Large Corporations Displacing Aging IT Workers With H-1B Visa Workers 617
New submitter genericmk writes "NPR is running an interesting story about the unfortunate status of the aging programmers in the IT industry. Older IT workers are opposing the H-1B visa overhaul. Large corporations want more visa, they claim, because of a shortage of IT talent. However, these companies are actively avoiding older, more experienced workers, and are bringing in large volumes of foreign staff. The younger, foreign workers are often easier to control, and they demand lower wages; indentured servitude is replacing higher cost labor."
Greedy Upper Management. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Greedy Upper Management. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Greedy Upper Management. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Greedy Upper Management. (Score:5, Interesting)
Ahhhhh, echos of the housing bubble? Corporate America has shifted targets from lowly craftsmen, to the formerly elite IT crowd.
The day will come when a citizen of the US can't buy an IT job, especially if he looks like a white American.
It's funny that you mention that. I work in IT at a Fortune 500 company. One day last week, I was in a meeting and I was the only black person there and ironically I also had the lightest skin. Indian H1Bs are ALL OVER IT. Anything Oracle related is dominated by Indian H1Bs.
LK
Re:Greedy Upper Management. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Greedy Upper Management. (Score:4, Interesting)
Any examples for those of us who have no idea outside of military contracting?
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The day will come when a citizen of the US can't buy an IT job, especially if he looks like a white American.
Oh please, it's an economic problem, not a racial one. But then if you're a racist, I suppose all problems are racial ones.
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Or you can control the market by passing laws (bribing senators) limiting the free market because your a CEO with millions (and a company with billions) so you get all the benefits of living in a first world country while paying for none of it!
Protectionism is protectionism, whether you are fucking the future of the country you are in or not.
"Shortage" (Score:5, Insightful)
"Large corporations want more visa, they claim, because of a shortage of dirt cheap IT talent"
There, ftfy
Re:"Shortage" (Score:5, Insightful)
Many people like to claim that they lack talent with the relevant skills for the particular jobs. I think some of this is true, but most is BS. What it really means is that they don't want to spend even a minute training anyone. They'd rather have the person with the particulars already on the resume than hire someone who might need some minimal introduction. Ie, any older programmer is going to be able to figure out your new fad language of the year very quickly, and will be able to program it far better than your entry level worker who peppers the resume with buzzwords.
This is where age discrimination comes in, and it's very subtle, and the people doing the discrimination don't even realize they're doing it. Managers want the exact match for a job, HR people are filtering based on keywords, executives want to give out lowest possible salary. It all adds up.
The visa system is up for abuse, and it is being abused. Those execs who disagree about this should be made to step up and prove that no other suitable workers could be found.
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I've been at places though where some H1-B people were great and some were mediocre, and some were atrocious.
Re:"Shortage" (Score:4, Informative)
Re:"Shortage" (Score:4, Informative)
It's worse than that. They identify the foreign workers they want to import, and then taylor the job descriptions so those workers are uniquely qualified for the job.
This is as relevant now as it was when it was made. [youtube.com]
I expect there will be no relief in sight until Americans start electing politicians that put the interests of Americans first. Not that I'm holding my breath.
Re:"Shortage" (Score:5, Insightful)
I expect there will be no relief in sight until Americans start electing politicians that put the interests of Americans first
The politicians are already doing that. CEOs are also Americans, isn't it so? Some of the profit is donated to politicians; that's how the feedback loop is operating.
Or perhaps you meant some other Americans, like those peons in IT? How much do they donate [memegenerator.net] to Congressmen?
This political system is the best the money can buy. If you don't like its results then perhaps the system ought to be replaced with something else. It would be otherwise foolish to expect a different result.
From the POV of many CEOs, american workers are overpaid, underexploited, and too pampered with benefits. Foreign workforce - who often comes from countries that we do not associate with widespread wealth - is willing to work on terms of pseudo-slavery. The american worker might just as well curl up and die, he is not needed anymore, aside from a handful of highly educated workers. The american worker cannot even be a customer because he has no job and no income to pay for things. In this aspect a rice farmer in China is a better customer, he has an honest income and can buy a gizmo once in a while. The words "customer" and "employed" are synonyms.
