An Embellished Resume

http://fsbfeatures.blogs.fsb.cnn.com/2007/09/25/should-the-us-grant-more-h-1b-visas/

In short: Absolutely not. Both my wife and I have over 40 years combined experience in the IT arena, and we’ve worked as developers, project managers, team leads, DBAs, business analysts. We have never seen such utter lack of competence in the IT world since the onslaught of cheap Indian labor in the late 90’s and right after the Y2K crisis.

Many of these Indian H1B developers’ resumes are filled with outright lies; they regularly claim they have certification and experience orders of magnitude above what they actually have; and worst of all, in many cases, they are literally impossible to understand because of language difficulties, making project work a nightmare.

Most of this is cultural, unfortunately: In India, Pakistan, and China, there is no concept of intellectual property, and there is also massive corruption that influences everyday life. So it’s totally acceptable to embellish by 20% or 50% because everyone else around you is doing it.
Put that same person in an American setting, and the lack of coding quality, understanding of simple American and European business principles, and - most importantly - the ability to act intuitively without any direct management simply evaporates.

The reason for this mess, pure and simple: After Y2K, contractors were charging outrageously high rates for coding and development, and IT departments were reeling from those costs. Rather than solve the problem - hiring only the best workers, training the substandard ones to become better, and simply flushing the rest - the Indians showed up with promises of being able to do the work for 20% of the cost. American CFOs and freshly-minted MBAs saw this as a chance to regain control of these costs, figuring that even if the offshored resource screws it up four times, they were still ahead of the game in terms of cost.

What needs to happen, unfortuately, is a major disaster, either from a security / data loss standpoint, or the loss of a major center of Indian computing. (After all, Pakistan hates India, and vice versa … and they both do have nuclear weapons, right?) And then it’s time to call all the junior MBAs on the carpet and start rolling heads down the hallway. I have a bevy of American friends who understand how to benefit from this … and we’re just waiting for the show to start. Keep watching - it’s gonna be an interesting end to this decade!