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Bangalore Beats Silicon Valley
An anonymous reader writes "The inevitable has happened. Bangalore, which grew under the shadow of America 's Silicon Valley over the last two decades, has finally overtaken its parent. Today, Bangalore stands ahead of Bay Area, San Francisco and California, with a lead of 20,000 techies, while employing a total number of 1.5 lakh engineers."
1.5 lakh engineers.
What's a lakh, and why do they need engineers?
It's amazing that during an election year that I've yet to hear one thing from Dean or Bush about this. Is everyone bought and paid for?
I honestly think that a lot of the current commentators are dead on when they say that this is a "fad" and this will eventually balance itself out. Wait until some corporations get a gut full of having their code halfway across the globe. Most companies aren't willing to let you work at home and yet they're willing to hire hoards of people they'll never meet to write their code? Heh. This will right itself eventually.
It will be interesting to see how long it can sustain its growth to prevent the same kind of retraction that hit Silicon Valley.
Were those things in the 5th Element.
If you can read this sig - the bitch fell off.
Who would want to live there? At least California is pretty.
...a lakh is 100,000.
1.5 lakh, so 150,000?
"Bangalore stands ahead of Bay Area, San Francisco and California, with a lead of 20,000 techies, while employing a total number of 1.5 lakh engineers."
1.5 engineers hey. Always wondered where that 0.5 kid from the average 2.5 family got to. Engineering.
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
Name 5 great software products to have come out of Bangalore. Last!! It hasn't begun.
How many of you have dealt with these Asian techies and have been on the phone longer due to a misunderstanding between yourself and a techie?
Rather Frustrating!
Maybe there's a learning curve, but if I had my druthers, I wouldn't put up with it.
Is this an New Year's/April's Fool article?
I don't see the folks on Sand Hill Road moving to India very soon.
Also, the article is from India Times, so expect some bias.
with a lead of 20,000 techies, while employing a total number of 1.5 lakh engineers
What unit of measure is a lakh or what is a lakh and how come they only need 1.5 engineers for 20,000 techies.
Is this meant to be sung to the tune of Monty Python's "He's a lumberjack" ???
yes, except you are likley to find bugs crawling around in it. true story.
With the result that Bangalore took off with a bang. Y2K went out with a whimper.
IBM's own support is just banging your head against a wall. Most of the people I speak with sound like they have a mouth full of marbles.
I refuse to call IBM tech support anymore. I'd rather deal with JBoss than Websphere. At least I can get answers.
. . . with a total payroll of what? about $50k?
'I ain't a liar, baby, and I ain't proud I just want what I'm not allowed.' -- Violent Femmes, 36-24-36
Q: What does Tascha Yar do when she's drunk and horney and can't find Mr. Data?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
lets see how USA is losing
Steel, Textiles, Computing, Cars and Trucks, Electronics, Shrimps (yeah really)
so what do you do again ?
which grew under the shadow...
India is Mordor??
"I did this cuz Linux gives me a woody"
www.google.com
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
A couple of years ago on a train journey to Mumbai I had a long conversation with an Indian software engineer. Once he'd got his University degree he got a job in Silicon Valley, but only stayed a couple of years because he realised that although salaries are lower in India he would actually be a lot better off in India because your dollar goes a lot further there. In India he could actually afford servants - a maid, cook etc. as well as a big house with a swimming pool and car. So if you read this type of story and think of hundreds of poorly paid Indians in sweatshops hacking out code, think again.
I'm sorry, but so what?
I'm not an American (Norwegian if you must know), but I have worked in Silicon Valley. Like the saying goes, it's not the size, but the quality. Yes, the best engineers in India is probably comparable to the best in the US and the rest of the world, but I find that the average engineer in India is worse than the average in the US.
Je ne parle pas francais.
It's the sign of inevitablity !! No point grumbling about it anymore.
And I care because... why? At its height, Silicon Valley/San Fran contained thousands of individuals hoping to get rich quick by pretending to be techies. Now India has thousands of individuals hoping to have a better life by pretending to be techies. There's nothing new here. Move along.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Wow. 150,000 engineers.
Must cost all of half a million dollars to pay all of them those excellent offshore wages.
You're joking right? Getting answers from the JBoss crowd is like pulling teeth with chopsticks - bloody hard work and painful when you finally get there. OTOH, maybe you're paying them...
The Indians sometimes write as at 1,00,000. If I remember rightly, there's also the crore, which is 100 lakh (or 10^7).
Ydco co
Those jobs aren't ever coming back and neither will these.
Can I bum a sig?
Now would be a good time to put together a petition and send it to the various candidates and demand that there be some restrictions to all the tech jobs going overseas.
Good luck. Unless you accompany your petition with big sacks full of money, don't expect any results (other than a polite letter -- maybe). Those same candidates/elected officals didn't act when manufacturing jobs went offshore, why would they act now?
'I ain't a liar, baby, and I ain't proud I just want what I'm not allowed.' -- Violent Femmes, 36-24-36
A City in India ("Garden City of India").
i ti cal-map.htm
http://www.mapsofindia.com/maps/india/india-pol
(remove the space)
Look straight up from the southern tip about 200-250 miles north.
If you quantify Bangalore's 'takeover' of Silicon Valley solely based on the number of techs, then yes, Bangalore looks to be in the lead. But if you quantify it in dollar amounts (average salary per tech x number of techs), I'd bet that The Valley still has a pretty sizeable lead.
I for one welcome our new Indian techie overlords.
(oh and the new Chinese manufacturing overlords too)
That, my friends, is why you never send your strategic assets/software to out-sourcers!
Sue, you say? HA! If you actually win, try enforcing it - especially in a third world country!
There is no spoon or sig.
I, for one, welcome our new Indian masters!
With the wages they get paid in Bangalore, a computer professional there can't afford a house, either.
like here in the US: Introduce websites like Slashdot and Fark in Hindi. ;)
How many people know the difference between tech support and IT?
Thanks Mr Bush! Lets take lot of jobs and move them overseas so that big companies can flurish here in the U.S. at the expense of the American worker.
Yes probably flamebait, but sometimes people are labelled that because they speak the truth.
India. What is it all about... is it good, or is it whack?
So how many of their languages do you speak?
Which puts you in exactly what position complaining about other peoples foreign language skills?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
They speak English in India.
See the CIA factbook entry on India.
-Peter
Now I'm gonna have those words stuck in my head all day.
Show of hands please: how many of you have had to deal with these American techies (managers?). Is it possible to understand those "real nice" redneck boys down in the deep south? Very frustrating! I spend too much time on the phone because of them.
Interesting point that keeps cropping up in my meetings with Americans: tabling something in a meeting means exactly the opposite there. I guess we all have to learn how to communicate better with each other.
Not for long !!! Our President will fix ...
1 06 -0511-bush-immigration.html
the problem
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/mexico/20040
WASHINGTON - President Bush is proposing to let foreign workers who have U.S. jobs waiting for them enter America
With the ability to get cheaper labor off short in the tech world, the prices for certain tech consumer goods (from software to DVDs to car computer brains) will fall, allowing prices to fall as well.
This will allow the average consumer to spend more of their money on other items, including entertainment, debt reduction, maybe even more money towards a mortgage or a new car. Jobs moving to other countries is only good news -- I can only hope we see more of it as it will allow people here in the States to find new things to do with their overpriced labor.
Maybe we'll even see that we don't deserve as much as we earn, and that we're not so special.
Tibor Machan has a great article on Job Security and why this phrase is false. If you can not produce a desired product at a price that the buyers are willing to pay, you are not really producing anything but waste. American techs are paid way too much for what really has become a blue collar job in many cases.
Just like tariffs on imported steel and imported sugar have destroyed jobs in this country (by making cars here too expensive, and even Fannie Mae chocolates has closed down today because sugar is too expensive), putting tariffs on imported tech software will do the same. Allow consumers of technology to decide what they are willing to pay. U.S. firms can even promote a "Buy American" program if people really care.
I know I don't. I want to see prices fall on technology so I can focus my spending on other areas -- more dinners are local restaurants, maybe more concerts or theatre.
Remember, the Living Wage is a MYTH.
Its not the size that matters... its how you use it.
He is in the perfect position to complain, as a customer requesting technical support. He shouldn't have to learn a foreign language just to get help reviving an ailing system.
That said, I've had very good experiences in the past with "follow the sun" tech support from HP when I was a night-shift HP3000 operator. I suspect that widely used platforms requiring more support staff would be tougher to handle well.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
If the petition is backed up with a LOT of letters to Congressional and State Representatives, it may get somewhere. We did roll back H1B to 65,000 from 195,000 last fall. The fact that the middle class is getting affected has greatly increased the number of people concerned with this issue. The representatives HAVE to notice, if they want to keep their jobs!
What I find most curious is the incredibly rapid turnaround in opinion seen on Slashdot. During the dot-com boom, everyone was happy to see Open Source, a truly global phenomenon, bloooming. But now I see this strange bifurcation of views. Open Source software created by people from all over the globe is still good. On the other hand global commerce, in which the lowest-cost providers of goods and services win, is being villified.
So when a Chinese company (operating in non-democratic government) manufactures the inexpensive hardware that powers your gaming PC, that's fine. But when Indian programmers (operating in a democratic society) start beating out American programmers for jobs, there are some sort of insidious forces at work?
When principals butt up against pocketbooks is the time when you see what people truly believe.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
What is worse is when the language barrier isn't as bad, but they have absolutely no pride or care in their work. I recently called my company's help desk, which appears to be 100% outsourced to India. They give their employees great stage names like "Jason" and "Robert".
I called them regarding a problem with the LDAP server. They looked it up in their cookbook... there is no such thing as an LDAP server. The company doesn't have one! Surprise, surprise. (Yes, they flat out told me that the company didn't have one.) So I tell them (because I happen to know) that it is managed by the same people who do the exchange servers. I ask to speak to a back-line engineer.
They say that they cannot give this issue to a back line engineer because there is no escalation path for this issue. Because there is no escalation path, they can't do anything with the problem. So it isn't their issue.
About as far as I got was to convince them to give me to a second line engineer, unfortuantely, also from Indea. He at least had some vauge knowledge of what an LDAP server was.
In the end, I just hung up on them. They waste my time with their ignorance. I emailed a manager's address I found in the messaging group, and got real help from there.
Why on Earth is this insightful? This has nothing to do with Banglore.
Fact one Banglore is more than call centres. Call centres are not R&D. Fact two, you get a lot of Asian techies who work directly in the UK and US. Fact three when an Indian is speaking to an Indian they don't have trouble understanding each other because of accent. Fact four: hell, understanding Americans is sometimes so difficult, because their words have a different meaning then they do here (UK). Try: "damn mate, my car got nicked last night!" Totally different meaning. So much for misunderstanding.
The reason why Banglore is on its way up is that software development is becoming, in a sense, more "labour intensive" than manufacturing (you need programs to drive robots). Nowadays an OS, database and one custom application does not cut it any more. You have dozens of custom apps. They have to integrate with several databases well. They all have to interact with each other, not to mention customers. Result: a _lot_ of people needed for bugfixing, support etc. They don't have to be rocket scientists, just clever and quick.
On the other hand Silicon Valley is on its way down, because companies don't have as much money to invest into research as they used to have. Besides a lot of R&D has been done in the 90s, now it there is a lot to be reaped just from polishing things.
