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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.
In the short term, people in the US can choose to work at what amounts to starvation wages compared to local cost of living. Or move on to those new jobs everyone's always claiming will magically appear.
In the long term (after the American economy is destroyed but the richest have milked it for all they can and moved to whatever nation can still support their standard of living), foreign workers will have cause their local economies to grow and their wage expectations will grow simultaneously. Ultimately, they'll be the same as domestic labour only with the hassle of dealing with people in a different time zone and possibly with cultural and language issues. But hey, equalization will happen faster if America's crashing as quickly as they're growing.
It would seem one solution is to levy a 'standard of living' tariff on offshored jobs that covers the difference in expense, and here's the difficult part - remit the collected tariffs to the foreign workers instead of trying to hold onto it domestically.
That will not only make the domestic labor force more competitive in the short term, it will insure a rapid rise of the foreign economy so they are less competitive in the long run.
Or you can put up various walls, isolate your nation from the global economy, and find yourself falling further and further behind the rest of the planet over time.
"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.
Dearest Little People,
We have lobbied to remove Ethics and Morality from American Business, as they impact our ability to become obscenely wealthy, and will continue to do so.
Do not assume that care nor concern is capable of crossing the chasm between us, and you.
In short, Fuck You Very Much.
Hugs and Kisses,
- The 1%
That's not any different from the argument that companies shouldn't outsource manufacturing because it's eroding their customer base. It's meaningless in the era short term sales goals, meeting quarterly projections, and golden parachutes.
Yes, it is different. Those manufacturing companies aren't milking the government teat for funding. Whether companies outsource or not is a different beast - but a public institution using taxpayer money and outsourcing - giving that taxpayer money to non-nationals in what amounts to foreign aid, should be a big no-no.
This, so much this.
Talk about parallel universes ...
As people scale up in cooperative business ventures, their sheer numbers create another person (see "Citizens United").
As granularity decreases, so does humanity.
Groups of people who become businesses morph into the most undesirable people on the planet.
I mean that literally.
The sleaze is supported by millions of good people pointing to the despicable collective asshole they have become.
The golden idol is asymptotic CEO and shareholder wealth unbound by restraint of regulation, accountability, ethics, and morality.
While the weight of shame and damage is enormous, the dark force is spread across millions and millions of people, each of whom can tolerate their own greed at the molecular level.
We have met the enemy and he is us.
~ Pogo by Walt Kelly
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
They have some way around it that works. Major IT outsourcing firm here. We lay off 50-100 Americans every 1-2 months. Slowly. Quietly. That way the newspaper doesn't pick up on it and report about it. Then we replace those people with H1B visa workers. And that's only on if we can't outright send the work directly to India, i.e. a customer contract requiring US-based resources. Hell we even have a non-public HR policy titled "India First" which states this as corporate policy. Also we have a fuck load of lobbyists buying nice dinners and golf outings for your congress-critters in order to advance this agenda.
I hate it. I think it's wrong. But they have some way they are pulling it off, legally.
I think the original posted is absolutely correct, in his comment that, "I've observed that the average age is definitely older, and people have been here forever. Lots of my co-workers are stuck in their ways, and they have an attitude about their job + entitlements that only a person with no recent private sector work experience would have."
My wife work in I.T. for a local community college and has observed the same thing. The head of networking has been there for YEARS. His area of expertise was Novell Netware, which is utterly obsolete today. Ever since he was forced to move to support Windows networks and servers, he's done nothing but screw things up and hold back needed change. (He won't implement basic security precautions because he keeps saying they aren't necessary. In reality, he's probably not confident he can implement any of them properly and doesn't want to be bothered to learn.)
Another guy on the team was continually pushing updates out to systems that broke them, and then just going home, shrugging and saying, "Oops.... Oh well.... something to figure out later." Professors had to cancel classes in some cases, due to his negligence. Yet did they fire him? No! They just moved him to another area for a while, and now he's back, making the same mistakes again!
He's more trustworthy than Hillary.
My girlfriend was told this by her last employer. They expected her to do the work of someone making 40-50k/yr in her position, for 30k/yr instead, and told her that the job should be her life(little to no time off, mandatory OT if necessary). She told them that she expected a raise at her 1yr review, and instead they fired her.
The funny thing though is that she was the best employee that they had, and after they fired her a number of people immediately started looking for jobs elsewhere and quit. It's a fairly small company, so they've been impacted greatly now.
Who are these "they" you are referring to? These all sound like management decisions.
Same AC. I concede that the crummy bloatware and insane pricing is management's fault, but the apparent buffer bloat, weird packet filtering, and generally bad network performance everywhere on campus? It feels like careless gear selection, installation, and maintenance to me. Then there's the cultural aspect - the university holds dear a collaborative atmosphere in which one simply goes down the hall to meet people face-to-face. I don't think anyone I know here has ever met an IT worker or low-level manager in person.
And then there's the issue of legacy code that just grows more fragile over time. Again, that's management's responsibility: "add feature, feature, feature; the sooner the better and we can't afford quality."
This is really just an institutional IT department at a public university. Almost all of the actual software development that takes place here is within the context of an academic lab, and engineers are paid out of grant funding by their PIs. The same goes for our academic cluster staff. To the extent they isn't crippled by the bad building network, those systems are very impressive.
Outsourcing isn't going to fix any of it.
I don't think anyone (aside from the administration perhaps) is under the illusion outsourcing is going to fix the problems, but at least we'll be paying shit to match the shit performance.