Offshoring of IT. Good way to crash your company.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
And here we go...the Race To The Bottom for American jobs. Yippee, thanks Corporate America!
I recommend learning a skill or trade that can't be outsourced. Something that's hands-on, or something that most foreign workers simply can't do very well. (Tech writing and actual physical service work come to mind, but I'm sure there are others.)
This trend won't stop until outsourced workers cost enough to make it economical to hire US workers, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
face facts. use logic. best way to prevent jobs going to non american citizens is to be truly productive and contributing value for money paid, not demanding to be paid more for doing less, than non americans who are deservedly getting these jobs. all other ways including unions are simply welfare leeching on productivity of rest of the world, who has to do the work anyway as always.
Free markets work by encouraging competition. It makes no sense for companies to pay exuberant salaries to U.S. workers when similar results can be had for far less by outsourcing to countries whose citizens expect a standard of living far more meager than Americans. The Prophets promise to trickle upon those who worship at their alters.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Not if you institute a tax on it.
How many of them drive cars with foreign name plates? I have a friend who lost his job to someone from India a couple years ago. While we sat at his kitchen table I looked out his front windows at the two Toyota Prii that sat there. I was too polite to say anything.
I don't want to downplay the issue. But... market forces and cheap labor. There are a WHOLE lot of Americans in Vietnam, Korea, China, and South Africa tooling up their auto plants and teaching them to be competitive. Welcome to the real world. H1-B Visas are a red herring, and the sooner IT folks realize it, the better. The bigger problem is all the jobs that are going overseas - but there isn't a fix to that.
I was in a company that tried offshoring tech support. That lasted 2 years before they brought it back because the offshore just couldn't do the job.
Those unions worked great for manufacturing and prevented having those jobs go overseas, didn't they.
A friend of mine who can't get recruiters to leave him alone tells me he makes a point to study weekly, constantly learning. Anyone who is concerned about the level of outsourcing and illegal H1-B usage might keep that in mind.
No one can force you to work. Since your job is going away anyway, quit.
Will be sealed with the advent of better systems and automation technologies. Most of the jobs that go to India are menial tasks which require no or very little skill .The core stuff still happens in the west. There are extremely few kernel programmers in India. So think these layoffs as having been replaced by a robot.
If you are an American, with all the benefits that citizenship entails - education, infrastructure, living conditions, security, stable government, rule of law, material and spiritual abundance - that make you the envy of the rest of the planet... why the hell can you not compete with third-world peasants, struggling against oppressive governments, scarcity of resources, illiterate parents, crime and pollution?
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Seems like many jobs that are "IT" are not really. I can't find anything that says a single development job was lost.
--why?
The rote IT jobs that are best suited for labor arbitrage outsourcing are also the ones that should just be automated out of existence anyway or handled auto-magically by your cloud provider. The remaining jobs are the ones where close collaboration with the business makes them far more effective and those are going to be ones that you're going to regret offshoring.
The number of jobs that don't fall into either of those buckets is getting smaller by the day. It's hard to see how this kind of outsourcing has a long term future.
Problem is that companies try to outsource everything offshore. Nobody seems to know where to draw the line b/w what to retain and what to move offshore
Then again, I'm not a plebian bitch, whining about the 1% on one hand while screaming my head off about redistribution of the 1%'s wealth on the other.
Protip, chucklefucks - you are the 1%. Why aren't you reveling in the fact that poor, downtrodden third-worlders are being raised up with your money?
Where are your unions? I'm not talking about the american maffia organisations calling themselves unions, but unions like you can find in Europe that negotiates fair conditions for workers and work against wage dumping, and sometimes allows lower wages during short periods when company is going bust. Oh, yeah, the american greed killed all that, and now you are paying the price.
I already see the posts coming in saying "No union for me, thanks, I can take care of myself." I honestly used to think that, back when companies were only outsourcing routine tasks and qualified people were still being treated well everywhere. All I can say is, just wait until you're 40 or end up at one of these places offshoring their entire IT department. I am incredibly lucky and (for now) have a great senior-level position doing systems engineering work. However, between age discrimination, the loss of entry-level work, and the relentless drive to offshore anything that costs real money, we run the risk of driving talented people away from IT.
