Fake Indian Degree taking American Jobs

I did a little research. Al Qassim is a public university in Saudi Arabia, so I don't see why it would lack accreditation.

I have, though, run across some pages disputing the validity of Mahila Gram Vidyapith University. For instance... the following Indian government website lists it as a "fake university": http://www.ugc.ac.in/page/Fake-Universities.aspx

 

It matters when it's a blatant attempt from a MODERATOR to employ shaming language in an attempt to stifle conversation. If it's not appropriate for this area move it to off topic or if the language is offensive delete the post.

The is old news anyway. Anyone who has worked in IT for more than ten minutes and pays attention knows that there is rampant fraud on the H1B visa front. Why hire an expensive American trained engineer when you can import more H1B Visa holders into the country and hire ten of them for the same price? Shoot when I worked for CIS I was part of the investigation into my hometown diploma mill's degree holders looking for terrorists who had purchased degrees in an effort to circumvent immigration laws. Guess what else we found? Lots of people other countries with fake degrees in jobs they were not qualified for. We also found lots of government, military, and education people with fake degrees as well, but that is not the topic of the post lest anyone call me a racist or something.

Nothing new to see here, move along, move along.

 

I have people come in with 10 years of experience and zillions of technologies on their resume and they can't answer a simple question about any of those technologies.
I start out by saying, "I see you have JSF on your resume and you worked with JSF in two jobs for four years. How would you rate yourself in JSF on a scale of 1-10?"
Then the applicant says 9/10. I ask them some basic questions that someone with 3 days of JSF experience would know and they can't answer the question. Then they respond with "Well that was 2 years ago and I didn't do the screens for the application so I don't remember."

So then I ask them "Which technology do you feel you are a rockstar at?". They tell me which one they are great at, I ask them a few basic questions and they bomb again. I can't pay someone $80-100K when they can't even answer basic questions. It doesn't matter if they have a masters degree or not.

One thing we do have to watch out for with people from other countries is people having someone else do the phone interview for them. This happened to us twice and we hired one guy only to meet a totally different guy when he showed up for work.

 

Gotta agree with ryoder on this one.

I see way too many people that list every technology that they have ever touched on a resume, then can't do even the most basic things with that technology because they used it "so long ago."

Also, to RFValve's point on skills becoming obsolete quickly, that is the tradeoff to receiving high income in this industry. Right now, if someone wants to be able to do well as a programmer, they MUST be able to teach themselves new technologies. The days of waiting for your employer to pay for formal training are quickly disappearing. Even if they weren't, the technologies change so fast that a formal course can become obsolete in a year.

Also, I don't know if ryoder is seeing this, but I am see a MUCH higher interest amongst employers to see actual code/projects that you have worked on, rather than notations on a resume. In some circles (particularly Ruby development) it has become almost expected that a perspective programmer will have a GitHub/BitBucket account where others (particularly employers) can down load their projects and check out their code.

At the end of the day, the CORE programming practices don't change much. It really becomes a matter of learning new APIs, frameworks, etc every year. The core thought process of problem solving hasn't changed. I recently picked up Objective-C this past Spring. I thought that it would be a challenge, but fundamentally, it was really just a matter of getting used to the syntax, the xCode IDE and the iOS APIs. The adaptation occurred MUCH faster than I expected.

Where I see some of the few unemployed programmers failing is that they do one or more of 3 things.
1) Refuse to learn new technologies.
2) Dabble in a bunch of new technologies, instead of getting proficent in a few.
3) Don't create public projects for people to check out their code.

I am guilty of the last one myself. I haven't created a public GitHub account and I don't have a large public portfolio of projects. This is mostly do to the fact that almost all of my work has come to me via professional relationships, networking and word of mouth. However, the direction I wish to move my career requires more public projects. My goal for the end of the year is to create a solid public portfolio of some more interesting projects.

 

Your first clue is when it's 2012 and you have someone saying they have 5 years experience with SharePoint 2010. Blame the people looking for "rockstars" too. Quit using lame Marketing bullshit speak as a qualifier for employees. Never let an HR rep write your job description or pre-screen your potentials. Disaster. That is how you get the fakes coming through. If you want to hear some tales of IT woh go over to the Dice.com forums. Some of the stories are absolutely breath taking.

