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.

[q_an_a]

another reason to reduce H1B is that the majority of the people that come here are from countries that LOVE a social democratic form of govenrment. That means folks who think that the nanny state is the right state. Give me our friends to the south. People who work hard and believe in the almighty God not the almighty state.

[Poohbah]

Actually, if you ended H-1B visas, the coding jobs would simply leave America altogether. What do you do then?

Forbid visitors from bringing ZIP disks and CD-ROMs?

Cut all connections to routers and hosts outside the boundaries of the United States?

[dfwgator]

But what if a programmer is VERY good at generating clean, concise, and maintainable code but not so good at networking?

My question is, how can you stand out when your resume is competing with thousands of others??? As we see in the business world, it is not always the best product that gets sold, it is the product that has the best marketing. Programmers are no different. How can you prove your skills in 15 seconds to someone who doesn't know you from Adam? Everybody else is just as good as you, or at least can convince a potential employer of that. If you are a graphical designer, you can present a portfolio of work you have done, how can you do the same thing with code?

[Jhoffa_]

Cut all connections to routers and hosts outside the boundaries of the United States?

Exactly..

They way applications are written now, in colaborative form makes simply yanking the visas a non-starter.. Doesn't it?

[who_would_fardels_bear]

"Technology comes and goes with breathtaking rapidity"

In this regard, programmers are their own worst enemy. Most "innovations" in software are hardly that. They amount to just a few added functions and some changes in syntax that basically isolate the programmer further and further from the underlying processors.

By coming up with a supposedly new language or paradigm every five or so years, new college graduates benefitted at the expense of seasoned programmers.

Now the people that are benefitting are H1B programmers that come out of Java or XML or ??? mills.

If managers knew that it was just a matter of learning a new syntax, they would keep their seasoned employees and allow them to retrain while maintaining their vast experience in solving real problems.

Unfortunately management is ignorant in this regard, and looks for things like "2 years Java" on a resume rather than "10 years combined Fortran, C, C++".

I'm one of those sorry anti-capitalist bastards that works to live, rather than lives to work. I guess in a theoretical perfect capitalism all of those who don't live to work will be thrown on the trash heap of history.

I may see you someday on that trash heap when you have to call in sick one day or take your son or daughter to the doctor's office and you get replaced by a more dependable H1B indentured servant.

[mabelkitty]

It's a concerted effort to keep wages down, as Alan Greenspan dictated was necessary.

[Poohbah]

Code is becoming a commodity. Tough s**t.

[eno_]

So basically I spend my life either writing code or learning new code so that I am never obsolete.

What, you think you are entitled to fiddle with specs or schedules after a certain age?

I have been an authoritative expert in Lisp, PDP-11 assembler, 86k assembler, Unix device drivers (back when it was AT&T Unix), Mac programming (original Mac OS), distributed COM applications, and .NET (which never even got off the ground before I moved on). Now I'm working on Apache-centric distributed apps with various lanagues depending on the server, client, OS, etc.

I have started and sold companies and am fairly comfortably well-off, but I'm still not immune to learning someting new every 9-18 months. I have reached a elevl where I join startups and sometimes invest in them as an "angel." But I still code. I hire well because I can do whatever the people I'm hiring will do. I don't expect this to change until I score big enough to race J boats and vintage cars full time.

That's just life. You could have picked dentistry or a mortuary trade.

[who_would_fardels_bear]

It's one thing to expect a programmer to have some networking skills when looking for a new job, but what about all these people that are layed off and replaced by H1B folks?

Certainly they can prove their worth to their current company if managers judge on the right criteria.

If the government makes it more difficult for foreigners to find permanent work here (like almost every other country on the planet) then managers will be forced to take a harder look at their current employees.

And what ever happened to HR? Are they still expected to be in the Stone Age? Aren't they able to see that the very best programmers might be the very worst interviewees and resume-generators? Haven't they done anything in the last 40 years to address that concern? What about all of the Myers-Briggs tests, etc. that they love to thrust at us during interview time?

What's a lowly little INTJ supposed to do in a world run by ESFP bastards?

[anymouse]

Welcome to hell, code jockies. The aerospace industry has seen this economic genocide happen routinely about every 10 years. Evolve or die.

At least you have more than a handful of companies available that will even look at your resume.

[eno_]

There is, or should be, a big difference between GX and Sun. GX was a network operator. They hired people who could operate routers and stuff. They needed some IT coders, but nothing really elite. They can get by with a low-bidder approach.

Sun makes CPU chips and operating systems. This requires really top people, no matter the price. If they run their business as if this is not true, then they are not just abusing labor laws, they are headed for a fall because their products will suck.

[mabelkitty]

Monster.com is an Indian company.

[who_would_fardels_bear]

I am an authoritative expert in Fortran, C, UNIX Sys admin (Sun, HP, and IBM), Oracle DBMS, Oracle Development Tools, Excel, Access, VB, and I can work in C++ and a variety of other tools/IDE's that I've had to learn over the years.

In a number of cases it would have been better for my employer if I had been allowed to generate more code in fewer languages than much less codes in lots of different languages.

I agree that we need to learn, but what I have learned in terms of program management, requirement analysis & specification, and tool selection is as important (if not more so) than learning yet another syntax because it is supposed to be the be-all-and-end-all.

Architects are now capable of creating very sophisticated and elaborate structures because they build on skills and methods developed over centuries. We continue to build half-baked and mediocre applications because we are constantly reinventing the wheel, and then having the newbies push it around.

[mabelkitty]

Wrongo, buddy.

Ask Enron about doing whatever is in the best interests of stockholders.

These guys were violating the laws and regulations that everyone else has to follow.

Eliminate all laws and regulations for employment, then we can talk.

[who_would_fardels_bear]

"Code is becoming a commodity. Tough s**t."

Everthing can be reduced to either bits or atoms. When coding is truly a commodity, then we will be able to have the machines program the machines to move all the atoms around.

Then everybody is out of work.

[dfwgator]

Architects are now capable of creating very sophisticated and elaborate structures because they build on skills and methods developed over centuries. We continue to build half-baked and mediocre applications because we are constantly reinventing the wheel, and then having the newbies push it around.

Instead of standing on the shoulders of giants, we stand on each others' feet.

[mabelkitty]

Haven't you heard? HR departments have been replaced by attorneys whose sole purpose is to protect management and make sure they can get away with anything they want regardless of the law.