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IBM Moving Developer Jobs Overseas
helixcode123 writes "According to the New York Times (also on Yahoo News), IBM is planning on moving a substantial number of high level jobs overseas to 'India and other countries.' IBM argues, in essence, that they need to do this to stay competitive. The article
quotes that Forrester Research '...estimated that 450,000 computer industry jobs could be transferred abroad in the next 12 years, representing 8 percent of the nation's computer jobs.'"
My only question is, if you have questions with the code, aren't you going to need a translator for the comments?
English is the international language for software development. Most companies that have overseas work, or open operations will have business-level English speakers at hand for this stuff. We have 3 Indians here, all of whom speak excellent English (although one has an accent exactly like Apu) just for that reason.
And what's a network function variable?
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Exactly. This is what happens in an efficient (global) economy. A product becomes popular (computer technology) it becomes a commodity and gets cheaper, margins shrink and you look to save on costs.
The solution isn't to weep and wail and whinge, but to innovate. That's how the US got where it is in the first place. But you should understand it never stops. Free your mind and get rich!
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I wonder if the time zone difference might be seen as an advantage, i.e., as a way to have skilled, white-collar employees working on a problem 24/7 without having to pay them a premium for working overnight?
Hell yeah!
I work for a small (~120 employees, two divisions - software development and infrastructure) and we have an office in Pune, India to do software dev.
The software people here talk to the client all day, have meetings, and write specs. Then you know what they do at the end of the day?
They send an email with the specs to the guys in India. Then they go home for dinner, hang out with their families, and crash.
When they come in the next morning, they have an email from the coder slaves (sorry, I mean, "folks at the India office") that has the code. Done.
They spend the day demoing it to the client, having meetings, firming up the spec, and the cycle repeats. But only for about half as long as it would if the product were being developed here. And for 25% of the price.
Our India office wasn't very utilized when it first started up. Now I think the utilization in the first quarter of this year was above 90%.
That is a big reason this is so attractive, and India in particular.
Maybe your grandkids will be lucky and get into the India's future version of the H1B program to encourage tech workers to move and work there.
Seriously, there will always be a need for a highly skilled and highly educated workforce.
In case you're interested, here are some more links about this and other related issues that we have seen before.
Leaked: IBM Execs Urge Moving Jobs Offshore in Internal Teleconference
An internal recording of an IBM teleconference about moving jobs offshore was leaked (Google) to the New York Times by an upset employee. From the article: '...under increasing pressure to cut costs and build global supply networks... I.B.M. needed to accelerate its efforts to move white-collar, often high-paying, jobs overseas even though that might create a backlash among politicians and its own employees. "Our competitors are doing it and we have to do it," said Tom Lynch, I.B.M.'s director for global employee relations. He also said that 3 million service jobs were expected to shift to foreign workers by 2015 (based on a Forrester Research report, which represents about 2 percent of all American jobs) and that I.B.M. should move some of its jobs now done in the United States, including software design jobs, to India and other countries. Oracle plans to increase its jobs in India to 6,000 from 3,200, while Microsoft plans to double the size of its software development operation in India to 500 by late this year. Accenture has 4,400 workers in India, China, Russia and the Philippines.' Critics say 'schools will stop producing the computer engineers and programmers we need for the future' as a result of these moves. Listen to the IBM recording in Real format (direct link at pnm://audio.nytimes.com/audiosrc/2003/07/21/busine ss/20030722jobs.audio.rm). More at the SJMN, Inquirer, and CNN/Reuters. Slashdot has discussed Global competition, offshore outsourcing, lower cost replacement workers and the ensuing legal turmoil before.
To paraphrase from the movie Jerry Maguire:
It's not technology friends, It's technology business.
I beg to differ. I've sent out over 2,500 resumes since Jan 1 and actively go after many of them rather than sending a resume & sitting & waiting on the phone to ring. Most of them tell me they received over 400 resumes before they even got the office doors open at 8am because it came out in the morning paper and people wanted to get theirs in first. The others just tell me I'm overqualified without even asking me if I would work for a lower salary (which I would at this point).
With unemployment higher than it's been in decades and companies sending thousands of jobs overseas, this is a bad thing.
Dell starting sending jobs overseas this year too and my department was the very first to go. It was my early Christmas present.
I'm just spending my time off learning more *nix flavors & learning c++ & Perl.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.