Someone straight out of graduate school is a highly skilled professional. Especially if they have a Ph.D.
And there is a shortage in many specialized fields. Especially in academia where the pay is lower - I have a Ph.D and 12 years work experience since then, and I don’t make $130k. The last few times we had a job opening in our team, we struggled to find anyone qualified. Due to the nature of our work we couldn’t hire a foreign national, and ended up hiring people from different fields.
And STEM fields, including IT.
As someone who hires and has people working for me with H1-B Visas, they are a pain in the butt. I’d rather just not deal with them at all. There is paperwork. There is the inevitable lengthy trips out of the country (on person who is working for me is out for all of February, back in India).
And when the burden of bringing people in gets high enough, just offshore. The company I used to work for had about 90% of its engineers in the U.S. in 2000. Now, its 20%. Its easier (and cheaper) to hire them in China, and since so many of them were Chinese on H1-B Visas anyway…
If we want these jobs to be filled by Americans in America, then we’ve got to fix the education system starting in kindergarten. The protectionist employment policies combined with starvation of the education system is a road to economic trouble.
The L-1 visa is also a possibility if they have worked for the same or a related employer abroad. In either case those jobs should pay enough for people to rent decent housing; if they choose not to, that’s a choice.
I’d like a cite for this as it is completely counter to my experience (25+ years in IT). We had a 2,000 sq ft data center - battery->generator power, redundant internet, cooling, etc. We shifted it to the cloud and saved a fucking pile of money.
I’m howling with laughter at the idea of an offshore business analyst in Bangalore trying to tease out actual requirements from stateside business folks.
I bet you had hardware Raid, enterprise class servers, 24x7 support, redundant networking to the servers, enterprise storage, name brand everything and a lot of underutilized, single purpose servers.
None of which you have in the cloud.
FWIW, at 2000 sqft you should be using cage space to optimize anyways, the infrastructure costs are high.
If you have bursty, ephemeral workflows or ones where most of the work is 8x7 the cloud is cheaper. The ROI on a fully utilized hypervisor with instances running 24x7 is 2 months for windows and 4 for linux for the physical hardware with 1 year reserve pricing with like for like ODM gear with a 3 year life time that gives lots of room for power, cooling and space.
But private cloud can inexpensive depending on workload if you don’t try to buy glasshouse everything and work with a cloud workflow.
You nailed it. Unfortunately, many people will not understand the reference of the magnitude of it (most executives don’t either). It is a very real problem that I have to deal with on a daily basis.
If you don’t believe me, do you remember the time when you had to call tech support and you got transferred to people in India using fake Americanized names and they still couldn’t help you after you waited for 30 minutes to even get someone on the line? I am an IT professional myself, my boss is a very distinguished engineer and we even have to deal with this bullshit on a daily basis. It has gotten so bad that I have the cell phone numbers to Directors and Vice Presidents for one of the largest and most respected companies in the world and I have had to use it twice. The will bitch slap them into complete submersion but that doesn’t solve the root problem. Indian outsourcing isn’t working because they simply don’t have the talent at the lower levels.
On its face I would quibble a bit with the 130K (if 1989 limits were subject to an inflation escalator, we would be at 115K). But it seems pretty clear that the influx of H1B IT professionals has suppressed wages for some home grown IT professionals.
What kills me are the cultural differences- for whatever reason, there’s some element of “face” involved with every interaction, and getting around that and getting them to admit that there’s a problem with what they did or how something works is a huge trial. We’re not accusing them of incompetence; just pointing out that something’s not working as expected, and to please investigate. But a significant portion of the time, they come back and say nothing was wrong, yet it starts magically working at about the same time.
That, and they do stuff that as a former programmer, I scratch my head at. Stuff like not escaping control characters because it wasn’t in the requirements. Uh, duh, escaping < and > in the body text of an XML tag shouldn’t HAVE to be in the requirements. That kind of thing ought to go without saying, as if you don’t escape them, you’ve left a massive bug in your code. Ideally, QA would catch that, but apparently not.
And we then have to argue at extended length with these clowns that no, we can’t require dioctors not to use the < and > signs in their notes, and yes, you have to escape that stuff out so that it doesn’t choke your XML parser. And that no, we’re not paying for you to fix that, because you should have known better.
I know that problem well. In fact, I had it happen yesterday. I escalated a serious and hard to troubleshoot problem that required multiple teams to diagnose. It suddenly started working again during after a 3 hour international conference call but nobody would tell me what the problem was or how they fixed it. It is the same problem that was also mysteriously “fixed” a few months ago. I work in a highly regulated and controlled environment and now I have to go to “court” (corporate reliability review) and explain that we apparently have poltergeists because stable systems keep breaking and then fixing themselves for no explainable reason. It is maddening.
Here is a good summary of the current H-1B visa problem (and it is a real problem). The original law has serious design flaws that placement firms learned how to exploit very well a few years ago so the demand exploded while the number of visas stayed constant. It doesn’t prioritize based on importance or need. Instead, it picks the “winners” based on postmark dates and then a lottery. That isn’t a good way to fulfill the stated goals of the system.
I am not sure why you are citing quara comments as a source but lets look at the studies that have been done.
NFAP report:
Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella all were here on H1B’s, most converting from F1 where they would never qualify for 130K.
While it is easy to blame bottom dollar consulting firms, which are horrid no matter what part of the world they are in (but you get what you pay for). All of these individuals would have started something some place else in the world.
Our k-12 education system is on par with 3rd world countries when it comes to producing STEM graduates.
