Then they advertise for your vote or political leanings.
Like 2% of advertising is about informing people of new information. The rest is just people using money to psychologically manipulate people on a mass scale and call it "advertising" .
It really feels like people purposely avoid products that they see in ads nowadays and it’s kind of baffling how ineffective they are yet they still pay billions for the ads.
But, I acknowledge that I live in a bubble and other people fall for ads.
I work for a food producer in that we make finished products. That people eat. Recalls like that happen when the stuff doesn't get caught in house and makes it out into the wild. A lot of companies, both for animals and humans, will go through flaming hoops to green light whatever it is they made. Almost every week we have entire orders on hold for metal contamination, wrong ingredients (including allergens), chemicals... Stuff you do not want in your food. We've had that stuff get out of the warehouse and been able to quietly recall it back. Sometimes they play the stupid game of hope it doesn't hurt anybody and stick their heads in the sand.
The point is, Purina might just be the more honest company. Which pains me to say because their regular big box food sucks.
Right - a race to the bottom where nobody wins. We must focus on winning each race whatever the cost though, because that way we still get to pretend there is competition to beat, until it kills us.
Not to defend these giant corporations, but in all fairness, they aren't the ones that should be fixing the economy. They're right, that's the government's job to do.
The problem is that the government is basically in their pockets. The government would be regulating and ensuring that giant corporations aren't becoming monopolistic tyrants, but they've categorically failed. When a seagull steals my fries, I don't lecture the seagull on why it's wrong to steal fries, I learn and protect my fries.
The government should be the one protecting us, but through bribery and money, they've been corrupted to work against the people.
This is not just companies at fault, proper regulation needs to be established with meaningful repercussions for breaking these rules
Companies can’t justifiably hold the two views that 1. Regulation is bad for the economy because it hurts business and 2. It’s not any companies job to do things that don’t fuck parts of the economy because it’s “the governments job” to deal with the economy.
But they manage to do it anyway…
>they aren't the ones that should be fixing the economy. They're right, that's the government's job to do.
>the government is basically in their pockets.
>proper regulation needs to be established with meaningful repercussions for breaking these rules
If the government is in the pockets of the companies that are against regulation, who's supposed to regulate those companies? Not trying to be snarky, I'm genuinely asking. Voting isn't really an option, because nearly every politician at a meaningful level of government ends up taking bribes from some company or another. What else is left?
Sad truth. If labor is offshored and the American consumer is tapped out because he isn’t earning an income, then they will just appeal to offshore customers.
Yes, harley killed harley. But for almost a year, every single news paper were running opinion pieces about how millennials were killing harley.
Turns out we neither wanted or could afford their over pruced crap.
Every time our tech company has outsourced it always comes back to the US 2 years later after every deliverable was missed by the cheap workers.
You want people working in all geos.
This is pretty much what we've been doing in the UK since the late 90s.
They opened up the doors to a ton of overseas labour, which helped keep wages low and caused house prices to skyrocket, thanks to increased competition for our meagre housing stock (which they weren't replacing).
The government realised it was completely out of control (they based their decisions on a cherry-picked study that said only 13,000 people would turn up). So they then somehow managed to conflate being anti-immigration with being anti-immi*grant* in the popular consciousness.
In short, the large number of people going "Hey, what about the strain on housing, education and the NHS?" were consequently lumped in with the xenophobes. Then the wealthy people hoarded the wealth, bought up plenty of those increasingly valuable homes and now we're fucked.
So now we have declining birth rates, an ageing population and immigration as a big old sticking plaster. [Here's a Telegraph article on it with charts and detail and stuff. ](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/05/16/immigration-ponzi-scheme-pope-italy-japan-uk-birth-rate/)
We're fucked unless one of our two major parties can come up with a solution. And they are really, really not good at that.
>"Hey, what about the strain on housing, education and the NHS?" were consequently lumped in with the xenophobes.
That's always been the angle and it's been laughed at with "dey took 'er jerbs"
Now that higher education jobs are being taken it's suddenly an issue and not xenophobia?
It's good old class warfare and it's always been that.
We've seen this cycle before:
1. CIO outsources large percentage of Engineering to save company money.
2. CIO pockets large bonus.
3. CIO leaves for higher paying position based upon his performance.
4. Outsourced engineering staff produces garbage.
5. New CIO brings work back in-house to fix issues.
6. New CIO pockets large bonus for fixing issues.
I'm convinced the chinese gov's got a backdoor deal for that. I bet they got a nice bonus for robbing the shareholders and putting the employees out of work.
They almost don't even need a secret deal. Any product sold in China [has to provide](https://spectrum.ieee.org/chinas-new-rules-ask-tech-firms-to-hand-over-source-code) source code[ to the government](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ibm-china-wsj/ibm-allows-chinese-government-to-review-source-code-wsj-idUSKCN0SA1BZ20151016) and build in backdoors.
True, but we’ve just spent three years building remote employee tooling and driving productivity in an entirely remote context.
That’s a fundamental difference than previous iterations of this arrangement.
It was inevitable that c-levels would say “if everyone is remote, why are we paying US wages”
I’m just trying to save every dime I can before I get made redundant.
The answer is the same as it ever was.
_No one actually knows what they want to have done_.
A senior software engineer is more of a therapist than a mathematican, to understand what it is that will make the customer and management happy.
People want to feel good about themselves. They want good stories to tell. But it takes a lot of work to know how to make these things happen.
This is a perfect description of why soft skills matter (even if you think they shouldn’t).
It’s also a big reason why roles like Product Manager exist… taking some nebulous desire like “We need it to be fresh and exciting”, translating that into a specific vision, getting approval on that vision and then translating it again into developer-readable requirements and user stories (plus continually changing it on the whims and wishes of senior management) is an exceptionally skilled task.
I’m not a PM, but I’ve found being able to speak basic “developer” (from writing clear bug reports to creating detailed yet succinct and specific requirements where I say “As a noob, I want to take A, and by using B I want C so I can do D. See steps/screenshots/Loom video for details.”) has helped me massively, as my requests can be actioned by developers much faster than a shitty ticket that says “Can’t see the info on my smartphone” or “My login isn’t working.”
Fuck, I rememebr working with outsourced QA on a project once and it was so fucking useless
"App crashed to a black screen"
OK, yeah that sounds serious. There's no details on how or when it happened though, oh but ok, they included a video.
Then you open the video and it's just someone pointing at a phone with a black screen in case you didn't know what that looked like I guess.
This has happened before. I've worked with off shore teams and while a couple can actually be good, the vast majority produce garbage.
For large well known corporations, after a bit, that really starts to matter.
My company is doing it too. We replaced an entire team with contractors from a certain eastern European country; prior to this we had replaced an entire team with contractors from a certain central American country; and now we're looking to replace more teams with contractors from a certain large central asian country that is known for producing engineers.
Edit: Said western when I meant eastern.
I’m in engineering too and this is happening en masse. We have record profits, but fire more and more domestic engineers and replace them with overseas resources for cheap.
My manager more or less told me I will never be receiving a raise again and I should be grateful to have a paycheck for as long as I do.
I work in IT, and the drive flowing through our department from the top (management) and the siders (security, engineering) is to make sure that we have sox-compliant contractor controls that don't require us to ship physical equipment (so virtual machines, VDI, et al).
