Laid-Off IT Workers Worry US Is Losing Tech Jobs To Outsourcing (www.cio.in) 391
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. (Score:2, Informative)
Duh... And in other news, the sun is hot.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Not at night, it isn't!
Re: Duh... And in other news, the sun is hot. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Uh...yeah! (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
Re:Uh...yeah! (Score:5, Interesting)
"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%
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FTFY.
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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)
Re:Uh...yeah! (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:Uh...yeah! (Score:5, Insightful)
Pass a law limiting CEO pay and shareholder payouts to some multiple of the number of the salary of every employee below C level. Even better, just limit profits and capital in a similar way, with the excess being taxed off.
Suddenly employment and good wages become assets rather than liabilities.
A lot of Japanese companies see their primary reason for existing as to provide employment. I don't think is possible in the West, but perhaps we can change how companies see their human resources in the same way that environmental regulations made efficiency and emissions a factor.
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Pass a law limiting CEO pay and shareholder payouts to some multiple of the number of the salary of every employee below C level.
You really think this should be the role of the government? Let me rephrase, do you think that the US government's constitutional role is to limit anyone's pay?
Even better, just limit profits and capital in a similar way, with the excess being taxed off.
Same question as above along with a "really?" You think the government should be able to limit profits and capital? Should the government be able to limit how much of my income I can put in my saving's account and instead require me to invest my savings back into the economy?
Wasn't one of the criticisms of the banks was not having enough capital t
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Let me rephrase, do you think that the US government's constitutional role is to limit anyone's pay?
I don't know, and I don't really care. The US constitution is not perfect, and it can be amended and changed if required.
You think the government should be able to limit profits and capital?
It already does, via taxation. There are numerous other limitations placed on companies too.
In the UK we are looking at preventing companies from buying land and then not developing it, but instead just waiting for the market to pick up and contributing to the housing shortage. That seems entirely reasonable to me - we get to decide the laws on land ownership, no one is forcing companies
Re:Uh...yeah! (Score:4, Funny)
In the UK we
Dude, the UK is not the US. The UK is a police state where you can get in trouble for something as simple as expressing your opinion on twitter.
The UK is a socialist state. In the US, we cherish our freedoms, which we gained by kicking you lot out, remember?
Re:Uh...yeah! (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering that CEO-to-regular employee pay is now around 300-to-1, and that CEO pay has increased almost 1000% since the 1970's, and regular employee compensation has only increased 10% in the same time frame, I'd say that there are serious socioeconomic impacts that needs to be addressed.
Personal opinion:
It's not ideal to enforce pay restrictions, but there has been a serious class divide over the last 40-50 years, culminating to a point where CEO's are paid absurd compensation packages, even in the event that they tank the company. Employees are now no longer considered valuable assets to a company that is not employee-owned. Something needs to be done to balance company salaries, and to prevent CEO's from running away with the lion's share when the employees are likely more responsible for the company's success than the CEO.
If proposed laws to restrict CEO pay are not constitutional, we should amend the constitution to allow it. Until we do, they will reap the unwarranted benefits incurred by the labor and sacrifices made by the under-paid employees.
Again, this is my personal opinion and I could be completely in the wrong, but I feel like SOMETHING needs to be done or else we're all going to be stuck with the shitty end of the stick for a long time to come.
http://www.epi.org/publication... [epi.org]
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Let me rephrase, do you think that the US government's constitutional role is to limit anyone's pay?
The government isn't limiting pay. The government is taxing pay over a particular threshold.
hould the government be able to limit how much of my income I can put in my saving's account
Are you unaware of the limits on deposits into IRAs and 401ks?
Wasn't one of the criticisms of the banks was not having enough capital to not need the bailouts?
No, the criticism was that they were doing insanely risky deals while pretending they were safe. Thus they overextended themselves and became insolvent.
The correct course of action would be to temporarily seize the assets of the failed banks, and then sell them off to other banks that were not doing these insane deals....which is what the FDIC does in e
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president bonzo and his 'piss on my leg' - er, uhm, I mean trickle-down econ.
that kind of started the whole corp greed thing, in the biggest way.
"business is good. the hell with actual people who do the work"
lather rinse repeat. and this is what we now have.
oblig: STIGGINIT!