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Do you really want to put the interests of Native Americans first?
No, because the current state doesn't (or shouldn't) provide infinite (going forward) advantage to currently living people just because their ancestors were under temporary and finite disadvantage a long time ago. For the same reason a descendant of a French peasant does not sue a descendant of a French noble for the oppression that the said noble may have done unto the said peasant. In worst case (such as after a war) the loser pays repar
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It's all about supply and demand. Unless you're a corporation. Look, I would love to work as cheap as an H1-B or an off-shored worker, but guess what? I have to pay American prices for American things for American living. While a corporation might be able to pull from the labor pull of *THE ENTIRE PLANET*, I have to pay whatever price milk is for milk in my city and whatever the rent rate is for rent and whatever health care costs are for health care in my area. I can't farm out my expenses to the same plac
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The H1-B workers are living here, too. They pay American prices for American things too. They pay the same price for milk that you do, and the same rent that you do, and the same health care costs. AND, they often send a big chunk of change home to support their families. So, how are they able to do it making so much less, while you can't?
Re:"Shortage" (Score:4, Informative)
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They live in that situation temporarily, saving as much money as possible because that money is going to buy so much more once they are back home.
They can live 8 - 12 in a rented house designed for 4 for 4 years because the end game for them is more money than they could have made in a decade at home.
But someone who is staying here permantently, lives 8 - 12 in a house designed for 4 and after 4 years he'll have sav
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And it's definitely worse to fight to keep immigrants out, because that will lead to the positions being off-shored altogether. Unless you're going to fight off-shoring, too, somehow (good luck with that).
And if you fight off-shoring, firms outside of america will eventually become more competitive than american companies and undercut them on pricing. You could ban imports then, but you can't ban them from competing with your exports to, say, Saudi Arabia, and if the Saudis start buying from them instead of us because they are cheaper, then why would the Saudi need to send oil our way?
Re:"Shortage" (Score:4, Insightful)
>And if you fight off-shoring, firms outside of america will eventually become more competitive than american companies and undercut them on pricing.
Actually, something different happens. The price of living in $outside_of_America goes up (since they are making more money now) and their costs rise. Things cost what they do in America because roads are not free, schools are not free, government is not free, and not turning your environment in to a shithole is not free.
Re:"Shortage" (Score:4, Insightful)
So it's in the best interest of Americans to slash our standard of living to that of a third world country, just so that the executives can squeeze even more labor out of our paltry wages while they live lives of extreme comfort and wealth? The goal should be to bring up the standard of living everywhere, not sacrifice any progress we've made in any one place to prop up the fiefdoms of our ruling class.
You know that your life, also, will look worse and worse in this race to the bottom, right? You do realize that you're not one of the ruling class and you never will be, right? It's not necessary to destroy the American middle class to bring up the Indian middle class.
Re:"Shortage" (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, a shortage at the nice price. That is what this has always been about.
Industry groups have been bellyaching about shortages since the 70s. Dire predictions of shortages are regularly made. Only now, they may finally be right. So many citizens have been displaced for so long, the H1-Bs may be the industry's best source of technical talent. It's a self full-filling prophecy. They may have run off so many older citizen engineers, developers and what have you that the young ones see that and opt for a more stable career path. So they may have produced the shortage they've been predicting for so long.
Re:"Shortage" (Score:5, Insightful)
The sickening thing is, when your business is an IT business, why would you do this to yourself? It's like a dissonant behavior where "prescribed action" doesn't even reflect upon the world it's being acted in.
Let's say you do indeed get good value out of your Indian H1B workers (you don't, but let's just say you do). Great. This is the best possible outcome of H1B workers. But in the meantime, you're stagnating domestic IT salaries, which means talented people will not look to work for you or will leave the field. And suddenly, your domestic company is 100% dependent on foreign labor, which you need government regulation to acquire.
