Note to self: Do Not Fly on any Indian Airlines.

Derg said:
If you guys think it's just India that has those issues.
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So what you're saying is that it's all HU-MONS that are terrible.

Yes, I understand. I've seen what gets self-published in the relatively unencumbered environment of the internet.

Ah … and you go on to say that the only real solution is some kind of scorched-earth cataclysmic event, and that the only truly provident and intelligent among us are the ones pursuing that objective.

Well that all seems good and reasonable. Here's your beer back.
 
Minuteman said:
So what you're saying is that it's all HU-MONS that are terrible.

Yes, I understand. I've seen what gets self-published in the relatively unencumbered environment of the internet.

Ah … and you go on to say that the only real solution is some kind of scorched-earth cataclysmic event, and that the only truly provident and intelligent among us are the ones pursuing that objective.

Well that all seems good and reasonable. Here's your beer back.
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It's just a lot easier to look out of the window at "those" people than it is to dig around in the dark corners of our own couch to see that, well, ridiculousness isn't a cultural thing, it's a universal human condition.

Like when one of my FO's sneered at the Caribbean work ethic. Then we saw the exact same thing flying through Atlanta. And then New York.

We've gotten a lot of stuff handed to us as Americans and we're awesome at sneering our nose at people we assume to be inferior to us.
 
swisspilot said:
Really? I guess you are an expert on India, ever been there?

I think a lot of people here, posting comments really have no clue, while it is true that a big majority of Indian pilots are below western standards, you guys forget the big picture. Becoming a pilot in India is not easy, and being a pilot is a huge status, a lot of spoiled and rich kids end up in this field, some of them have never moved a finger in their lives to do anything, so they are not used to make any special effort to get there, all they want is the uniform. There are set up marriages to gain a position within an airline, bribes to pass interviews and so on....unfortunately this is the reality of most Indian pilots, but it does not represent at all the Indian work culture, in other fields where you are required to work your way up you have amazing skilled professionals, that export their abilities world wide.
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And in those other fields, you never find corruption like that.
Oh.
Wait.

In my experience, and I've gotta say it, for every one good, competent, qualified, smart Indian that I've met in tech, I've had to deal with at least a dozen obdurate, obstinate, ignorant, wrong engineers whose approach to problems fell quite solidly into "baffle them with •."

And I've worked with A LOT of Indians. Indian recruiters supply Indian candidates; Indian hiring managers hire Indians to staff the operation, seemingly based more on how much bling they're wearing than their knowledge and ability. It's a really ugly thing to say, because I can't say it without sounding racist... but it's absolutely true. And it has nothing to do with race—I've worked with a number of truly excellent Indian engineers. Culture, on the other hand...

Corporations balked at paying more for good US coders, so they lobbied for more H1Bs to stagnate wages.

I found this comment the other day, which I found telling:

My brother - who is CEO of a tech company in Silicon Valley - asked me to post his comments. Here they are:

“... When we needed to hire some key design engineers about a year ago, we tried hiring Americans. We interviewed about a half dozen people, but they all wanted way too much $$ and their skill levels did not seem to be where we needed them to be. So, instead, we ended up hiring 2 Russian engineers as temps, and also joined up with an Indian design company, where we have 4 or 5 more engineers working in India on our project. This is working well for us, despite the language and distances.

I am strongly for buying and hiring American. But, if you really can’t find what you need, it is not possible to stick with that philosophy. We have to get things done. The temp engineers I was considering for the project, who did not seem really all that capable to us, wanted anywhere from $110 to $150/hour. The Russians are on site and charging us $65 and $75/hour. They are very dedicated and workaholics. The Indians charge us $35/hour, and are excellent engineers.”
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Or to put it a different way "We didn't want to pay what it cost to hire US workers, so we hired H1Bs and outsourced."

If I had a nickel for every time I heard "But I can get ten people in India for the price of one here," or even "I can get two Indians QA guys for the cost of one American, and they'll work fourteen hours a day."

