Are Indian H-1B workers a threat to American techies?

This is not a recent article.  But I ran across some boots-on-the-ground information that should shed some light on the subject.  First, the article:

A few days ago, I wrote a piece on the fracas that ensued when Disney and power utility Southern California Edison apparently hired Indian firms TCS and Infosys to replace in-house tech workers with Indians on H-1B visas. What seemed to enrage many about these two situations was the added ignominy that these fired workers had to suffer when they were made to train their Indian counterparts lest they lose out on their severance pay.

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Still, there is a general feeling in the US that Indian companies have played fast and loose in trying to make a quick buck, which in this case is around $20 billion in revenue -- no small pile. Along the way, American IT workers feel enormously embittered towards people who they feel are not skilled enough and have poor communication skills, while Indian H-1B holders are aghast when they discover that they are being paid a fraction of a client's billed amount. It's an ugly situation all around.

So what is really going on?  I think there is a moral case to be made here.  I believe there are plenty of Americans who are skilled to fill these jobs.  They aren't being hired because it's much cheaper to bring in foreign workers under the H1B visa program.  This is an ABUSE of the system.

The question came up in Quora and here is the question and what I thought was the pointed answer:

Do you really believe the "there are too few qualified software engineers available in the USA" speech that software companies are preaching?

Donald William Gillies, Software Engineer at Google

1.7k Views

I graduated with a PhD in computer science in 1993. In that year, UT-Arlington (a 3rd rate almost-community-college-level school) had 1 job opening and received 400 job applicants. UT-Austin (a 1st rate top-10 school) had 2 positions and received 1500 applicants. The odds are a little better today; at the PhD level now perhaps there are only 50 applicants for every position open. I worked in an ECE department that was a top-10 school, and we found that half of our graduates never found a job in Electrical Engineering. Is there a shortage of computer scientists or electrical engineers in the USA? No way.

The people who say there is a shortage, are all of them shills for the H1B industry. Many lawyers make an illicit living off that program. America definitely has a shortage of software engineers with no college loans who are willing to work for food. There is an unlimited supply of students from overseas who received free government-paid educations from their home countries, and are willing to work for almost nothing because they have no encumberances and their families are starving, overseas. Meanwhile, many USA engineering schools are charging a tuition premium for software engineers (and other engineers) to become educated.

The H1B program has replaced Civil-War Slavery as a way to indenture software engineers and force them to work for the same company for 7 years. What American companies are complaining about is that they don't have a way to get slave-labor for 100% of their workforce, like a Southern Plantation had in the 1840's. My previous employer had roughly 4,000 employees (40% of their engineering workforce) from the H1B program, and that wasn't enough for them. They had a fulltime army of salaried lawyers to run their "H1B factory" at a big discount to smaller companies. They wanted 100% H1B workers, they had to hire 60% of their engineers domestically, which was 60% too many. The CEO was just given a $95M pay package whilst 1000 layoffs were announced, all the ones I knew about were American-born, that was his way of funding his obscene pay package.

Software Engineering has become a field that rewards foreigners and penalizes domestically grown engineers who work hard and play by the rules and borrow heavily to fund their wildly overpriced American educations.

The Taulbee survey is a very precise survey of PhD, MS, and BS production in computer science, by ~150 CS departments nationwide.. If you read it I think you will notice that graduate student production is at an all-time high, university hiring is at an all-time low, and BS production is re-approaching the bubble levels of 2001-2004. These are all signs of a surfeit, NOT a shortage...

There were several commenters that disagreed.  A few that agreed.  I think this one was the most valid.

California gun law will let police confiscate legally-owned weapons

I don't see how this could hold up in court.  Why don't they just use asset forfeiture laws???

Under the law, the factors a judge can consider in granting the restraining order include not only threats of violence, but also prior felony arrests (even without a conviction), evidence of alcohol abuse, and even the simple act of recently purchasing a gun or ammunition.

Once granted, police can use the restraining order to confiscate all of a person’s guns and ammunition, and the person is also barred from buying or possessing guns and ammo for the duration of the order. A full court hearing must then be heard within three weeks. At that hearing, a judge will be able to extend the restraining order for an entire year.

“The law gives us a vehicle to cause the person to surrender their weapons, to have a time out, if you will,” Los Angeles Police Department Assistant Chief Michael Moore told Southern California Public Radio. “It allows further examination of the person’s mental state.”

This is CA.  This law will be sooo....abused.

