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My Position On The Disney Layoffs
91–100 of 148 posts
Re: My Position On The Disney Layoffs
#92Yet another xenophobic article. What if disney hired an American contractor that replaced their old infrastructure with new age docker/cloud/YC-funded stack and were able to save costs by cutting 250 positions replacing them with 50 pure blooded americans (oh wait and another 10 pround "undocumented" immigrants). The reality is that this person is on the wrong side of efficiency argument. And he is just blaming his i…
No. I have no problem with outsourcing, or foreign labor. I've lead such efforts myself. I'm not a xenophobe. I've not in favor of scrapping H-1B Visas. It's easy for you to dismiss it by tossing labels. I'm not even angry or anti-Disney; I'm smart enough to see it for what it is. I've been in IT and a developer for a long time. I've seen it all. I didn't know how badly the H-1B system was being used to create labor forces for the maintenance of services instead of what it's for - bringing in hard to obtain talent, until I encountered it. Jobs are being lost to this, highly talented jobs, by the thousands, and it's not suppose to. It's suppose to augment your staff. Almost overnight 3/4ths of our office building were speaking a different language. Even if you don't see any of it that way; do you really think you'd approve if you had a good review, a raise, and then were told you're being replaced and you have to train your replacement or they're going to keep the severance you're entitled to by corporate policies? I don't think anyone sees that as professional or acceptable.
Re: My Position On The Disney Layoffs
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am having trouble understanding your point and hoping you can clarify it. Disney contracted with this company to perform this action. Isn't Disney responsible for accepting these actions?
Disney doesn't ask questions about how people are procured. From Disney's perspective, they're just hiring a company to take over technical operations and support. Technology is honestly not Disney's core competency, so it makes sense to outsource to someone who can do the same work with a lower cost base because it IS their core competency. They just have to sign a contract with Cognizant/Wipro/Infosys/etc that says…
I was drawing up a reply that makes an analogy to home contractors using undocumented labor. (I won't entertain far-below-market bids because those contractors are certainly using undocumented labor.) But, then I realized that I eat in restaurants that most likely use undocumented labor, so I have no moral high ground on this issue. (sigh...)
Moving away from analogy to Disney contracting with an IT firm like Cognizant, just to draw a name from the list you provided. Cognizant is perfectly well documenting the labor, but they are stretching beyond recognition job definitions to get around the "spirit" of the H1B law.
It would be interesting for the US legal system to have an "...in the spirit of..." requirement in determining violation in these matters rather than strictly a "...conforms to the written letter of..." requirement. It might prevent some of this cat-and-mouse bs.
Re: My Position On The Disney Layoffs
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who's "us"? I don't know you, and I have friends who aren't Americans who have been prevented by immigration policy from taking jobs here that I know they'd have been great at. Why should I care more about you keeping your job--just because we were born in the same politically defined geographic area? But if you need a self-interested explanation: because you don't want to be competing with people who have artificial…
Why should you care? Possibly because you realize that undercutting your countrymen, the people you have to live with now regardless of whether they are employed or not, is something that makes your actual community now a worse place. Call it self interest, but I want to live in a society that is functional and with neighbors that are happy. The alternative is to retreat further and further into an affluent bubble. T…
"Community" is loose term - choosing to limit the boundaries to "your country" is arbitrary. There is an argument to be made that having the people best suited for a job work on it will improve long term economic viability of the product itself and in turn availability of the product to the "community". There is also the risk of losing the best talent to an entity outside this arbitrary definition of community and then get crushed by a superior, competing product/service - where is the economic sense in that?
Re: My Position On The Disney Layoffs
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sadly, none of which says anything about the 70 new jobs and 30,000 jobs total added in the US being non-citizens. New jobs in the US != NOT H1B workers. Skillfully avoiding the topic, but I guess that's why he has that job. And I say this as a non-citizen working in the US.
As reported in the original NYT article, the 70 new Disney IT jobs are actual Disney employees, not the controversial outsourced contractors (though the new Disney employees may or may not include H1-B workers). The eliminated Disney IT jobs were outsourced to a contracting shop. The contracting shop hired H1-B workers to perform the outsourced work. The net overall effect appears to be that H1B workers replaced Disn…
Disney and the contracting firm are both corporations.
Corporations do not exist in free markets. They are a product of nothing but legislative intervention in the free market in the form of the Companies Act (the reformed version of the 1850's) and its descendents around the world. Without this interference in the marketplace, corporations in the modern sense cannot and did not exist.
The only reason this kind of situation can arise is because of the nature of corporate relationships, in which the actions of individuals are hidden behind the collective mask of corporate ownership. Otherwise, it would be, "Jane fired Fred from America and replaced him with Amir from India" and the locus of effect would be undeniable.
