Posted on 11/11/2009 12:38:12 PM PST by AuntB
Sudhir Kapoor, 25, got the call from his employer late last year. It was bad news: The economic downturn meant the technology company had to let him go.
Laxmi Aiyar, who is returning to India after she was laid off by her company, says, "It is Indian talents who made America rich and prosperous. Now, they are throwing us out like a can of Pepsi."
Since nearly 40 percent of all H-1B visa holders are from India , the mounting layoffs are hitting Indian professionals particularly hard.
....Lives have been disrupted, and some said they were under tremendous stress to pay back mortgage loans for buying houses and cars. Many had children born on U.S. soil and wonder how their children will adjust to Indian schools and a different way of life.
H-1s have been reluctant to publicize their plight, for two reasons: They fear that most Americans are unsympathetic to their predicament, and many do not want their family and friends in India to know that their American dream didn't quite work out.
If someone has worked abroad for more than seven years, they are often found unfit to work in "resurgent India ." And managers have to tread carefully between paying them more than "locals."
"What America 's basically saying is, 'We've educated you, we've trained you, we've taught you all about our markets,'" says Vivek Wadhwa, a successful Indian-born tech entrepreneur turned Duke University professor. "'Now you have to get the hell out of here. "
"Our generation has benefited because America has welcomed us and we have learned so much here," said Himanshu Khare, a software professional in Boston on a H1B visa, but thinking of going back to India.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
What?! you brought a bunch of Mc’s here?
For crying outloud! they make good chandeliers, wine glasses and adorable little green men but do we really need them here?
Oh, forgot about their banks like Barclays but hey, I am just a 5th generation American.
Yes my great, great, great grand paddy was Irish.
Still, when your visa is no longer valid .... Adios!
Oh, and we’ll leave the light on.
My company lays off Americans and continues to hire Indians. The aren’t that smart, they can’t speak English well enough to understand. Send them ALL back!
Nobody who is here on a temporary H-1B work visa should be buying a house with a 30-year mortgage.
-PJ
“Multinationals such as MS deliberately cast a wide
net - IQ and ability trump nationality, and the Asians
are just plain more willing/able to defer gratification
and go for the postgrad degree.”
Willing, because of the factors I pointed out above.
Able, no.
I am a software engineer. I have over 12 years of experience and a masters degree. I will share two things with you.
I went to school at a California university. I was a TA while I was in school. The brunt of my work was grading papers for computer science courses. These included program code/output and essays about various topics. Our biggest minority group in the CS department was Indians. Every single person I ever caught cheating was Indian. Over and over they would copy each other’s code. They would fake their output with code that obviously won’t compile. I never knocked anyone for not being a native English speaker, but for a final essay on bluetooth in a networking course, three papers from Indians had perfect English. Googling some sentences showed me one guy turned in someone’s essay and put their name on it. Another paper was just bluetooth.com put into a word document. The other guy took things from different sources, but didn’t cite any of it.
These people didn’t understand real programming or theory. The only thing they wanted to do was play with Java. For some reason Indians are drawn to Java as if it were flavored with curry and cardamom. These are the people who said things in my upper division courses like “do we have to use pointers in this class? AWWWWWWWWW. THIS IS SO STUPID!!”
Now for the second part of the story. I’ve never had any luck working with Indian programmers. I spent 9 years at a medical device company. I worked my way through school and so the software head didn’t want me. I was basically a software engineer for the R&D department instead of the software department. They hired some Indian guy who was later fired for running his own V&V (verification and validation) and marking things as passing when they actually failed. That could get someone thrown in jail if the product ever hurt anyone.
I worked next at Panasonic. We were a lab in Salt Lake City that wrote middleware to be used by a team of engineers in Japan. They wanted some of the example uses of our middleware to be done by an Indian firm. The reasoning was that someone else could use our middleware to get an idea of how well people can adapt to it. I spoke out against the idea. So did our company vice-president, actually. (We were a separate division.) They went ahead and did it anyway. We gave them our libraries for the Java version and our java examples. We gave them some scenarios to write software for, and told them under no circumstances should they try to modify our demos. They should do it from scratch.
