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Indian CEO Says Most US Tech Grads "Unemployable"
theodp writes "When questioned about his firm's US hiring, Information Week reports that Vineet Nayar, the CEO of the Indian outsourcing giant HCL Technologies, showed he can stereotype with the best of them, telling an audience in NYC that most American tech grads are 'unemployable.' Explaining that Americans are far less willing than students from developing economies like India, China, and Brazil to master the 'boring' details of tech process and methodology, the HCL chief added that most Americans are just too expensive to train. HCL, which was reportedly awarded a secretive $170 million outsourcing contract by Microsoft last April, gets a personal thumbs-up from Steve Ballmer for 'walking the extra mile.' Ballmer was busy last week pitching more H-1B visas as the cure for America's job ills at The National Summit."
yes.. because getting in foreign workers will help REDUCE local unemployment.... maybe in soviet russia.
I'd say its time to pull the plug on free trade and let these people jump start their own local economies on their own merits, and not on shoveling their crap into the USA. India has not done a damned thing for the USA and I see no reason why the USA should throw its people out of work to subsidize India's economy.
Free trade is not worth it.
This is my sig.
If Americans are unemployable then why are they the ones paying the Indians to do the job? The money is coming from somewhere, and to make others do the work for you takes some brains. What this guy doesn't answer is why is it that when I have to review code coming from India it is full of bugs, short cuts, and shit that doesn't make a damn bit of sense even to the Indian staff that's stateside?
I know there is going to be a lot of flak directed at HCL.
But unfortunately HCL is not the only monkey around.
I live in India, and have a lot of friends working in such companies (Infosys, Wipro, HCL, TCS etc., etc.,)
These service companies have lot of PR support due to feeding poor kids meals blah blah (you get the philantrophy angle, right?)
However beneath the facade lurks pure evil.
Firstly these are service companies. they bill clients by the hour. Which then brings us to their processes and employees.
Innovation and smart working is discouraged, and the training given is "how to bill maximum hours" and "how to fool the client into believing you are working".
So these drones are taught how not to work smartly, how not to do more with less time. you get tonnes of reports tones of meaningless slides to fool the clients, who are anyways willing to get fooled.
But kid yourself not, same is the case with US based service companies also, but with service companies a smaller percentage in US(except in Law area), things don't seem obvious.
But Indian IT has become a service economy with drones. Drones who are dumb "copy paste" coders.
I am in a product company, and often we get software engineers with 10 years of "coding" experience who do not know how to use regular expressions. Infact in their job, they would do a manual search and replace, because they can bill more hours to client.
Such practices actually make hiring intelligent engineers bad, They want drones.
Till few years back, when product companies were unheard of in India, many people migrated off-shore. Nowadays the drain has stemmed, but with lots of money coming in, even good engineers are flocking to this circus, and the whole place is a mess.
Now why do Amercian comanies like to get screwed? Well the managers there can justify their paychecks more readily if tonnes of drone like reports and jargon filled meaningless data is thrown around in board meetings.
your PHBs love these drones. They work for 14 hours a day at half the cost. OTOH, an intelligent enginner will work for 4 hours finish the work, and charge double. How will they boast that they have a cheap engineer working for 14 hours a day?
Now Microsoft loves these companies very much. Because they promote windows, and in their advertisements, boast about better performance and all that BS. The public here trusts these guys. Wow CEO used to clean his own toilet. Woweee!
They go to these fund raisers, do hoop haa about poor kids, give a few hundred dollars to a charity, and they are the ambassadors of good will.
The dark side is brushed under the carpet.
Whats not told is that number of hours each employee spends at his/her desk is counted. Every time you go in your wing, your clock starts ticking.
Every time you go out, clock stops.
Companies like Accenture India division make employees sign on bonds that they are willing to work 12 hours a day. Its all a circus, and the American PHBs love their circus animals.
Who suffers. Grads in the US, and engineers like us who have so limited options in India. Moreover our reputation suffers. We are clubbed "Indian engineers are not intelligent".
On the plus side product companies are growing, but on the downside most of these have these drones who cannot unlearn what the service industry taught them?
Ever wonder why India does not have companies like Intel, Lenovo, Huawai emerging, but only subsidiaries and service drones?
Well I just gave you your answer.
CEO of Indian outsourcing company says Indians are better workers than Americans. In other news, CEO of GM says that GM is a better company than Toyota.
when you pay them $15/hr and expect them to be good at what they do.
