Facebook/Google should be forced to hire only Americans. At gunpoint if needed.
01-27-2016, 11:21 PM
Ok, I wrote this up last night and wanted to comb through it one time. This is a snapshot of what I see on a daily basis as a tech recruiter. I tried not to get bogged down in technicalities of the minutia more focused on painting the big picture..
Every year in April, companies file H1B visas so workers can begin working on these visas in October of that year. The number of visas granted is roughly 200K. Only legitimate organizations can file for these. One Man LLC’s cannot.
Now, how does one go from a non H1 to an H1 you ask? There are a few ways; here are the most common.
Graduate with a masters or bachelors as a foreign student and you are on a OPT Visa for up to 19 months that your educational institution sponsors. (No cost to the candidate). If you major in a STEM field you are granted 27 months on an OPT. This can only occur after you’ve been on an F1 Visa program in which you can work no more than 20 hours a week and that work has to be a work study or school approved internship.
Another very common way to get on an H1 is to take the L1 route. The L1 route is an Intracompany transfer. So you work for a company in another country and they then transfer put to work “on loan” from their home countries business. Ex; Accenture India sends Raju to Accenture USA. He can only work for Accenture USA under the terms of his visa since he is truly an employee of Accenture India. He is basically an indentured servant. If he is a very good indentured servant, they’ll file his H1. This rarely happens. What usually happens is mom n pop “third party agency” file his H1 unbeknownst to his employer in the US in April. When it becomes active in October, he gives notice to Big time consulting firm, gets a bump in salary (generally 60-80K USD), and begins being pimped out.
There are other ways to do it but these are general the most common.
With the Visas out of the way; lets get on to the business of what happens.
When employed by a big consulting firm, visa IT workers, lets just stick with developers for arguments sake, are being billed out at a rate of no less than $125/HR which equates to annual cost of 250K. These rates can go much higher. The average US IT workers salary is between 85-130K. The average salary for consulting worker is between 65-95K (+the H1 filing process costs a few thousand) which is less employment cost for labor to the employer but because there are now profits involved in the equation, the client ends up paying substantially more. Outsourcing is already operating at a huge loss. Additionally, the knowledge doesn’t stay with the organization that paid for it. So when Raju from Accenture gets put on a new project, his knowledge goes with him and poof goes the value. Yes there is documentation but lets be real, its not good and done in a way for the long term. The Fortune 1000 corp and consulting firm know the terms of the agreement when they get into it.
Now, this is where it gets criminal. The third party vendor I told you about before goes around and snaps up as many OTP candidates as possible, whose visa is being paid for by their school, and creates completely fabricated resumes. These resumes say the candidate has between 5+ to 7+ year experience on average and they want to bill between 55-90/HR which results in an annualized cost of $110K-180K per year. My organization, a US based staffing firm, then has to turn around and mark it up so we make a profit. So the cost goes up again. Now the real kicker here is that these 5 to 7 year “Candidates” are really fresh grads with no experience. They are between the ages 24-28.
Oh, your 28 and have three degrees and 8 years of full time experience. Damn man, you are a time management freak! It’s a lie. You look at their massively cookie cutter resume and ask, oh you worked @ Wells Fargo in Dallas for two years. What was the address? To which they answer “Address????....I didn’t get you” Yes, you worked there for two years, what street did you work on? Oh, you can’t answer that; where did you and your coworkers grab lunch? “Lunch????....I didn’t get you? can you repeat”
The best question to ask is; ok, you just regurgitated the technologies on your resume to me. Now, what were they used for? Technology isn’t used in a vacuum, there is always a function. What was the functionality scope of your project?...Crickets.
Just today, I had someone tell me he worked at Rolls Royce in Dallas as a UI developer. Go on LinkedIn and select Rolls Royce and Filter for Dallas. There are 31 Salesman, no corporate offices and certainly no IT groups. Its moronic.
Their employer will just substitute a generic indian name at the top of the resume or put in one of their five middle names and spam the job boards until an offer comes up. Its massively inefficient for everyone but the employer doesn’t care because they have no skin in the game. They are just sitting in India pimping out their classmates that were smart enough to be presented to come to the US.
