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

nytimes.com

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

#191

Post by BeetleB »

godzilla82 wrote: post #113
whydoudodis wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much of Bangalore and modern Indian cities are almost at par with San Francisco as far as Infrastructure goes. How do I know this? I travel to India 3 times a year for work.

Sorry you are so wrong. What do you consider infrastructure? I have lived in the bay area and in Bangalore, I have no idea how you can even compare them in terms of roads, city planning, utilities agencies, Civic agencies etc. I think the exchange rate of your country's currency allows you to stay at top tier places when you visit India, that's why you'd experience India differently than Indians.

>I think the exchange rate of your country's currency allows you to stay at top tier places when you visit India, that's why you'd experience India differently than Indians.

Which is exactly what he was saying.

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

#192

Post by viral007 »

pjmlp wrote: post #121
blizkreeg wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're getting a little defensive here. IBM was one of the crown jewels of American industry. It was an iconic company in its time. The fact that it now employs more people in India than the US is something to ponder. It isn't so much about the merits of outsourcing. Everything can be done cheaper by getting it done in another part of the world. Should it be? Sometimes the answer is yes, at other times, not. Imagine…

They are already being outsourced to cheaper countries. Check for example CyberCity in Port Louis, Mauritius. Quite a few Indian helpdesk centers have moved there.

Also look at Philippines, Vietnam, etc...

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

#193

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

pkaye wrote: post #16
gourabmi wrote: post #6

I'm not surprised. As H1-B regulations keep getting more strict, this phenomenon will spread to other big players in the industry.

What regulations have gotten strict? From last I read, the changes that Trump proposed seems to have gotten nowhere. Yet IBM has been shifting the worker base to India for decades.

> the changes that Trump proposed seems to have gotten nowhere

Revisions to H1B are "under review". It may all be just smoke and mirrors but it would be an easy, and legal, way for Trump to meet one of his campaign initiatives.

EO 13788:

(b) In order to promote the proper functioning of the H-1B visa program, the Secretary of State, the Attorney General, the Secretary of Labor, and the Secretary of Homeland Security shall, as soon as practicable, suggest reforms to help ensure that H-1B visas are awarded to the most-skilled or highest-paid petition beneficiaries.

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

#194

Post by pm90 »

gozur88 wrote: post #177
taurussai wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Bangalore, sale price/monthly rent ratio in an ok neighborhood would be around 200. In a pretty good neighborhood this go up to to 300-400. Mumbai is more expensive than this. Nobody buys property in India and makes a killing off the rents -- its mainly the price appreciation (inflation is around 6-7%).

That's the classic real estate bubble.

In countries of > 1 billion people who are racing towards development, the real estate bubble just goes on and on. Even in smaller cities, real estate is seen as a very profitable investment as even more people make the rural to urban transition, jacking up demand to stratospheric levels.

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

#195

Post by mirrormind »

snambi wrote: post #172
mirrormind wrote: post #163

I am an Indian and i will tell you how it is. Most indians in india and the valley where i live and work suck in programming. I can't say how i do because we can never judge ourselves objectively. Indians in India write bad code because they will they are being cheated and being paid less money. The other issue is the education system is to memorize stuff and get a job so they can make money. There is no passion to d…

Majority of programmers are bad. It is nothing to do with race or nationality. People are taking to programming because it pays well and there is demand. Most companies hire a person with good attitude than a great programmer with bad attitude.

"People are taking to programming because it pays well and there is demand." This statement is wrong. Not everyone takes to programming only for that sole reason. In america people tend to follow their passion first.

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

#196

Post by kd0amg »

snambi wrote: post #176
schnevets wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not forget a Western stereotype from 10 years ago: the deprecated specialist. Since the 80s, IBM has had a lot of bloat from poorly managed technologists who owned "the JDBC-based plugin for integrating AIX-based Lotus Notes servers with a COBOL-based mainframe that is only used by JP Morgan and the state government of Ohio". Despite the risk, it's easier to toss these responsibilities to a junior-level develop…

Most junior developers will not even know that getting into a dead end job such as these are the end of their career. Sad!

On the other hand, they've probably had a lot more early exposure to the idea that one is better off changing jobs every few years. After having three jobs in ten years instead of one, they're much less likely to be stuck with a non-transferable skillset.

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

#197

Post by potlee »

maxxxxx wrote: post #159
iamnewhereqwer wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll probably get in trouble but russians don't like to hire russians.

Discriminating against Russians is OK. No worries :-)

Technically this is true, sadly. Nationalities are not a protected group.

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

#198

Post by vram22 »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #109
snambi wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Americans are not aware of cost of living in places like Bangalore. The India real estate is expensive for the folks living in Silicon Valley. It is cheaper to buy real estate in USA compared to India.

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?

Rents go up high too. Can't say how well they correlate to prices for buying outright (as your other question asks), but they are high, IME. Also, some property owners raise the rent each year. Talking about residential rents here, but I think commercial ones raise it each year too.

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

#199

Post by indubitable »

calvinbhai wrote: post #70

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.

At a high enough level a company's customers and employees are one and the same. Exploiting labor can lead directly to a tragedy of the commons. If all companies were able to pursue the cheapest labor possible on a worldwide scale, then the overall disposable income in this nation would proportionally decrease. That income is precisely what ends up being used to purchase a company's products and fund their ventures. In the big picture - when all companies pay less, they end up earning less.

This is also ignoring local effects. As domestic workers are displaced by the cheapest workers across the world, unemployment would increase. As wages decrease and revenues fall you have the ideal scenario to start an economic depression. Rising unemployment and an economy in depression is something that is extremely difficult to stop once it starts. Fear of even the hint of this happening is part of the reason we're already flirting with ostensibly insane economic measures ranging from quantitative easing to negative interest rates.

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

#200

Post by scholia »

github-cat wrote: post #124
snambi wrote: 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.

Do really good American developers actually want to work for IBM? Serious question....
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