Here's my idea -- form a profession similar to the one engineers have and a related trade guild, not a traditional labor union. Unions will never fly with the Libertarian, lone wolf, I'm-better-than-everyone-in-my-field crowd. It would have to be structured around the professional licensure model, like the AMA. The AMA and related organizations keep doctors employed and making serious money. How do they do this?
- Limiting labor supply by not allowing new medical school slots to be opened
- Paying for laws their members need passed, such as forcing recent health care reform to rely on the insurance model that keeps their reimbursement rates high
- Ensuring quality of profession members by licensing new medical school grads, and training them through residency and fellowship programs
- Requiring continuing education
I would say the biggest benefit to members of the profession would be standardizing basic education. I'm not talking about handing Microsoft or Oracle or Google the reins, I'm talking about making sure people understand the fundamentals of IT and development, not just how to feed code into the magic black box. This would mean evil tradesy things like apprenticeships and OJT for new members, but it would ensure that we wouldn't get the typical MCSE bootcamp or coder academy graduates who only know one way to solve a problem.
The first step beyond getting people to agree would be to basically do what the other professional organizations do -- take up a collection and pay for laws to be passed limiting the ability to offshore work. It's time we admit that the only way to get anything passed in Congress is to pay for it, and lobbyists are the equivalent of handing lawmakers paper bags of money.
To make this fair to employers, they would need to get something too. I would say the best approach would be to promise no union style work rules would be enforced, while quality would be maintained by self-regulation. I think it's horrible that someone can screw up a job so badly they get fired, then just clean up their resume and get another job without any repercussion -- and I've seen this happen many times. If companies could be assured that their job would get done without the need to bring it back onshore to clean it up at consulting rates, they'd be open to this possibility.
If the US stops being the world's consumer of last resort there will be no one to take it's place. The global race to the bottom wage wise can not work, someone has to leech away rent/income away from capital and give it to consumers. It might be better if the redistribution was more equitable globally, but it would be far worse if it wasn't there at all.
No 'professional organization' is going to stop free market forces. Many have tried, all fail eventually. What you're up against is labor arbitrage, brought about by the globalization of the workforce. It first started in blue-collar professions; with advances in technology it has moved to knowledge work as well. Instead of thinking about India being some distant country think of it like the business next door, competing for the business that your employer provides. Why would a customer pay 3x for your employer's output than they would the Indian company? Do you think passing a law that prevents the business next to yours from competing would ever work?
us citizens are the most overworked people. They have long days, work a lot, low wages and very good 'value for the money'. But you americans buy all the US corporate propaganda and sell out your rights because maybe you'll be the one getting rich by a fluke chance somewhere in the future. Egoism, everyone for themselves results in this.
The funniest thing is that taxes are pretty high in the USA, but instead of producing services and regulations helping citizens, it ends up in social services for corporations and deregulation of corporate america and laws that denies rights to citizens.
If no one in the US has a good job to earn money to buy things with, how is anyone in America going to "consume" anything?
No jobs, no money in consumers hands, no demand.
What "rest of the economy" is left after all the good jobs have gone overseas?
--PM
Nonsense. It isn't a company behaving rationally. It's executives who know that making the company bottom line look better for a few quarters means big bonuses. They can then move on with a great story about how the great job they did before the company crashes and burns.
No they make it too easy and cheap to source non american employees. American workers laws and protections are laughable at best and mostly non-existent.
The only trickle down we'll ever see is the urine falling on our heads.
Fine, as long as all C-level pay is drastically cut as well. Unless you truly think most CEOs are dozens to thousands of times more productive than a lowly employee to be getting their hugely inflated salaries.
Sorry, but it's not being greedy to actually want non-stagnant wages when CEOs are making record salaries.
Except this is bullshit. Consumers only benefit from reduced prices to a point because they have to be able to afford fixed costs such as insurance, food, and rent. Fixed costs that have skyrocketed in recent years. An iPhone being 20$ less means nothing to a family that may have 100$ a month in discretionary income after taxes.
The healthiest economies in the world are the ones that rigorously maintain the middle class because the amount of money in the global economy means precisely dick after people's fixed costs are being met. What matters most to the economy is that money is able to freely flow through as many people as possible because when money changes hands value is created. This isn't about a few hundred thousand jobs. This is about entire communities being impacted because the buying power of the average american is being undermined by cost cutting measures, and as more and more people approach their discretionary income margins the more the economy suffers as there is less capital for luxuries and investment in new technologies.