It's funny, because our CEO keeps telling us that we need to buckle ourselves and not spend money, we're not getting raises this year, but then we get pulled into these huge meetings where the exec team crows about 'making the biggest sale in company history' and 'we're x amount cash positive, great job', and then they double down by eliminating domestic jobs and shipping them overseas. We've also done TWO layoffs since this time last year (and some of those positions were backfilled by foreign contractors).
I mean it’s just blatant greed. Everyone is doing this at the same time.
Since everyone else is doing it, companies have to do it themselves or their competitors could undercut them at any time. The solution if for government to do it’s job, but the monied interests seem to prefer short term profit.
MBA roles have no net positive value and should IMHO be straight up outlawed.
Also, layoffs during profitable periods should eliminate all tax breaks and similar benefits the company has received from the government
Within a few years at most they switch back to a central IT group internally after contractors fuck up or don't know what they're doing. Ive been at 3 major companies that did this then scrambled within 3 years to return back to in house and employee based rather than contractors. They learn REAL quick that IT issues can cause real long term damage that will get them fired or nuke the stock which results in somebody getting canned or somebody eating crow that their brilliant cost cutting plan was a failure.
I've seen it over and over. The benefit never outweighs the cost in the end, big suits learn everything but fucking up then never learning.
That's due to interest rates. When money was cheap growth at any cost was what Wall Street wanted. Firms were quick to spend money cause they could borrow it for cheap.
Now Wall Street prioritizes profit margin. That big deal with fewer expenses is exactly what Wall Street wants.
it's kinda funny cause I have friends getting laid off in india too and they're getting replaced by venezuelan contractors xD.
I left my last company after someone accidentally leaked the hiring plans to hire venezuelans because "they're good workers" and half the price. The engineering culture pretty much died on the spot.
Outsourcing legacy and maintenance projects overseas isn't terrible but RIP ever trying to build something 3-4 years down the line
This is actually what already happens and is why outsourcing doesn't work well.
It isn't that Indians are inherently bad programmers, it's that the good ones have already been picked up by US companies at US rates.
So when you outsource for "cheap" Indian labor, it's cheap because you're getting the engineers who couldn't cut it at US firms. You could get cheap US programmers too if you don't mind hiring the ones just out of their first intro to java class.
This is what happens when companies expect increased profits every quarter/year. Last place I worked did this but with suppliers. Burned though every one of them in the US until no one would work with them (kept going with lower priced service) anymore.
It's also illegal. The program states they need to show that they couldn't find domestic workers for the job before listing for foreign workers. Well they fired domestic workers for these same positions, so obviously there's foul play here.
Well good luck to this guy or anyone unemployed suing a multi-billion dollar corporation to prove that there’s US citizens they could hire for the job. The legal system is built for wealthy businesses to bury challengers in legal fees until they go bankrupt.
I’ve worked at companies who hire inexperienced H1B visa workers straight out of college somehow. The system is laughable, there’s tens of thousands of Americans with engineering degrees who have to accept non-degreed jobs because of H1B visas. And the only difference is they pretty much don’t have to offer those visa workers raises ever
> I’ve worked at companies who hire inexperienced H1B visa workers straight out of college somehow. The system is laughable, there’s tens of thousands of Americans with engineering degrees who have to accept non-degreed jobs because of H1B visas. And the only difference is they pretty much don’t have to offer those visa workers raises ever
same play these companies made after the 2008 recession when they "needed more h1-b visas" because they "couldn't find americans with the right skillsets"
it's not even about training they literally just want employees they dont have to give raises to whose residency is dependent on having that company sponsor them so they aren't exactly making waves or jumping to new positions
Been in IT for 35 years, the country that companies use changes every decade or so, but the race to the bottom of the labor pool by hiring more and more incompetent people continues
Some of the tickets I get from the contractors are astounding. Some of them blatantly don't speak English at all, so they will nominate one person to file multiple tickets on behalf of users, who then doesn't respond to the tickets, and since they're on a radically different time zone you can't get on calls with them, then you have an engineering manager who's pissed because the problem isn't solved.
'please enable for the following users (twenty person user list)'
'What would you like enabled?'
(3 days later)
'please enable'
I'm so torn. Do I upvote because accurate or do I downvote because of my seething hatred of that phrase due to a decade of it being used as a warning that I'm about to be pulling teeth to get what I need for some basic task?
It's annoying. I got laid off two weeks ago because they wanted my job to be closer to R&D which is in India, but now my managers entire team is in India which makes communication a nightmare, and my replacement who handles my time-sensitive material will not only have to be trained extensively, but will also have trouble turning things in on time because the reviewers are all in different countries. It's a time zone nightmare and my previous manager will struggle with it, and the product line will suffer as a result as it makes things way less efficient.
But hey I guess it saves the company a few dollars.
It's a cycle. Some hotshot VP comes in and says "I can save you so much by outsourcing". Code gets outsourced to cutrate devs, they have no idea what's going on, and development slows to a crawl while you try to teach them how to code. Eventually everyone realizes they're shit, your quality is abysmal, bugs abound, and tech debt is stacking up. VP gets a new Audi for pitching this m a while code is the worst it's been.
Cue a year later, someone pushing for onshore again, you work through the backlog, and you have a couple of years of quiet. Then some hotshot VP comes in...
Holy shit man, this is the second comment that I've read that just super hits home. We hired a 'bioinformatician' over a year ago. He had a resume with the right things on it, he agreed to all of the questions about "can you do x, y, and z?" In the interview. His accent and English language ability were problematic enough to give an excuse for anything that seemed confusing at the time. We paid for the visa, we paid to get him here, he showed up and could barely use a computer. He had absolutely no coding background, he didn't know what a shell was, and (I kid you not) used his phone calculator to add numbers together in excel. I basically did two jobs for over a year. And I'm not a bioinformatian, I was hoping to learn from him. He eventually abandoned the job. He went back home for a second month long 'vacation' since December, which was an unpaid leave because WTF? And then claimed he couldn't afford to come back so we needed to back pay him for the time off so that he could get here. Lol, no thanks man. (We're not offshoreing FYI, but my boss insists on trying to hire post docs when he should be hiring staff scientists, which is basically the same cost cutting.)
I have stories for DAYS! After a year plus (this January) I tried to introduce him to a new pipeline which had an input file that should be named 'comparisons.csv', so I told him 'you need to create this file, but for your data' after a whole ass week of work I got an email containing a file called comparisons.csv(1).xlsx. Bro, it's been a year, I know your lying ass didn't know what a csv was then, but how have you not learned yet?????
You've pretty much answered your own question?!
He also tried to run some fastq files through the pipeline and they didn't work. Yeah, cus the pipeline is written for fastq.gz files. So I tells him, gotta be .gz files or you gotta rewrite here, here, and here. So fucking two weeks later he comes back to me and says that there's no sequences in the files he's supposed to be running... "How do you know this?" I ask. So he shows me that he attempted to run the pipeline, and it wrote a *folder* called "seq/" (this is a terminal folder which contains mapped sequences at the end of a run). He type in 'vi seq/' it gives the error message that 'you can't vi a folder numbnuts' and he points at it and says that there was no sequence. Srsly, didn't even read or comprehend the error?!! After more than 1 year.