Megaship docks in L.A. as change roils shipping industry

I love big machines.  These ships are awesome!!

The CMA CGM Benjamin Franklin, which arrived Saturday at the Port of Los Angeles on a maiden voyage from China and South Korea, can carry nearly a third more cargo than the largest ships that currently call at the San Pedro Bay ports.

In an effort to move more cargo on less fuel, ocean freight carriers are in a race to build megaships with much larger capacities than the typical ships calling at U.S. ports. The average container ship being built now is nearly three times the size of the average a decade ago.

Aerial footage shows California methane leak

Oh, and the video is in black and white to make it look REALLY NASTY.  It is nasty and the tech guys are trying their damndest to stop the leak.

At the same time, 86,000 barrels of oil seep through natural sources onto the Santa Barbra coast.  No one seems to be too upset about that.

So, what are the latest numbers on natural oil seep quantities? We at SOS first started our little non-profit nine years ago because we were astounded by the amount of oil and gas flowing into our local coastal waters. We reviewed studies by pre-eminent researchers at UC Santa Barbara (UCSB). A 1999 publication by Hornafius et al. was entitled The World’s Most Spectacular Marine Hydrocarbon Seeps. The study states that literature reviews of marine hydrocarbon seepage usually conclude that the area along the northern Santa Barbara Channel is one of the most prolific hydrocarbon seepage areas in the world. We knew natural seepage existed at other places worldwide. The idea that quantities in the channel were comparable was astounding. Upon reviewing the 1999 study by Quigley et al. that showed oil production could reduce seepage – we were hooked. (More about that later!)

But what are those quantities? The UCSB Hydrocarbon Seeps Project is the online compendium of ongoing research on the natural laboratory that is the Coal Oil Point seep field. Based upon this research and data from analyses of other seeps in the Santa Barbara Channel our co-founder Bruce Allen, a physicist, extracted the estimate that roughly 86,000 barrels/3,000,000 gallons of oil bubble into the Santa Barbara Channel each year.

CA Reps VOW TO KILL FREE SPEECH

Hat tip to Frontpage.com on this one.  Loretta Sanchez and Judy Chu, both from CA are sponsors of this bill.  Absolutely disgusting.

That’s right: “violence, bigotry and hateful rhetoric.” The implications of those five words will fly by most people who read them, and the mainstream media, of course, will do nothing to elucidate them. But what H. Res. 569 does is conflate violence -- attacks on innocent civilians, which have no justification under any circumstances – with “bigotry” and “hateful rhetoric,” which are identified on the basis of subjective judgments. The inclusion of condemnations of “bigotry” and “hateful rhetoric” in this Resolution, while appearing to be high-minded, take on an ominous character when one recalls the fact that for years, Ellison, Carson, and his allies (including groups such as the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations, CAIR) have been smearing any and all honest examination of how Islamic jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to incite hatred and violence as “bigotry” and “hateful rhetoric.” This Resolution is using the specter of violence against Muslims to try to quash legitimate research into the motives and goals of those who have vowed to destroy us, which will have the effect of allowing the jihad to advance unimpeded and unopposed.

New York Loses $400 Million After Imposing The Nation’s Highest Cigarette Tax

And NYC thought they were taking the high road.  All they did was push the whole cigarette economy underground.  Do you blame the smoker?

Smokers responded to higher prices not by shelling out more cash at the store but by turning to the black market, crossing state lines and buying cheaper brands, such as Seneca, from Native American outlets. The last 10 years have a been a boon to organized crime, with 58 percent of New York’s cigarettes supplied from out-of-state, according to the Tax Foundation. The number of packs bought paying the full tax has also collapsed by 62 percent.

62 per cent!  And NYC hasn't seen the errors of their ways?  As usual, it's leftist gone wild.

California welcomes world’s first fully sustainable biofuel facility

Now, this actually looks interesting.  I'm all in with biodiesel.  Maybe these guys are doing it right.

The new San Joaquin Valley-based facility, which is owned and operated by sustainable biofuel and bioenergy company Biodico Westside, will produce up to 20 million gallons of biodiesel per year, and create 45 direct jobs in partnership with West Hills Community College.

“Biodico Westside Facility is a result of years of research and development to produce biofuels that make good environmental, social and business sense,” said Biodico President and Founder Russ Teall. “Today, we are forging a new path in biofuel production by utilizing sustainable solutions to convert diverse feedstocks into renewable sources of fuel and energy.”