Tag: IT

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This IT worker had to train an H-1B replacement

The H1-B program is such a cluster fuck visited on the American worker that cluster fuck is not a strong enough term.  I’m in IT and I have been watching this disaster for years.

I was contracting at large financial firm.  I begin noticing a large number of young Indians coming in as contract workers.  Contracting is a very common method in IT.  Companies like because they can staff up and staff down as needed.  I used to like because the companies generally compensated well for the insecurity of a contracting positions, and I did not mind moving around to different jobs.  To get back to my position at the financial firm.  When I saw all the Indians coming in I knew my days were numbered, and they were.  They found a pretense to terminate my contract nine months early.  It was my second contract at this firm, and they had actually given me more money to come back for a second contract.  Additionally, they had given me an 18 month contract when normal they did not go over a year.  They seemed to like my work. My consulting firm later told me that they were bringing in the Indians at $25/hour  less than I was receiving.  I can promise you I was not getting rich.  This was at a time long past the glory days of contracting.

This particular consulting firm ended up going out of business as they could not compete with the cheap off-shore labor either.  And this was one of the older and bigger consulting companies.  Now days, when a consulting company calls you about a contract if you are talking to an American it is a miracle.  If the consulting company is not Indian it is even more of a miracle.  You have to give the Indians credit.  Many of the Indian companies have used the minority preferences given by our laws to gain an advantage.  Essentially this has allowed Indian firms to corner this market in preference to American firms.

Who do I blame?  I do not blame individual Indians, but I do blame Congress and our President who are in cahoots with our corporations who only care about profit and cheap, cheap labor.   It is something I have ranted about for years.  Congress briefly played lip service to all the complaints, but I do believe the problem is even worse than it was before.

To read about one of these horror stories, go to This IT worker had to train an H-1B replacement at Computerworld.com

 

Just in case you do not know what a H1-B Visa — click the link for the Wikepedia article on same.

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U.S. expands H-1B fraud case against IT services firm

Gee whiz, what a surprise!

“The indictment charges that the methods used by Vision Systems “have substantially deprived U.S. citizens of employment.”

Link to article below:

U.S. expands H-1B fraud case against IT services firm

I was working at a Fortune 500 financial company.  My consulting firm stop sending over folks as they were paying Indian H1-B workers $20 – $25 an hour less than old consultants were receiving.  Guess whose contract was cut short.  Apparently they had an arrangement to bring over these young workers with a firm in Indian.  No proof, but that was the general supposition.

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Education, Education, Education

A quote from a Washington Post article:

Second, welcome foreign innovators. Harvard research fellow Vivek Wadhwa reports that immigrants have founded more than half of all Silicon Valley start-ups in the past decade. These immigrant-led, American tech companies employed more than 450,000 workers and grossed $52 billion in 2005. For U.S. companies to employ a highly specialized foreign worker, the employee must hold an H-1B visa, but current law allows for the issuing of only 65,000 H-1B visas per year.

The H-1B cap was established to prevent foreigners from taking American jobs, but, in fact, an education gap frequently leaves American candidates less qualified for these positions. Lawmakers could improve the situation all around by removing the cap on H-1B visas while imposing a 10 percent payroll tax above and beyond the benchmark salary for any position being filled by holders of such visas. The proceeds of the payroll tax could be channeled into U.S. reeducation programs. This compromise would bring the best innovators to work here while subsidizing the continued education of American talent.

Click here for full article

First Mr. Wadhwa or is it Ms. Wadhwa scares us by saying that there will be no new innovation in the USA without immigrants, specifically H-1B workers. Continue reading “Education, Education, Education”