Why Tech Companies Have an India Jones

Date: Sunday, December 29, 2002 2:41 PM

H-1B and JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER

www.ZaZona.com

This biased propaganda article has one very important passage that's worth
reading again, even if the article is 2 years old:

Trilogy skirts the H-1B visa problem because U.S.
law is more relaxed when domestic firms transfer
workers from foreign branches.

What they are actually referring to is the L visa. Once companies have
overseas offices it becomes much easier and cheaper for them to transfer
foreign workers into the United States by using the L visa and it is indeed
a way to skirt the "H-1B visa problem".

For those of you that are new to this newsletter I will send some previous
newsletters on the subject of the L visa if you request it. Go to the
following web pages for further background:

http://www.zazona.com/shameh1b/VisaTypes.htm

http://www.zazona.com/shameh1b/VisaGlut.PDF

http://www.business2.com/articles/mag/0,1640,6607,FF.html

Why Tech Companies Have an India Jones

The subcontinent has the richest pool of engineers outside the United
States. Here's the lowdown on how to get them.
By David Batstone, June 2000 Issue

Sudah Durairaj can't get enough of the United States. The U.S. tech sector
can't get enough Sudah Durairajs.

Take, for example, Shared Resources, a computer consulting company in
Columbus, Ohio, desperate for programmers. President Maria Tray found the
local market hopelessly picked over. So she asked an Indian colleague to
help her place an ad in a major Indian newspaper. A few months later, Tray
traveled to Chennai (formerly Madras) for interviews. In a matter of days,
she had inked deals with Durairaj and five other engineers eager for jobs in
the United States.

India has been a key recruiting territory of U.S. tech firms for years. But
now the demand for skilled programmers has become so intense that even small
businesses like Tray's are tapping India's work force. U.S. companies need
to fill some 269,000 IT positions, and that talent shortfall will increase
as the number of technology jobs expands from 5 million today to 6 million
in 2008, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Although plenty of immigrant techies from other countries have established
themselves in the United States, those from India make up the biggest group.
Of the 115,000 H-1B visas issued to foreign technology workers in 1999
alone, almost half went to Indians. The subcontinent simply offers the best
pool of offshore talent. Most educated Indians speak excellent English, and
India's vast educational system produces more than 73,000 IT graduates a
year -- more than twice the number in the United States. And U.S. firms can
easily lure Indian recruits with starting salaries in the neighborhood of
$60,000 a year, 10 times more than they would make in India.

At the top end, India's techies can match algorithms with the best alums of
MIT or Caltech. The six Indian Institutes of Technology produce the most
hotly sought graduates -- many of whom end up in the prime jobs at U.S.
technology companies -- and another 43 private and regional colleges
throughout India also produce competent engineers. Beyond those schools,
countless fly-by-night 'institutes' produce programmers of widely varying
abilities.

Despite these hordes of eager tech workers, jetting to India to get them is
a tough way to build an IT staff. Tray waited 13 months for five of her six
Shared Resources recruits to arrive in Columbus; the sixth is still waiting
for visa approval. "I couldn't afford to pour that much time into every new
employee," says Tray.

Her team got caught in the H-1B logjam. The federal government created the
H-1B visas so that U.S. companies could hire foreigners with proven
technical skills; sponsored H-1B workers can stay in the country for up to
six years. But for fiscal 2000, the government granted only 115,000 of the
visas on a first-come, first-served basis. In 1999 the cap was reached in
mid-June, more than three months before the end of the fiscal year. This
year it maxed out in record time -- by mid-March. Applicants who don't make
it through the gate in a given year are put in a queue and wait for next
year.

Before getting caught in the immigration tangle, U.S. companies should
consider the Indian talent that's closer to home. An estimated 140,000
Indian IT workers already live in the United States; many are graduate
students or already hold H-1B visas (which are transferable between
companies). One way to find potential hires is to hang out at meetings of
organizations like IndUS Entrepreneurs (TiE), a professional group for
Indian engineers, investors, and managers that has chapters throughout the
United States.

Another approach is to check out engineering departments at U.S.
universities. After finishing at the IITs, many students come here for
graduate studies. George Mason University, for example, established a
special scholarship program to lure these coveted students.

For a quicker fix, you can call on an Indian IT temp agency, or "bodyshop,"
that deploys software engineers to tackle specific projects. Indian
entrepreneurs have established some of the most prominent U.S.-based code
farms, including iGate Capital in Oakdale, Pa., and TekEdge in Santa Clara,
Calif.

Bodyshops aren't cheap: They generally charge 25 to 30 percent over what
similar talent on staff would command. Also, though most agencies don't like
poaching, there's nothing to stop you from making a job offer if you find an
ace contractor. Just don't be surprised if the agency charges you 25 percent
of your hire's first-year salary if you succeed.

Bodyshops charge a premium for speedy delivery but don't always provide
premium talent. Their workers typically come from India's lesser engineering
schools. Keypur Patel, founder of Brience, a wireless-technology startup in
San Francisco, says the bodyshop temps can handle basic applications but
often are found wanting when it comes to mission-critical operations. "I'd
never rely on them to build my e-commerce infrastructure," he says.

For more demanding projects, the answer is often to outsource to firms in
India. Thanks to the Web, you can turn an Indian company into an extension
of your IT department. Tata Consultancy and Wipro, among others, specialize
in providing inexpensive, long-distance programming for faraway companies.

Offshore development has become hugely popular in both old- and new-economy
sectors. Last year, one in five Fortune 1,000 companies outsourced
development to Indian firms. For example, Wipro's 6,000 employees crunch
code for heavy hitters such as Cisco Systems, IBM, and Lucent
Technologies -- as well as for a growing number of Net startups.

Many midsize and large tech companies open their own development centers in
India. Trilogy Software, a 1,000-person e-commerce software developer in
Austin, Texas, recently decided to open a satellite operation in India.
Before doing so, Trilogy formed an alliance with Group Ipex, a U.S.
recruiting firm plugged into the Indian engineering world. When Group Ipex
placed Trilogy's help-wanted ad in newspapers in India's four largest
cities, more than 1,000 risumis poured in during the first 12 hours.

Trilogy plans to operate its Indian hub like a baseball farm club. The
initial 20 or so hires will get big, challenging projects; those who do well
will be offered full-time gigs at its U.S. headquarters. Trilogy skirts the
H-1B visa problem because U.S. law is more relaxed when domestic firms
transfer workers from foreign branches.

To find recruits in India, for work there or in the United States, newspaper
ads are effective. One clever U.S. firm recently placed an ad in the
personals section, where Indian mothers advertise to find spouses for their
children. It read, "Tech firm seeks arranged marriage with systems
administrator. Dowry paid in stock options."

Help to Keep ZaZona.com Online

Donate to the Cause at
http://www.zazona.com/Donations.htm
To Subscribe or Unsubcribe send an email to

Back to archives