[ale] chance to talk with Johnny Isakson('s staff)

[Vaidhy Mayilrangam]

Ah!! so you want capitaliam and globalization only when it favors you..

Vaidhy
On Tue, Nov 12, 2002 at 10:58:29PM -0500, Jeff Hubbs wrote:
> 
> > Well Jeff - I too am formerlly employed and have been displaced, in the past, by companies 
> > exploiting the H1 program. I have also hired H1 persons and have many friends, here and abroad 
> > who are currently, or have previously, worked as H1 people. Therefore I am pretty intimate with the 
> > details and overall situation. I caution you and others about reacting emotionally about the issue 
> > and make an effort to truly understand what is going on and what the correct solution is.
> 
> I don't think it's wrong of me to have an emotional reaction to what I
> have seen happening to me and around me.  I have an emotional reaction
> to seeing my industry in decay, by which I mean bad business leading to
> bad technology.  I have an emotional reaction to seeing friends who
> worked for their companies for years and built up a lot of the company's
> value through their special talents and dedication get dumped out the
> front door, suddenly confronted with losing their houses and cars,
> through no fault of the own and, in many cases, through the fault of
> people whose incredible ineptitude or outright malfeasance hasn't yet
> caught up to them (I'm referring to the serial company murderers that
> seem to bounce from one "F***ed Company" to another).  I have an
> emotional reaction to the notion of working in an industry that is so
> volatile that people who have spent all of their adulthood (and in some
> cases, even childhood) educating themselves to go into it and moving up
> within it, only to find that they cannot control where they live, how
> they live, where they will work, or how far they must travel to get
> there.  
> 
> Now, I'm able to turn my emotional reactions into positive motivation
> toward moving forward with the job hunt and I've even managed to get
> through some barriers with respect to doing consulting work and even
> being open to doing things outside my core competency in order to bring
> in some additional income, but I'm unapologetic for having the emotions
> I have and I don't believe they prevent me from perceiving what's going
> on.
> 
> > First off - you, and the government, are operating under the false and statist premise that its 
> > anybody's damn business what someone is paid to perform a certain task. 
> 
> I'm hardly a statist, nor am I advocating a position that the Government
> should invoke wage controls.  I favor a free labor market within our
> borders and even to some extent across our borders, but I feel that the
> H-1B program as it has been misused represent are analogous to leaks in
> the labor market plumbing.  The leaks disrupt flow and pressure.  
> 
> > "Depressed wages",  if 
> > one could claim that such a state exists, can only occur if, in a free market - over saturation has 
> > occurred for that skill set or, in a socialist market, constraints have been imposed that artificially 
> > imbalance the options available to the employer and employeed. 
> 
> There's actually another way to have depressed wages, and that's to
> deliberately and artificially oversaturate the market, or, do something
> akin to union-busting - bring in labor that will do the work for
> significantly less than the going rate.  I would contend that both of
> these situations are taking place (IT "diploma mills" representing the
> former and H-1B abuse representing the latter).  And, even though the
> kinds of workers I'm talking about are low-level programming jobs, it is
> clear that upper-level IT jobs such as project management will also see
> a wage depression as the sinkholes drop out from underneath.
> 
>  
> > Well that is nearly the situation that we are in presently. The fact is, a very significant percentage of 
> > H1 employees have been let go and, although many would be willing to accept new employment 
> > for even lower wages, almost no H1 people, regardless of talent, are getting hired today. Notice 
> > that "can't sponsor VISA" print in every job posting you've read in the last year. This clear counter-
> > example to your claim helps define the accusation as "bunk" as I previously asserted. 
> 
> Your counterexample depends on a sweeping generalization.  H-1B "body
> shop" staff are not hired, but still go in to do the jobs that would
> otherwise be done by Americans, permanent *or* contract.  Furthermore, a
> quick look at Computer/IT ads in the AJC would appear to refute your
> generalization; in the 10/13 paper, of the 24 ads, only one as much as
> hinted that it wouldn't sponsor (it said something about "employment
> eligibility").  Yes, I see lots of "won't sponsor" blurbs in postings,
> but it's far from universal.  
> 
> > Understand 
> > that a great deal of these people are indeed being paid very competitive wages and are competent 
> > and earning every bit of it. Many came here with the understanding that, if they held up their end of 
> > things, did their work, paid their taxes, obeyed the law, and paid several thousand dollars in fees, 
> > didn't change jobs - after several years they would receive permanent resident status and be free to 
> > be employed and employ others at will. 
> 
> But many didn't get several years; many that I knew personally didn't
> even get one.  They were brought over under one situation and were sent
> back under another.  One I knew fairly well was fine with going back;
> others were quite upset and the company president reminded them that he
> was not running an immigration service.  
> 
> > The FACTs show that the vast majority of such H1 
> > employees getting their green cards do not achieve unusual boosts in their income either at their H1 
> > employer or new employers that they may move to once achieving their green card status. This 
> > again demonstrates your presumptions to be "bunk". On the contrary, all of these H1 employees 
> > that have been let go (at a far higher likelyhood than non-H1 employees, btw) 
> 
> Nope, some employers further abused the H-1B program by cutting
> Americans *without* cutting H-1Bs in similar positions and then still
> bringing in more H-1Bs.  
> 
> > and were in the 
