Experience with Cognizant: I've seen people, just after 2 years asked to give-up technical career and focus on management stuffs like setting up conference calls, excel work, estimation and email etc. Just after 2 years you are expected to 'mentor' (aka dump work to) the juniors.
I see, strict H1B rules is good for India too. This way, Management learns to respect real talents and not shoe-lickers(highly suspect this will happen, but slight chance) . Then people who want to go to USA, will prepare themselves technically rather than saying 'yes to boss' for everything in an attempt to get visa.
There is also misconception (i believe) among Americans, they think if these are talented one from India, then what about rest of people working in offshore! Fact is, Most often, the real work will be done by employee in India, and definitely each team will have at-least couple of high-skilled person, but these guys don't have email-communication/shoe-licking skills. They are honestly happy about this strict visa rules.
It is extremely wrong to say Managerial roles are there for the taking and good developers are not taking them.
If you are a good developer most managers are extremely hostile to you. Because they think if you become a manager you become a threat to their job. Therefore they prevent you from becoming a manager.
Its typical power play.
If you are really good and have real chops in you to do any big stuff, you are ruined in India. People will try to get rid of you anyway they can. The society as a whole hates merit people here. Because most are crooks and they don't like seeing real people getting rewards. That would disrupt their ecosystem.
If you are good, India is the last place you want to be. Move out, one way or other for your own good.
The issue isn't just limited to software companies. You see in a country like India question papers leak, people cheat in exams. Teachers have their favorite pets at schools and colleges whom they reward with marks unfairly. What happens when a populace of this kids goes to do jobs? They bring the same culture everywhere. Which is why you will see every one wants to cheat at everything.
Everything from cheating at taxes(fake rent receipts), jumping traffic signals, promotions at office, voting for wrong interests, bribes, corruption etc etc. This permeates to every aspect of our nations very existing character.
People, society and governments have wrong priorities in India. Most think building roads or some fancy infrastructure will solve their issues.
In reality Human resources are what matters in building a country. The rest happens on auto pilot.
I won't say everything on west runs on Merit. But the situation is definitely better than India in my experience. Most importantly I have seen better the quality of human resources better a country turns out to be.
My guess is India will take a lot of time, several decades, may be even centuries to fix its core issues.
A large part of the country is undeveloped. Fixing roads and infrastructure definitely helps but reducing population and creating better health should help as well.
India is a huge exporter of engineering talent. This is bad because it's a brain drain for the country. If I was getting SV level salaries, India would make sense.
Yes, I've seen them too, that's their typical attitude :) I still remember dejected co-worker (who resigned and took back his resignation because manager made false promise to retain him) said, "these guys shouldn't called managers, they are cheats,cheaters"
I think this is largely a cultural thing - many Indians just don't see development itself as a career, everyone just wants to be a manager with people working below them. Sort of a 'face' thing. And of course when you have that attitude, you are generally not going to be excited or even really interested in development, which is perhaps one of the reasons why so many Indian developers are just not very good*
* Source: I've been team leader for an Indian dev team working out of Mumbai for several years. I am not saying India doesn't have good developers who care - it does, but they are extremely rare are companies like Capgemini and Cognizant, who simply don't pay enough to attract such people.
There are people, especially who can't play the poisonous political game for too far that their mileage is limited to a point. These people have to retrain themselves with some hard hands on skills, or will suffer at the next purge.
Read my other comments. Management fanciness is Indias national culture.
I don't quite agree with cultural thing view. Honestly, 11 yrs back when I started with Cognizant, I was asked so many times by managers "how long you going to be technical? you can write programs now, do you want to continue that even after 5 yr or 10 yrs?"
Its not cultural thing, its being imposed by less talented management people, who see 'people/project management' is the only path for growth.
Assuming these managers you mention were also Indian, couldn't their behaviour also be part of it being a 'cultural thing'?
true, these managers are Indians too :) They follow the rules set by their high management, it has to be company culture set by founders.
Edit: you mentioned many Indian wants to be managers and dont see development as career choice, I disagree. I view the situation as, many Indians forced to follow companies culture set by founders. There is difference between the two.
Edit2: >My Indian friends who work or worked at such companies tell me this comes not just from management and the company itself, but also from a desire for the perception of prestige; to appear 'important' to their families in particular.
hmm, i think your Indian friend shared wrong info with you. Indian Families doesn't know difference between manager or tech-lead, technical architect. Most often middle class families doesn't care about the designation in IT but they do care about salary :)
In a population of 1.2 billion, of course not everyone fully buys in to this. I've had the pleasure of working with some Indian devs who were interested and excited by development, and saw a good, non-administrative career ahead of them irregardless of what others thought of them. Of course I never have this pleasure for long - they always leave for product companies, and usually get 200% or more salary into the bargain!
