> "In late November, this former employee received his annual performance review, which he provided to The New York Times. His supervisor, who was not aware the man was scheduled for layoff, wrote that because of his superior skills and “outstanding” work, he had saved the company thousands of dollars. The supervisor added that he was looking forward to another highly productive year of having the employee on the team. The employee got a raise. His severance pay had to be recalculated to include it."<p>That's absolutely horrible. Not only is it a case of left hand not talking to right hand, it almost seems cruel to review someone in the position of being laid off so highly that it warrants a raise. Nobody stopped to consider "maybe we should keep this employee around?" It's disheartening.
> “It was so humiliating to train somebody else to take over your job. I still can’t grasp it.”<p>Indeed, that sounds terrible. I haven't been in that (exceptionally difficult) situation, but I wonder why the laid off employees consented to this? I wouldn't be in any rush to help the company lay me off and transition to a cheaper replacement. Was their severance package dependent on this?
I was in the same position when I worked at H-P. They outsourced our team to Costa Rica and we spent our last few months training our replacements remotely. The last few weeks we just sat around, watched them work, and answered their questions.<p>It was a weird position to be for several reasons, but the weirdest part was getting to know lovely people who were excited about their new job in Costa Rica and feeling the perverse incentive to train them poorly so my job might last a couple more months. It's not something I ever hope to relive.
Isn't this just straight-up illegal?<p>The H1B program disallows hiring foreign workers and paying them less than the equivalent rate for US workers. While there may be some debate about whether tech companies find ways to skirt the law, "we are laying off US workers to save money and replacing them with H1B workers" seems to flagrantly violate the law. No?
I know someone who has consulted for Disney IT a few years ago. Specifically in engineering management. They did not have a very high opinion of the culture and the overall productivity of the organization was abysmal; he considered it a "Dilbert-land" place to work. So in that vein they seem to be doing something completely predictable.<p>If someone comes to me to outsource me, I would totally help them do it because they will end up with exactly what they deserve. Outsourcing software engineering is the last refuge of incompetent management.
I would like to see H1-B visas awarded to individuals rather than the company/position. It really distorts the job market to have people tied to a particular position at a particular company. If H1-B visa holders could look for other employment after say 6 months then the market could set the fair wage implicitly rather than trying to get the government to do explicitly which they are pretty poor at doing in my experience.<p>The American immigration system has a lot of issues with it but I think this could be a relatively easy fix. I've worked with a lot of H1-B employees and in general I think the United States is really lucky to have such talented people willing to relocate and live in the US.
This is the sort of thing that makes me very sympathetic to unions. Imagine if the entire disney IT workforce stood up at once and said "ok, we all leave, now." What would happen to Disney's IT systems?<p>This is almost a perfect example of divide-and-conquer, where a united and powerful single actor (a corporation) picks off workers one by one.<p>I'm pretty sure, at this point, that IT workers will never unionize. I'd say that people who see the value in a union will probably just go into other fields (like nursing, where unions have actually successfully threatened strikes over exactly this issue).
This is why I say that the floor for H1-B should be 5X the minimum wage, or 10x the poverty level and a 20% employer tax on top of that. Then there would be a lot less abuse.<p>If you really cannot find someone domestically to fill a role, there's no reason you should be paying less for such rare skills.
I know foreign workers are a controversial topic in the software/tech industry...but intrinsically does it matter the replacement worker was foreign? In other words, would there be less controversy if the worker was replaced with a lower paid American, or what if the foreign worker was paid more (it appears opponents of foreign workers might take greater issue if the foreign worker was paid more than the American-counterpart).<p>I understand the general claim/controversy is that American workers are laid-off and replaced with foreign workers who are paid less...lowering the wages for American workers across the board. But there does not seem to be evidence of that in this instance, just a "they took our jobs" attitude that the foreign worker. Obviously there is a separate issue, in that it appears the employer seems to have expressly stated that the worker's position was being eliminated, but does not appear to be accurate, I am just curious why focus on the <i>foreign</i> aspect.
