Comment by makmanalp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by makmanalp | Hacker News Reader

I think this would be less of a story if the replacements were not Indian.

Employees get fired all the time for being too senior, too wise to their rights and too expensive (even if that is not the stated reason), and in large companies entire divisions are often laid off and replaced by managed service providers and consultants that'll do the job for less.

This is just the horrible reality of employment in the US - the H-1B system has many faults, but that's not the cause here, the cause is the company itself.

You can see this in every field - employer loyalty is at a low, full time workers get hired on a part time basis, workers get rotated regularly, people get fired so they don't qualify for seniority, hours get shifted to comply with the bare minimum of labor law, etc.

Disclaimer: I'm on an H-1B.

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edit: Clarification: My first sentence should have been "if the replacements were American". Prevailing opinion seems to be that Americans losing jobs to foreigners is unfair, but no one bats an eyelid at Americans losing jobs to Americans - it's just capitalism.

I wasn't really going for the blatant racism angle, even though there is quite a bit of that too at the lower levels of the discourse pile.

You know, I disagree with that. I think the reason this is a big story is that the H1B was sold to congress, and the American people, as a solution to a severe crisis in the supply of software developers and other tech workers.

For instance, Netflix fires people all the time. They also hire H1B workers, at (you can see the data) a very high rate. Now, there are still arguments to be made about worker freedom and mobility, suppressing salaries at the high end, an excessive tolerance of false negatives in hiring… but ultimately, using H1B workers for $250K+ jobs isn't going to get your average American riled up.

Using these visas to specifically fire and replace US Citizens, and withholding a small severance unless the US citizens train their replacements, goes deeply against the way this visa was sold, which is a way to bring in more high level talent that is essentially unavailable in the US (ie., purely additive with synergies with existing workforce, not at all a replacement).

> if the replacements were not Indian.

You hit the nail on the head. Would there be these many complaints if the replacements were Canadians? Nope. Would there be many complaints if the replacements were English? Nope. Would there be many complaints if the replacements were Aussies. Nope.

Would there be many complaints if the replacements were Mexicans? Yes.

What's common between Mexico and India? What ever could it be?

Low wages?

Your question is obviously trying to bait people into being racist. However, there is another thread. People from Canada, England, and Australia probably wouldn't be willing to accept far less in terms of salary. The standard of living in those countries is fairly high. So one wouldn't really be able to make the argument that an employer brought in a bunch of Canadians to drive down the wages of Americans.

Seriously? How about their average wage?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_wa...

To save you the trouble of clicking on the link:

  US: $3,263
  Canada: $2,724
  Australian: $2,610
  UK: $3,065
  Mexico: $609
  India: $295

For your first part, immigrants displacing jobs is a news story pretty much anytime it's not western European. These stories are common place with Hispanics, eastern Euros, Middle Easterners, Africans, etc. The difference here is the perverse corporate (read: institutionalized) incentives to benefit from displacing those jobs.

Your second parts about the reality of employment in the US is dead on. There are some companies (or at least some organizations) that benefit from grooming employees and keeping them engaged, but most pretenses of commitment are embarrassing lies. Reid Hoffman's spiel about "tours of duty" strikes me as the most suitable framework for the current corporate job market.

Whether Disney's actions mirror those of other companies acting badly (they do), they clearly violated the purpose of the H1B program.

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