It is simply stupid to suggest that the economy losing middle class jobs is somehow a benefit.
"There are lies, there are damn lies, and there are statistics"
"Better would be to blame idiot politicians that make stupid rules"
Companies work really hard at making sure those idiot politicians get elected and quite often also write the legislation for them.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
They moved all of these IT jobs to Cognizant, which is a company made up almost entirely of H1bs. Cognizant is blatantly in violation of the H1b laws, and if they are taken down, as they should be, all of the companies that are depending on Cognizant for outsourced labor will be up a creek without a paddle.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I don't know what the situation was like at that company in particular.
But having worked for and with a few large companies, it's not that hard to imagine why they were offshored - the article mentions the company "needed a more flexible staffing model that could better serve the cyclical nature of our business". I'm pretty sure from seeing other IT departments in action, that they in fact could not handle bursting kinds of workload, nor a cyclical business that ebbed and flowed to a large degree. IT departments are typically extremely rigid, and scared of even the smallest change.
IT as a role in a company must evolve or die off altogether. It must change to a form that truly helps a business instead of shackling it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Damn; so glad I never got around to sending them that resume'.
Doctor and Lawyer salaries are through the roof because those are two of very few jobs that can not be outsourced to a third world country. If Blue Cross could ship you to Haiti for a 40c an hour doctor you don't think they would?
Welcome to the "Global Economy". You have heard all about it I'm sure, and how great it is. A real Utopia where everyone benefits. Assuming of course you are already extremely wealthy, because the rest of the people are expendable. As long as a company can stay afloat using dirt cheap labor, they will. Zuckerberg won the lottery, nothing more. That is your shot to getting out of the cesspool we are creating by complacently watching the government be run by the same people profiteering.
History is cyclical, we have seen this all before. The same result will come eventually, because people never learn to learn from history.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Shipping costs and more control drive automation in US manufacturing.
We need to look at cutting full time to 32 hours a week to start with a slow slide down to say 20 from that. Just to make automation fit in better while softening the blow of people going on welfare / disability. Also need some kind of basic income system to replace disability / welfare / etc.
Now there is some abuse of disability / welfare but some times the system penalizes work in a way that people are better off not working. Or in other cases the cost of getting to work does not really cover what they make there.
"This was a very difficult decision, as we value all of our nearly 4,000 U.S. employees and their contributions."
Truthfully phrased:
"This was a very simple decision, as we nearly value all of our 4,000 U.S. employees and their contributions."
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I've been down, I've been beat
I've been tossed into the street
Beggin' nickels, beggin' dimes
Just to get my bottle of wine
Some say life she's a lady
Kinda soft, kinda shady
I can tell you life is rich
She's no lady, she's a bitch
They suck my body out
But friend there is no doubt
I'm gonna pay the devil his dues
'Cause I'm sick of being abused
Eat the rich, eat the rich
Don't you know life is a bitch
Eat the rich, eat the rich
Out of the palace and into the ditch
Steal my money, steal my car
Took my woman and my old guitar
Runnin' crazy, runnin' wild
Blind alley in my mind
Just can't fight the temptation
It's become my inspiration
Gonna get myself an axe
Break some heads, break some backs
They suck my body out
But friend there is no doubt
I'm gonna pay the devil his dues
'Cause I'm sick of being abused
Eat the rich, eat the rich
Don't you know life is a bitch
Eat the rich, eat the rich
Out of the palace and into the ditch
Don't stop me
Eat the rich, eat the rich
Don't you know life is a bitch
Eat the rich, eat the rich
Out of the palace and into the ditch
Eat the rich, eat the rich
Don't you know life is a bitch
Eat the rich, eat the rich
Out of the palace and into the ditch
Out of the palace and into the ditch
They suck my body out
This space unintentionally left blank.
The world isn't binary.
There are middle grounds between corporate capitalism and communism.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
> Secondly, they will chase you regardless of your qualifications because they are paid on commission. Third, they are not your friend.
They get paid their commission if and when they provide the best candidate, the one who gets hired. Twice, a call from a recruiter has resulted in a job offer that doubled my take-home pay - that's pretty friendly in my book. Of course my experience may be different from yours because as I said I make it a point to study my field weekly, not to bitch and moan about "the evil HR departments" who won't recommend me for an interview.
You can continue to complain because people as people continue to not hire you, or you can do something different; your choice.