The truth is that the demand for technologists across all industries is so high right now that an increase in H1B visa quota brought very little impact to the overall supply demand in the current job market. Look around, is it any easier to high developers now?<p>What's sad about it though, is that, given the reputation of these out-sourcing companies such as Infosys, I am not too confident in the qualification of the tech people they imported. Worse, these companies are so good taking advantage of the loopholes in the H1B application process that they actually hurt the chance of people with really qualifications.
To me, this doesn't look as horrible as the article makes it out to be.<p>I get a ~90 day notice that my job is ending, during which time I continue to work the same hours and have time to apply to other positions inside and outside of Disney.<p>After that, if I don't have a job w/in Disney and separation occurs I get 10% of my annual salary. That's 5.2 weeks severance.<p>Am I missing something in the numbers?<p>There is certainly an emotional aspect to "training your replacements", but it does seem like Disney is trying to do right by employees and shareholders at the same time. Better balancing act than I've seen at most places.
As an Indian and an H1B myself who is compensated decently (1.8 times prevailing wage) -- I hate these companies since they lead to us being stigmatised as a group. I'm sure my coworkers are going to read this article today and point at me and say "Ugh, there's my H1B replacement.", even though I'm like one of two H1Bs at x00 employee company.<p>Ultimately, this leads back to the fact that the US has a large number of laws which are not enforced in reality. If these companies are breaking the law so badly (and they probably are, the top 7 or so companies using H1B are Infosys and other outsourcing firms) -- why don't employees go ahead and sue them? They are (presumably) incorporated in the US after all, it's not like they are untouchable.<p>This is also an excellent case for H1B reform. If a green card was a necessary condition of employing an H1B, these tech companies would have a much harder time retaining their lower paid employees, and the cost of "outsourcing in the US" as it were, would be prohibitive.
So many things wrong about this move by Disney. Terrible to see Julian Castro pushing for H1B increase. I hope the technology sector worker takes heed. Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and all corporations are out to keep wages low using whatever legal means possible, even illegal as the Steve Jobs/Eric Schmidt agreements show. $100K+ salaries is too much for the 1% and their investors to sustain so they'll bring in the foreign workers through these visas to replace 40+ year-old tech workers (age discrimination?). The federal government doesn't care. It is too busy trying to work out the TPP which no doubt, is another win for these corporations. The tech sector workers need to unite to maintain the gains they have made. The last time Americans had access to this quality of life was working for manufacturing plants. Unions helped maintain that lifestyle until over time, the 1% removed those protections and unions started dying off. Once again, we have an opportunity to maintain a high quality of life but we need to unionize. If you hate the word union, then use community. We need to form a community of tech sector workers to protect our gains. We cannot let these corporations get away with this without us making a move. Show or not, Gawker writers know that bloggers are easily replaceable what with all the English majors American universities are churning out each year. To protect their jobs, it makes sense to unionize. There's no reason why a 30-something year-old writer should live with the fear that any day, a fresh out of college individual can easily take over.
I for one won't be taking the family to Disney after reading this article, brutal. How do you measure how happy people are in your theme parks if they're on the street? Voice your concerns with your wallets and with local politicians. This is wrong on so many levels.
The exact thing happened in Canada a while ago with RBC. <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/rbc-replaces-canadian-staff-with-foreign-workers-1.1315008" rel="nofollow">http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/rbc-replaces-...</a><p>Kicked off a major firestorm here, which ultimately lead the government to change the way the foreign worker program functions.
I would have given two weeks notice as soon as they tried to pull this off. If they escorted me out the door as soon as I gave notice, so be it. In America, the land of "employment at will", the only way to stack the deck in your favor is to have "fuck you" money in the bank. This counters the effects of employment at will and turns it to your advantage.
I would love to know Paul Graham's reaction to this story. H1Bs are a f-ing scam. There is <i>no</i> shortage of tech talent, there is a shortage of companies willing to pay for said talent.<p>And stop talking about H1B holders as "immigrants". They are not. H1B is a non-immigrant visa.
