Journalist Lee Fang has been producing some impressive work on his Substack. This recent post comes right on the heels of more than 140,000 layoffs by Big Tech.
When Google first launched, the mantra was “Don’t be evil”. That was later amended to “Do the right thing”. Naive folks like me might tend to believe that Doing the Right Thing applies to treatment of the users. My mistake! It obviously means what’s right for the stockholders. As Forest Gump might say, “Evil is as evil does.”
H-1B visas are not a new thing. They’ve been around since 1990, spun off from the H-1 visa created in 1952. The original purpose was to provide a way to get skilled technical workers into positions that US companies could not fill. That’s still the reason companies give for requesting H-1B visas now. The argument is that our education system has fallen so far behind that there are not enough people trained in science and technology to meet demand. In reality this practice is used to replace older, experienced (high salaried) workers with foreign workers willing to work cheaply in exchange for being allowed to live and work in the US. In some of the more egregious uses of the H-1B, the about-to-be-terminated US worker is asked to train his replacement in order to secure severance pay.
There is some merit to the argument that deficiency in our education system for training people in science and technology has led to a shortage of skilled workers. COVID set education back a lot with shutdowns and online learning. But in this case we are seeing a fully trained and experienced workers being swapped out for low-cost replacements. These are people with families, mortgages, car payments, and all the components that make up life in these United States. Finding another job is not easy, when all the big tech companies are playing the same game. Worse, in tech being over 50 means “aging out” of the market.
The savings from this practice will likely be used for buying back shares to drive stock prices higher. We’ll still be stuck digging through the first two or three pages of search results to get past the ads unrelated to our search. We’ll still have toxic tweets and comments to avoid. But we’ll still have the kitten and puppy pictures to keep us entertained. Hooray.