Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2004 15:45:40 -0700 From: Norm Matloff To: Norm Matloff Subject: "Dude, Did I Steal Your Programming Job?" To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter I became aware of Mr. Sivakumar's book with the above title a few weeks ago. When I failed to find it in a few bookstores, I looked in an Indian bookstore (I had been told the book has been popular with H-1Bs and some Indian-Americans), but still couldn't find it. I was ready to order the book sight unseen when the enclosed article appeared, and sadly, I now see that there is no need for me to buy the book after all. The book had been billed as "balanced," and the fact that a programmer would have literary aspirations is refreshing (I'm still recovering from the shock of seeing Bill Blunden's fine writing), but what we have below is a collection of the usual oversimplifications and logical errors. There are far too many misleading statements in the article to address them all, but let me treat a few selected ones. First and foremost, consider this passage: Consider the benefits due to these foreigners who came to the United States, many of them on H1-B visas: Sameer Bhatia, who founded Hotmail; Sergey Brin, who co-founded Google; Alfred S. Chuang, who founded BEA Systems; Vinod Khosla, who co-founded Sun Microsystems; Vinod Dham, who designed the Pentium chip; Linus Torvalds, who invented Linux; Anders Hejlsberg, who architected the C# language; and James Gosling, who developed the Java language. Does Dobbs know the number of jobs that were created due to the efforts of these people? This is the usual "Indian motel" fallacy. About half of the small motels in the U.S. are owned by Indian immigrants. Good for them, but does that mean that without Indians we wouldn't have motels? Of course not. That would be an absurdity, and so is the remark above, which falsely implies that without the people named above, the industry would be lesser today than it is. In this industry, virtually NO ONE individual or company has been inexpendable. NO ONE. Let's look at the people above one by one: * Does the author REALLY think that Hotmail played a key role? Come ON! Without Hotmail, things would be as they are today. Nothing special about Hotmail technologically. * I've been a Google user from the early days, but again, there were a lot of other search engines at the time (and still are). Without Google, we'd still have search engines. And as far as I'm concerned (speaking now with my statistician hat on, as it is a statistical issue technologically), they are all of similar quality. * Alfred Chuang of BEA is a graduate of our department. (BEA's major product, WebLogic, was developed by a company founded by another UCD alumnus, Paul Ambrose, who if anyone cares, is a U.S. native.) We're very pleased by Alfred's success, and as someone with great fondness for Hong Kong, I've got to say that Alfred is a great example of the outstanding business prowess HKers are famous for. But again, there have been lots of other companies doing the same thing. * As to Khosla, once again Sun has been just one of many companies in the workstation market, and now in the server market. Again, I consider the quality to be similar among the various firms. And by the way, Khosla's contribution was as a businessperson, not technological. * Dham "designed the Pentium chip"? All by himself???? That's funny, people who work for Intel in Israel think that THEY designed it all by themselves. The fact is that they're all wrong. The Pentium chips have been HUGE group efforts. Again, NO ONE is inexpendable. * As to Torvalds, I am a huge fan and promoter of Linux. But there is nothing especially brilliant about Linux either, and in pure technological terms, its competitor, FreeBSD, is superior. And oh, by the way, Torvalds developed Linux long before he came to the U.S.; his contributions in the U.S. have been meager. * Hejlsberg? I don't like the language, but again, the comment about Dham above applies. * Gosling? Again, see the comment on Dham above. I must add that I have always strongly supported facilitating the immigration of "the best and the brightest," and have acted personally on that conviction many times, championing the hiring in Silicon Valley and in my own department of certain foreign nationals (mostly Chinese and Indian) whom I considered brilliant. But none of the people above would make my list, and as I said, none of the individuals above were inexpendable. By the way, the author is wrong about Dobbs in the above passage. Dobbs would be the first to agree with the author's point above. But I must repeat, Dobbs would be wrong in doing so. Again, the article is chock full of misleading statements, too many to mention. I do want to address the following passage, though: I admit that the so-called body-shoppers misused the visa loopholes. But most of the foreign workers, including me, came here at a time when America really needed us: when Europe and Japan were trying to compete with the United States in the software sector, when companies such as Business Objects and SAP were popping up around the world to threaten U.S. software dominance and when five different American companies greatly needed my skills. It is NOT just the body shops that abuse the loopholes. It is virtually EVERY company in the field, including the big names. See for instance my analysis for Intel at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/GradDegrees2.txt For a full treatment of the issue, see the detailed analysis in my law journal article at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/MichJLawReform.pdf And, NO, America did NOT "really need" the H-1Bs during the boom years, as claimed by the author. No independent analysis ever found a labor shortage; instead, what they "needed" was cheap labor. Even the ITAA, king of the industry lobbyists, now admits that the industry overhired (their word) during that time. And even at that time, the ITAA basically admitted that qualified people were available but were too expensive. Again, see my law journal article for a detailed analysis. Norm http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1658367,00.asp Stop the H1-B Bashing By N. Sivakumar October 4, 2004 Foreign, high-tech workers help the American economy. CNN news anchor Lou Dobbs probably doesn't know that there are millions of immigrant techies living in the United States, inventing great things, spawning great startups and creating millions of American jobs. But what about average viewers? Do they believe everything he says? They must, judging from anti-outsourcing Web sites that are flooded with hostile-especially anti-Indian-messages. I respect Dobbs' concern for the American middle class. I agree that even though free trade has proven benefits, we can't ship all the jobs overseas. A country is made up of people, not buildings and corporations. But Dobbs and others see only one side of the H1-B visa-the very visa that allowed me to come to this great country to rediscover myself. Consider the benefits due to these foreigners who came to the United States, many of them on H1-B visas: Sameer Bhatia, who founded Hotmail; Sergey Brin, who co-founded Google; Alfred S. Chuang, who founded BEA Systems; Vinod Khosla, who co-founded Sun Microsystems; Vinod Dham, who designed the Pentium chip; Linus Torvalds, who invented Linux; Anders Hejlsberg, who architected the C# language; and James Gosling, who developed the Java language. Does Dobbs know the number of jobs that were created due to the efforts of these people? H1-B visas have their place. American taxpayers get high-tech workers for free, without having to pay for their formal education. People who come here on these visas pay every tax that U.S. citizens do, including Social Security and Medicare. But if they return to their homeland, then they will not get any benefits from these programs. The recent recession cost the United States more than half a million immigrant high-tech workers who had to return home-after paying all these taxes. And what about the enormous expenses they incurred to settle down in the United States? I admit that the so-called body-shoppers misused the visa loopholes. But most of the foreign workers, including me, came here at a time when America really needed us: when Europe and Japan were trying to compete with the United States in the software sector, when companies such as Business Objects and SAP were popping up around the world to threaten U.S. software dominance and when five different American companies greatly needed my skills. It is time for Dobbs to wake up to the facts. We foreign, high-tech workers should not be scorned. We did not jump into a vessel and land in San Jose. We came to this wonderful land in search of opportunities. Our work has been, and will be, to the benefit of everyone. N. Sivakumar is the author of "Dude, Did I Steal Your Job? Debugging Indian Programmers," published by DivineTree Publications. He is a software engineer in the United States with more than 10 years of industry experience in EDA (electronic design automation), security and CRM (customer relationship management). He can be reached at nsivakumar@divinetree.com. Free Spectrum is a forum for the IT community. Send submissions to free_spectrum@ziffdavis.com.