IT Giant Favored Indian H-1B Workers Over US Employees (bloomberg.com) 112
chiguy writes: In October, a jury in a federal class-action lawsuit returned a verdict that found Cognizant intentionally discriminated against more than 2,000 non-Indian employees between 2013 and 2022. The verdict, which echoed a previously undisclosed finding from a 2020 US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission investigation, centered on discrimination claims based on race and national origin. Cognizant, based in Teaneck, New Jersey, was found to have preferred workers from India, most of whom joined the firm's US workforce of about 32,000 using skilled-worker visas called H-1Bs.
The case is part of a wave of recent discrimination claims against IT outsourcing companies that underscore growing concerns that these firms have exploited a broken employment-visa system to secure a cheaper, more malleable workforce. In the process, US workers say they've been disadvantaged. The industry, which provides computer services to other companies, makes extensive use of H-1Bs; over the past decade and a half, no employer has obtained more of them than Cognizant, federal records show.
The case is part of a wave of recent discrimination claims against IT outsourcing companies that underscore growing concerns that these firms have exploited a broken employment-visa system to secure a cheaper, more malleable workforce. In the process, US workers say they've been disadvantaged. The industry, which provides computer services to other companies, makes extensive use of H-1Bs; over the past decade and a half, no employer has obtained more of them than Cognizant, federal records show.
can't find USC willing work 80 hours for low pay (Score:5, Informative)
can't find USC willing work 80 hours for low pay.
also they can deport the H-1Bs if they speak up about any labor issues.
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On the other hand, they would probably just move the major part of their operation abroad if they did not have H1Bs. That would be worse.
Re: can't find USC willing work 80 hours for low p (Score:1)
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Indeed. And that selling point was never true except in cases where very limited interaction is enough. These cases exist but are not standard.
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That hurts a lot of companies if they move, because their clients are American or European, and they tend to like "local" companies. If they supply consultants or contractors, they'd better be local also. There are plenty of cheaper offshore sites anyway, one more new one will have troubles fitting in (especially if they have Americaqn or European execs).
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Keep 10% locals as "translators". Move the rest.
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Not really. It is a trade-off. With H1Bs it falls on the side of staying. Without them, it probably does not.
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They would already do that if they could and it worked well
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I'm surprised (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean... we all knew this. It was common sense. It wasn't that there weren't Americans to do the jobs, just not ones who would do it for as little as someone dealing with Indian cost-of-living over American.
The whole program was to reduce costs, not to supply workers because there weren't enough of them.
The surprising part is that enough people in positions that mattered were willing to let this go to court in the first place, and that they weren't able to put up a more successful veneer of plausibility to defend it in court.
Re:I'm surprised (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean... we all knew this. It was common sense. It wasn't that there weren't Americans to do the jobs, just not ones who would do it for as little as someone dealing with Indian cost-of-living over American.
There are actually companies that use H-1B visas legitimately, largely because other visas are so much harder to get, and there legitimately aren't enough programmers in the U.S. The harder you make it to get H-1B visas, the more they'll outsource that labor to outsourcing firms operating in those other countries, because that's even cheaper.
The problem is that there's a middle ground between not using H-1B visas and using them correctly — companies like Cognizant and a bunch of others who pretty much everybody in the tech industry can name, but we won't out of respect for our colleagues who are stuck working there — where companies exploit the H-1B process to get cheap labor for other companies and then underpay their employees, give them poor benefits, or otherwise treat them in ways that other, more job-portable workers would not tolerate.
Changing the visa rules by increasing the 60-day grace period after losing a job, eliminating the requirement that new employers go through the whole H-1B process again whenever you change jobs (or greatly streamlining the process so that the employee can self-file and just provide proof of employment), etc. would go a long way towards making that abuse impossible by making it easier for H-1B employees to dump bad employers. And by making it easier for those employees to leave those employers, it would reduce the incentive for those employers to treat those employees badly and would encourage them to clean up their act.
Of course, this probably won't happen, because those companies pay politicians' campaign committees to not notice what they're doing, but that's a bigger problem.
Re:I'm surprised (Score:5, Interesting)
and there legitimately aren't enough programmers in the U.S.
Citation required. I suspect there aren't many programmers willing to put up with the BS companies give H-1B workers, but I think there are plenty of programmers. You just need to pay them a living wage. And make it so that you don't have to mortgage your life to afford a CS degree.
Re:I'm surprised (Score:5, Informative)
and there legitimately aren't enough programmers in the U.S.
Citation required. I suspect there aren't many programmers willing to put up with the BS companies give H-1B workers, but I think there are plenty of programmers. You just need to pay them a living wage. And make it so that you don't have to mortgage your life to afford a CS degree.
It's not just companies offering crap wages who can't find workers. The company where I work often struggles to hire programmers despite paying relatively good, market-competitive wages, and has a horde of people on various visas, precisely because there aren't enough home-grown programmers in the U.S. to meet demand.
The U.S. has about 4.19 million programmer jobs right now. In 2023, there were 112,720 people who graduated with a CS degree or similar degree in the United States. If that number were constant, you'd need to have 37 years of CS grads to fill the available jobs, and you'd barely break even with folks taking early retirement, dying, going on maternity/paternity leave, etc.