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Re:Uh...yeah! (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't understand how people can think that money is an infinite resource. It has to be backed by something tangible, and when you remove wages from the local economy like this then you weaken the local economy. The middle class is on life support, and that seems to be what the RNC and Wall Street want. There's a story of Henry Ford showing a UAW president a robotic assembly line, bragging about the robots never strike, never ask for a raise, don't take time off sick, can work 24 hours a day. The UAW president replied "But how many cars do these robots buy?"
Personally I think morality left business when the personnel office became 'Human Resources'. When you devalue a person to a slot that can be filled by any number of interchangeable people, then morality and ethics are out the window.
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Though I could save money by getting my prescription meds via mail, I buy them locally because that's local taxes and supporting local jobs. And when our pharmacy plan calls to tell me how much I could save, I tell them that and it usually leaves the person on the other end of the line silent.
Then don't bitch about the costs of health care when you go out of your way to buy more expensive medicines.
This is the reason so many insurance companies are switching away from copays and straight to deductibles.
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Though I could save money by getting my prescription meds via mail, I buy them locally because that's local taxes and supporting local jobs. And when our pharmacy plan calls to tell me how much I could save, I tell them that and it usually leaves the person on the other end of the line silent.
Then don't bitch about the costs of health care when you go out of your way to buy more expensive medicines. This is the reason so many insurance companies are switching away from copays and straight to deductibles.
Excuse me, but at what point did I "bitch about the costs of health care"? I made a comment that I willingly pay more for meds locally than buying them through the mail, I don't see a complaint in what I said. Having said that, I do spend a lot on health care and pharmacy as I have an immune disorder that is very expensive to treat and keep me alive. I don't like the fact that it seems like my monthly OTC meds get more expensive every time that I pick them up, but I didn't bitch about it. I recognize th
Re:Uh...yeah! (Score:5, Insightful)
A business is not a person. A business has only one moral. What is good for the profit margin. A business will poison the water, and kill its employees as long as their is profit is greater than the cost. See the majority of environmental disaster for the last 300 years. At the center is a business saving money by not safely disposing of products. Even Fukushima was at the heart a business saving money by providing the minimum levels of safety.
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According to the Supreme Court, a business (corporation) *IS* a person. Fix that for a start and you might make some progress.
uhh... no (Score:2)
You used to be right, but not any more. Money is no longer spent locally, so why should jobs be kept local? If people are buying all of their consumer goods from multinationals and having them delivered to their doorstep, then why should employment be any different?
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Business, legally, has no obligation whatever beyond "to maximize shareholder value"
Change the law.
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At least they left endowments, hospitals, and theaters as part of their legacy. Most of the new CEOs seem to want to leave nothing behind but a pic of their middle finger.
I should point out that we get lots of expensive sports stadiums that end up being paid for by local governments.
At least the Romans got bread and circuses.
University of California, San Francisco (Score:2)
The organization in question here is not some for-profit 1%-er evil CEO run korporashun, like say, Apple, Tesla, or the Daily Kos.
It's a public university run by the glorious people's State of California, and presumably all the faculty and staff are good San Fransiscans or at least good Californians who seek nothing more than progress.
rock star (Score:3)
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Re:rock star (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
not even rock star (Score:3)
A coworker in my former life was doing jobs of two for pitiful pay. One day when another coworker left, she was told to do the job of the departed in addition to the two she was handling. When she refused, she was written up for insubordination. A week later, she landed herself a job with normal work load and 50% increase in pay, and promptly left. That company ended up hiring three people each with higher than what she was paid to do the work she did.
It will ultimately balance out (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
UCSF is training people for...what? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:UCSF is training people for...what? (Score:5, Insightful)
UCSF will educate foreign students. Colleges in the UC system and most other state-sponsored colleges nationwide actually prefer foreign students. Locals pay less through in-state tuition discounts while foreign students pay considerably more.
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The government should stop funding public universities and giving financial aid to students to go to those universities if the universities outsource to offshore companies.
What government? The government of California mostly represents the interests of the government of California. What's their incentive to change a policy that benefits them?
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The only real way to make this work in California is to convince the governor that offshoring isn't Green.
Have the local workers all bicycle to work, and they're guaranteed a job.
