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NY Times: Temporary Visas To Import Talent Help Copycats Take Jobs Abroad
ErichTheRed writes: A new article from the NY Times surprised me. It describes what we in the IT industry see all the time — H-1B visas being used way outside of their original purpose. I think this is significant because the article describes the problem well and shows how Tata, Accenture, etc. are offshoring regular office work as well as IT work. I feel that showing the average Joe/Jane that their nice safe middle class office job isn't so safe is the only way to sway popular opinion on this important matter!
Reader theodp notes that Congress is making H-1B visa less costly for India-based IT services providers.
The article neglects to report on the end results of this process - making it seem like 'well, this is nasty, but it's what American business needs to do to remain competitive'. Since they mention Cognizant as one of the big players using this 'tape the current workers and then fire them' approach, let me comment as an ex worker that was ultimately fired after surviving a Cognizant outsourcing for several years and working with their devs (technically 'rebadged' as a Cognizant dev myself):
1. Productivity takes a huge hit. I have no idea whether the cost savings are enough to counteract that, but in our case the software products that had their development outsourced, all - without exception - have died on the vine and are now running on skeleton crews in anticipation of being shutdown once all existing support contracts with customers end. That's the endpoint where I lost my job.
2. The Indian developers never get up to speed. Or more accurately, they begin to get up to speed after 9 months to a year - but then Cognizant rotates them out to other projects, and you're back to total green junior guys watching the videos and asking stupid questions again. And yes, this is all by design. Cognizant's big selling point to the US companies is that they enable great flexibility to ramp staff up and down on demand. Why those companies believe that crap is another story altogether.
3. There is no concept of a senior developer. Prior to the Cognizant experience, the senior devs came up through the ranks and had an incredible depth of knowledge and experience about the specific products they were managing. Ultimately, that product-specific knowledge became as valuable as their tech chops. The Cognizant model relies on 'business analysts' who came up through the product design - i.e. spec writers, not through development. So where those folks used to be or have access to senior developers to sanity check their designs, there is now an utter vacuum. So there is no iterative back-and-forth to fix broken designs. Stuff gets built (way late) according to specs with problems that should've been caught along the way. Meanwhile, the offshore dev's spun their wheels trying to build something they didn't understand - often because it didn't make sense. Only to need to have it completely trashed and rewritten.
4. And this is a big one. All that 'knowledge transfer' material (i.e. the videos and any corresponding writeups) are the exclusive property of Cognizant. So that even if you come to realize that the Cognizant outsourcing was a mistake, you have already fired the people who had the original knowledge - and you don't even own the (shitty) materials to train staff to replace Cognizant. They essentially own your operation - at the same time as they drag it down.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...