More On the Disposable Tech Worker 323
Jim_Austin writes "At a press conference this week, in response to a question by a Science Careers reporter, Scott Corley, the Executive Director of immigration-reform group Compete America, argued that retraining workers doesn't make sense for IT companies. For the company, he argued, H-1B guest workers are a much better choice. 'It's not easy to retrain people,' Corley said. 'The further you get away from your education the less knowledge you have of the new technologies, and technology is always moving forward.'"
Not easy? (Score:4, Interesting)
I suspect he means "not cheap"
FTFA:
"The biggest slap in the face to all of us here is we have to train all of our replacements," said the IT worker. Once that training is completed, the IT workers receive severance pay. Some employees were offered jobs with the offshore firms, but at lower salaries and with reduced benefits, he said.
There's no reason they couldn't be training Americans to replace those jobs.
Biggest load of (Score:5, Interesting)
'The further you get away from your education the less knowledge you have of the new technologies
*cough*BULLSHIT*cough*
Does this guy think that the ONLY place you learn about new things is in school? Is he one of those pointy-haired bosses that doesn't think you know anything unless you have a "cert"?
Technology is always marching forward. EVERYONE needs to march along with it. In real-time. On the job. Constantly.
(That said, I'm an embedded engineer working in C. I'm "revolutionizing" this codeshop by showing them unit testing. And no Larry, just because we refer to them as "units" doesn't mean the blackbox testing we do is "unit-testing". WOOHOO for being on the cutting edge... of the 1970's...)
Re:This is true. (Score:5, Interesting)
More like the disposable company (Score:2, Interesting)
Every time a company treats me as disposable, I treat them as disposable. Quid pro quo, Clarice. Oh jeez I wonder why Microsoft is failing and Linux is exploding... I wonder why Adobe is going to hell... I can't wait to see Google go down in the near future as well.
This is only the beginning (Score:5, Interesting)
On one hand, it is normal business practice to maximize profits, though not necessarily for the benefit of the share holders. On the other hand, it is normal for the working class to sell their skill, ingenuity and labor in exchange for money (profit). Furthermore companies expect some amount of loyalty from the employees, valuing it only for so long as it benefits the company. The company on the other hand is under no obligation to have any loyalty to the employee.
This is a workable system so long as the required skill set changes slowly enough for employees to adapt and sustain themselves. This is still the case in certain industries like construction, home remodeling, etc. But in technology, new skill requirements pop up as fast as they can be invented and job experience greater than 3 years is irrelevant.
With the development of advanced IT management systems, as well as the outsourcing to lower paid foreign workers, American workers and their jobs are being eliminated. This is to be expected because it is normal to think that companies are always going to be trying to lower their expenses. The problem here is that this is creating an imbalance between the demand and supply of skils and labor.
The reason this is a problem is that it is eroding the middle class and it is middle class demand that is the source of economic activity. The reason 3rd World countries have stagnant economies and a lack of economic opportunity is there is no middle class and no middle class demand. Without a middle class and the money it has to spend, there's nobody to sell goods and services to. Sadly this is the direction that America is inexorably headed.
Today middle class jobs are being eliminated by outsourcing and advancing knowledge systems. We're not that far away from AI systems that will much, much further erode middle class jobs. It won't just be IT workers that will get it. it will be bankers, lawyers, workers in the insurance industry, etc.
IBM's Watson is now being used to invent new cuisines and is doing a pretty good job of it.
The demand for human labor and ingenuity is quickly being phased out as technology advances along with the issues of globalization. Therefore the fundamental premise that people can provide for themselves through the exchange of skill, ingenuity and labor is quickly being made obsolete, and this will fundamentally break our economic system. Futurists of the past would speculate that our society would become so rich that humans would only work because they wanted to and that we would have almost unlimited wealth and leisure time. But that isn't the way it's going is it? When there no longer is enough work to be had, there will a permanent underclass of poor in America, just as it is normal in the 3rd World.