Posted on 04/06/2009 3:59:02 AM PDT by angkor
MUMBAI -- With his master's degree in electrical engineering at North Carolina State University almost complete, Ravi, 24, received a promising job offer from a technology firm. He called his parents back in India, happy that he was on track for an H-1B work visa, which is seen as a steppingstone to U.S. citizenship.
But just before Thanksgiving, Ravi got a call from his future employer.
"They told me that because of the economic downturn they couldn't hire me in anticipation of tougher times ahead. They were laying off other American employees, and cutting my job would be a proactive measure," said Ravi, who gave only his first name because he did not want his job prospects affected. "I do feel bad for anyone losing a job, whether it's an American or an H-1B foreign worker. But for foreign students, if we don't get a job, we have to go back to our home countries. When I talk to my parents, they tell me not to worry, to just come home. [snip]"
As the U.S. economy slows, highly skilled foreign professionals seeking work under various visa programs are finding it harder to get jobs. President Obama's stimulus package stops U.S. companies, largely in banking and financial services, that take federal bailout money from hiring H-1B visa holders for two years if they have laid off American workers in the previous six months. The administration has vowed to tighten restrictions and step up oversight of all work visa applications.
The H-1B program brings in about 85,000 skilled foreign workers every year, ostensibly to fill jobs that U.S. workers cannot or will not do. But some companies in the science and technology fields, afraid of a backlash over hiring foreign professionals rather than American ones, are rescinding job offers.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
For every EDA, there's a Sun. (Sputter, sputter).
And for every "IQ of 300" Indian, there's a couple of Americans of equal talent who were edged aside; or went into another field.
Cheers!
My point is that their wealth is due to their ability to assimilate into the American economy and culture, while the countervailing opinion here is that they don't, that they aren't creative, that they abuse fellow Indians with H1B visas, etc.
Go back and read my first post. Or fly a kite.
I've sourced to China, India, Eastern Europe, South America, France, and all over the US. Right now I am US exclusive except for some data entry-type tasks. The only heuristic is that there are no heuristics.
And even when I find myself wanting to come up with a generalization for a sex or a geography, like magic, someone comes along and proves me wrong.
I’m afraid the EDA/Sun reference is lost on me. EDA - Electronic Design Automation. Sun certainly uses these products...but I don’t see the equivalence?
As for the bit about an Indian displacing an American. If you refer to jobs that have gone overseas. Sure - I won’t contest that occurs. If you are talking about the Indians who come here to work legally via one mechanism or another I don’t agree.
The problem with most of these arguments is that High Tech is mostly a meritocracy. People are paid what their talent demands.. Indian engineers working in the US are paid prevailing US wages.
Now if I’m an employer and I have two equally qualified applicants fresh out of school - one Indian and one a native born US citizen I’d pick the US citizen because in the long run he costs me less to employee. I don’t have to go through the green card process with him!
Further - most of these kids are coming here and taking post graduate degrees which were not filled by US applicants! The US doesn’t graduate that many native born engineers! With off-shoring becoming much more practical, the high tech jobs are disappearing as well. the lure of high paying jobs are going away, with less people choosing to go into engineer. (They are likely to become lawyers and run for congress instead..)
I hate to break this to you all, but this isn’t really caused by Government policy, but business making economic choices and the advent of cheap and efficient communications!
So - I don’t buy your bit about 1 for 2 displacement. I haven’t seen that in my career, and I’ve been in Silicon Valley as a working engineer for 25+ years now.
I may not be repling to the correct poster. Apologies if not.
There is a conv store not far from my home. I piss the guy off all the time. He has so many outdated food products, I walk thru the store and comment on them.
To be honest, tghe only reason I do this, he is always on the phone, talking some babbling languag. I gave him the benefit. I walked in there a week ago and there was an older Indian guy behind the counter. He and the owner were babbeling when I was trying to tell them what I wanted.
I got so pi$$ed and yelled...hello??? You are in America. Speak the Freaking English or the hell with you. How rude are you?