 

The question is, which technology? Lets say that I was a Visual Basic 7.0 programmer and was laid off because the company went out of business and decide to train myself in AJAX as I think this is in demand. I read every single book in AJAX but when I go for interviews everyone expects me to have 5 years of experience in AJAX before they can give me a chance, then because I cannot get a job I take a job as a tech support person while I get a new job but then employers would never call me because my last job is in tech support because they figure that I am not that great as a programmer because I work in support. As AJAX is not working, I try to learn anything in demand such as Php, Java, etc but then we have people like yourself that say that I am not a specialist as I don't know something very specific and blame me for my situation and finally the post goes to someone from India or Russia as there you have millions of people to chose from so for sure there is someone with the 5 years of AJAX experience.

I have seen this scenario too many times as I have been in IT training for many years. People trying to train themselves in something new but very few are able to make it because they need to get the knowledge at the right time otherwise it becomes useless.

There is something wrong with the IT business, I agree that the government needs to cut visas and force employers to find ways to give jobs to these IT professionals rather that keep getting people from overseas. If you cut the foreing visas, employers would have no choice but to hire these unemployed IT professionals and find ways to bring them to workforce.

I have been in the IT business for more than 20 years. Back in the 80s, you were not expected to be a guru in every technology to get a job as employers were willing to train or wait for you to become productive. All you needed back then was a degree and employers would take you and expect you to learn on your own but were not expecting you to come with an expert knowledge of the technology needed. With the advent of visas, employers just find cheaper to hire foreign experts rather than rely on local programmers that might take few months to become productive.

In few words, it is normal that people stay away from technology jobs given the bad experiences from a lot of people with the industry.

 

RFValve,

The scenario you describe is a VERY familiar one to me, particularly because it describes my experience as a new Java programmer back in 2002. However, a big issue is that HOW one demonstrates their skills has changed and opened up a bunch.

Lets take your VB7 programmer. I'll replace AJAX with HTML5/JavaScript since AJAX is just one facet of what one can do with HTML5/JavaScript (henceforth referred to as just HTML5).

So, your VB7 programmer just got laid off and decides that HTML5 is what he is going to study, not only because it is in demand, but also because front-end web app development is what he wants to do. First, instead of reading EVERY book on HTML5, he gets 1 or 2 books MAX. He goes through them and perhaps some of the online tutorials, working the examples/exercises. Next, he starts actually BUILDING THINGS and learns even more doing this. Perhaps he builds some HTML5 games like these:
HTML5games.com | games powered by HTML5

Or perhaps he builds some mashups like these:
ProgrammableWeb - Web 2.0 Mashups Directory

He stays abreast of the new trends in the technology, but doesn't flicker from one tool to the next. He regularly attends meetings at local HTML5 User Groups/Meetups. He also takes on some freelancing projects. This is one of the biggest differences in the market today compared to 13 years ago, when I first entered it. Back in the old days, the folks that hired programmers were mostly large companies and the government. Today, it is quite common for companies as small as one man shops to hire freelance programmers for some task. The freelance opportunities are enormous.

Between his personal projects and his freelancing projects, he has built a nice portfolio. Now he starts either a) jumping into freelancing fulltime, or b) applying for fulltime jobs. In fact, if he was smart, he put a link to his resume on his mashups/games, so he might be already getting inquiries. Lets assume that he is looking for a fulltime job. He hits the job boards, AND the web forums, AND he networks at the HTML5 User Groups/Meetups.

Assuming he a) lives in a large enough city, or b) is willing to move, he will get a response. Sure, he doesn't have 5 years HTML5 experience, but he has something better. He has actual evidence of his skill via his projects that are on the net. He is more likely to be spotted by a small company where the recruiters are also developers than some large 10,000+ employee enterprise with a HR department that doesn't know HTML5 from the Fantastic Four. With the smaller company, the recruiter/developer can appreciate the level of skill that the person has by looking at his projects. With the large enterprise, the HR personel only goes by how much his resume matches her checklist of required skills.

