Suit: Sun fired US workers to hire lower-paid Indians

Boston Globe ^ | March 18, 2003 | Hiawatha Bray

[sarcasm]

The lawsuit, for which class-action status is being sought, is certain to intensify an already fierce debate between technology companies and American engineers over the future of the H-1B visa program. Such visas let companies temporarily bring foreign workers into the United States.

[Caipirabob]

Interesting, but unless congress has taken a hard, realistic look at what they've done to the industry, I fail to see how this suit has any chance of success. Mind you, I believe it should be criminal to displace American workers with foreign workers unless the company has moved that area of business entirely outside of our borders.

[Jumper]

Several indicators of a perception problem there:

- California
- Democrat terror-itory
- Monlolpy-minded Americans can't stand the competition and probably were not competitive in the work place.

[sarcasm]

Yep, it has absolutely nothing to do with paying lower salaries.

[glorgau]

Yeah, but it's true. The Indians hang together tight. They aren't smarter, but they do have their own cliche.

[LibertarianInExile]

Which cliche?

"Thank you, come again!"

I think you mean CLIQUE. ROFL.

[doodad]

Call HP tech support for a wonderful example of offshore savings.

[eno_]

In most cases I would agree with you. Old white guys with bad polyester pants maintaining crappy old mainframe code are sitting ducks for cost reductions. But Sun replacing R&D engineers who, at Sun, are supposedly an elite group, is probably visa abuse and/or race discrimination, if the allegations are true. Sun has been squeezed pretty hard by Linux, which has knocked the stuffing out of everthing but the biggest corporate servers. So it is plausible that Sun would try to push down salary costs this way.

[Glenn]

Old white guys with bad polyester pants maintaining crappy old mainframe code are sitting ducks for cost reductions.

Could you be anymore insulting? I'm 50 and I'd kick your ass on the keyboard of your choosing. Your perceptions are bigotry. You're as bad as Sun or anyone else who think engineers have a "shelf life".

Moron.

[The Duke]

Hey Glenn ... don't look now but I think your polyester is showing! *G*

Seriously, I'm one of those oldsters myself, except the old code I wrote is what's gonna be steering those cruise missiles into downtown Baghdad this weekend! (And guiding those smart bombs).

[Glenn]

don't look now but I think your polyester is showing! *G*

Beats the hell out of cargo pants. Script puppies need pockets for their Game Boy and Bluetooth phones. Their need for constant distraction from the job is what keeps them from going postal, I guess.

[krb]

LOL!

[billorites]

Yessiree us old-timers have to stick together on this.

Someday FORTRAN and COBOL will be back and then who'll be laughing.

Dagnabbit.

[doosee]

Sun's boss Scott McNealy is truly a corporate punk. His reflection is on the whole company.

[tm22721]

Congress won't do anyting until the US engineering profession is decimated, and the Defense Department is forced to start giving foreign engineers security clearances.

Only then will Republicans wake up and realize that they are giving away the family jewels.

BUMP

[eno_]

Once a company decides that R&D costs should be shaved this way they are on the downhill. If you need to cut, it is better to cut whole departments and skim out the top people for integration into other projects.

[bimbo]

Khosla was quoted as saying that at Sun, people from India ''are favored over almost anybody else.''

Sounds to me like an admission of racial discrimination.

[Steel and Fire and Stone]

Have been "fired" as a consultant by an Indian manager at Ernst & Young, so that a Indian could replace me. The reason for termination was demonstrably groundless, but since I was an "at will" contractor, he has a free had to libel me, ruin my references, and pay the Indian. (I would not be surprised if he got a kick-back, since he worked for the same Indian-American consulting company as the guy he hired.

[eno_]

Sorry, but software has a shelf-life. "Dusty deck" systems are a failure of IT management to figure out when to replace old stuff: every year it is "cheaper" to keep paying extortionate maintenence fees and not recruit or retrain, until it turns out you are paying $2M/year for something that could be reimplemented for $200k to run on a $1000 server. You can't swing a cat without hitting a dozen IT departments where this is true.

[eno_]

The purpose of consultancies like E&Y is to bill their clients the maximum they can, and pay their employees the minimum. Indians make excellent team players in those settings. The real dupes are the ones that hire E&Y, Accenture, EDS, etc. in the first place.