H-1B hearing: Companies say foreign workers needed

InfoWorld ^ | Sept. 17, 2003 | Grant Gross, IDG News Service

[A. Pole]

It's even worse, if they are looking for someone with Doohickey version 6.0 experience, they won't bother with someone who has extensive experience with Doohickey 5.0.

Maybe you should just lie (as H1-B applicants do).

[Steel and Fire and Stone]

Anyone involved in this (IT) industry knows that the "...we can't find smart Americans.. they don't study math/sciences..aren't any qualified available.." argument is wholly falicious. The Fortune 100 consulting company I work for has a well known policy of "moving work to where it can be most efficiently performed.." meaning India, Canada, or in a pinch .. Texas using H1B's. They just attempted to outsource my entire account (over 200 employees, about half which are already H1Bs) to India, but the client wouldn't allow it.

I haven't wasted my time writng a politician in a long, long time. But the stuff these Republicans are saying is so false, they have to know it. Finestein gets to take the "high road" of truth?? I'm writing the White House, my local Congressman, my California Senators, and these loser GOP *@#*$*#$@! Senators, and telling them one simple message: My vote in the next national election moves with the H1B and L1 program. If the GOP persists in selling my industry and my job to the lowest international bidder, I'm done with them.

SFS

[ninenot]

Meet TexDawg--a man who has NO USE for employed Americans.

[ninenot]

Yup.

As an HR pro, I can write a job description that you will NEVER match.

Further, the project managers always down-size their labor cost estimates to look good--thus, the salary pegs go down a few notches.

Since I am an 'outside' HR type, I've seen it hundreds of times---"we want X, Y, Z, A, B, C, all for $XX,000.00" And one finds rather quickly that the people they want are actually $XX,000.00 plus around 25%.

They manage to hire some yock that can't do the job--and wonder why the hell THAT happened...

[ninenot]

Ingersoll-Rand never heard of Cincinnati Milacron's layoffs of engineers? They never heard of Phillips Plastics (Wisconsin) layoffs of engineers?

Or are their HR people too lazy to use a Thomas Register, find the appropriate local newspapers, and place an ad?

Maybe the HR folks are too, ah, dense to utilize the professional engineering society's placement service.

Jeez. It's not THAT hard.

[ninenot]

but the HR bubble-head chycks don't know that

Go to an HR professional society meeting some day. THere are NO men left in the biz to speak of.

EEO made it so.

[lelio]

Since I am an 'outside' HR type, I've seen it hundreds of times

Don't forget that a lot of people placing the ads or acting as headhunters don't know the space either. So someone somewhere once said in passing "We're using Brand X's Version Q of Product M" and then suddenly that's a requirement.

The people making up the ad to run in the paper or in the HR department that screen applicants aren't skilled enough to realize that someone with Brand Y's product of the same kind can probably catch on.

And to be fair to them, there's a lot of clowns out there that muddy up the waters. They're proficient in their narrow field but can't see the forest for the trees. So he makes it past a screener and then the project manager yells at them for sending them a moron. The screener walks away thinking "I've got to match this up exactly."

Course the easiest way to get around that as a job applicant is to tailor your cover letter to suit their needs exactly.

[Jim Cane]

So, imposing tariffs on foreign-manufactured products will cause more U.S. students to study engineering and science?

Yes.

You ask easy questions.

[doosee]

Ingersoll-Rand never heard of Cincinnati Milacron's layoffs of engineers?

Ingersoll is such an American loving company that they moved their Corporate charter and home to some island in the Carribean. Would anyone expect this company to have any concern for American workers?

[Jim Cane]

Meet TexDawg--a man who has NO USE for employed Americans.

Just ignore ol' Running Dawg. Chicom talking points and all.

[ninenot]

Generally, with all systems requirements, I've immediately told my clients that some latitiude will be necessary--unless they want an MVS internals geek w/BAL so they can tweak native TSO, or someone to mess with source code.

But all the common RDB packages work the same, just different nomenclature, some tricks that the other guy doesn't have, etc.

Hell, you can figure THAT out just by playing with Word and WordPerfect. One's the Caddy--but the Chev is passable.

[ninenot]

I recall that the list of 14 'movers' included about 8 manufacturers of hand tools--Cooper, Ingersoll, and one that wanted to leave, but got 'caught' in the PR fiasco--and several others.

Reason? Flat hand tools are coming in from PRC at about 1/8 the cost of US made tools. The move these companies made was to escape US Income tax--a partial offset of the PRC's predatory pricing scheme.

[SauronOfMordor]

Go to an HR professional society meeting some day. THere are NO men left in the biz to speak of. EEO made it so.

