Pink Slips at Disney. But First, Training Foreign Replacements | Hacker News Reader

Pink Slips at Disney. But First, Training Foreign Replacements

nytimes.com

31 pointsboh15 comments

Previous discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9653389

This type of use of H1-Bs is really frustrating for people that legitimately have developers who have a true need for the visa.

I've hosted FWD.us events, and I've applied for a number of H1-Bs (among other visas). It's hard to advocate for immigration reform when you see abuse like this.

Make it easier for H1-Bs to change jobs and companies will be less compelled to bring underpaid foreign workers.

Yes indeed. I worked with groups of Chinese chemists all on H1Bs. They had to work ridiculous hours and assigned the most mind killing labor. If they made trouble they were told they'd lose their job and it was deportation. Finally the company fired all its non-H1Bs, including me; eventually giving up the pretense and relocating overseas. Where was the department of labor and industry? One of my coworkers contacted them and they wouldn't even return the call. H1Bs are simply licenses for a form of slavery.

Absolutely. You don't have to look far to see h1b sponsors lourding it over their captives heads. Further, if I recall, green card application clock can get reset if you change jobs.. So even if you aren't being abused, you might camp out underpaid at an h1b sponsor till you get that.

This is why I'm EXTREMELY skeptical of companies calling for more H1-B's. I'm all for making the path to citizenship easier but these companies don't give a shit about that (However that's what they ACT like). They want cheap tech workers who they can use to replace their American workers. There isn't a shortage of tech workers, there are a shortage of tech workers that will work for shit. It's outsourcing 2.0.

The other discussion thread is talking a lot about the humiliation of having to train your lower-cost foreign replacements, all mostly from India.

So my first thought is rebellion. I wonder if there's some cultural blind spots that the trainers could exploit? It'd be the social equivalent of leaving a timebomb in the software. Don't explain how to weigh the options of which system to take down? Make the deployment system more obtuse? Make all of the hard decisions for them during those three months, so even though the trainees have been "doing the job", they haven't been exposed to any of the hard decision tradeoffs that were made?

I imagine that it would be hard for management to spot this kind of subversion.

I understand that this is almost par for the course in corporate America (and certainly elsewhere) but it's always a bit more striking when it involves a company whose business is selling fun and entertainment.

I mean...Marvel movies! New Star Wars movies! Pixar movies! All of the cartoons we loved as kids!

But yeah, their damage to U.S. copyright law and stuff like this always makes for a quick reminder that even when your brand means "fun!" it's still based in the calculating world of profits and shareholders.

I wish I could think of a good way to produce incentives that would negatively affect Disney; but Disney isn't the one doing this hiring its Infosys. So although Disney is reaping the benefits of Infosys's cheap labor; it is Infosys who is using the H1-Bs. The added level of indirection makes it more difficult in my mind to come up with a sane way to disincentivize this behavior.

We have to trace the corporate call stack to find our point of blame.

I feel the article doesn't really capture the whole story. (My comment in the other thread)... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9653389#9660767

What does this same scenario look like in 30 years?

Sorry to have to let you go, but please continue to perform your tasks so that your roboplacement can learn your function?

Imagine, if you will, that there was a law saying that we could only grow 7,500 androids per year, and then only to do jobs we couldn't do with humans.

Then companies play games and replace existing teams with androids, using up 7,000 of the available slots. The net result would be a shortage of androids for one-way space exploration and the other original intended purposes.

This is the situation today. We have a rapidly growing need for software engineers in startups, and some people say that we need more visas for companies that are actually creating new jobs and growing our economy.

But it's very hard for startups to get H1Bs when companies abuse the program for replacing existing workers.

I'm not saying that companies shouldn't be able to replace existing workers with immigrants, but if that's what we want, we should say so and loosen immigration policies in general.

As it stands, this behaviour is essentially Disney stealing slots from startups.

This is actually a (very) small plot point at the beginning of the book 'Sparrow' by Mary Doria Russell. A technician shadows you for an amount of time, until he/she feels they know exactly how your job gets done. Then they go off and teach an AI to do it.

It's roughly the underlying tension in Vonnegut's "Player Piano" as well.

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