The joys of training your imported replacement

The immigration debate is mostly driven by the crisis of massive illegal immigration, which has been deliberately conflated with legal immigration by activists, to the extent that we're not even supposed to refer to them as "illegal aliens" any more...

There's actually very little organized effort to reduce legal immigration, perhaps in part because the American people are exhausted from fighting over the illegal variety...

180,000 high-tech workers might not seem to count for much, when measured against the millions of illegal aliens already living in the United States, or the hundreds of thousands more - many of them unaccompanied minors - currently swamping the border in search of the amnesty they were promised. But if you're one of the people losing good jobs to an H-1B worker, they can loom very large indeed. Such was the case with an anonymous American IT worker identified only as "A.B." by Computerworld...

The story told by Computerworld is harrowing, and infuriating. The displaced American workers learned of the impending demise of their jobs months in advance. During the transition period, older techs who could not quickly secure new positions were made to dig their own graves, as they trained their replacements from India:

Training the replacement workers involved holding morning-long WebEx meetings several times a week with offshore outsourcing staff based in India. The sessions were recorded as details about the environment, including diagrams and scripts, were shared.

As they moved closer to the termination date for the U.S. workers, the overseas employees would follow or shadow, via WebEx sessions, everything an IT worker did during the day. The outsourcing firm's onshore staff helped to coordinate these efforts, but also worked to untangle the meaning of some of the questions.

The overseas workers did not appear to have much practical experience, and the same questions were asked repeatedly, A.B. said.

Tell me that doesn't sound like a little slice of heaven. Not only are you training your cheaper imported replacement, but they're watching everything you do all day, via "ghosting" software.

The outgoing American workers wrapped up their careers with a little symbolic rebellion, peppering their cubicles with American flags. Interestingly, the Indian workforce replacing them didn't understand what was going on, and seemed under the impression that the displaced American techs would skip happily off to other jobs...

CAIRCO Notes

Training your half-price foreign replacement is not thrilling. Been there - done that. - CAIRCO Director Fred Elbel