'Shameful' CBA hiring Indian ICT workers after firing Australians

Many years ago I was hired by {tech company} in {European country} (I'm from the US).

Once I worked there for a month and befriended my team, one of them showed me how they posted a fake job listing with exactly my experience, and we all laughed about it.

All of the implementations of this legislation seem trivial to rig. Even though it feels good to assume you outcompeted everyone in the UK with your leet skills and they had no option to import the heavy guns.

Was there literally nobody in the country capable of doing what you do? Or were they just not willing to pay enough?

Slaves are not paid wages. There’s no need to resort to hyperbole here, the practices are abhorrent enough without it.

MBAs or AI would make the same decisions as these are SYSTEMIC issues, which means its not up to individuals or orgs, but the entire system across the board has to change for fairer solutions to work.

Why? Cuz this is not just about cross border diff in labor rates but also in interest rates, real estate/rent, corporate tax rates, forex rates, regulations, govt subsidies, energy costs etc etc.

Sum it all up and the cost differential can't be swept under the carpet.

MBAs getting drilled to focus on the short term / maximize shareholder value which has created all kinds of issues. But that is not hard to change. Lot of schools exist that don't focus only on that. What's hard to change is the underlying calculus without global coordination.

>Maybe the problem is the MBAs and letting them run your company?

The vast majority of companies in the world are run by MBAs. Welcome to the club.

SV companies were an exception to this rule for a short time in history since tech moved faster than the dinosaurs in suits could comprehend or regulate, so it made sense to put engineers in charge to innovate quickly. Having zero interest rate money also helped a lot.

But now that the tech market has matured and consolidated, it's becoming like all the other "uncool" traditional industries, run by MBAs. Except unlike those old traditional industries, there's no credential barrier to entry or unions to protect them, for better and worse.

Thanks, corrected :-)

When I was a fresh immigrant child comments like these used to make me feel more uncomfortable than they do now. How I perceive these comments has changed over time.

What I want to address about this comment is the implicit identity associations involved. It's clear that you're drawing an identity distinction between "Canadian" and "Indian".

One of the things I've noticed about my own personal associations is that my own identity as an "Indian" kind of dissolved over the course of a decade or so after I immigrated as a child.

And when it evolved it didn't evolve in the direction of "Canadianness", for some generic definition thereof. My cultural identity broadened along horizons that had nothing to do with nationality.

When I think of "my tribe" now, it's on a values and interest basis. "My people" aren't Canadians or Indians, they're programmers and engineers and scientists and mathemeticians. Where I draw identity lines, it's no longer along national lines. My tribe's Gods are Turing and Church. Our saints are Torvalds and Carmack and Stroustrup and Van Rossum and Wall. We are friendly with the neighboring tribes that follow Euler and Goedel, as well as the yonder followers of Einstein and Newton and Feynman.

And I think that perspective dichotomy is reflective of an underlying deep shift in how people form identities, one that's being driven by the rise of instant, rich global communications through the internet.

So when I read comments like yours these days, I see yet another sign of the tension between that old structure and the new.

To bring this back to a Canadian context, Stephen Harper (former conservative PM) actually called this out very astutely a long time ago when talking about the Somewheres vs the Anywheres:

https://macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/stephen-harper-has-some-...

> Harper argues that today’s conservative populism deserves a respectful hearing because it harnesses the legitimate anxieties of the Somewheres, who haven’t been doing all that well in the globalized economy. As for the Anywheres, they don’t get it.

I'd only disagree about that last statement. I get it :) It's just that having been born in a very Somewhere place and having become an Anywhere, I really can't explain the depth of freedom you feel when you escape those identity bounds.

It's not that I don't understand the cultural perspective of the Somewheres. It's just that I see it as a prison.

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The future Canadian worker is a Canadian with Indian ancestry, you no doubt mean.

its funny but this is true, oh.. we did teach the rest of the west about offshoring refugees, something to be proud of.

We did it for all the working class jobs though? Plus the media says all economists agree that protectionist policies are bad... I read that paying workers first-world salary to make things in first-world countries will increase product and service costs which is bad for economy. Apparently if the West can't compete with third-world labour it's better to just outsource the those uncompetitive manual labour and service jobs.

Funny thing is, talking in general terms, everyone hates off shoring but not every one hates exports/expanding to other markets and profiting off it. By this logic, you should also advocate for native jobs and salaries for every market the company is in, no?

Not saying company X isn't off shoring to save costs and hurting local jobs. But it is also perhaps true that company Y is growing and selling their services/products in N countries but only has jobs in one(or few) of countries perhaps. Why is this fair if the first one isn't ?

That is the nativist view, yes. But I am not a nativist. Let every member of our species compete on a fair playing field without government interference, regardless of their birth circumstances.

It’s also a national security argument. Not just in terms of military defense but also political/trade relations.

Entirely outsourcing all critical goods and services is foolish. Who wants to be vulnerable to the whims of other countries?

It also shows that the median HN member is extremely racist against indians and believes in the great replacement!

Resistance to free market economics is not necessarily Marxist. Old-fashioned one-nation conservatives also find offshoring of this sort objectionable. If you consider the job of the state to be to cultivate a stable, cohesive society, you're going to favour regulation of actions that undermine that objective, including business strategies that erode the local skill base and economy.