Infosys plans to hire 10,000 American workers, open four U.S. tech centers
reuters.com
reuters.com
Better get started with US workers now, before someone cuts in first.
The act is peppered with phrases like "Preferring local workers etc" but we know how that turned out (and why it was so easy to ignore the spirit of the act). It raises revenue for the government, and cuts costs for the "poor old companies" at the expense of local workers.
Shame on anyone that abused this.
http://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departm...
From the Australian equivalent of the Onion: http://www.betootaadvocate.com/entertainment/turnbull-solves...
"It is no longer an issue. In one foul swoop, I’ve managed to appease the bible-thumpers and racists by scrapping the 457 visa and I’ve also got the unions pissing in my pocket. I’m a genius. All I did was turn it off and on again."
Hehe.
EDIT: India's a huge place, and there must therefore be some exceptionally strong developers there. My experience of dealing with Wipro, TCS, etc, tells me that these companies are very effective at either filtering out any engineering talent, or alternatively simply crushing the talent of those who they employ.
> Maybe the cost of an American has
> come down. Maybe Americans are willing
> to work at the rates Indians have been
> quietly working at.
1. The CIO/CTOs are too easily pushing the responsibility to such Indian IT companies. You know, easy to blame someone else and save money in the same time. And get some shares up too.
2. The Indian companies use very deceptive means to capture this market. Simply, they lie about their competencies.
It happened in multiple occasions when we got send from the indian 'partner' two 'best' person they had. They were suppose to be 10+ Linux experienced. Believe me, when I showed them the command line and I gave them a random, but real, task they just simply stared and didn't know where to start. After 10 minutes ( had to attend something else), I found them heavily browsing SO. Case closed!
I have seen the kinds of clients Indian IT handles and quality of the software they have produced. You can be more or less guaranteed your bank, insurance company, hospital, airline/transportation systems, phone/internet utility, entertainment/sports IT is all totally built and run by Indian IT.
The process is chaotic. The first iteration is a disaster almost always. But western management persist through that first and second and sometimes third iteration of garbage because the cost benefit is just impossible to ignore. And guess what by the 4th or 5th iteration things actually work.
What most people don't realize is there is no big difference between this story and the Facebook or Google story.
In one case its a bunch of kids who don't know what the command line is thrown into a bank or insurance or manufacturing companies IT system and its a trial by fire. Not knowing what the command line is has nothing to do with how smart/adaptable the kid is who gets thrown into the deep end.
Please note this is exactly what investors are betting on when they dump a bunch of cash on a bunch of kids at a future Facebook or Google. The kid might know what the command line is but that's not what investors are betting on. They are betting on the kid being smart and adaptable when thrown into the fire. They are willing to put up with the first couple iterations being disasters and sooner or later if you bet on the right kid things work.
Are there unintended consequences when things get built this way? Of course yes Mark Zuckerberg doesn't have a solution to fake news, celeb worship, hate speech, cyber bullying on his platform. But (most)people are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Same rules should apply to the indian kid running your bank servers that just got breached.
But just advertise it as such: "Look, we don't have any Linux specialists, but for this amount of money we charge, is worth to train this two guys, they are smart but no experience. Are you in?"
This honesty ( or lack of it ), is the problem, not the people. I mean, I also do browse SO, too :), and yes, sometimes I fail to give an immediate answer to a problem. But I tell this to the customer, and they feel comfortable, because in the other 99% of the cases I did solve their problem.
They'll spent three or six months on-site deep-diving the system and preparing to transition it back to their home office and meanwhile all the management-suits are nodding at the excellence of their outsourcing idea.
Once the project transitions, it's booted to a team of just-graduated staff who attempt to follow the documentation created by the transition team, and the rock-stars are presumably sent onto another on-site project. That's when the pain starts and by then it's too late; the local SMEs have all been let-go or reassigned.
That's spot on. India does have strong developers, after few years in work, their talent is intentionally crushed by management. They don't need talented,highly-confident people who can question the management decision. All they need is some average or below-average who knows how to copy/paste from Google. These people are ideal candidates because they will find it hard to get jobs in other companies and they will do everything(regardless of how the stupid work might be) asked by manager.
Infy is playing a long game where it will employ F1 visa students on OPT and perhaps get better chances of H1B lottery + targeting H4 EAD.
It is pointless to hire American. It defeats the whole purpose of geting things done cheaply.
While there's a lot of talented people, rather than promoting them, they just drain them. The ones that get promoted are the ones better at draining people.
They would claim that water rains from the ground towards the sky if it meant they do not have to admit a mistake and shift the blame towards someone else.
> People are living in a dream state if they think the next generation of Indian software tech is going to stay forever behind the west.
