Stop Offshoring
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Thursday, March 18, 2004
 
I came across a great posting today called Elegy for a Profession. Check it out. It really embodies the feelings of IT workers, the sacrifices we make on our jobs, and how we are now being discarded by greedy corporations.

Thursday, March 11, 2004
 
I'm glad that the offshore outsourcing issue is gaining more publicity. Every day, I see a story about it on TV or in the newspaper. This being an election year, we can make a difference by voting for candidates who oppose sending American jobs overseas.

Some recent articles:
Offshore job losses on voters' agendas
The New Face of the Silicon Age
Offshoring is no silver bullet
The option of staying stateside

Wednesday, March 10, 2004
 
My experience with H-1B Indians just sunk to a new low. The company I work for uses Infosys (one of the leading offshoring companies) to hire contract programmers, and we've been bringing in more help for the Project From Hell that I'm on. Despite Infosys's claim to be a "global" company, every resume I received was for an Indian programmer, and almost always H-1Bs, although the hiring pool they're choosing from is the Bay Area. Do hiring discrimination laws not apply to them??

The resumes I saw were all pretty impressive, but when I started to quiz the candidates, I found that their knowledge level was superficial, although they claimed to have a good deal of experience in a particular area. There was a great deal of exaggeration in the resumes. I've always suspected that some people pad their resumes, but this was ridiculous.

When I met one candidate who was somewhat qualified, I expressed a concern after the interview that he lacked certain specific skills we were looking for. The recruiter sending us these Indian candidates (who is also Indian himself) then informed me that the candidate did indeed have these skills, and that he used them in such and such a way on a previous project. I didn't even respond because what the recruiter was describing about the skills didn't even make sense from a technical point of view. On the next resume I received after that, the new candidate had those exact skills in question highlighted in ALL CAPS! How obvious can you be that you're tailoring your resume just to make us hire you?

It just made me sick to think that was how low they were going to put a contractor in our company. It also occurred to me that this was probably how so many H-1Bs wound up in American companies -- they lied on their resumes to trump up their skills and nobody at the hiring companies did adequate due diligence to confirm what they put on their resumes.

I also thought it curious that the resumes I saw all showed the candidates spending 2 to 3 months at a given client location. In my experience with contracting (and as a contractor myself), even if the contract is initially short-term, if you prove that you're good, the client will try to keep you on board longer. The fact that none of the candidates had long term stints confirmed my suspicions regarding their quality (or lack thereof).


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