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US Senators Question Indian Firms Over H-1Bs
xzvf sends us a link to a BusinessWeek report on the campaign of two US senators to get answers to how H-1B work visas are actually being used. Yesterday Senators Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Richard Durbin (D-IL) sent a letter (PDF) to nine Indian outsourcing firms that, among them, snapped up 30% of the H-1B visas issued last year. The senators want to know, among other things, whether the H-1B program is being used to enable the offshoring of American jobs. "Critics say outsourcing firms, including Infosys Technologies and Wipro, are using the visas to replace US employees with foreign workers, often cycling overseas staff through US training programs before sending them back into jobs at home."
Honestly, who is? So these firms exploit both, the Indian workers by taking a substantial part of their pay, and the american workers who might be a better fit for the jobs...
Staying one step ahead!
How about this- if a company wants to hire from country X, then they can have one H-1B visa for each corresponding visa that country X issues to allow a US citizen to work in country X. Of course that visa MUST be used. The "prevailing wage" issue might be a sticky wicket, the wage in country X might be too low to attract interest. But if country X is not willing to hire non-citizens because their own people are looking for work, why should the US?
But the better question is what type of software gets built from a practice like this one?
Extremely shitty software.
I don't work in IT, but the company I work for does depend heavily on a wide variety of computer systems. For years we've used some system developed in-house. It wasn't great, but for the most part it got the job done. However, a couple years back our management decided, for whatever reason, that we needed a new computer system. Somehow the contract was given to an Indian firm, based out of India.
The problems were numerous. First, there was essentially no interacting between any of our workers (ie. the people using the software) and the developers. They held two meetings over the course of about a year. One was at the very beginning of the project, and it was a complete disaster. The people they sent over could barely speak English. For the part of the meeting I sat in at, it was damn near impossible to get anything done. We'd try to explain to them how we used the old system, but they just couldn't understand what we were saying. We even had one fellow walk right out of the meeting, saying it was, in his words, "a fucking stupid idea".
Eventually they delivered the software. We had wanted it in six months. They took about ten. And as would be expected, it didn't work at all. The stability was terrible. Data would be lost. The usability was absolutely horrible. I mean, there were spelling errors all over the place, and sometimes we'd got "Work Uncomplete" messages. Yes, "uncomplete". I don't know much about software, but I don't think they tested it at all.
The second meeting was held to try to fix these problems. We were damn angry, as you can image. Thankfully, one of the people they sent over spoke English. It turns out he was born in New York, but was working in India for this outsourcing firm. He basically said that his job was to go around and do what he could to clean up the mess his colleagues made of these projects. At least he was able to understand our complaints.
I don't exactly know what happened, but I think that the management got a North American firm to rewrite a large portion of the software. At least now it's mostly functional. And it doesn't look much like the system the Indian firm provided, so I think a lot of it was rewritten.
These overseas folks are here principally because of a lack of skilled US citizens in critical areas. The ire being posted on this thread is largely misplaced. Instead of ranting about foreigners suckling "your" jobs out of this country, perhaps we should have better funded engineering education programs and engineering-related incentives for prospective college students so we have enough Americans to do the work? Banning the H1Bs will only make it harder to fill these vacancies, which helps no one.
Honestly, I've never understood the sense of entitlement some have about their IT jobs. If you're half as good as you say you are, you should have no problem landing your next gig.
The truth is that the entire H1-B visa program is intentionally used to provide cheap labor from overseas.
This is less true of L-1 and L-2 visas, except for firms engaged in active outsourcing.
If they would just make it easy (as in FAST, 6 months max time) to have people with legitimate Ph.D's move here - without any right of having their "family" move here, other than a spouse - the program might work.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I'd rather have a moron that understood me rather than a technically-minded person that I not only have to explain myself two or three times, I have to explain HIM two or three times to make sure I'm hearing him right.
I've got two good Indian friends here, and neither of them are fucking named John either, so quit even TRYING, call centers.
They're not nearly so docile now that H1 transfers are _relatively_ easy to do. Many startup employers here in Silicon Valley don't want to deal with H-1B's anymore because the legal expenses/hassles really add up, but will still hire them for difficult to fill positions. I personally have hired for permanent positions about 10 H-1Bs over the past 10 years--always at competitive wages and never to replace a current employee (it is very hard to find highly skilled embedded/networking software engineers).
Nearly all the H-1B candidates I've ever hired wanted to use it as a path to citizenship--not what H-1B was intended for, but good for the country (at least in my opinion).
I have on occasion reluctantly dealt with contracting outfits that sent us foreign workers (presumably also on H-1B)--these guys did seem like they might be getting screwed by their agency--though they were probably hoping some client would hire them away so they could stay in the US permanently too.
Tens of thousands of the best and brightest engineers in China, India (& the rest of the world) would love to come to the US--permanently. It will only harm the US if we don't at least allow some of the best of the best do so.
If US corporations really wanted the best talent of the world, they would be supporting GREEN CARD applicants and trying to find the best foreign students to cultivate. Or they would US students directly by scholarships and grants. No, they do not want US citizens. Full citizens have too many rights and demands. They want disposable workers which is what an H1-B is for them. Eventually they get to send the person home and ARE NOT OBLIGATED BY A PENSION. It's all about destroying the entire concept of pensions. It's all about corporate greed and short-sighted behaviour not what is good for the country. Bill Gates and his Foundation are taking dollars and stealing your future with one hand, and giving a few pennies back with the other and this apparently makes them saints to the people fooled by their PR.