A Lakh is 100,000 and a crore is 10,000,000 (hundred thousand and ten million respectively).
Wages are low in India, but so is the cost of living. They have a serious class distinction there so the people who build, maintain, and produce and distribute food are paid just enough to keep them alive (and they're often living in slum accomodation and so pay little or no rent). This means that a an Indidan developer might not be able to afford much, but they should be able to pay the rent on their flats/apparments (especially if the company helps them out there).
$1 is about 50 rupees and you can buy a good meal for two in a standard restaurant/cafe for that price. You can get some clothes for that price too. The more tech jobs that move out there, especially with any assisted education that the government might have to help with to help fuel the growth will mean that it won't always be so cheap to employ Indians over there.
This is a side-effect of global trade. Us in wealthy countries get the benefit of cheap products and labour, but eventually as more of us use the labour in India, they get wealthier and demand more and so India will be a proper first world economy and will start importing its developers and workers from poorer countries (like malaysia or indonesia perhaps).
aye. That was one of my first thoughts reading the summary - how fed up I am with American companies hiring techs to support their American customers, but the techs don't know English. I've dealt with Indian, Asian, native speakers etc and its incredibly frustrating.
I'm wondering if this isn't part of a plan on behalf of the companies to build in planned obselense. How many calls does joe average consumer have to make to tech support before he gives up and buys another computer/etc, figuring (or being told by the tech) the computer/etc must not be fixable? Planned obselense (intentionally designing products to fail, in order to force the customer to purchase another) was outlawed in the US a while ago, but this seems like perhaps a back door to the same thing?
There is very little future in being right when your boss is wrong.
I've always wanted to post this in an "offshoring" /. article, but have always arrived late to the game.
Firstly, a disclaimer: good on India. I hold nothing against them for accepting, with open arms, North American tech jobs as fast as CEOs rush to send them over.
That being said, I believe we (ie. North Americans) are being fucking morons about this. We are willingly shipping them high skilled jobs so Mr. CEO can report a quick profit the next quarter. In the mean time, we are losing an entire generation of "junior" positions. I believe that will spell the end of software development in North America.
My current job is that of a software architect. It is a high-skill job requiring very specialised knowledge in the area where we make software. I got to my current job by starting as a junior programmer at this company. After 3 years I was bumped up to "intermediate" developer. After 3 more it was a bump to "senior" developer. Now they think I know enough to design the systems I build.
Two years ago my company opened an office in Bangalore (we have offices across the globe). All new hiring has been through that office, and they ship the programmers from India to various other offices for training on projects. In another years time, programmers in that India office will have performed enough implimentations to be considered "intermediate" developers. In a few more years they'll be senior, and in a few more they'll be in my position.
As this is going on in India, all our own new grads will be working at Starbucks serving lattes, and will be left out of the loop.
All for the sake of a quick stock boost. Good on India, shame on us!
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
RULED
enjoy unemployment
"Attractive Women: Stay away. Nerd Crossing"
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Big deal. What do they call an engenner over there? I put my money with a someone who knows what they are doing here in the states instead of some lacky who thinks he knows what he is doing. These dumb asses think just because some 3rd rate school over there hands them a degree they can call themselves engeneer. Sorry it dont work that way.
If you think times are bad, just wait till the election is over. The Republicans have struck deals with several dozens of corporations to postpone their outsourcing decisions till the 2004 elections are over. Expect to see wave after wave of US layoffs in the wake of the elections... especially if Bush wins again.
There was an article in the WSJ last month about exactly this. Apparantly, huge companies like IBM and Microsoft are keeping a low profile in India. MS has gone so far as to remove their names from the buses that they use in India to ferry programmers back and forth to work.
Magnus.
As indicated here (It's the first paragraph)
If you can read this sig - the bitch fell off.
True, the numbers seem huge, but they are quite meaningless. Quantity does not imply quality. I have seen projects with 100+ programmers being *completely* scrapped. I regularly interview candidates who can't write a simple program, in whatever language, but call themselves "Software Engineers". I have seen resumes of "MS Word Programmers".
Frankly, I think this is nothing great - I am surprised it happened so recently. Like many other articles, this is yet another sensational article from the Times of India Group. Can't understand why Slashdot keeps posting from this paper.
I always complain when I am on a tech support call with someone whose primary language is not American English. I may be an asshole for doing it but a number of customer complaints is what caused Dell to move jobs back from India.
Unless and until India starts playing by the same rules the US plays by, anything is fair in this battle.
When we no longer produce anything of value here, what do we have to trade? One thing we can do is educate people, foriegn students continue to come to the US in greater numbers to learn. Another is tourism. How many Indian's want to vacation in Detroit? Our college costs keep rising to the point that it is becoming more and more difficult for the middle and lower middle class to get an education here. The middle and lower middle classes make up almost 70 percent of our population. Another thing we have is money lots of it. Not you or I, but the ones really pushing for globalization. The 1 percent of are population that controls most of the worlds wealth and now wants more. These people find a service economy great for them, the lower classes have and always will bow to their every need. In fact, if the cost of service employees gets to high, then they can always push for more immigration, it is especially easy to get haitian or mexican labor to replace those high priced citizenry. It helps to give them a california drivers license. Most of these individuals were born into their position. Do not think for a minute Bill Gates was born into a low or middle class family in the suburbs.
By moving to a service economy where most of everything is imported, the middle class is left to struggle to maintain their status. More and more that is done with debt, easy credit for a good life now. Pay the rich forever.
Globalization is great for up and coming economies, it was great for Japan, but they are now losing to Korea, Indonesia, India etc.
The rich 1 percent would have you believe that this is all for the benefit of poor countries, ignoring the fact that when the labor costs and living standards rise in those countries, they'll be in the same boat. It will be a long time till we see programmers whose native language is Tutsi. But eventually they'll be a source of cheap labor too.
So what we have in effect is the very rich deciding the middle class is not dependant enough so they have decided to take from the middle and give to the poor.
Not exactly what Robin Hood advocated.
Laugh - it's funny ;)
I work in Silicon Valley for a very large tech company, and in December 02 I spent a month flying hither and yon throughout India visiting all the major tech companies, so I think I can reasonably compare the two tech cultures.
/. - the geek drive seems to know no language or culture boundary.
Firstly, the big tech titans over there are ALL dependent upon the US economy. WiPro, TCS, Zensar, Infosys, etc. are all oriented towards the export market. The managers over there pay way more attention to the health of the US economy than to the economy there in India.
India has an amazing infrastructure for developing engineers. The IIT system, for example, is easily comparable to the best universities in the United States or elsewhere in the west.
My colleagues in India make significantly less than I do, yet they do live in quite comfortable middle-class-land. Yes, they do have servants, but in India, this is pretty common and not limited to techies.
The eagerness, drive and overall "geekness" of the technical people I worked with would be instantly recognized on
Currently, the average work experience of the Indian engineers I'd been working with was pretty low - they were all in their early-to-mid twenties. What this meant was that most of the architecture and design work (and hence the "innovation") was created in the States, and then shipped overseas for the implementation. But they're very hungry, and very driven (as I said earlier) - I suspect that we'll start to see a lot more original development and design in the next 5-10 years as the tech base matures and gets some experience under its belt.
This is why those export companies (like Infosys) are now eager to not just position themselves as implementors but designers and innovators as well - they want to move up the tech "food chain" because there are about a dozen countries (in Eastern Europe, China, etc) that want to occupy that place in the Food Chain where India now sits.
The thing is that this offshoring business is actually possible because of the success of the Internet. I often work from my local coffeehouse when I'm not in the office, or telecommuting from home. If all I'm doing is slinging bits, does it really matter where I am? Often the answer is no...my saving grace (thus far) is that I don't work in an easily commoditized discipline.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
hotmail.com
At least it was an indian guy who created it. Sold it to microsoft for $400 million..
Bash it all you want, hotmail was pretty revolutionary and is probably used by hundreds of millions of people..
Will code a sig generator for food
That's not the point! The issue here is with upper management in the US, Canada, and England seeing that to outsource something to India will be "cheaper", and therefore they just blindly choose to do so. These people don't take into account any differences in the English language locally and over there. They don't take into account the time lost due to such miscommunication. It is an unknown to many management 'cost-cutters' who just see themselves aving (currency-units).
Relatively Recently, my friend's company finally decided to upgrade their DOS-based (yes, recently) financial package into one that was Windows-gui-based. They made the choice to use a programming shop from Bangalore. The project was delayed initially due to working out communications issues, and that took 2-3 months. After other delays and problems, the product was obsoleted by the time it was ready, but that's not at issue.
My biggest problem is the people making the choices before weighing ALL the factors. I have nothing against quality techies anywhere. My complaint is more against quick-draw decisions where such things are NOT even considered.
I've worked at several organizations with a multicultural atmosphere, and I actually prefer it. However, someone has to decide how the communication will transpire. Sometimes I've questioned whether the decision makers have thought that through enough for things to work. In many cases, it hasn't.
That's the funniest thing I've read all week! Thanks!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This brought to you by Tin, which in its foil for is the perfect hat to use when reading this drivil..
What is worse is when...they have absolutely no pride or care in their work
...
unfortuantely, also from Indea. He at least had some vauge
You have absolutely no pride or care in your spelling - you're wasting my time with your ignorance.
I DISAGREE! I work on pSeries machiens and the folks down in Austin (YES AUSTIN, TX!) are very understandable and knowledgable. I don't have to explain things to them. I usually feed them the correct info and a snap report and they usually determine in quick order what I need. IBM's support (at least the pSeries machines and mainframe's) is top notch. Xerox support on the other hand just makes me scream....and they are all in the US! :)
Gorkman
Yeah, because he's quoting grub bitching about trolls!!!
My observations below come from my experience managing a distributed software engineering organization with presence in San Jose, CA and Delhi, India. I have a total of about 25 people working for me with have in the US and have in India (think of that poor guy who is split between the two countries - that must be me with all of my travel between the two!).
Let's face it will swing back to balance over time.
Right now, there is an incredible head-count cost advantage to moving a project to India, with many companies doing. The drive to offshore to India is driving demand there heavily. It is difficult to hire quality people, wages are going up quickly, people are jumping between companies, and it is much like things were in Silicon Valley during the bubble years.
What we will see, is that the head-count cost advantage, over time, will narrow and the other costs of going off-shore will come into play (coordination, latency, frequent travel, etc.). As this happens people will become more and more selective about what goes and what stays.
In the long-term, I think "offshore outsourcing" will fade to a degree, while "internal offshoring" (building distributed development teams within your company. I believe that the trend towards distributed deveopment organizations that take advantage of cost differntials and cherry pick the best talent in various geographies (as hard as it might be to believe, not everyone wants to live in Silicon Valley or the US for that matter, I have an excellent manager, with US Citizenship, orginally from India who moved back) will continue and accelerate.
What does this mean for us in the US? It means that we will have to go up the "software value stack" and work at a higher level. If a task can be done somewhere else for less cost, it wll be. This mans that we have to be constantly working to be at the cutting edge and have the breadth and depth to add significant value and coordinate project in these distributed teams. In a sense we each have to take the role in our projects that Linus has in driving the development of Linux.
If it is any comfort, realize that we aren't the only ones feeling threatened. My friends in India are all worried and looking over their shoulders at places like China, Vietnam, Ukraine, etc. wondering how they will move to higher and higher value-add activities over time.
