The displaced are the older, more experienced IT workers. It is hard for us to find new work as the influx of foreign labor, who employers do not have to pay as much for due to government rules, fill many of the positions.
Lotta Corporate Memory walked out the doors. Then the suits will wonder why the next quarter's bottom line dropped, despite the lower labor cost.
Many people in IT in large companies were there in the mainframe days when IT truly was a specialty skill. If those workers were loyal company people, they stayed and made their careers at the company - remember, we're talking about the 1980s now. These people continued to add value to the company as their knowledge grew with the company growth. They retrained through the PC revolution, Y2K, and the growth of the Web. They also saw salary inflation as anyone would who stayed with a company for a career.
At some point in a large company, organizational inertia takes over. Think about the impacts of 25+ years of cost-of-living adjustments, merit raises, and promotions on a careerist's income relative to what a new-hire might get in the same field.
Today, IT has become a commodity service, but the single-company career IT worker is earning a 30 year employee salary, not an IT salary.
This is what companies are trying to change with H-1B visa workers. They are displacing long-time salaried employees with short-term commodity-wage workers.
-PJ