Pick one.
Most importantly, it sets very dangerous precedents of U.S. federal government interference in the free market and in business decisions, and of economic nationalism worldwide:
* Today you might like who the federal government is picking on and threatening; tomorrow you might not. Do we want politicians making decisions for businesses and controlling the free market? We can count on the politicians making political, not economic decisions. It's like the worst of over-regulation, but with no legal framework or process to restrain it.
* Americans like it when jobs come to the U.S., but the U.S. long has been the standard-bearer of international free trade. If the U.S. stops promoting it, others likely will backslide quickly. Why shouldn't India demand the same of U.S. companies? (If your argument is fairness and how bad Infosys is, then you looking at factors that don't determine international trade practices.) When they demand that U.S. jobs move to their countries, will there even be a net gain in jobs?
All that will result is moving jobs back and forth not to increase productivity and find market efficiencies, but for political reasons. It will create market inefficiencies, which could (for example) raise costs for Infosys customers (including U.S. customers), reduce Infosys' overall employment, reduce profit for Infosys shareholders, and reduce overall productivity for the economies involved.
It's surprising how quickly the terms "free market" and "free trade" have disappeared from HN.
H1B abusers like Infosys use H1B to hire 90% of their staff. They then undercut US workers and cause them to be laid off while their cheaper H1B visa foreigners took jobs on US soil. Pretty much every government in the world regulates immigration. And if you ask a business which country has less favorable business rules, that would be India which is amongst the worst in the world.
Yes, they were. In a market, a "shortage" is meaningless without reference to a price level, and the only way to address a shortage at any given price level is to add additional supply from sellers willing to sell below what the necessary price would otherwise be for the final quantity traded.
Adding more workers at the "prevailing wage" means increasing the quantity traded without increasing price, which inherently favors the buyers of the good (labor, here) over sellers.
Structurally, the "abuse" by Infosys, et al., and the suppression of wage growth for highly-skilled labor is exactly what H-1B is designed to support, not just a loophole in the design but the fundamental, basic, high-level structure of the program.
H1B visas were intended to allow highly educated and qualified workers to work in the US, for a wage in par with local similarly qualified workers. Such people are in short supply worldwide. The problem with Infosys is that it tended to neither bring in highly qualified workers, nor pay them comparably to the US market.
It's easy to derive another conclusion from your premise. It'll create market inefficiency, which will allow other promising companies to compete, which can potentially raise the quality of the end-result. Possibly, Infosys' customers could be better served by more competent engineering force.
I agree; it should not be taken to an extreme and I didn't mean it in an ideological sense. But there is value to 'free' market competition; it's a useful tool and also provides freedom, in the sense of liberty, a core value of our society. Government intimidation of businesses is almost always a bad solution to the problems; law and regulation are democratic and much more just. Infosys isn't the first - remember the businesses whom Trump claims to have intimidated about their factory locations.
> It'll create market inefficiency, which will allow other promising companies to compete, which can potentially raise the quality of the end-result.
Fundamentally, that's not the result of inefficiency. It's called "inefficient" because it costs more for worse outcomes. It's a very predictable, well-tested outcome.
For example it's great the labor can move freely between borders at the senior level, but is it really desirable for seniors to compete with juniors?
Should companies make a profit from arbitrage between the bargaining power of someone on a temporary visa vs a permanent visa? It seems like an arbitrary and not very useful divide that has a very real market effect
Business are still free to make a decision to be subject of the law or to GTFO (e.g. take the business to a country, which allows uncontrolled immigration).
Because of companies like them, H1 visas themselves are so scarce these days. These companies apply for visas in bulk, pay just over prevailing wage, get their employees to come to US (often displacing higher paid US employees) etc. It is honestly a shame that US allowed this happen for so many years. Think about so many highly qualified international candidates/students who aren't able to secure their H1 visa because companies like Infosys chose to install their $60k worker in US. I have no sympathy at all for them.
India is free to reciprocate but I seriously doubt there could be a situation where workers in India are paid more than their American counterparts for it to have any tangible impact.
It breaks the site guidelines to post uncivilly and we ban accounts that do it, so please don't.
Just that I have one a couple of friends who had to leave US after their graduation, even after they secured good jobs, because of visa lottery. So, sometimes, it is difficult for me maintain decorum in my comments.
USA is still a country and they can impose certain thing to their advantage if they want to.
If they wish to prioritize their citizens first then so be it.
Also the main point is the abusive H-1B Visa. It is not free market when foreign workers cannot negotiate wage between companies. American citizens cannot compete against a foreign workers when the foreign workers cannot shop for salary.
It's corporate slavery.
