U.S. Tech Workers Bear Brunt of Immigration Policy

Fox News ^ | April 29, 2004 | Matt Hayes

[looscnnn]

In April, 2003, Kevin Flanagan, a computer programmer with Bank of America (search), was fired from his job after being forced to train his replacement, an Indian worker who was taking over Flanagan's job as part of Bank of America's effort to replace its American workforce with foreign labor.

Flanagan walked outside into his office parking lot and shot himself to death.

A year later, it's no surprise that the impact of foreign labor (search) on American workers has become a potent political issue this campaign season. What Americans need to understand is how complicit the U.S. government has been in helping large corporations secure cheap foreign labor, and the impact that has had not just on American workers, but on the foreign laborers doing their jobs for a fraction of their wages.

----Snip-----

[cyborg]

Agree wholeheartedly... they should be at least intellectually honest. Oh yes btw, in that story I told, the young man was getting paid less as well. A college grad is a lot cheaper than a lifer, and a HB1 employee is a lot cheaper than a college grad... wow some food chain developing.

[cyborg]

No not making it up... the bank branch ended up closing anyway. Carle Place, New York. I can see why she thought it was racial, but another lady was scheduled to get the boot and she was white. She saved them the trouble of dying from cancer :(

[stylin19a]

Got laid-off tuesday. (Thank you India). There's quite a few IT jobs available in my practice....but my skill set doesn't match most of the requirments.
Salary is not THE issue. Working is. Not sure I want to enhance my skills, only to see the same thing happening down the road.
Maybe it's time to get out of IT.

[looscnnn]

I am in the IT field also. When I was looking for a job, the skill sets that were required in job openings were nuts. They almost all wanted you to have experience with just about everything in IT, even if the job had nothing to do with them.

[Bismarck]

Here's a surprise for you. I came to this country with a J-1 and after its expiration I decided to enroll in an MBA program (now I have an F-1). I know a lot of people with H-1B and L-1 visas and they are ALL highly qualified and perfectly fluent in English (unlike Juanito and Conchita who crossed Rio Grande). They are an asset for this country AND a loss for their country of origin. Does the term brain drain ring a bell?

[freeeee]

"There's a new push in Congress to increase by 20,000 the number of foreign workers holding H-1B visas...Most of the H-1Bs that U.S. companies are hiring "are coming out of our own schools"...The bill (was) introduced earlier this month by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas)...The co-sponsors are all Republican"

Effort afoot to exempt 20k from H-1B cap

[american spirit]

I agree and the downward pressure on blue collar wages will continue as long as there's this idiotic policy of providing illegals with tax payer supported benefits. As long as labor intensive companies continue to pay a barely livable wage knowing full well the taxpayers are supplementing their worker's living expenses this problem will worsen.

[thoughtomator]

Maybe it's time to get out of IT.

Yeah, basically, that's the story. What corporate thinks it wants from IT, now, is not what IT staff in the US got hired to do, three years back.

Basically, corporate thinks of IT as mechanical work, and doesn't yet understand how pervasive language and cultural barriers actually are, in this particular field. So do something else until (if) they wake up - with a much stronger negotiating hand, once they are fully aware of the reasons they want you.

[Arthalion]

Heh, I've got one even better than that. An acquaintance of mine was laid off from his programmer/analyst (really sysadmin) job at a major corp, and was asked to train his replacement. After 12 years of running their systems, and turning what began as an ancient IBM 360 mainframe app into the central hub of a now global Sun network, they actually expected him to teach the entire system to an Indian replacement who barely spoke passable English, and to do so in 45 days. In theory, the training would garner him an $8,000 "severance bonus", but he was basically told that a refusal would result in a bad reference.

He trained the guy, but like he said "you can't pack 12 years of hacks, optimizations, and work arounds into 45 days of training". After he quit, the Indian H1-B brought the system down three times in as many months, each time idling over a thousand workers...the guy finally quit in the middle of the third failure claiming that he "couldn't take the stress of the job". They bounced through three new sysadmins over the following six months, none of whom really understood the intricacies of maintaining data integrity when you're synchronizing seven datacenters on four continents, and eventually outsourced the whole thing after giving up on the idea of an in-house sysadmin. The company that they'd outsourced to declared the whole system "unmanageable, unworkable, and outdated" and recommended that they go through a nearly $10 million dollar "upgrade" to optimize their systems.

