Disney Laid off 250 employees and replacing them with Indian H1-B Visa workers

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06/03/2015 22:54

Subject: Re:Disney Laid off 250 employees and replacing them with Indian H1-B Visa workers

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Anonymous

Anonymous wrote:IT person here. It goes like this: in IT there are the jobs that require a lot of creativity and a very high skillset, like designing new software.

Then there's the drudgery, like modifying the system that generates monthly bills to put in some new promotion dreamed up by the marketing department. Or the person who checks that the data backups ran OK yesterday. Or the guy who works the graveyard shift because someone needs to be there in case a server goes down.

American IT grads generally get the better jobs, not the drudgery. Not only do they understand business needs better (to design good software to match it), but US universities are generally better than foreign universities at teaching the really high-end stuff. Meanwhile, someone needs to do the IT drudgery jobs -- enter H-1Bs.

The thing to realize here is there is a major shortage of IT talent at both levels. Heard of people graduating university here with a computer science degree and being unemployed? It's virtually unheard of. All my friends at IT firms have enormous trouble hiring good people. All the software developers I know in this area all earn six-figure salaries, typically in the $150-200k range.

Are IT jobs going away, so that the shortage won't be an issue? Nope. If anything, it's going to get worse because our world relies more and more on computers, and I don't see that changing in our lifetimes.

At my company, we use US-based people for software design and programming (and pay a pretty penny for them), then non-US people for the drudgework, like restoring data from a backup and so on.

This is how it works. there is maybe 1% development jobs that need top notch talent. Even at microsoft, only a small subset of development jobs require top talent. Most development jobs do not need specialized talent and the companies want workers that are cheap and work 80 hours a week. H1B fulfills this.

There is no shortage of it workers. If there were salaries would be decreasing. Java developers were 90 to 120 per hour in 1999/2000/2001, now they are 50 to 70$ for same skill level. How does the price go down if there is a real shortage? It would go up.

In contrast, Salzman concluded in a paper released last year by the liberal Economic Policy Institute, real IT wages are about the same as they were in 1999. Further, he and his co-authors found, only half of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) college graduates each year get hired into STEM jobs. “We don’t dispute the fact at all that Facebook (FB) and Microsoft (MSFT) would like to have more, cheaper workers,” says Salzman’s co-author Daniel Kuehn, now a research associate at the Urban Institute. “But that doesn’t constitute a shortage.”