> > process of applying for green cards have lost several thousand dollars in application and legal fees 
> > paid out of pocket, have nearly zero chance of being re-employeed here in the US for any price, 
> > are being effectively deported out of the U.S.A., must pay to ship back or sell their possestions here 
> > and at great loss, remove their families and children from friends and schools and the promise of a 
> > better life in America,  and have absolutely no recourse whatsoever to regain any of this. Indeed 
> > they have paid taxes and our unemployment insurance yet are completely inelligable for any of the 
> > benefits of their contributions whatsoever. Yeah - they sure screwed you.
> 
> I'm sure that happened in some cases, but again, you appear to
> overgeneralize.  Some H-1B body shops actually paid those costs (but not
> the taxes).  And I never said that the H-1Bs screwed me - we were all
> just pawns.  It was a value system held by management that did all the
> screwing, to Americans *and* H-1Bs.  At least in my sphere of
> observation, it was the business model of placing H-1Bs with clients
> instead of Americans and sending work offshore at sub-market rates (the
> preferred mode of operation - H-1Bs that still had to pay Atlanta's cost
> of living were not that much of a bargain) that only added to the IT
> implosion.  When you see efforts to at least keep people (H-1Bs, Green
> Cards, and Americans alike) on payroll locally at something other than a
> loss sabotaged and highly lucrative long-term agreements that would have
> resulted in a permanent local staff being ignored, it's pretty clear
> that they were only interested in doing the lowest-cost thing - sending
> work overseas.
> 
> > Jeff - you have no right to be paid what you are "worth" and foreign compeition has no measurable 
> > impact on this fact. The only person who will ever pay you what you are worth is yourself. 
> 
> I disagree; I believe that my last two employers were paying me
> approximately what I was worth.  My pay and benefits were very much in
> line with what similar responsibilities and authority were getting
> people at the time according to salary surveys, other employers to whom
> I was applying for similar work, and colleagues.
> 
> A right 
> > that you and I, as citizens, have to the complete exclusion and exception of H1 persons. So 
> > perhaps you and I were being paid an artificially high wage during the boom? 
> 
> In my case, I don't think so.  The *increase* in pay and benefits during
> that same time period were also in keeping with the increases in
> responsibility and authority when viewed in the context of my entire
> working life (with one slight exception, which was because of something
> unrelated to my point).  
> 
> I'm not sure what you're trying to say or imply by these probes, but I
> can comfortably tell you that the picture of my situation that you're
> trying to paint of my circumstances doesn't match what those
> circumstances actually were. 
> 
> <snip> 
> 
> > Jeff - go read "Decline and Fall of the American Programmer" by Ed Yourdon (1992) to get a better 
> > perspective of what makes us competitive as programmers - and how we could lose that. H1's are 
> > symptomatic of the real problem - an effect rather than a cause. The fact is that, so long as America 
> > offers the highest freedom and opportunity to people vs. other countries, we will ALWAYS be the 
> > premier software development power in the world. 
> 
> While I'm sure I'd find that book interesting, it, and you, are
> preaching to the choir.  Americans have a head start regarding
> programming; it was our military and our universities that made it so. 
> But, in order to spread a peculiar and particular talent *widely*, it
> tends to not be spread *deeply,* hence the glut at the lower end of the
> scale, where people with only average talent stick to the kinds of
> development that only really require average talent to get marginally
> acceptable results (hence all the squirrelly Web sites, spaghetti code,
> etc.)
> 
> > Our willingness to import mind talent from the rest 
> > of the world and reward them more than they could ever hope for in their home nation ensures us of 
> > that place - we lose that and we're gonna feel the pain of 2nd or 3rd place real quick. Well guess 
> > what - for the last twenty years we have been the brain drain of China and India - making them 
> > completely non-competitive to us on the world market. Today we're kicking them all out and their 
> > countries are building infrastructure, providing tax incentives, and raising capital for them back 
> > home at rates faster than you can imagine..... just like you wanted.
> 
> Again, you ascribe feelings to me that I do not have ("just like you
> wanted"); persist in doing that and I'll just let you argue with
> yourself.  I have said on numerous occasions, however, that exploiting
> cost of living differences among different parts of the world, taking
> advantage of the relative effortlessness of moving data, requirements,
> and code worldwide, will likely have a leveling effect.  My opinion is
> that in the course of this leveling, American practitioners will lose
> more than offshore practitioners will gain, *especially* if American
> practitioners are outnumbered.
> 
> One particularly hard-hearted way of looking at the Gates Foundation's
> multimegabuck donations to fight AIDS in India is as a mass social
> engineering ploy to increase the number of potential MS-only software
> developers.  If it is true that MS is upping their already significant
> efforts to keep India's developer force (said to be 10% of that of the
> entire world) constrained to MS platforms and apps, would it not be only
> sensible to help the herd grow exponentially?
> 
> That's the thing about having unheard-of amounts of cash; you can use it
> to do things that are so unheard-of to be unimaginable.  In fact, it's
> the collective inability to imagine such things that helps them occur
> unimpeded. In the 1930s, the notion that a nation would build factories
> to kill millions of people and recycle parts of their bodies as well as
> their belongings or pave roads with uprooted gravestones would have been
> met with incredulity.  
> 
> 
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