And you have no hope of hiring a local, talented or otherwise, because you've effectively priced yourself out of the market - all while handing industrial expertise to foreign nationals.
52 years old.... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Free" Trade, What Did You Expect? (Score:5, Insightful)
What, you thought only the manufacturing base could outsource? Think again.
Re:"Free" Trade, What Did You Expect? (Score:5, Funny)
Workers unionise. IT workers obfuscate their code. :D
Re:"Free" Trade, What Did You Expect? (Score:4, Funny)
Senior IT workers obfuscate using an encryption scheme termed "cobol".
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Yes, much better that we remain isolationist. After all, market distortions only improve the longer you leave them in place!
Kidding aside, the silver lining here -- and it is a substantial one -- is that the follow-up story should be (and is): "Aging IT Workers Returning as Higher-Paid Consultants to Fix Fuck-Ups of H-1B Visa Workers".
Re:"Free" Trade, What Did You Expect? (Score:5, Funny)
Not indentured servitude (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not indentured servitude (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not indentured servitude (Score:5, Informative)
It is a form of bondage though, as those workers have no freedom to move to a different company on that visa. They are tied to the company. Therefore, they have to accept a lower wage because there is no threat of them leaving for a competitor.
The company doesn't have the incentive to increase salary because the barrier to switch jobs for the employee is very high. The employee could grow in experience and skill to be "Senior" while making an entry-level wage (which is still higher than back home). But the employee must work to increase their abilities or the corporation might cancel their visa and hire someone more capable.
one solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:one solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Widening the scope of the H1B visa shouldn't be an option. I'd like to see H1B visas become even MORE restrictive. Cut the number of H1B visas issued, shorten the term, limit the number allowed per company. In fact, I'd also like to see something implemented where once a visa issued for a company has expired they can't apply for another visa for a certain length of time, also require companies applying for H1B visas to fund programs to train people for the skill they are applying for visas for, something in the ballpark of $50K per year per visa. Would accomplish two goals, would guarantee that there is training for skills that are obviously in demand and would make bringing in H1B workers more expensive, thus possibly forcing companies to hire locally again.
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If H1B visa holders were allowed to find other jobs then there is no point in issuing H1B visas, just issue s regular work visa.
That is totally fine. Let's cancel the H1B visas and issue work visas instead.
Old News (Score:2)
This is very true (Score:5, Interesting)
I had worked for a major software company that was not Microsoft but worked in the virtualization area.
Over the last few years saw anybody over 50 terminated and then subsequently replaced with immigrant workers for lower wages. The workers terminated had alot of experience and could do the job more correctly and faster than staff subsequently hired -- suspect longer vacation time and higher wages made them targets for termination.
This has happened consistently over 3 years.
This is wrong.
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Many American businesses hate their workers.
American workers are too stupid to hate them in return.
Hiring Pinkertons to shoot workers is no longer fashionable, but don't think for a second our rulers and their rich puppet masters give a shit about any of the expendable peons they grind under their Juggernaut.
Older IT staff = Higher expected pay (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Older IT staff = Higher expected pay (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know that it's a race to the bottom. A news story this morning mentioned that wages had remained stagnant since 2001. Except 2001 you could be trained chimpanzee that knew HTML and make $100k a year. So maybe we're just finally purging all of the bullshit employees from the dot-com employment orgy.
All together I don't have that much sympathy. Most of those graybeards are libertarians who don't believe in any protectionism so... welcome to the free market.
Re:Older IT staff = Higher expected pay (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know that it's a race to the bottom. A news story this morning mentioned that wages had remained stagnant since 2001. Except 2001 you could be trained chimpanzee that knew HTML and make $100k a year. So maybe we're just finally purging all of the bullshit employees from the dot-com employment orgy.
All together I don't have that much sympathy. Most of those graybeards are libertarians who don't believe in any protectionism so... welcome to the free market.
You're out of date and off the mark. The dot-com drones long ago left the building. IT wages have actually been rising (modestly) and the IT unemployment rate is half what it is for most other professions.