Re:UCSF is training people for...what? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
I have the solution (Score:2, Funny)
Label people who disagree "white supremicists" or "nativists" or "Nazis". Then disregard everything they say. Problem solved.
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The problem is, when you have a situation where there seem to be mainly two "sides" to an issue, and the actual white supremacists and neo-Nazis are firmly and loudly on one of those sides, it's naturally going to make everyone else on that side look bad. It's up to the other people on that side to disavow those elements of their coalition and distance themselves from them. If you can't be bothered to do that, other people can't be bothered to distinguish between you and the Nazis.
Reversion to the mean (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Reversion to the mean (Score:5, Insightful)
If those manufacturing companies destroy all the wealth of the middle class by outsourcing all the jobs, they'll have nobody left to sell their shit too. This is why globalization is a loser's game. The "invisible hand" and free market only work if both labor and capital are mobile. But in the global economy, capital is infinitely mobile, while people are still mostly restricted to finding work in their own countries. This allows globalized corporations to play countries off each other in a game of international labor arbitrage to the detriment of every single human being on the planet.
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People who are coming on H1B are uprooting their entire life to be mobile. What stops you from doing the same. Many places in the world still will pay an American more to do the same job because America is onsidered most advanced so all its citizens must be super smart. Go work in the gulf or Africa and the expat salaries you get will mean you can retire in 5 years if you save smartly.
Re:Reversion to the mean (Score:5, Insightful)
people are leaving india (etc) to come to the US and they get a MUCH BETTER STANDARD OF LIVING. its a win for them.
reverse it: you are suggesting we americans leave one of the best countries in the world (for living standard) because some rich assholes CHOOSE to not hire us and watch us starve if we stay locally?
I think your thinking (and human compassion) needs work, my friend. you have an odd way of seeing things.
expecting locals to uproot because some rich fucker says so? yeah, that's surely the american dream, right there.
Re:Reversion to the mean (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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I think this is spot on, and I suggest we fix the education system.
We don't have schools.
We have day care centers.
While I agree that to a certain extent schools do serve as de facto day care centers, do you have any ideas for improvement or just complaints? I wish I had the answers. I really do. A large part of this is because it's what parents want and they pay the taxes. Homework is at a ridiculous level pretty much everywhere, and again, it's what parents want. Then these same parents complain without any sense of responsibility for the mess that their kids don't get enough sleep and are always tired when they
re: manufacturing jobs (Score:2)
I agree that a lot of the recent "Trump talk" about bringing back manufacturing is just speech to make an audience happy. But it doesn't have to all be nonsense either.
You can see by how many foreign auto-makers chose to put assembly plants in the U.S. that it can make good financial sense. (Not long ago, the whole "Buy American!" thing meant bashing companies like Toyota, Hyundai and Kia -- yet today, they're employing lots of American workers and putting the vehicles together here that we buy here. Saves
Re:Reversion to the mean (Score:5, Insightful)
If we want higher than average wages then we need to do things that will get higher than average results.
I work at UCSF (so posting AC). The truth is these IT workers were simply never very good (at least on average). The network is slow and unstable. Requests take forever to be filled. IT places unreasonable costs on anyone foolish enough to work with, instead of around, them. They charge over $1,000 just to make a single DNS entry for a new computer, for example. Then there's the bloatware they stick on university laptops and PCs - Symantec, BigFix (institutional spyware), Dell Data Protection. DDP in particular is totally incompatible with recent Mac OSes, leaving most Mac laptops with frequent "reboot to update" prompts that never go away (not fixed in two years).
They also failed to garner allies at UCSF who would have fought for their jobs. This is an institution of scientists who depend on IT services in most aspects of their work, and one in which professional camaraderie is very important. Unlike some other schools / research centers, IT here never participated in the culture. If they had made themselves personally available to people, if they had shown that they cared about the scientific output of the university, if they had demonstrated some dedication to making things work for people, so their science could get done, and if they had built some social capital through friendly outreach, then they wouldn't be getting outsourced.
UCSF is a premier research university - the second largest recipient of NIH funding in the country - and most aspects of the university reflect that. I'm sure some companies would outsource workers to save a couple short-term bucks regardless of how indispensable those workers had become. This university isn't like that, but we will look for a cheaper option if there's nothing to recommend sticking with what we've got.