If only we could have those 2-week programming courses you give your Indian programmers before you let them loose on mission-critical projects, imagine what great programmers we could be!
The last code delivered by Infosys was functional... but had to be ripped back out of production.
The next bit of code didn't follow any of our published standards. It took several days to fix the obvious problems, then it got booted out of testing for a week's corrections.
They used to be a lot better back in 2003.
The biggest problem right now is that they won't say "no" to management about anything. Insanely crazy schedules-- "Sure, we can meet that". Grossly abbreviated testing... "Okay- we can mitigate that risk".
I think most of the super sharp guys are now management there. The actual coders are now getting down to low experience yes men/women who are not as clever and rush things without following standards.
Doesn't matter-- you just can't get around the fact that they currently make 1/10th of what we do and bill out at 1/3 of what we do.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I posted this before and I'll post it again.
So far in the last 12 months I've had three side projects that projects that were outsourced but for whatever reason such a mess was made of them that the clients have brought them to us to fix at a higher than normal rate.
My employer's now collaborating with an "reverse" outsourcing mob who've set themselves up to help people bring their failing outsourced projects back and are getting a fair bit of work through it.
To be honest, the quality of code I'm seeing is easily the worst I've ever seen and that includes half-assed open source projects. Whether that's because it's just "sweatshop code" as one client put it or they are attempting to write super advanced AI code generators and using them to generate the code...and failing miserably, I don't know. But it's terrible. From the complete lack of imagination and forward thinking in design, right down to the god awful highly inconsistently cased variable names.
Remember this is *three* different projects from three different Indian companies theoretically written by three different sets of programmers. The code all looks and feels the same, which leads me to believe there's something going on industry wide over there. What that is I have no idea but they need to fix it quick smart as the industry as a whole is getting a bit of a reputation.
What I do know is people are willing to pay much more once they've tried outsourcing and failed.
Those that don't go out of business in the mean time that is.
(Yes I'm sure there's some top quality code coming out of India, I doubt most of it is written by the sorts of companies in this articlee).
On one level, that may be true. There are a lot of people who think that College is supposed to be the same as a tech school. They go to college expecting to be trained for a specific career. Some colleges have begun to oblige and are acting like the trade schools that some students (and parents) expect them to be.
If you've only been trained in retreading tires, you don't know how to mount a new tire on the rim and balance it. When the CS requirements of some schools consist of "MS Office" in three different sections, how in the fuck do they expect their grads to know anything?
Now, on the other hand there are plents of schools who are giving real and complete tech educations. These people are constantly getting screwed by employers who give up after interviewing a few of the other kind of student.
Lastly you have the tech executives who want nothing more than to lower costs. They want the cheapest labor, and nothing else. They are pushing to raise the H1B caps. They are pushing for outsourcing. It has nothing to do with the quality of US grads. It has EVERYTHING to do with the fact that they want to pay people less money. If I spend 6 years in college and have a Master's degree, you can kiss my ass with your $35k offer. The guys right off the boat from Bombay will be willing to take that sort of job. They don't have $50-200k in student loans to pay back. It's basic economics. What this glut is doing is providing a greater supply of labor in order to drive down prices.
If you're the only plumber in your town, you can charge pretty much whatever you want. No one else has the skills, knowledge or tools to do that work. What happens if overnight four more plumbers come to town? Instead of being able to charge $75 per hour, you may have to cut back to $50. What happens if ten more plumbers come to town? You'll suddenly find yourself working for minimum wage. That's what certain executive-types are trying to do to technology.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Perhaps Mr. Nayar should stop beating around the bush and just state the reasons why he thinks Americans are unemployable:
Americans enjoy running water.
Americans don't want to live in a small mud hut with their whole extended family.
Americans don't want to work 80 hours a week on slave wages with no overtime.
Americans have a higher cost of living in regards to just about everything.
Americans usually need cars to function in American society.
Americans want to have 72"+ LED backlit LCD TVs.
Managers don't get bonuses for hiring Americans.
I personally think that every job should have a wage that a person can live off of, "unskilled" or "skilled". If you want to see something funny, hand a CEO a floor buffer and watch him fumble about with it.
...get code monkeys.
