India Has Its Own 'H-1B' Problem

[mule_train]

India Has Its Own 'H-1B' Problem
Posted by Paul McDougall on Sep 16, 2009 11:16 AM

U.S. worker groups complain that Indian outsourcers import too many employees to this country under the H-1B visa program. Ironically, Indian professionals—and New Delhi—are now stressing over the throng of talent from the People's Republic that is accompanying Chinese business contracts into the Subcontinent.



"An India-specific approach will have to be thought through by Chinese companies," said S Jaishankar, India's ambassador to Beijing, in a huddle this week with Indian and Chinese business and government leaders.

Jaishankar—perhaps the world's most tone deaf diplomat given the millions of Desi workers employed abroad—groused that Chinese companies that carry out direct foreign investment in India tend to populate their operations with Chinese workers, while enterprises from other countries, like the U.S., usually hire locals.

"I have personal experience in working with many of India's other major economic partners. I cannot recall their investments and projects requiring such large manpower support from home," said Jaishankar. He's right on that: IBM, for instance, now employs more than 80,000 Indian workers in its operations in the country

http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2009/09/india_has_its_o.html;jsessionid=CTDBFMOXLTRZ1QE1GHPCKHWATMY32JVN

[DJ13]

1. How about we all just keep our own workers at home and pay them better?

Problem solved.

[supernova]

2. Excuse me for a minute...

:rofl:


*Ahem*

Thats better.

[enid602]

3. wall

The Indian Government is also building a wall to keep out climatic refugees from Bangladesh, which is expected to submerge given global warming.

[pampango]

4. It says this is an H-1B problem but it's not about Indian companies hiring Chinese professionals.

"Chinese companies that carry out direct foreign investment in India tend to populate their operations with Chinese workers, while enterprises from other countries, like the U.S., usually hire locals."

They are complaining about Chinese companies investing in projects in India but bringing the workers from China rather than hiring Indian locals. That doesn't strike me as the same thing as running a flawed and incompetently run visa program for professionals. It would be like Honda building a plant in Ohio then bringing all the workers over from Japan to run the factory.

What's weird is that India's per capita income is 1/3 of China's. Chinese investors are importing expensive (relatively) labor from China instead of hiring local Indians presumably for less. That doesn't make any sense. It would be like an American company building in a factory in Mexico but bringing Americans to work in the factory.

[mule_train]

5. Having seen H-1b written computer code, perhaps the chinese understand that

cheaper is not always better

[lapfog_1]

7. The Indian engineers are getting better... and very rapidly

I had two working for me in 1991, and they, while being nice guys, were just horrible at writing code. One was clearly doing this because it's a profession appropriate to his caste and he was pushed into it. He had no talent for it nor any passion to learn or understand.

In the years since then, I've had occasion to work with more and more Indian imports (and a few still in India), and they are much much better. A few were even my technical equals or superiors (I've been doing computer programming for nearly 40 years, mostly in research areas of Operating Systems, Storage Systems, and networking with numerous patents and published papers). The H1-B folks are getting better, with each graduating class.

[Progressive_In_NC]

13. They may be getting better but I just let 6 go from a big Indian firm for lack of ability to think

They could cut code okay, but they wouldn't talk in meetings and couldn't think on the fly to make necessary changes to code before it hit testing.

Two had doctorates, the other four had masters degrees and I'd get 50% of the production rate out of those really nice guys over my US programmers. Plus, there was so many rewrites that they put me terribly off schedule. And this was from one of the larger firms that charged me 60 bucks an hour for these L1 visa'd guys.


My client mandated that we used the offshore resources, but for 60 bucks an hour, I could have gotten some darn good US talent. Go figure.

[Deja Q]

16. Not speaking in meetings could have any number of reasons...

Not thinking on the fly to resolve crises in an adequate time frame -- that DOES suggest they are not good coders. Good coders understand languages through and through, which is what enables them to "think on the fly".

Were they new to the company, or had they been there a long time? If I were new to a company, I'd be slow when looking at code too; trying to understand what makes it tick. Again, understanding helps thinking on the fly easier. After a certain point, that might reveal something different. (Not necessarily fraud, but being slow-witted. If not other possibilities; I am only mentioning the first two that came to mind.)

[lapfog_1]

21. Yes, I always tried to avoid the dog - fire hydrant syndrome

Face it, a *lot* of programmers, when they wade into a pile of code they don't understand, their initial reaction is to start making modifications to it so they DO understand it. Sort of like a dog at the fire hydrant... "I don't understand this odor, but I know it's not mine, so I think I'll lift my leg and..."

But contractors are usually on some sort of time constraint and need to figure things out very quickly and get the job done. My rule is the Diving rule (I used to teach scuba diving). Plan the dive, Dive the plan. i.e. Study the code, decide what needs to be done, then do it. If you studied it carefully, this will work. If not...

[lapfog_1]

18. Well, I never expect PhDs (of any nationality) to cut code.

It's usually trained out of them. The guys with Masters, OTOH...

I expect the PhDs to come up with brilliant ideas... but they also usually come up with complex solutions to complex problems. I, of course, would rather KISS.

