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No Americans Need Apply
Victor G. Sommers writes "Daniel Soong, who lost his programming job to Indian offshore companies, is willing to relocate to India. 'It would be really interesting to work in Bangalore,' he says. 'But I was told, "Daniel, it is against the law for you to work here. You can come here on vacation, but you can't work here."' Indian officials have told him they don't hire Americans." An article in ComputerWorld talks about the possibility of getting more than you bargained for in outsourced code.
That's common in many countries all around the world. As long as you aren't a citizien it is rather hard to get a job - not just because of possible prejudices but also simply because you are not allowed to!
Seriously: typical wage for Indian IT graduate: $200/month. Equivalent for US graduate: 10--20 times more.
It is almost redundant to say that Indian firms won't be hiring many Americans.
Curiously, my little firm is now subcontracting for Indian firms, so perhaps the rules can be bent a little for genius Belgians. C'est genial!
Ceci n'est pas une signature
I think the point being made is that everyone bitches about how jobs are moving overseas because of American's extravagant lifestyles, etc. But when someone is willing to move to a place where you can live dirt-cheap, the government over there won't allow it.
And actually you can move right on in to California now, since the retarded state gov is basically trying abolish all immigration law. Come on over!
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
Yeah, sure. Except that if the plans by the US Office of Homeland Security come through, I won't be able to fly over to the USA with my brand new EU passport without submitting my fingerprints and/or retinal scan with the visa. The new passports will, at the request of the beforementioned office, have to feature digital biometric information that will be fed to a federal database.
I will not submit to this.
the level of difficulty one has immigrating to the USA, even on the H1 visa program.
..don't panic
Okay - so the point of H1B's is to provide workers for a growing economy when we can't train our own people fast enough, right? (No local talent).
So when there IS an abundance of local talent (evidenced by the posting volume of /. posts) why aren't H1B's sent home? I have no problem with international workers being here, if they are filling a need that can't be filled locally.
To give an example of the way I think the H1B system is getting worked, the last job I worked at was an Informix 4GL shop. If you don't know what this is, it's the most insanely brain-dead programming language ever made. No features, no objects, hell you can't even pass arrays to functions. So what does this company do? Hires chinese H1B's who don't really know anything, for pennies. These guys were working REALLY cheap (like $8/hr) and the company had no intention of hiring any Americans because they wouldn't work for $8/hr. They had some scam running where a few of the american employees did work that cheap "officially" but got kickbacks for supporting the H1B program. I came into this company from a merger, and left shortly thereafter.
My current company is outsourcing to an Indian development firm who supposedly has 30 employees assigned to us. Our entire dev team here in the US is like 5 people, and we're doing the lion's share of the work!
So my opinion of outsourced and H1B employees is rather low, although I'll be the first to admit that there are probably lots of great foreign computer folks out there too. I just haven't seen any :)
It seems to me that globalization is making Americans more wealthy to the tune of $500 billion a year.
A Trade Deficit means we continue to import more than we export, that is, spend more than we produce.
This is a cycle most of you are more familiar referring to as DEBT, in this case, foreign debt. The cycle is hard to stop once it gets rolling, and once foreign debtors no longer believe us credit-worthy, they can refuse us credit and cripple our economy.
Read this for a better understanding of the situation. Economists have been warning about this for years, and now that our core software industries are packing up for India, things look even more bleak. Considering how every government official in America has chosen to ignore this problem, including every president since Reagan, I can't see us addressing it in time to really help.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Apparently, the Republican party is outsourcing fund raising to Indian call centers as well...
j an /50310103.016.asp
http://www.business-standard.com/archives/2003/
Wonder how they do the Texas drawl?
You really didn't understand the article from the SBA website, did you? IAAE (I Am An Economist), and it boils down to this -- what can a foreigner do with a US dollar? The only thing that he or she can do is buy US-produced goods and services. When he or she does that, it increases demand for US production which stimulates the US economy and causes the GDP to rise.
Foreigners putting their dollars into dollar-denominated investments only puts off the problem. At some point, the foreigner must use the dollars to buy US-produced goods and services. Doing anything else means that US consumers have gotten a whole lot of real goods and services for the price of printing a bunch of green paper or transferring a few electrons.
A trade imbalance is not like your PERSONAL debt. It doesn't mean the same thing, so don't try to apply your intuition about personal debts to a trade deficit.
--Paul
Well, there's always miners. Mining jobs are among the highest-paying jobs in the country (U.S.). Support mining and miners in your community, for not only do miners provide the raw materials (avg. is 45,000lbs/year of newly mined minerals for each American) for everything from basic infrastructure, agriculture, communications, power generation, etc. to luxury goods, but the money we spend in the community, from equipment to services to goods, helps everyone. I know it isn't perfect, but you have to admit that countries with abundant natural resources are the richer nations.
I'm relatively secure in my job discovering mineral deposits, knowing that for at least the next hundred years or more, we'll still need everything from gravel to gold, and that we'll need someone to find those deposits, and mine them.
-cp-
You are not correct that jobs always go to the lower wage country. Wages in Canada are generally lower than in the U.S., but during the tech bubble, many Canadian businesses were bought and the jobs were transferred to the U.S. At the time there was a management fad that thought that all your employees had to be together in the same place.
:-)
Now we have a fad for outsourcing, and Canada is again bypassed to go to places even cheaper. It is never good to be in the middle
Before Americans get too riled up about the Indians, they should perhaps examine their own history of buying companies and moving them to the U.S. American immigration laws prevented employees of those companies from following "their" jobs too. They might also reflect on where the revenue that pays their wages comes from, maybe foreigners think they are entitled to share some of the wages that their purchases make possible.
As far as I am concerned, Americans are just getting a taste of what other countries have gone through the last few years. Americans disproportionally benefited from the tech bubble and may have a false idea of how much they are really worth.
-- Pot is safer than Beer