No, but they know the difference between 'manager' and 'not a manager'. It's not just one friend, it's multiple people across Capgemini and Cognizant. You make a good point about salary being important, but it's far easier and more common to become a manager at Capgemini, Cognizant etc than it is to become a good developer anywhere.
Not new. This culture has existed since forever.
You will see in India there is wild craze for MBA degrees. Everyone wants an MBA. Like every single person. I even know house wife's who do MBA's because 'Just in case'.
Even before that, non impactful, unreal and very little value adding desk jobs have always been valued heavily in Indian culture.
To give you an example IAS. People know the job involves forwarding a few memos, approving leaves and vacation requests and supervising a few juniors. You get luxury free accommodation, handful pay and other myriad benefits.
Even in the private world its the same.
It all comes down to a simple thing: "In management, you get a lot of big stuff for free, which others don't get even after work".
On the other side, I've known a lot of Indian developers at product companies here in the US and they're mostly brilliant. I'm sure it's self selected to a degree because you've gotta be pretty smart to get a job on the other side of the world. Still, I think taking down these big visa abusing companies is good for the US and India. The good engineers in both countries will get the pay they deserve, and Indian developers will get a better shot at working at companies that aren't just body shops
Like not changing your oil, it's not something you can recover from.
These sheep are work horses for the political cartels, and these people do bulk of the heavy lifting as the plum money, opportunities and rewards are eaten office politicians and their minions.
Most of this kind of talent is used and thrown like tissues or they grow a brain and move to different companies.
For the H1B, you only need to be applying to work in a "specialty occupation" and earn more than the prevailing wage for that occupation in the US.
From the USCIS website, "Generally speaking, a job is a specialty occupation if the occupation normally requires a bachelors degree in a related field of study. Jobs in fields such as engineering, math, and business, as well as many technology fields often qualify as a specialty occupation."
https://www.uscis.gov/eir/visa-guide/h-1b-specialty-occupati...
You haven't met everyone of them to apply such a broad characterization. You have a point to make - that these three businesses abuse the Visa - but that gets lost in your attempt to pass judgment on a group of people you haven't met, and yet feel at home grouping them together as "shoe-lickers". Get off your high horse.
On the other hand, Your ill-informed view paints a poor picture of you. As I said before - stop thinking you are better. Instead, you came across as a massive douche.
Yes not all people are bad. But Most are. Buy this is in every single company. Not just outsourcing firms.
The issue in India is scarcity. Which is every one wants their pound of flesh even if that comes from their own brother. They want it.
The Op is right though. You can't get anything through work in most Indian companies. Regional politics, linguistic politics, connections in high places, politics is what you need to progress in India.
In India work doesn't get you too far. Society doesn't reward work or merit. In fact rewards corrupt practices both in government and private sectors.
Yet people in India wonder why no good things happen here.
I often run into people who ask me about my immigration status and when I say that I am waiting for my GC to be done, they nod sympathetically, roll their eyes and tell about someone they know who "had to wait two years! Gosh!!". I tell them, with as much politeness I can muster, that I have been in the country for over 10 years, have filed for my GC 5 years ago,, and expect to wait another 5 to get it.
If the US didn't have a considerable amount of immigrants from those countries then the times would be 8x less.
Same happens with Mexico. There are so many Mexican immigrants in the US already (legal and illegal) that getting a GC it's almost impossible now unless you have a legitimate marriage to a citizen.
No, past levels of immigration has no bearing on the backlogs. For example Germany, Ireland, Italy etc have no skilled immigration backlogs.
Maybe there ought to be another level for folks who have won awards from recognized societies and associations such as Nobel, ACM, what not
Anyway, seems like a crappy place to work all around. Except for management, presumably.
The same question could be asked about corruption in India. A lot of Indians just seem overly eager to screw each other over, and lord it over each other. You see this in Indian colleges, with the so-called phenomenon of "ragging", which is really just socially accepted mental/physical abuse.
I just feel Americans (while many are total assholes), that the majority are generally much nicer as a people, and they don't treat each other like complete crap. What's wrong with Indian culture? How does Indian society manage to cultivate so many terrible people? (serious question)
The petty corruption in the small scale is pervasive in India. I find that not the case in US. Most people one interacts with in US are honest (except car salesmen :). But at the higher echelons of society, the corruption is at a much larger scale in US.
I compare this with driving in both countries. In India the number of accidents are much higher, but the fatality per accident is much lower. In US, accidents are rare, but when it happens, the likelihood of someone getting killed is high. I think this is because drivers in India each try to squeeze out small advantages, and as a whole the traffic never gets to gain much speed, so when the inevitable accident happens, it is often not fatal. But in US, far more people follow the rules, everyone moves faster on an average, but the one careless driver in the group can cause much more damage.
I think of corrupt behavior the same way - the average Joe is not corrupt in US, so the society as a whole makes much better progress. But that leaves the system vulnerable to the action of one sociopath, so at the high end you see much bigger scandals.
