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Adam Davidson at The New York Times has a story debunking the myth of the job-stealing immigrant:
When I was growing up in the 1980s, I watched my grandfather — my dad’s stepdad — struggle with his own prejudice. He was a blue-collar World War II veteran who loved his family above all things and was constantly afraid for them. He carried a gun and, like many men of his generation, saw threats in people he didn’t understand: African-Americans, independent women, gays. By the time he died, 10 years ago, he had softened. He stopped using racist and homophobic slurs; he even hugged my gay cousin. But there was one view he wasn’t going to change. He had no time for Hispanics, he told us, and he wasn’t backing down. After all, this wasn’t a matter of bigotry. It was plain economics. These immigrants were stealing jobs from “Americans.”
I’ve been thinking about my grandfather lately, because there are signs that 2015 could bring about the beginning of a truce — or at least a reconfiguration — in the politics of immigration. Several of the potential Republican presidential candidates, most notably Jeb Bush, have expressed pro-immigration views. Even self-identified Tea Party Republicans respond three to two in favor of a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Every other group — Republicans in general, independents and especially Democrats — is largely pro-immigrant. According to Pew, roughly as many people (18 percent of Americans) believed in 2010 that President Obama was a Muslim as believe today that undocumented immigrants should be expelled from the United States. Of course, that 18 percent can make a lot of noise. But for everyone else, immigration seems to be going the way of same-sex marriage, marijuana and the mohawk — it’s something that a handful of people freak out about but that the rest of us have long since come to accept.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Justin Case on Saturday March 28 2015, @08:27PM
When I go to the grocery store and see three different brands of peanut butter on the shelf, I like having the freedom to choose the least expensive one. So I understand when my employer wants that same freedom.
Furthermore I think everyone should have the right to live in whatever country they choose, as long as they obey that country's laws.
So it is hard to reconcile my political views with my personal experience. Back in the late 1990s when the web was really starting to catch on, I worked for a large employer who had maybe 100 web developers. Mind you this was back when web developers wrote well designed server-based code, instead of dragging and dropping candy bars and cartoons like they do now.
We were good, but we were expensive. So after a while the Indians started appearing by the dozens. At first they worked side by side with us in the USA but before long "offshoring" was the thing and management discovered they could ship bits to India and back for much less than moving people around. Let a couple years pass and the USA based staff got trimmed back by 90% while the work went to Indians.
Mind you, we originally had the corporate web sites running on four redundant IBM servers. Take any one down, nobody noticed. After the Indians did their thing, we had hundreds of PCs in the data center. The code had so many memory leaks that there was actually a full-time rebooter who walked around and rebooted each PC once a day. Yes, that's all he did. So I guess the plan did create one job. Of course, when a PC based webserver went down, all the users lost their active sessions, but who cares?
Here we are coming up on 15-20 years later and my income is finally creeping back near what I made before the Indians showed up, not considering inflation. This after a decade of cleaning the crap out of Microsoft's pipes for almost no pay.
So while I think immigration and the global economy is "the right thing" and good for the world at large, it surely hasn't been good for me personally. I hope all that money went to India and raised their grindingly awful standard of living a bit. That's how it's supposed to work, right?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2015, @09:41PM
I don't doubt the facts of your post, but the fact is that your employer in the '90s found it more economical to use cheap labor, even if it meant that the service they were offering was less reliable.
Isn't that what posters on SN and /. advocate when they're consumers? Stop protecting inefficient corporations with laws, let consumers vote with their dollars, or just download copyrighted material without paying.
People want it both ways. People in the film, music, journalism, and publishing businesses don't deserve protection from the government, but IT workers do. I just find that stupid.
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Sunday March 29 2015, @02:50AM
I think the problem is that quality simply isn't valued in web programming, perhaps outside of niches like financial or trading websites where speed, reliability, and (one would hope) security are useful qualities. I'm not sure if Facebook does this anymore, but it's well-known that their coders used to simply upload new code to the running production server with minimal testing. Because no one really cares if Facebook goes down for a few minutes while they figure out what went wrong. Similarly, no one cares if a cat picture website goes down for a few minutes or customers randomly lose their active sessions once a day.
I think web programming has an outsized percentage of bottom-feeders compared to the rest of the field. There are certainly areas in software engineering where quality, for various facets of quality, are valued. If you run into trouble again, you might want to look at another part of the field. Maybe embedded software, OSes, compiler development, or anything safety-critical. Programmers don't like it when their compilers crash; no one likes it when their OS crashes; and, I can guarantee you that either the code that runs in pacemakers or airplane cockpits isn't being fed out to the lowest bidder from India, or, if it is, that someone needs to blow the whistle on that company immediately before someone dies.