The only way to stop this is to make IT a licensed profession just like with doctors, attorneys, and electricians.
It's funny how executive jobs are don' seem to be off shored.. I would think a CEO from India would be cheaper for the company.
The company usually blackmails the employee by threatening to withhold benefits, such as severance. This is exactly what should be illegal.
We need to look at cutting full time to 32 hours a week
France has a 35 hour work week and an unemployment rate that is double that of the U.S, and also France has a lower labor force participation rate overall (by about 10%).
Then organize and everyone quit exactly at the same time. They'd be fucked. Maybe you won't get severance, but it would be mutally assured destruction.. the impact of that will be felt everywhere as a precedence. Managers and board members understand risk more than anything else, they will stand up and pay attention...
Rupert Murdoch bought National Geographic? Cripes...
it's not being greedy to actually want non-stagnant wages
Non-farm business sector real compensation per hour is up 2.7% since 2014, after a long plateau due to the recession and formerly high unemployment rate, which is now down to 5%.
CEO pay is down over 30% (as a ratio with average worker pay) since 2000 though.
I don't get it. I was doing that kind of work in 2002, and it was shitty then already.
What's there left to E-learn? We've got YouTube, Kahn Academy and world-class universities dumping their entire curriculum online and into BitTorrent.
What's left to outsource to India, I'm wondering? Looks like this was a shit company anyway. It's probably gonna fold anytime soon anyway. I wouldn't be surprised.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
There is no good way to lay people off and replace them. It's always humiliating and degrading.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The above scenario will never happen, because there will always be someone making a lot of money
The point being that the jobs that got outsourced are jobs that are no longer creating enough added value to keep them inside a high-wage location, such as Ohio, USA
Even at Silicon Valley there are jobs that have been outsourced, but if we examine what kind of jobs that had been outsourced and which jobs still remain we will find that the jobs still remain (and are still being created) in America are jobs that are heavy on the side of creativity
Data entry jobs, even some of those so-called 'programming' jobs have become so routine it no longer makes any sense to employ people doing this low-value jobs in America
In other words, if you are Americans and still want to work in America, find yourself a niche, a niche which add a lot of value to what you do, a niche that no one outside of America can easily duplicate, and you will get to enjoy your job as long as what you do creates more money to your employer than what they pay you every month
You guys may not like what I am saying, but we need to face the reality somehow --- this world's competitiveness has heat up tremendously. USA and Europe are no longer the only places in the world where innovations happen
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I don't give a damn about India. They can handle their own problems. If history is my guide, they'll handle them badly because lying, cheating, and resume inflating don't work on overpopulation and infrastructure problems the same way they do on American executives who are also liars and cheaters.
No, we want tax policies and tariffs that make offshoring unprofitable. One of the very first thing the founders of this nation did was engage in protectionist trade policies because they knew that having industry wad important for this country. When George Washington found out he'd been elected President he sent away to what at the time was the only fine clothing maker in the country for a new suit. You see, the British forbade the colonists from having such things because they knew that industry wad important for their nation too.
Washington wanted to send a message. It's one that's apparently lost on herp derps like you who like to yell 'communism' every time somebody purposes not letting companies do whatever they want.
The founders trade policies served this nation well all the way up until we were stupid enough to elect Ronald Reagan, an act which coincides precisely with the decline of the middle class and wages across the board. Since then we've engaged in these stupid globalist 'free trade' policies that have all but destroyed the economic power of most of the nation.
It's time to return to what works, and this free trade crap doesn't work in any way that actually matters.
The long term outlook bleak.
Outsourcing may cut costs in the short term. If done well it will also cut costs in the long term. But hardly any outsourcing job gets done well. If the outsourcing company had developed their system well, then they would have had a system that operates at minimal costs and outsourcing wouldn't even be an issue.
I see the following scenario: Cognizant et all will gain bargaining power over their customers and prices will rise. Wages will go up and prices will rise even more. A fine equilibrium will be reached so that outsourcing will not be reversed. Then cockiness will tip the balance and insourcing threats will introduce a period of mistrust and negotiation. Eventually perhaps the tables will turn.
In short: Companies that take their system development seriously will gain over ones that don't. The former will have strong systems that are kept running by a minimal work force -Like us CS dudes actually think is sensible. Make your choice.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
http://www.bbc.com/capital/sto...
