Evan Dodds – Non-work-related blog

Finished reading this book (by N.Sivakumar) over the past weekend. Hadn’t heard of it previously, but a coworker suggested it to me at lunch one day and it sounded pretty interesting.

I found the book to be slightly less professional than expected. It was an unabashedly self-published book, written by a non-native English speaker, and it had been only lightly edited. Grammatical mistakes aside, he made a number of good points.

In one of his more indisputable points, the author commented on the overtly hostile work environment many H1-B visa holders face here in the US. From the subtle pain-in-the-ass of having to fill out so many forms and contort yourself into the complexities of maintaining the exact same job for several years (or start all over if a green-card is your goal) foisted upon these legal immigrants by the government… down to the derisive comments and unwarranted, stereotyped perceptions from their peers. At the end of their day, it’s in many real ways pretty unpleasant to be an H1-B worker.

He also talked about a bunch of less obvious things: pointers to Indian H1-B workers on how to avoid some of the stereotypes by making behavioral changes (avoiding curry), etc.

It was in one of these sort of “pointing out things about the world” sections that he made one mistake that frustrated me and caused me to lose some respect for the book; he fell into one of the same behaviors that he so calmly had been criticizing just a chapter or two earlier. He stereotyped various groups of workers by their ethnic background. I think he was doing it to try to make the point that different immigrant workers have different cultural backgrounds, and this is without question.

Oh well. My key takeaways from the book were:

1. H1B visa workers (or, at least, foreign-immigrant technical workers) have played a huge part in our prolonged period of prosperity by keeping American companies at the top of their game.
2. H1B visa workers face a gauntlet of frustration and discrimination in their effort to “just do the job” and feed their families, etc.

These both seem true to me, and it’s a shame it’s not widely recognized. As a member of IEEE, I was pretty frustrated over the past few years to see the protectionist standpoint put forth by this organization in various attempts to limit H1B visa numbers. The US needs all the talent it can get, wherever it comes from (and even better if this talent has been educated at zero cost to the US taxpayer).