While people like to pretend that there is some form of American exceptionalism that resulted in our successes post WWII, most of our success is due to the fact that we attracted the best of the best around the world.
And it is quite clear those days are going away.
Bottom dollar consulting firms are what we are talking about here. I don’t have any problem with a Pakistani brain surgeon coming here on an H-1B visa to start a practice in the U.S. Albert Einstein was a foreigner after all and he did just fine at Princeton. That is not what we are talking about though.
It is also complete bullshit to claim that “Our k-12 education system is on par with 3rd world countries when it comes to producing STEM graduates.” My daughters go to public schools and they have to work their ass off especially in math and science. I live in the greater Boston area. Granted, we have piss poor schools like Harvard, MIT, Tufts, Boston University, Boston College, Brandeis and roughly 100 hundred others but we make due. Don’t even think about the 3000 or so colleges and universities spread around the U.S.
Do you want me to give you some cites on how piss-poor Chinese and Indian universities are because I can do that easily? The only reason that foreign universities produce more STEM graduates these days is the same reason reason that they assemble iPhones. It is just an assembly line to produce as many graduates as quickly as possible but that doesn’t work well when it comes to real education.
There is a reason why the U.S. is the only country on Earth to ever land on the moon, invent the internet, the airplane and so many other things that it would break the server if I listed them all. Not all countries and cultures are equal when it comes to modern technology contributions.
I think you are being a bit too defensive, but if you kill the H-1B you kill the method that companies use to hire the J1 graduates.
But I will provide a Cite, although I won’t fall for your “Indian” strawman. With 1.252 billion people and large amounts of social economic stratification it is silly to lump them in one group, especially when debasing that many people based on anecdote.
https://www.nsf.gov/nsb/sei/edTool/data/highschool-08.html
Are you claiming that the entry requirements are easier for Indians?
http://www.iie.org/Services/Project-Atlas/United-States/International-Students-In-US
I should also note that besides opinion you haven’t proven that bottom dollar employees is the reason that H1B visa holders are hired.
And trust me, there are lots of call centers and help desks with cheap as dirt experience workers.
And the vast majority of them are terrible. I deal with it every day. It would be better if they didn’t exist at all. Like I said earlier, my conversion rate is 3 - 4 Indian IT professionals to 1 American but occasionally you will find a good one and I hang on to those for dear life. It shouldn’t be that surprising. It is a 3rd world country with a caste system where they don’t even have reliable power. I let the relatively wealthy Indian project managers deal with their country-mates and they usually do it well.
There are many good reasons why I am truly mad about this. I had to manage development for Indian developers at one of the largest U.S. HR consulting firms when they took over the programs. I had to stay on the phone for 36 hours straight during a holiday to solve a problem that I could have fixed myself in 10 minutes. I had to cancel vacation time with my wife and young daughters due to incompetence. It was just me and the security guard in a building for 1,200 people with dim lighting for an entire weekend. We got it fixed but it took way more time than necessary.
The same thing happened a few weeks later except this time I shoulder checked a VP when I told him I was leaving and he tried to physically block me. That isn’t going to work because I already accused him of getting slaves a few months earlier (I was embarrassed by that comment at the time but I stand by it now). Bottom line, the entire management structure got fired, I got as sick as a person can be and still make it out alive and I am never dealing with that type of bullshit again.
You have to witness it in person but the whole thing is exploitation and largely unproductive. It reminds me of people that claim migrant farm workers are the only ones that can pick crops. OK, we will just create a quasi-slave group of people that can do it for you and no one will complain about it because they are more tanned and much cheaper than your average white person. That sound like a winning idea to me. What do you think?
The plural of anecdote is not data.
I have built systems that passed more than a billion dollars of transactions with programmers from India. And I have see good companies sink with American programmers.
It may be easier to categorize them that way but the huge difference is that you can run a crappy cheep operation in India
A billion dollars is chump change in my current work environment and that is per year, not over time. The comments stand. My superiors would agree. India is just not on par yet. You can get some good ones but they are hit or miss.
Of course there are plenty of terrible American companies. Most of them fail very quickly. I have the luxury of demanding concierge service and we ended up with group of exceptionally good ones that will jump when you tell them to.
What gets me are the runbooks.
If I’m working with a US-based team that isn’t from some absolute shithole managed services shop, I know that I can spend a minimum amount of time creating spare, but accurate high-level documentation and rely on intangible cultural understanding and assumptions about lateral thinking abilities to take care of most of corner cases. This is generally true whether the individuals involved are native born or immigrants.
Every. Single. Time. I’ve had to work with an offshore team, the required documentation takes more effort than the actual offshore operations. Any edge case that isn’t explicitly documented in excruciating detail results in a 3AM phone call to me or one of my reports.
I also like how I’m supposed to be available 24x7 to support the offshore team, but I’ve never been able to raise one of them on the phone outside of their normal business hours. On the other hand, local business hours for them are like 11AM-7AM Bangalore time, and there’s no way I’d do that shit, so hat’s off I guess.
Word. Except (as I pointed above) Russian/Ukrainian/Byelorussian programmers. Those were easily on or above US level.
It isn’t just you. That is the problem in a nutshell. I seriously doubt it saves any money at all.
I said 1B per quarter, and I said CC transactions
I have worked at 4 companies in the top 15 of this list.
as the HR software industry is only about $14 I want a cite vs platitudes.
At&t wireless failed due to a migration that Siebel screwed up, and they were a 44B a year company,
Even ADT only had 900M of Revenue in 2015.
So how about you PM me on the companies you are talking about and I will PM the ones I am talking about.
I have the feeling you are paying for McDonalds and expect a 4 star treatment.