IBM Now Has More Employees in India Than in the U.S
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Considering this, how is the number of employees in India and US even a relevant question. Isn't it similar to say why is there more manufacturing workforce in China when compared to US for company X? We know why, it costs less for the company and the client, and taking advantage of it opened up new markets/demand.
hmm, sounds just like SF or NYC.
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 you are up for a 2+2 hour commute daily.
By way of comparison, plenty of people in the UK entering their first IT job would make less than the equivalent of 25,00,000!
I also hire directly for our own office in Mumbai from time-to-time, so I know that market rates are.
Just look at any jobs board - even for experienced devs, its rare to find such high paying jobs, e.g.
> SRM University sets new placement record of 6064 on Day 1
> The highest offer was from Wipro 1641, followed by TCS 1611, Cognizant 1506 and Infosys 1306.
You can imagine the quality of interview when they have interviewed at least 1500 students on a single day.
So the average salary is 8.98 lakh. Unlike what you might like to believe there are many non-IT people working in IT, specially in places like IBM. So their salary will be even lower than 8.98 lakhs.
Most freshers get near to Associate Systems Engineer. The salary range is between 3.7 lakhs to 8.65 lakhs. This is farcry from what you believe it is. Yes, there are colleges whose salaries are pushed to the limit thanks to the startups but majority are not as well of as you might think.
Yeah, I concede. For some reason, I had the belief that IBM is one of the better paying company in India, but it pays on the level of inferior consultancies.
50k salary 1.5-2mil GBP for a well size 2 bed in a good area.
Apparently you can get a 2-bedroom flat in Bexley for £150,000....
The 10 cheapest places to buy in London: where to find the best-value homes in the capital, from Barking and Dagenham to Hounslow http://www.homesandproperty.co.uk/property-news/buying/londo...
> "As it turns out, Bob had simply outsourced his own job to a Chinese consulting firm. Bob spent less than one-fifth of his six-figure salary for a Chinese firm to do his job for him."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jan/16/software-devel...
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 for a second that 50 years from today (when say India is in a place where the US is today), many Indian jobs are outsourced to another country. Same thing.
Are people allowed to go to Walmart and choose to buy something for less money than the mom and pop store? Are traders allowed to take advantage of pricing differentials in different markets? Are employers allowed to relocated outside of San Francisco to find less expensive employees?
You can try to stop the market from reaching equilibrium...but I have a feeling you won't win in the end, at least not without some help from the armed forces.
IBM has been laying off people in the US (and maybe elsewhere too) for several years, every now and then. I have been in the software field for many years now, and have been reading the industry news for a long time, that's how I know it. I remember even way back, I used to read the news in Indian and foreign IT magazines, every now and then, that IBM (and other US companies too) were laying off like 10K, 20K, or more workers at a time. And it was not always because of outsourcing jobs to India, in many earlier cases it was before outsourcing even started.
But it sort of reinforces my point that companies do layoffs. Sure, some Indian companies have started doing it too, whatever the pros and cons may be.
Founders and CEOs in the US like the ability to hire and fire, and the idea of employment at will. Some employees, less so.
India has historically been a country where paternalistic management practices were common, and firing was seen as something to be avoided as far as possible, considered as a big deal, the news and impact of it to be minimized or played down (I know this last point is so to some extent in the US too), and as a huge social stigma (for the person being fired or laid off). That has been changing some recently, due to Western influences. There can be both pros and cons to the matter. Don't have a final viewpoint on it.
Edited to change "been a company" to "been a country".
Edit: Quoting myself:
>India has historically been a country where paternalistic management practices were common, and firing was seen as something to be avoided as far as possible
This is also the case in government service - as in, in India, for long, and maybe even nowadays, it was almost impossible to fire a government employee, whatever the reason. Job security (along with poverty) was a huge reason why, in earlier years, many, or even the majority of people preferred government jobs - because even though the pay, environment, perks were all mostly shitty - though getting cheap owned or rented housing was seen as a good perk by many - again, a house was seen as a major asset to strive for - you could not be easily fired from your job. In a country with devastating annual floods / droughts (both still the case) / somewhat frequent famines, poverty, etc., those were factors to be considered. I remember even a classmate of mine (this was many years later than the start of the period I am talking about - the start was at Indian Independence or even years before), exulting to a few of us friends that "I 'got' DOTE!" (where DOTE == Department Of Technical Education", meaning that he got a "seat" in a government engineering college, meaning that if he did his stuff even just adequately, a secure lifelong government job was guaranteed - as witnessed by his answer when someone asked him why he went for it - his answer in one word was - "security" (of livelihood, of course, not computer security).