Headcount, even headcount-by-proxy, is power, to a manager. So to climb the ladder, you build empires. The bigger your empire, the more capable you appear. That is the I-fox-you-knot theme in the tech world, and competence isn't even a metric.

The simple fact is that India is pumping out people with paper qualifications and no actual knowledge, and they band together to benefit themselves. This isn't to say that they're in any way incapable of being me, or better, but that's not the culture. And that's the difference between judging a culture and judging a race.

Oh, and by the way, I ran this by two of my (very good!) Indian coworkers at one point (at Palm), because I wanted their opinion and a sanity check. They agreed completely, and said that it's an awful problem*. They didn't know what to do about it, but they assured me that they see the same thing, and that they themselves have trouble standing out and getting into the really interesting jobs because of it. They told me lots of gritty details about the whole thing, even going over some resumes for candidates and pointing out how I could tell that they were fake (So I didn't waste my time phone screening or interviewing them).

-Fox
* - You see, geeks are geeks. And they want technology to succeed, and advance, and they want to do cool, excellent things. And the industry is in the gutter because of this, and that hurts everyone.
 
Acrofox said:
And in those other fields, you never find corruption like that.
Oh.
Wait.

In my experience, and I've gotta say it, for every one good, competent, qualified, smart Indian that I've met in tech, I've had to deal with at least a dozen obdurate, obstinate, ignorant, wrong engineers whose approach to problems fell quite solidly into "baffle them with *I don't have the education to emote without using a curse word*."

And I've worked with A LOT of Indians. Indian recruiters supply Indian candidates; Indian hiring managers hire Indians to staff the operation, seemingly based more on how much bling they're wearing than their knowledge and ability. It's a really ugly thing to say, because I can't say it without sounding racist... but it's absolutely true. And it has nothing to do with race—I've worked with a number of truly excellent Indian engineers. Culture, on the other hand...

Corporations balked at paying more for good US coders, so they lobbied for more H1Bs to stagnate wages.

I found this comment the other day, which I found telling:



Or to put it a different way "We didn't want to pay what it cost to hire US workers, so we hired H1Bs and outsourced."

If I had a nickel for every time I heard "But I can get ten people in India for the price of one here," or even "I can get two Indians QA guys for the cost of one American, and they'll work fourteen hours a day."

Headcount, even headcount-by-proxy, is power, to a manager. So to climb the ladder, you build empires. The bigger your empire, the more capable you appear. That is the I-fox-you-knot theme in the tech world, and competence isn't even a metric.

The simple fact is that India is pumping out people with paper qualifications and no actual knowledge, and they band together to benefit themselves. This isn't to say that they're in any way incapable of being me, or better, but that's not the culture. And that's the difference between judging a culture and judging a race.

Oh, and by the way, I ran this by two of my (very good!) Indian coworkers at one point (at Palm), because I wanted their opinion and a sanity check. They agreed completely, and said that it's an awful problem*. They didn't know what to do about it, but they assured me that they see the same thing, and that they themselves have trouble standing out and getting into the really interesting jobs because of it. They told me lots of gritty details about the whole thing, even going over some resumes for candidates and pointing out how I could tell that they were fake (So I didn't waste my time phone screening or interviewing them).

-Fox
* - You see, geeks are geeks. And they want technology to succeed, and advance, and they want to do cool, excellent things. And the industry is in the gutter because of this, and that hurts everyone.
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My fave is the "deviated septum" scam. One of my all-time-most-diligent students was Indian. He did very well here in the US, then returned to India where he took the top score in the nation on two of the DGCA knowledge tests. His American medicals never had issues. Before he left for home, he told me that when he took his Indian medical exam he would get a no-pass for deviated septum. Yup, he did. Almost everyone in India does. The cure is either to have a $10K surgery or give the examiner a $1K bribe. Nice system, eh? But @Derg is somewhat correct; There is corruption everywhere. Personally, I don't think it's much of a problem in the US at the low end; high end not so much. But Asia, South America, many parts of the Mid-East, Africa, and Russia? ... Yeah. Big time. Every level of almost everything needs grease. On the other hand, I think they could all take lessons in the trade from India.
 