Unfortunately, the graduation rate hasn't been constant. In the year 2000, there were only about 50k CS grads. From the year 1970 through 2011, there were cumulatively just 1,149,371 grads in CS-related fields (source [ed.gov]), and even if you naïvely assume that there were 112,720 in 2012 through 2024 (for which I don't have numbers), that only gets you 2,614,731. In 1970, there were just 2,388 grads in cs-related fields. If we naïvely assume that number was constant prior to that, then every computer science graduate would need to still be alive and employed beginning with the ones who graduated college in the year 1310. I mean talk about a high retirement age. :-D
And although you're right that you don't *have* to have a CS degree to be a programmer, the reality is that about 72% of programmers do have a degree in CS or a closely related field. There have been somewhere between about 2 million and 2.6 million grads in CS-related fields since 1970. So even if you assume a retirement age of 75+ (which is unrealistic in a high-paying field), you would still need about half of all programmers to not have CS degrees if you want enough home-grown programmers to meet our current needs without bringing people in from other countries. We're not just a little bit short on programmers. We're short by about a million programmers, or about one quarter of the workforce.
So at least in the short term, no, the problem will not be solved by paying people more. Yes, over decades, that will encourage people to choose that career more, and will help alleviate the problem, but only if the number of jobs doesn't increase to match, so even that isn't a given. We really *do* need to bring tech workers in from other countries to meet demand.
This is not to say that the H-1B program, as currently designed, is a very good way of doing that. :-D
Decades? Why decades? (Score:2)
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Your senior in High School knows that they won't get laid by saying "I'm an engineer". Engineers are stereotyped as badly dressed nerds who may be brainy, but are low on the sexual desirability scale.
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A chick magnet for transactional relationships, sure...
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All relationships are transactional.
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So what?
With the big developer bucks, they can afford lots of attention from strippers & hookers
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Lmao I boned plenty of counterculture chicks in college
Re:Decades? Why decades? (Score:5, Interesting)
A senior in High School or a freshman in Stem would make the switch to CS almost immediately if they thought they could make a better living if Tech H1-Bs were not artificially lowering IT salaries. We could pump out a million IT people in 5-6 years.
So why didn't we? New college grads at bigger companies are making $140k in the Bay Area. In my experience, that's a pretty strong motivator even at that level, and the result is that a lot of people get into CS who really don't have the knack for programming, and they end up wasting time and money and never really quite pulling it off. Higher salaries do help attract the best and brightest, but ultimately there are only so many best and brightest, and that as much as anything is one of the limiting factors. The other limiting factors are lack of interest and lack of foundational understanding that makes changing gears easy.
What's really needed is earlier training in at least the basic concepts of programming, logical thinking, etc. from a young age, so that by the time they get to the high school or college level, they all at least have the conceptual background to pull it off, so a larger number of them will be able to do so, and more to the point, you'll have years of data showing who really did well in those areas and stands a real chance of being a decent programmer, so you won't have so many people spending lots of money and then dropping out of the major by the end of the first year. And that just leaves lack of interest, which can also be cultivated over time.
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Has your company considered training people? It might take a couple of years to get fully up to speed, but it's doable.
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Has your company considered training people? It might take a couple of years to get fully up to speed, but it's doable.
Every year, 1.73 million people in the U.S. try to learn to code. Out of those, 107,000 of them get a degree, and 72% of coders have a degree, so doing the math, presumably about 149,000 people in total successfully learn to code each year, or about 8.6% of people who try. Companies training people would have to pay 12 people to end up with a single person who could cut it.
If you think spending $140k for a new college grad is expensive (some small percentage of whom still can't code), try paying 12 people
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There's a difference between someone trying to learn to code for fun or because their evil forced them to, and someone passing an interview and getting paid well to do it.
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There's a difference between someone trying to learn to code for fun or because their evil forced them to, and someone passing an interview and getting paid well to do it.
If they can pass the interview, they don't need to be trained (beyond learning specific on-the-job skills, which pretty much every company does). The problem is that even among people who look qualified on paper, in practice, only maybe about one in five can make it through an interview at a typical tech company. When you the failure rate for candidates who *are* ostensibly trained programmers is that high, can you imagine how much worse the failure rate would be among people who don't have any training i
Re:I'm surprised (Score:5, Interesting)
You should post a link to the openings since I know a couple of laid-off programmers looking for work who would be happy to apply. As it is, new CS grads in the US are unable to find openings, so there's zero need for H1Bs right now. The incoming administration should freeze H1Bs until there's a legitimate need that can't be met. That is absolutely not the case in December 2024. It's well researched that H1Bs displace American employees, the numbers were something on the order of every 100 H1B displaces 33 to 61 domestic CS workers. It's also well researched that H1Bs are paid far less than non-H1Bs.