How about we just require that H1Bs get paid 1.5 to 2 times the prevailing wage. This would stop companies from hiring them to save money over local workers. It would mean that if a company hired them, they really needed them.
A while ago somebody here proposed auctioning off the visas. I think that's a fascinating idea, as it would guarantee that nobody was hired simply because they were available below market rates. The auction process would immediately make the median wage equal to or greater than the market wage. At that point, the companies do battle over how special their special talent is.
Another positive effect would be that the people who actually are most valuable will get the visas rather than the people who got lucky in the lottery. Imagine a brilliant person whose employer would gladly pay $500K to sponsor getting sent home because some other average schmuck got the visa. Kind of sucks for everybody but the schmuck. That's not exactly what we were hoping for when the program was instituted.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
I am a US citizen and a former Microsoft employee. I am very glad to see that these senators are investigating the H-1B visa program. Microsoft makes use of this program and is always very vocal about increasing its role. I hope they will have a chance to investigate how Microsoft uses the H-1B and L visa programs and what sort of work environment that creates here in the US.
I worked at Microsoft from January 2001 until May 2007 as a software design engineer at the corporate headquarters in Redmond, WA. Most of Microsoft's products, such as Windows, Office, Exchange, and SQL Server are developed here in Redmond. If you walk through the halls where the programmers are working, you will see that the majority of the workers are not from the US.
While at Microsoft, I interviewed job candidates for programming positions. Microsoft HR provided screened resumes, and my team interviewed and made hiring decisions. Microsoft HR publicly states that they make "diverse hiring" a goal. Race and nationality never are and never have been factors in my hiring decisions, but I was very rarely presented with American candidates, which is strange given that we are in America. Almost every candidate was a foreign worker. The positions we were trying to fill are not very unique that we needed to look outside the US - these were typical programming and testing positions. Microsoft has thousands of such positions, and the job functions performed by foreign programmers do not differ from those of American programmers.
In some of Microsoft's product development divisions, including one that I worked in for 5 years, foreign workers also participate in the hiring process as interviewers. Some teams are comprised almost entirely of foreign workers, mostly from India or China, from the bottom up through several levels of management. It is to a point now that many foreign workers are the ones conducting the job interviews and making the hiring decisions here in Redmond.
Being an American on a team with mostly H-1B visaholders is discouraging at times. As an American you want to live your life, work hard, and make your workplace the best it can be. Your coworkers are more concerned about navigating their way through the immigration system and ensuring that they keep their visa sponsor happy.
I don't have any ill-will towards H-1B workers, rather I feel sorry for them because of the leverage that their employer has over their lives as their visa sponsor. My gut feeling is that employers like Microsoft are either directly abusing the H-1B program or indirectly benefiting from its abuse. The program allows them to hire thousands of employees and relocate them to a place where they have no citizenship and can have their sponsorship revoked at any time. This naturally makes them more attractive to hire than an American who is already here and trying to get a job. Without the sponsorship component of the visa, this would not be possible.
Last year, I took an undergraduate Labor Economics seminar and wrote a paper on H-1B program's impact on domestic labor force. You can find it here:
http://panic.berkeley.edu/~akopps/paper/paper.pdf
I looked at the correlation between the relative supply of H-1B workers and the wages of IT workers. Surprisingly, I found no significant correlation between the presence of H-1B workers and labor market outcomes. However, surprisingly, if you look at the impact at the impact on the wages of only male workers, then there is a slight but a very clear (statistically significant) 'impact' on their earnings. Even more surprisingly, if you also look at the correlation between the earnings of female domestic workers and the relative supply of H-1B workers, then there is a POSITIVE impact on their earnings.
Of course, I concede that there could be a A LOT of problems with the methodology I used and with the data employed in this study. My methodology was basically constrained by whatever data I had access to. However, if we assume for a moment that the data and methodology were more or less reliable, then I suspect that what's happening is that the IT labor market is somewhat segregated by genders (someone needs to test this hypothesis). E.g. the female workers tend to be employed in occupations that are complimentary to occupations that are dominated by male workers (e.g. QA, testing, etc). If this assumption is correct, then the H-1B workers (who are predominantly male) might indeed depress the earnings of male domestic workers a little bit, but at the same time the increase supply of male workers boots the demand for occupations that tend to employ female IT workers. So, if you look at the overall effect on earnings, there is no relationship, but there is clearly something going on once you break down the earnings data by genders.
Meanwhile racism in America keeps some people thinking that somehow we have an advantage that can't be measured. So many people think that Chinese or Indian tech workers are somehow inferior. They are at this point but its not genetics keeping them back. Assuming we are better is only going to diminish our influence more and more. I'm taking a trip to Europe soon and its going to hurt. Americans used to travel abroad and everywhere they went their dollars went far. In Europe they don't want dollars, our influence is getting smaller and smaller and its even worse in Asia.
A lot of people blame the American standard of living for this. They say if we didn't have to pay so much for American workers then there wouldn't be outsourcing but its just BS. The cycle that the parent post outlined is a concise way of showing what is going on. The cycle is going to finally get broken when foreign workers CAN do the job and we are all left out of the loop.
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