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I work at a university as well (not a community college - one that does research grants and has doctorate programs) - not that you'll read this, but I find a lot of this cross billing madness that happens at the management level.
For instance all those things you mentioned we do for free - the only thing we change for is when you actually need physical servers, licensing, and storage space.
We probably finish over a hundred projects a year - as central IT - it's well over a quarter of all projects the univers
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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....There is nothing special about the US that entitles workers here to abnormally high wages...
The cost of housing. The cost of consumables. The cost of insurance. In other words, the cost of living in this country.
All factors in what actually makes our particular wage rate rather "special" by comparison. The US Military refers to as a Cost Of Living Allowance (COLA), which they also adjust wages for, depending on where you are forced to work.
Unfortunately, a reversion to the mean needs to adjust accordingly for ALL goods and services. Due to greed and corruption, there's no chance in hell of
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I.T. in colleges .... (Score:4, Interesting)
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!
Global competition (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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Workers in poorer countries benefit. And morally its more moral that a poor country worker can now afford healthcare and meat even though as a result a rich country worker can no longer afford a sports car and a boat.
Re:Global competition (Score:4, Insightful)
binary thinking, much?
I don't want to buy a sports car. I just want to have a stable job that lasts long enough for me at at least CONSIDER buying a home. not owning a home means that every few years, I have to move when the landlord decides to sell his rental home or eject me since he can make more money with a new tenant than one that has been there for a few years. add to this the fact that you cannot rent a place unless you HAVE A JOB AT THE TIME (at least in the bay area, its an unwritten rule and I've been caught in that situation more than once; its not fun, let me tell you.)
its not about luxuries. its about having a stable life, being able to continue to afford healthcare, to be able to continue to afford the RENT payments and all that. forget even saving for the future, I'm just about able to make immediate bill payments and hope I break even each month.
why should I care about some other country's poor folks? we have enough problems in this country; I don't see india (etc) reaching out to help the US! no other country is reaching out to help us, either. so why is it OUR JOB to employ the world's poorer people in their own countries AT OUR OWN EXPENSE?
I know where you're from. I can tell by how you write.
and you have a very unbalanced view of things.
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The Bay area is not representative of the US. Its much more like India as its hand to mouth but outside of Bay Area in the midwest and the East coast people in IT jobs easily have huge houses, multiple SUVS, ATVs, boats and tons of shit. And they expect to keep affording the same even if the work they do can be done at the same quality from across the world.
Believe me not many jobs are getting outsourced to India from the Bay Area. These jobs were first outsourced to the midwest and Texas and only then sent
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Poverty as defined in this country is upper middle class in most developing countries
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Poverty is a relative condition. Being in crappy house with a beat up car in a marginal neighborhood with no savings can be worlds different from living in a shack made of sticks without running water, electricity or any health care whatsoever.
Even at the lower rungs of the US ladder we're quite a bit higher than a lot of the world.
Which is a rather sad statement, but one that is very real.
This is illegal. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:This is illegal. (Score:5, Insightful)
Incorrect. The rules you're talking about are easily and routinely gamed. The workarounds are straightforward.
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Yup.
There are even seminars on how to do it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCbFEgFajGU [youtube.com]
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Re:This is illegal. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hah. Nope. You miss all those stories in the news and even here on /. over the last couple of years of people being forced to train their replacements and being replaced by H1B's? Guess so, there's no shortage of stories on it. These companies are gaming the system. Just like companies in Canada are abusing the TFW(temporary foreign worker) program. The difference between H1B and TFW if anyone is wondering is that a TFW can work any job. The shittiest companies at the very bottom(janitorial/fast food) [huffingtonpost.ca], to big name companies like Royal Bank of Canada [www.cbc.ca] have been caught gaming the system up here too.
This type of stuff is what causes violent revolutions, and neither governments or businesses seem to give a shit that they're contributing to something that will bite them in the ass. Only upside is down there in the US, Trump wants to gut and fix that program. In Canada, Trudeau decided to undo what the conservatives had put in place in order to limit how companies could abuse the TFW program.
Nothing but a race to the fucking bottom, and it's very easy to see where this shit started. Those people who used to seasonally work as farm workers(fruit/tobacco/etc). When I was a teen, you could make 30-50% more per hour then min wage. Then the government changed the rule to allow imported foreign labor. Hourly wages went away, people were paid by weight/count. And people who lived in the country stopped doing the work because it was an absolute shit wage being paid.
