<story><title>My Position On The Disney Layoffs</title><url>https://plus.google.com/+KeithBarrett/posts/PWA6BXs7dbS</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>exelius</author><text>I believe the author is simply mistaken that H1-Bs are the problem. H1-Bs are limited enough that they can&amp;#x27;t be responsible for the volume of outsourcing. They also carry salary parity requirements, and while H1-B holders rarely actually make market salary, the savings still aren&amp;#x27;t enough to prompt a wave of outsourcing. There was a problem at one time with H1-Bs, but the H1-B lottery has become so competitive that it&amp;#x27;s not a reliable option for companies to base a business model around anymore. The majority of H1-B recipients these days are foreign nationals who attended American universities, often with masters degrees. Those are the kinds of foreign nationals we want participating in the US economy.&lt;p&gt;The problem today are the L-1 visas, which are relatively unregulated. L-1 visas are for foreign nationals in a management capacity whose companies wish to transfer them to the US. These visas only require that the employer pay the employee&amp;#x27;s living expenses, and the employee receives the normal salary they would make in their home country (!).&lt;p&gt;All of this is fine until you start to stretch the definition of &amp;quot;management&amp;quot;. Which many consulting companies (Tata, Infosys, Cognizant, etc) have started to do -- they can take a person from India who is paid ~$25,000&amp;#x2F;yr (a good engineer&amp;#x27;s salary in India), fly him to the US on an L-1 visa, and charge him out to the client at $100&amp;#x2F;hr. An equivalent US-based contractor rate for the same position would be $125&amp;#x2F;hr and have margins around 10-15%. But the offshoring firms can undercut US-based contractors by 25%, eat all the travel&amp;#x2F;housing expenses, and STILL make well over 100% margins.&lt;p&gt;L-1s are actually the problem. There&amp;#x27;s no salary parity requirement, there&amp;#x27;s no requirement to look for US-based candidates of equivalent positions, just a requirement that the person is &amp;quot;acting in a management capacity&amp;quot; and has worked for the company for at least 1 year. It&amp;#x27;s hard to prove that someone is not &amp;quot;acting in a management capacity&amp;quot; -- many of the companies outright lie on the visa applications. What&amp;#x27;s worse, this type of dishonesty is considered fair game when dealing with corrupt bureaucracies in India or China. But L-1s are fueling the latest wave of offshoring: they allow companies to bring people to the US at offshore prices.</text></item><item><author>ThePhysicist</author><text>&amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;m sharing news about it because this experience has taught me the H-1b Visa program needs to change to protect others in the future.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s surprising to me that Disney was able to replace its local workforce by foreigners via H-1b visas, since I always thought that companies making use of this type of visa were required to prove that they would not be able to find an employee with the required qualifications in the US? Firing an employee to replace him with an H-1b holder seems to completely contradict this requirement.&lt;p&gt;Also, reading the visa requirements it seems that the company would be forced to pay an H-1b employee a salary which is equivalent to that payed to a &amp;quot;normal&amp;quot; employee performing the same function, so there does  not seem to be a huge financial benefit in this either.&lt;p&gt;Can anyone explain this?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>djb_hackernews</author><text>&amp;gt; The majority of H1-B recipients these days are foreign nationals who attended American universities, often with masters degrees. Those are the kinds of foreign nationals we want participating in the US economy.&lt;p&gt;most smart companies that use the H1-B visa program only hire those with masters degrees. This does 2 things:&lt;p&gt;- They can first bring them on as &amp;quot;interns&amp;quot; under the F1 visa, which can be extended quite a bit. They are paid peanuts while the firms weed out the absolute duds.&lt;p&gt;- This avoids the requirements on firms for extra reporting if a certain percentage of their staff are H1-B don&amp;#x27;t have masters degrees.&lt;p&gt;This creates a nice little loophole where smaller colleges have massive massive STEM programs with an insane majority being foreign students. The students get their foot in the door to play the game and the colleges get paid.&lt;p&gt;Take UT Dallas for example: &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;ecs.utdallas.edu&amp;#x2F;academics&amp;#x2F;assessment-docs&amp;#x2F;2014&amp;#x2F;2014%20Fall%20ECS%20Enrollment.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;ecs.utdallas.edu&amp;#x2F;academics&amp;#x2F;assessment-docs&amp;#x2F;2014&amp;#x2F;2014%...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;The CS Masters program is bigger than the CS undergrad program, only 4% of graduating CS undergrads are international, where as 93% of FT CS Masters students are international. That should be odd to anyone.</text></comment>
