Posted on 06/22/2015 6:13:59 AM PDT by ConservingFreedom
It is an especially humiliating thing to lose your job overnight, kind of like being at the receiving end of a summary execution at the crack of dawn. But it must be an entirely different kind of feeling to be given delayed marching orders and then be forced to stick around to train your replacement, who has just been shipped in from a foreign country, under the additional threat that not doing so will cost you your severance. h1b-one.jpg
This is apparently what two companies -- Walt Disney and power utility Southern California Edison -- did over the last year, forcing the Department of Labour to open up investigations against Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys a few days ago for "possible violations of rules for visas for foreign technology workers under contracts" on the heels of a New York Times story on the Disney situation.
The Times is not the first to report these cases. Computerworld wrote a detailed story in February about how SCE, Southern California's largest utility, laid off around 400 people and hired their replacements from Infosys, based in Bangalore, and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), in Mumbai. The Times focused more on the fracas at Disney, where 250 people were told in October last year that they were going to lose their jobs to Indians, with the added ignominy of having to train them.
Both Infosys and TCS deny that the Labour Department has launched an investigation into them -- indeed, they say that they have not been informed of any sort of probe being conducted at all.
Meanwhile, Indian IT industry body Nasscom claims that the Indian IT sector is being unfairly tarred without any attention to "facts and logic". Nasscom president R Chandrashekhar said its members are, as they always have been in situations like this, cooperating with US authorities on requests for information.
The stakes are enormous. The US remains by far the bulk of the market for the more than $140 billion Indian IT services industry, where exports are over $98 billion.
American IT workers are naturally incensed at any reports of IT jobs being stolen from under their noses by companies that pay their replacements a fraction of the wage.
"The program has created a highly lucrative business model of bringing in cheaper H-1B workers to substitute for Americans," said Ron Hira, a professor of public policy at Howard University, who studies visa programs and has testified before Congress about H-1B visas (PDF), in the Times story.
After all, the H-1B visa on which these tech workers arrive are meant for "specialized" positions that require advanced science or computer skills, where American equivalents cannot be found. But critics say that because of legal loopholes, companies often do not have to prove that American workers are being displaced. Christina’s story of quality at home and work Check out how our Nestlé Pure Life Mom makes sure quality is a top priority at home and at work. Sponsored by: Nestle® Pure Life®
On the other side of the fence, defenders of H-1Bs doing outsourced work in the US say that many American workers with advanced skills do not gravitate towards these relatively lower-end positions, and that the churn rate amongst Americans is often high enough to be a hiring deterrent. And those who do apply for the job are often older and need to be extensively re-skilled in order to be able to function in the fast-paced world of evolving programming languages.
In the final analysis, the saga of Indian IT companies being scrutinized for unfair labour practices in my opinion is as much about these firms gaming the system as it is about the history of labour within the American capitalist machine, the nexus between politics and big business in the US and its priorities, the real impact of H-1B on American IT jobs and wages, as well as the future of work.
Stay tuned for the next article on the H-1B saga that examines all of these issues within the context of the recent alleged probe against Infosys and TCS.
I had been processing I9 candidates on the average of six to ten a day at our center. I9 is the H-1B code and the majority were from Infosys. They were either from Pakistan or India and were going to Microsoft.
Ebeneezer Scrooge did not reform at the end of the story.
Huh????
Kill it.
“...and remember to always type in code, b = z, z = a, etc....it is company policy to code so that only the creator can read it.”
If a company needs an HB-1 worker because they can’t find a qualified American worker no problem we’ll just adjust the law. Here’s how the new HB-1 visa program works, you can’t find an American then you have to pay the foreign worker 3 times the highest American wage for that position plus a tax surcharge of 20% of the wage. If that foreign worker is so essential then they’ll gladly pay for it. We’ll see just how vital these foreign workers really are!
“Look at what all that cheap foreign labor did for Microsoft.