I wonder what he earnt this year? I would say that a rich overpaid CEO complaining that people won't accept a sub-standard wage are the epitome of hypocrisy and greed. I'm surprised he's not whining that good slaves are hard to find.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I'm currently working at a major US tech company and litterly every program I have inherited from some out sourcing group is utter crap. I'm talking about EVERY variable is a global variable, one source file for a 5000 line program, no makefile just a line at the top which says compile with gcc blah blah blah, and the list goes on. The reason for out sourcing is not skill its cost. Why pay an American programmer who knows what hes doing when you can out source it and get a program which barely works and when bugs arise blame something/someone else.
In the long run these companies are going to learn the hard way that paying an out sourced developer who has a 3 month class in C will get you nowhere near a developer with a CS degree in terms of quality, functionality, and efficiency.
I have to review code coming from India it is full of bugs, short cuts, and shit that doesn't make a damn bit of sense
Amen. I won't say that all the programmers in India suck, because that would be an inaccurate stereotype. However, I will say that The worst code I have ever seen from American programmers I have worked with was better than the best code that came back from Indian outsourced groups. I suspect that all the GOOD INDIAN PROGRAMMERS CAME TO AMERICA TO MAKE BETTER MONEY.
Why would you hire the leftovers? Really, you think that you can just get better quality by spending less? Really?
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
The biz lobbyists first claimed that not enough US citizens were going into the field. Now it's that we are "too lazy for the details", not quantity? Which is it? Outsourcing and H1B's were never sold as a way to replace "C" Americans with "A" 3rd-worlders. Did they lie to Congress and voters?
Table-ized A.I.
Vote with your wallets
This will never work. Just like businesses, most people care about their bottom line. Any Midwestern autoworker would sign under your post, and yet look at their spending habits outside of buying (heavily discounted) American cars. I bet they don't think twice about buying the cheapest jeans or kitchenware made in china while shopping at some mega retailer.
Supposedly, the Indians coming to the States are the smartest. I find them to be no better than American educated and trained workers. IIT is not a breeding ground for great talent, rather superior attitudes. No different than the Ivy League in the United States. I have worked with plenty of Indian talent in Silicon Valley, and managed many as well. It depends on the person; where you go to school, or if you go to school, is irrelevant.
The Chinese and Europeans are the folks I move to the top of the interview list.
Slashdot - The great and glorious cluster fuck of Internet wisdom.
You didn't "got stupid", it's just that your industry had grown so much that the internal market alone could not sustain further industrial growth.
-- Let's go Viridian.
Doesn't matter-- you just can't get around the fact that they currently make 1/10th of what we do and bill out at 1/3 of what we do.
This is part of the problem with the kind of short term "thinking" that a lot of the MBAs who decide to outsource a lot of this stuff engage in. They don't realize and/or don't care that paying 1/3 of what it would cost to write it here is actually more expensive in both "money cost" and missed opportunity (which is often the *really* big price that causes a lot of companies to go under) when you have to do it several times over before you get something close to usable.
Instead, they tend to see things more like this: "I cut our expenses by x%. I want a bonus. Now let me find another place to work before this decision catches up with me."
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
"master the 'boring' details of tech process and methodology"
Ha!
I myself have worked for large outfits and many in my family work for large outfits. My experience and that of my loved ones is that working with Indian companies is a guarantee for disaster. Recently my sister witnessed a $50 million project being trashed. The problem is that Indian IT companies usually limit themselves to implementing exactly what you specify. Or, if you ask for an analysis, they let a bloated system emerge. Unless you work for a CMMI level 4 company this attitude is next to useless.
People that master "tech process and methodology" wind up being slaves to "quality". Quality as in "meticulously following the procedures." As more than 90% of businesses don't really have quality in place -or at best, have some quality shroud- this means that de facto they are slaves to the next management level. Very convenient once you are the manager.
The problem is that higher management and share holders don't understand that this is common practice. They only see that Indians cost 10 times less than European/US people. If you need 20 times more people to do the work, cost double. The bureaucracy of 20 times more people cripples your organization.
Man, I've seen a team of 10-15 people writing 'make' files for package generation. And particularly crappy 'make' files at that. Had to wait hours to have them running a 'make pkg' command and returning me the generated package. For Christ's sake! This is something you think about and implement on a rainy afternoon and which takes 1 minute to run each time afterwards.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
I'm living in the Philippines, I can answer the crappy code part. While many might like to think of us as being a 'third world' kind of country, we are more of a follower of first world trends in disguise, we do it by building cheap look-a-likes and selling at a price our market can accommodate. We don't really fit the glove of this whole "X World" thing.