What Is Racism?
The 'racist' double standard: how Whites are made to feel guilty and "hateful" for loving their own people and culture.
by Thomas Jackson
There is surely no nation in the world that holds "racism" in greater horror than does the United States. Compared to other kinds of offenses, it is thought to be somehow more reprehensible. The press and public have become so used to tales of murder, rape, robbery, and arson, that any but the most spectacular crimes are shrugged off as part of the inevitable texture of American life. "Racism" is never shrugged off. For example, when a White Georgetown Law School student reported earlier this year that black students are not as qualified as White students, it set off a booming, national controversy about "racism." If the student had merely murdered someone he would have attracted far less attention and criticism.
Racism is, indeed, the national obsession. Universities are on full alert for it, newspapers and politicians denounce it, churches preach against it, America is said to be racked with it, but just what is racism?
Dictionaries are not much help in understanding what is meant by the word. They usually define it as the belief that one's own ethnic stock is superior to others, or as the belief that culture and behavior are rooted in race. When Americans speak of racism they mean a great deal more than this. Nevertheless, the dictionary definition of racism is a clue to understanding what Americans do mean. A peculiarly American meaning derives from the current dogma that all ethnic stocks are equal. Despite clear evidence to the contrary, all races have been declared to be equally talented and hard- working, and anyone who questions the dogma is thought to be not merely wrong but evil.
The dogma has logical consequences that are profoundly important. If blacks, for example, are equal to Whites in every way, what accounts for their poverty, criminality, and dissipation? Since any theory of racial differences has been outlawed, the only possible explanation for black failure is White racism. And since blacks are markedly poor, crime-prone, and dissipated, America must be racked with pervasive racism. Nothing else could be keeping them in such an abject state.
All public discourse on race today is locked into this rigid logic. Any explanation for black failure that does not depend on White wickedness threatens to veer off into the forbidden territory of racial differences. Thus, even if today's Whites can find in their hearts no desire to oppress blacks, yesterday's Whites must have oppressed them. If Whites do not consciously oppress blacks, they must oppress them Unconsciously. If no obviously racist individuals can be identified, then societal institutions must be racist. Or, since blacks are failing so terribly in America, there simply must be millions of White people we do not know about, who are working day and night to keep blacks in misery. The dogma of racial equality leaves no room for an explanation of black failure that is not, in some fashion, an indictment of White people.
The logical consequences of this are clear. Since we are required to believe that the only explanation for non-White failure is White racism, every time a non-White is poor, commits a crime, goes on welfare, or takes drugs, White society stands accused of yet another act of racism. All failure or misbehavior by non-Whites is standing proof that White society is riddled with hatred and bigotry. For precisely so long as non-Whites fail to succeed in life at exactly the same level as Whites, Whites will be, by definition, thwarting and oppressing them. This obligatory pattern of thinking leads to strange conclusions. First of all, racism is a sin that is thought to be committed almost exclusively by White people. Indeed, a black congressman from Chicago, Gus Savage, and Coleman Young, the black mayor of Detroit, have argued that only White people can be racist. Likewise, in 1987, the affirmative action officer of the State In
I am not sure if this is a wonderful thing. As it is there are too many sub-standard colleges, and basic equipment and teaching staff is lacking in many. Such hypergrowth, in my opinion can cause nothing but trouble. I don't think the basic systems and infrastructure are there to support such an endeavor. Yes there are currently very good institutions but they are very few in the top tier. Most just dispatch their students with a "token" degree.
Frankly, I think this insane growth in the engineering colleges, is just too much of herd mentality. - not unlike the dot com mania. And instead of treating a college as a social cause or obligation, most of the "engineering" and "medical" colleges are nothing but commercial enterprises. They are run purely as businesses, even to the extent, that many are called "donation colleges." You pay a huge huge amount of money and you get in - even in medical colleges !! Just imagine one of those doctors operating on you. It happens in India all the time !
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
I hear that. I had to return a Dell laptop a few months ago; I called them up and got shuttled to "engineer" to "sales representative", etc, basically to hell and back. And they were incredibly pushy for me to keep the laptop. Finally I managed to extract an RMA number from them. Hopefully Dell support will get better when they bring it back home to the USA.
With the wages they get paid in Bangalore, a computer professional there can't afford a house, either.
Allow me to clear up a misunderstanding about housing costs in Silicon Valley. You generally would learn this in Econ 101, but most people slept through it anyway, so here's a refresher:
When environmental and subsidized housing zealots push through ridiculous development restrictions legislation, scarcity ensues, and scarcity causes prices to rise, expecially in a place where demand is very high.
Bangalore doesn't have rich white liberals demanding that the spotted california shit-eating sucker fish be "protected" by cordoning off hundreds of thousands of acres of perfectly good land. Bangalore doesn't have rich white liberals demanding that all tenants have a "right" to a giant lawn. Bangalore doesn't have rich white liberals screaming for price controls for the poor.
"According to researches made in the 1980s about one-third of Indians study or studied in schools, which have English as medium of instruction. This number has gone up in the 1990s. For these people, English is in many senses their first language and it is easier for them to read, write and even communicate in English than in their own Indian languages. This makes India the second largest English speaking country in the world after USA."
Source: http://adaniel.tripod.com/education.htm
I ran a benchmark on my quantum computer, now I can't find it anywhere!
When a post about outsourcing to India comes up, there's the inevitable discussion about the workplace in India being a sweatshop and how they are poorly paid. I've posted a few comments about this in earlier discussions, but right now I'm in a better position to comment on it since I have had first-hand exposure to the workplace out here. (I'm an Indian studying in the US, currently vacationing in India) What I have to say is both good and bad.
I have plenty of former classmates and friends who are working in Bangalore and a list of the companies they work in are pretty impressive - from GE to Texas Instruments and all the outsourcing contractors such as Wipro and Infosys. I also had a friend working in a Dell call center.
About the work they do: Bangalore is not just about call centers and code monkeys. My friend works in GE and she works on PET scan machines and cyclotrons and their workplace is just as impressive as the best labs I've seen in the US. Her supervisor is a guy in his late twenties who already holds four patents and is expecting a fifth one soon. I already mentioned the friend in the call center, so the point I'm trying to make is that the work being done in Bangalore ranges from the inane call handling to the super techy fundamental research. (And yes, there are those amazing pharma companies who are making new drugs which are ultra cheap compared to the American ones due to.. I'm assuming this.. the low cost of research).
Now that that's out of the way, let's look at the amount of money they make. Most of the slashdotters are right - they don't make much. My friend who has been working in Wipro for exactly a year now gets just over $250 a month after all the deductions for numerous stuff. Now if you take into account purchasing power parity (PPP), 1USD ~= Rs. 8 (compared to the exchange rate of 1USD ~= Rs 50). So let's multiply $250 by 6 to get a closer approximation of the real worth in terms of purchasing power - that gies us $1500 a month which is no big shakes.
That of course, is not the case with everyone - if you makes something like Rs. 50,000 a month (which many of them with a few years of experience do), it's the equivalent of $1000 (in current exchange rate terms) and $6000 per month in real purchasing power terms. Which is a very comfortable amount - a little does go a very long way in India. Then there are the guys who work in India, but come to the US for onsite projects lasting a couple of years. They don't spend much in the US, and since they are paid by the client, most contractors (like Tata) give them their usual pay in India - that's like getting paid in India and the US, so when the return home, they go back with something like $15,000 in savings(which is a large sum in rupees) and they have a years worth of salary waitinf ror them. Of course, it doesn't happen to everyone, but these guys (I know one person who's a VLSI engineer who can come to the US pretty often) have the best of both worlds.
Lastly, about work conditions : Most good companies have excellent work conditions which I've seen - posh offices, gyms, every facility you can think of. Contractors such as Wipro and Infosys have campuses to die for. The work hours are killers though. My friends go to work at around 8 and rarely ever come back before 9 even though the official work hours are from 8-5. On top of that they go to work on weekends so that project deadlines can be kept. However, if I was running a company, I'd be happy to get employees who are willing to work their asses off to get the work done compared to employees who stick to the clock.
All in all, work hours are extremely long, workplaces are good, pay is low, and the work ranges from the inane to extremely high tech.
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
This hemoraging of jobs overseas has to become a prime election issue.
There was a good article on this topic in the Sunday L.A. Times pointing out it isn't only the Tech industry losing jobs overseas. All job levels and industries are sending services jobs overseas.
The Corporate CEO's and politicians they have in their back pockets only see improved operating costs, what they aren't seeing is they U.S. customers losing their jobs and won't be able to afford their products as time goes on.
Back when Alvin Tofler wrote _The Third Wave_ and said losing our manufactuing industry overseas isn't a problem, because America will become a Services based economy. Now we are losing our Services economy, but their isn't anything to replace it. The CEOs and politicians that cater to them need to open there eyes.
Outsourcing jobs overseas NEEDS to become a major issue in the upcoming elections. Every canidate needs to be informed of the issues and asked how they stand on it.
Enjoy our complimentary smart bombs with high-explosive payload at no extra charge!
You have once again successfully screwed your fellow citizen. I commend you!
The company I work for, while incorporated in the US (for tax benefits and defense contracts, y'know), has the bulk of its employees in Bangalore. I, fortunately, have not had to work with the Bangalore office, since my work export control, meaning that foreign nationals can't work on it without special permission from the State Department. My coworkers on civilian projects, however, dread having to work with India. I'm not certain how much of it can be blamed on the Indian engineers themselves, and how much is the fault of poor communication, but all I ever hear about Bangalore is how often work needs to be sent back to be redone, and how inconvenient the time difference is.
...I had a point when I started writing this.
Do the company savings on salary and benefits make up for having to redraw a set of design prints five or six times? I don't know. I do know it runs the American engineers ragged and frustrates our customers when there's a schedule delay. The interface between the US and India is the real rough spot, I think. I know that purely internal work in both countries goes smoothly, but not being able to use our huge labor pool in India is hurting the American side of the business. Maybe I'm able to look at things dispassionately because my job isn't going overseas, but I *want* international outsourcing to work...and it's a rough start for my company. We need to overcome language and cultural barriers (any American who thinks Indian English and American English are the same dialect has never spoken to an Indian) and establish some actual communication between the continents, instead of throwing a set of design requirements into the ether and expecting the Magic Overseas Engineers to sprinkle some pixie dust and suddenly have a working set of engineering drawings.
Is it different for IT work? I don't think coming up with design requirements for a program and then implementing them is a fundamentally different process than for a jet engine.
On the other hand, the broken English of the company newsletter is occasionally hilarious.
-Carolyn
Like Daddy always said: if you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit.
They say the same thing about you ;-)
I find Indians' English to be generally intelligible. (Far more so than Australians'.) I also find the Indian accent very pleasing to the ear.
But that's just my taste.
-Peter
Indian friends I have, have told me that were shocked to discover after they arrived in the US that we did not have servants and cooks.
Of course, we *know* who the servants and cooks are in India and *their* standard of living.
Maybe India will get more than they bargained for... all they need is a class-based revolt.
They almost didn't survive. The result was A Good Thing for the consumer.
Now Japan has to worry about China, Korea and Taiwan doing the same thing to them.
It pays to go to work every day thinking it may be your last day there.
