I cannot comment on how Facebook, Google or Microsoft do their hiring. However, i have experience working with companies like Netscape(both before and after being part of AOL), H.P, Oracle, Maxtor. The way these companies hired H1-Bs - they would hire them as contractors through firms like TCS, Wipro, Infosys or smaller IT firms which basically had a small office with an accountant and couple of clerks to do the billing and wages. I went through one of these smaller companies and so did a lot of other people then (this is about 10 years back, things might be different now). If they like your work, they would offer you employment (mostly at market rates - depending on how good they think you are and how badly they need your skills) and process your H1-B visa. That's how i was hired as a full time employee by my eventual employer. That's the route most H1-Bs used to take. I doubt Google or Facebook or even Microsoft go to India to hire 10k H1-Bs as you mention, but I wouldn't know.
You might be in the 1-5% then. Most H1-B visa holders work as contractors through their employers. They are paid below average wages while their employers charge their clients per-hour billing. It's rampant in companies like Infosys, Tata Consultancy, Wipro etc. If you read the news, it says these companies command most of the H1-B visas. So you denying that it doesn't happen or that it might be a one off case is really disingenuous. I speak from both personal experience and from accounts of my friends and people i know in the IT sector. Also, I never mentioned about any threats or abuse. I just said that green card is used as a carrot to keep you on low wages with your employer. If you quit while in the middle of the green card process, depending on which stage you are in, you might have to start the process all over again. That's the reason why i called it indentured labour. There are enough documents detailing this practise if you care to look. It's not exactly the same as working for McDonalds since even average pay in IT is quite high. So most people don't complain and eventually move to a company they are working as contractors for, as full time employees.
As someone who worked on an H1-B visa about 10 years back in Silicon Valley, i can confirm that these visas are being misused by IT consulting companies. They take the majority of these visas and then use them as baits in india for IT professionals. Most indian IT companies are nothing but cheap labour shops. If there is a dearth of IT professionals, make H1-B non-employer specific. All it does is make you a bonded labourer for 4-6 years with your employer who promises to process your green card while paying you a low salary. This is a big scam and i hope enough people take notice so that something is done about it. Most people on H1-B won't speak about it cause they don't want to go back home or lose their job. This is what keeps it going.
So you wouldn't be able to hire 1000 Indian programmers with that exchange rate.
Also your racist comments show how little you know about Indian programmers some of who are big names in the American Computer Industry.
Also almost every Indian programmer is well versed with English language and most of them can understand/write better english than you, so you won't have to hire a crappy american undergrad to do the translation work.
Well when I posed the question about "how many engineers etc do you know", I meant the general public. If the whole question is about how a select few know about the contributors of a project, then I think this already happens. People who are the main contributors are well known in the hacker community and even amongst the power users.
And if the debate is about mentioning every tom, dick and harry who contributed a line of code in a project, then i think it is just noise and so companies like redhat have a very good reason for removing this noise from their end product.
Would you want to wait a couple of hours so that everyone who ever contributed code to every program installed on your computer gets his/her due before you can do anything useful ?
Besides as others have already pointed, GUI based programs generally have Help->About dialog mentioning the credits.
Non gui programs can have a switch similar to -V for version info mentioning those who have contributed significantly to the code. But listing every coder who contributed atleast 1 line of code is insanity and actually takes away from the approach.
Also reiser is actually including an "Advertisement" with his code. Here's the thing which was removed by Debian which resulted in the controversy. ---- Start of shameless advertisement ------------ The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is the primary sponsor of Reiser4. DARPA does not endorse this project; it merely sponsors it.
Continuing core development of version 3 is mostly paid for by Hans Reiser from money made selling licenses in addition to the GPL to companies who don't want it known that they use ReiserFS as a foundation for their proprietary product. And my lawyer asked 'People pay you money for this?'. Yup. Hee Hee. Life is good. If you buy ReiserFS, you can focus on your value add rather than reinventing an entire FS. You should buy some free software too....
SuSE pays for continuing work on journaling for version 3, and paid for much of the previous version 3 work. Reiserfs integration in their distro is consistently solid.
MP3.com paid for initial journaling development.
Bigstorage.com contributes to our general fund every month, and has done so for quite a long time.
Thanks to all of those sponsors, including the secret ones. Without you, Hans would still have that day job, and the merry band of hackers would be missing quite a few....
Have fun. ------ End of shameless advertisement ------------
Now would you like to see the corner stones in the building mentioning something like this ? What you are talking about is crediting those people who have contributed quite significantly like : Miguel de Icaza for his work on many significant projects. This is totally fine and can be done by having a web page mentioning the chief contributors for each project, maybe even having their pictures and a brief about them.
On the contrary, a lot of people from the computer industry who were programmers are quite well known today. Examples of this would be Bill Gates (a prodigious hacker in his time), Larry Ellison, Linus , Stallman etc.
A lot of people in this industry have been featured in news on radio and t.v. including hackers, crackers etc.
So your assumption that only CEO's names are well known is not true. Besides the reasons why CEO's are known is because of their job function and not their popularity. Their job includes addressing conferences, shareholder meetings, giving press interviews and appearing on t.v.
Would you rather interview a programmer in a company to know what the company's future plans are or how the current recession is going to affect the companies bottom-line ?
Please understand the differences before quoting from books to justify your claims.
How many engineers names do you know who built damns or roads or other such important infrastructure ?
This is true about any field you can think of except maybe fashion and photography.
