"No Americans Need Apply"
Sep 17th 2003, 3:45 pm
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"No Americans Need Apply"
http://www.cio.com/archive/090103/people_sidebar_1.html
No Americans Need Apply
Daniel Soong, who lost his programming job to Indian offshore
companies, is willing to relocate to India. But Indian officials have
told him they don't hire Americans.
BY BEN WORTHEN
DANIEL SOONG GOT his first computer in the fifth grade, a Timex
Sinclair that used an audiocassette player for a disk drive and the
family's black-and-white television for a monitor. It cost about a
hundred dollars at Radio Shack and wasn't good for much more than
writing a few snippets of code in Basic. But that was enough to hook
him. By the time he was in high school, he was taking calculus and
advanced mathematics. He declared computer science as his major after
his first semester at Sacramento State.
When he graduated in 1995, information technology was booming. The
Internet was on its way to commercialization, and entrepreneurs were
looking to capitalize on the growth potential in IT. For Soong, a job
in the field was a natural next step on a journey he'd started when he
was 10. "I wasn't looking to get rich or anything," he says, just
searching for a steady job doing something he loved.
Now age 30, Soong doesn't even have that. He has been out of work
since January 2002, when ChevronTexaco outsourced his job to India.
And like millions of other Americans, he can't find work in IT. Soong
doesn't see his situation improving anytime soon, and you can hear the
despair in his voice. "There's no sense of hope," he says. "No hope
for college graduates, no hope for people looking for a job, no hope
for any of us."
It wasn't always that way. After graduating from college, Soong stayed
in Sacramento for two years working as a programmer in the data
warehouse group at Intel. He then left to work as a consultant for
PricewaterhouseCoopers, based out of Boston, a job that sent him
across country and all over the world. It was a dream job. In 1999 he
returned to California to join a mortgage dotcom, but interest rates
were high and the fledgling company never got off the ground. Soong
was laid off three months after he started.
He wasn't worried, however. "My skills were in demand," says Soong,
who is an expert at several database and programming languages
including SAP ABAP/4, Oracle SQL, C++, HTML and Web Development Tools.
After briefly working on a contract for HP, he moved back to the East
Coast for a full-time position with Accenture. But again he was laid
off. "I was in a building with 500 people," says Soong. "Then they
started to offshore. Nine months later we were down to 50 people."
By this time, Soong was desperate to find a stable position, and in
October 2001 he seemed to have found it; he accepted a contract
position with ChevronTexaco in San Ramon, Calif., to help the oil
giant finish a $200 million to $300 million SAP project. He hoped that
at the end of his six-month contract he could join the company
full-time. But Soong soon noticed something that would not bode well
for his future with the company: It had a lot of workers on H-1B and
L-1 visas, and every day their ranks seemed to grow.
Meanwhile Soong and his fellow consultants weren't training
ChevronTexaco employees, but visa candidates and offshore personnel.
The American employees and contract workers were slowly being let go,
20 every two weeks or so. With 1,000 cubicles spread out over two
floors, the changes were hard to notice. "It was subtle," says Soong.
So subtle that he was shocked when his turn came. In January, halfway
through his six-month $60,000 contract, Soong was called in to an
office on the fifth floor to meet with two senior managers he had
never seen before. "People kept telling me I was doing an excellent
job," he says. "Why would they get rid of me?" Nevertheless, they told
him he wasn't performing well enough. "They tried that on me. I told
them my program works great, I had trained everyone, and my full-time
ChevronTexaco manager can back me up. The room was silent for a
minute." Only then did one of the managers close the office door.
"Then they just saidÉ well, they came up with another excuse."
(Chevron Texaco declined to comment for this article.)
Soong began looking for work, but he soon realized the job market had
changed. No one he knew could find a job. At one point he had a lead
on a job in Texas. The company wanted to hire him, but it had signed a
contract with a consultancy—Tata. Still, the company arranged an
interview for Soong. "[The interviewer] hung up on me after 15
seconds," says Soong. He started making inquiries. His friends told
him that Tata only interviewed Americans to be in compliance with the
equal opportunity employment commission, and that no Americans were
ever hired.
After three months of joblessness, he was forced to move back into his
parents' home. Browsing the Internet, Soong found a community of
people in similar circumstances. He spent months talking online to his
fellow unemployed programmers. But he never joined an organization or
even attended a meeting until May, after he heard about Kevin
Flanagan, a programmer at Bank of America's Danville, Calif.,
office—and a former Chevron employee—who shot himself after he was
forced to train his Indian replacement worker.
"It could have been any one of us," Soong says. "His desperation came
from the fact that he felt alone. That is the desperation we all
feel."
Shortly after Flanagan's death, Soong went to his first meeting of an
unemployed tech workers group called No More H-1B—a bold step for
someone who never thought of himself as particularly political. He now
attends meetings at least every other week with Programmers Guild and
Communications Workers of America. For the past two months he has been
handing out fliers in downtown San Francisco, writing letters to his
elected officials and trying to get proposals into the state
legislature that would make it illegal for state contracts to go to
companies that offshore work.
Every day Soong makes the rounds of employment agencies. When he is
lucky he gets a temporary job answering phones or testing video games,
nothing that ever pays more than $10 an hour. Most days he doesn't
work. "I've been able to pay my bills at the end of the month," he
said in early June, "although this month may be a little tough." Two
weeks later, Soong canceled his cell phone and e-mail accounts.
He still gets occasional interviews, but he feels that they are just
for show and that the companies will send the job overseas. Soong
recently decided to send his rŽsumŽ to India, to see if he could get
work there.
