Hopes Shine Bright in H1-B Dusk

It is perhaps their thick-skins and ingenuity that will see the Indian techies through the rough sea of impending layoffs, retrenchments and dot.com busts in the wake of the US economic slowdown, job market analysts here say.

Thanks to the slump, average dollar rates that H1-B techies command have gone down from $80-$100 dollars per hour by as much as half to one-fourth.

The average time H1-B professionals are spending on the bench has also increased from two weeks to a month or more in the past couple of months. Though exact figures are difficult to estimate, the number of H1-B techies on the bench has increased 5-10 times the usual numbers.

Instead of a scramble for professionals qualified in technologies such as Java, ASP, VB etc., retrenchments and job cuts confront the techies.

But, this is only a temporary phase and the Indian techie will survive it all, the experts in the industry say. There are enough jobs for the techies, whether fresh or already working there, but way down the value chain, they point out.

"It's the driest in five years. There is a lot of uncertainty. The past 2-3 months has been a tight situation. But, America doesn't let you down," says an optimistic Xavier Augustin, CEO Y-Axis.com, an on-line H1B recruitment portal.

"It's a rich economy, a vast market, and the poorest of the states there is richer than average economies of many developing nations."

The situation is only temporary. Many of them will be absorbed in new sectors such as ERP, which is staging a comeback, Unix technologies and fundamentals such as C and C++. Besides, there is a demand from new companies in the US, and also newer markets in China, Japan, Singapore and European countries, though there's nothing like the US, he adds.

It may not be as rosy as it was in 2000. But, the stigma of longer bench periods and the huge Indian man's ego only makes them wait and watch the scenario, take up lesser jobs like data entry and meanwhile upgrade and acquire the pertinent skill sets, instead of returning to India, says Sharmila Rao, business manager of Mousetrap Careers, a consultancy firm.

"Indians, with all due respect to them, are very thick-skinned, have huge egos and clever. Because of the egos, those already emigrated do not want to come back to face the so-called loss of face at having returned, and therefore take up odd-small jobs," she says.

Even if there are retrenchments, the techies will manage to find other jobs if their technology fundamentals in areas such as C, C++ etc are good, she adds.

"Also, being clever, most of those who have acquired the H1-B visa, which is for a three-year period, do not resign from their current employment in India, and prefer to wait here till the consultant firm sponsoring them informs them about prospective openings," she adds.

Moreover, there are plenty of jobs for techies there in the fields of telecom, embedded technology, Oracle, Power Builder, etc., she adds.

"It's like Y2K. Nobody's going to come back. Only the situation is going to get highly competitive and it will be survival of the fittest," says P Ashalatha, Youngsoft Software Development and Training, a sister concern of an Atlanta-based consultancy firm. The downturn will do the Indian techie good in yet another respect. With companies favouring offshore development to cut costs, more techies will be trained on newer technologies in companies in India.

This will lead to the emergence of a new labour force qualified to work in the US and thus create more demand for the H1-B visa, Augustin says.

A classic case of "H1-B is dead. Long live H1-B!"?