As for Cognizant, they should be barred from applying for H1Bs for a long period of time as restitution. If companies threaten to offshore instead, they should go for it. I've literally never heard anyone say "Wow, offshoring is so much better!". Secondly, there should be no H1Bs made available to any company that contracts H1B hires to other companies. That is an abuse of the system. Companies should have 4 options:
1) Hire a US citizen themselves
2) Apply for an H1B or O1 themselves
3) Contract a US citizen from a consulting company
4) Offshore
The option that should never be permitted is "Contract an H1B from a 3rd party". That makes zero sense when H1B is supposed to be for skilled labor that cannot be sourced from the citizen population. You don't obtain an H1B in 30 minutes or less, it's a lengthy process that is completely disconnected from the eventual company that "hires" the contractor. Lower cost and immobile labor was not the intention of H1Bs, though it's certainly being used for that purpose by companies like Cognizant.
If an immigrant is so highly skilled that no one in the US has that skill set, fantastic, they can use the O1 visa since there's no cap on those. The problem is the overwhelming majority of H1Bs have some skills but in no way meet the extraordinary contributions to their fields bar, which an O-1 requires.
So we have a path for extremely skilled immigrants via the O-1. Therefore H1Bs should be limited to situations where no American applied for a job. However, hiding a job posting as a disembodied advertisement in the back pages of the local Sunday paper is easy to ensure nobody can apply for it. Ideally, jobs would have to be posted on a government system with salary so skilled Americans can apply for them before any H1B is approved. The website should enable applicants to apply with a "minimum acceptable salary" and if anyone applies with a minimum acceptable salary that is under some multiple of the prevailing wage for the role, then no H1B should be granted since the problem is not "no applicants" but "offered salary is too far below market".
A government website posting pre-requisites, blocking the H1B if any qualified Americans apply, a ban on subcontracting H1B holders, and forcing sponsors of "highly skilled” individuals to defend their credentials for an O1 visa would ensure that the visa program was being used as intended.
Parting thought: if a company lays off any employees, they should be barred from access to H1Bs for several years after the layoff. Also, H1Bs should have a floor of 2x the prevailing wage for a role. If an entry-level IT role typically pays $65K, then the minimum salary for the H1B should be $130K. Time to close the loopholes and stop the abuse of the system.
Re:I'm surprised (Score:5, Interesting)
You should post a link to the openings since I know a couple of laid-off programmers looking for work who would be happy to apply.
Odds are probably 20% that your laid-off programmers used to work there, so let me restate that a little more precisely. Right now, there's a temporary downturn in the job market. For the majority of the last decade, the company where I work has had trouble finding people. And even now, they still have trouble finding people qualified for the roles, just for a smaller number of more specialized roles.
As it is, new CS grads in the US are unable to find openings, so there's zero need for H1Bs right now.
Depends on whether the CS grads actually have the qualifications. H-1Bs aren't always for bottom-rung new college hire jobs, and throwing multiple NCHs at something when you need a moderately senior engineer isn't always a winning strategy. :-) But yes, in principle, I agree that H-1B visas should be massively curtailed, and as far as I know, that is happening at companies that have done layoffs.
The incoming administration should freeze H1Bs until there's a legitimate need that can't be met. That is absolutely not the case in December 2024.
This is where we disagree. An H-1B lasts three years, and there are at least a million people. If you suspended renewals for even six months, you'd have open jobs for everyone who is unemployed in tech, but whether they would be a match for those positions is not automatically a given. Maybe the jobs would require skills that they don't have, or maybe the jobs would be too junior for them, and in either of those scenarios, you'd end up with both open jobs *and* unemployed engineers, which is worse.
At the time they are hired, an H-1B has to be hired based on them having conducted a search and having been unable to find somebody local to do the job. So unless they lied on the application (which some companies almost certainly do, but presumably not most companies), freezing the H-1B process seems unlikely to solve anything, but will either put a lot of people out of a job, which is likely bad for the world as a whole, or will cause the companies to employ them as remote workers in their own countries, which will cause brain drain in the U.S.
So I tend to disagree. We don't need to block legitimate use of H-1B visas to protect jobs. We just need to apply the existing laws evenly and ensure that folks aren't bending or breaking the rules.
It's well researched that H1Bs displace American employees, the numbers were something on the order of every 100 H1B displaces 33 to 61 domestic CS workers. It's also well researched that H1Bs are paid far less than non-H1Bs.
See above. If this is happening, it means somebody is breaking the law, and punishment should be incurred. This action against Cognizant is hopefully the first of many similar rulings.
As for Cognizant, they should be barred from applying for H1Bs for a long period of time as restitution. If companies threaten to offshore instead, they should go for it. I've literally never heard anyone say "Wow, offshoring is so much better!". Secondly, there should be no H1Bs made available to any company that contracts H1B hires to other companies. That is an abuse of the system.
I tend to agree. Companies like Cognizant are a blight on the industry, and should be punished to the fullest extent of the law.