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No, he doesn't. He just says he does. However, being Trump, even if he wanted to do it, he's incapable of doing it competently.
You been paying attention to what he's done and said? No? You should. Let me know when you get to the part where he's been keeping his promises, and putting people in place who would happily stand up to his views if they're bad. Your thinking is still stuck in a period where politicians would lie through their teeth, and you're now in an era where you have a person who wasn't ever a politician until he was elected POTUS keeping his promises.
That's not an upside, it's a sad effect of politics, you can promise the moon, and deliver a nice shot of your own ass.
And now the funny part. Where you can hear the former never-tru
Re:This is illegal. (Score:5, Insightful)
"You been paying attention to what he's done and said?"
Yes, for the past 20+ years. Apparently you have not paid any attention to him until recently, which makes you a complete moron for trusting him.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
He's more trustworthy than Hillary.
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Yes, for the past 20+ years. Apparently you have not paid any attention to him until recently, which makes you a complete moron for trusting him.
So then you know that he likes flapping off his mouth, but doing things that are fundamentally to the point of what he states he's going to do. Yes, very moronic. You figure out why he got elected yet?
But let's look at the opposition and their rigged DNC primary which was a great idea. Hillary wanting to push the US into WWIII with Russia was a great idea too. And her wanting to outsource jobs, and her support of TPP, and her "open border" policy, all very good things. Gee would you look at that? Lo
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You been paying attention to what he's done and said?
Yes, it has been staggering in his lack of competence, and general inability to remain accurate to facts, combined with self-aggrandizement and deceit.
Do you think I didn't notice? Well, I think you haven't noticed. I bet you can't even name 10 of Trump's personal screw-ups. I'll even let you pick them out over his life time, even though you could likely do it in the last week if you paid attention.
Let me know when you get to the part where he's been keeping his promises, and putting people in place who would happily stand up to his views if they're bad.
Neither one of those things has happened. Ok, I heard maybe DeVos tried to push back on the transgender r
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Do what in a month? Take credit for stuff that the Obama administration worked on for 8 years?
The only thing he's really done is to stun the rest of the world into immobility for a while until they figure out whether he is the homicidal maniac that he tries to pretend he is . As soon as somebody else decides to stomp on his balls and gets away with it, it's game over for the game guy.
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Do what in a month? Take credit for stuff that the Obama administration worked on for 8 years?
You mean Obama's actions to worsen race relations in the US? Every single time he opened his mouth on something relating to race, he made the situation worse? That instead of waiting for truth, his administration would fabricate and outright lie? You remember Benghazi don't you? How's that "it was because it was a video narrative" bullshit working out these days. To fund terrorists in the middle east because Assad? To back groups that are linked to ISIS? You wonder why ISIS is already on the run a mon
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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 l
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So leak it to the media or file form WH-4 [dol.gov] with the Department of Labor [dol.gov].
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Right. Which is why Obama was called the 'Deporter in Chief'.
Yep, there is quite a bit Sturm Und Drang on both sides of the asylum today. Probably due to alien micro parasites in our water.
I don't mind losing the job. (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Hopefully, Trump will stop this (Score:4, Insightful)
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He will have to prove it.
Don't worry, Trump will fix it (Score:2)
After all, one of his core messages was that he wanted to bring jobs back to America...
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Not only in the USA (Score:2)
I live un Canada (Montréal) after been layoff in 2005 I was forced to became a consultant (and no more insurance, lost my pension plan, etc) I choose to reoriente myself as a mecanic technician to help me achieve the rest of my Working Time.
I'm worried about the "newbie pipeline" (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
What? Did you assume you were immune? (Score:2)
Age Discrimination (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Ignorance is bliss (Score:2)
Sorry, dude, but where exactly have you been those past 25ish years? Living in a sheltered bubble or ... how could you NOT see this happen before?
California gravy train (Score:2)
That may have less to do with outsourcing and more to do with the fact that California has budget and pension problems.
The guy wasn't working for "a company", he was working for the California university system. Peopl who "work for companies"
Gov't doing visas wrong (Score:2)
Been-there-done-that. The thing is, I can accept the idea that we have to compete on a global market, and brains are becoming a cheap commodity. We cannot stop the inevitable. It's not 1970 anymore.