Derg said:
I don't know, take a peek at our political process, what it takes to get into office and I'd say that the top end is as corrupt as any other country. Much less blood, of course.
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That's what I was saying... Low end every day transactions in the US are not often jacked up. High end transactions almost always, despite the great efforts to maintain an appearance of propriety.
 
I had an Indian student that could barely drive a scooter to school and now she's a A320 captain. This wasn't 20 years ago this was like 6-7 years ago.

Surprisingly her dad was a big shot at an Indian Airline.

There is a lot of corruption and under the table deals in India. Hard work is not the best way to get a seat at an airline in India. It takes money and family connections.

I have flown Indian airlines and wasn't too worried about it because I know the captain was an expat.

Of course there are the select few that are good pilots and take the profession very serious, but unfortunately, that is a select few. For the most part they want to just wear the uniform and post pilot post on Facebook.
 
Acrofox said:
Or to put it a different way "We didn't want to pay what it cost to hire US workers, so we hired H1Bs and outsourced."
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Any H1B will always cost more then an American worker, to give you an idea NESTLE, a Swiss company, hires a lot of Swiss people to work at their CT base, on average a swiss worker costs the company 3 times more then an American to fill the same position, no one will ever think to move over to the US unless he would make more then 100K a year.
 
Goonie said:
I had an Indian student that could barely drive a scooter to school and now she's a A320 captain. This wasn't 20 years ago this was like 6-7 years ago.

Surprisingly her dad was a big shot at an Indian Airline.

There is a lot of corruption and under the table deals in India. Hard work is not the best way to get a seat at an airline in India. It takes money and family connections.

I have flown Indian airlines and wasn't too worried about it because I know the captain was an expat.

Of course there are the select few that are good pilots and take the profession very serious, but unfortunately, that is a select few. For the most part they want to just wear the uniform and post pilot post on Facebook.
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Kind of like in another country where nepotism, big name universities, and immense barriers to entry exist? Murica. Perspective is a funny thing ain't it?
 
turbomax97 said:
Kind of like in another country where nepotism, big name universities, and immense barriers to entry exist? Murica. Perspective is a funny thing ain't it?
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Maybe so, but I feel pretty confident that despite the flaws in our process the final product (professional aviation) is in every objective, measurable way better than what India turns out.
 
I've met really smart and brilliant Indians who really work hard and know their crap.

I've met lazy and incompetent Indians as well.

Good and bad...hey just like any other nationality!
 
swisspilot said:
Any H1B will always cost more then an American worker, to give you an idea NESTLE, a Swiss company, hires a lot of Swiss people to work at their CT base, on average a swiss worker costs the company 3 times more then an American to fill the same position, no one will ever think to move over to the US unless he would make more then 100K a year.
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Go home @swisspilot, you're drunk.

-Fox
 
PositionAndHold said:
I get what you're trying to say. However, when over 600 hundred students are suspended for cheating on their exams that says some thing. Most of the people helping them cheat (by scaling walls of the schools) were their parents. I think it's a little more widespread than you're letting on.

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I thought you were talking about re USAF for a second there...
 
swisspilot said:
Any H1B will always cost more then an American worker
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No American will pick strawberries for $2/hour while a Mexican might. When I had my first calculus encounters there was a Russian guy digging foundation at my friends house. Turned out to be a math professor , but would much rather work in construction because he could make more money for the family. Mind you he was only 300 miles west of his home and making multiple yearly salaries in a month. Guess what, no local guy would dig for the same money, let alone teach you calc on a smoke break.