The option that should never be permitted is "Contract an H1B from a 3rd party". That makes zero sense when H1B is supposed to be for skilled labor that cannot be sourced from the citizen population. You don't obtain an H1B in 30 minutes or less, it's a lengthy process that is completely disconnected from the eventual company that "hires" the contractor. Lower cost and immobile labor was not the intention of H1Bs, though it's certainly being used for t
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Also "programmer" is a wide range. From those who can program, to those who cannot get hello world to work without help. Note the recent article that "English" was going to be the popular programming language of the future... So someone who only does ultra high level scripting is often not prepared to get out of that box ("I can't do Ruby, I only know Python!1!"), or prefer going with "low code" and "no code" styles. In over 40 years of programming, I've seen personal standards of programming continuall
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In over 40 years of programming, I've seen personal standards of programming continually drop.
Is that just because you spit people into two groups: "better than me" and "worse than me"? As you get better, more people are worse than you!
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No, more like they've can't program. They don't know the language standards. They program by cut-and-paste, even if the original code is buggy. They can't indent properly even though all editors and IDEs can do this for you, so that all the cut-and-paste leads to randomized indentation. Seriously, they've got the book "Program in C in 12 Days" and their bookmark has been stuck in day 4 for over a decade. And that's just the language, there's a lack of problem solving skills as well, inability to handle
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The sw eng hiring process in the US is crap. IDK what to do about it but i simultaneously know good people who aren't getting reasonable offers AND companies looking for basically those people.
I think it's just the noise from absolutely crap resumes and recruiters and outsourcing companies and people applying for jobs they're not qualified for that has just gummed up the works.
Also, on the hiring side a lot of companies are in denial about what upper tier people cost. My new mgmt basically is looking to
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They need a little more than just a CS degree. How about some practical knowledge of what they will be doing? Programmers are not interchangeable, they have skillsets that fit some jobs and not others. So if you need someone to program a website you don't hire a hardware programmer.
It doesn't matter how much you pay them, they need a lot more than just a CS degree.
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Re: I'm surprised (Score:3)
There would definitely be trouble involved. Shit, there's trouble involved even when web developers switch from one framework to another. JavaScript is a language notorious for trying to hide complexity but instead just adds to it in ways that don't even make any sense half of the time.
https://youtu.be/pZUTdw6zcck [youtu.be]
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Re: I'm surprised (Score:2)
Citation required. I suspect there aren't many programmers willing to put up with the BS companies give H-1B workers, but I think there are plenty of programmers. You just need to pay them a living wage. And make it so that you don't have to mortgage your life to afford a CS degree.
A lot of the better paid software developers don't even have a CS degree. You really don't need one. The main thing CS teaches is a lot of algorithms, most of which you could likely figure out on your own without having ever encountered that particular problem before.
If you can't have figured them out on your own, then with or without a CS degree, you'd never really be a decent software developer because you likely aren't any good at problem solving in general. If you want to land a job at one of the heavy
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*straightens glasses*
well ACTSHULLY
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Who told you there aren't enough programmers? There are far more CSCI/Programming degrees awarded each year than there are new positions. People end up like me, working in a different market, because the pay for programmers has dropped significantly (unless you land a big-tech job).
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same for IT.
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I mean... we all knew this. It was common sense. It wasn't that there weren't Americans to do the jobs, just not ones who would do it for as little as someone dealing with Indian cost-of-living over American.
There are actually companies that use H-1B visas legitimately, largely because other visas are so much harder to get, and there legitimately aren't enough programmers in the U.S. The harder you make it to get H-1B visas, the more they'll outsource that labor to outsourcing firms operating in those other countries, because that's even cheaper.
To a point. I've known far too many companies that offshored for "cheap" labor that had to bring it back because of the -expletive- show that was created.
Plus sometimes you literally can't offshore because you can't let data cross international borders. I remember verifying a laptop trace a few years ago, after a bunch of alarms went off. A remote worker logged in from the Bahamas. That set off a bunch whole bunch of alerts because you weren't supposed to log in from anywhere but the USA. Heck you weren'
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...and there legitimately aren't enough programmers in the U.S.
Bullshit. There are too many programmers in the U.S. for the available jobs, and the rampant abuses of the H1B program ensure that the U.S. workers have no choice but to put up with employer bullshit. We know this because employers are imposing RTO mandates in hope that a lot of programmers will quit, because there are many, many H1B programmers who will fill the newly opened positions for those who do.
If there really were too few U.S. programmers, we would be treated much, much better than we are. We're s
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...and there legitimately aren't enough programmers in the U.S.
Bullshit. There are too many programmers in the U.S. for the available jobs, and the rampant abuses of the H1B program ensure that the U.S. workers have no choice but to put up with employer bullshit. We know this because employers are imposing RTO mandates in hope that a lot of programmers will quit, because there are many, many H1B programmers who will fill the newly opened positions for those who do.
Actually, I'm pretty sure it is more that there are programmers in cheaper locations who will fill the positions. H-1B caps make replacing large numbers of local employees with H-1B employees basically impossible. There are only 85,000 H-1B visa issued per year, and there were almost three times that many tech-sector layoffs in 2024 (235,481 [trueup.io]), so you'd have at best a one-in-three chance of being able to pull it off even if you somehow managed to convince federal regulators to let you hire an H-1B within a
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"I supported it because the Indian guy who was being supported was my friend"
so he was a nepo-H1B?
