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Laid-Off IT Workers Worry US Is Losing Tech Jobs To Outsourcing (www.cio.in)
An anonymous reader shares a CIO article: Sixty-three-year-old Bob Zhang is worried about the future of tech jobs in the U.S. Will the high-paying positions be a thing of the past? Zhang thinks it's already starting to happen. He's one of 79 IT workers from the University of California, San Francisco, who've been laid off. Tuesday was their last day on the job. To replace them, the school is outsourcing some of their work to an Indian firm. "Usually, they outsource the low-paying jobs," he said at a gathering outside a school building. "But now they use H-1B (visa) and use foreign workers to replace the high-paying jobs. This trend is dangerous." It was a sentiment shared among the laid-off IT workers, who've tried to push the school to save their positions, to no avail. Now they fear other publicly-funded universities will take the same approach, and replace U.S. employees with foreign workers. "Once you send out the manufacturing jobs, once you send out the service jobs, once you send out the research jobs, what's left? There's nothing left," said Tan, who's 55 and now looking for a new job. Kurt Ho, another laid-off worker, said he was paid an annual salary of about US$110,000, but the new workers replacing his position will fraction that amount. "In two years, I could be at another company, and I could be facing the same thing," he said.
Duh... And in other news, the sun is hot.
At the same price point, there is no reason for an employer to prefer the H-1B.
H1Bs can't quit without jeopardizing their residency.
I'm in the same situation right now, albeit I'm a -little- older than 63... Employers are not allowed to ask you questions related to your age, but it's pretty obvious when you forget and start relating sexism in the workplace to the synod of Rome in 850. The bigger issue (at least for me) seems to be that it doesn't matter if your 63 or 2022, employers are looking for young cheap people that have exactly the skills they think they need without considering the advantages of experience and adaptability. If they can't find that locally, they outsource.
Seriously, you would think that 200 decades of experience would count for something, but no. It seems far more important that you are a tiny square peg they need to fill the tiny square hole they have. Sheesh.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
If we want higher than average wages then we need to do things that will get higher than average results.
I think this is spot on, and I suggest we fix the education system.
We don't have schools.
We have day care centers.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
The sad thing is these workers were likely bullied into compliance with the management objectives on the threat of losing their jobs, and they were sold out anyway.
Parent AC here. That may well be true, but if so, I wish that IT workers themselves had gone to the effort to make that clear to others at the university. There is a very open environment here, and what I've been saying distills the general opinions of lots of folks from graduate students to department-administering PIs.
FTFY.
Top 1% = $368,238 (20.9% of income) Top 0.5% = $558,726 (16.8% of income) Top 0.1% = $1,695,136 (10.3% of income) Top 0.01% = $9,141,190 (5% of income)