Slashdot Mirror
I cannot comment on how Facebook, Google or Microsoft do their hiring. However, i have experience working with companies
like Netscape(both before and after being part of AOL), H.P, Oracle, Maxtor. The way these companies hired H1-Bs - they
would hire them as contractors through firms like TCS, Wipro, Infosys or smaller IT firms which basically had a small office with
an accountant and couple of clerks to do the billing and wages. I went through one of these smaller companies and so did a lot
of other people then (this is about 10 years back, things might be different now). If they like your work, they would offer you
employment (mostly at market rates - depending on how good they think you are and how badly they need your skills) and
process your H1-B visa. That's how i was hired as a full time employee by my eventual employer. That's the route most H1-Bs
used to take. I doubt Google or Facebook or even Microsoft go to India to hire 10k H1-Bs as you mention, but I wouldn't know.
You might be in the 1-5% then. Most H1-B visa holders work as contractors through their employers. They are paid below average wages while their employers charge their clients per-hour billing. It's rampant in companies like Infosys, Tata Consultancy, Wipro etc. If you read the news, it says these companies command most of the H1-B visas. So you denying that it doesn't happen or that it might be a one off case is really disingenuous. I speak from both personal experience and from accounts of my friends and people i know in the IT sector. Also, I never mentioned about any threats or abuse. I just said that green card is used as a carrot to keep you on low wages with your employer. If you quit while in the middle of the green card process, depending on which stage you are in, you might have to start the process all over again. That's the reason why i called it indentured labour. There are enough documents detailing this practise if you care to look. It's not exactly the same as working for McDonalds since even average pay in IT is quite high. So most people don't complain and eventually move to a company they are working as contractors for, as full time employees.
None taken. Cheers :)
As someone who worked on an H1-B visa about 10 years back in Silicon Valley, i can confirm that these visas are being misused by IT consulting companies. They take the majority of these visas and then use them as baits in india for IT professionals. Most indian IT companies are nothing but cheap labour shops. If there is a dearth of IT professionals, make H1-B non-employer specific. All it does is make you a bonded labourer for 4-6 years with your employer who promises to process your green card while paying you a low salary. This is a big scam and i hope enough people take notice so that something is done about it. Most people on H1-B won't speak about it cause they don't want to go back home or lose their job. This is what keeps it going.
It's the same author who, a couple of days ago, wrote the Microsoft butt kissing, ass licking blog entry.
Yeah and had it not been for RMS, you would have
..go back to licking
been happy to dole out money to microsoft.
Now since you have free software, you no longer
care about the philosophy or ideology that made
it possible.
You don't even deserve it
microsoft's droppings.
Nice try!
but 1$ -> 45 Indian Ruppes
So you wouldn't be able to hire 1000 Indian programmers with that exchange rate.
Also your racist comments show how little you know about Indian programmers some of who are big names in the American Computer Industry.
Also almost every Indian programmer is well versed with English language and most of them can understand/write better english than you, so you won't have to hire a crappy american undergrad to do the translation work.
Well when I posed the question about "how many engineers etc do you know", I meant the general public. If the whole question is about how a select few know about the contributors of a project, then I think this already happens. People who are the main contributors are well known in the hacker community and even amongst the power users.
And if the debate is about mentioning every tom, dick and harry who contributed a line of code in a project, then i think it is just noise and so companies like redhat have a very good reason for removing this noise from their end product.
Would you want to wait a couple of hours so that everyone who ever contributed code to every program installed on your computer gets his/her due before you can do anything useful ?
Besides as others have already pointed, GUI based programs generally have Help->About dialog mentioning the credits.
Non gui programs can have a switch similar to -V for version info mentioning those who have contributed significantly to the code. But listing every coder who contributed atleast 1 line of code is insanity and actually takes away from the approach.
Also reiser is actually including an "Advertisement" with his code. Here's the thing which was removed by Debian which resulted in the controversy.
---- Start of shameless advertisement ------------
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is the primary sponsor of
Reiser4. DARPA does not endorse this project; it merely sponsors it.
Continuing core development of version 3 is mostly paid for by Hans Reiser from
money made selling licenses in addition to the GPL to companies who don't want
it known that they use ReiserFS as a foundation for their proprietary product.
And my lawyer asked 'People pay you money for this?'. Yup. Hee Hee. Life is
good. If you buy ReiserFS, you can focus on your value add rather than
reinventing an entire FS. You should buy some free software too....
SuSE pays for continuing work on journaling for version 3, and paid for much of
the previous version 3 work. Reiserfs integration in their distro is
consistently solid.
MP3.com paid for initial journaling development.
Bigstorage.com contributes to our general fund every month, and has done so for
quite a long time.
Thanks to all of those sponsors, including the secret ones. Without you, Hans
would still have that day job, and the merry band of hackers would be missing
quite a few....
Have fun.
------ End of shameless advertisement ------------
Now would you like to see the corner stones in the building mentioning something like this ? What you are talking about is crediting those people who have contributed quite significantly like : Miguel de Icaza for his work on many significant projects. This is totally fine and can be done by having a web page mentioning the chief contributors for each project, maybe even having their pictures and a brief about them.
On the contrary, a lot of people from the computer industry who were programmers are quite well known today. Examples of this would be Bill Gates (a prodigious hacker in his time), Larry Ellison, Linus , Stallman etc.
A lot of people in this industry have been featured in news on radio and t.v. including hackers, crackers etc.
So your assumption that only CEO's names are well known is not true. Besides the reasons why CEO's are known is because of their job function and not their popularity. Their job includes addressing conferences, shareholder meetings, giving press interviews and appearing on t.v.
Would you rather interview a programmer in a company to know what the company's future plans are or how the current recession is going to affect the companies bottom-line ?
Please understand the differences before quoting from books to justify your claims.
How many engineers names do you know who built damns or roads or other such important infrastructure ?
This is true about any field you can think of except maybe fashion and photography.
I read this denial way before slashdot posted the story. Seems some local newspapers are way ahead of slashdot.
_ id =306808047
http://www.timesofindia.com/articleshow.asp?art
It says establish not invent you moron!!