After 6 months, and who knows how many thousands of dollars, all they did was give us back our own demos and claim that they met the scenarios. They did NOTHING.
I’ve also heard a story from someone at the medical device company (this is hearsay obviously) who had experience with Indian software engineers as well. All they did was give them back some opensource stuff they downloaded off the net and say that this would work for them.
I don’t consider myself racist, but I guess in all honesty I am towards Indians and technology. Many are liars and cheats (and we have plenty of those homegrown in the US). Many have no skills and no understanding. The entire thing is a way for them to get ahead, but it’s failing. Nobody talks about outsourcing anymore. Not to China (I have stories about this at the medical company regarding mechanical engineering and chassis prototyping), and not to India. Why? Because it doesn’t work. You get what you pay for. You know what I consider Indian outsourcing? Job security.
I’ll tell you what, I will never take a chance on anyone from India. Especially a doctor. I will worry that they cheated their way through school.
I apologize for the stereotyping. I know it’s wrong, but experience has shown me that I can’t take chances. I am not exaggerating when I say EVERY SINGLE PERSON caught cheating was from India. Every single one. Believe me... I love catching cheaters. Everyone was heavily scrutinized.
As Abu would say, “Thank you, come again.”
No, I'm not saying that but basking in our past glories while ignoring current realities is doing this country a disservice.
Go look at the demographics in engineering classrooms. Then take a walk across campus and look at the demographics in the liberal arts (basket weaving) programs. It's sad.
Your experience may indeed vary. I can only be guided by what I see at work.
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As a 20 year IT pro who has been cut MANY times when projects ended (defense industry) while H1-B's were kept on in new assignments I can tell you that every single one had the same game plan ... get here on a H1-B , import a bride (and some are stunning) from back home ,, have at least one anchor baby and stay here forever.
Well, BOO HOO! My trained, cry on cue crocodile is crying enough tears to resink the Titanic.
The whole H1-B thing is nothing but a stab in the back of American technology people, all so some congressman can get campaign funds from certain large companies.
With over 10 percent UNemployment of Americans during the 0bama Depression, I think all H1-Bs should be sent home.
The whole claim that these people do jobs Americans can’t do is just as much BULL as the claim by politicians that illegal aliens do jobs that Americans won’t do!
It is time that Americans be hired FIRST!!
And, then you went on to talk about students in schools. A complete disconnect. Again, talk about hyperbole.
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Pretty easy to do when they pay for college in rupees and get paid in dollars ... SEND THE SLAVES HOME AND HIRE AMERICANS WHOSE WORK DOESN'T NEED TO BE RE-WORKED BECAUSE WE UNDERSTAND THE REQUIREMENTS.
In computer science grad school (four years ago) the Indian students were great. They spoke good English and worked hard and the Indian professors in our department got on them and made sure they understood what cheating was.
Our problem was Middle Eastern and African students. The horror stories... my friend was a TA for an intro course and she had so much harassment from African, mostly Muslim, male students because she was pretty and blond. And the one really bad plagiarism case I saw close up was a Middle Eastern student who got foisted into my group. Fortunately we caught him, documented it, and took it to the professor, because if we’d turned in the assignment without realizing it we American students could have lost our funding...
They're doing this as well. They don't need visas to take American jobs.
Go back to your cult nations and try to better your own country!
Maybe, maybe not.
When I was in engineering school back in the early 80s I had to have a 3.1 GPA to get accepted into the College of Engineering at my University starting the Junior year. When I graduated the requirement for US students had been raised to 3.2.
More than half of the open seats were reserved for foreign students who paid about $900 per credit hour while our fees were around $50 per credit hour. The foreign students only had to have the university GPA average of 2.2 to get accepted into the program while the US students had to fight tooth and nail to get the remaining scrap seats.
The University was going for the bucks and if they allowed entry by merit the US students would have kicked butt.
Why didn’t they try to change their visas while here?
The computers they work on were not invented in India.
That's about as arrogant a statement as I've heard this week.
#13—employers probably pay them less.
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