“They were the biggest tech giant on the planet; controlled practically 95% of the operating systems in home and office, - then missed out on all of the major tech developments of the 21st century ( revamped search engines, digital music, smartphones, tablets, social media ).”
- http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3291987/posts?page=73#73
What is happening is either that "new" languages are really just the same old languages with slightly different syntax (e.g. Python) or the newer languages are easier to pick up because they come with more object libraries (e.g. imagine writing a user interface from the ground up with only C.)
What newbie programmers don't have is the experience that only comes after years of getting nonsensical, vague, or contradictory requirements from customers and working with those customers to turn them into a clear, concise, and coherent set of requirements and then into a useful and intuitive application.
I’m an IT engineer at a company that uses TCS for application development and Tier II support. It’s been my experience that the support engineers they provide are often no more than script-reading troubleshooters, and when they are outside of their script, they cannot function. There are always exceptions, but we were recently tasked with interviewing a handful of candidates to provide assistance with vulnerability remediation and found that many of them had a hard time articulating what, exactly, they would do to perform simple tasks such as registry editing or even locating specific files in a file system on both Linux and Windows platforms.
I’m not saying they’re useless. Businesses often go this route to get cheap labor without having to pay for healthcare, retirement, etc. My contention on this is that domestic engineers often work longer hours, have better understanding of corporate systems, and put in the time on weekends and holidays to keep the company running which is part of the mentality of “earning one’s keep.” I know I do it without question. It’s part of being an IT professional.
What is happening is either that "new" languages are really just the same old languages with slightly different syntax (e.g. Python) or the newer languages are easier to pick up because they come with more object libraries (e.g. imagine writing a user interface from the ground up with only C.)
Yup, it's a BS excuse meant to fool people who know no programming.
Even if it is new languages, it takes months if not years to turn out a new enterprise class business application, you just don’t sit down and write it.
With the speed of technology, these workers won’t even be able to use those languages before the next big thing.
Tech workers you have to invest in, if you don’t, they loose these skills.
So in the end, there is only the salary that we are talking about and the ability of the Indian company to provide internal tech training for their employees rather than going out to third parties.
Also, the Indian companies require their employees to pay for training and conferences out of their pocket and write internal and public blogs promoting the company. This is on their own time.
If the Indian employee knew their rights and the company didn’t have an H1B leverage over them...there would be hundreds of employment lawsuits. Having the Indian company insulates the customer company.
The bean counters are patted on the back for saving a buck, while quality and efficiency suffer.
In our company, anyway, it’s noticeable. They’ve prided themselves in the reduction of on-call contacts for engineers, but the number of production impacting incidents has gone up steadily.
Regardless of the country of origin, contractors generally don’t work as diligently or as carefully as FTE counterparts, because they don’t have skin in the game. When you’re brought on full time and have all of those benefits, you are much more discriminate and careful when you work in production environments. This is playing out almost universally across American IT shops.
Just about all of them had a very poor command of the English language -
There is an expectation of technical ability to work with techsuport, and I find that it doesn't exist in these folks. However they are told to call techsupport and scream in order to get us to do their job for them. I have many, many stories about this topic that I won't share here...
It's frustrating enough to make me want to retire early and let them drown...
Sky, you misrepresented the I-9 Form a little bit.
All new hires, including USA citizens, must complete an I-9.
Basically, you just sign a statement, under risk of perjury, that you are authorized to work in the USA.
You have to present documents, which your new employer photocopies, that “confirm” your identity, like a drivers license.
And, you must “confirm” your lawful right to live and work in the USA, with documents like a USA passport, Green Card, Work Visa, etc.
Also, a huge percentage of Asian Indians are chasing a Green Card, which means years of indentured service to one corporation, which may, or may not, become their Green Card sponsor.
I see some humor this - at some point in time the Asian Indian immigrants with Green Cards will be evicted from their American jobs by new Third World H-1Bs!
I've seen that happen.
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