I suspect any American child grows up wondering what it would be like to be President and what he or she would do as President. We, of course, don't think about dealing with thorny economics issues and rogue nations, or the real world of making national laws, which some would compare to the infamous practice of sausage making featured in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. We think in terms of symbols and ideals, e.g., eliminating poverty and peace in the world.
There are several distinctly American archetypes, among them the frontier, the Horatio Alger ideal of the self-made success story from humble origins, and a diverse nation built by immigrants and their descendants. In particular, I was inspired by Emma Lazarus' immortal lines from "The New Colossus":
"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries sheWith silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
I knew early on that I was different: my parents also spoke French, and we sometimes ate different dishes, especially cretons and tourtierre.
In my daydream, I see myself swearing in a diverse group of new citizens on Ellis Island, assuring them that the American ideal of liberty and opportunity is just as alive and relevant today as it was generations ago when my ancestors immigrated from Quebec looking for a better life. I want them to know I'm excited for them but also excited for America. Today we are one: we are all Americans, and we share a common destiny. I work, not for the sake of my own vanity or glory, but for the sake of our ambitions and the future of our children and grandchldren.
In Silicon Valley this week, Rahul Naik became a US citizen. I wish I had been there, because it's been also my dream for him since we first met in 1999.
I had accepted a subcontract position, commuting from Chicago as a temp corporate DBA at Advantest. The incumbent DBA had just given notice, accepting a position as a consultant in a robust DBA job market. What I remember most my first day was hearing in my first minute of meeting my client boss, the comptroller, that his first priority was replacing me. (I later discovered the contractor was marking up my rate over 100%; I was annoyed because they had earlier walked away from the table demanding I cut my own rate by 15%--plus I was more interested in a longer-term engagement, and their exploitive rate worked against that.)
Rahul, who worked as a perm for the same contractor, was away for the training; I would later learn that he had reviewed resumes for the position and had recommended me. In the meanwhile, the incumbent DBA and his crony in the accounting department, among other things, bad-mouthed Rahul to me. It would later turn out that the DBA (Vince) had had ambitions for the vacant IT manager's slot and had been turned down. One of the things he had promised accounting manager Susan was that once he was selected, he would bring her on his team as a systems analyst, a position Rahul was then holding.
When Vince left, Susan was unhappy with both Rahul and myself, even more when the comptroller chose a former Tyco IT manager as our new boss. Rumor has it Vince was fired on his second day of work for the consulting company, and Susan applied political pressure to get Vince rehired. My boss used another colleague's trip home to India to justify extending my original 5-week contract and had me continue as lead for the company's ERP production database, much to Vince's chagrin. Vince started spreading a rumor that the new manager had made me an offer, which was totally false. My boss was upset at me because he was convinced I had started the rumor; he had been dropping subtle hints about going perm, but I wasn't interested and did nothing to encourage him. In fact, I had specifically told Vince that my contract had a no-compete clause, and I expected to leave by the end of the month. Vince resigned for the second time in less than 3 months, getting an offer with stock options from a prior employer. Susan, of course, held me responsible for her crony leaving.
Rahul and I immediately hit it off, and we were the lynchpins of the new boss' aggressive IT agenda. Among other things, our manager cancelled an unproductive Clarify implementation contract, headed by a former Advantest manager whom had refused to move in a corporate headquarter relocation, and named Rahul project manager. (We got limited functionality in production in less than 2 months, after several months of the contractor being unable to do the same in a test environment.)
I fondly remember those days, a number of times capped off by dinner together at a nearby Sunnyvale Indian buffet restaurant with a slow-serve mango ice cream machine. (I had developed a taste for mango during my business trips to Brazil.) Rahul introduced me (and still tutors me) to the wonders of Indian culture, including Bollywood and Indian music videos. As a man with four beautiful sisters, I am especially enchanted with the observance of Raksha Bandhan (re: raksha-bandhan.com):
"Rakhi or Raksha is a sacred thread embellished with sister's love and affection for her brother. On the day of Raksha Bandhan sisters tie Rakhi on their brother's wrist and express their love for him. By accepting a Rakhi from a sister a brother gladly takes on the responsibility of protecting [his] sister. In Indian tradition the frail thread of Rakhi is considered stronger than iron chains as it binds brothers and sisters in an inseparable bond of love and trust."Rahul proudly wore his Rakhi (which had piqued my curiosity) and joyfully spoke of his baby niece, something I can relate to having 9 wonderful nieces and 6 precious grand-nieces. I remembered that after I learned of his subsequent marriage and the birth of their first-born daughter.
I loved the synergy at work between us; I had (and continue to have) utter faith in his professional competence, integrity, intellect, judgment and ability to deliver. I sometimes called us the Lennon/McCartney of Oracle-based applications; but I think, with Rahul's considerable interpersonal skills, he has enjoyed synergistic relationships throughout his professional career.