> All that will result is moving jobs back and forth not to increase productivity and find market efficiencies, but for political reasons. It will create market inefficiencies, which could (for example) raise costs for Infosys customers (including U.S. customers), reduce Infosys' overall employment, reduce profit for Infosys shareholders, and reduce overall productivity for the economies involved.
> It's surprising how quickly the terms "free market" and "free trade" have disappeared from HN.
You're really just economic arm chairing.
You harp such libertarian things but you don't address the core issue. H1-B visa and those people inabilities to negotiate wage which artificially lower Americans salary (my salary, I've seen it first hand and I've heard from it from my buddies).
Hell I don't even know if you know the issue at all other than using this to harp about libertarian idealism.
So a visa only available to workers with a certain skill set that chained them to companies is the free market?
> It's surprising how quickly the terms "free market" and "free trade" have disappeared from HN.
Because a phrase like "free market" is propaganda and meaningless.
That the word free is attached to it is part of the propaganda element, what's the alternative, an unfree market?
And the word market is the meaningless. How is a market selling radishes in the USA for dollars today different than a market selling radishes in the USSR for rubles in 1951? They're the same thing. What's different is production, namely who controlled it - in the USA, production is overwhelmingly owned and controlled by heirs who do not work and who spend their days jetting to things like the Fyre Festival in the Bahamas - in the USSR production was not controlled by that class.
Well, if not propaganda, at least ambiguous, yeah.
Adding on to that: If there's any group that distrusts the modifier "free", it's techies who've seen enough open-source stuff to remember "free as in beer" versus "free as in speech".
I think the main misconception is that there is a "free market". The US government, and most governments around the world, have been heavily interventionist since at least WWII. This was born of necessity - the Great Depression was largely the outcome of capitalism left unchecked. After WWII the U.S. economy was in tatters. Truman and Eisenhower both took very aggressive interventionist policies to keep the economy afloat. Similarly, with the cold war, the U.S. invested heavily in basic research, much of which is the basis for the tech industry as we know it. This economic policy hasn't changed much since WWII. Most industry in the U.S. has been subsidised. Most of U.S. foreign policy has revolved around protecting U.S. interests - which is our economy, things like our energy sector and interests in farmland in places like Brazil. Agribusiness still gets huge subsidies, making Mexican farmers unable to compete, leading a large part to the poor conditions in our neighboring country and the bleed over effects here. And on and on. A "free market" is a complete illusion.
Globalisation was just another means to promote economic interests. It was nothing to do with some free market ideal, outside of propaganda. It was a means to exploit cheap labor in other countries to the benefit of our own economy. Unfortunately, it is mostly to the benefit of white collar jobs and corporate interests. Unchecked globalisation has decimated the working class in the U.S. and much of Europe, and also cost us generations of knowledge on producing goods. Infosys is another example of this - it hits a bit closer to home for us programmers. Fortunately engineering is not so easy to offshore or replace with cheap labour, as it requires highly trained people. And demand outstrips supply. If offshoring had worked, we would all be a lot more unhappy about the effects of globalisation.
Personally, I think any ideology is dangerous. The "free market" should be a tool - good at some things, bad at others - and not an ideological dogma. I don't think it works well when enterprises cannot fail, a necessary part of the free market; so public safety, health care, basic utilities (e.g. water), etc. aren't good problems on which to apply the free market tool. It's also not useful for goods that shouldn't be distributed based on ability to pay, such as basic infrastructure (roads, phone, Internet), education, basic nutrition or health care.
But it is an excellent tool for many purposes, and has a moral basis - it provides for the liberty of the business owners to do what they want with their property. I didn't agree when it was a dogma, and I don't agree that it's unimportant. It's essential.
> Globalisation was just another means to promote economic interests. It was nothing to do with some free market ideal
I strongly disagree. Free trade is a fundamental of free market economics, in theory and reality. It's just interference in the free market, this time at an international border instead of inside it (consider: would it be different if it happened at U.S. state borders? Urban borders?). If I'm making cars and must pay more for worse steel, simply because the worse steel plant is in one location and the better one in another, that wastes economic resources: It wastes the car manufacturer's money, which could go to something more useful such as more jobs, better cars, or payments to shareholders; it wastes the car buyer's money, which could have purchased a better car (i.e., with better steel); it wastes much of the resources put into the inferior steel plant, which could go to more productive uses (look up comparative advantage); and it deprives a productive enterprise, the better steel plant, of resources that it fairly won on merit in the marketplace. The fact is that the better steel plant uses the money more efficiently, freeing up for better uses the extra money that would be consumed making bad steel and funding the people who built the better mousetrap. You probably want your mousetrap to succeed on its merits, not on whether the President happens to like you.