The basic gist of what I am saying is that the market for programmers has changed dramatically. Back when I was just starting out, the model of going through a headhunter/HR department that was looking for people with 5 years experience in a technology that was only 2 years old was still popular. Now, it is quite possible for someone to completely circumvent the big company programmer/Dilbert lifestyle. I have been freelancing for 5 years now and that has been made possible, in large part, because of the new talent acquisition strategies used today. There have been instances where I have gotten freelance work simply by being an active participant on forums and answering people's technical questions.

People are DESPERATE for skilled programmers. Sure, many companies SAY that they only want rockstar programmers. Heck, I only want to date swimsuit models and Playboy Bunnies. But what I want and what I am going to get are too different things. It is the same with companies looking for programmers today. They can either wait for their "rockstar" and never get their project off the ground, or go for a skilled, but normal programmer that is easy to work with and actually deliver the product. What they chose says a lot about whether I would want to work for them.

 

Thanks for the great plan.

My question to you, wouldn't be a lot easier just to do a CPA or CFA that might take a year of courses and some exams? CPAs are also in demand and start at 40K and make more than 100K in 5 years. I have done some accounting and it is a lot easier to do accounting courses that keep taking computer classes all your life.

I have been in IT most of my life and technologies come and go, I am getting tired of this and slowly moving into risk management and operations research.

All I got say is that if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn't take IT as my career path. It is a lot more efficient to take a path that is more stable and doesn't have a lot of changes like IT. There is a reason why people are not taking this career path anymore and it is not lazyness as some might think. Most people can make a good decent salary without the crazy hours of IT of 100 hrs a week plus time to learn new stuff, I just dont think is worth it as with new technologies your experience goes back to zero and you go start all over again.



Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

 

Let's review. The op said the schools had "funny names." Did he actually think that an Indian university would be called "Smith College?" One of our other members has established the fact that at least one of the schools cited is a legitimate state university. I haven't verified this but clearly neither did you. The op states that the employees are qualified for their positions and only says he viewed their linkdin pages, not their resumes or their personnel files. That's all unofficial stuff that doesn't necessarily mean anything in regards to their qualifications for their current positions. Finally, the op says that this is a large successful company and that these employees have been enrolled is well respected PhD programs. Despite all this we are to believe that these employees are unqualified con men. I'd like to suggest two things. In this modern world of globilization, people should get accustomed to hearing "funny names," and not automatically assume this means that something underhanded is happening. I'd also suggest that you assume that the hiring managers at IBM know what they're doing and that the doctoral degree admissions committees at major universities know what they're doing. Finally, I'd like to point out to 033 that if my intent was to stifle conversation on this topic I could have deleted the original post and banned the poster without anyone being the wiser. Instead, I offered an opinion and then let the thread develop along it's natural course. Nothing has been deleted, no one has been banned and based on the fact that this thread is now well into it's second page, conversation has not been stifled.

Having just looked back on the beginning of this thread I would like to point out one more logical inconsistency. It is simply this. Comperguy says (paraphrase) "I'm not xenophobic, I'm from Africa." So Africans are immune to this prejudice? Don't we know that some of the worst cases of genocide in the world have occurred on the African continent? C'mon.

 

It has been my experience that many times immigrants are more xenofobic than natives. I agree with you, my first reaction when I read the post was that the OP was just jealous about his or her coworkers and for this reason doing research on their backgrounds to see if he or she could find something against them.

If these people managed to do a PhD at a top institution and convinced people that they are capable of doing a job, why someone would care if they finished their bachelors from a Mickey Mouse school? If anyone would approach me and tell me that my programmer that got a PhD from Carnegie Mellon has a degree from an obscure college with no accreditation in India and for this reason should fire him, I would probably fire the person that came with this absurd argument first.

By the way, in England people can actually be admitted to a Masters with no degree at all if the student shows that masters the subject. It would be acceptable in England for someone that finished a B.S from Mickey Mouse non accredited university to be admitted to a M.Sc based on memberships to prestigious associations (e.g. British Computer Society). I am sure that if someone uses linkedin, would find people with degree mills that have M.Sc and PhDs from British schools.

 

For that matter, India also has the concept of "membership (by examination) to professional societies as equable to a degree" - probably borrowed from England. A few I know of are:
https://www.ieindia.info/
IETE
Indian Institute of Industrial Engineering - Administration
Operational Research Society of India
There could be many others, but that would be another thread altogether

 

The issue of H1B visa is controversial. One one hand, we can argue that you can train Americans to do the job so H1B visas are not required but on the other hand graduate schools rely heavily on foreign students that are attracted to the US because the existance of H1B visas. If the visas are gone, you will not be able to attract the best of the world to the US and graduate schools would suffer and also industry as they might lose a competitive advantage as the best go somewhere else.