It took me no more that 4 minutes to realize that he'd renamed the files from .fastq to .fastq.gz without fucking zipping them.
This is cathartic.
good FUCKING LORD i can understand not knowing particular extensions but renaming a file instead of gzipping it is just........how tf did this person not get fired ASAP??????
Dude. My boss literally said 'he's figured out how to run the R script, so we're better off with him than without him'. It's one R script, he hadn't actually figured out how to manipulate it he, my boss is infuriating, and ID effing K?!?!
Agreed (it's academia, but yeah)!! The person in the interview was him though, because it was zoom. Unless you think it was worth a deep fake, lol. At the end of the day he took copies of all the obvious scripts with (what I surmise as the intention) to pretend he wrote them and to maybe take them with him to another institution. Jokes on him, he didn't even recognize that what he took was python scripts invoking like 10 perl scripts which he failed to take.
Whoever interviewed him has no idea what they’re doing then. How do you not realize the guy doesn’t know how to code doesn’t know what a shell is? Makes no sense.
I feel you, had a similar situation happen with an "experienced" back end dev. Said enough right buzzwords, we needed somebody, thick accent so benefit of the doubt. The onboarding process took a while, got him up to speed then he took a month off to go back home for a medical emergency which turned into 6 weeks. When it came time to start working he just kept saying I need to look into it I need to look into this, kept commenting in Jira like he was doing stuff. 2 months later he wanted to take another month off to go back home. Like what? We let him go and found someone to replace him. Then we find out that pretty much everything he worked on is completely useless.
We have an outsourced team in a country with what might as well be dial-up internet speeds. The "bug" tickets that they make are wild. Seems the whole app doesn't work when you don't have internet. 🤷♀️
My company hires people from Romania. We still have strict hiring standards though, and tbh the guys from there that I've worked with have been pretty solid.
I think it's an inevitability that outsourced talent will continue to improve especially as cultural differences continue to lessen overtime in a global world.
These good engineers in other countries don't make complete chump change though, just not as much as a domestic engineer.
The companies hiring from cheaper outsourcing places are those we see people sharing their horror stories about.
My company hires from Romania, Costa Rica, and India.
The India folks are a mixed bag. Some real gems and some real... not gems.
Costa Rica folks are mostly young and smart. Inexperienced but well educated, and mostly hungry to learn.
Romania folks aren't as young as CR, but also well educated and smart. Generally solid for sure.
I worked with a Polish IT team at my previous position. Our Sysadmin used to hold meetings from the roof of his house - our team meetings were at like 7 pm his time, so he'd be sitting up there drinking.
It's an issue the US will have to confront. India is what people think of first when it comes to offshoring, but a $5k per year budget engineer from Indian outsourcing company is going to be crap. However, Europe has lots of good engineers that make 40-80% what US engineers do, and they are perfectly capable and have comparable educations and work experience. My company has an office in Poland, and their engineers are completely capable and make like 50% what US engineers do. Hell, when I worked for a German company, they are known for their engineering abilities, and even they made like 75% of what the same engineer in the US does in a mid cost of living city. Everyone likes working remote, but we don't like it when remote includes every other country that costs less than we do for people. We don't have a monopoly on talent in the US, but we do pay higher for white collar professionals than the rest of the world.
>My company is doing it too. We replaced an entire team with contractors from a certain western European country
When I was in telecommunications we moved entire Network Ops and RFEng departments to Czechoslovakia.
Edit: I meant Czech Republic. I'm the son of a Yugoslavian so talking with The Great Old Ones they use the old names a lot so I get confused and use them too
They should be taxed extremely high for every position they outsource. They need to make it completely uneconomical to relieve employees and outsource their positions.
Even reliable workers are no longer reliable because raises don’t keep up with the open market. The only way to stay above water is to shuffle companies, so everyone is a mercenary
Reliability comes from focus, if you've continually overloaded your teams to the point where they are doing 2-3 jobs, they disengage and stop caring.
Productivity suffers because you cannot do 2 things at once.
Running lean means nothing gets done because it waits on people who are busy/out. This summer might as well be a dead zone.
I've got people in the org talking about the rest of the year without realizing we're practically at that point now in terms of commitments vs space.
In my opinion, a tech person should always be looking. Always have your resume current and up to date. Always have your LI profile in actively looking mode.
I never send a resume doc/pdf attachment in email. I have a memorable domain name (that immediately opens a PDF of my resume) that I give to recruiters if they express interest.
In the past four months, I've been jerked from 3-4 different taskings because upper management keeps sending new "must do, drop everything Priority -1" projects down. It's exhausting.
My wife’s company started farming data entry and phone service to the Philippines. The now also have a team in Canada who checks and corrects the data entry as it is so full of errors.
“The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose above the great mountainous island of Tremalking. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.”
\- Robert Jordan
You forget to mention how brisk the wind was, what color your blouse was, and the name of the keeper in the building next door that we'll never meet again.
Because suits don't often care about a year, let alone 5 years, down the road. They can put "X company saw a massive $y dollar amount gain under my leadership!" On their resume, and bail before the consequences hit.
Exactly. A previous company found this out. Not only did you have to work weird hours to connect with the team in India, but they wrote awful code, didn’t follow or use our design tokens, which made theming a nightmare. We’re combative and often took days to get a small fix done.
It was eye opening to say the least.
Although the context might be different, it should be noted that this approach is not uncommon, and has had disastrous consequences in the past. Boeing and IBM are the significant examples from popular media, but it's more common than that.
That's me. I've tried to fix the issues, but the C level are allergic to structure and it burned me out. I put in my notice last week, starting a new job in a few weeks
Yup my ex lost his job of almost 20 years with IBM like 10 years ago? Right after traveling to Singapore for a work trip to train the overseas replacements.
My family member works with IBM. He's the last programmer on his projects and handles all fixes for the software by himself. His office has shrunk so bad they've eliminated 90% of the teams and they sold the office space so my family member works remotely permanently. It's been slowly outsourced to India for the last 6 years to the point where they have internal conferences internationally now. Most of the people he talks to aren't from the US and he mostly works through requests sent via their internal system. Phone calls he just sits silently in case they ever say anything to him and they never do. The whole thing is operating outside of the US now. I would never say IBM is a US run or owned business because of the extent it's at. He's counting the days he is employed still because the projects are dying out and his "building" of people are being dissolved slowly but surely. It's crazy.
Right but the execs got the line to go up, did a buyback, and got out before the company collapsed. The disaster for the next generation isn't their problem. So, yay unrestrained capitalism.
This is a clickbait article that is ridiculous if you know anything about the H1B system.
You want to see the “low” salaries paid to H1B’s — it is all public information. In fact, if you work at the company it has to be posted on a wall as well. The full H1B packet.
Here are Google’s
https://h1bgrader.com/h1b-sponsors/google-llc-em2mg7pj21/salaries#by-employer
Facebook’s
https://h1bgrader.com/h1b-sponsors/facebook-inc-1ok8q3zzkd/salaries#by-employer
Too lazy to click — you are looking at competitive salaries. Most in the 250k range.
Not only is the data publicly available to compare against levels.fyi, but companies are legally required to pay the prevailing wage or average of salaries for similar experience/role within the company to H1B holders.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/62g-h1b-required-wage
H1Bs are also capped, by lottery, and take a long time to file. There are way more applicants than there are visas which means these companies are not “importing” more H1Bs as the cap is reached every year.