Therefore there is a perennial drive to gather for yourself whatever you get, while you have the chance.
Japan has a very high population density + high forest/natural cover, meaning people are squeezed into very tiny living space, yet the (generally) respectful and selfless way in which they treat each other (in general) is something most other counties learn from.
Similarly, Germany has 80+ million people living in a tiny parcel of land, but they're doing fine, and they've kept their country a beautiful and great place to live.
Just the condition of the streets in major cities in India tell a lot--strewn with garbage and resume. Yoy walk over empty McDonald's fries holders and cups, when you walk the streets of some cities. In some cities, you have a semi-open sewer system that runs by the road, creating a foul smell on evey street, and helping breed mosquitoes.
The almost repulsing and disgusting state of place places, the streets, and cities in general--tell a lot about the apathy of the people of the things that are outside their home.
These sort of things make it harder for the deserving employees.
People who already H1's are now treated as kings to which every single person in offshore centers are supposed to bow and do whatever asked for.
The new people who get H1's will now be people in the inner most circles of the cartels.
These companies do actually abuse the program and the legit people who are highly skilled suffer because of the lottery system - including highly skilled Indians who do NOT work at these companies but are working in small startups who cannot afford to put in multiple applications to win the lottery by statistics (instead of skill).
If this "flooding" is stopped then a lot of SV startups will have an easier time recruiting great talent from India.
I am skeptical though of the fact that whatever is replacing this system will not be circumvented soon in some other way.
I think the overall effect is going to be a little different than what you imagine. Unless you are imagining a future where people who think a programmer is an "anomalously high-cost peon who types some mumbo-jumbo into some other mumbo-jumbo" [1] suddenly realize they are wrong and develop a profound appreciation of their services.
This is going to play out not too different from what happens when the minimum wage is raised, except at a higher level.
Average person expects: everyone will get paid more. Actual effect: less employment overall in the economy.
Average person expects: companies will be forced to hire local. Actual effect: a more active search for SaaS which doesn't have insurance overheads and doesn't complain to your HR department, and certainly won't threaten to complain to the great Donald when its services are terminated.
Average person expects: much better treatment of programmers by non-programmers. Actual effect: Ah ha ha ha...
Average person expects: much fairer and more equitable distribution of wealth. Actual effect: Because of the reasons mentioned above, even greater distortions, resentment against the ones who have the best paying jobs, the creation of "inside vs outside" class systems, government intervention to "fix" this problem which will make things worse.
Be careful what you wish for...
[1] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pro...
1: Overtime exemptions. Management has zero incentive to hire experts and drive labor costs out of projects, which in turn hides those labor costs. You get lots of unpaid OT and tremendous immeasurable technical debt that managers spit-shine and pass onto the next investor or manager.
2: IT employee's can't work freelance due to IRS Tax rules that they are an employee and not a contractor which creates both criminal and civil liabilities for managers. Remember the programmer who crashed his Cessna into an IRS Building? This was why.
3: Anti-Labor market policies. H1B's, allowing silicon valley corps to enter into agreements not to poach each others employee's, and so forth.
Today, the IT market is 10% actual people who can program, architect, manage and in hack in general, 20% maintainers who spit shine the solutions and keep them running, and the remainder are empty bodies in a position who know almost nothing or just barely enough to do their jobs but if you throw anything outside of that very narrow expertise at them they disintegrate. The entire market, from education bodies straight up to the c-level execs and investors, encourage this as high-tech is the new whip used on the working man to run bubble after bubble and make money.
In that environment, the real hackers make decent money but have to be careful to continue progressing their craft. Everyone else has to fuck or be fucked.
Can you cite a source?
I have never heard anything about this. I have known many devs who take on freelance side projects, though obviously it depends on the particulars of their employment contract.
So, not very worried.
Here's a link I found on STEM statistics:
http://dpeaflcio.org/programs-publications/issue-fact-sheets...
Medicare for all certainly seems like one substantive way to address your comment. Can you do an "expectations vs reality" for that one?
Unfortunately I think the phrase about USA political parties, "there are no longer ideologies, only interests" applies.
I don't think it was capitalist values that led to wage dumping, but rather wilful ignorance. Until now, the consensus of the global elites was that open borders are good, and that those who called for controlling immigration were evil in some way. Although I am extremely disturbed by the rise of populist right-wing movements, I am also convinced they have tapped into popular resentment of open borders philosophies that transcends simplistic labelling.
Bernie Sanders is an obvious example of a politician from the Western Left who opposed open borders, but an even more interesting example is the "xenophobic" violence in South Africa.