Here in the UK programming jobs are slowly disappearing down the sink and emerging somewhere
in india. I suspect its less of a problem elsewhere
in europe because I doubt many indians speak german or polish etc and its always easier to deal with workers who speak your language and code
using naming conventions in your language too, but I suspect if the cost reductions become hard to resist it won't be long before young Ranjit & friends in Bangalore are
sent on a Learn Polish in 21 Days course.
Entertainment.
-kgj
-kgj
Oh, please. * Wrong metric, this one actually supports growth in the valley * You can't throw people at every problem * The valley is as much about marketing as it is engineering, a retained competency no other cluster can and will match Bonus Link: Peter Drucker on India vs. China and how the US has focused on the wrong emerging superpower
If its english they should use english. Or alternatively 150K would have been just as clear
as writing it longhand. Who the hell has ever heard
of a "lakh"??
Who would want to live there? At least California is pretty.
Maybe some places that aren't California are pretty.
Maybe some people live there happily.
QUOTE
it is found out that the Americans are shying away from the challenges of math and science
UNQUOTE
Then they must be shying toward burger flipping.
It happened to me a lakh times... It took us some time to persuade them not to use the term lakh in design specs ("the alarm database must be able to keep at least 2 lakh alarm instances").
Say out loud: I'm an Aspie and I'm somewhat proud, I guess. Uh. Can I write an email in all caps instead? Hm...
but only 100 times smaller.
I wasn't sure what a lakh was, but something about 1.5 engineers didn't sound so impressive.
"You American engineers are so smug! Me and my half-carcass here will take all of you on!"
Fact #1: Indian's don't use deodarant.
Fact #2: Indian's don't use toilet tissue (they wipe their ass with their hand using water)
Fact #3: India itself smells like poop with the cow dung everywhere and all...
Whenever this issue comes up I always see somebody or the other clamoring for legislation or other forms of protectionism. But in doing this they make some serious assumptions, that are wrong --
a)American companies can be better off without any offshore development... No.
Reason 1... Not enough americans are getting into the engineering disciplines, and those that are do not get the grad degrees etc. Have you seen the university graduate school departments for Masters/Phd. lately? How many americans do you see? India already produces vastly larger number of Engineers/computer science degrees then USA. It had at the last count about 1200-1500 engineering schools.
Reason 2: Offshore/onshore combination development is a model that Indian companies have perfected as an art form, with the result that companies like Wipro, Infosys etc. are directly bidding for the contracts that US companies were outsourcing to them, because of lower costs. In fact IBM lists the Indian company Wipro as one of its most formidable competiters in future for its core services business. So, either US companies need to perfect the model, or start loosing contracts especially internationally
b) Stoping outsourcing for govt. contracts using legislation will help. False It would probably slow things down, but it would only mean taxing the common citizen more to pay another US citizen, i.e. redistribution of wealth, and not any creation of wealth. On the other hand outsourcing means more dollars in the hands of Indians, and what do they do with those dollars? they can do only one of the 2 things, i.e. either buy US products or invest back in US, and they do both. At the same time more wealth is created in US, because some customers save money,and the money that went out, came back again and bought more products creating even more jobs.
c) Indian companies are not creating any products.
False. Subsidiaries of US companies in India are creating complete products. See previous stories in slashdot. But even besides that India has been getting the largest amount of VC capital in Asia for last couple of years, and you will se products out soon. Some products are already there. For e.g. iflex In FY03, International Banking Systems (IBS) has ranked Flexcube as the number one selling universal banking solution in the world. Represented in over 50 countries through more than 30 corporate business partners, i-flex has gained the recognition of the first company in the world to cross the 100-installations mark for its product in less than 5 years. And there are other success stories.
Allow me to refer to you a wonderful book; "The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire". Please take time to read carefully and extrapolate events in Roman times to modern times.
This came up a while back.
Maybe you can move to India, but you can't work there. They're not eagerly handing out H1Bs, or any sort of equivalent. The old, "Then move to India, where the jobs are," argument has been raised numerous times, and finally someone (presumably knowledgable) posted this little tidbit.
From what I can tell, these emerging 3rd world countries want these jobs to improve their countries, not to enable American expats to exploit their lower cost of living. (I suspect they're happy to let you spend your dollars there, just not earn them.)
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Which part are you accusing of being "drivil" (sic)?
The first part, about layoffs being postponed till after the elections, or the second, about buses in Bangalore?
Both of these are facts, and have been documented by multiple sources in the MAINSTREAM media, including republican-friendly Wall Street Journal.
Magnus.
Perhaps once they have the majority of the programming jobs, they won't put up with you, and will only speak in a different language.
I don't speak any other languages either, but I am not ignorant enough to think that everyone must speak my native language flawlessly. This is the kind of attitude that is going to bury the US someday. You are a short-sighted fool if you think it can't happen.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
You READ it? You mean there are ARTICLES in it? I tought it was just full of pictures.
It isn't just the rich white liberal behind these restrictions. Us rich white conservatives that alreay own our home support them as well. It makes our home value rise. Sad but true...
Think about it. An Indian or a Pak executive will work for a lot less...and they certainly won't screw up^h^h^h^h^h^h^hmanage the company any better or worse than their overpaid American counterparts. Anyone interested in starting an executive outsourcing company with me? :)
I went into one near me yesterday that i was last in after it opened a couple of years ago. I swear the place hasn't been cleaned since it opened and this was in a upper-income suburb. Moral of this? You get what you pay for so remember that all you idiots driving into your local walmart to buy your cheap crap. So in 50 years once 90% of America resembles India of today will a Indian be sitting around saying great there goes our programming jobs to cheap Americans? And thats why it pays to be a creative person not a programmer, programmers are monkies creative people are unique.
At least you recognize the change in the winds. Go back to school and get something like an MBA. That's what I'm doing.
Biodiesel : domestic, renewable, clean, and in the fuel tank of my bone stock 2002 New Beetle TDI
To watch tech salaries rise, you don't have to raise the standard of living of the whole country. You just have to raise the expectations of those people capable of fitting into the tech sector, as well as their economic neighborhoods.
This will lead to terrible unrest in India, as poor people flock to Banglador (and the like) in search of jobs. Not tech jobs, since they're not qualified, but Starbucks jobs, servant jobs, etc. There was an article in the past few weeks about people being beaten who tried to move into an area to apply for a railroad job.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Hotmail was created in Silicon Valley. Here's an article about it.
It was a typical Valley product with people from the entire planet working on it. In my expereience the teams are about equal parts Indian, Chinese, European and American.
so what do you do again ?
"This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it--we're talking trade balances here--once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwaves in Tadzhikistan and selling them here--once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel--once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani bricklayer would consider to be prosperity--y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery"
(From Snow Crash.)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
For each mistake of ANY kind you make, you should knock a quarter off of your hourly wage. Don't make any mistakes? BULLSHIT.
Grow up. That's my advice to you. Grow up.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
There's so much Amero-centric ignorance in this forum. Perfect example of intolerance and fear.
Who's stealing the jobs? Do the Indians come marching into America, and put guns to the heads of IBM, Dell and Microsoft and tell them to move the jobs over?
HELL NO!
These companies only move the jobs over to make MORE profit (read that as greed). To increase their bottom line. To line the pockets of investors (ever buy a mutual fund?), buy fancy cars, that suck up cruddy oil, which come from Arab countries, that Bush ends up bombin cause his daddy had no balls.
When Ignorant People are threatened, they blame everyone else and never take responsiblity. They blame the funny looking people down the street with their funny accents, they blame migrant workers, they blame foriegners, they blame immigrants, they blame other countries...
Poor xenophobic bastards. Blame blame blame, and never take responsibility.
Of "The Man" is blamless.
Got a link to any of these mainstream sources?
Thanks
Everybody dies frustrated and sad and that is beautiful
I just don't understand fellow U.S. tech-industry slashdotters creaming their pants about this. Because of the our industry's corruption and willingness to employ multitudinous/cheap but crappy labor forces from the third world instead of qualified Americans - we will,eventually, all be sweeping floors at McDee's.
I don't know how about you - but is sure pisses me off to know that the tech industry would rather have an Engrish-speaking sweatshop slave they can pay $1 per day than a fully qualified Software Engineer they would actually have to treat like a human being.
>> Tax incentives? You want other people to be forced to subsidize your paycheck?
As opposed to other people being forced to subsidize that paycheck being taken away, hell yeah, I do. As it stands, corporations get a tax incentive to outsource to the third world. Therefore all unemployed people obviously are unemployed by their own choice and preference, right? right?
>> If you can't compete with the indians, tough luck, get another job. That's how capitalism works. That's how it's supposed to work.
Yeah, to hell with all those lazy b*stards in Flint MI, and those stupid pillotex people. Dammit, just because theres not enough jobs for everone is no excuse not to go have a job. Obviously if your GED isn't getting you a job, it's you're fault that the world economic trend has screwed you over. After all, you could have stolen a presidential election, or leveraged junk bonds to a hostile takeover. Phbt. Only stupid people are poor, and Capitalism is referenced over 8800 times in the King James Bible.
>> That means better prices on the products for everyone.
Especially people who can't feed their families anymore. They benefit a whole lot.
Listen you conservative dingus - Capitalism is neither inherently good OR bad. What IS bad is people who use loaded words and tricks to ram their agenda past all cogent discussion for their own benefit. WITHOUT DEBATE THERE IS NO DEMOCRACY. THAT'S why I am so disgusted with the conserative party. You're destroying this county for the benefit of the highest bidder/buyer.
>> Lowering the overall tax rate is the only good tax incentive
Define "good"... you're obviously using it in some way other than the dictionary.
>> I've had it up to here with whining special interest whom are all uniquely deserving of other people's money in their own heads
Then Stop Corporate Welfare A-hole!
Do you have any idea of the HISTORY behind such laws? It's because employers would pay below subsistence wages to unskilled workers (as in not even really enough to live off of...) so that they'd have to work 12 or more hours in a day just to make enough money to barely live.
Not a pretty sight, really.
Now they're exporting that misery to the third world countries because they can and it nets a profit short-term for the businesses.
It amazes me how many "get a job" people are so clueless- because they're NOT IN THE SITUATION AND NEVER HAVE BEEN IN THE FIRST PLACE. They don't understand that many of these people that are "too good to work a real job" (By the way, define "real job" for me... If it's manual labor, then you don't understand what many actually did in the Tech fields- not all of them were "web developers" that got laid off, etc. Many of the people that got laid off had "real" jobs that were worth what they were getting paid for them until the Great Downsizing...) actually have obligations like houses and the such that many of what you'd consider "real" jobs won't even pay for an efficiency, let alone the obligations like car payments, insurance, etc.
If you've not been there, PLEASE do everyone a favor and shut the fuck up.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Try this one you republican bi-tatch.
Traditional republican tactics-
1)Lie out the ass.
2)when confronted with a counter argument, imply that the source is unreliable because it is not conservative enough.
3)when confronted with mainstream sources, imply that they do not exist because they're not on your lap in a silver platter.
4)when you're confronted with the raw facts in your lap, wave off the whole discussion as "no longer relevant" or "old news" then make up a new lie.
5)Steal an election, tear up the constitution and wipe your ass on the flag. Then salute the confederate flag and export jobs to the 3rd world.
6)No profit, but you already own everything so who cares as long as you keep your powerbase intact.