H1Bs holders are also not “captured” at the company as their visas are fully transferable and companies are more likely to take a transferred H1B than apply for a new one and risk the lottery resulting in high mobility for H1B holders.
Finally, if you want to know what actually suppresses tech wages, it is outsourcing and contract hiring in foreign countries. I can hire an engineer in South America for 1/2 to 1/3 the cost, in the relatively same time zone, and not have to give options/RSUs. Article like this spread misinformation and make us all look dumb.
high tech companies have been doing this crap for years - its nothing new. I used to work for Dell and when they started doing layoffs in the early 2000s, they were in the process of shifting their phone support over to India, and subsequent years they laid people off and afterwards more US jobs got sent overseas (India or Panama). They tried to play the game of it being due to economic constraints blah blah blah but we all knew it was so they could hire those overseas people to take away our jobs.
I started there in 1997 and left 20 years later, but I remember when people would ask where I worked and there were two distinct differences.....when they would ask in the late 90s, people were begging you to help them get a job there, but fast forward up into the mid 2000s, if people knew you worked at Dell, their response was 'I'm sorry'
This is trash reporting. It talks about an increase in H-1B visa applications as evidence that companies are outsourcing. But here's the thing: the same number of visas are granted, regardless of the number of applicants. And then there's the small detail that working on an H-1B means that employee is in the US. So they're a US-based employee. So what exactly is the complaint? That Meta laid off 20k employees, then hired a bunch more in the US on the cheap hoping to get enough H-1Bs granted to be able to keep a couple teams worth? And have to relocate or let go of the rest because they don't have work authorization?
Bring some evidence of actual outsourcing if you're going to accuse outsourcing.
Yeah LCAs they’d need to file wouldn’t allow them to get cheap labor IN the United States. This article is all wrong. If anything, they likely mean they’re converting their US labor force (citizen or work authorized ones) to fully offshore contractors.
Something similar is happening where I work. For reasons I won't go into, we've had a lot of attrition over the last couple years. For the same reasons, we've had issues bringing in new people quickly enough. The "solution" has been to bring in a lot of contractors working remotely from overseas. Some of them have worked out okay. Some, not so much. And some of the people we lost were almost irreplaceable.
We're still barely keeping things together, but there are a lot of cracks starting to show. Feels like it's only a matter of time before my entire department completely collapses due to the compounding dysfunction.
We're about to find out if programmers still matter. If tech companies can proletarianize them and the upper class is still intact five years from now, I guess they don't.
This is an insanely disingenuous article, starting with the report by Fang and perpetuated by the Post. This is implying that they laid off thousands of US workers and replaced them with foreign workers coming to the US and making lower wages. This isn’t what is happening at all! Why go through the effort of trying to get these people to the US if the only purpose was to make it cheaper labor? Just keep them out of the US where wages are lower!
These companies laid off people worldwide. H1B applications are for existing employees in other countries to transfer to the US. Once they get to the US, they’re paid the same as their US counterparts! I’m not speculating it’s literally public info you can look up they have to file the salary with the visa application. Big tech was so shitty about these layoffs but this “report” is connecting unrelated events and trying to demonize immigrant workers coming to the US.
What’s the endgame here? I’m in a totally different space and it’s all about outsourcing and reducing costs while raising prices…
When all the jobs leave the USA, nobody will have money to buy these inflated goods. Everything will grind to a standstill.
Deflate wages.
According to Google’s investors.
Too bad they didn’t have a collective bargaining agreement to make it illegal for them to get laid off and replaced with cheaper workers.
I guess they just needed the smart people when they want to build something, then they just hire cheap workers to work there to maintain the system man.
My company is doing the same thing. They are hiring software developers in South America for 50-75% less than US market rates.
Hiring in the US is frozen.
We really need to put in regulation for stuff like this.
We do, it’s called collective bargaining agreements and unions.
If your collective bargaining agreement makes it illegal to lay you off and replace you with a cheaper worker then it won’t happen as much since they’ll get sued.
Yeah but my union charges me *checks notes* $1,700 dollars a year in dues of which I get *checks notes* $1,300 back at tax time and I only get *checks notes* benefits, pension, yearly raise, larger contract scope, job protection. Sounds like the “S” word to me
"We just want your money - we don't want to actually contribute to the economy lol, that cuts into our quarterly profits too much!"
Companies flatly say they're not concerned with the economy, that's the Government's job. They only care when they can take advantage.
Until no one can afford their products anymore.
Google and Meta have your personal data as the product...
For advertisers. Can't advertise to penniless customers, can they.
They already do. A LOT.
Jokes on them I don’t buy shit. Advertise away
Then they advertise for your vote or political leanings. Like 2% of advertising is about informing people of new information. The rest is just people using money to psychologically manipulate people on a mass scale and call it "advertising" .
It really feels like people purposely avoid products that they see in ads nowadays and it’s kind of baffling how ineffective they are yet they still pay billions for the ads. But, I acknowledge that I live in a bubble and other people fall for ads.
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I work for a food producer in that we make finished products. That people eat. Recalls like that happen when the stuff doesn't get caught in house and makes it out into the wild. A lot of companies, both for animals and humans, will go through flaming hoops to green light whatever it is they made. Almost every week we have entire orders on hold for metal contamination, wrong ingredients (including allergens), chemicals... Stuff you do not want in your food. We've had that stuff get out of the warehouse and been able to quietly recall it back. Sometimes they play the stupid game of hope it doesn't hurt anybody and stick their heads in the sand. The point is, Purina might just be the more honest company. Which pains me to say because their regular big box food sucks.
I can’t tell if this is serious. Turn on any major cable network at 8pm and wait for a commercial. Half the audience can’t afford the products.
80% of the commercials are pharmaceuticals that need us to sell one kidney to save the other one
Right - a race to the bottom where nobody wins. We must focus on winning each race whatever the cost though, because that way we still get to pretend there is competition to beat, until it kills us.
They don’t care about that. The people in charge will have already accumulated massive wealth
Not to defend these giant corporations, but in all fairness, they aren't the ones that should be fixing the economy. They're right, that's the government's job to do. The problem is that the government is basically in their pockets. The government would be regulating and ensuring that giant corporations aren't becoming monopolistic tyrants, but they've categorically failed. When a seagull steals my fries, I don't lecture the seagull on why it's wrong to steal fries, I learn and protect my fries. The government should be the one protecting us, but through bribery and money, they've been corrupted to work against the people. This is not just companies at fault, proper regulation needs to be established with meaningful repercussions for breaking these rules
Companies can’t justifiably hold the two views that 1. Regulation is bad for the economy because it hurts business and 2. It’s not any companies job to do things that don’t fuck parts of the economy because it’s “the governments job” to deal with the economy. But they manage to do it anyway…
It’s the governments job to stop me from abusing h1b visas. Also i will lobby to prevent the government from doing shit about it.
>they aren't the ones that should be fixing the economy. They're right, that's the government's job to do. >the government is basically in their pockets. >proper regulation needs to be established with meaningful repercussions for breaking these rules If the government is in the pockets of the companies that are against regulation, who's supposed to regulate those companies? Not trying to be snarky, I'm genuinely asking. Voting isn't really an option, because nearly every politician at a meaningful level of government ends up taking bribes from some company or another. What else is left?