In the 1990s, for various reasons, South Africa ended up with de facto open borders. People flowed in from the rest of Africa and the Indian subcontinent. The economic collapse of Zimbabwe led to an even bigger inflow of foreigners. Refugees from other African countries often made a bee-line for SA. Employers often hired easily-exploited foreigners in preference to locals, and foreign businessmen were able to out-compete locals by using family members as very low paid labour, and undercutting small businesses run by South Africans in the impoverished townships, and in small towns by doing things like living in their shops. This in a country with extremely high unemployment.
Things came to a head in early 2008 when the first round of "xenophobic violence" erupted, and, since then, there have been sporadic outbreaks. Although the violence is often horrific, and obviously worthy of condemnation, the South African elites have been unwilling to address its causes, instead using words like "xenophobia" and generally deploring those who oppose open borders. These same elites benefited from the cheap labour, and dont bear the costs of uncontrolled immigration.
Although the violence in South Africa, and the rise of racist and bigoted rhetoric in the West is deeply disturbing, and worthy of condemnation, it is wilful blindness to the underlying causes that has lead to such extreme outcomes.
The latter I imagine. The Democratic Party is a firmly neoliberal institution as it is, but they're especially wooed by anything associated with "tech." It's like dangling keys in front of a baby. If corporations claim that they're hiring the best/brightest talent that simply can't be found elsewhere, then who is a mere politician to question that?
This move seems consistent with Trump's and part of the GOP's nationalist, anti-immigrant, anti-international trade ideology. He'll try to sell aspects of it in ways that appeal, but IMO it will have bad consequences for the U.S. and other economies:
First, demonizing foreign companies is a very dangerous trend to start. It's the same thought process as racial and religious prejudice - the outsiders are just one broad stereotype and threatening. Is it coincidence that he chose a country that is different and more foreign to most Americans - i.e., he didn't choose the UK or Australia, or even Germany.
Second, much of SV sells their products, including their technical services, outside the U.S.; if the U.S. becomes hostile to foreign goods and services, why will others continue to buying the same from American companies? If the U.S. abandons free trade in general, why will others pursue it? It also is a blow to global productivity; instead of large productivity benefits of economic specialization, with everyone using best-in-world products and services (again, many of which are American), we all become limited to best-in-our-country.
Third, India in particular is very important to the U.S., economically and strategically. Power comes from wealth and population; since WWII the U.S. has been by far the largest advanced economy in the world (Japan is second, ~40% as big), and thus the leading world power. China and India each have around 4 times the U.S. population and their economies are advancing quickly; if they advance far enough, the U.S. will be to them as the UK is to the U.S.; also the core of world economic activity will be Asia, where the people and wealth are. China is hostile to the U.S. in many ways; India at least is a (somewhat) pluralistic democracy which shares a British heritage with America. The U.S. may need India economically and strategically, and if Indians feel the U.S. is hostile to them as a nation or on a racial basis, it could cause significant damage.
According to the article, the three named companies are the three top recipients of H1B visas. Australia, Germany, and the UK are not mentioned because Australian, German, and UK companies are not among the top H1B abusers. There's no conspiracy here. The over-representation of Indians as H1B programmers has been noted even as far back as the GAO report I posted elsewhere.
> China and India each have around 4 times the U.S. population and their economies are advancing quickly; if they advance far enough, the U.S. will be to them as the UK is to the U.S.; also the core of world economic activity will be Asia, where the people and wealth are.
And much of that economic advancement in China has happened with very protectionist policies, so your argument that the US must promote free trade at the expense of enforcing its own laws and protecting its labor-force in order to maintain its economic strength is a little strange.
> instead of large productivity benefits of economic specialization, with everyone using best-in-world products and services (again, many of which are American), we all become limited to best-in-our-country.
Protectionism rarely means the outright banning of imports, it usually just involves tariffs. And there are plenty of tariffs right now in the US and many other countries and the world isn't falling apart as we're forced to use subpar products. (If anything, the relaxation of trade barriers and lowering of tariffs has resulted in more junk.)
I have very little sympathy with the idea that we have to throw the American labor force under the bus because of nebulous concerns about the distant future. We have corporations exploiting the laws to suppress wages and lay off American workers in favor of H1Bs right now in the present, and we know what to do about it. We don't know how the future is going to play out. In the long run, we are all dead.
I think American workers are very expensive indeed, even programmers here are largely over-compensated. That is why American companies are moving to other countries to save cost.
Protectionist policy can move some business back to America if other countries want to sell here. But as China soon amounts to the biggest market for many catalogs in the world, I don't think US have too much leverage on this one unless those global companies are willing to lose the Chinese market.
> much of that economic advancement in China has happened with very protectionist policies
To a significant degree, China's growth has been due to international trade, importing materials and exporting manufactured goods.