7)Kill babies.
What if your resume is legitimately miles long (i.e. 4-5 pages...)?
Unless you've been working fast food or retail jobs all that time, they're going to wonder WHY you're applying for the position- and think that with all those skills that you're going to leave at the first opportunity- AND NOT GIVE YOU THE JOB. The same goes for a lot of the tech positions out there. And not revealing your qualifications will lose you the job if they find out you omitted things on your application.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Oh my god, people in India are getting richer, but people in US are getting poorer or may eat shit someday if our government administration don't take actions on job offshoring and outsourcing issues, etc.
OK this might upset some people, but that's too bad.
As a Very Large Company(tm), we outsourced our help desk a few years back. It was a painful running joke in the office that if you wanted to do no work done, you'd "phone India" with a problem.
The joke stopped justover half a year ago. Our India helpdesk is incredibly efficient at fixing problems, the staff are polite, and there's no bad attitude. I don't care how much money the company has saved--they have improved the quality of their internal support, and that's something pretty damned valuable.
So before everyone whines about 'cheap but crappy outsourcing,' make sure that it really is crappy. I'd wager that for all but the most highly skilled jobs, the overseas work is as good as anything locally.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Yeaaah ! The US are aggressively promoting free market when it suits its needs (e.g. selling GMO all over the place) but don't want to loose when other countries are cheaper ? I think you don't represent enough electors to matter to your congressman. That's too bad.
>>rich white liberals
You could probably have left off the 'white liberal' part.
All the haves in this area (White, Chinese, Indian, Mexican, Black) want housing shortages so their property increases in value. That way they can sell their poorly-built house from the 1950s for 1/2 million+ and make about 450K on the deal.
That is a lot of prescription drugs.
And condos and high-rise apartment buildings ruin the 'aesthetic environment' of the area, so people fight tooth-and-nail against them--like in Mtn View, where I live.
India is hungry for U.S. dollars now but one day they'll want to call the shots. Even though India has nuclear weapons it's doubtful they have enough to overcome our newly developed, wiz-bang, handy-dandy, anti-ballistic missle defense system so we can bully them too when the time comes. I'm sure they have at least 3 or 4 terrorists living in India we could use as a pretext for invading them. That'll teach them not to mess with the Big Dog.
See our government is thinking ahead! We just don't give them enough credit sometimes.
Political Science
by Randy Newman
No one likes us-I don't know why
We may not be perfect, but heaven knows we try
But all around, even our old friends put us down
Let's drop the big one and see what happens
We give them money-but are they grateful?
No, they're spiteful and they're hateful
They don't respect us-so let's surprise them
We'll drop the big one and pulverize them
Asia's crowded and Europe's too old
Africa is far too hot
And Canada's too cold
And South America stole our name
Let's drop the big one
There'll be no one left to blame us
We'll save Australia
Don't wanna hurt no kangaroo
We'll build an All American amusement park there
They got surfin', too
Boom goes London and boom Paree
More room for you and more room for me
And every city the whole world round
Will just be another American town
Oh, how peaceful it will be
We'll set everybody free
You'll wear a Japanese kimono
And there'll be Italian shoes for me
They all hate us anyhow
So let's drop the big one now
Let's drop the big one now
"Meaningless!, Meaningless!" says the Teacher. "Utterly meaningless!"
That part..
Smaller CEOs that recognise that outsourcing is a long term investment probably will never do it.
It will take at least a decade to produce the expertise that some of the over-optimistic hope to replace.
Outsourcing infotech in that sense is a fad.
And though it feels like I have had my livelihood stolen, all that has happened is that good will has been run down for short term gains. When I get back to business, my rate is going to be much more punishing, I feel.
There is no doubt about the need for quality infotech delivery, so why does industry try and cheat?
Excellent return on their investment can already be made in the West by those with a clue - and a personnel rather than a human resource department.
There is understandable hysteria concerning the subject of offshoring by IT professionals in the West, but I think that things should settle down soon and allow the phenomenon to be seen in it's true perspective : as a way of separating and lowering fixed labour costs.
The problem looks worse currently, because there seems to be a blanket resolve by industry not to release development budgets. I would say that there has been a record level of under-investment in infotech for a variety of reasons.
Perhaps clients hoped to create a frosty climate that would kill off some of the more frivolous infotech players. If so, they have now bitten down to the bone and the lack of investment must be starting to hurt by now.
It has proven problematic time and time again to put all our economic eggs in one basket. India should diversify. It is a big country in need of a lot of different home-grown services. Being a parasite of the US economy has caused problems for a lot of other asian countries when China outcompeted them in manufacturing. If a lower bidder comes along once India grows a bit, they might be in a similar position.
Table-ized A.I.
There is also the new H-1b for everybody initiative. I doubt the effects here will be noticed till after the election.
An empirical counterproof:
A. The US is the most free trade country in the world, at least among major countries.
B. The average American Joe is better off than any other country's.
If A and B are true, it disproves what you say is "apprently happening". Remember, appearences can be very misleading.
Working at a coffee shop pays more than being a machinist in many cases.
Or bigger bonuses for executives?
That's what irks me. The benefit of outsourcing to India is being put directly into the company's bottom line, not passed on to the consumer (who now has no job).
Globalization would make me so much happier -- it does have the potential to even out gross economic disparities -- if I didn't see the whole process being manipulated by the wealthy for their own benefit.
The enemies of Democracy are
US has already cut down on H1 visas to 65000 - and already there is demand for getting that number down to zero. Add to that - there is demand for stopping the outsourcing. Guess what - if both these things US will become like China.. on its way to a closed economy
We'd have no spears, no clothing, and living in trees as apes.
Attraction is important when "having more babies" is the answer to everything.
They didn't really survive. The goverment threw them a temporary lifeline with protectionist laws. No, the Japanese companies have built non-unionized factories in the southern states. They're beating the big 3 in cars and are now turning to trucks. Why do you think the big 3 are focusing on cars at this year's Detroit car show? To be frank though, the Detroit car show isn't even the biggest or most important anymore. If the big 3 don't pull something out of their hats soon, they'll be up the crapper again looking for more support from the US government. They can't even afford to lay people off as they cost too much in retirement! I expect they'll start trying to screw their ex-employees out of their pensions soon - which are already believed to cost $1,000 per car at retail more than their US-built Japanese competitors.
* - Note that the degree major is unspecified.
In the great CONS chain of life, you can either be the CAR or be in the CDR.
I can easily imagine how someone might be in favor of free trade(free movement of goods accross international borders) but oppose open borders(and stuff like H-1b). I like Open Source. I don't approve of an the H-1b expansion(I think it was way too much and has been greatly abused). I also don't like the huge trade deficits and government borrowing facilitated by dropping of tariffs. Those may be symptomatic that the US tax structure is _seriously_ out of wack. What I'd really like to see personally is imposition of tariffs just sufficient to close the trade gap, a balancing of the US budget and a move to revamp the US tax system so US export products would be moer competitive and tariffs-particularly with countries like Japan and the EU could gradually be lowered. The only reason IMHO for running a big trade deficit is stuff like rebuilding a country after a war. This current trade deficit is just propping up bad government policies.
I have grown up. Its time for software engineers, programmers, program developers whatever the fairies want to call themselves to grow up.
EVERY other type of engineer has to go thru some sort of a certifying process to instill the base levels of competence except for software engineers. Its ridiculous. And we're supposed to just put up with it.
I'm not asking for programmers to be perfect. But to earn anything over $20 an hour for creating the type of software we all use today is a crime in my mind. From Windows to Mozilla to Real Player to Adobe Acrobat, to corporate web apps such as online banking software IT SUCKS.
It all sucks. There's no excuse, no fucking excuse. Building bridges is hard. But its done right. Building planes is hard but its done right. Wiring homes, constructing sewer systems....etc its ALL HARD but it gets done the proper way. Otherwise people don't get paid or at the very least are sued for their money back. But software engineers? The little princes who sit in cubicles and think their fecal matter smells pleasant because they type on friggin keyboards...oh no critisize not these precious souls lest you rouse their ire! They just keep pumping out crap after crap after crap and hardly if ever suffer any negative consequences.
So now we're seeing a situation where people in another country are going to get paid 1/5th to 1/6th the salary as a US programmer to produce the same quality work and I AM GLAD. I can't wait until only the absolute cream of the crop western coders earn anything above $20/hour. Plumbers, carpenters, mechanics, chimney sweeps shall make more than you and somehow you fucks you losers who spent tens of thousands of dollars and 4 years of your life on a "Computer Science" degree will either have to accept your new lower wages or find another line of work and actually become GOOD AT SOMETHING for a change.
I know my comments have been sacriligeous here on Slashdot but I just can't pretend that the overwhelming majority of software produced today is very substandard.
Do with my statement what you will.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Where's the common sense in that?
- Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.
It can be understand internationaly and is not "indian centric" ;-)
.....
...
...
;-) :o)
k = kilo = 1 000 = 10e3
M = mega = 1 000 000 = 10e6
See the list of all size expresion 10 power of
See the list of expresion 2 power of
For instance you can use k$ or M$
OR better, k$/s which is a way michael dell is counting on his retail site
Well ... (insert thoughtful southern pause) ... Us real nice redneck boys don't have any problem understanding one another. Maybe you could take a language course like Pimsleur or Berlitz. Wonder if they offer "Southern" ...
(and, no - "tabling" something means to drop it down here too)
-rickHe had india doing his and the republican parties' phone fund raising.
Bush falsely offered protection for the steel workers knowing full well that EU/Japan/UN would force him to obey our agreements from the 80's. He had nothing to lose.
I would guess that Dean will not comment until he realizes that he has to say something. That may be interesting to hear. Do you argue for an overall world economy that will ultimatly help you or do you try to protect local high-end jobs?
I strikes me that our leaders will take easy ways out rather than do the right thing. Time to set direction for our nation the way that India did.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Is it possible to understand those "real nice" redneck boys down in the deep south?
Not entirely on topic, but I agree completely.
A hint for people working in tech support, or really any job where you need to talk to the public. First of all, speak at a reasonable pace, and ENUNCIATE!!!.
Two days ago, I called a few places to find out it they had a particular hard-to-find product in stock. One fellow, who appeared to speak English, I could not understand whatsoever.
I asked him to repeat what he said - Tip #2, when someone asks you to repeat something, don't use the same rapid, clipped, poorly-enunciated style as the first time.
I repeated this twice more, same response each time, then just hung up in disgust. I still have no idea what he said. For all I know, he said they had the product I wanted in stock, for some obscenely low price. But I'll never know, because he couldn't take the damned marbles out of his mouth.
I realize that losing a single $1500 sale doesn't mean all that much to most companies, but in my experience, salespeople like that count as the rule, not the exception.
We drink water from lead cups?
You made my point for me very nicely thanks ;)
m
In Canada (although that could be changing) and the UK, tabling an item at a meeting means to introduce and start talking about it, not drop it for later and move on to the next topic.
I did a Google search, and this was the first item I came across. It's rather cheesy, but it makes this point at the end of the second paragraph:
http://www.apics-redwood.org/article/art9910CS.ht
The answer to that statement is "That's just silly. To a manager cost cutting means cutting YOUR job, not his. Havn't you been paying attention?"
It's amazing that during an election year that I've yet to hear one thing from Dean or Bush about this. Is everyone bought and paid for?