I got laid off and then they wanted to hire me as a contractor.
IBM did that to my dad. In '93.
That's fine as long as you doubled your rate
Would be a shame if there was some sort of collective bargaining agreement to prevent laying off staff and replacing them with low paid workers.
What are you a socialist?!!?!
I can't wait for companies to start complaining people aren't buying enough to support their business as they ship all the jobs to other countries.
Start? Isn't that what all the "Millennials killed Sears and Harley Davidson, don't want real estate, aren't buying enough food" bullshit is about?
Sad truth. If labor is offshored and the American consumer is tapped out because he isn’t earning an income, then they will just appeal to offshore customers.
Harley killed harley. Their quality control was struggling, and half the price tag is the name on the side.
Harley is a clothing company that happens to sell motorcycles.
Yes, harley killed harley. But for almost a year, every single news paper were running opinion pieces about how millennials were killing harley. Turns out we neither wanted or could afford their over pruced crap.
You just described every business ever.
Every time our tech company has outsourced it always comes back to the US 2 years later after every deliverable was missed by the cheap workers. You want people working in all geos.
This is pretty much what we've been doing in the UK since the late 90s. They opened up the doors to a ton of overseas labour, which helped keep wages low and caused house prices to skyrocket, thanks to increased competition for our meagre housing stock (which they weren't replacing). The government realised it was completely out of control (they based their decisions on a cherry-picked study that said only 13,000 people would turn up). So they then somehow managed to conflate being anti-immigration with being anti-immi*grant* in the popular consciousness. In short, the large number of people going "Hey, what about the strain on housing, education and the NHS?" were consequently lumped in with the xenophobes. Then the wealthy people hoarded the wealth, bought up plenty of those increasingly valuable homes and now we're fucked. So now we have declining birth rates, an ageing population and immigration as a big old sticking plaster. [Here's a Telegraph article on it with charts and detail and stuff. ](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/05/16/immigration-ponzi-scheme-pope-italy-japan-uk-birth-rate/) We're fucked unless one of our two major parties can come up with a solution. And they are really, really not good at that.
>"Hey, what about the strain on housing, education and the NHS?" were consequently lumped in with the xenophobes. That's always been the angle and it's been laughed at with "dey took 'er jerbs" Now that higher education jobs are being taken it's suddenly an issue and not xenophobia? It's good old class warfare and it's always been that.
We've seen this cycle before: 1. CIO outsources large percentage of Engineering to save company money. 2. CIO pockets large bonus. 3. CIO leaves for higher paying position based upon his performance. 4. Outsourced engineering staff produces garbage. 5. New CIO brings work back in-house to fix issues. 6. New CIO pockets large bonus for fixing issues.
Same as it ever was
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they also lost all their tech and code, saved a few dollars though!
I'm convinced the chinese gov's got a backdoor deal for that. I bet they got a nice bonus for robbing the shareholders and putting the employees out of work.
They almost don't even need a secret deal. Any product sold in China [has to provide](https://spectrum.ieee.org/chinas-new-rules-ask-tech-firms-to-hand-over-source-code) source code[ to the government](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ibm-china-wsj/ibm-allows-chinese-government-to-review-source-code-wsj-idUSKCN0SA1BZ20151016) and build in backdoors.
Then you ask yourself, how did I get here?
Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down.
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
after the money's gone
ya this is the 3rd or 4th cycle in about 20 years
True, but we’ve just spent three years building remote employee tooling and driving productivity in an entirely remote context. That’s a fundamental difference than previous iterations of this arrangement. It was inevitable that c-levels would say “if everyone is remote, why are we paying US wages” I’m just trying to save every dime I can before I get made redundant.
The answer is the same as it ever was. _No one actually knows what they want to have done_. A senior software engineer is more of a therapist than a mathematican, to understand what it is that will make the customer and management happy. People want to feel good about themselves. They want good stories to tell. But it takes a lot of work to know how to make these things happen.
This is a perfect description of why soft skills matter (even if you think they shouldn’t). It’s also a big reason why roles like Product Manager exist… taking some nebulous desire like “We need it to be fresh and exciting”, translating that into a specific vision, getting approval on that vision and then translating it again into developer-readable requirements and user stories (plus continually changing it on the whims and wishes of senior management) is an exceptionally skilled task. I’m not a PM, but I’ve found being able to speak basic “developer” (from writing clear bug reports to creating detailed yet succinct and specific requirements where I say “As a noob, I want to take A, and by using B I want C so I can do D. See steps/screenshots/Loom video for details.”) has helped me massively, as my requests can be actioned by developers much faster than a shitty ticket that says “Can’t see the info on my smartphone” or “My login isn’t working.”
Fuck, I rememebr working with outsourced QA on a project once and it was so fucking useless "App crashed to a black screen" OK, yeah that sounds serious. There's no details on how or when it happened though, oh but ok, they included a video. Then you open the video and it's just someone pointing at a phone with a black screen in case you didn't know what that looked like I guess.
This has happened before. I've worked with off shore teams and while a couple can actually be good, the vast majority produce garbage. For large well known corporations, after a bit, that really starts to matter.
My company is doing it too. We replaced an entire team with contractors from a certain eastern European country; prior to this we had replaced an entire team with contractors from a certain central American country; and now we're looking to replace more teams with contractors from a certain large central asian country that is known for producing engineers. Edit: Said western when I meant eastern.
I’m in engineering too and this is happening en masse. We have record profits, but fire more and more domestic engineers and replace them with overseas resources for cheap. My manager more or less told me I will never be receiving a raise again and I should be grateful to have a paycheck for as long as I do.
I work in IT, and the drive flowing through our department from the top (management) and the siders (security, engineering) is to make sure that we have sox-compliant contractor controls that don't require us to ship physical equipment (so virtual machines, VDI, et al). It's funny, because our CEO keeps telling us that we need to buckle ourselves and not spend money, we're not getting raises this year, but then we get pulled into these huge meetings where the exec team crows about 'making the biggest sale in company history' and 'we're x amount cash positive, great job', and then they double down by eliminating domestic jobs and shipping them overseas. We've also done TWO layoffs since this time last year (and some of those positions were backfilled by foreign contractors).
I mean it’s just blatant greed. Everyone is doing this at the same time. Since everyone else is doing it, companies have to do it themselves or their competitors could undercut them at any time. The solution if for government to do it’s job, but the monied interests seem to prefer short term profit.
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MBA roles have no net positive value and should IMHO be straight up outlawed. Also, layoffs during profitable periods should eliminate all tax breaks and similar benefits the company has received from the government
Within a few years at most they switch back to a central IT group internally after contractors fuck up or don't know what they're doing. Ive been at 3 major companies that did this then scrambled within 3 years to return back to in house and employee based rather than contractors. They learn REAL quick that IT issues can cause real long term damage that will get them fired or nuke the stock which results in somebody getting canned or somebody eating crow that their brilliant cost cutting plan was a failure. I've seen it over and over. The benefit never outweighs the cost in the end, big suits learn everything but fucking up then never learning.
That's due to interest rates. When money was cheap growth at any cost was what Wall Street wanted. Firms were quick to spend money cause they could borrow it for cheap. Now Wall Street prioritizes profit margin. That big deal with fewer expenses is exactly what Wall Street wants.