Also, China is a developing economy; they are in a much different situation than the U.S. and different rules apply. Protectionism for the fragile industries and national economies of developing nations is expected and, to a degree, healthy. If developing economies were open to all foreign business, there would be no domestic industries left (they can't compete with businesses capitalized at Western levels, with all the other advantages of advanced economies) and be very vulnerable to the whims of foreign businesses and governments.
> nebulous concerns about the distant future
These aren't nebulous at all, but well-established laws and patterns of economics. It's as predictable as not maintaining your code - we can call the consequences far off and nebulous because they aren't immediate, but really they are entirely predictable.
> we have to throw the American labor force under the bus
I agree completely that that shouldn't happen and isn't necessary. Labor should have a seat at the table when trade is negotiated and we can have both. In fact, it is necessary to have both:
If the U.S. economy contracts or simply doesn't grow as fast, labor suffers the most. If trade with India is cut or doesn't grow as fast, that means fewer jobs for American workers. If global security is undermined, that has very serious impacts on everyone, including the workers who die on the front lines. The CEOs probably will be fine, for the most part.
The fundamental problem, IMHO, is that while free trade is good for aggregate prosperity, we don't live in aggregate; we live as individuals. If the U.S. economy grows 1% because of the efficiency of the international labor pool, but no individual's income grows 1% (except coincidentally); it doesn't help the individual who loses his/her job - their economy contracted 100%. More specifically, capital can move much faster than labor: a factory can be moved from Missouri to Guangdong much faster than the workers in Missouri can move - they can't move to China at all and finding another factory takes time, more than a lifetime for many.
Trade must serve people, as individuals, and must protect them from that economic reality.
This is superficial reasoning. Bastiat taught economists to look beyond this obvious job loss. Protectionism causes MORE job losses than free trade. The number of jobs in an economy are a function of aggregate demand and impacted by fiscal and monetary policy-trade doesn't change it one bit. Trade changes the _nature_ of the jobs, not the number. So the right thing is to allow freedom to trade.
Given the way the system is set up, of course consulting companies are going to file applications for an extremely large number of mediocre applicants, and not a small number of supremely qualified applicants. This isn't even a loophole, it's simply exercising an intended feature of the system.
Everyone has known for years that the system is broken, but no one in government has the courage to pass meaningful immigration reform. If you're looking for someone to blame, blame your representatives in Washington.
A) The consequences for committing a very light foul just inside the penalty box is way too high, compared to the penalty for committing a light foul just outside. For the former, you get an almost-guaranteed goal. For the latter, you get a free kick which comes to nothing most of the time. There needs to be some better middle ground here.
B) The ref only ever calls penalty kicks if the striker takes a fall. If the striker gets fouled, but still make a brave effort to continue playing, the ref simply lets the game continue. If players were not penalized for staying on their feet, I'm sure you'll see a lot more people doing so.
1. Real advance skilled labor, not menial skills 2. Fair distribution. Companies need to get a fair shot to get what they need and no single company ought to be allowed to hog the permits
Better question, if there are 100 visas allowed, and 80 experts needed for software, and 50 experts needed for bio, then how do you compare software experts vs bio experts? What metric do you use to justify someone is more of an expert overall? It is apples and oranges.
Arguably, the most effective justification is that experts in X are compensated higher, therefore they must extract more value for the US economy, than experts in Y. A simple sort on minimum-guaranteed-salary seems best.
However, this stops being the case if we have no cap. But a limitless H1B systems is not a likely reality.
==== Fair distribution. Companies need to get a fair shot to get what they need and no single company ought to be allowed to hog the permits reply
This sounds like you have an issue with "free market" economics. You seem to be arguing from the point of view of an idealist, not a pragmatist. I'm a pragmatist. Sadly, I'm not sure our conversation would amount to anything constructive.
Example: Sound designers and sound mixers typically do not make a six figure salary in the US. The industry is essential to many fields, including advertising, theater, television, etc.
Supply/Demand is also a function of how much the employer has to pay.
But more importantly, you haven't then answered my question.
> Better question, if there are 100 visas allowed, and 80 experts needed for software, and 50 experts needed for bio, then how do you compare software experts vs bio experts? What metric do you use to justify someone is more of an expert overall? It is apples and oranges.
Conversely, if a for-profit company claims that they are "essential to the economy", but make so little profits that they can't afford H1B visas, I'd be extremely skeptical of such claims. It undermines the entire premise of a free-market economy.
You might find that without any cyclical dependencies, it is really hard to define "crucial" without ending up on "provide most value". And when discussing jobs which "provide most value" you are forced into a corner accepting that the highest paid positions are the ones which the market has determined as "providing most value".
They weren't playing by the rules, that's the point. The problem is no agency really had the authority to do anything about it (i.e., the rules were mostly in practice unenforceable.) It was essentially one of the many, many "good faith" type of laws we have in the US, where the government simply assumes that, because laws and rules exist, they will be followed, and there's a very high bar for action to be taken against lawbreakers. Whether you ascribe that to malice or incompetence on the part of our lawmakers is up to you.