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Overall, I support immigration to America, including programmers from India. They are generally great people in my experience.
I don't support these companies like Cognizant, who abuse the immigration process, who abuse the law, and who abuse the people they ostensibly "help" to get a visa. So great, I'm glad to see Cognizant slapped down here.
Re: I'm surprised (Score:2)
Can we just replace the H-1B program, already? (Score:5)
The H-1B program needs to be terminated. If someone is skilled enough that they are allowed to come to the US and displace job held by someone domestically, they need to get a permanent resident, "green card" visa, with a quick path to citizenship, and not be beholden to a single employer, so they don't have to deal with slave conditions or face deportation. Instead, if they are that skilled, they can go to another employer.
The current H-1B program has created a lot of friction and likely was one of the causes of why people voted the way they did in the last election. Especially for allowing two H-1B lotteries in a year, each of which giving 100,000+ visas, and each of those visas displacing someone from the US for a job.
Re:Can we just replace the H-1B program, already? (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree with you, but I don't think most people even know what an H-1B is, and were not thinking about it as a source of their immigration concerns. Instead what is going to happen is that there will be a big headline about all the mexicans, haitians or whoever we hate today getting kicked out. The numbers will be made to look "very bigly", and that portion of the voting public will be sated.
If anyone does say anything specifically about H-1B, they'll be easily shouted down: H-1Bs are for jobs that already pay way more than what Trump's main base makes, so they're not going to care. Dividing and conquering is the best way of making sure money continues to concentrate at the top, and the little people never get access to enough money to escape the rat race.
The people I know who would be opposed to it (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Can we just replace the H-1B program, already? (Score:5, Informative)
> H-1Bs are for jobs that already pay way more than what Trump's main base makes, so they're not going to care.
You seem to have missed all the Silicon Valley billionaires on his team that support his agenda.
No (Score:2)
It is absolutely being abused, but it's also invaluable for some small companies to get help. A company I worked for, that had about 30 employees, needed an entry-level data analyst. The *only* person who submitted their resume and accepted our offer was an H1B holder. We hired him and he worked out great. It wasn't even a lowball offer, the pay was good, it's just nobody wanted to take an "entry level" data analyst position.
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> It wasn't even a lowball offer, the pay was good
What was the pay?
40 hours?
There are folks out there with a hundred applications in and no offers.
Which job board? Zip, Monster, Indeed, LinkedIn?
This is an unusual situation if the pay was good and the hours reasonable.
If it were 60 hours for $24K, then, yeah, no.
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He said "replace" not "get rid of", and I think there's a fair point there. You can still get that foreign labor, but if they are so valuable as to be an H1B holder, we should be more aggressive about that person getting longer term immigration status.
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Narrator: The pay was indeed not good.
Re:Can we just replace the H-1B program, already? (Score:5, Interesting)
The current H-1B program has created a lot of friction and likely was one of the causes of why people voted the way they did in the last election.
As a Republican talking point, yeah. But as the actual cause of uncle Jim-Bob losing his job at the coal mine? Probably not. Getting rid of it isn't going to bring jobs back to the rural areas, at least not the kind that pay what Americans are expecting to earn.
You have to remember that when people say they want jobs, they mean well-paying jobs. They've already seen the help wanted sign in front of the McDonald's.
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Not a chance (Score:1)
When a Democrat suggests cutting back on H1Bs they get branded racist and taken out and went to Republican does it... Well they just don't do it. The Republi
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Green card is not so easy to get, it takes a long time, and it has weird requirements. You can't get a green card while not being in the country in the first place. So H1-B is the major stepping stone to getting that.
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You can't get a green card while not being in the country in the first place. So H1-B is the major stepping stone to getting that.
Yes, but it forces basically the way the system is forces everyone to lie since H-1B is expressly a non-immigrant visa and one of the requirements for getting it and renewing it is affirming that you have no intention to immigrate.
The "standard" process is (at least at reasonably good companies that agree to support your Green Card application)
1) get H1B for 3 years
2) after 2.x years apply for 2nd and last 3 year period. As part of that you're go out of your way in the application to say that this is ju
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They'll just find a different way; like I've got friends who lost their jobs because the venture capitalist firms decided to just outsource all their work to India.
No visas...no paperwork...just hire remote workers in India and fire all your US staff.
Maybe when they pass some laws making that type of activity illegal; things will improve. But as long as they're allowed to outsource, they will.
IT Giant Favors Indian Slaves Over US Workers (Score:2)
Talking about kicking in an open door about throwaway IT laborers.
called racist if you said it (Score:3, Insightful)
If you pointed this out at any time you were called a racist and told that H-1Bs have to be compensated equally. Equally to dirt after you've driven out all of the US folks.
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I don't think pointing out that it's unfair to give employers that much power over a class of employees was ever considered racist.
Of course an employer would prefer that amount of power over their employees.
Shareholders (Score:3)
I can pay US Citizens $X/hr
I can pay Indian workers $(X-Y)/hr
I know, I'll take the more expensive option, 'cos my shareholders would _love_ that...!
