High-tech visas provoke disputes

The use of foreign workers as software programmers has fired debate on the availability and skill of older U.S. workers.

By JOHN BALZ

© St. Petersburg Times, published November 9, 2000

L.R. DuBroff is up to his elbows in "other people's filth," scraping, scrubbing and reassembling the guts of an industrial-strength carpet cleaner. Hoses and pumps, vacuum motors and hot water heaters, are all in a dirty, tangled mess from rugged battles against nasty stains.

"We have to laugh at these things because otherwise we cry," says the 63-year-old.

Fixing vacuum cleaners is not what DuBroff expected to be doing with a mathematics degree and 36 years as a top-notch software development engineer. The Altamonte Springs resident worked first for some of technology's biggest players and later as an independent contractor at BellSouth.

In the mid-'90s though, DuBroff says he and others were pushed out as too expensive, too outdated. They were replaced by foreign workers imported under the federal government's H-1B program of temporary work permits.

As DuBroff sees it, his hard-luck tale is one of corporate greed and bottom lines. About getting caught in the web of business models and cost-cutting tactics. And it's a fairly common one among aging programmers.

High-tech industries pushed Congress aggressively over the past year to expand the H-1B visa program, claiming they need more workers to fill hundreds of thousands of jobs and keep the economy humming. President Clinton heeded their call and signed a bill in October to expand the number of H-1B visas issued annually from the current 115,000 to almost 200,000.

Critics say there's plenty of intelligent, hard-working labor yet to be mined in America, and foreign-born workers are just cheap, temporary indentured servants. DuBroff says it gives companies an easy solution to the question, " Why pay $80,000 a year for one programmer when you can get two for the same price?" The benefits of the H-1B visa program have long been known. High-tech industry is clamoring for new sources of employees in an increasingly globalized marketplace where foreign capital and labor are just as welcome and profitable as their homegrown counterparts.

At Texas Instruments, roughly 700 of the 23,000 employees are temporary H-1B visa workers, the majority of which work in the semiconductor chipmaker's Dallas/Fort Worth headquarters. Roger Coker, director of TI's U.S. recruiting, says despite "feverish" efforts to fill jobs, the company has 1,600 open positions. Many of them have been sitting vacant for months.

"I've been recruiting for 20 years, and these are the most competitive times in my entire career," Coker says. "It doesn't matter where you're from, if you can design we want you."

Under rules of the visa program, employers are supposed to search first for U.S. applicants to fill jobs and must sign an affidavit stating that American workers will not be displaced by any H-1B hires.

And that has meant opportunity -- albeit fragile -- for people such as Abelardo Antique, a software engineer who works as a design engineer for Jacksonville-based CTI Logistix. A native of Manila, the University of Cincinnati graduate gave up a solid, comfortable job with a Filipino beer brewery for a "lifetime opportunity."

"It was all worth it,"says Antique, 38. "Given a second chance, I'd do it again."

Antique considers his H-1B visa a blessing even though he knows his stay here is tenuous -- the visa will expire in 2003. H-1B workers can legally stay in the United States for up to six years, during which time they usually struggle through an unfamiliar bureaucracy in hopes of obtaining a green card.

Programmers, who wade in an abstract muck of analytical concepts and mathematical formulas that make technology do what it promises, are not an old bunch. While 60 percent of computer science majors take programming positions after graduation, only 20 percent remain as programmers 20 years later, according to the National Survey of College Graduates.

Technology companies say most of these one-time programmers have simply moved up to management positions, but others, such as American Engineers Association president Bill Reed, are skeptical. He believes employers are ignoring them.

"We're throwing away hundreds of thousands, even millions of years of experience from our knowledge base by getting rid of these people," he said.

John Miano, a 38-year-old independent software consultant from Summit, N.J., questions just how "qualified" the help imported from abroad actually is. "You hear about the highly skilled people being brought in, but the reality is that they ain't highly skilled, they are just cheap," Miano said. "The people who are brought in are going to screw up."

And when that happens, Miano steps in to clean up the mess by going after a software program's bugs. For a fee, of course. "I'm profiting by pointing out the stupidity of the whole process," said Miano. "Thanks to H-1B, I have an airplane."

Still, Miano opposes further expansion of H-1B visas. If jobs are so short, he asks, why aren't programmer salaries escalating rapidly?

Texas Instrument's Coker acknowledges that there are plenty of older programmers available for work but says it would take from five to 18 months to learn the proper skills. A company simply can't afford to retrain workers whose skills are not current, he said.

"I can't go to a guy who's been designing airplane cockpit instruments and train him to create integrated chips," Coker insists. "We need people who can step in and start designing on Monday."

At 63, DuBroff predates the computer age -- he saw his first computer in college. As a youth, he dreamed of becoming a veterinarian but was drawn to engineering because of its problem-solving elements.

In 1960, after a four-year stint in the Navy, he took an entry-level programming position with Bell Telephone Laboratories. He went on to work for a half-dozen other high-tech corporations until 1992, when the Florida economic climate for engineers turned frigid. DuBroff began contracting his services and in the fall of 1995 BellSouth hired him on a six-month project in its Birmingham, Ala., office. The project dragged on, and DuBroff's contract kept being renewed.

BellSouth had operated for years with a team of 1,000 or so in-house engineers directing several thousand independent hires.

But in 1998, according to DuBroff, Andersen Consulting convinced BellSouth management to dump its own people and farm out software development. Almost all the engineers kept their jobs, but they became employees of Andersen. The company gutted the old BellSouth teams, firing already-established programmers at a clip of a couple hundred a month and replacing them with H-1B visa workers.

"At this point, I saw the handwriting on the wall," DuBroff said. "I knew what would happen, it was just a question of how long."

Eighteen months to be exact. In October 1999, after four years of renewals, DuBroff was let go.

Peg Bernhardt, a BellSouth spokeswoman, said the company cannot discuss specific personnel cases but that it never initiated massive layoffs to replace employees with H-1B hires. The company does hire a limited number of H-1B workers on a temporary basis, she said. Andersen Consulting declined to comment.

Figuring out how many other programmers share DuBroff's story is almost impossible, according to Norm Matloff, a computer science professor at the University of California-Davis. There are roughly a half-million former programmers in America, he says, and although all may not know the hottest computer language, an experienced programmer can become proficient in a new language in a couple months.

DuBroff, still highly confident about his own computer skills level, remains near Orlando running the carpet cleaning equipment rental business with his wife. He never sought legal recourse against BellSouth.

"I thought about a lawsuit," he said. "But it would be costly, and Andersen could afford a better, more expensive legal team."

Matloff says there isn't much for workers such as DuBroff to do. Age discrimination is a difficult case to prove and mounting a serious lobbying campaign requires massive mobilization efforts among a group of people who are not predisposed to rallying. The industry, he says, has relied on the "ignorance and apathy" of former programmers to gain the upper hand.

Despite an affinity for software, DuBroff's experience has soured him enough to stay away for good.

"I'm so disgusted that I just won't have anything to do with it," he said. "I've totally divorced myself from it."

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