![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
a comment to Computerworld article
Apr. 29th, 2009 10:42 amArticle at: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9131729
What people complaining about H1-B usually forget is that it cuts the offshoring tremendously. One of my past employers tried long and hard to establish a development office in India and failed. Why? Just could not find the employees who are any good. The only thing that worked was testing, and even that very poorly. An employee in India may cost 10% of an US employee but if he does only 1% of work (if any, in reality they tended to do nothing useful and break other things along the way), he is still 10 times more expensive.
Now you may ask, there are lots of smart Indian guys around in US, how come you couldn't find any in India? That's exactly the point. Thanks to the H-1B program, they are in US. And for most of the past decade anyone who was worth anything at all was quickly picked up by H-1B and moved to US. Where they earn US wages, which money stays in US and further powers the US economy. (Yes, I've been picked up by the same vacuum cleaner too when India was sucked dry at the end of 90's and the recruiters turned to the Eastern Europe).
Think about what is going to happen if these people stay in their countries, or even worse, are forced to return from US to their countries. The offshoring would finally work, and have a huge boom. That's when the jobs and money are going to run from US. What scares me the most is the programs like the one announced by IBM, where they offer the downsized H-1B employees to move back to their wild countries and work there at local wages. Good for IBM, very bad for the employees.
So don't complain about H-1B, embrace it. Yes, it drives down the wages, but the alternative would drive them down even worse, or kill the software industry in US altogether.
What people complaining about H1-B usually forget is that it cuts the offshoring tremendously. One of my past employers tried long and hard to establish a development office in India and failed. Why? Just could not find the employees who are any good. The only thing that worked was testing, and even that very poorly. An employee in India may cost 10% of an US employee but if he does only 1% of work (if any, in reality they tended to do nothing useful and break other things along the way), he is still 10 times more expensive.
Now you may ask, there are lots of smart Indian guys around in US, how come you couldn't find any in India? That's exactly the point. Thanks to the H-1B program, they are in US. And for most of the past decade anyone who was worth anything at all was quickly picked up by H-1B and moved to US. Where they earn US wages, which money stays in US and further powers the US economy. (Yes, I've been picked up by the same vacuum cleaner too when India was sucked dry at the end of 90's and the recruiters turned to the Eastern Europe).
Think about what is going to happen if these people stay in their countries, or even worse, are forced to return from US to their countries. The offshoring would finally work, and have a huge boom. That's when the jobs and money are going to run from US. What scares me the most is the programs like the one announced by IBM, where they offer the downsized H-1B employees to move back to their wild countries and work there at local wages. Good for IBM, very bad for the employees.
So don't complain about H-1B, embrace it. Yes, it drives down the wages, but the alternative would drive them down even worse, or kill the software industry in US altogether.