Re:Shareholders (Score:5, Informative)
I can pay US Citizens $X/hr
I can pay Indian workers $(X-Y)/hr
I know, I'll take the more expensive option, 'cos my shareholders would _love_ that...!
I know you were being semi-sarcastic, but in my experience, the Indians quality of work is wayyyy shittier then their US counterparts. Sure you save a bunch of cash (good for shareholders/CEO yacht), but when the work quality goes down the toilet, that can lead to a damaged company reputation not to mention pissing off the existing US workers waiting to be replaced.
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depends on the job. i had a relative that worked on oil rigs. he was in charge of hiring. he said the indians were the best because even if they knew nothing at the beginning, they were willing to learn and do whatever to make their bosses happy. workers from other countries had lower motivation and thus lower performance.
anecdotal, maybe, but that's the point, it depends on the job and industry. same reason most construction workers in the area that i live are hispanic. they are the only ones willing to pu
Re: (Score:2)
I can pay US Citizens $X/hr
I can pay Indian workers $(X-Y)/hr
I know, I'll take the more expensive option, 'cos my shareholders would _love_ that...!
I know you were being semi-sarcastic, but in my experience, the Indians quality of work is wayyyy shittier then their US counterparts. Sure you save a bunch of cash (good for shareholders/CEO yacht), but when the work quality goes down the toilet, that can lead to a damaged company reputation not to mention pissing off the existing US workers waiting to be replaced.
You're not thinking this through... If they do a really shitty job, that's a feature not a bug. First off, there's money in extending the project and then money in a new project to fix the one you've just finished.
Re:Shareholders (Score:5, Informative)
Sounds like the shareholders are the problem in this society.
Shocked, I'm beside mysefl.... (Score:2, Offtopic)
If you don't know how to administrator a Free
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I demanded, not asked, that Microsoft use PGP to sign the emails, so my system could put them into the right order, and validate who I was speaking with on any given thread.
dude, i've had my share of similar encounters w/ support.
But still this particular request is amusing. I can not think of a single main-stream provider of networking / SaaS etc that i've encountered who would have respond to that in any positive way or who even could.
I'm actually fairly surprised that they communicated via actual emails rather than forcing you into a ticketing system which has the advantage of linearizing the conversation, thereby preventing this very issue (at the expense of offering no
Re: (Score:2)
Microsoft support does not like tickets. When you open a request, you select email or phone and regardless, they ALWAYS call. so annoying.
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That's why I wanted the data encrypted so it had a single reference source, which can prevent this kind of probl
Raise minimum salary (Score:3)
Govt should raise minimum H-1B salary to 130k (or whatever is reasonable) minimum irrespective of profession. Also add 3-6% extra payroll tax. That will make companies look for US workers over foreign workers.
Sort of agree. (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
"It should be like 125% or prevailing salary in the region & specialty. That will at least make these companies 'consider' a non-H1B"
H1-B is supposed to be for exceptional talent. Employers should pay a premium for premium talent.
Re: (Score:2)
And that's when you company just lays off all the US staff and hires a remote outsourcing firm. You have zero visa issues and you save money. It's a win-win for business.
They won't look at US workers first until they are forced to; and they will not allow that to happen.
Sad situation (Score:4, Interesting)
I believe that 12 years ago I was let go during a medium size layoff at a very large company that used Cognizant and replaced by multiple low paid Indian workers with little experience. It was a horrible environment to work in, the work was awful, management didn't have a clue, and the benefits were great. In a way I'm glad I'm gone, but if I stayed I probably would be able to retire early.
I can attest to this... (Score:1)
Because you think only one company did wrong ? (Score:1)
It isn't just tech. Kill H1-B visas. (Score:5, Informative)
TL;DR: The H1-B visa program is a pox on labor rights, safety, and leads to insane abuses. It isn't just limited to tech. Healthcare example follows.
We've all known that this was an issue since the inception of the H1-B visa program. This being Slashdot and TFS, we're naturally thinking about tech workers of course. Another place you see this is in American medicine. The way it works is that someone goes to undergrad, maybe grad school, then goes to medical school. In the third year of medical school, students apply for a residency which is necessary to actually practice medicine after graduation. Unfortunately, for at least the last 20-25 years, many of the residency programs seem to be stacked with (largely Indian) foreign students who are on H1-Bs. This pushes the domestic graduates into situations where they either don't get one, or wind up moving clear across the country for 3-7 years for training.
Why this is done in medicine has baffled me, because despite all the problems with medicine in America, we still have more than sufficient applications to medical school, and therefore eventually residency, in the first place. If we truly had a shortage of American graduates, the logical thing to do is expand the number of medical school places for Americans.
But if you dive into it a little more, it becomes obvious what is actually going on, which isn't that dissimilar from tech. The residency programs are largely run by hospitals. Hospitals rely on what amounts to cheap slave labor which would ordinarily violate all sorts of labor laws and rules of common sense. A couple decades ago after a report from The Institute of Medicine entitled "To Err is Human," states and eventually the American College of Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) put in work hour restrictions. Before then, it wasn't uncommon for a resident to be pulling multiday shifts, with no regard for meals, sleep, or well-being. There were several high profile incidents of medical error precisely because of this, as well as car accidents and other things directly related to this abuse. This happened back in 2003, and finally some work hour restrictions were added.