Why would a large corporation pay more to hire H1B? In any case, some scholars recognize a different advantage of H1B:

[/QUOTE]

My father was told way back then, that if he'd done the same job here as he did in Europe, he'd make 10x the money. For him money was not the most important thing. Some people might be much more hard pressed to immigrate (poor, starving, no prospects, persecuted etc)
Some will immigrate solely for the sake of flying.
In any case the Indians I met in college were aware of the conditions in their country but honestly most of them were SMART, HARD WORKING and INTELLIGENT. Makes me think race makes no difference at all, and if anything they'd be better in math than the locals, so it must be the system that screws it all up.
 
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swisspilot said:
Any H1B will always cost more then an American worker, to give you an idea NESTLE, a Swiss company, hires a lot of Swiss people to work at their CT base, on average a swiss worker costs the company 3 times more then an American to fill the same position, no one will ever think to move over to the US unless he would make more then 100K a year.
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Since I work in Switzerland a lot, and have friends on the H1B here in the US. In my industry, the individuals are paid 10K or so less than the US worker to compensate for the additional costs. After a number of years, they do have the support for a green card. Their experiences have varied from very positive to the "I cant go home, so I have no choice but to deal with this." Their reasons for coming to the US are pretty varied from escaping the poor conditions of their home country (for example Zimbabwe) to having more options in their field of work (Belgium) etc. The salaries that most people are moving for are making less than 100K a year though.

In Switzerland, we have another complicating factor. My industry does not have enough Swiss to work on my projects so we use other Europeans (Germans/Austrians). In fact those that are living in Switzerland and work in my industry by and large come from different countries. The Swiss work visa requires that we pay the exact same salary to these workers which throws my expense listing way off. (I budget per hours and expenses, so I am fine with higher hourly fees but my expenses are more or less fixed). The equalizing salary is paid directly to the foreign national much like an out of pocket expense. In one case, that meant we had to pay $1,500 for their time in Switzerland per week. A rather great idea, but I am surprised the Swiss governement does not take this equalizing amount as a tax to support its residents than pay others for working in Switzerland (as a note, we also provide a per diem to these works and pay for their hotel/travel just like we would for any one).

I have been thinking a lot about spending some time as an Expat as I understand the Swiss packages offered are pretty good. We ran tax rates a few weeks ago and were surprisingly comparable, although cost of living is of course much higher. My biggest hold up though is what to do with an English speaking only girlfriend who may not have the same job opportunities that I do.
 
xargos said:
No American will pick strawberries for $2/hour while a Mexican might.
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And that's kinda the point. If farm immigrants weren't here picking strawberries at $2 an hour then U.S. citizens would be doing it at $12 an hour (yeah, I'm pullin' that figure out my six) or more. Sure, prices would go up, but that would be made up in other areas of the economy.

As long as we condone paying slave wages for any segment of the workforce then all wages will be chipped at in the race to the bottom by the WalMarts of the world.

Just my thought on the matter.
 
Oh, and as much as I admire and respect Michio Kaku, he's simply wrong on the H-1B program not taking away jobs from U.S. citizens:

Pink Slips at Disney. But First, Training Foreign Replacements

And perhaps Mr. Kaku should consider that the reason we can no longer rely upon our educational system to produce the scientists we need is because H-1B give us an out. Remove H-1B from the equation and we'd have no choice but to improve our own educational system to compensate.
 
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Derg said:
It's just a lot easier to look out of the window at "those" people than it is to dig around in the dark corners of our own couch to see that, well, ridiculousness isn't a cultural thing, it's a universal human condition.

Like when one of my FO's sneered at the Caribbean work ethic. Then we saw the exact same thing flying through Atlanta. And then New York.

We've gotten a lot of stuff handed to us as Americans and we're awesome at sneering our nose at people we assume to be inferior to us.
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Didn't Delta have to straighten out Korean Airlines in the '90s, due in large part to their cultural issues causing several high profile fatal accidents?
 
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