<story><title>My Position On The Disney Layoffs</title><url>https://plus.google.com/+KeithBarrett/posts/PWA6BXs7dbS</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>exelius</author><text>I believe the author is simply mistaken that H1-Bs are the problem. H1-Bs are limited enough that they can&amp;#x27;t be responsible for the volume of outsourcing. They also carry salary parity requirements, and while H1-B holders rarely actually make market salary, the savings still aren&amp;#x27;t enough to prompt a wave of outsourcing. There was a problem at one time with H1-Bs, but the H1-B lottery has become so competitive that it&amp;#x27;s not a reliable option for companies to base a business model around anymore. The majority of H1-B recipients these days are foreign nationals who attended American universities, often with masters degrees. Those are the kinds of foreign nationals we want participating in the US economy.&lt;p&gt;The problem today are the L-1 visas, which are relatively unregulated. L-1 visas are for foreign nationals in a management capacity whose companies wish to transfer them to the US. These visas only require that the employer pay the employee&amp;#x27;s living expenses, and the employee receives the normal salary they would make in their home country (!).&lt;p&gt;All of this is fine until you start to stretch the definition of &amp;quot;management&amp;quot;. Which many consulting companies (Tata, Infosys, Cognizant, etc) have started to do -- they can take a person from India who is paid ~$25,000&amp;#x2F;yr (a good engineer&amp;#x27;s salary in India), fly him to the US on an L-1 visa, and charge him out to the client at $100&amp;#x2F;hr. An equivalent US-based contractor rate for the same position would be $125&amp;#x2F;hr and have margins around 10-15%. But the offshoring firms can undercut US-based contractors by 25%, eat all the travel&amp;#x2F;housing expenses, and STILL make well over 100% margins.&lt;p&gt;L-1s are actually the problem. There&amp;#x27;s no salary parity requirement, there&amp;#x27;s no requirement to look for US-based candidates of equivalent positions, just a requirement that the person is &amp;quot;acting in a management capacity&amp;quot; and has worked for the company for at least 1 year. It&amp;#x27;s hard to prove that someone is not &amp;quot;acting in a management capacity&amp;quot; -- many of the companies outright lie on the visa applications. What&amp;#x27;s worse, this type of dishonesty is considered fair game when dealing with corrupt bureaucracies in India or China. But L-1s are fueling the latest wave of offshoring: they allow companies to bring people to the US at offshore prices.</text></item><item><author>ThePhysicist</author><text>&amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;m sharing news about it because this experience has taught me the H-1b Visa program needs to change to protect others in the future.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s surprising to me that Disney was able to replace its local workforce by foreigners via H-1b visas, since I always thought that companies making use of this type of visa were required to prove that they would not be able to find an employee with the required qualifications in the US? Firing an employee to replace him with an H-1b holder seems to completely contradict this requirement.&lt;p&gt;Also, reading the visa requirements it seems that the company would be forced to pay an H-1b employee a salary which is equivalent to that payed to a &amp;quot;normal&amp;quot; employee performing the same function, so there does  not seem to be a huge financial benefit in this either.&lt;p&gt;Can anyone explain this?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>drzaiusapelord</author><text>&amp;gt;They also carry salary parity requirements&lt;p&gt;This is easily gamed by creating &amp;quot;new&amp;quot; positions with trivially different responsibilities than the old positions you want to get rid of.  Now you don&amp;#x27;t have an established salary history to work with.  That&amp;#x27;s on top of having H1B&amp;#x27;s by the shorthairs because its so difficult for them to switch jobs, thus the 60+ workweek the domestic workers rightfully balked at is achievable by cost-cutting managers.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s on top of what Disney did, which was just outsource an entire department to a provider, which side-steps all the paltry protections in the H1B program.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;The majority of H1-B recipients these days are foreign nationals who attended American universities, often with masters degrees. Those are the kinds of foreign nationals we want participating in the US economy.&lt;p&gt;Frankly, in IT&amp;#x2F;CS a lot of higher degrees are little more than adult daycare. If you can&amp;#x27;t figure out how to code via a 4 year degree then another 2 ain&amp;#x27;t helping you. Even if Disney got MS holders because their workforce needed MS&amp;#x27;s for some weird reason, which sounds highly questionable to me, some nerds straight out of school aren&amp;#x27;t going to do a good job running operations with zero professional experience and 10 hours of training from the previous guy. Its clear they did this not for better outcomes but for cost savings.&lt;p&gt;Its likely an H1B has an undergrad degree for a foreign university that&amp;#x27;s little more than a diploma mill anyway.&lt;p&gt;Its hilarious that we bemoan the lack of people, especially women, in STEM, when many STEM jobs can be eliminated with the blessing of the federal government via whats essentially bought and paid-for legislation by large companies looking to cut IT costs.  No wonder law school enrollments and finance higher ed degrees have been so high. The smart guys, and women in general apparently, know tech is a ripoff precisely because of shit like H1B&amp;#x27;s stealing their jobs. Lets stop excusing the H1B program. Its designed to take American jobs from Americans and everyone knows it.</text></comment>