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
There is no way you can argue logically with CEOs who are concerned only with a good quarterly report to ensure the golden parachute for them. Only bullets solves something in this situation.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
isn't an IT company.
I watched an IT (manufacturing and research) company slowly die.
Started with printed circuit boards from Hong Kong,
then they arrived stuffed and flow soldered,
then they arrived machine tested,
then the repairs were done over there,
then new systems were developed in China.
With each cost saving a few more people were made redundant,
until they just had a manager, accountant and secretary.
Go well
Yes because you can keep consuming without income. Don't you guys already have enough debt as it is.
Yes, because this is what results from those "unions and employment protections".
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Duh! We don't have a trickle-down or trickle-up economy anymore; either one would be preferred to the "trickle-out" that we have now as it least moves money in the system. No, our nation is (and has been for quite some time now) been hemorrhaging wealth overseas. Meanwhile, our national debt is growing at warp speeds and when it finally crashes, the nation, "the union" as you know it dissolves. And as for China and everyone else, they can all go fuck themselves as there won't be an dollars to collect on!
Life is not for the lazy.
The job growth, sadly, is in retail and service sector jobs. I gave up on IT altogether after being effected by another layoff. I went ahead and got a CDL and now I drive for a living. Ironically, the joy of tinkering and experimenting with technology has returned.
http://politics.slashdot.org/story/15/08/18/029216/trump-targets-the-abuse-of-h-1b-visas
Microsoft: Satya Nadella
So it begins...
It's funny how after 20 years of us "IT guys" obliterating entire industries, destroying millions of jobs (and no, no new job is created when the a software replaces a department) now that we are the victim of the same thing (efficiency) we cry out loud like crazy. This is what happens, unfortunately. At some point everything will be a commodity, and the only real value will be the people with real business instincts to make the right decision for the company. Even software development that right now is considered highly creative and safe, yes, it may be, but can also be done from anywhere in the world you have a connection. The only value in the future of software development will be the people who will be able to come up with software that sells. Once they have the idea, there are thousands of technologies, frameworks, pre-made libraries that can help with that. Even now, I am working with a framework and libraries for functionalities that 2 years ago I would have needed to write myself. Now it's all done I just have to execute them. What I could bill 60 hours in the past, I now finish in 10. Yes, it's more efficient, it's also cheaper. Today all I have to do is to come up with an idea, I can probably execute it incredibly fast and cheap with no employees. Is that good, is that bad?
My experience in the tech world has been that most tech people lean libertarian....a kind of "don't bother me and I won't bother you" culture. This culture is reflected in the early days of software and networks where most code and communications protocols weren't designed with security built in.
Unfortunately, this world has ended. The world is a nasty place of people competing for resources and politics is part of that world.
The IT world needs a lobby group - maybe many groups to represent its interests in our government policies and our interactions with the world.
Rough consensus and running code are no longer enough.
Clearly fear mongering. Outsourcing IT is nothing new, it happens here and there and sometime it works and sometimes it fails. IT and manufacturing have nothing to do with each other and in all reality the US has tons of manufacturing jobs. We need better education if we want people to grow up with ambition and a skillset that isn't so easily replaced. We have to invest into out citizens to ensure we have a good workforce. OR, we accept that every country has a 10% demographics that is pretty darn smart and those 10% globally are the people that do a huge majority of the necessary work. The other 90% are just there mostly contributing to their own existence. Once you tap the 10% of your country, you need to get tap the 10% of the rest of the world. That being the case, we problem need to accept that fact that the 10% need to subsidize the 90% in both brainpower and a fair piece of the pie. Income inequality really isn't good for anyone, it just slows down the economy because hording money never increases production or profits. Either way you have to subsidize the dumb people and as we automate more, we have to subsidize more and more people. People won't just go away quietly or be swept under the rug. They will keep reproducing even with the lowest possible standard of living you can image. Adaption is the human superpower, so wage inequality is not going to fix itself. It will take an act of democratic power. The idea that there can always be enough jobs in the country for everyone to be employed is just false and it's getting less and less true every decade.
The world isn't binary.
There are middle grounds between corporate capitalism and communism.
Precisely. Computers have freed us to be able to think great thoughts. Why is is that the more powerful computers get, the more we seem to downgrade our own, more nuanced systems of logic developed over the centuries?
Why also does everything have to be a straight line or a hyperbola? Can't we accept that many phenomena have one or more maxima and minima or may even go abruptly discontinuous?