Hardly the heady days of pre-Y2K. but things have been on the uptick for some time and it's a rare day when I don't get calls and emails from headhunters.
Re:Older IT staff = Higher expected pay (Score:4, Interesting)
IT wages have actually been rising (modestly) and the IT unemployment rate is half what it is for most other professions.
Oddly, I remember half the people in IT (literally) being out of work nominally overnight. Most of them had to go into other fields then, because there were no jobs. So if the unemployment rate is half what it ought to be, it may well be at least in part because half the people left the job market some time ago, and they haven't been replaced at the same rate that they were being produced back in the dot-com bubble.
I was there. Spent 3+ years with virtually no income at all during the early 2000's. I got over it. Then Bush Recession II came along and I got whacked again. But that was then, this is now. We've lost a LOT of people, some of which are good riddance, some, not. But I'm a pretty dour person, and I'm feeling better than I have in a long time.
Hardly the heady days of pre-Y2K. but things have been on the uptick for some time and it's a rare day when I don't get calls and emails from headhunters.
Me too, but most of them are bullshit.
Most of EVERYTHING is bullshit. I get plenty of that as well. But when recruiting departments from some of the biggest names in the business call me personally (and in one case, 2 separate divisions), I can't help but feel that the tide has started moving the other way. These are companies that not only bulk-hire H1-Bs, but normally expect the masses to crowd outside their doors begging for scraps. So when they approach me, I'm inclined to think there's actually some real demand on the supply/demand equation again.
Ummm NO... it is not just aging US Workers.. (Score:3, Insightful)
It is ALL US workers.
I have personally seen a downsize where ALL US workers were let go and ALL of the H1-Bs were retained.
This is not a joke or a tall tail.
And Note that US workers were at or even better in the skills that were retained.
This would go some way in explaining... (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been observing a downward spiral in quality of web applications, sites and services for some years now. Old school programmers/developers wouldn't make some of the bone-headed mistakes I keep encountering. How can we suddenly have so many incompetant people doing this work? Easy - they know how to write code, but do not have the wisdom to avoid drop-through logic, non-intuitive interfaces, extremely fragile code, etc.
Gotta be a mill somewhere, cranking out code monkeys who are paid by the deadline, not but the quality of their work.
video showing how this is done (Score:5, Informative)
This is an older video, but it shows just how companies manage to avoid hiring qualified Americans just to flood the market with cheap H1B laborers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCbFEgFajGU [youtube.com]
Re:video showing how this is done (Score:5, Interesting)
Mod parent up. Yes this is a very old problem. Pre Y2K and years prior to my 40th birthday I saw the writing on the wall. I saw how friends with H1Bs were treated as indentured servants, sometimes earning little more than 1/2 what their US-born colleagues earned. I saw how people from certain countries were assumed to have magical mystical IT talent and how people with dubious certificates and knowledge of hot software products (VisualBASIC, DBase 3...), were given the same "irreplaceable" specialized H1B treatment as brain surgeons and PhD level scientific experts.
I saw where US IT jobs were going-- so I followed my outsourced IT career out of the country. And no, I don't particularly miss the short vacations, high taxes, high medical costs, high education costs, long drives and terrible job security many US workers have to put up with. If US companies continue to abuse the H1B system as a cheap labor pool, American workers should consider emigrating to countries where real IT experience is still valued as being worthy of more than a living wage. (e.g. all of Europe, Brazil, most of Asia, Canada, Australia, New Zealand...)
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Cost to much to be old (Score:5, Insightful)
As in, cost to much to pay older workers. Why? Because with corporations, greed matters I mean, the bottom line matters. Why should they pay people $60k a year when they can outsource it/hire cheaper foreigners in the states for $30k a year?
Corporate Greed, giving your job to someone else for cheaper.
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Unemployment? (Score:3)
Seriously. Any administration who promises to deal with unemployment, and yet allows this to happen, is just incredibly misguided.
