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Immigration Attorneys: Industry Pushes Foreign Labor, Claiming 'US Students Can't Hack It In Tech' (breitbart.com)
geek writes: According to Caroline May from Breitbart News, "The tech industry is seeking to bolster its argument for more white-collar foreign tech workers with the insulting claim that the education system is insufficiently preparing Americans for tech fields, according to pro-American worker attorneys with the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI). [In an op-ed published at The Daily Caller, IRLI attorneys John Miano and Ian Smith take the tech industry to task for its strategy to promote the H-1B visa program -- alleging a labor shortage of apt American tech workers while importing thousands of foreign workers on H1-B visas from countries with lower educational results than the U.S.]" John Miano and Ian Smith write via The Daily Caller: "But if the H-1B program really is meant to correct the failings of our education system, as BigTech's new messaging-push implies, why is it importing so many people from India? According to results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a global standardized math and science assessment sponsored by the OECD, India scored almost dead last among the 74 countries tested. The results were apparently so embarrassing, the country pulled out of the program all together. Not surprisingly then, there isn't a single Indian university that appears within the top 250 spots of the World University Rankings Survey. And unlike American bachelor's degrees, obtaining a bachelor's in India takes only three years of study."
and 60-80 hours a week with no OT pay
But you're making the quite flawed assumption that you should only ever compare the cream of the crop. I'll give you a hint: 99% of H-1B workers aren't IIT graduates and wouldn't have made it to the top 50% in the entry test. The argument that just because one well-known outlier in India is good, that this is a "propaganda piece" is laughable.
The truth is far, far simpler: the companies are looking for cheaper workers, and India is happy to provide. Quality is of little concern.
I employ a lot of IT talent in Canada and the US. Here's what see in the marketplace:
* North American talent is the best, bar none but ... ...
* North American talent is produced in small quantities.
* Indian talent is (among the?) worst, but
* Indian talent is produced by the thousands.
I also work with many business partners, some of whom are Indian outsourcers and some of whom are large US corporations that have outsourced a large part of their IT work to India.
The work that gets done in India is usually shoddy. It takes 3 Indians to attempt the same job that one American will do.
So what's wrong? Are Indians dumb or something?
Turns out, they are exactly as smart (or dumb, take your pick) as anyone else. But they operate in a toxic work culture:
* Their organizations encourage cheating, which begins with those very difficult University entrance exams.
* Corruption permeates the workplace. You do favours for managers, so they will later help you advance your career.
* If you are really smart, you get poached from one outsourcing firm to another every 6-18 months. You never settle into a job long enough to get productive. Indian outsourcers literally have talent scouts on their payroll that have full time jobs at competitor firms.
* If you are not very smart, you stay in the same job for much longer, but you will never be very productive for the same reason that a not very smart American will never be very productive.
As a result, Indian outsourcers tend to have incredibly poor productivity and work quality. Firms that hire them are fools, because they look only at the low (and rising) hourly rates, but not at what an hour of labour will buy you.
I also see Indian workers (H1B or just normal immigrants) working in North America. First, I assume these are among the best and brightest, as they obviously had the motivation to relocate and had to get through whatever filters immigration authorities apply. These people fit in quite well and after a few years are (aside from accent) indistinguishable from their native-born cousins.
So the problems are basically this:
* North American education is good, but should scoop up a bigger segment of the population to compete.
* Indian education mostly sucks, with a few exceptions like IIT.
* Indian workplace culture is dysfunctional, and it's better to hire immigrants from there than to either send work over or give work to temporary workers. Don't outsource to Indian firms - that's a disaster.
* Employers frequently mistake hourly rates for total cost of ownership. They harm themselves and their former local workers through this mistake.
That's the world we live in.
A coworker of mine is from India - green card, permanent resident, married to a US citizen. She told me her credit load per semester was 18 and that "humanities and other general education" were not required. Also that foreign languages were a high school requirement.
She also said her education was fully government paid (and that the admissions requirements are far higher than for US universities).
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
Well, it depends on what you are going for.
Did you get straight A's or did your grades take a hit because of your class load? Lower grades exclude you from select jobs and sometimes change the entire path of your career.
Did you intern? Because a lot of companies don't like to hire people without experiece.
Was it a Stem degree? If so, you are pretty sharp because stem degrees are much harder than many other degrees. You may be atypical if so. If it's not a hard degree, your achievement is less impressive.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
So what? Indian universities are, for the most part, diploma mills with no academic standards.
-- Will program for bandwidth
We've hired several people from India. You have to perform a rigorous technical interview because more than half of them didn't know a damn thing. The people we hired are good, though.
-- Will program for bandwidth
They don't, speaking as an Indian in IT in India. The big outsourcing companies, whether the homegrown ones like Infosys/Wipro/TCS or the foreign (to us) ones like Accenture/Capgemini/Cognizant have no such rule about hiring only IITians. MNC product companies on the other hand - Amazon, Adobe, IBM etc - do hire the cream of the crop for their local R&D facilities. The IITians you see in the US probably went there to do their master's and then got a job locally (not sure what visa category that comes under)
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
The other reason is that US students at age 18 are behind their counterparts in other countries. You get to 18 in the USA and your qualifications are as far as I can make out roughly the same as a 16 year old in the UK. This was abundantly clear in the notes for a number of my text books back when I was studying for my physics degree. They would specify the level of study that the text books where suitable for. In fact one of the books we used in the final year of my *undergraduate* degree suggested that it was suitable for masters degrees in the USA. In fact most masters degrees in the USA take two years where in the UK they take just one year.
Put another way you can get an undergraduate degree at either Oxford or Cambridge in three years. Both of which are in the top 10 universities in the world, with a reputation to match. If offering degrees in three years was a bad thing how come these two are managing it?
In fact University College London and Imperial College London are also in the top 10, so that is 40% of the top 10 universities in the world offering degrees in three years.