Name another country circa 1911 that could have produced IBM and enabled it to acquire such vast global scale at its peak. There are only a handful of nations that can even be considered as possible.
IBM came out of the US for the exact same reason Fairchild, Intel, Cisco, Silicon Graphics, Motorola, Texas Instruments, HP, Sun, Xerox, AMD, Apple, Qualcomm, etc. all did.
By that reasoning, IBM is outsourcing from the US for exactly the same reason virtually all the other companies you listed are.
Sure, something about the US helped them to exist and thrive. And something about the US is helping them to outsource.
The argument cuts both ways.
Of course. Most of the outsourcing has been about labor costs. The US has among the highest labor costs on the the planet, the nations (Vietnam, China, India, Mexico, etc) that the US has heavily outsourced to - whether manufacturing or IT - are or were far lower net cost nations to do those outsourced things in.
What's cutting against the US is mostly obvious: incomes are very high, infrastructure costs are far too high (impacts almost everything in the cost structure in the US, from transportation to manufacturing), the effective corporate income tax rate in the US is among the highest (while many developed nations are aggressively lowering their rates), vast & rapid growth in economic regulations over the last 30-40 years, large expansion of general burden on business formation over that time (taxes, regulation, red tape, abusive zoning laws, etc.; leading to far lower dynamism in the US economy, weak productivity growth, perpetually falling new business formation, etc).
It was no accident.
The IT industry is the first truly global industry. I can do my job from a coffee shop in NYC, a mountain monastery in Tibet, or a beach in Cancun. I just need my trusty laptop and WiFi access.
And yet, even though I'm the same person, doing the same work, I get taxed differently, I pay different prices for the same goods, and the cost of living is vastly different. Why should I be "allowed" to do work for IBM from the NYC coffee-shop but not the from Cancun beach? Would the product of my brain's labor be vastly different? Does me hopping on a plane and committing code from a different longitude and latitude make me a less-deserving person?
And yes, Indian jobs should get outsourced to another country - if it makes sense. Why not? Why do we have "protected" classes of people? And who gets to decide who's protected?
Software is truly unique like that - you can collaborate with people you've never seen face-to-face, different perspectives, different cultures, but all working towards a common goal. I'm not aware of any other industry you can do that.
And you expect IBM to just sit there quietly, while told, "Hire Jim, not Srinivas, because although Srinivas can do the exact same work for 1/10th the cost, Jim, being American, is a more important human being, your competitive advantage be damned" ?
Check for example CyberCity in Port Louis, Mauritius.
Quite a few Indian helpdesk centers have moved there.
So I think the real takeaway here is that IBM is no longer a US based company, per se - but now is just a global tech company.
And you might even say they are the first of the giants to just be simply a "lobal tech company" -- while many a startup are already "global" or virtual as it were -- its just an interesting shift in the timeline of IBM as a company.... and thus relevant and of note when looking at the company IBM itself.
This racism is again mirrored in the huge salary difference. Are those Indian workers really worth so much less?
One thing is certain to me, that low salary is hurting IBM. By not paying a competitive salary, those IBM offices in India are lacking the deep experience of western programmers. In a way, they have to re-invent the wheel. In the pictures, everyone there is Indian, and that hurts the company as a whole. Diversity is more than just not being all white. Diversity means not being exclusive to any background and ethnicity.
Edit: I have yet to hear of anyone (European or American) from the sectors I work in, being poached to work in India.
As someone who grew up in America during that time, this is the exact opposite that I was told by the media and teachers. We were taught that Indians were just as effective (if not more) than people working in the US and that we shouldn't select jobs that will be outsourced in the future (like programming). In fact computer science enrollment in many colleges were at an all-time low during that time because of outsourcing fear.
So I completely disagree with your generalization that many Americans thought Indians were worse at programming.
