H1B Visa - my experience

This blog entry was inspired by reading this current article on CNN.

There are many anecdotal stories about how someone they know lost work, compensation or benefits due to H-1B Visas.

I have my own story - and this story didn't happen to someone else - it happened to me. This is a first person account. I will leave the names of the company out of it. Although the diligent reader can scour my blog for my name, my name is so common that I could be anyone throughout the country.

There is a company that I have done work for as a consultant in the SAP scope. It is a large company of about 12000 people. I wrote a specialized system in .NET to handle their warehousing needs. They have two primary facilities and one central warehouse. The goods need to get to the primary facilities, regardless of if SAP is up or down. The programs need to run on small form factor devices such as Microsoft Windows Mobile devices.

So, my system, connects and posts data to SAP, connects and retrieves master data from SAP, contains its own custom database and a series of services that run periodically to get the data and perform postings when SAP is down. It is a fairly complex system written in .NET, where I also wrote the custom function modules in SAP to perform postings and there is custom data inside of SAP including custom tables to record errors and transactional data. There are other subsystems for specific activities such as inventory counts to overcome some of the problems inherent in the SAP system. (Inventory Counts in IM can only have up to 300 items and the client has thousands of items in each storage location)

The client is composed of two major segments. There is the primary company and there is an external entity which controls all the IT aspects. I interact a lot with both segments. Some time ago I was offered a job by the IT segment.

This seemed like a really good thing. I would be able to get really in to the system and do things that people can do in the long-term instead of just short 2-month contracts.

A few months later I find that the IT company has hired an H-1B Visa person on, and the opening for me was mysteriously consumed by "We have some internal problems with budgeting." So, I was pot luck out of a job, no big deal at this point.

Then, on my last contract with the client, guess who I had to train? The H-1B Visa employee they just hired. I spent a considerable amount of my last contract training him, because it appears that they hired him - he had the wrong skill set. He had no experience with .NET and he had no experience with SQL Server and he had no experience with SQL Server Agent jobs (the facility I use for writing services) and I had to teach him, not only the business end of the transactions, not only the infrastructure of the system, but I had to teach him the basics of .NET programming, SQL Server architecture, SQL Server interaction with .NET programming (how to interact with the database, call stored procedures, parameterized queries, regular queries), the SAP .NET Connector, how it works, basic database funcitonality, SQL Agent operation, the use of the classes I used for file transfer protocol, and how the web pages look and work on the handheld devices, everything I knew about how the handheld devices operated, etc...

And there is a lot of etc, and there is a lot of me having to go over things multiple times and there is a lot of explaining basic architecture over and over again before we even get to explaining the business side of the transactions.

He took very few notes. Since then, I haven't had any more contracts with the client. It is possible that the primary client may hire me, but may also be prevented from doing so because of non-solicitation and non-compete clauses.

So, now I don't have that opportunity for work, the possibility of me getting a job to support my family vanished (and this need is greater now since with two young children I want to work for an employer instead of with an consulting company). There are actually lots of reasons why I'd like to work for an actual employer.

But, this is how H-1B Visas affect people in the real world. The H1-B visa holder is young, single, not from this country, doesn't own a house, and has relatively low expenses and relatively low experience.

The point of the H1-B visa is that companies, when they cannot find people with the knowledge they need in the US, go to H1-B visa to get people from other countries that do have that knowledge.

Clearly, the intent of the program was completely violated. I am the ideal candidate for their job as the person that wrote the system, but still they went with a H-1B Visa holder and transferred it over - and they are probably paying him tens of thousands of dollars less than I would demand. I'd probably demand 120K. They are probably paying him 80K.