But there is a serious issue with the free market's (including free trade's) impact on labor. My way of looking at it is that capital can move much more quickly than labor: A factory can move much more quickly than its workers can (either to the new factory or to equivalent jobs). The economy is there to serve people, so that should be addressed.
> The US government, and most governments around the world, have been heavily interventionist since at least WWII. This was born of necessity - the Great Depression was largely the outcome of capitalism left unchecked. After WWII the U.S. economy was in tatters. Truman and Eisenhower both took very aggressive interventionist policies to keep the economy afloat.
While I agree with much of your point, parts of that history are time-shifted. The Great Depression began in 1929 and FDR took office in 1933. That's (roughly) when the heavy intervention began, and it took place until the end of WWII (1945) - though much of the intervention during WWII was for a different reason, to use the nation's economic resources for war materials. Post-WWII (though maybe not the next day) the U.S. economy was robust. The 1950s, including under Eisenhower, were possibly the greatest economic boom in U.S. history, and it continued until roughly the 1970s. Heavy regulation, intervention and taxes - though not at the scale of the Great Depression - which continued until the early 1980s, was not due to economic necessity, but possibly due to a belief in democratic government.
Interesting. Could you detail out this a bit more, legally? I'd like to know the specific law which makes this "discrimination" illegal.
Google is your friend. Indian body shops pay far less and apply for far more visas.
I personally don't have a problem with equally qualified Indians getting paid less than the American counterparts as well, even if that might be the (illegal) case. In a free market, whoever provides best quality with the cheapest price wins anyway (and the employer gets to decide what 'quality' means to them), so I don't understand all the whining. Eventually, it's American companies that get benefited by these cheap workers, growing American economy. The local people, then would need to lower their rates to match the competition. That's what happens across the world.
Working conditions and pay in Infosys are not great for sure. There is a reason how this has come about - companies trying to do their best to cut IT costs. One of my friends working in a billion dollar IT product company says the company is fine with in-house teams for the product teams but everything auxiliary like Finance systems etc they want to sub-contract to Infy and the likes. They have much larger budget for contracting than they do for in-house hires. The reason is in the managements mind that is a high short term cost with immediate removals, whereas full time employees need to be maintained well. Now the company hasn't done well in the past 2 years and there has been pressure on the company to trim more costs. How are they going to achieve it without compromising on their core products? Hire cheaper developers for everything they can think of. So there are market forces in play and if it wasn't an "Indian" IT there will be a "Philippines" or "Mexico" IT company. There is pressure for cutting labor costs and it has to go somewhere. Sure people can unionize (or protectionism which is happening now) but that hasn't boded well for other industries.
Then there is a question of whether US workers are ready to work on the reduced pay and work culture? It has nothing to do with talent rather the grind. My guess is people don't want to work on the reduced pay and work timings.
It is a complex problem to solve but this is similar to people asking for US made iPhones. Sure the intellect required for R&D might not be found in China but then the mass production with 24*7 cheap production lines is not something feasible in US. If the government goes after China you can be sure companies (maybe even Chinese one) finding the next "best" alternative - Mexico, Africa etc.
1) with a H1b visa that'll be renewed only for the duration of contract (sometimes renewed only for 6 months, but regularly)
2) with a greencard application, which means no need to obey orders of thy master / manager and nor work like a slave, just to ensure the green card application is not in jeopardy.
3) with excruciatingly long wait of greencard (for those born in India it'll soon be > 20 years wait)
4) because switching to an another employer is just as simple as signing an offer letter and filling I-9. Another company wont go through the painful H1b process
These reasons, are applicable to non-Americans too, as long as they are not born in India or China.
So, Infosys hiring Americans will definitely turn the tables against India based outsourcing companies like Infy and TCS.
But this still doesn't solve the "stealing of jobs" problem from outsourcing companies that are based in US, but have huge operations in India (HP, IBM, Accenture, EDS etc).
NRIs are wooed by the goverment and get visa free access and many other rights like NRI bank accounts and have rights to buy property. They live eating noodles in US and come back to India to buy few apartments.
Due to this local citizens themselves are unable to buy property in their own country and have to then resort to send their kids abroad.
Most people who go to Infosys in India are usually not the brightest but mostly those people who don't get into other big companies. We call them "Mass Recruiters" because they hire a whole bunch of people without looking at the skills or if they are a fit.
1 - https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/08/india...
Infy's best hope is to become a global offshore entity, but the greatest challenge of all is going to be evolving a legacy IT services and support outfit into a credible AI development house, two fundamentally different entities. I doubt it is possible
Indian perspective