We have enough problems with unskilled citizens unable to get jobs, let alone trucking in some guest workers to now make the skilled citizen IT workers unemployable.
Re:Unemployment? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Unemployment? (Score:4, Funny)
That's socialism!
(Yes some asshole will say this and it won't happen even if it makes fucking sense and would 100% without a doubt save the US economy and it won't happen)
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Why hasn't that happened in Europe, then? 4-6 weeks of vacation + several holidays, long-ass maternity/paternity(!!!) leave, developed-world salary levels, many (all?) countries in the EU having regulations on working hours per week, etc.
Crazy (Score:5, Insightful)
Is there any other business with such an age bias, beyond sports and teen pop idols. You don't see lawyers or accountants being treated like this, nor architects or mechanical engineers. There is no reason whatsoever for a youth culture in IT and programming, experience is more valuable than anything else in this business, moreso than most other businesses.
Re:Crazy (Score:5, Interesting)
Is there any other business with such an age bias, beyond sports and teen pop idols. You don't see lawyers or accountants being treated like this, nor architects or mechanical engineers. There is no reason whatsoever for a youth culture in IT and programming, experience is more valuable than anything else in this business, moreso than most other businesses.
The problem is, if you're a lawyer or an architect, what you learned in school is fundamentally going to be the same as what you need to know 30 years later. People don't perceive IT that way. New languages, new paradigms, new hardware. There is a common thread, if you stick with it long enough. Like the way apps have bounced between central and distributed systems over and over through the years. But superficially, it looks like all that old tech is "obsolete". Much of it isn't. It just resurfaces in a new form.
Re:Crazy (Score:4, Insightful)
New languages, new paradigms, new hardware.
OK, tell me what new languages are more than different syntax on the same old constructs? I see procedural, OO (class-based and/or prototypical, with and without multiple inheritance), set/array based (APL and descendants, SQL), logic (out of favor right now), functional, and macro. That's it. And those were explored thirty years ago. Everything else is library and syntax. BFD.
New paradigms? Well, you have web and virtual cloud. One's a boiled over client-server architecture, the other's been done since OS/360.
New hardware? Well, if you've seen one assembler, you've seen them all. Some hardware has additional SIMD functionality (video cards, high-end bespoke processors), and you can make a Beowulf cluster but, other than that, there's nothing that wasn't there (again) thirty years ago.
The real question is why computer science research has stagnated for the past thirty years, and why companies don't see that people who have been around for the past thirty years can pick up any of these things in about three days (having seen all of this crap for 30+ years).
In the end, the only answer is that it's all cost. And then people wonder why no one wants to go into software.
job based health care hurts haveing older people (Score:5, Insightful)
job based health care hurts having older people work for companies.
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Bullshit. Corporate greed is what hurts everyone but the 1%.
FTFY
"Demand lower wages" (Score:5, Funny)
This is happening in all departments for a while (Score:5, Interesting)
That and using temp workers calling them contract but not paying contract wages.
Thus avoiding paying for benefits and vacations.
It's like the trucking industry "driver shortage" an illusion promoted around a business model that uses up (abuses) young drivers.
Business opportunity? (Score:4, Interesting)
So can I make money hiring underemployed older IT workers and marketing their labor for top dollar?
Damn! (Score:3)
I'm luckier than some because I re-entered IT in '95 and didn't get an AA degree until 2002, so on paper it looks like I'm about 35
-I'm just sayin'
Illegal to pay less (Score:5, Informative)
It is illegal [doleta.gov] to pay a H1B worker less than the prevailing rate.
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And R.X. Cringely has a nice piece that explains why it still happens:
http://betanews.com/2012/10/25/h-1b-visa-abuse-limits-wages-and-steals-us-jobs/
Re:Illegal to pay less (Score:4, Insightful)
It is illegal [doleta.gov] to pay a H1B worker less than the prevailing rate.