That said, Why: It's simple. We are what we are because our ethos is "Near enough really is absolutely good enough, anything better is a waste of money, effort, and time". An analogy: You want a straight and level sidewalk? Damn, that's going to cost you extra. And you want it free of obstructions like telegraph poles, open drains, plus all the little lines that we refuse to step on? You want wheelchair access too? And you want it to actually be 'finished'? Well, for that kind of crazy desire, your price has now reached exactly the same as what you would pay in first world USA or anywhere else in the world for the same quality stretch of sidewalk.
Americans want stuff done on the cheap. Guess what - you actually do get what you pay for! (I know, who'd have though!)
What that CEO actually means is that American employees aren't willing to 1. Put in 4-6 extra hours every day 2. Lower coding standards (use 's' as variable names, enormous methods, no refactoring, cutting corners) 3. Be mindless enough to follow a team lead's decisions without proactive thinking or questioning. Which is why they'd never fit in at HCL.
Always proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
Being a coder from India, I can answer your question. The reason is plain and simple economics and greed. While Indian coders in general come cheap when compared to those in US companies wanna further reduce costs there are other factors.
I earn a lot more than my counterparts doing same job because I belong to a top engineering school and quality of work expected from me is different than several others. While my company is full of guys from lower level colleges where education situation is really bad. Companies hire these guys cause they come cheap (some earn even 1/4 of what I do). While guys from top colleges ask for more companies refrain from hiring these people and hire college grads from lower colleges who would work on minimum wage.
IT job is thus considered worst in most IIT's and most engineers end up doing MS/PHD or MBA's.
do you know what #1 and #2 are? facts
no, they're theories. at best. or maybe just assertions.
My experience with the majority (and yes there are exceptions) of Indian IT workers is that they have little or no creativity or the ability/willingness to question obviously bad design. Yes they get the work done but at what overall cost to the business.
For example, the IT of an Airline was outsourced to an Indian company. We had to get a firewall rule added so that passenger details could be sent to Homeland Security. It took over 3 months for their supposedly expert network managers to get the rule added even though they had been supplied with detailed instructions on how to do it.
When asked why it had taken so long, the answer given was 'We have no one here who has done that sort of configuration before'. This was coming from a company that boasted how many Cisco certified people they had.
On the other hand, there are exceptions and most of those (IMHO) are people who have been trained outside India and have thus broken the mould so to speak. Many of these can think creatively and add real value to projects. Ironically, these Indians have a very low opinion of companies such as HCL etc to properly run western IT departments.
I'm posting as an AC as I'm currently working in an IT Dept that is about to be outsourced to and Indian Company. I'd like to keep my job as long as possible.
I work in Silicon Valley, was a consultant for most of the last 30 years. Manager for about half that time.
I have hired lots of Indians, Chinese, Philipinos, ... no Indians have ever hired me. My friends and I don't know of a case where an Indian has hired a European. Some of the sharpest people I know have been rejected at companies like Brocade by Indian interviewers who pronounced them "not sharp enough".
Indians, generally, think Americans aren't much good. I have had Indian teachers in a local college class remark to their class of non-Indians that their daughters would never marry Americans, as they aren't suitable -- not serious people, etc. This was a standard attitude among Indian parents in private schools our kid has attended.
Judging people across a cultural divide is difficult. Standard interviews are nearly useless in making hiring decisions (lots of research to this point), so most people are hired on some dimension of "we like him/her, he/she is like us". Thus, the groups within Silicon Valley companies, and entire companies, who are all of one ethnic group, e.g. mainland Chinese, Taiwanese, Hindi speakers, ...
If we Europeans discriminated like that, EEOE would be down our necks.
Uhm, the guys who invented the transistor, and setup a bunch of well-known semiconductor companies, the traitorous eight, how many were born outside the USA? Of the rest, how many were born to immigrants to the USA?
(The answers: "at least 3" for the first, and "at least 1" for the second).
It's hilarious that a nation whose success was built on waves of immigration can spawn people so ignorant of the contributions of immigrants. The rest of the 1st world doesn't mind though - we'll be glad to take the USAs spot as patron of the world's best & brightest - please do stop your H1-B programme.
