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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.'"
so its okay to outsource jobs to reduce costs but not okay to lower salaries of the top management to reduce costs?
Don't Tread on OpenSource
Right now businessmen are eager to outsource a 80k / yr job to a 10k / yr position. (Forget that 5k shit in the Times, you need more developers and there are hidden costs, in delivery delays and communication overhead.)
What are the boards going to do when they realize you can get a CEO for only 100k / year in India or Russia ? If Ed Whitacre (SBC) was replaced, the 82 million a year savings (yes, look it up) would nearly be enough to make SBC profitable, for the first time since they hired him !
Corporate Boards themselves are much cheaper overseas; in some cases you only have to go as far as Canada to get boards that work for a tenth the price of boards in the United States.
These changes are the inevitable reflection of the market, and passing laws against it just damages our competitiveness. American CEOs will always be able re-train to other jobs to stay competitive.
Best of all, the savings to the bottom line can be feed into tax-free dividends, which help keep the stock market strong.
The IPs of those who respond against this post or mod it down will be reported to Asscraft as Al Qeada agents.
While it is true that many technical jobs have been moved to India, the best Indian engineers actual come to the US to have jobs here.
CBS's 60 Minutes had a segment on students of the ultra-competitive Indian Institute of Technology a while ago. And apparently all the graduates from IIT want to come to the US.
Therefore, I have the thesis that technical jobs in the US are simply getting more and more advanced, whlie "easier" technical jobs are being moved overseas.
You have a bank. That bank runs on a mainframe. That mainframe is programmed in something like COBOL or somesuch. There's a problem getting COBOL programmers. Not many people want to learn or work with COBOL any more, so when these existing programmers retire or die (which will cause the pool of COBOL programmers to dwindle 15% in the next decade), they're going to be hard to replace. But in India there's a crapload of people willing to do the work. It would be considerably cheaper to outsource the maintenance on the existing system than it would be to rewrite it in flavor-of-the-month language/platform, so to India the jobs go.
Yes, throw in the factor of "lay of tons of people about to retire and outsource them now" and the situation gets all shitty, but why doesn't it ever occur to people that sometimes the jobs are outsourced because no one wants to do it anymore?
A place I interviewed at outsources their document imaging to India - and the nature of the business meant that millions and millions of documents are done this way. True, they saved a lot of money by not paying rows and rows of Americans a minimum wage, but the other problem was that there simply weren't enough Americans willing to do it, period.
Schnapple
From the article: ...the company's executives were particularly worried that the trend could spur unionization efforts.
Why aren't we unionized? What are the actual benefits, downsides, and what does it take to get there?
This is obviously the beginning of a downward spiral, so I say we should act now while we have a chance.
This is part of a larger problem in which everyone looks out for #1. If we would only concider our actions on the scope of our community (speaking nationally), things might be different... from copyright laws to workforce management.
no comment
Programming is simply a commodity. I oughta know, I am a programmer. My job will go overseas sometime soon. I'm just trying to make as much money as possible beforehand, in the opes that I am prepared.
I'm a programmer too, and I find little logic in your comment. Why should a company which is based in the U.S. be allowed to benefit from the infrastructure here while offshoring jobs? Why should the company get a free ride when their employees no longer pay U.S. taxes or pay into Social Security, and the company no longer pays the mandatory matching contribution? Sure, the company might make more money in the short run (and shareholders in whatever country make a few pennies), but it is at the expense of the American taxpayer. Companies that offshore their labor should do the right thing and offshore their headquarters and management as well, so they can adequately supervise their operations.
Since U.S. executive compensation is so horribly out of whack compared to the average worker's in comparison to the rest of the world (over 500:1 at last count), why aren't the executives' jobs offshored first? That would be the most logical place to start cutting costs and improving profits. And if managerial brains are not a commodity, what is? IBM's position is: "Ooh, ooh, other companies are doing it, so we gotta do it too." I liked the old IBM better. Then they had real management that appreciated the fact that the current employees made the company what it was.
Actually, sugar cane is still grown in Hawaii. Surprisingly, sugar is the one of the most subsidised industries in the US. We pay over five times the "world price" for sugar.
Originally it was just to protect sugar growers, but after corn syrup became the number one sugar substitute, it's now used to keep domestic sugar prices higher than corn.
Why would this be that important? Well because the first political primary is in Iowa, of course, corn capital of the world. Historians will look back at the US and wonder why in the hell corn farmers had such a huge impact on the policies of the most powerful nation in the world.