The writer could have done a better job concealing their sources — the people who spoke on the condition of anonymity could still be easily identified by the information (age, skills) listed in the article.
I went through a round of this (elsewhere). Not to focus specifically on India, but in my case I was asked to train two Indians. Over the course of a couple of months, they proved unable to effectively do the job. But, budget and power relationships often win out over effectively doing the job. Especially in a larger company, where any blame for resulting declines in productivity or outright failure, gets spread around to the point where those responsible for the decision are not adversely affected.<p>I also saw the latter with some of my domestic colleagues. For a while, I would step into the gap and ensure that things were corrected.<p>With the benefit of experience and hindsight, I would do things differently. Learn to pro-actively walk away from such circunstances, as soon as you can. The longer you stay, the more you contribute to the success of those making such policy and the more you risk trapping yourself in the results.
Isn't this at will employment? Companies can ask any employee to take the trash out or even clean up the kitchen(barring physical disabilities and strength). If you refuse they can fire you, same as you can quit anytime for any reason or no reason.
A major problem I see with H1-B workers is that they are basically held captive by their employment. If they are let go they'll either have to find another H1-B role at a different company or they will be sent back to their home country. This control companies have over them basically will cause a foreigner to work harder, accept less pay, and also refrain from making complaints against their employers. It's no wonder that US companies like Disney and others abuse the H1-B system.
I think this is now common. I did the same thing to our replacement after I was laid off. My last 2 weeks with the company was in India doing a face to face training/handover.
I find mainstream hostility towards skilled workers really interesting because if you had replaced this group of people with any other group of people like women or other ethnic minorities, you can really start to see how outright hostile people are.<p>If you actually take the maxim of fairness and equality seriously, skilled foreign workers are by far the most unfairly discriminated group of people. Much more than blacks and women who are supposedly discriminated against in tech. Unlike women and blacks, skilled foreign workers actually have the government with arbitrary set of standards to determine who can work and who can't.<p>Another part of the immigration story that's fascinating is illegal immigrant stories are almost always come with some sob story to make readers feel empathic towards them. Such stories are almost never told with skilled immigrants.
I think this would be less of a story if the replacements were not Indian.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Disclaimer: I'm on an H-1B.<p>-----<p>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.<p>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.
Am I the only one, who feels like there is something odd about this article?<p><i>250 Disney employees were told [...] that they would be laid off.</i><p>Is it really big news that 250 were laid off?<p><i>Over the next three months, some Disney employees were required to train their replacements to do the jobs they had lost.</i><p>What does it mean to train your replacement for a software engineer? Did they teach them how to write code? 3 Month is not enough time for that. Did they explain how their existing code works? That would be quite a normal thing, but 3 month is really long for that.<p><i>"because of his superior skills and “outstanding” work, he had saved the company thousands of dollars"</i><p>The average software engineer should be able to save a company hundreds of thousands of dollars, not thousands, provided they are given the right resources. If he only saved the company thousands of dollars and did not generate new revenue, that explains why he was laid off.<p><i>His résumé lists a top-level skill certification and command of seven operating systems, 15 program languages [...] “I was forced into early retirement,”</i><p>If he was really so skilled, why did he not find another position at Disney or elsewhere?
This has been going on since the dot com bust. My friend had to train his offshore replacement at his company. He did things like train them saying one thing in the morning, and then say the exact opposite thing in the afternoon. The replacement workers would mention the conflict that but he would insist they were wrong. This went on for a month or so until the training period was over.
The real problem is that workers negotiate salaries as part of their H1B.<p>A better system would allocate H1Bs to the most talented foreign workers and let them choose their own employer here in the US, negotiating a market rate salary if they so choose.