From the GAO report on H1Bs:
> Under the law, in certifying employers’ initial requests for H-1B workers, Labor is limited to ensuring that the employer’s application form has no obvious errors or omissions. It does not have the authority to verify whether information provided by employers on labor conditions, such as wages to be paid, is correct. Moreover, some of this same information is reviewed again by INS during its assessment of employer requests for workers. Further, Labor has limited authority to ensure that employers are actually complying with the law’s requirements after the H-1B workers are employed in the United States. Unlike under other labor laws it enforces, Labor generally cannot initiate enforcement actions (such as conducting investigations and subpoenaing employer records), even if it believes employers are violating the law. [2]
Keep this in mind when people tell you there's no such thing as H1B abuse because the rules say they're required to pay the prevailing wage, or that they have to try to hire Americans first. For decades there have been virtually no consequences for flagrantly violating the rules. If it was especially egregious then you might face a lawsuit...but since you're a corporation with deep pockets and then people suing you are generally laid-off employees, that's a small risk, and you probably end up settling. [1] Keep in mind that no matter how much people cheerlead H1B, this [3] is the day-to-day reality: Americans being fired and their work being contracted out to these massive H1B firms on the cheap.
I'm not against a visa allowing companies to hire talent they really can't get in the US, but that is not at all the reality of the H1B program as it exists today, and thousands of people have suffered for it.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/26/us/lawsuit-claims-disney-...
[2] http://www.gao.gov/new.items/he00157.pdf
[3] http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-201502...
Cognizant is unequivocally the worst most atrocious slave labor, nepotism infested, abusive companies She and I have ever been exposed to.
They treated her like a slave.
Making her do the work of others and letting the other person get the credit.
Passing her up on raises and promotions no matter how well she did in "reviews" or how many awards they gave her and the clients she worked for gave her. I would lost the clients she worked for but I won't. They should be ashamed for hiring cognizant. Absolutely shamed to death.
Making her stay up late to take offshore conference calls to India to work with her incompetent offshore team. Who were all related. It's so incestuous how indian IT works. Southern Indians really dislike northern Indians which I never understood no matter how many times it's explained to me. So there is some racism involved in indian IT as well as nepotism.
She was severely underpaid. I mean laughable so. Like 50% less of what she made at her next job.
She was lied to constantly. Especially about moving expenses being covered and then they would refuse to talk about why they only paid half of what the agreed to pay.
They just treated her like a slave. It's a wretched company run by wretched people from the bottom to the top. I hope they all get hit by bus.
>Southern Indians really dislike northern Indians which I never understood
Its a good point. Its true for the opposite too. I think its based on who is running the management. If south-indian occupies the managerial position, north-indian dislikes him and if north-indian is the manager, then south-indians dislike him.
As long as South-Indian and North-Indian works at same category there is lesser dislike between each other.
they're also run and managed by real assholes. complete entitlement complex - definitely a sign of corruption / abuse.
Examples? Not saying you are wrong, just want to understand.
> They are terrible.
Reasons? Again, just trying to understand perspectives.
and it's not just the big players -- there are dozens if not hundreds of little cottage industries bodyshops that use their previous bigfirm alumni connections to do the exact same thing. fuck all of them. ever hear of an "approved vendors list"? those are all now hijacked by bodyshop crony dipshits. and that's just the tip of the scam iceberg. i haven't dealt with any of these assholes in over 5 years and it still makes me angry.
excuse my french but this is a HUGE problem in our industry and needs straight talk. h1b's aren't the only people they abuse. that's just the engine that drives the entire shit show forward.
I understand to you think they (TCS etc.) are rude and not well-qualified but there are American customers who are paying for their consulting services by the hour; I assume they are fundamentally satisfied otherwise they would go elsewhere?
That they are putting in a lot applications - that seems to be within the letter of the law; maybe not the intention but I am not sure as this have been going for a while.
They're fundamentally satisfied because their staffing budgets look awesomely low, there is a latency between the time the hiring is done and the dung hits the turbine, then they somehow manage to pass the blame for the shitty systems on to external factors, and they move on to a higher paid position or take their golden parachute before the horrible reality sinks in to those left behind that they have been royally shafted. The shaftees are too embarrassed to admit they were hoodwinked (and stupid), so they make excuses too, and the cycle repeats.
The whole time this is happening, the competent engineers have been screaming and rending their garments, to no avail, until they are laid off for not being team players or for earning too much.
EDIT: TCS had "The number of non-Indian nationals was 21,282" in 2013.
EDIT2: Cognizant "The company has more than 255,800 employees globally, of which over 150,000 are in India"
EDIT3: Infosys "Its workforce consists of employees representing 122 nationalities working from 32 countries (37 countries as per the base location)."
So Americans are minority in those companies.