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
Then you're doing something wrong. I'm sorry for this, but I can't stand people who blame job markets for being unemployed. There's *always* work, so long as you know where to look.
If you have a CMU degree, developing software at home *casually* for 20 years is hardly an endorsement. I could say that same thing and I'm only 30. Being unemployed for 6 out of 7 years is also very, very bad. I'd think twice about even touching you for *any* job if I found that out. Hell, working in MacD's would have looked better - I've recommended IT staff for employment even though they've been working at supermarkets, etc. lately because I *know* it's a tough market and they need to take what they can get. It also makes me wonder what the hell you *have* been doing for those years, if you weren't working. Maybe you travelled, maybe you lived off your savings, maybe you started your own business, maybe you did other things, but hell - 6 entire years of unemployment is a bad place to start from. You think you're going to land an MS job with that on your record (not that I've ever seen the big deal with MS jobs, to be honest)?
And I've found jobs online and offline - the best ones are normally online but I've landed some lovely places offline too, usually by word-of-mouth (90% of my clients over the last nine years have been by word-of-mouth). And I don't mean "keyboard shuffler" jobs. I make a good living providing IT management to schools (state and private, primary, secondary, college, already supported for IT or not) in London - hardly an "easy" job to land, especially for a kid straight out of university, especially for one with *NO* work experience when they started, especially for nine years of full employment in a row (seven self-employed but often working for only a handful of clients on a regular basis) and *especially* when I was actually hired to work on critical IT systems in preference to the existing, "free", borough services provided to those schools & colleges. It's a matter of persistence and having something to show. Getting an interview and getting a job are vastly different things - the interview is HARD to get, the job shouldn't be if you've got to interview.
Something about your post suggests to me that you have FAR too high an expectation based on the fact that you have a skill that you have rarely demonstrated in a work environment, but mostly "at home" on toy projects. I can program in C, Z80 and x86 assembly. I can manage SQL databases. I've made my own toy operating systems. I can build and manage networks. None of that matters, even though I use it as part of my job. I'd love to have a job doing certain parts of that, but it's just not possible to fill my hours with the tasks I enjoy the most. I have dozens of those sorts of qualifications, projects, etc. too, they appear on my CV, but equally I have a full history of employment in a relevant sector. Recession? Stop blaming external factors for your expectations. England is in one of it's worst ever "recessions"... at the height of it, I left one job to seek out another because I wasn't enjoying it. I have a house with substantial mortgage, a wife who earns her share and (at the time) a newborn child. I competed for the new role against 50-year experienced IT managers, in a London borough, and walked into the job - not because I was cheap, not because I was perceived as being easily led, but because my history spoke for itself even though my employers understood 0.1% of what was on my CV.
I don't think "no one wanted to hire"... I think "no one wanted to hire YOU". I'd probably bin your CV if you have a six year unexplained gap in it and your biggest project was an MMORPG (I'm sorry, but it's a game... unless I'm a game developer, I *will* just ignore that project as nothing more than a hobby). I'd be worried that you can't find a job online (I view submissions from skilled IT people who submit on paper with suspicion if they could have filed online) - that's where the *best* IT jobs are... they are shor
Seriously though, it really sounds like a study of the TCO of MBAs is more in order -- how many outsourcing snafus, and how much of the current financial woes in the US, are due to MBAs with precisely the mentality noted by the GP:
Unfortunately, we find much of this same short-sighted idiotic MBA behaviour in the US government over the past several years:
"We support our troops," indeed. How bitter. I have good friends in the military, and these Blackwater goons are effectively stealing wages from them. Meh. Another example:
By any strict economic definition, there is another word for "profit" -- "inefficiency". Ethically speaking, one might even stretch things a bit and call it "theft". Making a living is one thing, but fleecing your customers simply because you can is a crime in all but name.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
This post and its associated rating (currently 50% Troll) is a prime example of how /.'s moderators have really gone downhill. The text of the post is both relevant and spot-on, rather more insightful than otherwise, and in no way is it seeking to get a rise out of the readership by misleading obstinacy. Sure, it's cynical as hell, but then again, the current situation in the US would seem to warrant precisely such an attitude.
It seems the mods need more education about what "Troll" really means -- for starters, "Troll" != "Disagree", and "Troll" != "Do not like".
