Posted on 05/04/2006 7:37:14 AM PDT by areafiftyone
You're implying that you are a hiring manager in an IT shop, and you are incapable of doing the basic functions of a hiring manager (i.e. finding, interviewing, and negotiating with competent IT workers).
You're willing to pay two to seven times more than the workers' rates to a recruiting firm rather than to a direct-hire employee or to an independent contractor. That is a tremendous waste, and poor management of financial and human resources.
The argument that managers don't have the time to screen resumes and select potential interviewees is a bogus argument. You still have to select from the applicants supplied by the recruiting firms and conduct interviews of the selected applicants. Then you pay exorbitant billing rates to the recruiting firms, usually for the life of the contract, during which the recruiting firm is providing little or no benefit, either to your firm or to the worker.
Why not contract directly with American workers? Many of them are incorporated or organized as an LLC or proptietorship to handle their own taxes and benefits, or they could easily get established as such. You could eliminate the costs of the recruiting and contracting firms from the loop, and split the difference in rates with the people who are actually doing the work.
Recruiting firms are not sending you the "best qualified". They are sending you the applicants that will provide them the greatest margin on billing rate.
Of course, we're pretending that there are no kickbacks, bribes, or other elements of corruption involved in the hiring process.
Allen is off my radar so is Condi and Newt is looking better to me all the time, personal warts and all.
Do you think Newt is electable?
Please email this one line to Senator Allen. ASAP.
You summed it up to a tee, in one line. Amazing.
In the old days, bre-Bush, I used to worry about things like 'electability'. Now I would vote for the Hildebeast herself if she ran against open borders no more H1B's.
Me too, and his take on those issues is awesome.
You're making an assumption, though--that people who want to come here on H-1B visas *want* to become American citizens. I imagine some do, but many (most?) don't.
I'm actually surprised this came back up again. With offshoring being the Next Big Thing, and with the communication infrastructure being what it is worldwide nowadays, Prakesh and Shilpa can do much of the work from Bangalore and Hyderabad. You don't always need to go through the immense expense and pain of the paperwork jungle to get them the visa and bring them Stateside anymore. And for the roles that DO have to have a warm body sitting in a chair in the US, I'd rather see that chair filled with somebody who was already here and looking for the job, if they can do it.
The problem is that the H-1B is solid in theory--the supposed safeguards that a job "has" to be offered to Americans first and that it has to pay the same regardless of who's filling it. But we both know that's not how reality works. Companies collude with the body shops to write the job requirements in precise, sneaky ways so that ONLY the chosen visaholder can fill it--I used to read my old employer's H-1B postings and marvel at the esoteric, precise skillsets they required when I knew damn good and well that half those skills wouldn't be needed. They were there to keep out-of-work local programmers in South Carolina from getting the job. Then they'd set the job position three pay grades lower than anybody else in the company, so (for example) a SQL programmer that would've logically been a pay grade 14 "lead" position (as mine was on the mainframe side) was advertised as a grade 11 "junior" position that paid $25k less.
Your idea works if you're wanting to attract the best and the brightest from overseas *if* they actually do want to stay here, contribute, and assimilate. But I can't see business interests ever giving up that bondservant feel to the H-1B. And meanwhile, there's a growing pool of domestic homegrown IT and engineering talent that's working at Home Depot because Ashok is either sitting at their desk or doing their job from twelve timezones away.
}:-)4
I know a lot of FR say they won't vote for him because of her personal background, but to be perfectly honest, at this point I care more about how strong a leader someone is going to be and how much the person running our country understands history and why it should not be repeated.
Newt is a lot of things, but I don't think anyone can deny he is a conservative and very brilliant and he certainly knows history.
In addition, I don't think he'd be afraid to use the veto if need be or stand up to Putin and China over Iran if that is called for... I think he has a good understanding of South America and what is happening down there, too..
According to things I've read he is getting a good reception so far in both Iowa and New Hampshire -- and he is not what I would call a RINO and not McCain light.
"You're implying that you are a hiring manager in an IT shop, and you are incapable of doing the basic functions of a hiring manager (i.e. finding, interviewing, and negotiating with competent IT workers)."