I also saw, through Rahul's experience, the dark side of the H1B program. He mentioned to me how his start as an Advantest subcontractor had come from his own initiative to find a follow-up assignment, and the company didn't like the lower rate and punished him in a number of ways, including canceling promised bonuses. Our boss, in fact, had tried in a couple of ways to meddle in Rahul's affairs that risked his being sent back to India before the requisite 7 years to a green card: once he offered the contractor to increase Rahul's rate if they would give Rahul a raise (the company took the rate increase, but Rahul did not see a dime); later, after the contractor went through a merger (my boss hoped that Rahul's contract would go unnoticed), they reassigned Rahul to a project with a better rate near San Francisco, and my boss was seriously thinking of going to court to block, on least on a temporary basis, Rahul's leaving. I had to jawbone my boss, because he was playing Russian roulette with Rahul's life. (To this day, I don't understand why Rahul went back to Advantest after getting his green card.)
I, of course, didn't want Rahul to leave. I think Rahul had a moderating effect on my boss, whom had a penchant for impetuous decisions. For instance, my boss had, without notice, postponed an email account migration for managers (affecting our web expense setups) and arbitrarily moved up go-live 3 weeks (not even checking, for instance, whether the sofware was installed on the production server). I overheard him telling an engineering manager, a direct report to the CEO, to go ahead and submit an expense report with the new software, and I had to race to my cubicle to change the CEO's stored email address. I developed a chronic stress-induced cough and my voice would fade out trying to sing, symptoms which disappeared soon after I resigned from Advantest.
After Rahul left, I made up my mind to leave Advantest and had scheduled an in-person interview with an Austin-based real estate portal. My boss unexpectedly suffered a heart attack on a business trip to Vermont. To the chagrin of the recruiter, I canceled my visit, more out of a sense of professional and moral responsibility to Advantest than on behalf of my boss. I think he suspected something was up and gave me a significant pay raise after my May review, but almost half of it was in the form of bonus payments to be distributed over the next 6 months. I left two months later.
Rahul and I have kept in touch after my leaving Advantest. For instance, he once spontaneously wrote to rave about a concurrent program I had written in his absence which essentially empowered a sales manager to implement Japanese parent company price list changes in a fraction of the time it had taken before. Our former boss committed political suicide, and Rahul was named his successor.
Like all good friends, we have our share of disagreements on political and other matters. For example, during the past election cycle, Rahul completely lost confidence and respect for John McCain's judgment over the selection of Sarah Palin (especially after the Couric interviews). Faithful readers of my blog know that I have been a consistent critic of Sarah Palin, with doubts stemming from her reusing debunked lines from her first two addresses in stump speeches (e.g., she misleadingly and deliberately implied that she had offered to give Congress its money back for the Bridge to Nowhere), when in fact the bridge funds were used for other projects, she had run for governor pushing for the relevant Gravina Island bridge, and she canceled the project only after 8 months after finding out estimated bridge costs had doubled and only after McCain himself revisited the controversy after the Minnesota bridge collapse). I do not get Fox News' "slobbering love affair" with all things Sarah Palin, including the revisionist and disingenuous rationalizations of Palin's being torpedoed by a softball question over what newspapers and magazines she reads. Palin's attempts to scapegoat the McCain campaign for continuing with the Couric interviews are particularly pathetic and self-serving; it's not like the Wasilla Queen of Pork Barrel Spending has accepted responsibility for her unsatisfactory performance. Seriously, if you have to filibuster a question over reading materials, how can you deal with complex economics issues and international crises? There's more to economics than promoting oil and gas development in Alaska.
My point to Rahul was that the onus was on Sarah Palin to withdraw, which her own political ambitions would never let her do. I did think Sarah Palin was better than Rahul's judgment of her; after all, she took out better-known and funded politicians, two of whom had won prior gubernatorial elections in Alaska, on her way to becoming governor, and she has a certain charisma. But I still felt uncomfortable on my side of the argument, because I know he had a legitimate reason for questioning McCain's executive judgment.
I jokingly told Rahul that now he has an opportunity to cancel out my vote. He laughed, saying, "Don't count on it."
Rahul Naik today is a real-life example of an immigrant success story. He has been a founder and executive officer for two Internet ventures, XpenseTracker.com and transactionexchange.com. I have also worked with a number of other Indians, also highly competent, hard-working and exceptionally professional over the past 15 years. Of course, India is but one source of outstanding talent; I have also worked with conscientious immigrants from Russia, the Philippines and Eastern Europe. All of these people have in common leaving the emotional security of their native homeland and their extended families to start a new life in America, to live their dream, wanting what we Americans have and all too often take for granted.
The other day I listened to a Polish colleague happy with having obtained one of the coveted immigration slots but sad for a fellow countrywoman, whom excelled in her studies at Princeton but was forced to return to Poland, unable to find an H1B sponsor.
This brings out a crying need for us to revisit immigration reform, including revamping country-based quotas, ending chained immigration, fixing a broken-down foreign worker system, and putting more emphasis on merit (including education, fluency in English and professional skills). I do not underestimate misguided opposition based on job protectionism and darker, more xenophobic reasons. As a descendant of immigrants, I celebrate the contributions and synergies of immigrant workers and the diversity of cultures in America.