If you go even higher, 10,000,000 is written as "10,00,00,000" and called "1 crore".
No one said Most of Them. I said Many of Them. There's a difference. And if it wasn't clear earlier, let me state it clearly. The three companies have most of their employees in India. But there are people employed in other countries too.
#2. If a group of people are willing to do your job for less money (as much as you'd like to point out the quality, it's probably good enough), your job WILL be fucked with or without H1-B visas. That is how a capitalism works.
Sure fix the H1B system but only you can fix your inefficiency. Big cos will find the most efficient route for getting good enough quality of work doen and most of the work is / will be shipped offshore.
friend: "As a developer, you guys don't really care about jargons MB and GB? like 4GB of RAM? Is that hard for you to understand?"
me:"No,thats pretty basic to know about MB/GB..why you are asking?"
friend: "10+ yr .net dev joined our team a month ago, while discussing something he told us he don't know what is MB and GB!".
me:"No way, he must be joking"
friend: "No, no he is pretty serious. He said, as a experienced dev, don't need to handle with hardwares and such..so don't know about all these MB's and GB's mean, like testers/sys.admin do."
Guess what, this 10+yr guy, worked in Dubai (onsite) for few years and returned to India.
The other H1Bs I've worked with have in general been good, often above average, and a few have been absolutely world class and people that I'd love to work with again . . . but the distribution is not what you'd expect for a program officially intended to fill in gaps of expertise and to supplement the US workforce where it is lacking otherwise unobtainable staff.
[I've been writing software for a living since the late 1970s, working on products that you've almost certainly heard of and some you've probably used, and I've got enough perspective and experience to be a pretty good judge of someone's level of expertise]
Infosys alone has 33000 applications in 2016. Google only had 4000. These numbers include renewals, but still.
A Republican representative has proposed legislation for the millions of undocumented immigrants brought as children.[1]
A Republican introduced a bill to improve the E2 visa program.[2]
I grew up as an undocumented immigrant in California (I left voluntarily after graduating high school to live in Mexico). I have yet to see something to actually improve _legal_ immigration from the Democrats. All they talk about is a pathway to citizenship for undocumented workers without actually trying to improve immigration based on merit.
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/01/us/politics/immigration-t...
[1]: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article1...
[2]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/1834
Just as an example, take a look at the bill that came closest to greatly improving our legal immigration system[1], and helping undocumented immigrants (S.744 of the 113th Congress), which passed with a super-majority in the Senate[2]. It was promoted and sponsored by some very well-known Republican Senators (e.g. John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, etc).
This bill contained provisions that would have fixed many of issues discussed in this thread, like what these unscrupulous consulting companies are doing with the current system. It would have made it easier for skilled immigrants to get green cards, for foreign students to stay in the country after they graduate, among many many other things. It was a compromise between parties, but yet it was a beautiful bill.
But Republicans in the House, lead by then-Speaker John Boehner prevented the bill from even being voted on. If the bill had been allowed a vote, it would have easily passed the House, and become law today. But a minority of the House (i.e. a majority of the Republicans in the House) unilaterally blocked passage of the bill. John Boehner actually said that the Republican party would "be over" if the 11-12 million undocumented immigrants were allowed to acquire citizenship eventually (as the bill would have enabled them to).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Security,_Economic_Oppo...
Real life is more nuanced than "everything Trump does is bad," and companies (these three especially) have abused H1B to keep wages low and decrease employee leverage, so I'm glad to see a crack down.
You've basically highlighted one of the biggest problems with H1B, the potential for what effectively amounts to indentured servitude.
Any consulting company will want to protect their investments from being poached and it has nothing to do with the work auth status of their employees.
Which is why they're doing the right thing by almost never agreeing to buy out clauses in their contract, which are really only their to provide an illusion of flexibility. This prevents "poaching" (hint : when you pay a fingers fee it cases to be passing) and hey, if your servant, I mean employee finds some other employer to go work for you can always fire them and institute revocation proceedings with US IS. That won't have a chilling effect at all (or as you CALL, "protecting your investment"). And I'm sure it's only a coincidence that on many occasions the Big Three have been accused of sharing blacklists of employees, too?
Also, about the average wage. TCS, Infosys, Cognizant send their employees in all states of US. Including the the states in south, mid-west, and Appalachian region. So what is this comparison with salaries in Silicon Valley?
How is merit going to be measured? Prove me there can be a rule set that performs better. That's where I'd like the conversation to be at.
I'm not convinced we can conceive a normalization scheme that wouldn't end up unwillingly benefiting certain companies and industries and states over others though.
A) Get the rid of the H1B cap, and set the minimum income requirement to $100k/year. If you're smart enough and talented enough that someone is willing to pay you 6 figures, you would be an asset to this country and there will always be room for you here.
