For 32-year old engineer Manohar Singh, life has come a full circle. He is now without a job.
It was a cruel twist of fate — he was doing well at security technology firm McAfee in Bengaluru when he convinced himself that US was the place to be. “I always wanted to start an IT services business of my own. I wanted to see how business got generated,” Singh says.
A US-based placement agency arranged the H-1B Visa, a license for American firms to employ foreign nationals in specialty occupations. Singh reached California in time for a project interview on September 15.
But the world changed.
The same day, investment banking giant Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy protection, the largest bankruptcy in US history. The country, and the rest of globe, had started slipping into a financial crisis that is now being equated with The Great Depression.
The interviews dried up. Job offers that sprung up were at ridiculously low salaries. The placement agencies, under duress themselves, started playing tricks.
“They wanted to me to fake experience; wanted to me to add McAffe US in place of India. I had never worked in the US before,” Singh, who returned to India in October, says. It is doubly difficult to land a job in the security domain in the US, unless one is a ‘Green Card’ holder or a US citizen.
When he refused to comply, the agents “diplomatically” removed the mention of any nationality from his resume.
The edited CVs went to the US offices of HP, Wipro, CSC, and SlashSupport among others. Singh says he cleared most of the interviews he appeared in but the pay offered wouldn’t support a “decent life”. Many companies had already announced eliminations and the market was seeing an over supply of local talent.
“Some fellow Indians I stayed with in California accepted projects at salaries as low as $35-40,000 per annum while to lead a decent life in the Bay Area, you need at least $60,000,” he says.
Before he landed in the US, the placement agency had agreed to find him jobs not less than $85,000 a year; they would charge 20 per cent of the per hour earning as commission.
Singh, meanwhile, tired of the waiting game — he had already blown up nearly five lakh in travel, food and payments made to the agency. Back in India, he had a home and personal loan, as well as a dependant family.
“Many Indians I knew were too ashamed to come back to India. They thought they would embarrass themselves before friends and family after boasting of being in the US. They either waited on for projects to happen or accepted ones at a very low pay,” Singh says.
He came back to Bengaluru but found, to great dismay, that things were not very much different. Most technology companies had ‘frozen’ positions and a firm that offered him Rs 19 lakhs before he went to the US now said they could only pay Rs 12 lakh.
Singh still argues with this company; tries to convince its human resources department that his 11-year experience and expertise is not in sync with the trimmed offer.
As Singh sees his bank balance shrink with loan installment outflows every month, he may have to reconcile to the inevitable. Take up whatever is on offer and wait for the dark clouds to fade away.
Source:
http://www.dc-epaper.com/dc/dch/2008/12/08/index.shtml?ArtId=016_006&Search=Y
