The Industry Standard - H-1B visa regulations lifted for TARP recipients? - Comments

I have more than 20 years

Soft. Eng. — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 08:51:18 -0400

I have more than 20 years experience in development and systems administration. I have worked for many different companies both as a contractor and a full-time employee. The vast majority of H1- B visa holders are fantastic at precisely whatever job they trained for, with 0 innovation and 0 cross training. They are far less effective at their jobs than the average "geek". The differences can be found in their lack of passion and interest in their jobs, which leads to a lack of skills necessary to adapt in the workplace to changing conditions and/or unusual problems or requests from their employers.

I always felt comfortable as a development manager when I asked any Indian (read H1-B or former H1-B) employees to do some horribly lengthy and tedious task, but never when I had a challenging task that required real innovation. A "geek" would welcome the challenge, while the contractors would find any excuse to "wait" on technical support, emails from other professionals, etc...

I have found that very few IT employers know this, but nearly all skilled developers know it. The "geeks" demand a higher salary, but there is a reason behind it that has nothing to do with fat, arrogant, or lazy Americans. We will not put up with abuse of hours and unreasonable expectations for overtime, the Visa holders will. That's why employers prefer them: greed. Unfortunately, they are robbing productivity and quality to feed profit, as is shows by the poor quality of closed-source software developed largely by H1-B visa holders (BEA WebLogic and Portal, MS Windows [esp Vista]).

Google relies on open source and open source is dominated by American and European developers (Most Indians prefer MS crap). Android is more than twice as fast as Windows Moble 6.1, has far more innovative features, is designed for the ease of the UI while WM6.1 requires the stylus because most of the buttons and menus are too small for human fingers to hit reliably.

I could go on in this vein for some time, but you get the idea: You get what you pay for, so go ahead and save your money by hiring cheep labor from India, you only guarantee your own company will be outpaced and out-developed by the open-source community. We code because we love it, not because we have to send money back to our family.

Judged negative. There was

Ian Lamont — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 10:23:10 -0400

Judged negative. There was very little support for such a change to begin with, and few politicians would dare to go against popular sentiment in these times.

Ian Lamont
Managing Editor
The Industry Standard
twitter.com/the_standard

Microsoft defends its use of

Yi-Wyn Yen167771 — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 15:29:56 -0500

Microsoft defends its use of H-1 visas in a letter to Sen. Charles Grassey who doesn't believe companies that lay off U.S. workers should employ foreigners with H-1 visas.

It's gonna be very hard to

Liv Jin — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 15:34:59 -0500

It's gonna be very hard to reverse the bill since it's been passed by the President...

Besides, the reason why Indian immigrants accounted for 70% of the H1B quota is because they did fraud such as multi-filing in their H1B applications....

"It is an open secret in the Indian IT community of the US that a 'Desi' (referring to Indian) consultancy company, for reasons of self-interest, can stoop to any extent to get the average Indian IT professional in its employment to maintain legal status in the US. Except for some of the big names in the consultancy business, many foreign IT consultants grossly violate immigration laws to meet their goals."

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1482242/foreign_workers_h1b_vis...

H-1B visa regulations lifted for TARP recipients?

Yi-Wyn Yen — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 13:13:18 -0500

President Obama's stimulus package will make it difficult for foreigners to get H-1B work visas with companies that accept TARP money. An amendment in the stimulus bill puts strict regulations on the hiring practices of the New York banks and financial services companies who have taken TARP money. The federal government wants TARP-funded companies to hire from the growing pool of laid-off Americans rather than new immigrants seeking H-1B visas.

The new provision especially hurts Indian immigrants, who make up roughly 70% of the 65,000 H-1B visas awarded in the U.S. each year and who work primarily in the IT sector.

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York (D) calls the hiring restrictions on H-1B workers "counterproductive" to New York's economy and vows to work hard to change it. Schumer will need to create an amendment in another bill that must be passed through Congress in order to reverse or change the strict hiring policies of TARP recipients.

Prediction: An amendment to make it easier for Troubled Asset Recovery Program recipients to hire H-1B visa workers will be passed through Congress by September 1, 2009.

Image: Niyam Bhushan/Flickr