The President of the United States of America routinely does a lot of his job from locations other than the White House or even withing the USA at all. Or are American CEOs so magical that they cannot do likewise?
And if so, why do they like to move their incorporations to tax-haven countries while maintaining their real-world presence in the USA?
Next you'll be telling us that tax cuts for the unemployed don't work either!
Feel good, don't it? You can keep telling yourself you'll work at all the companies that survive when this one crashes. Thing is they've been outsourcing and bringing in h1-bs for 20 years, and I don't recall that happening once. What I do recall is several companies put out of business by the outsourcers. I also see wage stagnant for everyone but a few at the top...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
If you're not sure who Cengage is, they're one of the the companies that charges $300 for a college Intro Physics textbook and then locks half the content and all the problems behind a website that requires a one-time-use registration card, so that used textbooks are worthless.
Wonder what Trump and Carly think? If Carly opposes it, she'd have to explain why she presumably supported it while in HP. The Don has said that he's for all immigration that's done legally! Just b'cos he's fond of the wall and wants to end illegal immigration doesn't imply that's he's opposed to legal immigration as well
Dr Ben has talked about the need to get the entire US population productive to match the likes of India & China. Would like to see his proposals
E pluribus unum means "out of many, one".
...even IT workers in low-cost parts of the country are too expensive and their work is being sent to Cognizant, one of the largest H-1B visa users.
So are we not even pretending anymore that H-1B visas are for workers possessing skills not found locally? Because that's what they are supposed to be for. And that's what we have been told over and over when we made the observation that it's really about wage suppression. And yet, it seems to be about wage suppression. I guess we're one more industry that's finding out that unregulated Capitalism is not our friend.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Non-farm business sector real compensation per hour [stlouisfed.org] is up 2.7% since 2014, after a long plateau due to the recession and formerly high unemployment rate, which is now down to 5%.
Oh wow, 2.7%. That's an amazing pay raise especially when you factor in inflation. Oh and according to your Atlantic link's study, by comparison CEO pay is up anywhere from nearly 13% to over 37%. So sorry if I don't furiously masturbate of a pittance of a 2.7% wage increase.
CEO pay is down over 30% [theatlantic.com] (as a ratio with average worker pay) since 2000 though.
And yet it is still up to 273 times the average workers salary per that article. And even being off by 30%, their pay is still at near record highs historically. On the other hand, inflation adjusted wages for everyone else is still stagnant. Am I supposed to shed crocodile tears at the misfortune of CEOs that they are only making slightly less than obscene wages?
And these companies do what they do because the US government, the state governments, and the local municipalities make it expensive and difficult to employ Americans.
These governments make the rules. Companies simply play the game the best they can under the rules. It silly to blame them for behaving rationally.
Better would be to blame idiot politicians that make stupid rules.
This is so hilariously divorced from reality, I have to think you're joking or trolling. Companies simply play the game the best they can under the rules? As though they are detached observers and not primary participants in the shaping of law and policy? Perhaps you should look into LASIK to deal with that myopia.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Or... Great for the rest of us, their lower costs will fight margin compression for a time, but their competitors will follow suit to remain competitive and while 3 million Americans lose out on high wages, 300 million Americans gain in lower consumption costs (after all, we are a consumption economy), and India will gain 9 million jobs. For the American and Indian economies, this is a plus. The whole world gets more economic expansion as the cheapest possible costs are applied to work, and consumption increases. Don't let the lobbies and unions bogg the rest of consumers down. Just as steel workers fought to keep the cost of construction and cars up, the IT workers are fighting to keep the cost of software and IT up, at the expense of the rest of the economy.
Cengage doesn't serve all 300 million Americans; not even close. And what on Earth makes you think that labor saving will result in lower consumer prices? That savings goes to profit. That's the whole point.
I see your member number isn't that low. One day maybe you'll grow up and join the rest of us in understanding that supply-side economics doesn't work.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
So, you want communism? Guaranteed jobs from the government?
Or you want to find a way to make India just vanish into thin air?
If you are employed, at least we're dispelled the myth that the jobs go to the most capable and intelligent people.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
face facts. use logic. best way to prevent jobs going to non american citizens is to be truly productive and contributing value for money paid.
Is that really how you think these decisions are made? They somehow measure the value and productivity of the worker and decide whether they are getting their money's worth?