Of course it is, but for corporations > a certain size, the risk * cost of punishment is insignificant compared to the benefits of ignoring corporate law. Back in the early 90s, a company was blocked from $2 Billion in contracts because of a bribery scandal, they still came out ahead. BP probably came out ahead after the oil spill, AIG, Bernie Madoff, horse meat scandal... Sorry, but we don't live in a world where the "fictional person" of a US corporation has a non-fictional conscience.
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Too hard to enforce. You just give the cheaper worker a title that has a lower pay grade. Ie, you make "Software Engineer 1" do the same work as "Software Engineer 3". If for some bizarre reason this causes problems then you just say "oh, we're doing a title and pay re-evaluation next month, we're just a little behind is all". But don't even worry about that, the Labor Department isn't sending out inspectors, and the H1-B visa holder is in not going to rock the boat and risk being departed.
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Let me explain how it works. A company does not "hire" an Hr1B person - I've never seen that happen of late.
If you've never seen it happen of late, it means that you have no experience with some of the biggest beneficiaries of the H-1B program in the IT sector - such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon etc.
And this is a reason why so much software sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course not everybody older is actually better. Older folks that have refused to learn will be on par or worse than the younger people. But older folks that have kept up are invaluable. True, young programmers can generate a lot more lines of code for the same price, but once you take quality into account and things like design and architecture, most code by young programmers sucks badly. Not their fault, but quite a bit of experience is required for good coding. Unfortunately, incompetent management cannot understand that (and most management is incompetent with regard to IT). What would be needed is something that other engineering disciplines have mastered: Qualification levels, and required minimum qualification levels of personnel used to protect you from becoming liable for software failures. While this may sound old-school, there really seems to be no other way. If electricians were the mixed bag that "programmers" are, houses would burn down all the time and many people would die from electrocution.
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If electricians were the mixed bag that "programmers" are, houses would burn down all the time and many people would die from electrocution.
If being an electrician were as difficult as being a programmer....
Simple solution (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyone here on H-1B should be allowed to seek any job anywhere for the duration of their H-1B stay. They just need to negotiate with the new employer during the 3 year visa term to provide pro-rated compensation to the company that pre-paid to put the H-1B through. That eliminates the indentured servitude and opens the free market to the technical talent, as it should be.
Re:Simple solution (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyone here on H-1B should be allowed to seek any job anywhere for the duration of their H-1B stay. They just need to negotiate with the new employer during the 3 year visa term to provide pro-rated compensation to the company that pre-paid to put the H-1B through. That eliminates the indentured servitude and opens the free market to the technical talent, as it should be.
During one of the Clinton era H1B reforms, this was the proposed policy. I always assumed it was made into law, but when I emigrated to seek better IT employment, I stopped worrying about the fine print of US H1B law, companies rarely obeyed even easy-to-enforce clauses such as the prevailing wage requirement.
So where is the EEOC on this? (Score:3)
Age discrimination is illegal. You can read the law [eeoc.gov] yourself, where it specifically states:
It shall be unlawful for an employer-
(1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual or otherwise discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s age;
(2) to limit, segregate, or classify his employees in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual’s age; or
(3) to reduce the wage rate of any employee in order to comply with this chapter.
It's very clear language, and there's no legitimate reason that the companies who are doing this should not be in court right now about it.
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Age discrimination is illegal. You can read the law [eeoc.gov] yourself ...
True. Now try to prove it in court. (a) where will you get the money or find a lawyer to take this on a contingency basis? (b) what do you rate your chances of success, absent a smoking gun memo from some C-level exec located (if they've kept the required email archives) after extensive discovery?
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That's going to come back to haunt them (Score:3)
Firing your most skilled employees in a highly specialized and difficult field is beyond stupidity. This will end badly for them. Fortunately for the rest of us this means that there will be some talent freed up. So snatch them up while you can.
Cue the xenophobia (Score:5, Insightful)
This headline will just serve as an excuse for people to post rants about how their talent is being overlooked because of the foreigners invading our shores while ignoring the fact that many people who try to work as programmers are just terrible (see: fizzbuzz).