At that point, the company came back to him and offered $30,000 for a six month project to fully document the databases and systems that he'd developed so that they could be upgraded by this company. When he returned, he discovered that all of the previous IT management had been fired by a new CIO because of their "inept" handling of the transition, and that everyone involved with his layoff was history. After learning that, he pointed out to the CIO that for $10 million, he could sysadmin the entire system for 100 years at $100,000 a year (he'd only been making $55k a year before being laid off). The CIO accepted on the spot.

So in the end, he got his job back, his paycheck was doubled, and the new CIO was awarded a huge bonus for "saving" the company $10 million bucks.

Now THAT'S what I call mismanagement :-\

[janetgreen]

Yet somewhere in America, a middle-aged American will be training his replacement how to do his job at half the cost, and wondering what will happen to his family once the severance money runs out.

This exact thing happened to a friend of ours in San Jose. He was an older, experienced tech worker who had been on the same job for thirty years. He unknowingly trained his lower paid Indian replacement, then the company dumped him. He died a year later from a stroke, probably brought on by the stress of it all. The companies prosper while the employees get the boot. There's no such thing as loyalty anymore.

[cyborg]

Wow they sure learned their lesson. I wonder how many times that same mistake has been repeated by other companies? Wow.

[stylin19a]

You hit the nail on the head. I trained my replacements. I showed them how to press the buttons and I wrote the documentation for the processes>
How do I tell them what i KNOW and how i KNOW when to do.
The cleint can't swallow their pride, and are mired in various outages...sometimes, the lowest bidder is the lowest bidder for a reason.

[stylin19a]

oh good grief !
cleint=client
when to do. = when to do it.

[SAMWolf]

Bump. Get that college edumacation and go into Data Processing. You'll always have a job. < /sarcasm>

[NewRomeTacitus]

"They took our jobs!"

South Park finally addressed the immigration and H1B abuse problems but weaseled by making the invaders "people from the future" who arrive via Terminator-style time travel. Most of the related issues were hit upon: inability to communicate, undercutting of wages and job displacement, schools caving into demands for bilingual ed, refusal to assimilate, overcrowding, early child care entrusted to strangers because they're cheap; I probably missed a few.

The angered men assembled to find a solution. "They took our jobs!" was garbled a lot but even more ridiculous was their decision to become gay, thus denying the people of the future a future. Eventually Kyle made an impassioned speech convincing everyone to work for a better future for everyone, uniting the disgruntled people into a positive effort, causing the people from the future to fade away because their need to migrate to our era disappeared.

While working in a garden Cartman pointed out that the "united working for a better future" thing was pretty gay. The others agreed, dropped their garden tools and went on with their ordinary lives.

Obviously the two ordinarily bright young writers recognize the ongoing problems but aren't bright enough to imagine anything close to a solution. Sure, it's a silly and often profane comedy, but most of the time Parker and Stone toss a proposal in whenever their show touches on real-life dilemmas. Guess they've made so much money for so long that they've finally achieved becoming out of touch with we commoners.

[Brownie74]

Just another day in congress. Bump!!

[truthkeeper]

BUMP

[Reaganwuzthebest]

US Tech Workers Bear Brunt of Immigration Policy

Immigration policy??... I didn't know we had one. It's more like a come one, come all open door to me.

[sixmil]

Your point is well taken... I just think it's sad what he did, that he felt things were so bad he shot himself.

Some people still have pride in their work and a strong attachment to it, which is something very much at odds with the open borders / trade cartel. They believe that the rest of the world owes them something for providing them jobs, as if it is not actaully employees providing them with something tangeable.

[m87339]

Now THAT'S what I call mismanagement :-\

Yes -- the idea that any organization would allow itself to get to the point where it is held hostage by one individual is truly mismanagement. There should be rigorous procedures in place and documentation standards and policies to ensure continuity. What if your "hero" won the lottery? The affect on the enterprise would be the same.

The structure should be in place to allow a talented sysadmin to use his/her creative abilities to create procedures to increase efficiency and effectiveness and then turn it over to a stable operational organization. Anthing less suggests that the individual in question has no sense of dicsipline and doesn't care about the enterprise to which they work. They are just hacks who have been able to take a small amount of knowledge and leverage it to make themselves "indespensible."

I have seen these types of "heros" before in my almost 30 years of IT -- I get them fired as soon as possible since they are mavericks who do more harm than good.