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Ok Sanjay.
Then explain CEO compensation....
H1B's contractors now cost more than $100K (although the actual person doing the work gets a fraction of that money). The reason is there's a shortage. Supply and demand. That's why companies are pushing to list the H1B caps.
No one looks at how we go into this situation. Around the 2000s the bean counters had a choice between adding more college hires and H1B/Off-shore resources. They cost a similar amount of money, but a H1B resource can be leveraged because they need an employer to sponsor their visa. Thus begins the cycle. No one is hiring the next generation of workers and the hole gets bigger and bigger.
Between 2005 and 2011 I didn't work in a single shop that had programming Interns or college hires (I consult and see a lot of large IT shops). As H1B and offshore rates ratcheted up companies were forced to look at college hiring again. So naturally the first thing congress wants to do is entirely remove H1B caps* (This by the way has bi-partisan support).
Back in my world I make a crap-ton of money with On-Shoring projects. Companies that tried it the 2000s are pulling development back into the US. We cost a lot more than off-shore workers, but the we get so much more done with a significantly higher degree of success.
Did you bitch when we started manufacturing our televisions in Japan or did you happily buy two because they were less expensive now and the quality was, "Good Enough?" Or did you do the "right thing" and simply refuse to buy electronics that were made in a different country because you wanted to make sure your fellow citizens had good jobs to be able to buy the products of your company? Did you start going without electronics because you refused to take part in that off-shoring or did you support that off-shoring of labor?
We know the answers. Well, to butcher the idea, now there's nobody left to speak for you.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Absolutely. I wish I had known this, and knew how to do it, before.
It could be said:
It's not what you know, it's who knows what you know.
It was only fairly recently that I discovered a good way to make it easy for recruiters to discover what my skills are, working with their system.
That put me in a job pretty well matched to my skillset. Since I built skills around what I enjoy, I enjoy my job pretty well. I kind of people I work with now are the types of nerd who read Slashdot, so my boss and his boss might be reading this thread. Did I mention I enjoy my job, and my comments about recruiters refer to how I got into my current position?
As an I.T. support contractor, I get paid big bucks to clean up other people's messes. Sometimes literally. I was doing a PC refresh project at a hospital when I took on an unassigned side project to clean up a storage room filled with so much surplus PC equipment that no one had seen the floor in eight years. Took me six weeks in between regular assignments to sort through, haul out to the warehouse, and palletize for recycling all that crap. After facilities sanitized and waxed the floor, I presented an empty room to my manager and the I.T. staff.
Well, I bought one TV in the 90s, and didn't buy a new TV until 2009. Anything before that, I was too young to do anything. I do not support off-shoring and I support that by buying local as much as possible. I love my state, and as a person who is the top 15-20% earning bracket, I know where my loyalties lie if I want to keep doing that and that means that I buy local as much as possible. That's the trickle down economics that I can stand behind, when people in my bracket do that then we have a platform for success. Most my furniture is oregon made or U.S. made, my car is made in Lafayette, IN. I have a famous electric car all made in the U.S. I only go to oregon businesses for my lunch and dinner. I don't eat at national chains. I invest in my local infrastructure.
I approve every goddam tax hike that helps my community. With wealth comes responsibility. I'm fully cognizant that my body of success lies on the success of others. I'm happy to pay higher taxes because I think it will lead to a better future for my children and my country. I will also make sure that my government spends its money wisely by participating vigorously in it.
Except he is living in the U.S. and is pulling a U.S. salary.
You must have also hand hewn the keyboard from rugged oak trees and trained squirrels to bring those packets back and forth to the network. Those varied electronic devices you own are surely all made here and not just assembled here - like the famous car you mention, those are all locally sourced materials, after all...
Point being, and while you have made some exceptions, people are just fine with cost cutting until it impacts them. They'll happily own and buy stuff made overseas and, likely, use the excuse that they've no choice because going without won't be a choice they're willing to make.
Personally? I try to be a responsible citizen but I also accept reality.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
So do many H1B's, I'm told.
>Any "American" company or individual that gives away American jobs to foreign countries are traitors to the USA and should be publicly murdered.
Sounds good to me. I'll get the rope.
Yes, but the economy is still harmed.
The US economy. But the Indian economy is boosted. Do you think that we listen to India whine every time we build a new robotic assembly line that puts one of their manual assembly lines out of business? Of course not. This whole 'us and them' argument is kinda bullshit, as we all live on the same planet, and in the end anything that improves productivity globally is probably a good thing.
