A crime against Americans

The Examiner ^ | 12/24/2002 | REY DAVID

[JimRic54]

A crime against Americans BY REY DAVID Special to The Examiner

I HAVE BEEN a software engineer for the past 15 years, and a good one at that. Seven months ago, my company decided to give my job to offshore software outsourcers from India, and I got laid off.

Unemployment has caused me tremendous hardship. Like so many others in the Bay Area, landing a paying job has become a Herculean full-time job, fraught with tedious daily tasks and crushing frustration.

I have come to accept that there would be difficult periods like this during any business cycle. But I was stunned and aggrieved when I observed a crime being perpetrated at a time like this -- an unconscionable crime against hard-working, law-abiding, tax-paying, patriotic IT professionals like me.

Allow me to explain. There are many job ads I come across for which my skills and experience are ideal. The reason I have not successfully landed one is that, according to at least four of the recruiters I asked, there are around 500 applicants for every job opening. That's an astonishing number. With so many applicants, it would be reasonable to assume your chances of succeeding are not very good.

Here is where I first discovered the crime: I noticed a few ads advertised that they sponsor H1-B visas. I found that the companies who sponsor H1-B visas are invariably owned or run by Indians. There are thousands of unemployed IT professionals in the Bay Area who are U.S. residents and desperately looking for work. And here we see some Indian-owned companies who will spend the time, effort and money to bring people in from India to fill their job openings. That is unconscionable!

I thought that there had to be a mistake. This is the United States of America. Surely the authorities would not allow such crimes to take place. To my horror, I learned it has become a common practice for some Indians to set up dummy corporations, create dozens of bogus job openings, sponsor H1-B visas for candidates in India and arrange a temporary home for these "successful candidates."

These candidates pay their "sponsor" a fixed fee for his "services." They then stay with other successful candidates in an arranged home until they find a paying job for themselves with some bona fide American company.

But why would the companies bother to advertise openings to the public when they have no intention of hiring locally? They advertise to satisfy the INS's minimum requirements for H1-B sponsorship.

This despicable practice may explain why there has been exponential growth in the number of Indian IT professionals in the Bay Area.

I am not being discriminatory or racist. I don't care about someone's ethnicity or skin color. What I care about is behavior! And the fact is, people have systematically taken jobs away from deserving Americans right from under our feet.

The problem keeps getting bigger. I observed that when an Indian rose to a position of authority, he would hire Indians whenever possible.

Friends have shared with me that when they succeeded in getting an interview at an Indian-owned company, the interviewer and almost everybody else in the office was Indian.

My friends would feel like the interviewer had no intention of hiring anyone who wasn't Indian. The Indian companies invited non-Indians to interview only for the sake of appearance, and for state Equal Employment Opportunity reporting purposes.

In any case, some enterprising Indians have learned ways around the law to bring Indian nationals here for profit.

Indian professionals who have been brought in here through illicit means are swamping the IT jobs marketplace. It is hurting hardworking, law-abiding, tax-paying, patriotic Americans like me who are desperately looking for honest work.

And it has got to stop!

Comment: letters@examiner.com

Rey David has been a software engineer for 15 years. He lives in Livermore.

[kimoajax]

You are right on target.

The majority of the CMM level 5 software development firms in the world located in India?

What they don't seem to be able to master is the business knowledge and sense. They are very good however and doing exactly what they are told....even if it makes no sense sometimes. Hence, mastery of the software development process is key for them....and is also their weakness in the sense they seldom are on the front end (the business and/or creative end) of anything that is being developed.

[norraad]

Reminds me of the gas station scam, perhaps it's involved here too.

They get low-interest taxpayer backed loans which they never pay because they keep flipping them to other "family" members.

A new family of very poverty stricken indians just "bought" a gas staton here for a million+ dollars.

Times that by the tens of thousands the other "family" members have around the country.

Oh, and don't forget the hotels.

What else have I missed?

[GingisK]

Sorry, but writing a compiler...

You are just plain wrong. Logical thinking is not rote. Tightening nuts on bolts is rote.

Not everyone can be a "manager", for there must be someone to manage. The point of the matter is, once the jobs are eliminated in the US, so will the consumers. Then even the management jobs will go overseas since there would be no marketplace here. This would require marketing skill appropriate for the new consumer nations.

[dirtboy]

You are just plain wrong. Logical thinking is not rote. Tightening nuts on bolts is rote.

I've got nearly two decades of experience in IT. I've seen plenty of programmers who work at rote tasks. I've seen very few who understand how to make IT an integral, strategic asset for a company, and they usually don't stay programmers for very long.

[GingisK]

I've got nearly two decades of experience in IT. I've seen plenty of programmers who work at rote tasks.

I've got over three decades doing the same. Of course, I'm not in IT per se, I'm in embedded systems programming ... hooked right into the hardware and new product development. Yes, there are rote programmers, but there are creative ones as well.

There are rote businessmen, rote real estate agents, etc. Creativity is an individual asset that must be cherished and nurished whereever it is found.