B) Keep the H1B cap, and auction off the visas using annual salaries. If there are more applicants than visas, the people who get paid the most will get the visa.
I won't pretend that either proposal is perfect, but it's sure better than the current broken system.
B has the normalization problem full blown.
I'm thinking all we could do is cap outsourcing companies. If you don't plan on having the employee work on your own products, then you're limited to a smaller number of foreign hires a year.
I agree about reviewing the threshold yearly, and indexing for inflation.
Why normalize for region though? Why should companies in SF be penalized by the visa system just because they pay high salaries? I stand by my earlier assertion that anyone whom a company deems valuable enough to pay six figures, is valuable enough to be an asset to this nation.
Well 100k in SF is not equal to exceptional talent. So for 100k, you'd bring engineers who don't fit your definition of "deserving to be here". While 100k in say Nashville, well that's definitly going to be someone exceptional if a Nashville company is willing to spend it on them.
So in SF, to infer that the candidate truly merits to be here, he needs to be expanssive to those companies, and 100k in SF is not.
For B, you really want to give your highly paid jobs to foreign workers, who can easily leave the country with all that money? Once again, the richer the company, the better the chance.
Btw, this is the only scheme I think could be better, but I actually don't hear a lot of people bringing it up. And when I think more about it, I'm not sure it's possible to implement.
Lotterie is in a way a solution to the normalization problem. Given two companies in different places, both who've interviewed a different candidate and believe they merit to get the job, and are both willing to pay a different amount for the candidate. You could say, instead of attempting to normalize and risking possibly high false positive, we will randomly distribute. That's a normalization scheme.
"Infosys, TCS accounted for only 8.8% of total H1B visas"
"All Indian IT companies cumulatively account for less than 20% of the total approved H1B visas although Indian nationals get about 71% of the H1B visas,” Nasscom said. It added that this is a testimony to the high skill levels of India-origin professionals. The annual number of Indian IT specialists working on temporary visas for Indian IT service companies is about 0.009% of the 158-million-member US workforce, it said."
I wonder since this data is public, how come different stats are concluded ?
(1) large consulting firms like Cap Gemini, Accenture, IBM Global Service etc. These are American or European competitors of TCS, Infy, Cognizant[1], Wipro.
(2) "desi body shops" which are typically run by American-Indian business community.
#2 has a long tail - there are lots of firms, and each gets a small number of H-1Bs each year. Also, fraud is much more rampant in this sector [2][3][4].
[1]: Cognizant is HQed in Teaneck, New Jersey. It started as an in-house technology unit of Dun & Bradstreet.
[2]: https://www.justice.gov/usao-edva/pr/couple-pleads-guilty-20...
[3]: http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/03/25/bay-area-tech-executiv...
[4]: https://www.justice.gov/usao-nj/pr/virginia-immigration-atto...
This is a depressing thread for any Indian developer.
Transparency in healthcare, labeling China a currency manipulator, and reforming the H1B visa program.
The first two have been discarded already. Curious to see what happens with this one.
The package they offered had less pay, no (or very low, I don't remember) stock options, less perks but (and the manager emphasised this), I'd get an "on site". I told him that I considered it a negative since I had a fairly good circle of friends professional and personal in Bangalore and didn't want to move. He couldn't really parse that and the conversation ended.
1. Computer and information sciences: 59,581
2. Engineering: 97,858
3. Engineering technologies: 17,238
4. Mathematics and statistics: 21,853
5. Physical sciences and science technologies: 30,038
Roughly 225,000+ people who can most easily pick up and practice the necessary advanced computer science skills needed for advanced software work.
This is not accounting for the fact that most other commercial computing needs, as in regular corporate IT work, can be met by people who have a basic understanding of logic, math and with sufficient additional computer training.
According to the latest BLS statistics [2] there are over 69,000+ jobs open in Feb 2017 in the Information sector alone. The cited source also includes total hires and separations.
The number of open computer positions in Feb alone are almost equal to the number of annual computer/information science graduates.
Am I wrong in assuming that there are far more job openings than can be met by the number of qualified college graduates in the space?
How is this gap addressed? Do the Indian IT companies fulfill this gap? Does the BLS statistics for unfilled computer job openings factor in both the domestically produced computer graduates and the ones provided by the IT outsourcing firms (H1Bs are onsite of course)?
If so there seems to be a big gap still remaining in the supply of domestic computer graduates.
I am honestly curious and not trying to take a position on what appears to be an inflammatory and highly emotional topic.
Please correct me if I am wrong and forgive me if I am incorrectly reading the statistics.
[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_322.10.a...
So maybe we should train Americans to that level that are willing to accept equally low wages. Since it appears there's a great number of jobs who want just that.
Still, it's a good idea. Bringing in more talented Indians will help the economy overall, just not for American software engineers.
http://www.inflation.eu/inflation-rates/united-states/histor...