It has to be a middle ground, I think Visas can be justified if the foreign worker is going to contribute with research and development of new products but not justified if the guy is coming to write plain HTML 5 programs for commercial web sites and gets paid $15 bucks an hour. The Visas should impose competitive salaries so employers are not encouraged to replace locals with foreigners for cheap labour.

 

Guys,
The real job killer is the L1 Visa. These are given to companies who have presence in USA and foreign lands like India. People with L1 visas are not supposed to work at their customer location but in their own offices - its just a company transfer. Many Indian Body shopping companies (many are multi-billion dollar companies) like Infosys/Wipri/Satyam/TCS/list goes on... etc heavily misuse these visas. They get thousands of these visas every year and send their low paid employees sitting in India to work at their customer locations all across USA. This is Illegal. In the company i work for, there are atleast 12 guys from India on L1 visas working along with us. This needs to stop. These L1 visa holders are killing American Jobs. If we send all these illegal visa holders back to their countries, we can take care of the unemployment situation to a great extent.

 

For those not familiar with how a H1 visa works and crying foul over underpayments:
- The sponsoring employer should obtain a PWD (Prevailing Wage Determination) from the Department of Labor. For example, if I want to sponsor a H1 visa for a foreign worker to work in Seattle area, I need to obtain PWD from DOL Washington state for,say, a Java programmer with 5 years of experience.
- The employer will then file a LCA (Labor Condition Application) with DOL that he'll pay the foreign worker a salary which is EQUAL OR HIGHER than the PWD provided by DOL.
- The employer can file for H1B visa ONLY AFTER the LCA has been issued.
- The LCA is a binding on the employer for the minimum salary he can pay to the foreign worker. Any violations can be reported to DOL, and the employer will be in serious trouble.

I know of many cases where employers tried to underpay the foreign worker got handled well by DOL.

 

Agreed that there are some malpractices in L1 visas. But imagine what happens if the employers decides to "send the jobs overseas" rather than "importing foreign workers". People in IT knows that this is already happening.
Issues like this are sensitive and have both sides to ponder over.

 

I would agree with this. H1 work visas are much harder to get than most people think. I have several friends that are foreigners. A lot of companies won't touch them without them already having some visa paperwork. In a lot of markets it's just cheaper to find an American.

 

I think that's the most likely situation. At the end of the day it's about profit for most companies and let's face it, they will make more money sending the job overseas then hiring an American.

 

Not so much anymore, The US dollar is weaker than the Canadian and Australia dollar and is getting weaker every day. It will get to a point where it might be just cheaper to hire Americans. I know that Australia took a hit with the weaker US dollar as many Asian students are going to the US for school as it is cheaper to study there now.

Chinese people now make more money than Mexicans according to some studies so it might get to a point where Chinese and Indian salaries are just the same or even better than American salaries.

 

I had a talk with an Infosys employee who works in our company on a L1 Visa. And mentioned that he is not supposed to work here as he should be working in Infosys's offices. He mentioned that there are thousands of Infosys employees like him all across USA working in various customer locations. This is Illegal. I should have recorded this conversation. Ultimately the owners of these companies(Infosys) should be held responsible for Visa fraud and put to conviction here in the USA. I am planning to notify USCIS and consulates in India about this and give details of all 12 Infosys employees work in our company Illegally. I would advise everybody to do the same. Atleast L1 Visa fraud can be contained.

 

Every law has holes in it, and companies like Infosys(and zillion others) know how to exploit them. What do you think your action will result in? Most probably those 12 employees will be deported, and Infosys won't loose anything. Then can get 100 more in the next flight.

And think - do you think your employer doesn't know this? And what will happen if your employer thinks it might be economic to get rid of you and your colleagues, and outsource your entire department to Infosys, so that Infosys can send your (and your colleagues) jobs overseas?

I don't know the solution to this problem, but I can say that you are trying to act on impulses. Think of those 12 guys who will be deported, and more importantly, think of your own career.