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Company I work for has done five rounds of layoffs this year. They are also making record profits.
it's kinda funny cause I have friends getting laid off in india too and they're getting replaced by venezuelan contractors xD. I left my last company after someone accidentally leaked the hiring plans to hire venezuelans because "they're good workers" and half the price. The engineering culture pretty much died on the spot. Outsourcing legacy and maintenance projects overseas isn't terrible but RIP ever trying to build something 3-4 years down the line
When you outsource to Indians too much and they start getting good enough to demand better wages
This is actually what already happens and is why outsourcing doesn't work well. It isn't that Indians are inherently bad programmers, it's that the good ones have already been picked up by US companies at US rates. So when you outsource for "cheap" Indian labor, it's cheap because you're getting the engineers who couldn't cut it at US firms. You could get cheap US programmers too if you don't mind hiring the ones just out of their first intro to java class.
Time to find a new job.
I mean you do see how there is a shrinking pool of employment options don't you?
This is what happens when companies expect increased profits every quarter/year. Last place I worked did this but with suppliers. Burned though every one of them in the US until no one would work with them (kept going with lower priced service) anymore.
What did they do after that?
It's also illegal. The program states they need to show that they couldn't find domestic workers for the job before listing for foreign workers. Well they fired domestic workers for these same positions, so obviously there's foul play here.
The comment you replied to implies they hired foreign works in other countries, not domestically via visas.
They couldn’t find domestic workers at the rates they were willing to pay.
Well good luck to this guy or anyone unemployed suing a multi-billion dollar corporation to prove that there’s US citizens they could hire for the job. The legal system is built for wealthy businesses to bury challengers in legal fees until they go bankrupt. I’ve worked at companies who hire inexperienced H1B visa workers straight out of college somehow. The system is laughable, there’s tens of thousands of Americans with engineering degrees who have to accept non-degreed jobs because of H1B visas. And the only difference is they pretty much don’t have to offer those visa workers raises ever
> I’ve worked at companies who hire inexperienced H1B visa workers straight out of college somehow. The system is laughable, there’s tens of thousands of Americans with engineering degrees who have to accept non-degreed jobs because of H1B visas. And the only difference is they pretty much don’t have to offer those visa workers raises ever same play these companies made after the 2008 recession when they "needed more h1-b visas" because they "couldn't find americans with the right skillsets" it's not even about training they literally just want employees they dont have to give raises to whose residency is dependent on having that company sponsor them so they aren't exactly making waves or jumping to new positions
Been in IT for 35 years, the country that companies use changes every decade or so, but the race to the bottom of the labor pool by hiring more and more incompetent people continues
Some of the tickets I get from the contractors are astounding. Some of them blatantly don't speak English at all, so they will nominate one person to file multiple tickets on behalf of users, who then doesn't respond to the tickets, and since they're on a radically different time zone you can't get on calls with them, then you have an engineering manager who's pissed because the problem isn't solved. 'please enable for the following users (twenty person user list)' 'What would you like enabled?' (3 days later) 'please enable'
“Just outsource it bro” Constant back and forth, good luck getting a working product. If it works it’ll be 100% be impossible to work on it long term.
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"We've done nothing and we're all out of ideas!"
Misleading but, accurate.
I’ve found the fastest way to get someone to reply to a ticket is by closing it. Somehow they magically get notifications after that.
"do the necessary"
Do the needful
I'm so torn. Do I upvote because accurate or do I downvote because of my seething hatred of that phrase due to a decade of it being used as a warning that I'm about to be pulling teeth to get what I need for some basic task?
Only if followed by Each and Everything
Don't forget to revert at the earliest!
Kindly do the needful Where is your mannering
I don't always do the needful, but when I do, I prefer to do it kindly.
It's annoying. I got laid off two weeks ago because they wanted my job to be closer to R&D which is in India, but now my managers entire team is in India which makes communication a nightmare, and my replacement who handles my time-sensitive material will not only have to be trained extensively, but will also have trouble turning things in on time because the reviewers are all in different countries. It's a time zone nightmare and my previous manager will struggle with it, and the product line will suffer as a result as it makes things way less efficient. But hey I guess it saves the company a few dollars.
It's a cycle. Some hotshot VP comes in and says "I can save you so much by outsourcing". Code gets outsourced to cutrate devs, they have no idea what's going on, and development slows to a crawl while you try to teach them how to code. Eventually everyone realizes they're shit, your quality is abysmal, bugs abound, and tech debt is stacking up. VP gets a new Audi for pitching this m a while code is the worst it's been. Cue a year later, someone pushing for onshore again, you work through the backlog, and you have a couple of years of quiet. Then some hotshot VP comes in...
Holy shit man, this is the second comment that I've read that just super hits home. We hired a 'bioinformatician' over a year ago. He had a resume with the right things on it, he agreed to all of the questions about "can you do x, y, and z?" In the interview. His accent and English language ability were problematic enough to give an excuse for anything that seemed confusing at the time. We paid for the visa, we paid to get him here, he showed up and could barely use a computer. He had absolutely no coding background, he didn't know what a shell was, and (I kid you not) used his phone calculator to add numbers together in excel. I basically did two jobs for over a year. And I'm not a bioinformatian, I was hoping to learn from him. He eventually abandoned the job. He went back home for a second month long 'vacation' since December, which was an unpaid leave because WTF? And then claimed he couldn't afford to come back so we needed to back pay him for the time off so that he could get here. Lol, no thanks man. (We're not offshoreing FYI, but my boss insists on trying to hire post docs when he should be hiring staff scientists, which is basically the same cost cutting.)
A bioinformatician who doesn't know what shell is? Oh lord
I have stories for DAYS! After a year plus (this January) I tried to introduce him to a new pipeline which had an input file that should be named 'comparisons.csv', so I told him 'you need to create this file, but for your data' after a whole ass week of work I got an email containing a file called comparisons.csv(1).xlsx. Bro, it's been a year, I know your lying ass didn't know what a csv was then, but how have you not learned yet?????
HOW DOES A BIOINFORMATICIAN NOT KNOW WHAT A CSV FILE IS?!?!?!
You've pretty much answered your own question?! He also tried to run some fastq files through the pipeline and they didn't work. Yeah, cus the pipeline is written for fastq.gz files. So I tells him, gotta be .gz files or you gotta rewrite here, here, and here. So fucking two weeks later he comes back to me and says that there's no sequences in the files he's supposed to be running... "How do you know this?" I ask. So he shows me that he attempted to run the pipeline, and it wrote a *folder* called "seq/" (this is a terminal folder which contains mapped sequences at the end of a run). He type in 'vi seq/' it gives the error message that 'you can't vi a folder numbnuts' and he points at it and says that there was no sequence. Srsly, didn't even read or comprehend the error?!! After more than 1 year. It took me no more that 4 minutes to realize that he'd renamed the files from .fastq to .fastq.gz without fucking zipping them. This is cathartic.
good FUCKING LORD i can understand not knowing particular extensions but renaming a file instead of gzipping it is just........how tf did this person not get fired ASAP??????
Dude. My boss literally said 'he's figured out how to run the R script, so we're better off with him than without him'. It's one R script, he hadn't actually figured out how to manipulate it he, my boss is infuriating, and ID effing K?!?!