Economists explained that software is a highly "tradeable good" and Asia -- especially India -- was filled with millions of highly educated cheap programmers.
Given that the number of people employed in software in America has remained constant since 2000, and that wages are about where they were then too, I think the evidence is that there has been a substantial "pressure release valve" effect going on. So while the most dire predictions of the 2000s haven't come true, it's also true that the confident optimism of the 1990s ill advised.
I would say that software development has been good to me so far as a career, but I still think I would hesitate to encourage a young person in America to pursue it.
This is absolutely terrible advice. Please do not ruin some young American's life with this advice. Technology seems to be one are where the demand seems to always outstrip supply, and a person trained in Computer Science would be capable of learning new skills and advancing rapidly in the tech industry.
Furthermore, since it the complexity of software grows exponentially rather than linearly, I believe that as the number of software developers grows linearly, the demand will grow exponentially ;).
Of course it depends on the market, but I disagree that is just SF. Seattle, NYC, SoCal (LA, San Diego etc.), Boston, Austin all have a thriving tech sector, although Bay Area still far outstrips them in demand and compensation.
I'm a bit of an oddity in that I took summer / nighttime college courses in 1995, when I was 10, then had a job programming right during the dot com bust. Everyone said that even if tech recovered it would probably all go to India so when I entered full-time university I went so far as to study structural engineering, something I didn't think would be easy to outsource.
When I transitioned back to software I was actually shocked at how big of a skill difference the median Indian and American / Canadian actually had. The top 1% between the two cultures is similar, but the median Indian, circa 2009 when I last interacted with them, was far behind.
1. IBM offices and most multinationals do pay competitive salary in India. We have the same problem with retaining talent in India that we have in US. Its hard to retain good programmers.
2.Thanks to US immigration system, you do find a lot of folks with deep experience working for firms in US for years return back to India. They carry with them the best practices that they learnt in US. Some of these people also attend US universities.
3. At least the big fives (I don't know about IBM) have consistent coding and code review standards across geographies and use similar frameworks, deployment and monitoring tool chains. So there is not as big of an impact as you think on coding standards across geographies, be it Dublin, Sydney or Bangalore. It usually tends to be the same.
I'm still banking on American workers to prove these companies wrong via innovation from within our borders, boycotting software companies who offshore American innovation and unionize or something to that effect to protect American workers here.
My thoughts are not about race, creed, religion or anything against India or Indian Programmers, it's about protecting American workers for American families here and in the future.
> This racism is again mirrored in the huge salary difference. Are those Indian workers really worth so much less?
Corporations pay people what they'll accept. Since many Indians are essentially doing salary arbitrage between what they'd make in India and the US, they'll accept less. Also, cost of living in India is much lower.
Literally none of what you've explained here is a result of racism, just economics.
Let's say, an engineer's monthly salary is $10,000 in the US and he can afford X level of arbitrary "comforts in life". To be able to afford the same X level of arbitrary "comforts of life" in India, he'd need just $3000 - $3500.
These numbers are for illustration purposes only. Actuals will vary. of course.
Is this true? I am ignorant of actual prices in Bay Area, but people are always complaining of high housing prices there.
http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/09/25/about-silicon-valleys-...
When I bought in 2001, every house on the peninsula (between San Francisco and San Jose) no matter what condition had at least a dozen offers and it's worse now. http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/04/13/sjm-shortage-0414/
5-6X will not get you a nice house in a nice area. It will just get you a small house. In San Jose, the cheapest ones I'm seeing are in the 500-600K range - smaller than 1000 sq ft.
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cit...
That doesn't make it right to do or that this behavior will get the high quality talent pool every company says they will hire. So why do you think that it will work in this case?
If you thin this is 10 years ago, you should watch some threads here and on /r/programming about people on H1b visas.
I've been working with and leading international teams for almost 10 years now, mainly with teams in India.
I see a huge gap between skillset and proficiency between the US, Europe and India. But I must qualify this - I've most been working with some of the large outsourcing companies in India, Capgemini, Infosys and Cognizant, and these companies are where you find unbelievably bad coders. I often literally have to interview 20+ candidates before I find anyone even half decent, and even then, the level is much less than a candidate with similar time-served from Europe or the US.
