So you agree that there are some jobs Americans wont take.>>> no i think there is a c team that is cheaper. I worked with tata way back when GE brought some in. They needed a lot of hand holding as they had no business sense with their COBOL chops. I still remember the guy asking about pallidating part numbers. they were great people but paid half of we where and we had to work twice as hard filling in for their lack of business skills. It was an MRP system. Then another group replace our IT where i now work. When they had an issue one night. never called me (business now) for guidance. Fixed the error and ran the jobs. Three days later we realized they sent in a duplicate file of $8M in payments. It took me almost two months to clear those payments.
I have consulted to over 35 large shops; never a small shop. In the large shops there is a big variance in skills of both citizen and non-citizen staff; and of both employees and consultants.
In some shops the consultants are the experts and the IT employees in technical positions are not expected to have any skills. Other shops are the exact opposite, the employees are expected to have the expertise and the consultants are not expected to think; but to just do the grunt work that will soon be automated.
Even in the same shop different departments and different teams in the same department vary greatly.
In general Federal government techies, both consultant and employee, have the lowest expectations and are the least competent. State and local government are next. State of Illinois is by far the most incompetent shop of the 35+ I’ve been in.
In general utilities (gas, electric, communications) rank second in least competent. The ones I’ve seen are by far the most inefficient with no regard for whether an effort has any value. Budgets and spending are independent of reality.
In general IT shops of retail business are in the middle in both business and technical skills. In general IT shops in insurance and banking are far above those named above. Manufacturing IT shops seem to be all over the map from my experience. Cant make generalizations about them.
Interestingly, there is no correlation between the skill expectations of an IT shop and the salary or rate expectations. Consultants to government are often the best paid of any consultants even though the expectations of skill level are very low.
In general, expectations of consultant rates in insurance and banking are in the middle. This is where the geeks go who love what they do so much they would do it for free ... and some of them almost do.
Expectations of rates in retail firms vary greatly, not just by the firm, but by the silo and team within the enterprise.
Technology category has little to do with rates. In DB2, Oracle, MS some DBAs are overpaid, some underpaid. Same with coding. Some COBOL, some Java, some C++ are overpaid, some underpaid for the same skill level.
So when we see a big variance in non-citizen rates and skills, and a big variance in citizen rates and skills we need to understand that big variance is the nature of the entire industry.
Note that most IT shop employees and consultants are not in silicon valley type IT firms. Most of them are in non-IT industries and it is of them I comment.