Sometimes if a “candidate” really can’t “crack” an interview with the three months of interview bullshitting prep they gave him, they’ll have another person on their payroll take the interview and send the fresher onsite. This always ends badly. We’ve had consultants break down crying because they couldn’t deal with the lying anymore. There is actually a case of a hiring manager calling us up and saying “Hey you know that guy that started this morning; I’m in my office and watching him run down the lawn to the parking lot very frantically. I don’t think our scope meeting went well with him this morning” I give them no pity but its sad, so far away from home and living a lie every day that you can never possibly live up to in the short term to maybe have a better future down the road.
Now if one of these “candidates” with 2-3 experience ever wants to go full time with an end client, say JPMC, their sense of value is so inflated that they want 40% raises to make the move. They think they are worth it and can get it. It rarely happens.
So every year, you have 200K H1s flooding the employment market pretending to be something they are not. H1s are supposed to expire after 2 three year terms. However, if a corporation begins the Green Card process, you can file for extensions in perpetuity. Some have been here for over a decade. You have at least 2 million H1s floating around the country. This doesn’t even account for those on student visas which, yes, will be less but its still in the hundreds of thousands.
And guess what? There is no quality control on any of this. There are so many fraudlent resumes attached to young, minimally experienced “consultants” that convolute the labor market.
The only check is really recruiters as gate keepers, hiring managers as interviews, team members as peers, and CIO’s who hire the consulting firms. However, we hold no legal power to straighten out the process so the firms will just fabricate another resume or shop to another organization until a hire occurs.
What has happened is the labor market is flooded with shiny, nonsense filled resumes and creates the ILLUSION OF COMPTENCY which keeps wages down. The avg. US worker has to compete solely on price as opposed to value or knowledge. However, they have to jump through hoops and go through numerous calls and interviews just to get an offer but they have no bargaining power. They are stuck and on average have a much harder time lying about their experience because they believe in good ole fashion honesty and transparency.
Now, this all seems overly harsh and negative, it may even come off that I hate indian consultants. I don’t. Some of the best guys I’ve worked with have been Indian but they are legit and any one of us would have a beer with them. The legit guys hate the scam too because of the stigma the fakes create. It’s the liars (24 year olds claiming to have 7+ years of experience) that have corrupted this market to the point that is unrecognizable. Unfortunately, there are a lot more liars than there are legit guys.
I mean ask yourself this; the technology was invented here. Why can’t we train people where the technology is built? One would assume if their countrymen are intelligent enough to develop the specs then they can train others local to them with a decent level of comprehension to be proficient and above average. There is no skills gap. There is a willingness gap. A willingness for visa workers to lie and a willingness for those in power to accept falsified backgrounds and shoddier product for less money and bargaining power of the labor force.
The anger however shouldn’t be placed at the feet of individual contributors from India on visas. The visa workers are just trying to better their lives and doing whatever they can to take that opportunity. It’s the executives, lobbyists, billionaires, and government that perpetuate this shell game.
One last remark; the truly talented people at the big tech companies like Google, FB, Paypal and Silicon valley in general are worth their weight in gold. They deserve visas and a swift green card (EB2, EB1 status). But in reality, there aren’t 200K of these people at the gates every year. Otherwise, we’d have flying cars and Marty McFly would be going back in time because of these geniuses on visas.
One last remark, whenever I do a search for an IT position on a job board, if I filter for US Cit and GC only, the number of available resumes drops by half. HALF. Every time. I don’t have the time or economic background to demonstrate what negative effects this has on the hiring process and economy in general but I can tell you this; its delaying real, honest candidates, visa or not, from getting to work and creating value. Its disastrous.
TL;DR the system is full of lies and is all about keeping wages down. There are thousands, more likely hundreds of thousands, of fraudlent profiles floating around which bottlenecks the process and floods the market with the perception that there are tons of talented visas workers with the right “skills”. These are paper skills and unverifiable. The visa program needs to be reformed.
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