This shouldn't be surprising if you see how such companies run development projects when left to their own devices; they will staff a project with 5-10x more devs than would be used elsewhere, and everyone works on an unimaginably narrow part of the project - someone might literally do nothing but write maps for the ORM, another person might do nothing but edit config files. It's madness.
I have however had excellent experiences with Indian devs on the rare occasions where I've been permitted to use small, development-focused businesses. Excellent developers absolutely exist in India - but they are as rare as hens' teeth the big body shops.
I should tell you that these big body shops have a reputation for hiring really bad programmers, basically because they have "processes" that they use to turn these people into problem solvers in very specific domains. More often than not, that is what their clients want as well: human eyes on a system designed and written by someone else. When in college, these were known as "bus" companies, because they would give job offers to a busload of students, but all the offers were pitiful and the work horrible.
Just like you noticed, if you want to see real talent, look elsewhere.
But on other hand, I have a theory. Indian firms write a lot more code. Their code quality distribution probably is same as any other group but since there is more code, a large percentage of overall bad code comes from India.
It is kind of like some teams in a large organization write a lot of code but they are the one with the most bugs and they get punished. Another team that rarely has bugs but they don't write as much as code as others and are rewarded for introducing least number of bugs in production.
Also, I personally feel there is fundamental difference is how Indians interview the candidates. Indian interviewers usually try to identify the weakness of a candidate (if there is a fullstack opening and the candidate's strength is more on the backend, the interviewer leans more towards frontend to identify the weaknesses of a candidate). Non-Indian interviewers most try to find the strengths of a candidate. When I attend interviews and see a panel with Indian names, I know that those slots suck.
Of course exceptions apply for everything..just my observation being Indian working in Indian teams..
Despite the risk, it's easier to toss these responsibilities to a junior-level developer overseas than to maintain a 20-year veteran in the New York office.
This overall reduced cost to a company is significant enough to invest in the market. As India is still considered a developing country, the quality of life, while debatable, would be considered a downgrade for many who could potentially be poached from other regions.
Which is exactly what he was saying.
And, all the money in the world can't buy good air quality.
Tech companies are especially inclined or incentivized to offshore work because their highest cost/liability sinks are their employees. Other sectors, a significant portion of their costs/liabilities are equipment, supplies, etc. Tech industry is unique in that their employees are their biggest liabilities.
I know that tech companies have been struggling the past decade+ on trying to rein in their employee costs. HR departments have trying hard to lower employee costs.
The move to bring in more women and minorities into tech is a commendable goal by FB, GOOGL and the tech industry, but it's also driven by rising employee costs. It's not spoken about widely and openly but these companies are desperate to get control over rising salaries/costs in the industry.
Diversity is a great way to maintain and lower employee costs that have political/social benefits. Another way to lower costs is offshoring, but that has a lot of political/social costs.
But profits are profits and costs are costs. The industry isn't going to stop offshoring because of bad publicity given how much they stand to gain.
IBM and other US firms do in fact pay locally competitive and generous (but not outrageous) salaries in India, as well as other foreign talent hotspots like Romania and Estonia.
Where are you getting this info from? I have grown up in America and never heard of this.
There are companies doing great work in India (Zoho comes to mind). Why would anyone want to use IBM as the representative of Indian innovation?
That statement is racist
They don't poach devs, rather acquire a full development unit.
Question: Now IBM charges probably $300/hour per programmer. Even if it is $100 and I understand that not every hour is billed, but why isn't IBM making way more money given Indian wages?
And that suggests that IBM is not making more money because IBM's work culture has not adapted well to changes in the global economy. It may be that they have shifted to India workers because they are no longer capable of monetizing their workers to an extent great enough to pay competitive salaries in the US, rather than some factor resulting from their reliance on India. It could also be both, creating a vicious feedback cycle.
In short, problem is that IBM is IBM, not that IBM is full of Indians.
did they? either way, i think you're equivocating. it's not a "racial" or "ethnic" connotated "indian code" that some people sometimes discuss. it's more in the domain of economics, geopolitics and "IT body shops". everyone has seen brilliant indians accomplishing great things.
> The idea of Indians actually working innovative jobs seemed laughable to many Americans.
this seems like a strawman. ten years ago, people thought IT in america would cease to exist in any meaningful capacity because of outsourcing.
