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IBM Now Has More Employees in India Than in the U.S

nytimes.com

141–150 of 259 posts

Re: IBM Now Has More Employees in India Than in the U.S

#141
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> its hard to live there with the salaries they are are getting hmm, sounds just like SF or NYC.

I'd say worse. IBM employees in India get paid around 500,000 rupees in India. A non-cramped 2 bedroom apartment in a decent area in the big cities (Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi ) will set you back 10,000,000 rupees easily. That is 20 times their salary. I'd say that's a higher multiplier per unit salary, than for the US. Also note that living just outside the city (as people in the US do) isn't always an option, unless…

Anecdata is a ~10x multiplier in SV for the kind of housing you describe.

Re: IBM Now Has More Employees in India Than in the U.S

#142

Would this be true if high skilled legal immigration system in USA wasn’t broken? If IBM had zero restrictions on importing skilled labor, IBM USA would probably still be larger than IBM India.

Cost of living is still higher in the US, so you have to pay them more in the US than in India.

The actual question is if these increased salary costs are offset by productivity improvements from not having to communicate across timezones etc. There's probably no single answer to that.

Re: IBM Now Has More Employees in India Than in the U.S

#143
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> its hard to live there with the salaries they are are getting hmm, sounds just like SF or NYC.

I'd say worse. IBM employees in India get paid around 500,000 rupees in India. A non-cramped 2 bedroom apartment in a decent area in the big cities (Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi ) will set you back 10,000,000 rupees easily. That is 20 times their salary. I'd say that's a higher multiplier per unit salary, than for the US. Also note that living just outside the city (as people in the US do) isn't always an option, unless…

The numbers look similar in Vancouver and Toronto. It seems to be an emergent trend in the global housing markets.

Re: IBM Now Has More Employees in India Than in the U.S

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same is true in china, but that has more to do with real estate bubbles than fundamentals. Rents are still very cheap. Is the same true in Indian cities?

The real estate pockets in industrial hubs like Bangalore, Mumbai is expensive. Tier 2 cities are cheaper.

How do sale prices correlate to rents?

Re: IBM Now Has More Employees in India Than in the U.S

#145
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe DB/2 and Websphere liberty profile... They tack the name 'Watson' on a lot of stuff, but some of that might be good.

Have you tried to use DB2 or WebSphere? Do you feel painful when you install them?

Liberty profile isn't exactly painful, but everything else Websphere is.

Regarding DB/2, I don't think that the installation process is the most interesting property of a database. The database is about as good as you can get, but there are certainly other options.

I tried installing WebSphere portal ten years ago for some reason and that killed my laptop. I'd say that that's probably the best possible outcome...

Oh, and I think TAM/TFIM/ISAM might be ok for companies over a certain size.

Not sure about their cloud offerings. Probably not promising.

Re: IBM Now Has More Employees in India Than in the U.S

#146
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> its hard to live there with the salaries they are are getting hmm, sounds just like SF or NYC.

I'd say worse. IBM employees in India get paid around 500,000 rupees in India. A non-cramped 2 bedroom apartment in a decent area in the big cities (Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi ) will set you back 10,000,000 rupees easily. That is 20 times their salary. I'd say that's a higher multiplier per unit salary, than for the US. Also note that living just outside the city (as people in the US do) isn't always an option, unless…

London has a 30-40x.

50k salary 1.5-2mil GBP for a well size 2 bed in a good area.

Re: IBM Now Has More Employees in India Than in the U.S

#147
The discussion seems to be diverted to outsourcing; whether it is good or bad. If I were an IBM shareholder, I want to know who is holding the IBM execs accountable? For years they have underperformed, whatever metric you care to use to reach that conclusion; they seem to be unaffected by outsourcing and have golden parachutes.

To hide their technical/execution incompetency they outsource jobs and cook the books. It is moot to discuss outsourcing, the real problems are: 1. The widening wage gap between a regular employee and an executive

2. Complete lack of accountability of executives

3. Despite their pathetic performance are getting richer and richer

Re: IBM Now Has More Employees in India Than in the U.S

#148
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of assumptions and bias in the comment above. You are implying that more expensive means higher quality. Less expensive means lower quality. Both are not true. The truth is, "opensource software and cloud" disrupted IBM's business model of selling proprietary software that runs on IBM hardware and selling services to maintain these.

Sorry, you misunderstood my point. My implication is that we should spent the money on the right people. For example, if we have budget of $10000, we can spend them hiring one/two good developers instead of hiring 4/5 below average developers.

The (unconscious) bias here is via the assumption that one can't hire good developers in India.

Re: IBM Now Has More Employees in India Than in the U.S

#150

For those working at IBM, how do you feel about your job in general? I have a couple friends working for IBM now or before, from what I gathered, unless you work in the research division or in the smart city project, the rest felt unimportant. These negative sentiments perhaps just edge cases...

IBM is best understood as a collection of disparate companies that have very little to do with each other in the day-to-day. There are generalizations to be made about the company as a whole, but the experience of working for IBM in division ABC is going to be vastly different from the experience of working in division DEF.
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