I stopped in today and the owner put down his damn phone and spoke to me... in English.
I could care less if I offended him.
It's as though they thought they were being paid by tare weight.
OMG g/w -- that is one of the funniest lines I have ever read on FR. I am literally LOL (no one literally LsOTFLOL)!!
Two snaps in a circle and a
If Left(Account_code,1)="1" then
(do something that makes no sense)
for you!
Sun was co-founded by an Indian if I recall. You know, back when everyone agrees the Indians *were* "the cream of the crop". And from what I have heard, they hired very many folks from India.
IF the hype about Indians walking on water were true, Sun would've done better, much better.
As for the bit about an Indian displacing an American. If you refer to jobs that have gone overseas. Sure - I won’t contest that occurs. If you are talking about the Indians who come here to work legally via one mechanism or another I don’t agree.
Ever hear of the company mockingly called "Hewlitt-Patel?" Or the CEO who claimed "No *American* has a right to a job"?
Or Brian Valentine of Microsoft declaiming "Think India! Two for the price of one!"
The problem with most of these arguments is that High Tech is mostly a meritocracy. People are paid what their talent demands.. Indian engineers working in the US are paid prevailing US wages.
Not at body shops; not as contractors/subcontractors; and not when higher ups from India practice "racial nepotism" or when C-level US execs clear out the US workers to hire preferentially from overseas.
I've seen it with my own eyes in company after company. Companies with 10's of billions in annual revenue. Startups. And midsize. I've seen US PhD's forced to train their replacements -- who then screwed the pooch, and blamed the US worker. I've also seen US PhD's forced to clean up the work of overseas workers, while the overseas worker "officially" get the credit.
Further - most of these kids are coming here and taking post graduate degrees which were not filled by US applicants! The US doesn’t graduate that many native born engineers! With off-shoring becoming much more practical, the high tech jobs are disappearing as well. the lure of high paying jobs are going away, with less people choosing to go into engineer.
Right, but only AFTER 10 years or more of throwing away qualified Americans, did the younger Americans figure out it wasn't worth it to go tens of thousands of dollars into debt only to be cast away as disposable in pursuit of managment's latest masturbatory fantasy. And the of course the schools filled up with foreigners.
I hate to break this to you all, but this isn’t really caused by Government policy, but business making economic choices and the advent of cheap and efficient communications!
I hate to break it to you, but government policies encouraged this kind of horse sh!t. The real truth is the businesses are doing this in the *hopes* of finding new markets; between the aging of the US population, and the lack of children here and Europe compared to the Third World, the companies want to have a new customer base. But to do that they have to transfer vast quantities of wealth *to* the Third World, in order to create a middle class which will want their products.
But they are being played for suckers -- too many of the technologies will simply be stolen or appropriated, and the markets closed to US products in the name of Indian or Chinese pride or "anti-Imperialism" or what not.
So - I don’t buy your bit about 1 for 2 displacement. I haven’t seen that in my career, and I’ve been in Silicon Valley as a working engineer for 25+ years now.
Get out of your echo chamber then, and try the East Coast or the Midwest. Scads of Indians there, hired in preference to Americans. And scads more given the same work, only offshore.
The fallacy in your position is this: India and China each have (roughly) a billion or so people. No matter how many jobs we create, it won't matter. They could take *EVERY* job available in the US and still have massive unemployment, unless they force their workers to be very inefficient, to spread the work around. If they leave massive unemployment will favoring a chosen few, there will be massive social unrest. If they do makework with American jobs, there won't be much of a middle class left in the US.
In order to have a durable, sustainable economy, you need to engage in the creation of things people want. Shifting money around creates no new wealth.
Cheers!
In your dreams. They get paid apx 50% of what US Born developers make. That is why management puts up with the crap they write. As long as it solves the immediate problem, management doesn't usually look at long term viability -- the code is, essentially "disposable."
I know what my H1B colleagues make and I know what my US Born colleagues make -- and my 50% figure is quite accurate. And has been for over 10 years.