> This racism is again mirrored in the huge salary difference. Are those Indian workers really worth so much less?
this doesn't make much sense to me, so some clarification would help. you cannot directly compare an absolute number in two economies. you can't even meaningfully do it between (say) san fransciso and knoxville.
> One thing is certain to me, that low salary is hurting IBM. By not paying a competitive salary, those IBM offices in India are lacking the deep experience of western programmers.
again, you cannot pay a salary that is absurdly huge and completely incongruent with the local economy - be it within india, the us or any other place. at least, not on a large scale. if you payed a wage translated directly from san francisco to india, your purchasing power would be massively inflated over the vast majority of people with "normal" salaries.
it also means that the burdens and inefficiencies of international work would not be offset, and so IBM and others probably wouldn't even be there in the first place.
> In the pictures, everyone there is Indian, and that hurts the company as a whole. Diversity is more than just not being all white. Diversity means not being exclusive to any background and ethnicity.
it's india. talking about "diversity" and "white" as you are doing is just... well, it seems rather ignorant, parochial and prescriptive.
> Edit: I have yet to hear of anyone (European or American) from the sectors I work in, being poached to work in India.
unless you're planning on staying permanently, it's not an economically advantageous thing to do. not necessarily because of the salary relative to local norms, but rather when you return to a the US or Europe or wherever, your savings accrued will be less than if you had stayed.
It's hard to not fall into this trap in certain fields of IT. To the point it's almost not regarded as racist
Though as a Systems Admin, outsourcing is considered more of a joke than anything. The lowest bidding contractor wins, and the people they hire are absolutely abysmal.
If contracting companies did the same thing, but hiring a 100% "American workforce" (or British/Australia/etc), and they did an equally mediocre job, I'd suspect the derision would shift accordingly
There's a lot of smart Indian people. They're no "better" or "worse" than the rest of us. They're just a larger sample size that get tarred with that brush
Nobody anywhere in the world is paid what they are "worth". They are paid whatever is necessary to keep them at the company. In other words, as an employee the competition is other employees in the same market.
It has nothing to do with racism, that's just intellectually lazy.
>By not paying a competitive salary, those IBM offices in India are lacking the deep experience of western programmers.
Paying a higher salary doesn't suddenly make the Indian workers smarter. It just makes the job more attractive to where the stronger experience is (currently the US).
"It often takes 2 and sometimes 3 Indian employees to perform the role of the North America diluting the savings." https://nyti.ms/2yxCQGX
Now that IBM has more people in India than in the US, maybe they will find that they face the opposite problem: US workers will have to adapt to their Indian counterparts instead of the other way around, so it will be more productive to hire an additional Indian than an additional American.
But all of it is just anecdotal evidence (it goes both ways).You are not only forgetting about how economics work but also evidently omitting how that happened that US is so rich and can afford paying such salaries.
I really do not want to elaborate more but todays tech companies create such huge social disparities in India that literally everyone wants to work in IT just to uplift himself from "3rd world poor" to EE standards.
whatever it is, perhaps it would be useful to ask yourself if there are other interpretations, as well as why you came to the conclusion you did.
It was a freaking nightmare of a process just to provision a single firewall rule... Sure thats a famous old saying about IBM -- but my personal new one is that I would never hire their professional services for anything after that experience.
As lots of people know that IBM gets 21 consecutive revenue decline and it's forced to cut down cost. But cutting down cost doesn't mean you should shift your development work to under qualified developers or programmers. This will further affect IBM's software quality and hurt its revenue. Why not putting the money hiring less but good developers. If you are a developer, you would find what that feels like to work with under qualified developers.
To be honest, have you heard about any impressive software product or solution from IBM in recent years? I would blame this to a short-visioned management team. Maybe its management team is thinking they could hire more below averaged developers with the same money of hiring one good developer in hoping that quantity can cover quality. In fact that's totally wrong in technology field.
Moreover, those talented technical people are escaping because they are not getting what they deserved. The management team is investing far less in technical talents than in so-called business. The end result is that the product quality will become worse and worse and customers would finally give them up.
While other companies are attracting talented IT people by all means, IBM is lost and it's driving them away.
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.
(I did say American developers, not Indian developers....)
