Top global IT firms have more staff in India than home nations

Top global IT firms have more staff in India than home nations
economictimes.indiatimes.com

In most other ways, these companies transcend national boundaries. For example, many of them book a substantial portion of revenues through complex networks of "offshore" subsidiaries to avoid paying corporate taxes in any jurisdiction.[1]

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[1] For example, see http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/04/28/business/Doubl...

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Edit: deleted reference to "Accenture," which is apparently legally domiciled in Ireland (thanks mschaef).

That's a nice euphemism for "there are a lot of fresh graduates whom we really don't have to pay much".

Considering that, the initial statement

"It's a measure of India's strength in software services and the number of engineers it produces that some of the world's largest IT companies have more employees in India now than in their home countries."

really isn't something to be very proud of.

If the man you're looking for is one in a million, we've probably got a thousand of them for you to pick from.

But I think there needs to be a defense made about cheap indian labour & why it works for american firms (more than the french or germans).

I'm sitting in Bangalore right now and I can see why this happened. We all speak English, we grew up watching Simpsons and can quote Friends episodes by events. We're immersed in the culture so deep that visiting your parents is a culture shock.

And the vast numbers are because there are a lot of bad engineers. There are a lot of good engineers - but a far lower fraction than in most other parts of the world.

But if you are an employer who's hiring locally instead of contracting work to a cheap contractor, you can spend some time culling the bad ones and then the good ones were truly great value for money.

My first job paid 250$ a month - for that pittance I was debugging ARM microkernels on an Ericsson phone. And that did pay the bills because of a few other advantages I had growing up - I had a cheap tax-payer funded education, but it was truly remarkable one beyond the textbooks.

My CS grad education cost approx 500$ for 4 years, had good teachers. The tenured professors were great, particularly graph theory & compilers - awesome COBOL teacher, whose lessons are why I'm finding hadoop to be very interesting to work on today. The labs were good with mostly SunOS/Netware boxes & a few Xilinx boards donated by alumni. I even had to do 8086 assembly by hand in hex for my lab exams.

My classmates included children of cab drivers, college professors, household help and of the filthy rich - we weren't equal outside college, but in class we were on the same level. Social class got scrubbed out of our egos and talent showed no correlation. And the EE course had 17 boys for approx 160 girls.

But that said all of us were the top ~1% of the state educational system after the math-heavy entrance tests (I had to get a double digit rank in approx 5-6 million people, to qualify).

Most of us spoke English as a first language (at least as good as one), nearly all of us bilingual (and not in the same languages) who were used to our English being misunderstood. This was something we all learnt to realize & work on our communication.

On top of that my college had an FSF chapter (http://www.cetafi.net/modules.php?name=News&file=print&sid=1...), I volunteered there for 2 months after college and even spent 2 years on an open-source project.

I might have been good engineer material to begin with. But that cheap and rather real-life education I got made me competitive on factors beyond economics.

And I assume there are at least a few like me around for the employers who want to dig through the chaff.