The greedy blackmailers working IT during the less than stellar hours before the whole “Y2K = end of the world as we know it scam” made a whole lot of techies rich.
It also made a lot of CEOs and millions of us “ignorant” non-IT worker types livid.
We eventually learned how easy it was to do a “hard shutdown” and fix the durned typewriter/file system on steroids ourselves.
Yes, I know programmers and other “IT Professionals” have defined skills I have not acquired.
Do “they” know “we” can learn, and will refuse to be held hostage again by a small group of computer code nerds?
No sympathy for the IT field from this quarter.
Now the people who can keep the electricity and water flowing through the lines to my home and business, those blue collar people who have physical and mental skill sets most people are unable to rapidly duplicate...those are the people who will never be outsourced.
Funny how during every emergency, those people show up and just do their jobs.
1) You mentioned doctors, for example. How many MD's are here on H1B visas? Remember? The medical industry covets shortages to drive up physician compensation.
2) Assimilating to the culture gives the game away. If the Indians were so superior, why didn't THEIR culture produce inventiveness, drive, and prodigious wealth? Back in the 1800's or so, India was wealthier than the US. And the US's "exploitation" was of blacks and (Cherokee, Sioux, Ojibwe, etc.) Indians, not Hindu (Hadji of Jonny Quest) Indians.
And you spelled "polysyllabic" as "polysylabic". Which brings up one more point. Too often Indians are praised despite being incomprehensible, and using language in emails which would get an American summarily FIRED on the spot. I thought business valued communication. It'd be nice to have the same standards about "being qualified" applied to all comers. :-) (Cheap shot, sure. But it's annoying to be lied to so blatantly by tech support. I am tempted to answer in a broad Texas drawl, "Y'awl, my name's Srikant, an' I gotta problem I ain't been able to solve, so I'm fixin' to ask some questions.")
Cheers!
Opportunity...get it dumbass?
Good for you! This is America and English is our language. I run into it all of the time... Vietnamese and mexicans refusing to speak English or unable to speak English. I will not do business with them if they do not speak English. Good for you!
LLS
Same here, but in semiconductors.
Liberals have discovered the Hindus to be much smarter than they thought and aren't the politically correct lapdogs they had them pegged for, now they want to get rid of them...
Kurukshetra War - Kali Yuga ping...
To be added to or removed from this ping list, please FReepmail Sir Francis Dashwood.
I’ve heard the same thing. All of the outsourcing and Visas have really drained the talent pool.
2) Their culture does produce a lot of those things - probably in excess of that found in the United States. Part of their challenge is that much of the country is still very backwoods and they have had some pretty bad governments. And I never said anyone was superior.
As for grammar, I deal with people here all over the country on a daily basis as well as all over the world. I've never fired anyone on the spot for bad grammar. The Indians I deal with these days - here and in India - have grammar as good or better than mine or other Americans I work with.
FWIW Indians do not count for any diversity measures since they are not an official minority in our country.
Cheers!
True. I’ve actually written those reports.
The H1B program should be suspended at least for the next few yrs.
The sad truth is that the US is no longer cost competitive in a large number of formerly high tech fields, many of which the US pioneered.
For instance, the Indian Chandrayaan lunar probe cost just $80 million as opposed to $500 mn and $400 mn for similar Japanese and Chinese probes, all launched in the last few months. Just HOW do you compete with costs structures like that? And no, the Indians float rather than peg their currency. So, its not a currency manipulation thing that accounts for their cost competitiveness.
Keeping the brighter lot amongst the Indians in India should benefit India in the longer run. Will hurt those currently in the US on student visas but am sure the higher edu and industry markets in the US and in India will adapt to changed circumstances within a year or 2 of the H1B program being scrapped.
Either way, India is destined to rise and is currently way, way below her true potential. Of course, the Indian political system is pretty much capable of screwing up anything, so I wouldn’t count on a fast or even a steady rise. It will likely be chaotic, messy but ultimately good for the country - pretty much like the democracy they have.
Just my $0.02.
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