The H-1B visa and outsourcing giants
H-1B visas are misused by outsourcing giants. That much is very clear to me. As an Indian tech guy, this is really annoying.
An interesting response by HN user raincom,
Delivery managers at WITCH (Wipro, Infy, TCS, CTS, HCL) outsourcing firms are paid based on how much they can earn from every account. So, this drives them do many things. One of the consequences is the perception of the said discrimination. Delivery managers prefer a cheaper resource to an expensive resource. They also practice this in India: that’s why every team in India is filled with 80% freshers or those who get paid $5k per annum in India.
In the states, they look for the cheapest resource to fill a position. Often times, they find spots that just require warm bodies to add billable hours. Guess, who would they go for? They will hire some H4 EAD who asks $65K per annum in NJ. These people are happy to get some job and experience.
In old days, companies used to have lots of people coasting in their jobs. Now, WITCH companies have captured that profit in a two prong process: offshore to India and charge the client $30 per hour per person, then pay some desperate college grad in India $3 per hour. And capture that $27 per hour.
This is similar to outsourcing the manufacturing, as the middle layers capture the profit, by paying peanuts in China and by getting rid of expensive employees in India.
Edit: basically, these companies are making money off of outsourcing lots of bullshit jobs. They are NOT eliminating bs jobs. In fact, most of WITCH company onsite people are project managers pretending to be super smart workers.
This is an essential truth to the outsourcing companies in India. This is also pretty much common knowledge to engineers in India.
These companies make good use of the glut of “qualified” engineers in India - most of whom lack employable skills, and pay them a decent lower middle-class salary (by Indian standards) and sell their services to companies (and misrepresent their experience).
I often get annoyed at people who complain about Indian engineers after working with outsourcing companies because when you pay peanuts, you’re going to get the bottom of the barrel.
It’s true that Indian employees are cheaper but they aren’t that cheap. $5k per annum will only get you the desperate ones. Pay about $25k or above and you’ll get better engineers.