The H-1B Problem/ Opportunity
The case for Remote Jamaican Engineering Talent
There is a clear shortage of Software Engineers to tackle the world’s problems. To highlight the issue let’s take a look at the United States’ H-1B Visa Program which was instituted in 1990. The program was initially meant to bring highly skilled laborers into the US for work in highly specialized fields such as science and technology. However, Over the years, critics of the program have been pointing out that the use of the program has been abused by top technology companies to hire foreign workers at lower wages than their american counterparts.
Currently, the cap for the H-1B visa is 65,000. A further 20,000 visas that are set aside for applicants with master’s degrees had all available application slots filled within five days of USCIS announcing the availability of the Visas . The current issue the corporations in the United states are facing is the fact that not enough industry ready engineers are leaving college with the requisite training. The reforms being proposed by the Trump administration as well as the temporary ban that has been decreed by Executive order is causing a disruption in the ready supply of skilled workers from India and China. According to Bloomberg In 2012 India takes about 64% of the total number of Visas issued, followed by China at 7.6%.
How was the H-1B administered before The Trump Administration?
To answer this question we have to examine the current status of the H-1B visa program. According to the USCIS as of April 3, 2017 the US Government has temporarily halted premium processing of H-1B applications. This means the stream of workers that were coming into to the US before that date has stopped, forcing US companies to search for people locally to fill these posts as they wait for the 6 month period to end so they can begin fast tracking their H-1B candidates again.
Because of the high amount of applications that would be submitted to the USCIS in the past, it was virtually impossible for immigration officials to sift through them all. They resorted to a makeshift “Lottery” system to decide allocation of the H-1B visas. This, along with the premium processing of applications and top Indian recruiting firms flooding the USCIS with applications to ensure most of their applications get through, created the circumstances that left the H-1B visa system in need of reform.
What’s Jamaica’s Opportunity?
According to JAMPRO, Jamaica is a prime BPO outsourcing location as a result of it being the largest English speaking Caribbean nation. Jamaica’s flight time from Miami is about 90 minutes. Both those factors combined with the cultural alignment Jamaica shares with most developed English-speaking countries in the Western Hemisphere, makes Jamaica an attractive destination for near shoring. The real opportunity however comes in the form of the island’s top three technical universities. The University of the West Indies, The Northern Caribbean University and the University of Technology combined produce over a 1000 graduates holding computer science degrees. With adequate apprenticeship, Jamaica, with help from apprentice initiatives through programs such as Hacker Hostel, can convince these technology companies to stop using systems like the H-1B Visa and instead use that capital to open up satellite offices in Jamaica to house their already trained engineers to work from Jamaica. Why does this make sense? According to David Bain, technical partner to Hacker Hostel, Founder of Alteroo Consulting, and former lecturer at the University of The West Indies, the cost of hiring a Jamaican engineer is about less than 60% of the cost of hiring a US-based engineer based on his findings. It is also worth noting that this analysis is based on the Jamaican industrial wage average for a Junior Level engineer.
How does Hacker Hostel Fit?
The mandate of Hacker Hostel is to build the engineering capacity of Jamaica and the Caribbean twenty fold. The organization plans to achieve this by partnering with “Prento” Alteroo’s emerging software apprenticeship program. Prento is an initiative of Alteroo which takes fresh out of college engineers and suitable 6th form (12th grade) graduates and puts them through a dynamic 6 month intensive program which focuses on preparing these young engineers with the baseline skills they need to be competitive at an international level. Hacker Hostel will facilitate two months of intensive problem solving and collaborative learning with top tier engineering students from all over the World such as MIT, Harvard, Howard, Johns Hopkins, NYU, Humber and Stanford. These engineers will be split into three programs and paired with apprentices based on their skill level.
Structured Program
This is a program specifically for Undergraduate Engineers where they are given two weeks of boot camp-like intensive courses around software development and the principles around Innovation & Entrepreneurship. Following the two week courses, they will be given six weeks to work alongside their Jamaican counterparts to implement a solution. The solutions they will be working on will be from local Startups from the PitchIt Caribbean competition as well as a few other partner organizations.
Unstructured program
This program is aimed at more skilled apprentices, post graduate students and early stage professionals who want to spend their eight weeks strictly working on solutions using their existing skill-sets. The problems they will be working on would be more complex in nature as these are presented by partner organizations who are looking for an eight week MVP to test their respective markets with. These solutions are Industry specific and as such carry a greater challenge to the engineers.
Digital Nomads
This program is aimed at two kinds of people
Startups
These individuals would come to Jamaica already with their fully funded, fully established businesses and all they are looking for is accommodation, co-working space, and introductions to local apprentices and engineers to join their team. They are driven to achieve two main objectives; to establish a remote working team, and to cut their cash burn rate as they search for customers to use the solutions they are building. At the end of their trip they go back home and they leave behind a fully functional offshore team in Jamaica.Nomads
These individuals are highly skilled freelancers who are coming to Jamaica simply for accommodation, co-working space & introduction the local innovation & startup scene in Jamaica. If they so choose they may get involved in projects locally and may choose to continue working on that project once they leave. Usually, they have a main source of income and just travel to countries for experiences, they would work and help to train local apprentices
What does this all mean?
Taken at face value, the H-1B problem seems to be just another controversial action along a string of other controversial actions taken by the new administration and seemingly nothing to care about. But looking closely at the incongruity that exists between Tech companies and their need to hire, train and retain valuable engineering talent indicates otherwise. With the immigration system that exists now, such as it is, the resources needed to exploit this change in policy are all located in Jamaica. Indeed, the time is ripe for Jamaica’s fledgling and growing BPO sector to step into a new phase of developing HIGHLY skilled engineers and using the might of the collective bargaining power of CARICOM to persuade top tech companies to build offices here in Jamaica and throughout the Caribbean. They will hire engineers who have participated in the “Prento” program facilitated by Alteroo and Hacker Hostel, because they will know that our apprenticeship program adheres to international standards and principles of software engineering.
This is the future of the Caribbean, the time has come for us to become an internationally renowned knowledge destination. The era of the sand, sea and rum has passed, to survive this coming new economy we must fully embrace our digital future.
