Slashdot Mirror
Indian IT Sector Warns Against US Visa Bill (reuters.com)
India's IT lobby warned on Tuesday that a bill before the U.S. Congress aimed at imposing tougher visa rules unfairly targets some of its members and will not solve a U.S. labor shortage in technology and engineering. From a report on Reuters: Industry lobby group Nasscom was responding to a bill introduced by Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat from California, that would double the minimum salary required for holders of H-1B visas to $130,000 and determine how many of the visas were allocated, based on factors such as overall wages. India's $150 billion information technology sector, led by Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys and Wipro, uses the H-1B visas to fly engineers and developers to service clients in the U.S., their biggest market, but opponents say they are using the visas to replace U.S. workers. Concerns about President Donald Trump's immigration policies were heightened by his ban on refugees on Friday. "The Lofgren Bill contains provisions that may prove challenging for the Indian IT sector and will also leave loopholes that will nullify the objective of saving American jobs," Nasscom said.
How about salary shortage? There is no shortage in engineering. Engineering in the West is a dead-end profession and you can only lie so much to young people before they study in some other field.
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/electrical-and-electronics-engineers.htm
"Job Outlook, 2014-24 0% (Little or no change)"
Engineering is for the naive.
Now we know who's abusing the H1B visa program - the ones who complain the loudest.
We offshore our India team, so we won't be affected by the H1B changes. But the body shops here will be decimated, which is probably going to be a good thing.
This has nothing to do with Permanent Residents, they aren't here on H-1B visas
There's a shortage of below minimum wage labor within our borders.
Call centers tend to be run as sweat shops to squeeze as much tech work out of as minimally qualified people as possible for a little pay as they can offer to get them to show up to work. India was the solution to pay even less to get equally unqualified work.
The problem with tech isn't the lack of people willing to work tech, there's thousands of reasonably good techs that are jobless in every major city. It's the way companies view tech. Bean counters see tech as a pure expense since I.T. rarely brings money into the company directly. The job of I.T. is to enable everyone else in the company to bring money in. Sadly I.T. is seen as the equivalent to cleaning staff or the electrician that had a job to do but never left by many organizations. This view of I.T. is part of why so many companies that shun tech are often caught without good backups and easily fall prey to ransomware. At least ransomware makers are profiting from the mindset.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
If you are hiring someone in the US for $3 an hour you are a monster. I hope you are exaggerating, otherwise please take a second to think of how you are devaluing human life and decency.
It isn't that American's "don't want to do the job" it's that they "don't want to the job for a non-living wage".
12 hours a day for $3 an hour isn't going to pay for any type of decent living condition in America. Acting like a feudal lord and being oh-so-beneficent as to allow the peasants to work for peanuts isn't something we should aspire to. The idea of a job-creator class is a joke. People should be ashamed for treating other humans like this.
We can, and should, do better.
Easy. You get to be one of the guys they hire to fix that crap code and process. EVERY project I have ever worked on with overseas code resources has had massive problems with the quality of code that is returned.
The same cycle always holds true: First the overseas resources are given full tasks to complete. Then the returned code is total shit and doesn't do what was asked. So the tasks are broken down into smaller chunks, and those still don't work. Then the resources are asked to provide procedures and subroutines written to a rigid spec, and 70% of those finally work. Then the company realizes that they're paying experienced software engineers over here to spend hours a day breaking things into small enough chunks that the overseas people will *probably* not screw up and the amount of time wasted is enormous, plus those software engineers could just do it themselves in a fraction of the time.
So the company stops offshoring after wasting a couple of years of time and god knows how much money.
Unless I misunderstand how it works in the US, if both Trump and Pence were removed from office this very moment the presidency would fall to the president pro tempore of the senate, who is currently Senator Orrin Hatch (A Republican).
I know nothing of his politics or whether he'd be for or against h1b reform though.
Actually, it would go to Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan. President Pro-Tempre (not sure about spelling) of the Senate is #4.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.