The article fails to mention that for the H1-B application a Labor Condition Application(LCA) has to be filed, which explicitly states that the employer will<p>"Pay the nonimmigrant workers at least the local prevailing wage or the employer's actual wage, whichever is higher; pay for non-productive time in certain circumstances; and offer benefits on the same basis as for U.S. workers;"[1]<p>Full disclosure: I'm on a H1-B and paid way more than the local prevailing wage for my position.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.dol.gov/compliance/guide/h1b.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.dol.gov/compliance/guide/h1b.htm</a>
I kind of have the attitude (and have exercised this in the past) that if my employer oversteps the bounds in such a ridiculous way, the contract becomes meaningless at that point.<p>It is, at the end of the day, paper with words on it.<p>The idea that this could affect future prospects is true, but only in a sort of vague way that doesn't really matter.<p>Imagine that a company works you to death and eventually you just can't turn up any more. Does it make sense to worry about references then? Do you ever want to work for such a company again, or even for someone who respects them? I wouldn't.
The H1B program is very clearly NOT meant to be a mechanism for importing workers to swap directly into existing jobs at lower pay. This is the crucial point of the article and of Disney's wrongdoing.
"A limited number of the visas, 85,000, are granted each year, and they are in hot demand. Technology giants like Microsoft, Facebook and Google repeatedly press for increases in the annual quotas, saying there are not enough Americans with the skills they need."<p>If Microsoft, Facebook, and Google are speaking the truth then wouldn't they be keen to pick up the talent being dismissed by Disney and Edison? Understand that someone monitoring ticketing tech at Disney World is different from a mobile software engineer but there must be some overlap.
10% severance of annual pay seems to be very low for an employee of 10 years. Is this normal in America? In Europe, in my experience, your severance gets larger the longer you have worked there. So for 10 years, something like 5-6months+ of pay would be what I'd expect.<p>*Edit - According to the UK Government, the statutory redundancy (severance) pay in the UK for a worker of 10 years would be 15 weeks pay at a maximum of £464 which equates to about £7k $10k. Obviously this is only the statutory level.
> Disney executives said that the layoffs were part of a reorganization, and that the company opened more positions than it eliminated.<p>And do all those positions collectively get paid more than what they used to? To a certain extent, I imagine you can hire a greater number of cheap workers who collectively can muddle through the job, but still cost less.<p>There's something disturbing about the "job creation!" moral trump card, when the same act is destroying or at least hurting other lives and careers.
It sounds terrible, but what's much, much worse is living in India. Sanitation is dreadful, salaries are low, and a corrupt bureaucracy ensures things stay that way.<p>So the NYT is opposing a practice which makes very poor people much better off, and makes much wealthier people a little worse off - unlike their Indian counterparts, they do not need to jump through hoops to get a visa and work at some other job - all on the basis of where those people were born. Classy.
In a similar vein, quite often I've seen manager asking people to train higher paid newcomers, while performing as fast as usual with no added bonuses.
I feel like this article is a bit sensationalist and lacks the other side of the story. I work for Disney IT, in the actual building pictured in the article. The layoffs in question were the result of a restructuring where many departments were shuffled and changed with an emphasis on new development work. Many employee's were reassigned and transferred, along with those employee's whose roles were removed. My understanding was that the purpose of the restructuring was to put more new development in the hands of actual company employee's with ongoing sustainment work shifted to the hands of contracted employee's. Many of the roles that were shifted to contractors included responsibilities for 24/7 call support and working general trouble tickets.<p>I cant really speak to the visa status of the contracted employees (I know that seems to be a lot of the focus of the comments in this thread). I do know that many of the people that were impacted by this restructuring found roles in other parts of the organization (which was mentioned in the article), many doing active development work on other projects. These employees included a wide range of ages and experience levels, so I really don't buy that agism was part of this decision. I do not know what those employees ended up making in the new roles, but I do have years of experience with the HR policies of this company and would be very surprised if those employees weren't making at or near their previous levels. With that said I really don't feel there were significant financial gains to be had by shifting those 250 roles around. I recently saw some internal figures showing that the number of non-contractor Disney IT employees has actually gone up slightly in the past year. This could be creative accounting statistics or it could be that there truly is not some scheme to replace knowledgeable local employees with less knowledgeable out-sourced employees as the article suggests. My experience and gut says the latter is more likely than the former, but that is my own opinion. I wont speculate on the disposition of the employees that are truly displaced and out of a job as a result of this restructuring, but I do feel for them, and hope for the best for them.<p>I've been in my IT role with Disney for only a few years (I have many more years in non-IT roles), but for me, I like the emphasis on actual development, and less on ongoing sustainment. I personally don't feel like my role or those around me are at risk of being replaced by an out-sourced team. I also work closely with some of the "managed services" folks, and appreciate that they will be handling the monitoring and calls in the wee hours while I get to create cool stuff during the day.<p>Disclaimer: I by no means speak for Disney or it's IT department. This is all my personal observation and opinions.