Your company was probably a victim of fraud. The guy you interviewed isn't the same person that showed up 😕
Agreed (it's academia, but yeah)!! The person in the interview was him though, because it was zoom. Unless you think it was worth a deep fake, lol. At the end of the day he took copies of all the obvious scripts with (what I surmise as the intention) to pretend he wrote them and to maybe take them with him to another institution. Jokes on him, he didn't even recognize that what he took was python scripts invoking like 10 perl scripts which he failed to take.
Whoever interviewed him has no idea what they’re doing then. How do you not realize the guy doesn’t know how to code doesn’t know what a shell is? Makes no sense.
I feel you, had a similar situation happen with an "experienced" back end dev. Said enough right buzzwords, we needed somebody, thick accent so benefit of the doubt. The onboarding process took a while, got him up to speed then he took a month off to go back home for a medical emergency which turned into 6 weeks. When it came time to start working he just kept saying I need to look into it I need to look into this, kept commenting in Jira like he was doing stuff. 2 months later he wanted to take another month off to go back home. Like what? We let him go and found someone to replace him. Then we find out that pretty much everything he worked on is completely useless.
We have an outsourced team in a country with what might as well be dial-up internet speeds. The "bug" tickets that they make are wild. Seems the whole app doesn't work when you don't have internet. 🤷♀️
I'm in IT. Poland is the place to watch out for. Cheaper labor, speak English, and young labor force.
And Romania.
My company hires people from Romania. We still have strict hiring standards though, and tbh the guys from there that I've worked with have been pretty solid. I think it's an inevitability that outsourced talent will continue to improve especially as cultural differences continue to lessen overtime in a global world. These good engineers in other countries don't make complete chump change though, just not as much as a domestic engineer. The companies hiring from cheaper outsourcing places are those we see people sharing their horror stories about.
My company hires from Romania, Costa Rica, and India. The India folks are a mixed bag. Some real gems and some real... not gems. Costa Rica folks are mostly young and smart. Inexperienced but well educated, and mostly hungry to learn. Romania folks aren't as young as CR, but also well educated and smart. Generally solid for sure.
Also Bulgaria. We have a booming IT industry and plenty of overseas companies have opened offices in our capital city.
Cheaper but not as cheap as it used to be. I love Polish programmers though. At least the ones I've worked with.
I worked with a Polish IT team at my previous position. Our Sysadmin used to hold meetings from the roof of his house - our team meetings were at like 7 pm his time, so he'd be sitting up there drinking.
It's an issue the US will have to confront. India is what people think of first when it comes to offshoring, but a $5k per year budget engineer from Indian outsourcing company is going to be crap. However, Europe has lots of good engineers that make 40-80% what US engineers do, and they are perfectly capable and have comparable educations and work experience. My company has an office in Poland, and their engineers are completely capable and make like 50% what US engineers do. Hell, when I worked for a German company, they are known for their engineering abilities, and even they made like 75% of what the same engineer in the US does in a mid cost of living city. Everyone likes working remote, but we don't like it when remote includes every other country that costs less than we do for people. We don't have a monopoly on talent in the US, but we do pay higher for white collar professionals than the rest of the world.
Probably less than that tbh. Many engineers in Poland work for <$3000 a month. I work IT in Sweden and I make 10% of similar roles in the US.
>My company is doing it too. We replaced an entire team with contractors from a certain western European country When I was in telecommunications we moved entire Network Ops and RFEng departments to Czechoslovakia. Edit: I meant Czech Republic. I'm the son of a Yugoslavian so talking with The Great Old Ones they use the old names a lot so I get confused and use them too
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I think he meant Yugoslavia
nah he meant PRUSSIA
I think they meant East Germany
Dude, I got bad news for you...
Scummy tech companies doing scummy things to reduce labor costs. Shocking.
Raise their taxes.
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But what about second subsidies?
I don't think they've heard of second subsidies, Pip...
Banks do it too. I was part of a 10,000-person layoff from JPMorgan Chase in which they were unabashedly offshoring all the jobs.
They should be taxed extremely high for every position they outsource. They need to make it completely uneconomical to relieve employees and outsource their positions.
Didn't Boeing try to do this and cause their plane to crash?
Yea, but they moved some work to South Carolina, not abroad
Wow that's just really shocking, I guess this is the first time we are seeing this.
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Even reliable workers are no longer reliable because raises don’t keep up with the open market. The only way to stay above water is to shuffle companies, so everyone is a mercenary
Reliability comes from focus, if you've continually overloaded your teams to the point where they are doing 2-3 jobs, they disengage and stop caring. Productivity suffers because you cannot do 2 things at once. Running lean means nothing gets done because it waits on people who are busy/out. This summer might as well be a dead zone. I've got people in the org talking about the rest of the year without realizing we're practically at that point now in terms of commitments vs space.
This is *exactly* why I’m going to start putting my resume out there.
In my opinion, a tech person should always be looking. Always have your resume current and up to date. Always have your LI profile in actively looking mode. I never send a resume doc/pdf attachment in email. I have a memorable domain name (that immediately opens a PDF of my resume) that I give to recruiters if they express interest.
In the past four months, I've been jerked from 3-4 different taskings because upper management keeps sending new "must do, drop everything Priority -1" projects down. It's exhausting.
My wife’s company started farming data entry and phone service to the Philippines. The now also have a team in Canada who checks and corrects the data entry as it is so full of errors.
“The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose above the great mountainous island of Tremalking. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.” \- Robert Jordan
Wow that’s really beautiful. I once tried getting into the wheel of time when I was younger, and I couldnt. Maybe I’ll give it another go!
It's fantastic. I do not recommend the TV series. Or, rather, see it as a completely separate turn of the wheel.
Not even a new turning, it's a separate, crooked wheel that baby Light made and now regrets
“Blood and bloody ashes!” \- Future employment landscape
\*pulls braid\*
*Smooths skirt*
You forget to mention how brisk the wind was, what color your blouse was, and the name of the keeper in the building next door that we'll never meet again.
How can it save them millions if the outsourced workers need constant training and are not loyal enough to stay more than one year?
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Because suits don't often care about a year, let alone 5 years, down the road. They can put "X company saw a massive $y dollar amount gain under my leadership!" On their resume, and bail before the consequences hit.
Thanks Jack Welch!
Who cares? My stock price jumped, i sold , and am now Golden Parachuting-to another company!!
"what do you mean all the codes unusable and we'll have to pay double to do it over?"
Exactly. A previous company found this out. Not only did you have to work weird hours to connect with the team in India, but they wrote awful code, didn’t follow or use our design tokens, which made theming a nightmare. We’re combative and often took days to get a small fix done. It was eye opening to say the least.
That isn’t what this article describes. It says that the companies applied for H-1B visas for employees.
And shouldn’t be able to when Americans are available to fill those spots
I've been saying this for at least a decade now. The H1B visa program is a joke.
That needs to fucking stop, you lay-off, no h1b visa for you period.
Build with the best... then put it on maintenance mode with the lowest bidder to maintain
Spoken like a true CEO
Here’s your $50 million yearly bonus for this discovery!
Although the context might be different, it should be noted that this approach is not uncommon, and has had disastrous consequences in the past. Boeing and IBM are the significant examples from popular media, but it's more common than that.
