Posted on 04/14/2012 8:14:05 AM PDT by jiggyboy
It's called outsourcing. American firms do it because foreign labor can be cheaper.
But now, one company is being accused of bringing those lower-paid workers to the U.S. illegally and that may be costing Americans jobs.
-- snip --
Palmer says Infosys, the global high-tech giant, engaged in a systematic practice of visa fraud, a charge the company denies.
Palmer said the first thing to catch his attention was an employee that had been in the U.S. from India several times before.
"He came up to me and he was literally in tears," Palmer said. "He told me he was over here illegally and he didn't wanna be here. He was worried that he would get caught."
-- snip --
Palmer says at first, most came over on H-1B visas. These visas are for people with specialized talents or a level of technical ability that can't be found among American workers.
When asked if all the people had some special expertise that couldn't be found in the U.S., Palmer said, "Absolutely not. Not even close. Many of them is what we call freshers. People that would just come over, whoever they could get to come over. Whoever got accepted for a visa."
Many of the people brought in, in fact, didn't know what they were doing at all, Palmer said.
-- snip --
When the U.S. State Department began to limit the number of H-1B visas, Palmer says Infosys began using another type of visa, the B-1. The B-1 is meant for employees who are traveling to consult with associates, attend training or a convention. But Palmer says the employees were brought in not for meetings, but for full time jobs.
Palmer said the jobs were in "Everything from coding software to testing software to fixing software to installing."
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
There's a video at the link as well.
This is happening every day in every sector of high-tech, and has been for not just years but decades.
Get rid of the illegals, get rid of the H1-B and B-1 scammers, put some of these executives in jail, and we'll be back to less than 5% unemployment.
Yet you still hear ‘HR’ people call in to talk shows claiming the H1B program is clean and badly needed.
Waiting....waiting...waiting....
Young kids aren't going into science and technology careers at the rate this country needs -- and there are very good reasons for that.
They are also misusing L1 visa, now they are sending freshers as Managers with zero industry experience.
I’m telling relatives with kids that engineering is now a loser as a degree — it’s a big investment in time and money, and in a couple of years the job will be outsourced to India anyway with the U.S. government either looking the other way or being in full support.
You could say the same thing about most fields (especially the item I highlighted). One of the issues we must contend with today is that younger workers in many fields will typically have an advantage in that their training is more "current" than their older counterparts. This would apply in any field where advances in technology are routine, ongoing, and difficult to keep up with.
And that was my point. Other fields experience advances in technology that are easy to keep up with -- retail, business management, library science, construction, the list goes on and on.
Engineering? Computer Science? Five years out of college, people may using the same thought processes that their professors imparted to them, but they are not using the same machines, the same computer languages, or the same protocols. Everything changes all the time. Older people need to work hard to keep up -- but the younger and cheaper workers simply know today's technology as a matter of course. The young are always exactly what industry wants "today". But their shelf life is very short.
Outside of Science and Technology careers, this problem exists in a much smaller degree.
L is a good program. That is if you want multinational companies to have operations in the US. I do. Perhaps even if they want newbies to come over.
The H1-B VISA should not be a lottery. You have executive level employees who would be earning 400k/yr losing out to 21 year old tech newbies with a 25k/yr job offer in the US. A person’s economic benefit to society can be judged by salary better than it can by a lottery.
As an engineer (20 yrs)and engineering manager for 8 yrs, I have never been unemployed and my job has never been outsourced. This is also the case for 6 other engineers across two generations in my family.
In my opinion, the IT industry is the one that is usually held up as the example of outsourcing and is not representative of other engineering careers available.
I am not claiming that my experience is representative of the entire country or all industries. I am just giving my personal perspective.
A lot of technical people steer their children away from technical careers. Sure, the career itself can be rewarding — but companies always want to hire people who are younger and cheaper. It’s definitely not a field for people over 50, and I’m not sure it’s a field for people over 40.
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Your blanket statements “but companies always want to hire people who are younger and cheaper” and “It’s definitely not a field for people over 50, and I’m not sure it’s a field for people over 40. “ are not true in my experience.
I have seen multiple examples of engineers over 50 being hired (in fact preferred) for a number of roles in my company. A smart company uses the experience and wisdom of older people and brings in fresh perspectives younger professionals.
Anyone in a technical or scientific field needs to “keep up with technology”, if they choose to stopping learning then I can’t understand how they would continue to find their career challenging or rewarding.
Until a few years ago, it was a good degree and a good career. But somebody starting out now has major disadvantages that either did not exist or were much less prevalent twenty or thirty years ago: legitimate resumes from around the world, rampant H1-B abuse at wholesale levels, and computerized resume scanning that looks only for the buzzwords of the week are just what come to mind immediately.
What type of engineering are you involved in? (Obviously there's an opportunity for me to start a new division in India or Latin America!)
But I've seen a lot of people who got shafted through no real fault of their own. US business managers sometimes look to India for SW development, or China for cheap manufacturing. These choices do not always work out well for the US business manager, but the allure of possibly saving money has convinced many in the US to layoff their technology workers in favor of younger, cheaper labor, or else foreign-born labor.
It's not true 100% of the time, but let's not pretend that this isn't happening and isn't an issue when we try to convince the next generation that engineering is a field with a bright future. Kids can see that the path is somewhat riskier than some other paths.
I am acquainted with about 20 mechanical and electrical engineers (masters / graduate level) from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, all of them having graduated in May, 2011. Not one of them is unemployed today. Every single one of them has got a job paying over 68,000 dollars annually, as starting pay, with most of them getting between 75,000 and 94,000 dollars, annually.
Whoever claims engineering is dead simply does not have a grasp on reality.
That gibes with my experience with Infosys. They have some talented people working for them, but they’ve got others who barely have a pulse. The whole offshoring paradigm has to have been a major disappointment for those companies that thought they’d save millions. But it’s been a boon for India, which has built its economic infrastructure on American dollars in the last 20 years.
In my job of tech support, I deal with many Indian’s and not only I have to deal with their condescending attitude but some of them expect you to bow down to them and kiss their @$$. A lot of them expect you to do their work for them. I told one of them that it was beyond the scope of support’s contract to do something and they in turned called me a lazy American who needs to work much harder !
Why would the hire someone from India who can’t do the job? What does the company gain by hiring them. There are plenty of people here already who do not know what they are doing that are will and able to not do the job. There are plenty who know they do not know what they are doing and would be willing to work for less.
It’s probably better thought of as a first-stage career: 15 years as a pure techie is probably as far as you want to take it. By then you should have transitioned well into management or marketing—or be gearing up to learn a new profession.
But that’s as it should be for many more manual laborers as well as teachers, police and firemen, etc.. We can’t be expecting to be retiring in our 40’s—and then living off of some grand pension for twice as long as we ever worked.
Our brains and brawn are best used early, in a first-stage career.
I don't know but they do. I get calls from tech recruiters all the time, mainly because I have a security clearance. The jobs are invariable short term contract positions that would require me to relocate. Why anyone thinks I would quit my job for a 3 month contract in some other state is beyond me but I get the emails and calls almost constantly. About 80% of the recruiters are Indian and I can almost never understand them. Their only job is to cold call people and talk them into applying for some job, and they certainly can't do it well, because I can never understand what they are saying.
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