In economics and finance, arbitrage is the practice of taking advantage of a price difference between two or more markets: striking a combination of matching deals that capitalize upon the imbalance, the profit being the difference between the market prices.
1983 to present I’ve been in many Fortune 100 companies where the IT department had plenty of budget for 3 big projects.
Each project manager would try to staff his project and not be able find enough people. The IT shop had 3 choices:
1. Kill one or 2 of the projects and move the people from those projects to the survivor.
2. Off shore 1 or 2 of the projects to India.
3. Hire immigrants (green, h1b, student visa, no visa)
Ive seen IT shops choose all 3 alternatives.
Why are IT managers who are conservative and want to employ citizens unable to find citizens willing and able to take 6 figure jobs?
We need to honestly deal with that question and find the answers.
I’ve taken several jobs where the IT manager was aggressively looking for many months and in one case over a year for a person like me to fill the six figure position. Eventually I became available and took the position. Ive seen hiring managers hold positions open for a citizen rather than give it to an immigrant.
1983-2012 I was always able to move to the next gig with no interruption between the gigs. Nov 2012 it was time for me to look again. After unsuccessfully looking in Illinois for 6 months I relented and took a job in Atlanta. I rejected many opportunities in TX for personal reasons.
Why did nobody in GA apply for the job I took?
Currently there are many IT and non-IT jobs in GA that apparently nobody is applying for.
And when hiring managers do hire a citizen, how often are they scraping the bottom of the barrel... people with IT degrees who have no clue of facts or logic, no clue of cause and effect? How often do they get a druggie? A couple years ago I ran through a series of trainees I was supposed to mentor. One was a paranoid Occupy Wallstreet type who lashed out at the VPs out of paranoia. And it reflected poorly on both the manager who hired him and on me, his supposed mentor.
Hiring Indians is a lot safer than hiring the bottom of the barrel citizens.
But the situation is more complex. I discovered when I came to Atlanta that recruiters assume that Americans will only take a job near their current home. In contrast, Indians will take a job anywhere in the US. CA, NY, GA are all the same to them. Even when recruiters see an American applying for a job a thousand miles from home, the recruiters see it as a low probability situation and do not follow up on it. Thus they discriminate against Americans.
It happened that I wanted the gig in Atlanta for political reasons, not IT reasons. So I kept pushing until a recruiter relented and arranged an interview for the job that he and I both knew I would get immediately as I was the perfect candidate and they had been unable to fill it for months.