Flashback: H-1B workers in line for Obamacare work

Some state governments are willing to hire offshore IT service providers to work on healthcare IT projects under controversial contracts that don't bar use of temporary foreign labor, or workers on H-1B visas.

Two multimillion-dollar government healthcare IT projects, one in Illinois and the other in the District of Columbia, illustrate what's going on.

In Illinois, Cognizant was awarded a $74.1 million contract in June to upgrade the state's Medicaid systems to meet the requirements of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare.

In January, the District of Columbia awarded Infosys a $49.5 million contract to develop a health benefit exchange and replace its Medicaid and eligibility systems.

Cognizant has submitted paperwork to hire 60 or more visa holders to work on the project -- a proposal that the state wasn't aware of, Jakubek said.

Infosys is a top-tier offshore contracting company. I’ve used them extensively in my career. As with all offshore teams, they will only be as effective as the onshore tech lead/coordinator. Infosys has a deep bench of talent and is one of the few SIs I know that can assemble huge teams on short notice for a reasonable price.

Despite popular opinion on the FR site, I can say *without reservation* that offshore resources play an important role in US IT companies. As an IT executive, I’ve hired dozens of American resources and utilized offshore talent as well. Frankly, many young American programmers these days think they are God’s gift to programming, but can’t tell you anything about design patterns.

Every company has the responsibility to find the best talent. I typically view 2-3 offshore resources as equivalent to *one* good domestic resource. Sometimes finding decent domestic resources is a challenge. The IT unemployment rate in Charlotte, NC for example is only about 1%. At $24/hr, however, sometimes it just makes sense to use offshore on certain projects where you can spend months and months and only find marginal domestic resources which cost you $85/hr.

(For this thread’s benefit)

Again, Infosys can be highly effective when led by the right architectural team and management. I would bet dollars to donuts that Infosys worked extremely hard to get sound requirements out of the Obama administration, but... you know... who has time to read a 1,000 page bill (and turn that into system requirements)?

I wouldn’t put this on Infosys. I’d put this directly on the idiots who wrote such a byzantine bill in the first place. The IT effort was doomed to failure.

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