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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.
"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,"
Well, thank goodness people are beginning to wake up. If you're doing business (i.e.: taking money from people) in a country, especially THIS country, you have a moral obligation to employ people from the community, if possible. Adjust your profit expectations accordingly. We're all in this together, or at least, we should be.
The H1-B scam has been going on long enough.
Isn't UCSF putting themselves out of a job? If the jobs get outsourced, then who needs UCSF? There's no reason to go to UC and get trained for something if no one will hire you.
Once you send out the manufacturing jobs, once you send out the service jobs, once you send out the research jobs, what's left?
A reversion to the mean. The US has some of the highest wages in the world. That's great but if we want to keep it that way we need to be doing things that are hard to replicate outside the US. That means investing in research and education and technology and infrastructure and supply chains. All things that have payoffs which are measured in decades. There is nothing special about the US that entitles workers here to abnormally high wages when the work can be done adequately well in locations with lower labor costs. If we want higher than average wages then we need to do things that will get higher than average results.
That's why a lot of the rhetoric coming from Washington about "bringing back manufacturing jobs" is just nonsense. Unless you want to accompany it with a reduction in wages to significantly lower amounts than we currently expect. Those jobs left because they were labor intensive and labor costs were substantially lower elsewhere. If the job can be done in China for $2/hour, you aren't going to compete on labor intensive manufacturing with wages of $15/hour or more. No amount of political promises will change that fact. Those jobs aren't coming back unless a drastic drop in wages comes with them. I'm pretty sure we don't actually want that.
And herein lies the inherent problem to the globalized capitalist economy. Eventually, there could be an equalized economy shared across the globe.
Getting to that point however, requires that the economically healthy nations fall while the economically poor nations rise.
The business owner benefits. The bankers benefit. The shareholders benefit. The workers get the shaft. Historically, trends like that lead to bad things.
It is only valid to hire an H1B when a qualified citizen does not exist. If you're laying off citizens to replace them with H1Bs, the use of H1Bs was clearly not valid.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
What I mind is the mentality that "if you're unemployed, then you're no good."
It kills me when I apply to jobs that I fit very closely or even exactly only to hear nothing back or "you don't have the skills."
And what really hurts is when your friends and family wonder why you can't get a job because you're a programmer and there's a shortage of programmers.
THAT hurts along with the comments. They think if you "know computers" you can just walk into any job you want and if you can't, then there's something wrong with you.
I love programming and computers - I HATE this goddamn industry!
This is an ABUSE of the H1B visa program, clear and simple. It's been done under democratic "leadership" and republican "leadership" Why? Simple...$$$$ corporations want to earn more profit, so they outsource for pennies on a dollar, kick back a ton of so called campaign donations, to ensure that the government goes along with it.
I'm 41, so I guess I'm way past due for Logan's Run style "renewal". However, I'm still here working in IT hoping I can stick around as long as possible because I actually enjoy the work a lot. I really don't like the fact that age discrimination makes it very hard for laid-off older IT workers to come back into the profession (and yes, it does exist....I understand some people don't keep their skills sharp, but even good people over 50 can't get cold call interviews; they need to know someone.) In my opinion, outsourcing and the H-1B visa simultaneously implement a brake on salaries for experienced people, and take away entry level positions that are needed to replace people at the low end. When a company can call up one of the body shops and cut their IT costs (on paper) by 80%, it's very difficult to convince them that they'll end up paying way more in the end.
This is a subject I care about a lot, because one of the things I like best about my job is sharing knowledge with the newbies and making them better IT people. It's fun being the adult in the room and showing people who've grown up with systems that are very abstracted from the actual goings-on under the hood how something actually works behind that cloud service, API call or PowerShell cmdlet. IT pros with a good grasp on fundamentals have no trouble picking up the latest fad or hot tool in my experience. What I worry about is the fact that people coming into the profession will see offshoring, outsourcing and age discrimination as a reason to not go into IT or software development. People aren't dumb - if they're smart enough to be excellent students, they'll pick a path like medicine, pharmacy or the rarefied world of investment banking or management consulting. Medicine is especially attractive for simple reasons -- the profession is highly regulated, experience is actually respected and rewarded, and the supply of medical school slots is kept low to ensure high salaries for people who put the work in. If you're smart enough and have a photographic memory, I can't see any reason why a young person today wouldn't try to get into medicine. We could use a lot more smart, talented people in IT. Another thing is working conditions, which could be improved in many places. That said, not every job involves 16 hour days banging out JavaScript in FrameworkOfTheMonth 0.9.1 while chugging Red Bull for a phone app; I've chosen to forego the highest possible salary to choose sane employers who understand work-life balance and actually appreciate my experience.
I think that the body shops who are abusing the L-1 and H-1B programs should be stopped. Kicking out the ladder of entry level IT employment is a bad thing and will lead to executives feeling that the only way they can get competent people is hiring from these body shops. Once that's firmly in place at every company, the profession is pretty much doomed to a fate of hourly, gig economy contracts whose rates just keep dropping. So, preseve the pipeline of newbies -- give them work so they can learn how to do IT right.
You will all the thanking trump once he starts the next phase of immigration reform - H visa reduction. It has been his plan all along. Trump has been aware of the destruction foreign workers sponsoring companies cause. The problem is three fold. The government providing visas. The companies will to directly hurt Americans and America by using them, and the desperate foreign workers that will do anything to get out of thier terrible countries. America is the best place even now.
Once Trump cuts the H visa program to shreds, the other issues resolve itself. Remember Trump has already set the stage for penalizing companies to move operations off shore and rewarding companies to stay on shore.
I hated Trump during the election. But after sorting out all the false news, I love what he's doing. He is saving our sovereign nation.
We are America. Not the world. We need to do what is best for our nation and its citizens FIRST, then play world police second. Not the other way around - the way it has been. Someone let this happen. From the 90's. Politicians selling out the American people to enrich themselves.
God bless Trump. And you all need to wake up. Celebrities are not leaders. They are simple people working for ALot of money. Don't idolize them. And don't think they know best. They don't live like us. Not even close.
Cue the propaganda about there being a worker shortage again. There is no worker shortage. There are workers lined up to work in IT. US companies have a champagne taste and a beer budget because that's what drives these insane profits on the stock exchange. The champagne is the American workers, the beer is the foreign workers for the most part with a few exceptions. This is why we need to suspend the H-1B Visa program because American companies will have no choice but to compromise. They certainly can afford it. I think it's only fair, the American people have been asked to compromise and compromise and then compromise again since 2008 to do their part to help the economy recover from The Great Recession. We've fulfilled that obligation now and it's time for us to get a slice of the historically enormous cash pile that has built up and been stored overseas to avoid repatriation.
We'll make great pets