$60 an hour... I suppose. Depends on the type of contract (time crunch or something). I was getting $100/hour back in the early 90's from Amdahl, but that was a special deal (only one month to get it to work so they could bid a major contract and I worked like 100+ hours a week on it... had a VP bringing me and my partner pizzas and cots to nap on).

These days...
Hey, I need a contract. And I'll be happy to do it for $50 or $60 an hour. Linux/Unix device drivers and storage systems, C, Perl, MySQL, PHP as well. File systems and backup. Well known in the field. Let me know if you need someone. I also know a guy who can get you a team of Russians for relatively cheap.

[invictus]

20. +1

[lapfog_1]

9. Ignore the per capita stuff.

The engineers that are in an upper caste (yes, sadly India is still VERY caste oriented) are making very nice salaries, even when compared to US salaries.

Chinese engineers, working for Chinese companies, are making less than what the Chinese would have to pay to hire equivalent Indian engineers.

[pampango]

12. The article doesn't say anything about hiring just engineers. You could make a case

for a company investing in another country and bringing in some top management or a few top engineers or scientists. But the Chinese companies are bringing in all the workers, too, and not hiring any Indians, so "per capita stuff" is relevant.

[Deja Q]

15. Be careful with that C-word, you might get flamed...

it happened to me so it might happen to you.

Whether or not the country is still Caste-oriented, I do not know. I've been told it is not. By somebody relevant to the issue, or more relevant to the issue than you or I will ever be. (But then, I also take anything on the internet with a grain of salt...)

[lapfog_1]

23. It's not a "dirty word" to people from India.

I lived for many years with a group from Punjab, to the point where I could start to speak Punjabi. The caste system is alive and well there. They know it, I know it. It's not "racist" to point it out. The caste system affects (but does not totally control) what schools they attend, what careers they go into, and, yes, who they marry.

And if you don't think it does... well, you are welcome to your opinion.

I, OTOH, had a good friend from India who was fine here as a alcoholic and taxi driver, but was from an upper caste in India. He returned home 2 years ago and committed suicide (an "honor" killing, in effect).

[lapfog_1]

6. Exactly 4 years ago

I was working at a (now defunct) Silicon Valley startup. A company which had maybe 120 engineers on staff, 80 of those engineers were located in India, and fully 60 percent (23 or 24) of the engineers in the US were H1-B visa employees.

I remember sitting in the break room with a group of the engineering staff and they were all talking about the new higher salaries that were being paid to the people in India (most H1-B people were in the $80K to $100K range, the folks in India were now making $50K and $60K, but the cost of living in India, even in Hyderabad, was much much less than Silicon Valley). They were all talking about how they could move back to India and do much better, even at the lower salary, blah, blah, blah.

I told them "just wait, pretty soon we will be outsourcing to China instead of India, there are a *lot* more engineers being trained in China than India, far more than in the US. Not only that, but I bet that India starts having Chinese engineers move there, because the infrastructure to support Engineering is better in India. Besides, this is a race to the bottom, to making software development the cheapest possible and to make us all "interchangeable resources" and not valued for our creative ability. They laughed and laughed at me...

Of course, I went on to say that in 10 years time, we will outsource to Africa instead of China... so there is that.

And I've been writing for 10 years that the world economy is more like a collection of pressure vessels, connected by small pipes with valves. The US was the high pressure tank, and Europe and South America were more modestly pressurized, and central America, China, India, and Africa were slight to severe vacuums. And what we've done with developing the internet, making English the language of commerce, and adopting free trade agreements was to replace the small pipes with big pipes and open the valves. Unfortunately, what the "planners" didn't realize, is that the resulting equalized pressure will be a wage which is barely above subsistence wages which means that instead of creating 4 billion consumers to sell products to, you erase most of the 600 million or so that were the consumers in the old scheme and nothing but the oligarchy (i.e the richest 1 percent) to replace them. And they, no matter how rich, won't spend enough to make up the difference.

[Deja Q]

17. With Gates taking a keen interest in Africa, is it really about altruism?

Granted, people can change, but Microsoft's business record has been disturbingly obvious since day 1. To make a long argument short: They are the wal-mart of the software industry.

[redqueen]

22. The Indian H1-B guys I work with have been saying that for years...

that software (and call center) workers in China (and other Asian countries according to them) will start taking jobs from the Inidan IT and BPO sectors.

[OhioChick]

8. .........

:nopity:

[Chisox08]

10. Wait for it ..................

:nopity:

[undeterred]

11. Oh, I thought maybe Americans were coming to take their jobs back.

That would be a tragedy. :nopity:

[invictus]

14. American H1-B visas should be abolished.

American jobs should be made available to Americans first.

[Deja Q]

19. With the claim that there are more unemployed US techs than hired H1B techs,

I have to agree some control is desperately needed.

Especially in terms of genuine fraud. But then, since when does ethics get anyone anywhere?

[treestar]

24. Chances are India has few immigration controls

India is generally a place one emigrates from, not migrates to.

If they've given visas to the Chinese to come in, or simply done nothing about it, then it's their own fault. They need to create and enforce their own regulations.