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

[Jeff Hubbs]

> 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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