How do you justify this blanket statement?
Because talented engineers don't want to work on the typical things that get outsourced, such as maintenance of legacy applications, helpdesks, implementation of dull ERP projects and so on. Therefore on average the quality of programmer at an outsourcing company is lower than at a real product company, and this would be the same at any outsourcing company in any country. It just so happens that some locations are cheap enough to make hiring large numbers of low quality engineers seem more attractive than fewer, high quality engineers payed sufficient salaries to attract them.
another assumption without substantiating evidence.
See the comment from @pavanred for some context.
There's a lot of implicit requirements that need to be taken into account when writing code: maintainability, security, performance, user experience, accessibility etc. It's better if everything is explicitly stated, but we don't live in a perfect world unfortunately. (My experience here shows that those implicit requirements are often not well executed, particularly when it comes to front-end code, due to a mix of: lacking experience, time pressure, different UX sensibilities).
Obviously, YMMV.
The Indian firm wanted requirements so detailed that I had to tell them where to put the for loops and while loops. It was faster to just write the code myself than explain such easy details.
The job of a programmer is to map the vague notion of what the software should do, which is reflected in the spec, into a concrete, internally consistent set of instructions to the computer.
Eventually I convinced management that even if we had to pay 2-3x for a competent developer stateside, it was worth the money because of the hidden costs of trying to outsource. The work we were doing required someone to be invested in learning the business and the problems we were trying to solve.
I have never bought an IBM-->lenovo laptop, although I have been provisioned some in various jobs...
What other main product(s) does IBM have that I would want?
they have great eng resources, scientists, etc... but I just dont see any of my money headed their way any time soon...
Some personal thought, execution is key for business success now.
But they still sell a lot of big iron to banks and FIs and try to shove QRadar down everyone's throat.
These days, IBM's competitors are companies like Deloitte, not Dell.
They tack the name 'Watson' on a lot of stuff, but some of that might be good.
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.
I used to work for IBM. We had a few workers in India who were decent to good, but most of them are just seat warmers. Their work was abysmal and required frequent re-doing.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff...
http://www.businessinsider.com/ibm-revenue-decline-20-straig...
It's a decline, nowhere near a collapse. IBM still has a tremendous amount of good will.
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
The thing that bothers me is that there's so many goddamn "project management professionals" state-side. It's like now students are coming out of college and going straight into project management doing bullshit work. American industry is in a downward spiral, we're training our competitors. These "low-cost-centers" are going to eat our lunch at some point in the future. They will be lean, efficient, creative, business savvy, and ready for anything. In the United states we'll all just be a bunch of useless PM's and supply chain specialists who can barely do more than work a phone. It will be like taking candy from a baby. Of course the execs that forced all this will be retired and living filthy rich by then.
In which reality is that a "new normal"? Companies have always been about profit maximization. The only thing that's changed is that we let them get away with more than we used to.
This one. It used to be that you would boost profits by innnovating and launching a new product line, not liquidating business segments. Instead of focusing on growth, corporate America is now preoccupied with trying to squeeze water from a stone. IBM has sold off countless viable profit centers in the interest of "streamlining" to the point at which there isn't much left of the company's former product line.
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.
http://www.deccanchronicle.com/world/america/040417/shock-to...
Did you think global companies weren't global?
Did you imagine corporations we're patriotic or loyal in some way?
Do you hope free marketism cares about anything than efficient allocation of resources / maximum profits?
Is it time to start talking about unionizing software developers? To protect their jobs, creative freedoms and the rampant ageism that exists in Silicon Valley?
If IBM had zero restrictions on importing skilled labor, IBM USA would probably still be larger than IBM India.
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.
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.
If $100 million flows from AT&T to IBM. And IBM pockets $10 million and sends $90 million to India, that would be a net -$90 million for the US economy.
Where do these jobs go?
Randomly, Amazon employs over 350,000 people, 25,000 of which are here in Seattle.
https://www.ted.com/talks/nirmalya_kumar_india_s_invisible_e...
(at the end)
It must be difficult having two hugely different cultures & work ethics trying to work in synchronicity to complete this type of project. (I'm only speculating that the project was done by their India teams and not the US/Canadian teams)
[1] http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/phoenix-ibm-contract-un...