Now, you may have some other valid problems that need to be solved, such as finding enough work for every person on Earth, or preventing total wealth aggregation by the top 1%, but don't entangle that with globalization.
A really sensible complaint would be, 'We have companies in the US that are taking advantage of our infrastructure, but aren't employing the local taxpayers, or are hiding funds overseas to avoid paying their taxes.'
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Shareholders not demanding value for money ?
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
A small group of Ultra Wealthy who own the means of production, a miniscule middle class that serves them and the rest in abject poverty. As long as the 1% are taken care of the rest of us are left to fend for ourselves...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Like scrum master, project manager, lead developer. When they can't outsource it they try for an h1-b and if that fails they try to make do without. Only when all other options have been exhausted do they consider an American. Usually for 80% of what the same job paid in 2000 but with more responsibility.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I'm going to tell you something that may be very helpful to you, and which you won't want to hear. Recruiting and on-boarding, then training, a new employee is expensive. Their total cost to hire an IT professional who then needs to be replaced is at least three months of your salary, normally more. Keeping that in mind ...
> I didn't say I've never gotten hired through them. I have, but more often than not, I've been cut loose
If they cut you loose after spending ~ $24,000 recruiting you, on-boarding you, and trying to get you up to speed, but still found it made more sense to try again with another candidate rather than to keep you, that means something. It means your work not as actually as good as your resume and what you told them in the interview. Maybe you used to be really good, you're an expert at Perl 5.2, PHP 4, and MySQL 4 perhaps, but haven't kept up. Maybe you know what you're doing, so you give good interview answers but you're sloppy, so your work isn't as good as knowledge. For some reason, you're not worth the salary they offered you. Maybe you're kinda like me - a genius asshole.
If it happened once, that might be just a bad fit. Twice and maybe you're unlucky. If you keep getting "cut loose" repeatedly, there's a reason. And it's not everybody getting let go, it's you who are the common denominator. It might do you a lot of good to talk to your boss and co-workers and find exactly out what the problem is.
I see, I misunderstood what you were saying. I heard "I've been hired through a recruiter and then the company cut me loose - repeatedly".
> They really don't care about candidates at all, apart from how much they can make off you.
Yeah, I'm sure most are focused on getting their job done, not on you personally. There job is to find someone whom the company will hire. I suppose if someone expected anything different they'd often be disappointed. On the other hand, since they get paid by getting someone hired, they're an ally (not friend) when I'm trying to get hired.
You do understand that will just massively increase labour costs, giving further incentives to outsourcing...
32 hours/wk is a gift. Keep it.
The issue people can't see is productivity will keep increasing, eventually leading to a massive unemployed force.
Massive social programs are indeed inevitable, but that will only work when all countries have them, otherwise a lot of labour will jump to the countries where they don't have to pay for that.
Its the big problem with the democrat / republican polarization. Both sides have some merits, but until they can see the whole picture by accepting both sides valid points, the disfunctionality will just continue, hurting the US economy.
I'm pretty sure he is a U.S. citizen. Having an H1B CEO would be a dangerous precedent.
I agree, I can only control my behavior. Since the question was directed about my behavior I answered it. I agree that people will try to get the best deal possible, I do recognize that buying local is important.
IT people waited too long, that ship has sailed. They kind of deserve it for not bothering to organize 20 years ago.
And you personally let them. Nobody said unions could preform miracles. You have to make some sort of effort, instead of laying around on your lazy ass waiting for someone else to take car of you. Idiot anon.
The responsible aren't the ones who control the markets, it seems. While I tend to agree with you, there are limits to what one can do and buying local isn't always an option unless you're willing to go without. Far to few people even care about buying local. And they wonder why the economy is depressed and where the jobs have gone. They demanded cheaper while refusing to work for less. They got cheaper and now they seem to be on a downward spiral to the point where they'll have even fewer jobs. I'm retired so, to me, it's just a show. I can, at least, insulate myself and my family from it. Unfortunately, a lot of others are not in that position.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Expel Brahmin From Your Country;
http://wh.gov/iyhMK
Casteism
Oh wow, 2.7%. That's an amazing pay raise especially when you factor in inflation.
2.7% is real compensation per hour, i.e. inflation-adjusted.