It follows from this that the lawmakers who intervened in the free market to create the corporate form of collective organization are--or ought to be--held responsible for the overall effect of corporate behaviour. The likely corrective action, as our Libertarian friends tell us, is further intervention in the free market in the form of regulation on this sort of behaviour.
Re: My Position On The Disney Layoffs
#96"I'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." Anyone who still supports FWD.us and believes that the US doesn't produce enough professionals to satisfy the needs of our businesses is straight up, while they are reading this, actually holding a crack pipe to their mouth.
I believe the US, or any other Western nation, doesn't produce enough professionals to satisfy the needs of our businesses. (Source: I'm a hiring manager.)
I also believe however that this situation is being abused to suppress wages by bringing in underpaid labour in a market that already needs a big upward salary correction to account for the shortage and economic value of these professionals.
Abusing and manipulating the problem out of short term self-interest doesn't mean there isn't a problem. In fact it's a very common pattern. See for instance the war on drugs.
Denial is not a strategy.
Re: My Position On The Disney Layoffs
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sadly, none of which says anything about the 70 new jobs and 30,000 jobs total added in the US being non-citizens. New jobs in the US != NOT H1B workers. Skillfully avoiding the topic, but I guess that's why he has that job. And I say this as a non-citizen working in the US.
>>And I say this as a non-citizen working in the US. If you don't mind answering a question I've had about this process for a while, it'd be great. Does your contract end at some point? Do you have options to stay in the US employed by another company?
As another non-citizen I'll add that I'm a 'full time' employee (in an "at will" state) and not on a contract. My visa expires 2 years from issuance but can be renewed (from an embassy outside the US). Like the H1B, I cannot remain in the US if I lose my employment but also like the H1B I can transfer my visa to a new employer.
I'm on a country specific visa though so my experience may differ from others. Notably, my visa class doesn't have a 'lottery'.
Re: My Position On The Disney Layoffs
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm an at-will employee, sponsored by my employer. I can transfer the visa to a new employer by resubmitting an LCA, but if I lose my job for whatever reason I have ten days to get a new job or I'm out of the country. Now... finding a job, getting an interview, having an offer made, accepting the offer, and getting the paperwork in? Good luck doing that in ten days.
This is the biggest problem with the H1B visa system. It's essentially a system that primarily benefits outsourcing shops by giving them a kind of deportation leverage over their employees. We should remove the sponsorship restriction and simply allow foreign workers who earn a minimum threshold. This is how Singapore does it. It might be 50k. It might be 70k. It might depend on geography and/or a market rate. Want t…
> Want to control the flow of immigration for certain jobs? Simply raise or lower the thresholds.
It bears emphasizing that this would be great for employers- Maximize the labor pool and costs drop.
Incidentally, this is why we are seeing so much effort to get more women into programming. Big companies aren't throwing millions at this because of a moral calling to achieve gender parity- They know that the more (historically, easier negotiating) women who are coding, the more labor costs decrease.
It will be interesting to see how many "SJW"s will still be pushing women into coding when their own salaries start to plummet.
Re: My Position On The Disney Layoffs
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not clear (or arguing the point) about how this is specific to H-1B. Companies routinely lay off older, more expensive workers to get cheaper, younger employees. It's not what companies should do, but they do it all of the time. And then there's this, where apparently Disney cancelled the layoffs: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/us/in-turnabout-disney-... Which I don't see how that's entirely possible given…
Anyone else read the article with the nagging voice saying: "Oh crap, we got caught trying to really bend the H1B program and have irked our main customer base. We'd better say that we are undoing it then put a policy in place to more slowly drive out everyone making more than minimum wage by using bad reviews and implementing impossible goals. No one will notice if we do it slowly."
I saw (or just inferred) damage control. The 'Happiest Place on Earth' can't make headlines for laying people off.
I mean, they still will lay people off, but they'll spin it like they are actually creating tons of jobs and everyone is super duper happy about it.
Re: My Position On The Disney Layoffs
#100"I'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." Anyone who still supports FWD.us and believes that the US doesn't produce enough professionals to satisfy the needs of our businesses is straight up, while they are reading this, actually holding a crack pipe to their mouth.
Protectionism doesn't work. There is wide consensus among economists on comparative advantage [1]. Healthy, non-protectionist immigration policies have been proposed to have similar effects as free trade [2,3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage [2] http://www.economics.uci.edu/files/docs/micro/s07/Peri.pdf [3] http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100008723963904434771045775512...
Any immigration policy short of opening the borders completely is "protectionist".
Just waving the word "protectionism" around is a non-statement that doesn't say anything about what may or may not be wrong wit the current policy.