The answer to that question is "Of course they are, havn't you been paying attention?"
Sadly, this appears to fall into the "globalization" groupthink. It's a "free market economy" therefore it must be good...right?
The answer to the last statement is more complex. The plain truth is that our government has done this to us on purpose. Rather than cutting back on spending they simply spend more and more and more. How do we pay for that? Well, last week Greenspan printed another $5 Billion in fiat money that has no gold or assets to back it up. In the same week the Fed issued an addition $17 Billion in debt. And that's just one week! How about a month of $17 billion weeks? Think about a year of $17 billion weeks. How about a decade of $17 billion weeks. What will that do to our economy? Throw in ridiculusly low interest rates and it's a recipie for disaster. Allow me to elaborate:
Here in Southern California we have 15% of the jobs and 10% of the nation's population. If you count Southern California and the San Fransisco/San Jose are we have nearly 15% of the population of the entire country AND a bit more than 20% of the jobs. (This data comes from Claritas, a demographics company that I use to work for)
People need to live where the jobs are. Yes, you can say "Go live in Indiana where you can buy a house on 2 acres of land for $200k" but then reality sets in and you realize that in general, you must live where the jobs are. People need to buy houses where they live. The artificially low interest rates have made it far too easy to get cheap money in the form of home loans. This access to easy money has artificially increased the price (not the value, but the price) of homes. In Mission Viejo in Orange County a house next door to my niece sold for $440k 4 years ago. It sold last month for $1.2 million. In my area of San Diego our home prices have doubled in 5 years.
So how do people pay for that house? They need higher wages. Now follow along because this is an important concept: To purchase the same house they could have had 4 years ago they need almost twice as much money. In other words It takes more money to purchase the same amount of stuff That ladies and gentlemen is the very definition of inflation. That is the inflation that Allan Greenspan says does not exist
So our government has made it far too easy to get money which has caused housing prices in the areas where the jobs exist to skyrocket. In the mean time they are printing money like maniacs which also deflats the value of all the existing dollars AND they're going deeper and deeper into debt at a such a rate that they seem determined to utterly destroy the country and it's entire economy at the fastest rate possible.
Our government does not represent us, the middle class. Republicans, Democrats, it doesn't matter. We don't need an election, we need a revolution.
Now are you paying attention?
There's no nerd stigma in India like here in the USA. Indian women would love to land a highly paid software programmer as a husband, pocket protector and all.
It is said by some that the loss of manufacturing jobs despite unions is evidence that unions don't work. However, much of the loss is due to attrition, not existing people losing their jobs. Unions tend to protect existing members. Entry into the field may be tough, but existing people are protected. This would give us techies a "soft landing". As long as schools discurage new citizen techies, attrition alone will take care of the offshoring difference.
By the tone of most of the replies in this thread, it seems to me that this statement is patently untrue. Of course the WSJ doesn't provide any source to back up their point. Is there any truth in their statement, or is this just another example of this newspaper's racist tendencies? I imagine if I was an Indian programmer doing high-level project management, I would be pretty offended by this claim.
Most likely, I imagine this is another means for the right to maintain their foothold with the middle and upper middle class by convincing them that while manufacturing jobs may be disapearing from the US, there is no reason the believe that more skilled positions will follow.
Fairly evocative of the stock market, and so why should it be surprising that the corresponding companies act in the same way? Unless the CEO and top management are highly courageous, and actually knows they're doing it's difficult not to buckle to fashion and shareholder fears. Who's to say that they'll survive in their post long enough to be shown correct anyway? (And that assumes they even know what they're doing in the first place) When lacking vision, the mantra is reduce costs at all cost.
For example, shed whole divisions of your company. Layoff experienced workers esp. if they're nearing pension (if that exists), hire young (or just stop hiring). Move operations to India, China, Russia, wherever. Curtail most benefits. Replace offices with cubes, cubes with benches, benches with shared space or work at home. Banish most office supplies and guard the rest jealously.
Sadly, many who rise through the CEO ranks to bigger and bigger companies are the "courageous" ones who slash and burn everything they don't see paying off in 18 months (or 12 or even 6 depending).
It's not that some of these things aren't necessary under certain circumstances, but they are not without negative consequences and huge risks. IMHO, the thing to do here is similar to good investing strategy: play the contrarian. Keep experienced people around, they know things, can do things, and elevate the productivity of those around them. Hire on some of the zillions of unemployed or under-employed techies in the states. You can have your pick at the some of the best, or if you don't need quite that and if you want to do something more short term, you can get good people right now on the very, very cheap. Innovate, release products. Even if the market isn't ready yet, being ahead of the game will pay off later. Having kept good people on board and treated them with respect will pay off when they don't jump ship when things get better.
Now, how many companies are actually doing this?
When India starts producing people like Bill Hewlett, Bill Joy, Steve Jobs, etc... or making things like the mouse, gui, the PC, or ATARI game machines, etc... or has institutions like Stanford or Xerox Parc,etc... then post an article.
Till then there is not much of a story
Sanity is the trademark of a weak mind. -- Mark Harrold
Moreover, it is found out that the Americans are shying away from the challenges of math and science. A recent National Science Foundation Study reveals a 5 per cent decline in the overall doctoral candidates in the US over the last five years.
One way to look at this is that we Americans are just lazy compared to Indians, Chinese, etc (and there is probably some truth to that). But from another perspective, why should we Americans bother to get advanced degrees in Math and Sciences when we're constantly bombarded with the message that we won't be doing the sorts of jobs here which require those degrees?
This gets me to my main point: we're not only witnessing the export of good paying jobs from the US to various 3rd world countries (and the associated economic effects), we're also witnessing a huge transfer of skills and knowlege out of the US.
As there are fewer tech jobs in the US it means that fewer engineers will be employed. When an engineer has no work for a year or two their skills will stagnate. Most engineers pick up new skills 'on the job' and without a job, they won't be picking up newer, in-demand skills.
Of course this has a ripple effect: your nephew Johnny who is in highschool wanted to follow in your footsteps and get into engineering, but now he sees that you've been out of work for a couple of years and you're considering a different field altogether. You sit down with him at Thanksgiving and tell him to go into dentistry or auto repair so that he can have a steady, decent-paying profession... Well, you get the picture. Whereas math and science education is already pretty poor in many parts of the US, this trend will not encourage it to get any better. No, we'll be offering pre-law classes in highschool instead of calculus soon.
It's so politically incorrect to call them "Indians".
They are "Native Americans"
Sheesh.
Will I be able to get a job over there after the next round of layoffs -- do they have an equivalent of an H1B program? Are there any WTO rules that ensure that the job market really is global? (Has the US argued against such rules, as a form a protectionism?)
Opinions my own, statements of fact may contain errors
But I still wonder about a couple of things.
1) Readers may not be fine with what makes Chinese hardware inexpensive, but they're still very eager to buy it. I have yet to see indignant reaction to news of a spiffy new high-capacity, super-cheap drive manufactured in China by an American company and sold for 1/2 the price of its predecessor. If people really believe that lower prices are not worth the side effects of doing business with mainland China, then why aren't techies everywhere boycotting?
2) You noted: If I lose my job to outsourcing, I can see that the customer is unlikely to see a reduction in price (or bugs) for the product, and the market is favoring poorer labor conditions. Overall, the world has not benefitted by my loss, so why should I like it?
I mean you no disrespect, but pricing pressures are the very thing that has driven American companies to outsource overseas. In order to keep prices down in a cutthroat market, the companies that provide high-quality goods and services more cheaply win. It's that simple. Consumers demand lower prices, and companies can only offer lower prices if their overhead is reduced.
I would also argue that there is benefit to the people of India. If a new strata of well-educated, well-paid (quality of life for a programmer in Bangalore may exceed that of a programmer working in the rat cage that is Silicon Valley) young Indians becomes the leading edge of a transformation in Indian society, the largest democracy on earth could lift all of its people out of "developing nation" status. Not only would that be good for India, it would be a great source of inspiration for other nations.
Finally I would add that my point about the comparison between the globalism of Open Source software and the globalism of international business was intended to call attention to the notion that once you open the door, you can't easily go back. Trade promotes progress. It's been proven over and over again throughout history.
My feeling is that Americans need to stop thinking about ways to stop the growth of India's outsourcing industry, and start thinking about how to improve our education system and create new technology markets.
Between our paranoia about physical security and our paranoia about economic dominance, it's difficult to remember that we're by far the most powerful nation on earth.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
That's not true. I was part of an international internship exchange program and we had so many few students willing to go to developing countries, it wasn't a problem getting them visas to work there. Usually, there is the principle of reciprocity at work here. The US government was willing to allocate us more US work visas if we could send more American citizens abroad as well.
Damn right. You got my sentiments spot on... nothing to add, just couldn't not agree.
http://business-times.asia1.com.sg/story/0,4567,10 3575,00.html
As long as they are going to take the jobs they might as well take them in the US and keep the money local.
Sorry, I couldn't resist...
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Having a car has little to do with obesity in America. Less excercise, yes, but not diet. General obesity (that is, non-genetic) is caused primarily by three things: 1) easy access to food, 2) excessive portion sizes (Super-Mega-Size those fries, for ya?) and 3) Americans eat more crap per capita than any other country. Without pinning the entire responsibility on any one fast food chain in particular, the amount of "fast" prepared, processed and fat-laden food available combined with the percentage of the average diet that is represented by said junk, is what makes us overweight. Also, our society (dietarily-speaking) seems to place a greater emphasis on meat rather than vegetables (no, I'm not a vegan).
For a very interesting, albeit disturbing treatment on the decline and fallout of the American diet, check out Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser.
Ryosen
One man's "Troll, +1" is another man's "Insightful, +1".
So thats one way to deal with the lack of women in India. Sons have always been strongly favored. With new medical technology- mainly ultrascan abortions- this dream has been realized. The male:female ratio in some villages is approaching 3:2.
On the oher hand, if anyone one is going to get a women, its going to be a smart, rich guy in Bangalore.
When I read statistics like this, and I think about how some of the major US development shops are offshoring labor, I feel like writing another letter to my congressperson demanding something be done about this. Tax penalties, for instance. Some incentive to keep the high-tech jobs in the US maybe. Otherwise, all of those who talk about the brain drain here in the US will see it get even worse. Maybe someone should start a registry of companies who offshore development labor, as the starting point for a boycott against this practice by those in the field. I know joe consumer isn't going to give a rat's ass either way if his latest version of whatever was coded here or overseas (by a company that is allegedly a US company.. IBM anyone?), but joe user doesn't buy the high-end software usually.
Imagine the stink if this was auto manufacturing or steel production or whatnot. The labor unions would be screaming for blood.
Very true, very true...
Other Slashdot readers always see through a 'self glorified' smoke screen, when it comes to commenting on outsourcing...
But this comment is the only genuine exception..
You fail to see the consequences.
1. American economy shifts overseas to reduce costs.
2. Foreign economies boom, American economy slows.
3. Foreign currencies boom, American currency tanks.
4. American currency becomes cheaper than foreign currencies.
5. Work flows back to America.
Meanwhile, standards of living across the world start to level out as nations like India and Pakistan become more prosperous.
Clear, Dark Skies
I groan at one reason cited near the end of the article--that U.S. students are shying away from math and science. Does that mean we'll get stuck with all the lawyers and M.B.A.s? We got only ourselves (meaning, our citizens) to blame.