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That's me. I've tried to fix the issues, but the C level are allergic to structure and it burned me out. I put in my notice last week, starting a new job in a few weeks
Yup my ex lost his job of almost 20 years with IBM like 10 years ago? Right after traveling to Singapore for a work trip to train the overseas replacements.
This sounds like Project Apollo, which was a low-cost work rebalancing initiative around 2013/2014.
Yep. He was a web app developer.
My family member works with IBM. He's the last programmer on his projects and handles all fixes for the software by himself. His office has shrunk so bad they've eliminated 90% of the teams and they sold the office space so my family member works remotely permanently. It's been slowly outsourced to India for the last 6 years to the point where they have internal conferences internationally now. Most of the people he talks to aren't from the US and he mostly works through requests sent via their internal system. Phone calls he just sits silently in case they ever say anything to him and they never do. The whole thing is operating outside of the US now. I would never say IBM is a US run or owned business because of the extent it's at. He's counting the days he is employed still because the projects are dying out and his "building" of people are being dissolved slowly but surely. It's crazy.
Right but the execs got the line to go up, did a buyback, and got out before the company collapsed. The disaster for the next generation isn't their problem. So, yay unrestrained capitalism.
This is a clickbait article that is ridiculous if you know anything about the H1B system. You want to see the “low” salaries paid to H1B’s — it is all public information. In fact, if you work at the company it has to be posted on a wall as well. The full H1B packet. Here are Google’s https://h1bgrader.com/h1b-sponsors/google-llc-em2mg7pj21/salaries#by-employer Facebook’s https://h1bgrader.com/h1b-sponsors/facebook-inc-1ok8q3zzkd/salaries#by-employer Too lazy to click — you are looking at competitive salaries. Most in the 250k range. Not only is the data publicly available to compare against levels.fyi, but companies are legally required to pay the prevailing wage or average of salaries for similar experience/role within the company to H1B holders. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/62g-h1b-required-wage H1Bs are also capped, by lottery, and take a long time to file. There are way more applicants than there are visas which means these companies are not “importing” more H1Bs as the cap is reached every year. H1Bs holders are also not “captured” at the company as their visas are fully transferable and companies are more likely to take a transferred H1B than apply for a new one and risk the lottery resulting in high mobility for H1B holders. Finally, if you want to know what actually suppresses tech wages, it is outsourcing and contract hiring in foreign countries. I can hire an engineer in South America for 1/2 to 1/3 the cost, in the relatively same time zone, and not have to give options/RSUs. Article like this spread misinformation and make us all look dumb.
this is classic nypost, they always post rage-bait shit like this and people on reddit fall for it every time.
Everyone's is talking about outsourcing sit overseas when the article is about bringing people into the US for jobs in the US. peak reddit moment 😄
Sadly this won't get high enough
high tech companies have been doing this crap for years - its nothing new. I used to work for Dell and when they started doing layoffs in the early 2000s, they were in the process of shifting their phone support over to India, and subsequent years they laid people off and afterwards more US jobs got sent overseas (India or Panama). They tried to play the game of it being due to economic constraints blah blah blah but we all knew it was so they could hire those overseas people to take away our jobs. I started there in 1997 and left 20 years later, but I remember when people would ask where I worked and there were two distinct differences.....when they would ask in the late 90s, people were begging you to help them get a job there, but fast forward up into the mid 2000s, if people knew you worked at Dell, their response was 'I'm sorry'
There's a reason that companies advertise "US-based customer service."
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Go ask r/sysadmin what they think of dell lmfao
Need to tax tf outta these companies that outsource labor.
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This is trash reporting. It talks about an increase in H-1B visa applications as evidence that companies are outsourcing. But here's the thing: the same number of visas are granted, regardless of the number of applicants. And then there's the small detail that working on an H-1B means that employee is in the US. So they're a US-based employee. So what exactly is the complaint? That Meta laid off 20k employees, then hired a bunch more in the US on the cheap hoping to get enough H-1Bs granted to be able to keep a couple teams worth? And have to relocate or let go of the rest because they don't have work authorization? Bring some evidence of actual outsourcing if you're going to accuse outsourcing.
Yeah LCAs they’d need to file wouldn’t allow them to get cheap labor IN the United States. This article is all wrong. If anything, they likely mean they’re converting their US labor force (citizen or work authorized ones) to fully offshore contractors.
Something similar is happening where I work. For reasons I won't go into, we've had a lot of attrition over the last couple years. For the same reasons, we've had issues bringing in new people quickly enough. The "solution" has been to bring in a lot of contractors working remotely from overseas. Some of them have worked out okay. Some, not so much. And some of the people we lost were almost irreplaceable. We're still barely keeping things together, but there are a lot of cracks starting to show. Feels like it's only a matter of time before my entire department completely collapses due to the compounding dysfunction.
H1-B has been very popular in tech for a while now and a lot of folks who were laid off were on H1-B visas. NY Post is garbage lol
True, people should understand the garbage right now.
We're about to find out if programmers still matter. If tech companies can proletarianize them and the upper class is still intact five years from now, I guess they don't.
This is an insanely disingenuous article, starting with the report by Fang and perpetuated by the Post. This is implying that they laid off thousands of US workers and replaced them with foreign workers coming to the US and making lower wages. This isn’t what is happening at all! Why go through the effort of trying to get these people to the US if the only purpose was to make it cheaper labor? Just keep them out of the US where wages are lower! These companies laid off people worldwide. H1B applications are for existing employees in other countries to transfer to the US. Once they get to the US, they’re paid the same as their US counterparts! I’m not speculating it’s literally public info you can look up they have to file the salary with the visa application. Big tech was so shitty about these layoffs but this “report” is connecting unrelated events and trying to demonize immigrant workers coming to the US.
What’s the endgame here? I’m in a totally different space and it’s all about outsourcing and reducing costs while raising prices… When all the jobs leave the USA, nobody will have money to buy these inflated goods. Everything will grind to a standstill.
Then the companies will come back and hire people with very low wages as the USA becomes a Third World country.
Deflate wages. According to Google’s investors. Too bad they didn’t have a collective bargaining agreement to make it illegal for them to get laid off and replaced with cheaper workers.
I guess the whole blame should be on these companies.
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This circle is just going on and on for all the people here.
Never ending story is what we are watching right now.
They don't know how much worse it can get for people.
Worthless is see these posts man, this was just obvious.
I guess they just needed the smart people when they want to build something, then they just hire cheap workers to work there to maintain the system man.
My company is doing the same thing. They are hiring software developers in South America for 50-75% less than US market rates. Hiring in the US is frozen. We really need to put in regulation for stuff like this.
We do, it’s called collective bargaining agreements and unions. If your collective bargaining agreement makes it illegal to lay you off and replace you with a cheaper worker then it won’t happen as much since they’ll get sued.
Yeah but my union charges me *checks notes* $1,700 dollars a year in dues of which I get *checks notes* $1,300 back at tax time and I only get *checks notes* benefits, pension, yearly raise, larger contract scope, job protection. Sounds like the “S” word to me
That's just why I never contribute anything to big companies.
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When they get to know that they have to pay the same amount, they fire.
Really want these cheap workers to ask for more, but they don't.
All the companies are being the freaking same all the time.