At the company I just started work for (employed at last!), there are NO males in the 12-person HR dept or payroll dept

[YankeeReb]

It is hard to displace U.S. workers when you don't have any U.S. workers to choose from," Dickson said'...........

This is the same line of garbage you hear from corporate flunkies at every level of employment. I spent 15 years in I.T. and saw my share of Indian, Chinese, Russian etc people being exploited because they were on a visa and couldn't quit a job without being sent home.

These days I'm out of IT and in the construction field (lower pay but they can't ship your job overseas), and I see hoardes of illegals doing jobs under conditions that would generate an ocean of lawsuits if they had Americans doing them. Things that OSHA would close the job down for (no safety equipment, improper ventalation things like that). The point is, it doesn't matter whether we're talking about H1-b engineers, asbestos removal workers or lettuce pickers. The reason most of these jobs can't be filled by Americans is that the conditions of employment are intolerable. The only way employers will improve these conditions is if the supply of cheap , semi-indentured labor is cut off.

[Paul Ross]

"Ingersoll-Rand has searched for more than a year to fill a plastics engineer and an industrial robotics engineer position, finally settling on a Canadian resident in both cases, said Elizabeth Dickson, advisor of immigration services for the industrial equipment manufacturer."

This particular example reeks. Someone should take a close look at the facts here. Anyone subscribe to the Society of Plastics Engineers? For such a supposedly super-heated field, it sure looks like their journal is highly concerned over U.S. Plastics Engineers working on their resumes, and networking skills to find jobs. It also mentions a steady stream of U.S. graduates of Plastics Engineers coming out of the colleges. H'mmmmmmm.

[Paul Ross]

Actually, yes, because that dries up the incentives for the outsourcing and importing...hence creating de facto a greater demand for U.S. production forces to fill the demand being currently displaced by the fraudulently-justified H-1Bs and L-1s. It worked for 200 years. Time to go back to the basics. No more entangling alliances.

[bvw]

As usual with H1-B postings it is all facile lies. As Alan Dershowitz said about Clinton's lies under oath before a grand jury -- "It's okay to perjure yourself about sex." Well, in the corporate world -- "It's okay to lie about anything that seems to make you money, or save moeny, or whatever strokes your corporate penis."

Big multi-national corporations don't have penises, of course, they are just full of dicks -- dicks willing to lie, and who can't trust an honest person. Grasso! Hey, he's a King of the Liars! More power to him for getting the contract he did. But look at the big Dick wolves all running the NYSE and the multi-nats.

People are so happy when the stock market goes up! They feel those big Dicks and Toms and Micheals running the big one up where it gives them such pleasure! "Oh give me that 401k again"

The cheap sleazy crack ho's of the stock market are the everyday 401k and retirement fund "investors" -- JQ Public, Mr. and Mrs. They just don't quite realize yet how they have been abused.

[DuncanWaring]

Ingersoll-Rand has searched for more than a year to fill a plastics engineer and an industrial robotics engineer position...

They were probably looking for someone who'd work for $25,000 a year.

I was laid-off a week ago from a "major manufacturer of aerospace electronic equipment".

When I started at that company 19 years ago in one of their Flight Management groups, I knew a fair amount about airplanes, but nothing about "Flight Management". I subsequently developed a significant portion of the "vertical navigation" function from scratch, part of which I now hold a patent on.

I recently, pre-layoff, interviewed with another group trying to build a Flight Management computer.

I was told my "vertical navigation experience isn't current enough" and I "...didn't know enough about their particular hardware architecture".

Idiots.

Those reasons would have been enough to disqualify me from the original job, which I excelled at.

[zeaal]

Spouses last day is Sept 30 ... telecom.

[remember]

Backers of the H-1B program argued Tuesday that the visas aren't taking away U.S. jobs, because some technology companies still can't find qualified workers for some positions. Ingersoll-Rand has searched for more than a year to fill a plastics engineer and an industrial robotics engineer position, finally settling on a Canadian resident in both cases, said Elizabeth Dickson, advisor of immigration services for the industrial equipment manufacturer.

Typical non sequitur. Elizabeth Dickson, who is she?

In addition, she is focusing on a couple of very unique positions. Most people reading that likely don't personally know a plastics engineer or industrial robotics engineer who is looking for work. Back during the boom, however, I asked an H-1B Visa worker who I worked with what his area of expertise was. It was C++. Now, one might argue that there was an occassional shortage of C++ programmers during the Boom (though I don't know that for a fact). But I can tell you that, in Silicon Valley, there are thousands of good C++ and Java programmers who are currently looking for work. There is definitely no shortage now. Anyone who says otherwise is flat-out lying. The H-1B Visa program definitely needs to be tightened up to those positions for which there is a clearly demonstratable shortage.