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
While I find this plausible, I find no easily locatable sources for it. It wasn't in the first 3 pages of links from Google under what I thought a plausible set of search links.
Now I don't follow the WSJ, so I would probably not have seen it if it were there. OTOH my default assumption would be that some reference would have shown up in Google. So an appropriate link to the story would be appreciated. (And no, lexis doesn't count as an appropriate link.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Minimum wage laws did nothing to raise the minimum wages of the poor. What they did is basically create a law saying that you can't hire someone worth less than $x per hour. If you have to pay a person $5 minimum, why would you hire someone that is only worth $3 per hour and has no skills? People never work at the minimum wage long -- once they have gained skills, their worth goes up. If you don't pay them more, your competition will.
/ www.mises.org/efandi/ch13.aspr g/freemarket_detail.asp?control =174&sortorder=title
The funny fact is that the average wage of unskilled workers has always been higher than the minimum wage. The minimum wage laws basically make it hard for the youth and the minorities to get jobs. Restaurants would love to hire 2 busboys at $3 an hour (a job that you don't stay at long once you have proven your ability to show up on time and work hard), but with minimum wage laws, they can only afford one worker at $6.
Here are some great links to minimum wage ideas:
http://www.mises.org/econsense/ch36.asp
http:/
http://www.mises.o
If you believe what Svartalf says, you've fallen victim to the Keynesian / Welfarists who believe that you have to help the poor instead of allowing the best of the poor to rise above the masses of people who care not to work, but only care to live on the backs of others.
Yup. It's easy to pontificate on the joys of globalism when you think you're riding the "long boom". It's different when your boom pops, but the other guys' doesn't.
Personally, I like to think I have enough integrity to take the long view: cycles come, cycles go, this to shall pass. Of course, I still have a job.
Clear, Dark Skies
Bombay Beats Washington, D.C.
from the only-a-matter-of-time dept.
Dukael_Mikakis write "The inevitable has happened. Americans have now resorted to outsourcing their political positions to India, making Bombay (or 'Mumbai', the new Washington, D.C. A proponent was cited, saying, 'Most politicians are out of touch with their constituents anyway, so whether they're in D.C. or by the Indian Sea, it probably won't have too much of an impact' in response to concerns over the responsiveness of Indian politicians.
'And, as a cost-cutting measure, it only makes sense,' the same source continued, 'because Indian politicians are corrupt for substantially less money than their American counterparts. And, while Americans are no slouches, Indian politicians are very familiar with rolling over at a corporate beck and call. This is a glorious achievement for American business.'
Opponents have also raised national security concerns over having an Indian president operating out of India, but these were also dismissed. 'Indians are loyal, hard-working, and will only be corrupt to the advantage of America. They wouldn't possibly shirk their duties. And with today's communication technology, it will almost be as if the politicians are in our living rooms. Trust me, there is nothing to worry about, unless you are an American politician.'
Exxon and Halliburton executives seemed enthusiastic about the idea, saying, 'I wonder if they've got much oil.'"
Argue my points instead of resorting to name-calling. I know you can do it. Deep within you there is some sort of articulate response just waiting to be posted on Slashdot.
Listen to your Inner Voice and tell me specifically what you think is wrong about my post. That applies to the parent of your post as well.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Ok, so all this is pointing towards the fact that i'm never going to get a job in the US tech industry. So what does a low 20's guy with a CS degree and little experience do now? Do we just give up and get a job in management? Do we have to go back to school and start over? How long will most tech jobs stick around here before being outsourced? Is it safe to say that the smaller business arn't big enough to bother with outsourcing overseas going to have jobs for us to fill? The competition for these will be rediculous. Do we go to grad school? What about the IT Management Programs that Uni's offer... I'm not going to cry and eat icecream on the couch, but i would like some advice as to what we're supposed to do now...
What's India's organized crime involvement with the financing of IT outsourcing in Bangalore?
Tech Public Policy stuff
This is a matter of the relative value of currency. With the dollar going down in relative value it doesn't seem likely that the savings of employing people on the other side of the world with the associated overhead will make as much sense as it once did.
You have absolutely no pride in the thoughts you express. You are writing as an anonymous coward. You're wasting my time with words you don't feel worthy of putting your name to.
But, yes, I really fudged that sentence.
Maybe it's a typo for " Latka engineers."
If we can tax imports of cargo and goods, why can't we do the same with code? This has a two fold effect of saving jobs, and raising revenue for the US.
Same thing happened with ICs and Asia. At first the grunt work was outsourced, then some low level design, and now all of it. American IC designers used to think their jobs were safe because they could 'do the hard stuff' and leave the rest to outsourcing.
Now they're all Java/.NET developers.
Anybody can start a storefront white box operation... but making it scale to a national level can't be done without external funding and may not be possible even with it.
While I labeled outsourcing as a management fad, there is no reason to believe that the fad won't last long enough to destroy most technology industry in the USA or persuade kids going into college now NOT to get degrees in technology-related fields.
Without tech industries in America, welcome to the Third World. You've presumably read SnowCrash. It's predicated on a "race to the bottom".
Tech Public Policy stuff
Having been involved in the operation of several call centers in India and working with a few software engineers there I would suggest that even though Bangalore has 20,000 more "engineers" that overall productivity is somewhat lower than the smaller number of workers in the US.
In our experience we found that dependent on the job we needed 2.5 to 5 Indian employees to match the productivty of a US employee. At $1/hr or thereabouts it is still cheaper to hire five Indians in place of one American, however.
India is winning because it has:
We are losing because we have:
These things are not neutral capitalist market forces - they are intentional, market-distorting government policies. Higher education subsidizes employers by increasing the supply of labor. A weak currency supports exporters (of labor or whatever) by making their products more competitive in world markets. Eventually a critical mass builds up and industrial leadership is captured.
In fact, as long as governments anywhere offer education and print money, it's useless to talk about "pure free markets," because you don't really have them. What you have is regulated markets that are currently being commanded to someone else's benefit and to your detriment. There's no shame in it if this spurs you to political action.
But then, what should that action be?
Well, individual wealthy investors love a strong dollar because it increases their international spending power and influence, and they love foreign educational subsidies because the cheap labor so created multiplies the value of their foreign investments. The problem is that, once too much industrial production is gone from the US, the dollar becomes unsustainable and finally collapses (because there aren't enough US products to buy with it) and the whole country - packed with suddenly worthless dollars but vacant of the industrial capital needed to actually produce anything of value - goes down the tubes (military commitments and all).
So what policies should you support to prevent this scenario?
Well, you should want a weaker dollar and cheaper, more aggressively subsidized technical education. This combo can make US industry competitive again in world markets.
Bush has it half right - he's letting the dollar gradually and progressively weaken. Every cent it falls makes your labor more competitive against your foes in Bangalore.
But it's also necessary to drastically correct and reorient public higher education. No more basket weaving classes and tuition hikes. We need to aggressively educate America's kids with real technical skills, or our industrial competitiveness and ultimately the country's future are going to bleed to death.
Get out there and organize! Recap of platform:
India is a cheap country to live in and I know it because I lived there. Yes you can say that you get very less pay than what you get in US but then you should also look at expenses. You spend more than half of your salary into taxes, rents, and payments of other kinds which is not the case in India. The saving there are tremendous. And you can end up saving more than here. The reason jobs keep on moving to India are significantly many some of which are: 1) 1 US Dollar = 50 Indian Rupees (approx) 2) You have to pay there much less than here in US. As for e.g. If I get paid here in US 5000 bucks a month, this translates to nearly 250,000 Indian Rupees. A salary of more than 25,000 Indian Rupees a month is considered more than excellent. 3) Excellent cheap labor. There are many educated people there whose primary language is English and can effectively deliver the goods. The economic condition is improving drastically and it does not surprise me why companies want to move jobs to countries like India and China with the very reason why we are seeing such a jump into Jobs @ Bangalore.
I didn't turn down anything that was actually offered to me in the form of "real work". It took me TWO FRIGGING YEARS to find a 6 month gig that I'm now two months into. Every place I talked to used the line "overqualified" quite a bit. You don't see device driver developers and client/server systems developers, getting VB coding jobs (which is what a lot of the positions out there have been for the past two years...).
And, if you must know, just before I got this gig, I was trying to scrape up the cash to get HVAC technician certifications so I could get a journeyman job doing that (since everybody, including businesses have to have that sort of thing these days...). Lots of money in that trade, I'm already knowlegeable and skilled at it having done it as a side business growing up, and I don't mind doing the work. But, I had to come up with the cash all the same so that I can be allowed by the Federal government to service HVAC systems- there's official training and tests to be taken for handling CFC's and HCFC's, etc.
If you've never been in the position these people are/have been in, you're hardly qualified or knowlegeable about commenting on the subject. Like I said to you in an earlier post, do EVERYONE else a favor and be quiet, will you?
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I have this strange feeling that a month or two before election day, Osama Bin Laden will get "caught". Bush's ratings will skyrocket and he will win in a landslide!
Perhaps, I've seen "Wag the Dog" one too many times!
OK, lets see your source on this. Oh, do you have inside information and can't reveal it? Oh, no? You made it up? That's what I thought.
Expect to see wave after wave of US layoffs in the wake of the elections...
And the election will have affected this how?
especially if Bush wins again.
If? Have you read a newspaper or watched TV lately? Without Hillary the question is not "If".
Infonaut seems to hold the "religous" belief that free trade is good for a nation.
But free trade really doesn't exist. Just look at the last WTO meeting. The third world walked out because the first world is still blocking their agricultural exports. Nations know the ideal is talk Free Trade for your exports and block imports any way you can get away with.
History is full of this kind of behavior.
Another example: If the jobs are moving to somewhere else, can't I simply move there to work? Usually no, most nations have laws limiting that.
Finally, lets take it to its logical conclusion, (as Western Rome did) we could hire cheap mercenary soldiers from other countries to form the majority of our military force. As a former military man, even Infonaut should see the danger here. And isn't a good deal of our current military effectiveness due to computerized technology? What will be the long term result of us losing our edge in technology?
As a side note: Those who say the dollars we ship overseas in foreign jobs have to come back to buy things here, overlook the fact that they can be used to buy real estate here. Thus driving up the price. So not only does your job disappear, your rent goes up too.
the zero came out of India.. so hehehe... what do u say for that? India is the inventor of all mathematics.
The Big Three didn't worry about Toyota and Honda until the 1980's because of the low priced foreign competition. They rested on their laurels turning out mediocre cars at best.
The feedback from the Japanese executives regarding their eventual siting of plants in the US is rather interesting - the success they had was due to the poor quality of American management rather than the American worker whom they thought was much better than the Japanese worker.
I wonder if the same sort of thing will eventually turn out to be true in the IT areas. If so it would suggest that the combination of American management and offshored programmer would be very vulnerable to foreign managed companies using American programmers.
This is similar to the concept that what really should be offshored is American management - these are the guys who are really making a lot more than the workers, are more likely to be corrupt and so on.
If I were a VC or somebody with a good looking business plan I would be very interested in bypassing the whole American management system and implementing a reverse structure like the Japanese currently have.
Yeah, like words vednesday or upgradation.
