10% unemployment but H1B visas accelerating

OK guys. This H1b visa crap is a sore subject with me!! After over 25 years in IT, I feel I am more qualified than most, if not all on ET to comment! Now, I'm going to tell you actual firsthand knowledge of h1b visa activity! Not he said, she said, I read somewhere, guessing & assuming. I'm talking verifiable facts!!

If there was any true need for h1b visa's there would not be so many unemployed & unable to find work IT people in the U.S.!! It is merely a way companies can get cheap labor, period!

The law states the the job needs to be posted & unfilled for some period of time. Not sure if time period is 30 or 60 days, I think 30. Before a h1b can be considered!!

Now, I working with HR closely over the years will tell you how they post the job requirements. They look at the h1b's resume of who they want to hire, & match the job to that resume almost exactly! So, basically nobody but this one person will qualify! Now, I'm talking about firsthand fact here, not guessing!

The great majority of h1b visa's given out are purely due to money, not the lack of qualified workers! Are there some real reasons for some super highly qualified people? I'm sure there is, after all most of Einsteins atomic bomb team came from Germany! But I'm sure the true numbers are in the hundreds at most, not thousands!

And in closing, after working with several of these h1b visa recipient's PERSONALLY! They tend to lie a lot, & blame it on a misunderstanding of our language. I can outline many more ways, the h1b visa program is abused. But I'm tired of typing!

 

From writing the ads once upon a time I can confirm that. It was just a way to get the equivalent of an indentured servant for 1/2 the cost of an American.

 

I was born in the heartland of America, as were my parents, their parents, my great-grand parents, my great-great grandparents, and so on.

For brevity, let’s just say that I have a deep, deep appreciation for our founding fathers.

The irony is that many naturalized citizens (or even aspiring citizens) have a clearer understanding of and deeper appreciation for our founding ideals than do many self-proclaimed “Americans.” In some cases they have risked life and limb for these beliefs. I am always sort of surprised at the strong sense of kinship I feel for such people when we happen to cross paths.

Angrycat's political and economic views are more purely American than many of the self-proclaimed "Americans" on this thread. She gets it. The ‘entitled’ swtrader, and those like him, would make Jefferson puke. They are American by birth only.

As traders we develop an ability to read between lines and see patterns. Applying that skill, it’s not hard to see where posters like “swtrader” are coming from: He was once a sub-performing lower level white-collar office worker. Probably an application developer for a company in the lower half of the Fortune 500. The hard truth is that Swtrader did not perform up to expectations and was fired. His manager told him his position was “downsized” or “outsourced.” True on the surface but he believed it in full because it made him feel better.

Easy to see swtraders’ cognitive dissonance about the real reasons he was fired and his subsequent projection onto ‘Indians.’ What a whining loser. He’s a fucking petri dish for a Psych 101 class on cognitive deviation. Class: observe the brain slice in the petri dish labeled ‘swtrader.’ It ain’t pretty but we hypothesize it's the result of parents raising a wuss and the wuss not fixing itself in early adulthood.

I ‘ve lead out-sourcing missions to India. In the beginning I had a skeptical bias. In fact, I still do. Even now, after successful experiences, I can say that it’s only right for certain well managed projects (can’t outsource a problem) and only if engaging one of the very top providers, such as TCS.

Sad to say, but much of India is hell on earth. One of the saddest things I’ve experienced is my first car ride from CSIA to the Taj hotel in Bombay/Mumbai. Miles of corrugated metal shacks and utter poverty lining the roadway, the result of decades of socialist government, socialist economics, etc. However, there is at least one bright spot that could save their country: IT outsourcing with a steady supply of talent from IIT. By the way, 400,000 apply to IIT and 7,500 are accepted.

I call India hell on earth, but that is a one-sided comment. There is a haunting and fascinating vibe to the ancient country that must be experienced first hand. To my way of looking at things, not the place to go for a relaxing family vacation, but maybe the place to go for a solo travel adventure with the goal of better understanding the world, an ancient culture, and the real result of certain political and economic decisions.