Methinks this kind of modding behaviour is the /. equivalent of griefers. Meh.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Until a couple of years ago, I worked for a major US IT firm, in Storage, and went to Bangalore to train new 2nd-level support guys on our mid-range products. The guys themselves were generally OK, since they weren't new to the industry, though there were some odd gaps in basic storage knowledge, such as SCSI protocols. Not something you'd expect to find in a person who'd allegedly done 2nd level support at another company, one that specialized in storage!
In general, though, I wasn't training new graduates from the likes of IIIT-B, but I met a few and had discussions with their managers. What I learned was that these young people were under immense pressure to succeed in IT, with the hopes and expectations of whole extended families riding on their backs. IT is the ticket out of the slums, and families make enormous sacrifices to get their kids in to the industry in the first place. In college, I was told, there's also massive pressure to score high marks, and the process is more biased towards rote learning and cramming for exams. Not totally, of course - that would be impossible - but the point is that, like the Indian education system in general, it's tighter and more authoritarian in terms of curriculum, and the schools themselves were under govt. pressure to deliver high numbers of graduates.
I hate to say this, but I met a few "graduates" who were simply not "graduate material", in terms of basic intelligence, curiosity, enthusiasm, or ability to absorb new concepts. Other graduates I met have great careers ahead of them, but I came away with the impression that "graduate" over there is a bit (again, not totally!) like "MCSE" in other countries: a statement of the exams you have passed, not a wider measure of your ability to function in a complex, ever-changing IT world. The problem with "cramming" is that while it might get you through an exam, the knowledge is not integrated and retained as well as it should be. I'm seeing this myself, now that I'm getting to go to university as a mature student (Engineering), where some subjects would IMHO be better assessed by e.g. thesis, not exam.
(this is not a
He's looking for someone to do a relatively simple DB-related job. He's asking a few questions that should be dead simple for anyone who's only so much as worked through tutorials in a few related subjects. It ain't rocket science.
You talk about "foreign formats," about not expecting academics to have practical experience, you talk about "tailored toward job postings"... but those are all hand-waving and pretty feeble excuses for not having a clue of basic concepts of the job they're applying for. No employer should be obligated to hire morons unless it's to do with Affirmative Action. If they can't handle this kind of stuff they should submit their application to MacDonalds.
I find it hard to believe it's so hard to get a hold of people with such basic skills. But if it's true, the educational system is deeply flawed and we need fixes, not excuses.
When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Rel
I don't know where you're working. Such poor work habits have only been the case in one environment I've ever seen, out of many my own job history and the many partners I've worked with, where the manager had frightened and alienated all the staff and they were all job hunting. (All 5 of those engineers resigned within one week of each other: it was frightening to see as a corporate partner, but I gave 2 of them recommendations because they were _good_ at dealing with that mess beyond what I would have tolerated.) One of the reasons those engineers balked was because not only was the product "not perfect" it was demonstrably broken due to the excess "features" added by the manager that were not part of the core requirements, and it simply would not work.
American workers are more willing to question authority. It drives authority nuts, and I've had it happen with international scenarios, where I struggled to be allowed to speak directly with the actual engineers so we could resolve the confusion about the most effective approach. We also loathe the telephone tag of sending our question to a call center or a manager, who rewrite and re-interpret it, then having them talk to a technician, who re-interprets it, and eventually gets to an engineer who wonders why we want to gogo-fratz with the banana puddijng, but does their best to send back an answer. We Americans try to sneak past those layers of management and bureaucracy to find the person who actually knows, and trade notes. (I do, anyway, and try to send them my patches.)
"It lasts, right now, for 1.25 years. Do the math."
Erm... 1.25 years of unemployment on a CV (and I don't know the rules but in most places you ARE allowed to do volunteer work and sometimes a small amount of actual work and still claim). Followed by the following thoughts in a potential employer's head:
"He was on benefits for over a year."
"He didn't do anything else in that time."
"If I employ him, there's nothing to stop him leaving in 3/6/9 months, whatever the cut-off point is, and then going back on full benefits for another year."
"Maybe he's using me to 'refresh' his benefits."
"I'm not going to get the best work out of him, and he's been idle for at least a year, and then he'll probably leave or get himself sacked."
"Why should I employ him?"
Unless you can answer that last question, there's nothing in it for an employer. It's harsh, yes, but true. Especially true as you get older... if you're going to employ a 40-year-old over a 30-year-old, they better have 10 years of experience to draw on! If they can't show that, you might as well employ the 30-year-old (who will want less money) and train him.
