3 ms·

As an Indian, I really really hope they ban Tata and Infosys (or any other Indian outsourcing company) from getting H1-B visas. The people they bring over are t

As an Indian, I really really hope they ban Tata and Infosys (or any other Indian outsourcing company) from getting H1-B visas. The people they bring over are the bottom of the barrel in India and have no interest in Computer Science whatsoever. They suck at their jobs. They can't write a single paragraph in English without grammatical errors. Furthermore, incidents like these will perpetuate xenophobia against the general Indian populace (I already regularly encounter abuse where I live).

enlightenedfool 12y ago
Nonsense. There are several Americans who are less skilled at the place I work. Xenophobia can't be stopped by Indians being better workers than locals. The article is about a loophole in law which any corporation would exploit, not just Tata and Infosys. My company (which is American) does it too, in way that isn't obvious. It makes zero sense to ban "any Indian outsourcing company"
- MichaelGG 12y ago
  > Xenophobia can't be stopped by Indians being better workers than locals But it would. Every case I've encountered where there is a skepticism of Indian workers is due to horrific experiences with such hires. I haven't seen the same applied to, say, Russian engineers. There may be a another reason, like just the sheer population and widespread English usage, but the result is that Indians suffer an unfair bias that other groups don't have. Things like MS shipping a major product made in IDC, with broken English in the dialogs. Or so many outsourced support and development failures. Perhaps it's because bad experiences are noticed because there was an interaction. But good experiences, say excellent code written by anonymous Google engineers, doesn't have any particular nationality associated with it (except American)? So if all tech support and dev was outsourced to Russia, then Russia would have a disproportionate bad rep? It's not fair (or perhaps not even fixable in a fair way), but if more interactions were positive, then there'd be less resistance. I feel bad for having an internal reaction when I start dealing with an Indian, but I try to balance that out by making an extra effort to be sure I'm concentrating on the work. And I know there's tons of far-more-talented-than-me Indians. It terrifies me that this bias might be mathematically incorrect, in addition to being individually unfair.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
CedarMadness 12y ago
I had to clean up after the mess Infosys made of a client's code a few years ago. It was horrible. There were few comments, most of them made little sense, and the code was a spaghetti mess. A complete rewrite would have been cheaper in the long run. That said, I've seen code written by Americans that was just as bad. The bottom of the barrel anywhere isn't a good choice.
IndianAstronaut 12y ago
Where do you live that you encounter abuse?
sridhar87 12y ago
"They suck at their jobs.", "They can't write a single paragraph in English without grammatical errors", "The people they bring over are the bottom of the barrel in India ", " have no interest in Computer Science" - Way too many generalizations IMO. There are over 100,000 employees in each of the companies, and of course some percentage of them might be what you describe, but I do have some some good friends who are good coders working there... and both the companies mentioned have billion dollars in revenues - not without a reason.
shas3 12y ago
Wow! Being an Indian (assuming you really are) doesn't make it any less inappropriate to make such sweeping generalizations!
smrtinsert 12y ago
You get what you pay for. We have great outsourcers but they are well compensated and work for boutique firms. The run of the mill outsources are terrible as you've stated.
geekam 12y ago
Companies like TCS and Infosys bring cheap labor mostly on L1 and not on H1. Most of the H1's I know are US graduates and majority are MS/PhD in CS. It is the L1 visa that allows a company to bring in cheap labor because the limitation on minimum salary by the DoL is not as stringent as H1. For H1 visa, a company has to file for labor certification with DoL and they decide what the minimum prevailing wage for a particular zip code, the skillset and the experience is. [1] Having said above I agree that the H1 visa IS being abused but the main issue is L1, not H1. there was about 20% abuse a few years ago and there was a huge crackdown by the USCIS and DoL on those doing that. [1] http://www.immihelp.com/l1-visa/l1-visa-h1b-visa-comparison.html http://www.immihelp.com/l1-visa/l1-visa-h1b-visa-comparison.... See the "Prevailing wage", "DoL approval", "Education requirement"

enlightenedfool 12y ago

Nonsense. There are several Americans who are less skilled at the place I work. Xenophobia can't be stopped by Indians being better workers than locals. The article is about a loophole in law which any corporation would exploit, not just Tata and Infosys. My company (which is American) does it too, in way that isn't obvious. It makes zero sense to ban "any Indian outsourcing company"

MichaelGG 12y ago
> Xenophobia can't be stopped by Indians being better workers than locals But it would. Every case I've encountered where there is a skepticism of Indian workers is due to horrific experiences with such hires. I haven't seen the same applied to, say, Russian engineers. There may be a another reason, like just the sheer population and widespread English usage, but the result is that Indians suffer an unfair bias that other groups don't have. Things like MS shipping a major product made in IDC, with broken English in the dialogs. Or so many outsourced support and development failures. Perhaps it's because bad experiences are noticed because there was an interaction. But good experiences, say excellent code written by anonymous Google engineers, doesn't have any particular nationality associated with it (except American)? So if all tech support and dev was outsourced to Russia, then Russia would have a disproportionate bad rep? It's not fair (or perhaps not even fixable in a fair way), but if more interactions were positive, then there'd be less resistance. I feel bad for having an internal reaction when I start dealing with an Indian, but I try to balance that out by making an extra effort to be sure I'm concentrating on the work. And I know there's tons of far-more-talented-than-me Indians. It terrifies me that this bias might be mathematically incorrect, in addition to being individually unfair.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

CedarMadness 12y ago

I had to clean up after the mess Infosys made of a client's code a few years ago. It was horrible. There were few comments, most of them made little sense, and the code was a spaghetti mess. A complete rewrite would have been cheaper in the long run. That said, I've seen code written by Americans that was just as bad. The bottom of the barrel anywhere isn't a good choice.

IndianAstronaut 12y ago

Where do you live that you encounter abuse?

sridhar87 12y ago

"They suck at their jobs.", "They can't write a single paragraph in English without grammatical errors", "The people they bring over are the bottom of the barrel in India ", " have no interest in Computer Science" - Way too many generalizations IMO. There are over 100,000 employees in each of the companies, and of course some percentage of them might be what you describe, but I do have some some good friends who are good coders working there... and both the companies mentioned have billion dollars in revenues - not without a reason.

shas3 12y ago

Wow! Being an Indian (assuming you really are) doesn't make it any less inappropriate to make such sweeping generalizations!

smrtinsert 12y ago

You get what you pay for. We have great outsourcers but they are well compensated and work for boutique firms. The run of the mill outsources are terrible as you've stated.

geekam 12y ago

Companies like TCS and Infosys bring cheap labor mostly on L1 and not on H1. Most of the H1's I know are US graduates and majority are MS/PhD in CS. It is the L1 visa that allows a company to bring in cheap labor because the limitation on minimum salary by the DoL is not as stringent as H1. For H1 visa, a company has to file for labor certification with DoL and they decide what the minimum prevailing wage for a particular zip code, the skillset and the experience is. [1] Having said above I agree that the H1 visa IS being abused but the main issue is L1, not H1. there was about 20% abuse a few years ago and there was a huge crackdown by the USCIS and DoL on those doing that. [1] http://www.immihelp.com/l1-visa/l1-visa-h1b-visa-comparison.html http://www.immihelp.com/l1-visa/l1-visa-h1b-visa-comparison.... See the "Prevailing wage", "DoL approval", "Education requirement"