However, I think it's reasonable to shut the tech-visa door during a recession, which the US government did NOT. I lost two jobs during a recession when the 1st company croaked and the 2nd outsourced, and had to leave the state and my family to find work. I probably would have actually voted for T back then, *gul
Dangerous for another reason ... (Score:2)
"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."
... the high-paying jobs are worth about as much as the janitorial jobs at the same school.
When jobs can be outsourced for cheaper wages, it's a clear sign that the "good old days," are gone.
The real danger is wasting time and money resisting change.
Just fucking outsource those goddam jobs, for Christ's sake, and ramp up the education system to produce workers that actually work at doing shit that makes a lot of money.
I have to think of everything.
Need to find a way to compete (Score:2)
It's worse (Score:3)
It's bad enough the school is doing this to their staff, but the school is ALSO charging students for curriculum which will prepare them to work the very same sort of jobs the school just outsourced.
So not only are they screwing their people, they're robbing their customers too and sending them into a dead end.
I'm not much of a protectionist. I think free trade is mostly a good thing. BUT I do think the US has a serious problem with H1-B and work visas in general. If you go to any other country, the process of getting in the country to work is MUCH MUCH harder. Canada, for example, will not allow someone in if they merely suspect the person is there to work and does not have a work visa and a sponsor. Even if they DO have a visa and a sponsor, the work in question has to be a job that NO Canadian can do. So if you take photos, for example, then you can't work there because clearly Canada has photographers who could do the work.
The US makes no such restrictions. You can come here and take the job of an American even if we have lots of other qualified Americans ready and able to do that work. We don't care. Bring on the foreigners! This is ridiculous.
Dumbasses (Score:2)
It seems like the UOC is just the latest in a long string of companies/institutions to repeat this experiment. They could save themselves a LOT of trouble by just looking around at the many others in the industry that already tried this and switched back, but for some reason these mangement types are always arrogant/clueless enough to think they automatically know better and are somehow different.
UOC will now take multiple years of inflicting tremendous pain on themselves before the bean counters will final
They should have thought about it before now. (Score:3)
On the other side of this issue, what about the students? Are they still going to go to this school knowing it's telling them their future job won't be there because an H1B has it or will they stop registering for these courses to send a message to the school's administration? I'll bet they will still attend and give their borrowed money to get a diploma that won't mean anything to an employer who can get people on the cheap.
Is it really that hard to find another job? (Score:3)
Are they really saying that it is that hard for qualified IT folks to find another job somewhere in the whole U.S. with a similar salary/cost of living tradeoff. I know plenty of recruiters who would be salivating at the thought of 110 highly qualified people looking for a job.
So the questions are:
What exactly do they do?
Have they kept their skills up and stayed marketable?
One guy complained that even if he finds a job he may get laid off again in two years. What type of 80s mindset is that? Changing jobs for qualified IT people is like changing socks.
Outsourcing could very well make it hard for *qualified* people to find a job in the future, but not today.
H-1B Visas (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:Obvious solution (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re: Obvious solution (Score:5, Funny)
Yes! I was born in Minnesota. I just got my HB1 visa approved last week and finally am back to work.
You just need to get your workers visa. Sure, I'm a citizen already but having that HB1 credential means I am better than you. Period. And I require sponsorship now. But that's ok. Ill be able to work in the country I was born and raised in again.
I love the HB1 visa program. My fellow USA citizens, apply for your visas today! You'll be back to work soon.
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You are not obligated to pay the mortgage or car payment. Nobody is forcing you to do this. The police are not going to arrest you if you walk away from it like they do in other countries. From the sounds of things you got divorced and have to pay child support. Well, so does every other American when they do the same thing. Tough shit and welcome to the club! Do what every other screwed over American does. Declare bankruptcy and walk away from the house and nice car you can no longer afford. Drive a beater
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You must be new here.
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So don't live in the city. There are tech jobs all over the country.
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No need to wipe the system, just don't cooperate well and talk in a heavy accent. Ask the replacement how much he earns and why they don't pay him well enough.
I have come to realize that some people from India may seem to speak English but then they don't mean the same thing as we mean.
Also realize that in India anyone that has been working for more than a year at the same company has been there for a long time.