Let the `’Light Shine

A great blogger is asking my opinion on the opportunity in India right now for IT professionals.  My opinion is, as it was before, that the opportunity in the USA is better still.  My reply is so long that I’d rather post it, as opposed to replying to a comment.

Opportunity, sure.
if it is so splendid right now in India, why are you here ?  I will venture a guess, and it’s only a guess …
A comparable job in India will still not pay you a salary comparable in USD. 

A comparable job in India simply does not exist, because here in the USA, people arrive to work at what … 8 or 9am, and by 5:10pm there is nobody but the night guard to be found in the building. 

In India managers work the people to their last nerve. They push them to the edge of insanity from cumulated stress.  Push push push. The person, the YOU that sits in front of the monitor gets diminished to your willingness to spend 16 of your 24 waking hours at the office.  Not one single opportunity to tell you how insignificant you are, and how countless scores of others are waiting in line for your job is ever passed up.

Not for one moment am I ignoring the sudden rise of what has been happening in India lately. I was a programmer in Silicon Valley right through the IT Bubble of Y2K.  Believe it or not, it felt exactly like what India is feeling now.  something like this  WHHHOOOOEEEEEEE … we are all invinsible …. !!!

But then again, plenty of the good people participating in this IT boom in India right now, actually lived through it here in the Valley too. How ironic. To go through that twice. I wouldn’t want to. 

Granted, and I have to make this note: I have not been in India, I have no idea what life there was like before, and I have no idea what life there is like now.  but my friend is there as we speak, in Hyderabad. And the amount of People from India who are applying yearly for their H1B visas (some through Multiple employers!!!!)  make me believe that the USA still reigns supreme. 

This past week we discussed the earth and our limited resources and global warming in my ethics class.  What a great heated debate.  But how it ties in with the immigrant issue is that for so many thousands of years, humans have migrated around the globe in search of the current green pastures.  In them the instinct (same as in the elephants and other migratory species)  that for a season one needs to go north, and then for the next season the greens will be flourishing in the south again.

With all this modern obsession about private property and keeping others off your land, humans have in a way very much disrupted this pattern of even giving the earth some space to breathe, heal and replenish.

I know I sometimes have little outbursts when I get angry at the fact that for almost 6 years now, I have kept within these laws of how immigrants should behave, only to be bested by supposedly “illegal” immigrants who work without a care, and lead their lives.  I realize that it’s not the other immigrants I’m angry at. It is my own sense of fear.  My fear that one wrong step may cause authorities to frown upon my application to a green card one day, and therefore I keep the laws and in the process sacrifice my sense of self.