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2015-02-20 Economy

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Posted by OldSpook 2015-02-20 02:49|| || Front Page|| [11 views ] Top

#1 If we don't export the jobs we import serf labor, until the only paying jobs left are in government, and if you don't vote for the incumbents, you lose your government job.

Posted by Glenmore 2015-02-20 07:24|| 2015-02-20 07:24|| Front Page Top

#2 H-1B nonimmigrant workers are much cheaper than locally recruited and hired U.S. workers.

Well, if this is the whole of the problem, you can fix it very easily. Just pass a law equating salaries. Me, I'm skeptical.

Posted by g(r)omgoru 2015-02-20 07:47|| 2015-02-20 07:47|| Front Page Top

#3 My employer keeps trying to use offshore labor to develop software -- the hourly cost is cheaper, and that's all the justification they need. These projects are universally failures -- the cash expended still remains unbelievable, there is no working software, and local employees have to clean up the mess. In one case one guy wrote a temporary solution in his spare time, accomplishing what a hundred or so Indians weren't able to do.

It's not (necessarily) that Indians aren't good workers or intelligent. The problems come from language and cultural differences, the time zone difference, and a different work ethic. Many times a task is allocated N "hours", and after N hours, the Indian developer says they're done and moves on -- working or not. A US developer knows that "hours" in this context are abstract, and that what matters is working software.

Plus there are "new" software development practices (just about 20 years old, but...) that don't seem to be making in-roads in Indian software mills. They appear to have a factory-worker mentality (do the time, perform the motions, job is done) versus a craftsman mentality (complete the task, do what needs to be done, satisfy the customer).

Posted by Rob Crawford 2015-02-20 08:38|| 2015-02-20 08:38|| Front Page Top

#4 Same story here, more or less. My company made digital maps for cars in teh days before it was universally accepted. Anyway they laid off all the cartographers and shipped everything to India. They got lower quality work (they don't have overpasses in India and there are other structural differences to road networks that caused confusion). Eventually the company was bought out and went away.

The real problem was management. The plan was to match the maps to photos (which could take a week per map) and then send the results to field teams to verify and add in addresses and no right turn type info. The field could do a map in a day. But impatient managers sent the maps out early because they had high paid field people sitting around waiting. The result was it took weeks to finish a map in the field and then weeks to align the results to the photos in the confusion afterwards. The managers of course blamed everyone but themselves and gave themselves raises and such. Really sad.

My boss, who came up with the plan initially, got me and one other cartographer to do one map the proper way. We finished it with no errors in incredible time, but nobody paid attention. It was just cheaper to offshore the work and figure how much worse could it all be after all?

Posted by rjschwarz 2015-02-20 09:59|| 2015-02-20 09:59|| Front Page Top

#5 Of course it is. Why else are both parties so eager to keep importing slave labor?

Big Business loves it, therefore so does Washington.

Posted by DarthVader 2015-02-20 10:18|| 2015-02-20 10:18|| Front Page Top

#6 "Just pass a law equating salaries."

That is already part of the law. If H1-B's are being abused, then prosecute the abusers. The concept of importing highly skilled labor (as opposed to human offal) does not bother me. What is the alternative, after all? If you can't import the heads then you ship the work itself offshore.

Posted by Vernal Prince of the Heathen Rus1608 2015-02-20 10:48|| 2015-02-20 10:48|| Front Page Top

#7 There might be a law that says H1B workers have to be paid the same as citizens but I think we all know that's not going to happen. If anything the companies will end up paying everybody less. H1B workers and outsourcing are both excellent ways to discourage American kids from becoming programmers. They don't believe there will be any jobs for them so they don't even bother to study it in school. Then you have a nation of computer illiterate lawyers and various other types of English majors who think you can solve all of the world's problems by using DreamWeaver to set up a website. You get politicians who believe the vendors when they say it will cost half a billion dollars to implement healthcare.gov and then when the government pays the money the site still doesn't work.

The United States is the country where modern CPUs and operating systems were invented but these days all of the computers are manufactured in China and all of the support is handled by call centers in Bombay. We're just pissing it away.

Posted by Ebbang Uluque6305 2015-02-20 12:31|| 2015-02-20 12:31|| Front Page Top

#8 It is not cheaper to off-shore the work. Not in the long run or the entire life-cycle of a project.

Even importing them here isn't cheaper. Sure, they work for a lower rate, but take three times as long to complete anything. And, what does get completed has to be 'fixed' to work correctly.

Currently working at a company that sends work to India and gets crap back along with having an army of 'contractors' in-house turning the crap into lesser crap that the American developers then turn into workable applications. Damn stupid.

Posted by Woozle Scourge of the Wee Folk4194 2015-02-20 14:25|| 2015-02-20 14:25|| Front Page Top

#9 The problem isnt that the H1B exists, its that it is being used not to get needed talent, but to displace US talent and force lower wages. And the way it does that is especially egregious: if an H1B gets fired, he is shopped back home. So he is virtually an indentured servant to the company that holds his visa: so they work them at lower wages, worse conditions and far more hours. The H1b becomes an indentured servant - not free to seek proper wages, and subject to the whims of his masters.

If the H1B were able to compete freely go between jobs, this wage cutting and other bullshittery would not be possible.

Thats why we should do away with the H1B completely. Either give them a green card (ending the employers ability to control the workers life), if we need them, or dont give them anything other than a temporary, non-renewable, 90 day work permit (enough to let a true expert or specialist in and get a problem on its way to being solved)

Posted by OldSpook 2015-02-20 17:02|| 2015-02-20 17:02|| Front Page Top

#10 Southern California Edison IT workers 'beyond furious' over H-1B replacements.

The H-1B program "was supposed to be for projects and jobs that American workers could not fill," this worker said. "But we're doing our job. It's not like they are bringing in these guys for new positions that nobody can fill.

"Not one of these jobs being filled by India was a job that an Edison employee wasn't already performing," he said.

Posted by mossomo 2015-02-20 23:34|| 2015-02-20 23:34|| Front Page Top

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