H1B As Boondoggle

After I posted yesterday, it dawned on me that I hadn't mentioned a major country that sends workers here via H1B or other, similar preferential programs, China. This is partly because the media discussions haven't mentioned it, either. But one thing this limits in the discussion is the extent to which the foreign workers' poor English limits their effectiveness.

Workers from India are less of a problem, because the British colonial background made English a highly useful second language for the whole country that otherwise had different regional languages. As a result, a dialect called South Asian English is fully recognized, and it's understood fairly well by speakers of US English.

This doesn't completely eliminate the problem, though, because, due to the US background, English is also commonly spoken in the Philippines, and while Filipino English is understandable to speakers of US English, South Asian English and Filipino English are less mutually intelligible. This has presented practical problems for companies that want to outsource their programming to both Indian and Filipino contractors.

So we're beginning to move into corporate boondoggle territory. The CIO and the CEO can cook up a bright idea of laying off the US IT workers and outsourcing them to India and the Philippines, and it might look really good to the Board, but it turns out the Indians and the Filipinos can't understand each other, and the whole thing becomes unworkable -- except nobody is allowed to mention it, because racism.

If you add China to the mix, it's worse, because mainland China doesn't have a colonial legacy of English use, and Chinese learn it only in school from teachers who mostly haven't practiced it in an English-speaking country. A company that brings in Chinese H1B workers has a much bigger problem. The HR department has a good solution: don't mention it, because racism.

I worked for a company that for a time was a major IBM competitor. Their business model was to buy up software companies who were about to go under, and some of them even had the same business model before they themselves were about to go under, so they were already a big agglomeration of obsolescent and buggy products. That, after all, was why they'd been struggling in the first place.

We'll call this company Technical Associates, or TA. TA mostly rebranded the same products from the smaller comnpanies and simply sold each newly acquired product to its expanding customer base as a part of a bundled discount. You already have Product A -- we can now offer you our new Products B, C, D, and E, which you previously had to buy separately from these now-absorbed companies that have become TA, as a single, discounted package. Such a deal!

The problem was that all those companies that offered the old products were failing because those products were obsolescent and buggy. But TA, as a discount operator, wasn't going to put money into updating those products or fixing the bugs. On the other hand, they had to look like that's what they were doing, or the customers wouidn't buy what they were selling, the stuff (and for that matter, TA) had a bad reputation already.

Through various transfers and reorganizations, I wound up working for TA as a field rep or field engineer, that is, someone who went to the customer site and installed or troubleshot their products. There was a great deal of troubleshooting to do.

I was told by my bosses that the products did indeed have bugs, but the programmers who fixed the bugs had priorities, and I needed to be patient (in fact, they never fixed bugs at all). But my job was to go to the customer sites, listen to what the customer said, identify the problems, call in the bugs to the support center, and get a ticket number. This was in actuality an endless charade, but that's 90% of any job, right?

Both the programmers who suipposedly fixed the bugs and the support reps at the call center who took your call and gave you a ticket number were almost all H1B-type foreign workers, whatever their specific immigration status. The ones from Pakistan spoke the best English and seemed the most cooperative and sympathetic. The Chinese were a different story.

I was flying all over the country to visit customer sites. In one case, I'd been working all week on one stubborn problem and having a hard time getting the call center even to admit it was a problem. It was Friday afternoon, I had a plane to catch, and I was being stonewalled by a Chinese support rep who was slow-walking the whole procedure. "We not golng rush. We do all steps. You run test H37Z?" I began to realize it was to her advantage to speak bad English, that slowed things down even more.

I ran out of patience "By the way," I asked her. "How long have you been in the US? Why is your English still so bad?"

I was in a lot of trouble for that the following week, racist devil, hate Chinese people. But that wasn't the real problem. The poorly-spoken foreign reps at the call center were just a smokescreen to cover up for the fact that the company wasn't going to spend the money to fix the bugs. I began to understand a little better how complicated the whole H1B scenario is. The foreign workers aren't necessarily even there to save money, there are lots of other payoffs. If nothing else, they're simply there to make everything just a little more complicated and just a little harder to figure out. Musk and Ramaswamy can't be that naive.

After I left TA, some whistleblowers went to the SEC, and TA's CEO went to federal prison for securities fraud. I'm convinced the foreign workers made the scam just that little bit harder to detect.