Whereas previously there were no limits at all, in 2003 guidelines were established that capped work hours at no more than 80/week averaged over a 4 week period. (See Medical Resident Work Hours. [wikipedia.org] Prior to that, it wasn't uncommon for people to be working well over 100 hours a week, particularly in specialties like surgery. Extended call could be no more than once every three nights or something like that. Unfortunately, the clowns that implemented this policy were simply bowing to some bad press. Their restrictions were that shifts for residents can be no more than 30 continuous hours of clinical care, and then they could hold the resident for an additional 6 "for didactics" which basically turned into lectures, paperwork, and scut work.
Meanwhile, much like H1-B holders, these medical residents were basically stuck where they were. They couldn't complain about working conditions or they risked their jobs. They couldn't just change residency because the working conditions were probably just as bad anywhere else, and slots were hard to get in the first place because of competition. Add in the artificial pressure caused by H1-B visas, where a person is tied to their employer, and it led to rampant misreporting of work hours and other chicanery.
Oh, and these guidelines didn't apply to medical students (i.e., those still in medical school), and shit flows downhill. I distinctly remember being in a surgical rotation in my third year of medical school at a VA hospital. The students would come in about 4AM, round on the patients, write the orders, etc. Then about 5:30 (so they could meet the guidelines) the interns would come in, followed by the residents, and then the attending would mosey on in about 6:45AM. But because the students weren't licensed, the orders we wrote couldn't be implemented until the intern signed off on them. But the intern didn't have a lot of time and was overworked and the liability structure at the VA was almost nonexistant, so after about a week in a rotation they tended to just block sign the orders, which was prone to error. And illegal. So now the students wound up working, I remember at one point, in excess of 100 hours a week, with no call room, rest, etc. It wasn't uncommon to go out into the parking lot and see cars with medical students passed out in them, with the engine idling so the air conditioning or heat would stay on. At least one person I know basically converted the back of his van into a bedroom.
So a combination of this kept wages criminally low, kept competing against American graduates, and reduced or eliminated any kind of collective bargaining power these people might have had. If an American graduate left, they'd simply be replaced by an H1-B visa holder who will accept crappy working conditions and not complain.
So is it any surprising, with environments like this even in healthcare in America, that tech workers are also treated like shit? Because they're replaceable. Thank the almighty H1-B visa program.
Compare this to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration Summary of Hours of Service Regulations [dot.gov] which describes regulations for a truck driver. There probably aren't a lot of truck drivers on H1-B visas.
(BTW, the ACGME work guidelines have been revised several times, but still suck. Because of pressure for people to lie on self-reported work hours, and all sorts of other nonsense, there was press that nothing had really improved. So they issued several revisions, and I don't know if anything is any better.)
Maybe with the change in administration this may change, but if I held my breath for that I would surely expire. Nothing is going to happen because of corporate interests.
Sooooo (Score:2)
Does this mean I can sue Cognizant? I spent a lot of time interviewing with them in 2016 only for them to hire a H1B visa holder. I only know this because I had friends who worked for the company and they told me afterwards.
Re: (Score:2)
You could try to join the class
There needs to be a class action suit (Score:3)
The "best and the brightest" get paid average (Score:3)
The H1B program is sold as being necessary for US companies to hire people with specialized skills that they are unable to find here. These are the best and the brightest, the cream of the crop, specialists in their field we are told. But they only have to pay them "average wage for the position".
The law should require the employers to pay them top dollar, the highest salaries for the role. H1-B employees should be allowed to change jobs at will.
And companies that hire H1-B;s should have a plan in place to replace them after a set amount of time and be prohibited from laying off citizen employees for two years before and after hiring any H1-B's.
It's why illegals are here (Score:1)
Cognizant is a costly scam (Score:5, Interesting)
My boss stupidly left an invoice out and I saw they were paying a junior Indian programmer mid-range local wages....their justification is that somehow this 23yo had 10 years industry experience? Even if the Indian guy is cheaper, they will demand you hire a management tier overseas to watch over your programmers...so now you have redundant managers on each continent...so yeah, you get 10 Indian 20-somethings for the same prices as a competent 6-8-person American team.
Beyond lying about the candidate's qualifications, they falsify invoices routinely. Another time, our division head called me into her office. She was asking about a project I was working on and wanted a demo. It was afternoon and no one in India was available (time difference), so she asked me to show the work I was supervising. I told her it hadn't even been started because the Cognizant India team made some excuse about not being able to work on it. I told her I hadn't hear anything from them in 2 weeks and had been asking daily (same excuse). She then asked me why they invoiced her for the work. It was never done, never started, etc, but they put it on an invoice thinking no one would notice. I even had every team check every source repo for activity. She thought they were late, not completely lying. Once she figured out what was going on, she asked me to keep it to myself and not tell anyone what we talked about. Why? She was getting kickbacks and wined and dined constantly and had a mini-vacation coming up to India on their dime.