I do agree with the tone of the post. If employers give all of the jobs to people overseas, there will be no one to purchase the products in this country. The proper approach for a business is to locate in another country in order to produce products for consumption in that country.

I was recently laid off, and it took four months to find another job. My skills are top notch, and my work has made many an employer a lot of money.

[FITZ]

More evidence that Globalization is a failure.

It's a failure to millions but a success for a few who are getting quite rich from the deals that were made.

Today thousands of Mexicans are protesting NAFTA, they're driving tractors from all over Mexico to the the center of Mexico City. Should be interesting but they've already managed to get portions of NAFTA undone. I hope they can get the whole thing thrown out for their sakes and ours.

http://www.eldiariodechihuahua.com.mx/edicion/articulo/elpais/notas/notappal.html

[Red Jones]

all you can do is find out if your congressman or senator voted for H1B in the big vote that occurred in 1998 to expand it. In that vote 90% of republicans voted for it and 80% of democrats in the house voted for it. In the senate it was 100% of republicans who supported it and 98% of democrats (ted kennedy voted against it). Then you vote against your congressman & senator. You should not care if the person you vote for is a dem or a repub, just that he has not in the past voted for h1b. We must throw the bums out, this is the only way. We americans re-elect 98% of the politicians who want to be re-elected. If we re-elected 30%, then they would work for us instead of stepping on us. It's just that simple.

But I blame the Republicans for h1b much more so than the democrats. Because when H1b first started 75% of repubs supported it while 65% of democrats opposed it. As the years went on the DNC and RNC began to pressure politicians to vote for it so that the corporate donations would flow. And the politicians grew to think it was suicidal to not vote for h1b as their party wouldn't give them money. We need to make it suicidal to vote for h1b. Otherwise, we don't deserve the freedom and prosperity we had in the past.

H1B is an absolutely pernicious program. It is functioning as an ethnic cleansing program with regards to engineering & software in the US. Americans can't sell their labor in 6 year time slots. It is an indentured servitude program. The Indian (or Russian or whatever) sells his labor for 6 years in order to legally occupy this country. This is the same deal the king made in approximately 1630 in order to bring people to the colonies. If you are over 40, then you were taught in gradeschool that this indentured servitude was a pre-cursor to the slavery institution that america had. And the same exact thing is going on today.

[The Duke]

When autos replaced horses where did all the buggy whip employees go???

This analogy does not recognize that the IT field, much like the medical and legal fields, encompasses a vast domain of knowledge that sometimes takes a lifetime to master. The "buggy whip" maker, by comparison, was in a rote assembly-line situation. It seems to me that you're deliberatlely trying to kick a dog here when it's down. Until conservates learn not to do this to one another we're going to see the occasional Bill Clinton come to power.

As an employer of programmers I must say one thing, which is that I've learned through experience that a good American software developer is MUCH preferable to the low cost ten-buck-an-hour guys in India- and I'm delighted that my competitors seem not to be learning that lesson! I told my US programmer the other day that I was looking for the first opportunity to give him a raise, even though he'd be making almost three times the money I've paid offshore programmers. The reason is because he gets that much more done per hour, is low maintenance, self-motivated, and is honest and has a traditional work ethic. And I'm not going to give him raises becasue I like spending more money, it's because I don't want want to risk losing him.

And let me not just pick on programmers in India, because it's the same elsewhere. There is a component that is unique to the American culture that makes for kick-ass software developers. The guys from Europe don't have it, the guys from Latin America don't have it, and the guys from China ...well, don't get me started on them. They're all great people, but the only great software developers I've seen in 25 years that has spanned the military and commercial sectors, from Fortune 500 companies and the hallways of NASA, from underground cities and secret arctic radar stations to lowly mom-and-pop operations, have been 100% true blue American.

So, the announcement of the death of the anglo software developer may be a bit premature, however it is certain that the industry has seen it's "glory days" - and the vast armies of "technocrats" and middle managers who are not true technologists are going to have to find greeter jobs at Walmart.

There was a bit of wisdom buried in one of the previous replies, which was the suggestion to the US worker to hire the Indian programmer to do a project, and then to market that product. I do a lot of that, and it helps. Also, if you want to move into a related field then consider disaster recovery and other areas of IT logistics (because someday those same companies are going to want to move from India to the next Third World sweatshop!).

[Red Jones]

There have been over one million H1b visas issued in the US. About half are programmers and that percentage is declining. The new trend in h1b is for non-hightech people to be sponsored. Now, h1b jobs include everything from $6.50/hour data entry people to $130,000 a year doctors. In my city they've imported carpenters, plasterers, masons, construction managers, 7-11 clerks, nurses, medical technicians, doctors, programmers, engineers of all sorts, horse trainers, personal assistants, cooks, financial analysts, marketing managers and others of all sorts. At the same time we have lots and lots of men standing on street corners looking for jobs.

Then there are the L visas. There are apparently many millions of people who've come in under the L visas. The L visa people don't stay permanently I think on a normal basis while the H visas do normally stay permanently if they choose and they normally do.

