BI Vendor CEO Blasts Gates' Position on H-1B

No need to eliminate cap on visas, claims Information Builders' Cohen

By Don Tennant

May 9, 2005 12:00 PM ET

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Computerworld - Gerald Cohen, the outspoken founder and CEO of New York-based business intelligence software vendor Information Builders Inc., spoke with Computerworld late last month about the controversy surrounding offshore outsourcing and the H-1B visa program. Excerpts follow:

Bill Gates told an audience in Washington recently that the U.S. needs to get rid of the cap on H-1B visas. What's your position on that? He's full of it. He says, "I'd hire a lot more American engineers if I could find them -- they're not available, and that's why we're going to China and India." He's going there because it's just cheaper. He can find all the engineers he wants in this country.

A lot of CEOs at companies like yours are saying that they just can't find the people. That's bull. You know who wants [to get rid of the cap]? The Indian companies. The way the Indian companies work is they have to have a certain number of people here, and a lot more people back there - so they're the ones who want to get all these people in. And they don't even pay them American wages -- they just pay them as cheaply as they can.

But surely you use overseas labor to lower your own costs. I'm going to put two hats on. With one hat, I say we want to keep jobs in New York City. The other hat says that we want the company to be prosperous, and if I can lower my costs by doing work overseas, the company's more prosperous. But I'm not so sure that's better for the country.

How much of your development work is done outside of the U.S.? We do a little quality-assurance work outside of the U.S. We find it's economical to do the routine kind of QA work [overseas].


Gerald Cohen, founder and CEO of Information Builders Inc.

What's your response to the unemployed U.S. IT worker who says you should be keeping those jobs in the U.S.? We have to [do business] economically. It's a real problem. The government is providing us with no help, so we're doing [what we have to do] ourselves.
If you look further down the road, there's going to be a huge drain of IT jobs. A lot of these jobs that go overseas are the spawning grounds for future jobs. So the whole industry's going to move offshore.

What do you want the government to do to help? [Indian vendors] will bring people into the U.S. cheaply. No! When you[bring people into] the U.S., you have to pay American wages. That would be a minimum standard, for example.
There are a lot of small things that could be done, but I have no solution for how we're going to throttle this in some way.

A lot of people say the education system in the U.S. is failing to provide qualified IT workers. Do you disagree? That's bunk. Why do you have declining computer science majors? Because every parent is saying, "Why major in computer science when all the jobs are going offshore?" It feeds itself.
And I guarantee you, if it doesn't stop, in a couple years, you're not going to have much of an IT industry here.

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