Cognizant doesn't deliver results. They're just a parasitic organization stroking executive egos while they rape the company financially. You'll never save money with them. Nothing is more expensive than a cheap programmer...and that's even before accounting for the blatant fraud they commit: lying about experience and credentials, lying about hours worked, lying about which projects they work on. It's not just overselling...it's outright fraud.
And let's say you get lucky and find a division that's not a bunch of crooks and somehow get a talented programmer in India or on H1B locally? Guess what? If they're that talented, they're in demand at companies that pay a good American wage, not a mediocre Indian one. Don't expect them to stay around long. Everyone some local insurance company wants through Cognizant?...if they're actually talented Google, MS, Meta, Netflix, etc want them as well. They WILL get poached. All you're left with for more than a short period of time is the worst India has to offer. No one saved money by outsourcing software work to India through Cognizant or any other body shop.
Re: (Score:2)
My boss stupidly left an invoice out and I saw they were paying a junior Indian programmer mid-range local wages....their justification is that somehow this 23yo had 10 years industry experience? Even if the Indian guy is cheaper, they will demand you hire a management tier overseas to watch over your programmers...so now you have redundant managers on each continent...so yeah, you get 10 Indian 20-somethings for the same prices as a competent 6-8-person American team.
Again turning this around to my previous healthcare analogy, this shit is rampant. When I was in medical residency, the hospital decided that they were going to standardize on some piece of shit called Vocera (later bought by Stryker) (just google it or look at the complaints on Reddit [reddit.com]), which offered some kind of tiered license structure that restricted the number of registered users to some arbitrary number without paying a lot more. I don't remember how much they paid for this piece of shit, but IIRC in
I think HCL too (Score:2)
I remember HCL also got in trouble for doing something similar.
Disney Got Away with It (Score:3)
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/0... [nytimes.com]
Pink Slips at Disney. But First, Training Foreign Replacements.
Julia Preston
June 3, 2015
ORLANDO, Fla. — The employees who kept the data systems humming in the vast Walt Disney fantasy fief did not suspect trouble when they were suddenly summoned to meetings with their boss.
While families rode the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train and searched for Nemo on clamobiles in the theme parks, these workers monitored computers in industrial buildings nearby, making sure millions of Walt Disney World ticket sales, store purchases and hotel reservations went through without a hitch. Some were performing so well that they thought they had been called in for bonuses.
Instead, about 250 Disney employees were told in late October that they would be laid off. Many of their jobs were transferred to immigrants on temporary visas for highly skilled technical workers, who were brought in by an outsourcing firm based in India. Over the next three months, some Disney employees were required to train their replacements to do the jobs they had lost.
“I just couldn’t believe they could fly people in to sit at our desks and take over our jobs exactly,” said one former worker, an American in his 40s who remains unemployed since his last day at Disney on Jan. 30. “It was so humiliating to train somebody else to take over your job. I still can’t grasp it.”
Disney executives said that the layoffs were part of a reorganization, and that the company opened more positions than it eliminated.
But the layoffs at Disney and at other companies, including the Southern California Edison power utility, are raising new questions about how businesses and outsourcing companies are using the temporary visas, known as H-1B, to place immigrants in technology jobs in the United States. These visas are at the center of a fierce debate in Congress over whether they complement American workers or displace them.
========
https://www.orlandosentinel.co... [orlandosentinel.com]
Legal fight ends for Disney IT workers who trained foreign replacements
The attorney who has filed several unsuccessful lawsuits after 250 Disney IT workers lost their jobs to Indian nationals in 2014 acknowledged Wednesday it is a legal fight she cannot win.
“We have lost,” Sara Blackwell said during a news conference in Orlando. “Unfortunately, we lost because it’s legal.”
The information technology workers’ grievances became national headlines after some were forced to train their replacements in 2014, putting a spotlight on the issue of H-1B visas. Some of the Americans were rehired for other jobs within the company, while others became unemployed or decided to retire.
Blackwell filed four unsuccessful lawsuits at the state and federal levels and after the most recent was dismissed by the state, she said she will not plan to refile again. In one of the cases, a federal judge said Disney was following existing immigration laws.
what was the point? (Score:2)
what was the point? They were doing this for decades previously... 4 years ago... same finding... which means that even when they are found to be at fault, the benefits of doing this crap outweighs the costs.
Doubt any punitive measures will turn back time for any of the American workers that were cheated out of a job by the abuse of the H1-B visa system.
Aren't those federal forms? Isn't it a criminal offense to lie on those? maybe throw a few employees in jail for just "doing what they were told"... no, se
Intent was racial bias favoring Indians (Score:2)
Yes, these companies exist to service companies that are trying to be cheap. However, the h1b worker could be selected from any country, but they overwhelmingly are not. Companies like Cognizant are Indian, and they favor Indians, not Americans, not Chinese, not Europeans, not Israelis, not any non-Indian.
There are two problems with the h1b program. The first is replacing Americans with cheaper foreign workers. The second is an intentional bias favoring Indians over all other nationalities.
The historical im
Discrimination against high salaries (Score:2)
price drives (Score:1)
"The greed bird says: Cheap cheap cheap!" (Score:2)