If an American called Indians unemployable, that American would labeled a bigot. But Indians say that sort of thing about Americans all the time. According to India, and a lot of US companies: all the smart people in the world come from countries where people earn as little as $1 a day.
If anybody in the US suggests that visa limits not be raised, India screams and cries about US racism and xenophobia. But, what percentage of Americans work for WiPro? My understanding is that India is not all accepting of immigrants from Bangladesh. And how can India's caste system not be consider one of the earth's most extreme form of bigotry? I might add, the US has a well earned reputation of being lavishly generous in matters of immigration.
India constantly warns the US about the horrors of a "brain drain" that would be
caused by the US not allowing unlimited guest workers from India. But why is
India not worried about the Indian "brain drain" caused by the "best and
brightest" leaving India. We might also want to give some thought to the US
"brain drain" that is being caused by the US "best and brightest" avoiding STEM
jobs, because the job prospects for Americans is so dismal.
Azim Premji, who owns 79% of WiPro, recently wrote an article that warned that "US protectionism will be counter-productive"
"If we get into protectionism, then the West is going to get a wave of protectionism in response, and that is going to turn back the clock 20 years," Premji told The Sunday Times.
"And it will be America and Europe that suffer," he said because they will be excluded from the only growth markets left, in Asia, Africa and China. You are not going to grow at 10 per cent trading in London, are you," he asked.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Infotech/ITeS/US-protectionism-will-be-counter-productive-Azim-Premji/articleshow/4683155.cms
Ever hear the expression: "what is good for the goose, is good for the gander?"
India is one of the most protectionist nations on earth, and they have been for
a long time. If India wants to consider guest workers part of trade agreements,
then when does India make good for the three million Indians already living in
the USA? Or does India consider "protectionism" a one-way thing?
I recall reading somewhere that in a basic programming concepts class, during the time when everyone was hopping on the comp sci bandwagon for easy money, there will be about half the people who come out of it simply unable to grasp such simple concepts as control structures and variables in any meaningful way -- no matter how good the instruction. The problem as I've come to see it is in India, your actual aptitude for programming isn't really relevant to whether you get into the training. I don't know why this is, because in theory this is tested for ahead of time.
The difference I see is that in the US, most people without such aptitude will change their majors. In India, it's no deterrent -- this is often the only way out of abject poverty and so they will understandably fight tooth and nail to complete their training and enter the workforce. This in turn heavily weights the available pool of developers in the direction of "incompetent".
It's not that the people of India are as a whole any less likely to have the ability to succeed in computer-related careers than anywhere else in the world population -- but desperation drives a disproportionately large percentage of unqualified people into this career path.
Don't be an idiot, the original post was absolutely 100% racist. Let's read it carefully:
"The Chinese and Europeans are the folks I move to the top of the interview list."
He clearly has stated that he shows preference to people of a specific ethnicity over others. That's textbook racism. It's not crosses burning on your lawn or racial slurs racism, but it is racism.
What the original poster has done has clearly described that they do not judge each Indian or American applicant on their own merits, and gives preference to Chinese and Europeans by "moving them to the top of the interview list." It may turn out that he hires more Europeans and Chinese over Americans and Indians, but their country of origin should have no bearing on his choice of qualified employees. Only their work experience and the answers they have to questions pertaining to the job should be relevant in an interview.
Besides, if he overlooks that one star programmer from India or the US just because of his prejudice, then he's doing a disservice both to the himself as well as the prospect.
We may be a litigious society that's lost a lot of it's motivation for working hard, but I'm an American myself and if you had treated me that way and you had interviewed me for a US position, I would show you just how hard working and litigious I personally could be. Thank goodness such treatment is against the law in the US.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
I don't mind immigrants, I object to the H1B visa program making immigrants "non-immigrants". Real immigrants are legal, they tend to be motivated to succeed in America, and have made innumerable contributions to America.
H1B visa holders can only stay in America a short time and many of them do "drone" work for insane work hours. They could be brilliant or dull but the fact is that our companies are using them as disposable employees.
We should trash that program and setup a longer term immigration program where they have to choose leaving, becoming a citizen, or becoming a permanent alien resident. Then they would have more of a chance to contribute and a chance of receiving a fair wage.