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AFL-CIO Proposed Reforms for the H1B Program
Alien54 writes "[I first saw this link over on RFN]. The AFL-CIO has announced a series of proposed reforms for the H1B Program. The proposal is very thorough, and covers eight different problem areas of the H1B laws."
I work near Silicon Valley and have many friends working in and around SIlicon Valley in high tech jobs. Many have H1B visas. They all seem smart, often much smarter than the Americans around them, and this is reflected in the fact that they often become promoted fast within their companies. In fact many high tech companies (employing Americans) seem to be built on technology developed by immigrants. They all seem to be paid damn well to me. I frequently have to recruit workers on H1B visas because many US schools seem more interesting in boosting people's self esteem than teaching students anything useful. I wouldn't entertain, even for a second, the idea of paying them less than Americans.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Define economically sound. I left my last company in part because they were starting to ship a large portion of the development tasks to India. That left fewer positions in the US, and those positions were turned into "analysts" and "customer interaction specialists", in other words, requirements gatherers and writers of tedious documents.
I saw some of the work that came back from India, and frankly, it sucked. GUI design was non-existent, as were coding standards. There was a distinct lack of understanding of any non-M$ developement tool/language. Many of "sys-admins" had no idea what a port was, much less how it could get hijacked, broken into, etc. One of our US admins did a port scan on one of their main servers and found an unknown program listening on port 31337. Uh huh... good job guys.
Furthermore, we had significant communication issues with the Indian offices due to the 14 hour time differential. The requirements people in the US could interact with our customers on a given day, it would take until the next day for the overseas "developers" to get the requirements. Issues, misunderstandings, etc. took one or more days further to resolve, etc. Time wasted is money wasted.
My point is that, although Indian labor may be cheaper on an hourly basis, how many more man-hours does it take to get the job done? By the time I left, the amount of money saved through overseas development was little to none. All that had been accomplished was a 50% staff attrition through layoffs or people, like myself, who saw the impending doom and jumped ship before the axe fell.
Most of the ones I meet have the goal of saving money here and moving back to India so they can live like kings, and also because they don't like the culture here.