"It would be really interesting to work in Bangalore," he says. "But I
was told, 'Daniel, it is against the law for you to work here. You can
come here on vacation, but you can't work here.'"
No Americans Need Apply
Daniel Soong, who lost his programming job to Indian offshore
companies, is willing to relocate to India. But Indian officials have
told him they don't hire Americans.
BY BEN WORTHEN
DANIEL SOONG GOT his first computer in the fifth grade, a Timex
Sinclair that used an audiocassette player for a disk drive and the
family's black-and-white television for a monitor. It cost about a
hundred dollars at Radio Shack and wasn't good for much more than
writing a few snippets of code in Basic. But that was enough to hook
him. By the time he was in high school, he was taking calculus and
advanced mathematics. He declared computer science as his major after
his first semester at Sacramento State.
When he graduated in 1995, information technology was booming. The
Internet was on its way to commercialization, and entrepreneurs were
looking to capitalize on the growth potential in IT. For Soong, a job
in the field was a natural next step on a journey he'd started when he
was 10. "I wasn't looking to get rich or anything," he says, just
searching for a steady job doing something he loved.
Now age 30, Soong doesn't even have that. He has been out of work
since January 2002, when ChevronTexaco outsourced his job to India.
And like millions of other Americans, he can't find work in IT. Soong
doesn't see his situation improving anytime soon, and you can hear the
despair in his voice. "There's no sense of hope," he says. "No hope
for college graduates, no hope for people looking for a job, no hope
for any of us."
It wasn't always that way. After graduating from college, Soong stayed
in Sacramento for two years working as a programmer in the data
warehouse group at Intel. He then left to work as a consultant for
PricewaterhouseCoopers, based out of Boston, a job that sent him
across country and all over the world. It was a dream job. In 1999 he
returned to California to join a mortgage dotcom, but interest rates
were high and the fledgling company never got off the ground. Soong
was laid off three months after he started.
He wasn't worried, however. "My skills were in demand," says Soong,
who is an expert at several database and programming languages
including SAP ABAP/4, Oracle SQL, C++, HTML and Web Development Tools.
After briefly working on a contract for HP, he moved back to the East
Coast for a full-time position with Accenture. But again he was laid
off. "I was in a building with 500 people," says Soong. "Then they
started to offshore. Nine months later we were down to 50 people."
By this time, Soong was desperate to find a stable position, and in
October 2001 he seemed to have found it; he accepted a contract
position with ChevronTexaco in San Ramon, Calif., to help the oil
giant finish a $200 million to $300 million SAP project. He hoped that
at the end of his six-month contract he could join the company
full-time. But Soong soon noticed something that would not bode well
for his future with the company: It had a lot of workers on H-1B and
L-1 visas, and every day their ranks seemed to grow.
Meanwhile Soong and his fellow consultants weren't training
ChevronTexaco employees, but visa candidates and offshore personnel.
The American employees and contract workers were slowly being let go,
20 every two weeks or so. With 1,000 cubicles spread out over two
floors, the changes were hard to notice. "It was subtle," says Soong.
So subtle that he was shocked when his turn came. In January, halfway
through his six-month $60,000 contract, Soong was called in to an
office on the fifth floor to meet with two senior managers he had
never seen before. "People kept telling me I was doing an excellent
job," he says. "Why would they get rid of me?" Nevertheless, they told
him he wasn't performing well enough. "They tried that on me. I told
them my program works great, I had trained everyone, and my full-time
ChevronTexaco manager can back me up. The room was silent for a
minute." Only then did one of the managers close the office door.
"Then they just saidÉ well, they came up with another excuse."
(Chevron Texaco declined to comment for this article.)
Soong began looking for work, but he soon realized the job market had
changed. No one he knew could find a job. At one point he had a lead
on a job in Texas. The company wanted to hire him, but it had signed a
contract with a consultancy—Tata. Still, the company arranged an
interview for Soong. "[The interviewer] hung up on me after 15
seconds," says Soong. He started making inquiries. His friends told
him that Tata only interviewed Americans to be in compliance with the
equal opportunity employment commission, and that no Americans were
ever hired.
After three months of joblessness, he was forced to move back into his
parents' home. Browsing the Internet, Soong found a community of
people in similar circumstances. He spent months talking online to his
fellow unemployed programmers. But he never joined an organization or
even attended a meeting until May, after he heard about Kevin
Flanagan, a programmer at Bank of America's Danville, Calif.,
office—and a former Chevron employee—who shot himself after he was
forced to train his Indian replacement worker.
"It could have been any one of us," Soong says. "His desperation came
from the fact that he felt alone. That is the desperation we all
feel."
Shortly after Flanagan's death, Soong went to his first meeting of an
unemployed tech workers group called No More H-1B—a bold step for
someone who never thought of himself as particularly political. He now
attends meetings at least every other week with Programmers Guild and
Communications Workers of America. For the past two months he has been
handing out fliers in downtown San Francisco, writing letters to his
elected officials and trying to get proposals into the state
legislature that would make it illegal for state contracts to go to
companies that offshore work.
Every day Soong makes the rounds of employment agencies. When he is
lucky he gets a temporary job answering phones or testing video games,
nothing that ever pays more than $10 an hour. Most days he doesn't
work. "I've been able to pay my bills at the end of the month," he
said in early June, "although this month may be a little tough." Two
weeks later, Soong canceled his cell phone and e-mail accounts.
He still gets occasional interviews, but he feels that they are just
for show and that the companies will send the job overseas. Soong
recently decided to send his rŽsumŽ to India, to see if he could get
work there.
"It would be really interesting to work in Bangalore," he says. "But I
was told, 'Daniel, it is against the law for you to work here. You can
come here on vacation, but you can't work here.'"