If there's a factory or agriculture operation that pays low wages, then they're likely to just replace all the americans with temporary L visa people. That has happened a lot. You just don't hear about it because they're low wage jobs.

Some big companies and software employers do prefer to not hire H1b's at all. These organizations have integrity or they recognize the special value of free labor. But many organizations seem to go predominantly h1b. There are many companies that have hundreds and hundreds of h1b people.

[anymouse]

You may be a troll, but with a very good message.

Sure it sucks to be unemployeed, especially when cheap foreign laborers are given your job. But no one owes anyone a job, let alone one that pays well. It is up to the individual to find a better job and sell themself to their potential employer. Otherwise try to start a business and see what real work is like.

[gcruse]

I immigrated to Canada during the seventies to run the subsidiary of an American company. The company had to prove to the Canadian Immigration service that they could not find anyone already in Canada to fill the position I was coming in to fill. This is what should be happening in the US, too.

[Red Jones]

you know what, you hardly build anything in Mass. Mass is a dead state where they don't build jack. Who would want to live there anyway?

[FITZ]

When all Americans wake up to the insidiousness of NAFTA and WTO it will be too late.

Maybe because Americans have had it good for so long they just can't see what is happening.

[Elric@Melnibone]

I'm with GK; software engineer with over 25 years experience, mostly in embedded. If you have a car/truck/motorcycle/snomobile less than about 15 years old, it runs because of me and my associates.

I, too, was laid off last year. Had a 3-month contract within a month. After that, I was off for 5 months before landing my current job.

In all cases, I was hired because of TECHNICAL skills. Managers in my business couldn't care less what your business skills are, they want to know what processors you're familiar with, what tools you use, what languages, how flexible.

Software engineering, ANY engineering, is an ART. Despite what SEI and other agencies try to promote, managers forget this at their own peril. My value to the company is in solving problems, meeting requirements, meeting schedules.

As for CMM, it's a joke. Virtually everything I've ever done has been one-off, every company involved in research and development. If everything you do is one-off, it is impossible to get beyone CMM level 2 legitimately. You may play the game and shuffle the papers but it's fake.

[Red Jones]

I do hope that you have your tongue firmly in your cheek.

H1b is a program that is made for the sake of importing people into the US, 195,000 workers per year and then their families later and then their families' families also later. There are many abuses of H1b. The system is set up so that these abuses can occur.

american workers are free workers, they can switch jobs at will, they can seek a raise. The law does not allow americans to sell their labor in 6 year time slots. H1b people are selling their labor in 6 year time slots at the price agreed upon while they are in India and completing this 6 year contract for the 1 sponsor must occur prior to getting green card. If h1b people could sponsor themselves and switch jobs during the 6 year period like an american, then they wouldn't be prized in the marketplace. So, h1b is set up to shaft americans.

It was noted that a lot of Indians h1b's did not have the know-how their resumes said they had. So congress did an investigation. They sent people to INdia to do a real investigation. They found that the resumes for the INdian h1b's are frequently just baloney. They put on the resume whatever the corporate sponsor wants, they exaggerate like crazy. In this way the document for our government that the Indians are qualified and we're not. But the corps don't care that the resumes are false, they really like the 6 year indentured servant thing.

And it's just like what dirtboy said, it's globalization you stupid idiot. But I would call H1b a New World Order policy because we've signed treaties committing us to H1b. Most democrats and most republicans are supportive of the NWO. These NWO policies include a lot of things that are definitely NOT in the American interest. If you voted for either Bush/Clinton/Bush, then you voted for it you dope. When americans hear about NWO policies such as rural cleansing, they just reject it out of hand. Oh, that can't possibly happen here. Oh, congress would never approve that. You stupid idiots, they keep you ignorant with the tv and you bury your heads. It's right in front of you now, waiting for you to cower before it.

[grb]

I'll agree that they are polite and technically competent. But they do not pay a premium for these workers. It's all about money.

[Red Jones]

Professor Matloff identified that you can call lawyers who specialize in h1b visas. The total cost is under 2 grand to get the paperwork done. Recruiters in India will send you resumes to select from. It also costs less to relocate an individual from India to do a high-powered software/engineering job than it costs to relocate an american within america.

[grb]

Your right It is suppose to be happening here, but there is obviously a way around that little tidbit.

[Mr. Jeeves]

There are many job ads I come across for which my skills and experience are ideal. The reason I have not successfully landed one is that, according to at least four of the recruiters I asked, there are around 500 applicants for every job opening.

News flash one: There are 500+ applicants for every job that appears in a newspaper.

News flash two: More than 80% of all job openings never appear in a newspaper.

Network. Build and maintain relationships with hiring managers in other companies while you are still employed. Never let an HR department see your resume - bypass those people by whatever means are necessary.

As Gordon Gekko said, "If you aren't inside, you're outside."

[GingisK]

Oh, yeah. You seem to be another one of those Americans who says "united we stand" simply by rote.