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This headline will just serve as an excuse for people to post rants about how their talent is being overlooked because of the foreigners invading our shores while ignoring the fact that many people who try to work as programmers are just terrible (see: fizzbuzz).
Don't forget rants about how you're expecting to get competent talent for $17K/year.
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Don't forget rants about how you're expecting to get competent talent for $17K/year.
6 figure salaries in an area where cost of living makes that a lot of money. But don't let your ignorance stop you from commenting.
How can I help but be ignorant? If you're really offering premium salaries, one would expect that you'd mention it. Sadly, most of the people complaining about no available talent are looking for rock-star talent at Wal-Mart wages, based on what I see offered versus the requirements. You're not going to attract candidates if you don't advertise your virtues.
Hypocracy much? (Score:3, Insightful)
Some large fraction of the slashdot crowd enjoys characterizing anti-illegal immigration types as 'racists.' Illegal immigration wiped out meat packing unions. It lowered the wage floor for tens of millions of workers.
Don't bitch about H-1B pressure if you have no patience for textile workers whinging about their 'jerbs.' Your degree doesn't mean shit; now you're just as fungible as Sally Mae and her meat cleaver, and you have less cause to complain; the H-1B guys are at least legal.
So don't be racist. Our borders and your job must be open to all... only racists say otherwise.
MBAs ruining business (Score:5, Insightful)
And the clueless MBAs strike again. Business school graduates forget that the basis of capitalism is capital, not short term profits. You build capital when you care about the company sticking around for a long time, when you intend people to buy your products because of the reputation of your brand, and when you genuinely care about making the world a better place one awesome toothbrush at a time.
MBAs on the other hand, only care about the company's survival until the next bonus time, believe that people will only buy something if they are tricked and brainwashed into it, and have no interest or knowledge of what the company actually produces.
And when you do not care about the products you make, why would you want talented employees to make them? If quality is irrelevant, all you need is a bunch of cheap warm bodies to make whatever garbage marketing can sell. It is amazing how fast you can ruin the economy when you only intend to stay on your job until the company dies, rather than until you retire from it.
Misleading Claim... (Score:3)
Why would this be surprising? 2001 was the end of the tech bubble when salaries were ridiculously inflated. Why would one expect them to keep up with inflation?
Why not compare 1994 to 2011? That would been more appropriate (although I don't know what it would show!)
After the bubble burst, it was rare to give an employee a pay cut to reflect the new market realities because of concerns about employee retention and morale. Either you laid them off because you couldn't afford them anymore or you didn't give them raises. Of course, workers who were hired to back-fill attrition or for new projects tended to get lower salaries -- but not dramatically so in part because of the salary inequities that would have caused (only unions seem willing to categorically accept dramatically lower compensation for everyone starting after date X than for those starting on or before date X - odd "good old boy's club").
This is a little like saying that housing has not kept up with general inflation -- by comparing 2006 prices to 2013 prices instead of comparing 1990 prices to 2013 prices.
Modern business school thinking (Score:5, Informative)
Ever had a conversation with these guys about how they do their jobs? They think in the short term and quantitatively, not quantitatively. They figure if they can get 2 subpar H-IBs at the same price as a 50 year-old, it evens out in the end.
Short story, I had a great conversation with one of these guys years back who was a manager of a chain restaurant. He was explaining to me the glorious logic of shorting ingredients to save money. How, by removing one pickle from a sandwich you could save millions a year. He was wildly enthusiastic about how powerful a management tool that shorting ingredients was. Now, as I listened to this my thoughts were on the long term effects of this policy and the promotion he was angling for.
So, Joe the manager cuts one pickle, saves the company $10 million a year and gets promoted up. Kelly takes his place and wants to move up too. So, she decides to make the buns 1 ounce smaller. She saves the company mad money and gets promoted up as well. And so on and so on until a premier chain restaurant starts looking more like McDonalds quality. But, none of those guys care because by the time the shit hits the fan they're probably cashed out!
Experience counts? Depends on the management.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Ralph, the 50+ yo: "Based on my experience, N year(s) if you have a functional spec and unit test designs."