H1Bs are abused at the large companies as well. I work for eBay and the company regularly turns a blind eye to American candidates in favor of hiring an H1B. The company has had high attrition this past year. During one meeting where a consultant met with our team (80% H1Bs), I called out that many of the company culture problems people raise come up from the fact that managers know they can boss around H1Bs without consequence. Many of my co-workers finally chimed in and agreed. It was this unspoken reality that H1B employees will never tell a manager or director that this is a short-sighted technology decision. After the meeting a few came up to me and remarked they were bewildered I understood their predicament. They disagree with many of the things they are asked to do and want to do better for the company, but they are essentially wage slaves trying to stay in America until they can achieve citizenship. Moving to a new company within 5 years starts the whole citizenship cycle over again too, so they are a less mobile workforce.<p>Even on simple things like open floor plans, common working hours, scrum/agile methodologies, when an H1B employee is asked for feedback they will offer no real opinion. It has a large impact on the work culture.<p>Some of my co-workers are great friends. I would love for them to be citizens here, but I cannot help but resent the H1B program to the point where I will now scan companies for how many H1Bs are working there. I want to be a part of a work culture that does not treat its employees like hourly wage slaves. I would prefer they are granted full citizenship so that their lower bargaining rights do not affect mine. Not only do I have H1B friends who feel their d<p>Someone earlier mentioned that Indians get a bad wrap in Silicon Valley. I'll just throw in that even amongst my Indian friends it is a well-accepted fact that there is a pattern of strong in-group preferences among Indians in hiring practices, office politics, and inter-worker relations. Racial/cultural/religious groups that have strong in-group preferences in diverse settings such as large corporations will tend to get a bad rap.<p>Amongst Stanford, IVY, etc friends the common comeback to this conversation is that I should start my own company to avoid being an employee. All agree being an employee is a precarious position in America unless you are at one of the top 3 tech companies, but even for those companies, they only need to retain and keep happy their best workers during the high growth phases. The divide is that amongst my friends who have raised $10-30mm seed rounds, they all came from very wealthy backgrounds to begin with. Middle and lower class Americans friends are pursuing my path as well, building up savings and a personal safety net for first 5-10 years out of college because we see how greatly in debt our parents are. The wealthy love the H1B program because it is completely beneficial for them that America has a wage slave system, and they'll never have to be on the other end of the stick.<p>Outside of engineering, the other roles in companies like eBay that I see where cheap foreign replacement is less of a risk and native Americans are valued are product managers. An MBA is an unspoken prerequisite for that role, and again, I only know of wealthy friends obtaining MBAs. Even a friend who has Harvard MBA stated, "an MBA is worthless, it's basically an extended networking party for rich kids."
But...but..there is currently some mythical god programmer stuck in india that could make investors billions if only we had a more open h1b visa program...<p>Nah these programs are never ever abused in any way shape or form by company management.
In Europe (particularly in Italy) such consulting firms bring workers with business travel visas, keep them working for 3 month and then substitute the whole team with fresh one. The story repeats after 3 month.<p>No H1Bs needed.
This article is framed as a scare-story about visas/immigrants, but what does it really have to do with visas or immigrants? Imagine the workers stayed in India, were trained using videoconferencing and worked remotely. It would be exactly the same situation for the US employees.