Anyway, long story short, we ended up selectively sourcing a significant chunk of our application development effort. We were able to terminate a substantial portion of our sub-performing app developers (swtrader types). By the end of the project, it worked out very well, even for many of the terminated because they got to find jobs that were better suited to their skill sets. Key point is: without the savings generated from outsourcing, we would have had to shed even more American jobs. Outsourcing saves American jobs, if not entire American companies. Like it or not, the reality is that we are in a global market and must compete globally to succeed. This means that American workers will need to deliver work product at the higher end of the value chain to justify higher pay...or be content with greeting at Walmart and serving fries. Just having the ability to write decent java or C code ain't gonna cut it anymore. Given the alternative of living some crap socialist life, I am good with this.

Angrycat, I understand and to some degree sympathize with what you say earlier in the thread about “lazy” American youth, but in my experience you over-state the degree. I certainly don’t raise my own kids that way, nor do our friends. I have no trouble finding the right kind of person in-country for the majority of our openings. Perhaps you are looking in the wrong circles. I’ve worked in NYC quite a bit. In many ways NYC is perhaps our greatest city; in other ways it is perhaps our most corrupt. But even in NYC we were able to find the right person for various positions. We consciously replace the lower 20% of performers with more promising candidates each year, so that helps. Bad hiring decisions are exposed and remedied rather quickly, as part of our natural process.

That’s all for now.

 

L. Anax - Now that's more like it. Even someone that even appears to agree with the outsourcing process(which I never agreed with & never will) understands the true nature of the process MONEY!! And that is my biggest problem with the process, it is based on lies!! Call a spade a spade!! Tell the truth, don't try to tell the public all that 'we have no qualified people' garbage, not make it look like they have no choice!

The real truth is closer to. We can't find enough qualified people that will work for salaries under the poverty level, plus work 60+ hours a week! So what if the salary we want to pay will not even cover their student loans, hey that's their problem!!

 

zx, of course it is, and should be, about money.

Some folks have trouble connecting the dots. It's not that complicated, but it does require understanding cause and effect.

The point is that selective sourcing saves American jobs, net-net. If saving American jobs is your concern, then you should be a supporter of selective sourcing.

H-1B caps are anti-free market and as such, Anti-American. I fully support whatever legal means people use to mitigate/circument anti-free market laws. Circumventing H-1B caps saves American jobs, net-net.

If saving American jobs is your concern, then you should support circumventing/abolishing H-1B caps.

btw, zx-12, cool bike. I take the 'busa out when I feel the need for speed.

 

The thing is that in this economy, teh Americans who are willing to work for H1 wages are not even considered!

I am going to put on top of my resume:

American Citizen willing to work for H1 salary!

lol

 

IMO, we should just charge a $10,000 per person entry fee, and allow one or two million per year to come in if they can show they would be able to support themselves, and forget all this crap that just makes lawyers rich.

Nothing will solve the outsourcing problem until we change our tax structure to encourage work and investment, and discourage importation and consumption.

 

It's not about money, work expertise or shortage of workers.

Work visas are part of a larger immigration policy intended to alter the demographics of the US.

 

On the business side, it's about money.

On the political side, it's about myriad waste-of-time issues, such as "demographics."

 

65k H-1B visas are split between technology, defense, medicine, education and banking industries ( these are what comes to mind at the moment). Considering that there are thousands of companies and institutions in these fields; it ends up perhaps one employee per company or less. Do you think given the facts that a large company like IBM, Google etc. would be worried if they spend $10k or $20k more on one employee per year? Not likely i.e. the only reason they are not hiring Americans is because there are not enough qualified Americans e.g. in US today we have a chronic shortage of nurses and we are importing them from Phillipines by the thousands on H-1B visas. Please know the facts before you go rant and rave.