Vlad, the 22 yo: " , !" (Russian to English: "not more than a month, sir!")
Paul, the PM: "Fire Ralph! Get me 20 more Vlads! BTW the client is Amazon's remodel!!"
CEO: "Paul, n-i-c-e job! Here's your raise and mine too!"
Note: I see this a lot. A whole lot. Sadly, I'm a PM and I see many PMP colleagues fall for this....
As an aging IT worker.. (Score:3)
... I wonder what other people of my age have been doing so wrong that they still need employment - they've had careers with salaries and conditions that noone is ever going to get in the future and ought to have been banking that while the going was good.
On the rare occasion I stray back into a "real" business to do a bit of consulting, I feel like I'm walking into a kindergarten: it's all competitive attention seeking and fingerpainting (sorry, Powerpoint).
I would feel desperately sorry for a younger generation if they thought they were going to have to be in that environment all their lives - but mainly because it would demonstrate a lack of ambition and foresight. You really ought to have some control over your own destiny by the time you reach your 50s. If you haven't, you've wasted the last 30-odd years.
Re: (Score:3)
typical NPR.
last millennium story.
Are you saying that it's no longer an issue and companies are welcoming experienced older workers with open arms?
Re: (Score:3)
average wages for programmers are still below $40 an hour
Glad I don't live there... (And that's roughly $80,000 per year, BTW, not six figures...)
Re:If it makes you feel any better... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:If it makes you feel any better... (Score:4)
Move to an area with a drastic shortage of IT talent like California (LA, Orange County or Bay Area). Every company I know has open reqs and can't find anyone to fill them. If you are any good at all, you could be making six figures within 5 years.
...and even with that six figure income still not be able to afford to buy a house within a decently short commute of where you work.
I looked at moving from Colorado to the Bay area a few years back. We would have had to sell our nice 2400 sq. ft. house in a nice suburb and move to a 650 sq. ft. fixer upper in a not so nice neighborhood that costs 3X what we could get for our current house. We decided not to move. I lived in the L.A. area from 1980 to 1994. I knew people then who had two hour (one way) commutes in order to actually be able to afford a house (e.g., in Riverside or San Bernadino counties).
Cheers,
Dave
Re: (Score:3)
Or 6 months, if you get hired working in your field. But 6 figures doesn't buy you much of anything in the Bay area; it's tight, and you'll be hounded by your utility and fuel bills after the huge amount you'll be spending on property taxes, etc.
No, the only way you can make this work is if you do it for a short period of time in your early 20s. But of course, you'd be making half that, and would have to dorm up with half a dozen other early-20s people to make it work..
Re:Well Duh! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
I actually happen to agree with the theoretical basis for the H1-B. Which is to allow foreign workers to supply skills that we have in short supply. Although being in short supply would imply that someone, somewhere is failing on the job.
But if that's really what H1-Bs were, the laws of Supply and Demand would mandate that people with these allegedly rare skills would be in a buyer's market and demanding a premium income. Instead we see H1-B wages routinely less than their domestic counterparts.
If we closed
Re:IM Anecdotal O, I agree. (Score:4, Interesting)
I've seen this a few places. Though I where I live it seems like there really is a serious shortage of C#/SQL/ASP.Net developers. Look at the job boards of any major city and those are some of the most proliferated spots that recruiters just cannot seem to fill fast enough (or at all) these days.
Please do not equate number of job postings with actual job availability. Many postings are headhunter duplications. Some are false postings to present the appearance of meeting legal requirements or for PR purposes.
Re: (Score:3)
they settle for lower wages. To them, $50 a week is still like winning the lottery
That would be true if the workers were being paid to work remotely, while still living in their lower-income country. If those workers are using the visas to come to the USA, then the lower wages are nowhere near enough to survive on. What you end up seeing is 8-10 people renting a house together because it is all they can afford.
Re: (Score:3)
We are all being enslaves by the international bankers.
Despite the name, the international bankers are monolithic, monoethnic, and monoracial.