Another Indian infiltrator, Arvind Panagariya, is peddling some more NASSCOM bullshit in the NY Times, in a piece titled "What Obama Can Learn From India."
At first, I thought he was going to be honest, and cover these topics:
1. How to produce more cell phones than toilets
2. How to keep you corrupt upper-caste oligarchy in charge
3. How to lead the world in sales of "Mein Kampf"
4. How to flood the world with millions of marble-mouthed slumdogs who remit 90% of their pay back to the upper-caste oligarchy
Instead, this slumdog peddled the typical crap:
The current U.S. administration, unfortunately, is succumbing to protectionist impulses. For instance, it recently imposed fee hikes of $2,000 or more on H1-B and L-1 visas for highly-skilled foreign workers at firms employing more than 50 workers, with half or more of their workers on H1-B visas. Another example is the discrimination in tax treatment based on whether the firms create jobs at home or abroad.
Of course, he was pretty much flamed in the comments section, except for the few illiterate slumdogs that chimed in from THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT, like Sameer:
america gets 1.3 $
for each dollar the usa spend through outsourcing ... it means that a return of 30% ...
secondly ...
i find many Americans r much concerned for BPO jobs ...
personally i dun like BPO jobs ..
i believe as soon as the indian economy changes into a production based economy ...
BPO jobs will lose its shine in india ... as indian youths r much concerned about the "name nd fame" factor .. nd BPO jobs doesnt give so in india...
even today in india a engineering degree course or a medical degree course is the first preference of students ...
and regarding software jobs .. i believe if americans want to compete wid indian counterpart .. thn they must reconsider their salary figures as IT giants
hire indian software techie coz of their less salary demand ..
Thanks, you stupid fuck.
But there was more insight from other Indians (I am seeing more bitching from the NRIs!):
Mr. Panagariya,
As an Indian techie who once used to be on the reviled H1B program, I feel that American engineers
have legitimate concerns in the employment immigration policies and related industry actions. Many American engineers with 20 years experience find that they are easily replaceable with foreigners with much less expertise and are willing to work for a little bit less. Unlike other professions like Medicine, Law or Business, there is not much growth in salary levels in Engineering with experience. Further the modern engineering process is designed to be compartmentalized and sent to the entity that will do it for the least cost - so to most employees the years of experience brings little advantage.
Irving, TX for example is full of "body shopping" companies floated by former Verizon employees, which offer H1B sponsorship, training and a possible placement with a client to almost anybody for a cost. Especially in their heydays till 2008, many of these H1B applicants used many tricks to burnish their resumes and inflate their experience - Housewives became experts in inventory management and pizza deliverers in supply chain management. Similarly there are innumerable violations of the intent of Work visa laws by employees, by employers and immigration lawyers who support them. Such violations not only hurt US workers but also other more legitimate H1B workers.
With these concerns in mind, it is a legitimate action on part of the American government to levy a USD2000 fee for every H1B or L1 worker that wishes to work there. The show of indignation on part of Indian outsourcing companies is duplicitous, especially when a typical worker bills out at 50 to 250 USD per hour. Let us say the median wage is 80 USD/hour - 400 per day or 2000 USD per week - Why is it so bad for the American government to get paid 1 weeks wages - that too probably once in 2 or 3 years. These modest fees are justified and the funds can be used for retraining programs in the US. Further India has similar rules - for example no foreigner is allowed to work if he is paid less than USD25000 - this is clearly a protectionist rule meant to prevent hordes of cheap workers invading India. So Indian government cannot complain about a US law that makes it a little bit more expensive to outsource work. In any case this will become a cost of business and will be passed on to the client, and may reduce the misuse of these visas.
Then you get the crap from the typical collaborator, who should get a tire-iron to his head:
Isn't the "they're stealing our jobs" refrain getting a little old? Reminds me of the "Gooback" episode of South Park.
How exactly are they stealing our jobs? That many American IT professionals have priced themselves out of the market is closer to the truth.
A couple years ago my company tasked me with staffing and managing a large org-wide program that had a big chunk of IT work. Our inhouse IT folks estimated the IT work to be about 30,000 hours, if I remember right. Given the timeline of the project, the estimate was that we'd need 2 IT project managers, 1 IT architect, 4 designers and 30 programmers.
We didn't employ enough IT staff to allocate to this, so we started looking outside.
The local staffing firms (similar to Manpower, KForce etc) gave impressive resumes, but the overall cost would have been upward of $15 million, because the hourly rates quoted ranged from $60 to $120.
Then we started looking at firms that do offshore work. The American company that we finally awarded the project to signed with us a fixed price contract for less than $5 million for executing the project, and an approx $1 million-a-year AMC. All the 30-odd programmers were based offshore - in India and the Philippines.
It's a better business model for them, it's better value for me as a business-owner.
Let us know when that off-shored project blows up, "manbearpig" and we'll round up some insurgents to clean it up, douchebag.
Then there is the typical eloquent response from an insurgent:
I love hearing about how "highly skilled" H1B and L1 visa holders promote productivity and so forth. The reality is that the H1B visa program, which once upon a time involved people with unique skill sets like a phd in solid state physics, etc, now are for any kind of job, assuming the person has the basic requirements of it. Thus programmers, engineers, etc are brought in under H1B's, many of them educated with no more then the equivalent of a 2 year associates degree here in the states.
And they are not paid market wages, they are paid a fraction of it, with no benefits, despite what the law says. More importantly, H1B visa holders are indentured servants, who cannot just go to another company and get a job that pays better, unless they can find someone to sponsor them. The Indian IT outsourcing/insourcing is not about productivity, it is about low wages, based on India turning out graduates of (for the most part) mediocre schools who are desperate for jobs, because without western companies, India produces very few jobs (other then outsourcing firms like infosys and wipro),so they have to in effect take jobs rather then create them themselves. And while there are many skilled Indian workers who are at the best level, a lot more frankly are mediocre at best, who get jobs because they are cheap, and the bosses at companies see this as being productive, since of course it saves them on salary and other things. Of course, the bosses don't see the other side of this, the often lack of quality (often caused by workers who don't understand what they are working on, or worse, as is common at many outsourcing firms in India, rapid turnover), and they also don't see what the employees of the company who have to oversea outsourced labor have to do to accomodate this workforce, spending a lot of time and effort, rather then in designing better ways to do things or better products, simply try to get the job done given what they are (and for all those of you who think the GOP is your friend, they just canned a bill that would have gotten rid of the tax credits companies get for outsourcing products).
And with IT, India is going to find that taking jobs from the west is going to end up cutting their own throat, much as export only societies like China are going to find, because cheap labor doesn't drive the kind of demand that the goods and services they are providing need, you cannot continue to create jobs based on cheap labor (put it this way, most of the Indian H1B workers in the US are not exactly happy; 99% of them, I can guarantee you,spend a lot of time trying to convince companies to sponsor their green card, so they can actually compete in the labor market and try to make a decent living). One of the problems with the Indian economy, much like the Chinese economy, is that the growth they are experiencing is coming on a zero sum basis, that what they take in their growth is taking away from others. They aren't creating new wealth, they aren't creating an internal market or creating new products or revolutionizing (sorry, Tom, but putting cell phone service on Mt. Everest is clever, but not exactly creating something new)...
Well said, wdef!