Posted on 01/31/2003 11:36:32 AM PST by 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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!).
Maybe because Americans have had it good for so long they just can't see what is happening.
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.
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."
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