Companies like IBM are "American" only in the sense that (1) legally they are domiciled in a US state such as, say, Delaware; (2) physically they are headquartered in or near a major US airport; and (3) their shares are listed in a US stock exchange. 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…
In all fairness, IBM is short for International Business Machines. Note how often they get dinged for their German branch "cooperating" with the Nazis (as opposed to ending up in the concentration camps themselves?).
> 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. I have to disagree I find that a lot of people from India do not pronounce the syllables in the way that a native speaker does.
> I have to disagree I find that a lot of people from India do not pronounce the syllables in the way that a native speaker does. But they can be understood. And they do speak well, apart from the funny (to us) accent. I personally find it more palatable than southern American accents, and more understandable than Caribbean accents (and I'm married to a Caribbean woman!), but that's just me...
Must be just you but I can understand a Southerner or someone from New York or Boston, UK/AUS/NZ/Canada any day of the week compared to Tarun I talked to this morning. I am talking about business conversations not people using slang or localized words/sayings.
How this is a big surprise? 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…
> 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. I have to disagree I find that a lot of people from India do not pronounce the syllables in the way that a native speaker does.
just as a brit would say an american doesn't speak the same way they do. English doesn't belong to the Americans or Brits or Australians or whoever else - English is a global language and is spoken differently in every corner of the world. What makes it native for many Indians is the fact that they grew up speaking that at home with their family - may not be the way you spoke or heard it - but that doesn't stop it from being native - nor does it stop it from being English!
> I have to disagree I find that a lot of people from India do not pronounce the syllables in the way that a native speaker does. But they can be understood. And they do speak well, apart from the funny (to us) accent. I personally find it more palatable than southern American accents, and more understandable than Caribbean accents (and I'm married to a Caribbean woman!), but that's just me...
Must be just you but I can understand a Southerner or someone from New York or Boston, UK/AUS/NZ/Canada any day of the week compared to Tarun I talked to this morning. I am talking about business conversations not people using slang or localized words/sayings.
Well business people tend to speak better in general and 'put off' the accent most of the time. Indians and Caribbean people included.
> I have to disagree I find that a lot of people from India do not pronounce the syllables in the way that a native speaker does. But they can be understood. And they do speak well, apart from the funny (to us) accent. I personally find it more palatable than southern American accents, and more understandable than Caribbean accents (and I'm married to a Caribbean woman!), but that's just me...
Must be just you but I can understand a Southerner or someone from New York or Boston, UK/AUS/NZ/Canada any day of the week compared to Tarun I talked to this morning. I am talking about business conversations not people using slang or localized words/sayings.
When I worked in tech support, I spoke with a lot of different people with a lot of different accents. The issue I discovered between Southern accents and Indian accents is, Southerners tend to talk slowly. That helps me process what they're trying to say (although their slang still throws me). The Indians I spoke to tend to speak English very quickly, more quickly than most Americans I know. The accent might be more understandable, but the speed combined with the accent makes it hard to get enough time to process the words before you're supposed to have a response to them.
It is the Indian mindset to solve every problem by hiring more people. Thanks to the shitload of cheap, unskilled engineers, this dream is economical. A friend had contracted one such company to overhaul his website. He has been co-ordinating with 4 - 5 people in the company, and it's been over a month, and these people can't write a simple 301 redirection without breaking his whole site. My friend happens to be a no…
seeing this from an onshore perspective of an IT company - it's really not about "solving every problem by hiring people being an Indian mentality" - it's actually a caveat of the way the IT Services industry works. IT companies are at the end of the day more or less commodity traders. what is the commodity? Skilled (arguably) labour. The more you sell - the more you make - I've seen companies sell x+50% heads for a project that required realistically maybe even less than x. But if you're making 20% margin on each head - and the company buying the effort is still saving a few million over doing the same work onshore - everyone is happy.
India would have the talent and the headcount to be anything it wanted to be, if it were not for the one missing ingredient: the ability to leave people's freedom alone. Many of factories in China would now be in India. Larry Page is in the market for another location. Mark Zuckerberg undoubtedly too. If India painstakingly managed to develop the ability to rein in their paperwork kingdom, the so-called "license Raj"…
The bureaucracy has indeed scared away a lot of foreign interest in the country.
Which is just fine because globalism would rape their country otherwise.
Wow, another 'China' is going to steal more jobs. lol
this is not new - china has maybe been more in the spotlight - IT has been outsourced to India atleast for 2 decades now - those jobs are already "stolen" if you will. The real story if you care to put aside your bias though - is that a bulk of what these guys are doing is IT grunt work - stuff thats in IT terms "menial" - solving simple tickets, implementing basic CRUD stuff etc. Stuff that a good programmer in the West - wouldn't want to do - and would honestly be too expensive to do. Until you figure out how to automate it - you do it where it's cheap and labour is ready. Econ 101.
> 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. I have to disagree I find that a lot of people from India do not pronounce the syllables in the way that a native speaker does.
just as a brit would say an american doesn't speak the same way they do. English doesn't belong to the Americans or Brits or Australians or whoever else - English is a global language and is spoken differently in every corner of the world. What makes it native for many Indians is the fact that they grew up speaking that at home with their family - may not be the way you spoke or heard it - but that doesn't stop it fr…
I agree that brits / americans / australians might have an easier time understanding each other. But that probably has to do more with exposure to each other than anything else. Simply put - you've only really dealt with Indians for maybe 2 decades as a nation? give it time - soon you'll understand them too.
How this is a big surprise? 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…
> And the vast numbers are because there are a lot of bad engineers. > On top of that my college had an FSF chapter, I volunteered there for 2 months after college and spent 2 years on an open-source project. Awesome re: FSF chapter and Open Source. If more Indian programmers did things like this (as well as start disruptive businesses) to show they're passionate about software, rather than wanting to be an engineer…