Because of many false assumptions about the situation I mentioned, I won't bother to comment on alot of what you said, because it was not germain to our situation.
Our firm contracted with our managment accounting firm for some temporary IT projects, of which we had many, and of which they were not the only supplier of such consultants to us, and for which the rate we agreed to pay for that work was competitive with our other contractors, so what WE paid was reasonable and fair, and met the rate scale that WE paid for such work.
What we did not know until after most of their work for us was completed, how much of their billing rate was being seen in the salary of the main person we had from them.
They had no obligation to tell us what his salary was, and until near the end when he told us, we had no idea it was so far below the billing rate. This differnce, whatever it is, is not widely discussed between the client and the person supplied by the vendor. It is accepted that the vendor is paying benefits and other things, has administrative costs and is earning a profit. It is not, and reasonably was not assumed that that profit is or would be immense. We had no reason to suspect what the managment accounting firm was doing, and no legal obligation to inquire and no knowledge of it until their employee told us. Part of how he came to tell us was that he was learning that we were paying equally for other people in similar capacities, but their employers were not milking those rates the way his was.
I hope this makes you better informed of the circumstances under which we learned of my friend's (he later became my friend, when I helped him find an immigration lawyer) salary situation, on his H1B visa. He then got that lawyer to pressure his company to release him to an H1B visa renewal with IBM. IBM got him his green card and he worked a number of years for them, before becoming an independent consultant.
I really don't care if they want to come here for citizenship or not. But, I do care that I want to encourage that citizenship path in the rules of the H1B visa.
If I am going to encourage an H1B type of visa, I am going to do so because I not only want to make it possible for the employer to have that kind of talent working here, I want to encourage that person to stay here.
And I want that person's job freedom to make it difficult for the employer here to exploit him and prefer him because he thinks he can pay less.
If the H1B visa holder can take himself to any employer here, he will not be competing based on any salary advantage over people already here. Eliminate the employer's hold on him and you eliminate most of his ability to unfairly displace a qualified person already here.
If that person's talents are so useful to that employer, they are also useful to the nation and I want to encourage retaining that talent; and not encourage the idea that the need for that talent is no more than temporary, because, in fact, it almost never is.
In point of fact, we have a "glut" of:
On the other hand, we have drastic shortages of:
And a disturbingly large number of people who have these jobs today don't really know what they are doing. ;)
H1B is a rather poor solution to this imbalance, because it tends to deliver the capital letters without the required communication skills or business experience. But it's sort of a solution, and it's popular with employers who are definitely enjoying the downward pressure it is placing on salaries and contract rates. We need Indian MS and PhD computer scientists (ultimately, they create jobs), but we don't need Indian network administrators, even if they are half-price. It appears that H1B is too often being (ab)used for the latter instead of the former.
But while it lasts there is still one great thing about America: Everything you need to know to become a highly successful IT professional in this country is out there for free on the Internet right now. If you want to beat out the Indian hordes, get good on your own time at J2EE, XML and web services. As long as you know how to speak English and can communicate ideas to management verbally and in writing, you've still got a big advantage over the foreigners.
Oh, and Allen's a Beltway Insider. If it seems that he and his peers don't work for the voters any more...well, they don't. Ultimately, employees of a company work for the company's customers, but they take orders from the people who hand them checks every two weeks. Even if those orders are not in the best interest of the company's customers.
Politicians do exactly the same thing. ;)
Dang. Who woulda thunk it?
High tech jobs are "jobs Americans don't want to do", too.
Fact, and thanks for saying it. I know this from personal experience. Many of us 40-50 y/o's retrained in object-oriented IT, so we have both the new stuff and the "dead" technologies experience. I can refer you to many of these folks; problem is, many of us have left IT for other fields.
I saw a piece in an online IT mag about displaced IT-ers retraining in advanced radiology technologies (MRI, CT, etc) b/c thier computer backgrounds were welcome. Guess what?
They view the jobs as commodities.
How many times have we heard "... it's not your job, it's the employer's job..."?
Fine. How about this?
"It's your job, YOU do it".
Or this?
"That's not my job".
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