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.

I work at a company which was a victim of a hostile take-over from the VC. An Indian-American who is part of the VC firm has taken the reigns as CEO and ejected the founder.

The first thing he did was lay-off dozens of technologists and outsource their roles to India. The software fell apart, the people sucked (I was in charge of managing a few, and it was in general an awful experience), and the customers started leaving in droves. Everything about our highly custom software requires rapid responses to customers. It's impossible when you have people, no matter what their skill level, 12 time-zones away.

The CEO back-pedaled, and brought Americans back on. Suddenly, the customers are coming back, and we are growing again. We were always profitable, but he doesn't like the margins. So now he has again tried the outsourcing strategy, but decided to open an office directly in Pune and have direct hires.

The customers are already, once again, suffering. A competitor who does zero out-sourcing is eating our lunch with new customers. (if not for a strict non-compete, I'd jump ship to them in a heart-beat.)

I'm leaving the company, because it sucks working for a CEO who is a poor leader and not creative enough to find ways to make money other than simply cutting costs. I've been here less than a year and have single-handedly built two pieces of new software that are in production with customers. It's been hard, because all of the knowledge has left. The people in India are completely disconnected from the customers.

Outsourcing makes sense to some degree if a company has a core job other than software, and IT is an employee facing role rather than customer facing, but only if it's a somewhat plug and play job that doesn't require lots of domain knowledge.

If you're a software company, and you want to compete, good luck.

My recommendation to anyone on this list:

If you find out that a potential employer outsources, know that this is a sign of someone who sacrifices employee and/or customer happiness to increase profits. This is also reflective of a company that doesn't know how to creatively boost profits in value-add ways.

My CEO has deluded himself into thinking he is adding value, because he can increase the number of technologists for each customer.

Perhaps most comical about the whole thing is that we are a small company with 50 employees, and there are more executives than US based technologists now. I'm looking forward to giving my 2 weeks notice, but not happy about what the impact is going to be on my customers.

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 Disney IT workers.

If you look at the corporate level: Disney didn't hire any H1-B workers as part of the restructuring, ergo Disney didn't replace existing jobs with H1-B workers. The contracting firm didn't fire anyone, ergo the contracting firm didn't replace existing jobs with H1-B workers. But apparently nobody is accountable for the overall effect.

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.

Yes; in a way it's laundering by placing a 3rd party in between to achieve the outcome, but the contracting shop could not complete or offer such savings without leveraging the H1-B system. Remember you can't replace employees with contractors, and outsourcing is suppose to be taking your service and transitioning it to specialized experts, so leveraging outsourcing to do layoffs, to cheap staff new to the field and training them is walking a line. Also instead of repositioning your staff into the new 70+ positions, forcing them to leave then re-submit is poor leadership, and it forced them to renegotiate new lower salaries.

>>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?

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 to control the flow of immigration for certain jobs? Simply raise or lower the thresholds.

I want to live in a country based on merit based principals that attracts the smartest and most hardworking people from around the world and to provide them the opportunities to start their businesses here.

I don't want to live in a country that schemes with immigration lawyers to rig a system that screws over foreigners and citizens alike for the benefit consulting firms that like to exploit workers.

We all lose when we allow class based systems to fester in our society.

> 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.

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'.

Are you on an E-3 too? Your scenario sounds identical to mine.

Yup.