"Internship" isn't what you're after -- you want a career, the right to own property, sufferage under the political system, etc. Try to visualize the difference between a wave of emigration and a few students doing a semester of foreign work study. It is very difficult for someone in mid-career to emigrate from the US.
The "America: Love it or Leave it" crowd have never seriously contemplated how difficult the latter option really is. And they won't, until they themselves are part of the class that does not "Love it" anymore.
Opportunities, in the rare cases when they present themselves, are usually not sufficient for emigration.
Do you really think software development is a "commodity"?
Do you also think other professions are commodities, like medicine or law? If you need surgery, or are accused of a crime, will you hire the cheapest doctor or lawyer available?
More than a billion people! And, as someone else has already pointed, the article was written in a Indian rag (India Times) which means the target readers would know the word 'lakh'.
A bit funny coming from the yankees.
Now i dont speak eton either but atleast my accent isnt a bastardized amalgation of italian,german and irish accents.
OK the above is a flamebait but for a reason.Indians speak with an indian accent and americans with american.Doesnt make either accent wrong or right.
Anyway the right accent would be from the english departments of Cambridge and Oxford.
Wanted : A Signature.
First, engineering is an industrial approximation of science. Ohm's Law isn't exact. It fails in the extreme. The engineer doesn't usually need a detailed understanding of quantum mechanics or GTR when working with electrical components. Computer Science IS math. Church's Thesis states this. It's as exact as mathematics itself. That's the difference. It's like comparing apples and oranges.
However, one could make the point that both engineering and CS require extensive project management and time management skills, a healthy dose of vendor documentation, and elaborate design.
The problem is that the line between advanced IT and engineering has grown thinner over the last 10 years. Sure, there's a big difference between writing a device driver and a creating a large scale enterprise application. However, I've seen guys who have done both. I've seen my share of guys with EE degrees working in what I term advanced IT (IT on a large scale with more sophisticated architectures). Of course, now that advanced math (combinatorics, algebra, and logic beyond discrete math) has been removed from most CS programs and CS has been moved to the engineering side of the house, this trend will continue. I understand the professional reasons. I respect them. However, I'd like to point out that Donald Knuth, Marvin Minsky, Dennis Ritchie, Martin Davis all have PhDs in math. I'm sure the list of prominent CS people with math degrees is extensive and on the theoretical side of the house it's all math anyway (once again, church's thesis).
I've always balked at people who say they like programming but can't stand mathematics. It just doesn't make sense. Either you haven't really studied mathematics or Alonzo Church is wrong. CS will always be an open and interdisciplinary field. AI is as much biophysics as it is engineering, and certainly requires an intimate knowledge of foundational mathematics as well. The computer program is mathematics, and fields like bioinfomatics, digital physics, and computational linguistics prove this.
What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean....
2000s: India (Russia, et. al.) are taking our programming jobs! We'll never be able to recover!
1990s: China is going to kick our ass! It's OK to export to China, but let's not import from China, or we'll see the American Way of Life crumble!
1980s: The Japanese are kicking our asses! Stop Japanese steel! Don't buy Japanse cars!
People all over the globe buy China's cheap goods (which will not be cheap forever, as China becomes more and more prosperous) and India's cheap code (which is already under threat from cheaper competitors).
But job loss is not the same thing as job displacement. The jobs that go elsewhere are replaced with other jobs. Throughout the 20th Century in the United States, as the country became less and less rural and more urbanized, the farm population dwindled. More efficient means of production meant less need for workers in most farm industries (I do understand that migrant farm labor is a factor here, but the migrant labor pool is no where near as large as the labor pool displaced by technology).
So where did all of those farm workers go? They lost their farm jobs but became steelworkers, factory workers, white collar workers, etc. America's very agile labor market was able to shift into new, growing arenas.
American workers may be hurt in the long run by the rise of outsourcing, but I don't think it will be from outsourcing per se. We live in a nation where many states teach the Theory of Creationism along with the Theory of Evolution. Our K-12 education system is in complete disarray in almost every large urban area. Our teachers are underpaid, overworked, and expected to perform parenting functions along with the Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic.
We need to get our shit together and realize that sitting dumb and comfy, arguing that Americans are inherently more skilled at high-tech tasks is a recipie for disaster. If we can keep creating the new high-tech jobs of the future, we have nothing to fear. If we continue to pay short shrift to the underpinnings of our current success, we will not be able to displace jobs to new industries, and we will suffer.
Protecting weak industries won't help us - creating the industries of tomorrow will. This stuff hurts. I know from personal experience. But it's the way capitalism works. We can't crow about how we espouse capitalism, then duck behind protectionism when that same capitalism doesn't work to our favor.
As for the strategic base, I agree with you wholeheartedly. That's why we need to get off our asses and develop a work force that is educated for the 21st Century instead of the 20th.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
...for what they are, or are you just telling different ones yourself. I didn't ask to be helped in my situation, I'm my own person and I managed to make it all work out, but to say that anyone can just "easily" get a job right now is also LYING just as much as the people you're trying to expose.
Your message would be much better recieved (and believed by all) if you got off your damned high horse yourself.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I hold the belief that trade should be as free as possible, and that the freer the trade, the more benefits to everyone involved.
But free trade really doesn't exist. Just look at the last WTO meeting. The third world walked out because the first world is still blocking their agricultural exports. Nations know the ideal is talk Free Trade for your exports and block imports any way you can get away with.
History is full of this kind of behavior.
I agree. It's the worst form of hypocracy for Europe and the United States to press the developing nations to open up their trade while simultaneously protecting our own (agriculture, which is now run by huge conglomerates for the most part, in particular).
Another example: If the jobs are moving to somewhere else, can't I simply move there to work? Usually no, most nations have laws limiting that.
Unless you're inside the EU.
Finally, lets take it to its logical conclusion, (as Western Rome did) we could hire cheap mercenary soldiers from other countries to form the majority of our military force. As a former military man, even Infonaut should see the danger here. And isn't a good deal of our current military effectiveness due to computerized technology? What will be the long term result of us losing our edge in technology?
You're assuming that the outsourcing of computerized technology represents the demise of American technology know-how. Even during the 1980s when America was getting spanked by the Japanese in the automobile market, nobody would argue that America had lost its ability to manufacture sophisticated manufactured goods.
But the real issue here is that we will only lose our technology edge if we continue to protect industries that are bloated, inefficient, and noncompetitive. If the American computer industry is in need of restructuring in order to remain competitive, let's do that restructuring NOW rather than later. Look at the Japanese. Their economy was screwed up for a decade because while America went through painful restructuring, the Japanese refused to do so. Putting our heads in the sand will not make the competitiveness of Indian and other programmers go away.
Just remember what the US automobile industry did during the 1970s and 1980s as Japan became better and better at building cars. First we belittled them and said their cars sucked. Then the tune changed and we accused them of dumping. Finally, we had to bail out Crystler because they and their cohorts in Detroit had been sitting on their asses.
As a side note: Those who say the dollars we ship overseas in foreign jobs have to come back to buy things here, overlook the fact that they can be used to buy real estate here. Thus driving up the price. So not only does your job disappear, your rent goes up too.
I see no correlation. Why does the price automatically go up if a foreign buyer purchases land? Many large Japanese companies bought up a lot of U.S. real estate in the early 1990s, only to sell it off a few years later at large losses.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I started looking around to see more about balgalore, and this popped up in google.
http://www.virtualbangalore.com/Ent/index.php
The site has been hacked.
When even the Indian girls are supersmart AND interested in tech/IT education, as it seems from:i d=7341 :-)
http://www.linuxjournal.com//article.php?s
the West will have to shapen up a bit, so go help your kids with their math homework
This is the way I see stuff in the larger picture. These issues are way beyond Dean/Bush IMO.
1. The west beleives in equality. The rest of the world not necessarily so. eg. The cast system. Thus, you become 1/5Billion = 0.
2. Some do not want the world to be ruled by 1 power. Thus, they prop other nations up by exporting technology.
3. With many different counteries there is a defacto free market. Entities will use this to violate national rules to their own advantage.
The best place to be is probably in security or some tech company that has a geographic priority in certain areas. Otherwise, your job will be eliminated. Of course, there is a solution to all this: the tariff. But I guess thats why the targeted all the manufacturing jobs first. I dont know how you apply it to information.
I could go on and on but thats my 2 cents for now.
Kucinich is very well known for having a serious grudge against corporate power. He actively dislikes entrenched corporate power. Check him out; he is running for President!
eat shiat and bark at the moon
... the Riders of Armaggedon rode the Earth and we will be judged for our sins.
Give me a brake, The US economy is in mild recovery, unemplyment is low and people are still whining.
Argh....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Bush was forced to back track on the steel tariffs due to a WTO ruling.
Nothing to do with the UN.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The US goverment has not done so for some time.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
If he could also afford a car, what then was he doing riding the train?
Lots of miles to go before you sleep!
Bravo!
Good job on the numbers, assuming they are accurate. I've been wording what the @#$%^&() has been going on with the national debt the last few years, myself (not the "derivative"/"slope" deficit, the actual amount, the debg). We seem destined to screw ourselves at the national financial level in the next 5 to 10 years.
And nobody cares...
Yow! I'm supposed to have a plan?
According to stuff I read (read, who does that?!?) in the paper, the US consumer price index does NOT include housing and fuel, because their prices are "too volatile". Never mind that they are among your biggest, most relevant, expenses.
This is one trick to hide exactly what you are pointing out (denial of big, big, inflation).
Yow! I'm supposed to have a plan?
Hey, thanks Malc ... I learned something.
-rickThe thing that gets me -- According to the World Bank, 35% of the population of India subsists on $1 a day or less. That's 350 million people. 80% subsist on $2 a day or less (800 million people). That's real poverty. How can I begrudge them a tech job? Particularly if they do it well.
In group behavior: 'because they're evil/morons/sheep/crazy' is not 'insightful' it's 'oversimplified'
Wakeup buddy. Its just like saying there's unrest in US cos for the last few centuries people all over the world have been flocking there for a better life?.
I'd have thought you'd have some 'witty' riposte for me by now. No substance and all rhetoric. Just like all the other "Libertarians" I've yet to meet up with. Your first clue about what I am should have been the tagline- that's a Libertarian sentiment, through and through. And, I do believe that much of what we got going on is a mess and is wrong- I just find that your answers aren't much better either.
There's historical reasons why some of the things we have going on are there and in place- and if you know nothing of the history you shouldn't be gainsaying it in the first place. Some of the laws in place are there because of abuses made by business people and there's no changing that fact- nice stories telling you that all it does is ensure that teenagers, etc. get a guaranteed amount of money not withstanding, it's still a fact that there were exploitative people and the government stepped in to prevent the exploitation. If the minimum wage doesn't fix the problem, then suggest something else that WILL fix the problem- otherwise keep quiet because that something is actually better than nothing.
The same goes for many of the other laws on the books. Now, things like Social Security, there's no good rationale for those- there really wasn't much of a real problem for the government to step in and fix there. But, that's different than the child labor laws and minimum wage laws.
Each of those laws should be weighed on their merits and whether or not government has a business in the situation or not (in the case of Child Labor Laws, it does...)- not an utterly simplistic view that there should be no government whatsoever ("Anarchistic Capitalism" is the statement you make in your tagline, I believe- that would be no government whatsoever, letting the businesses run everything. Bad Idea, really. Businesses, if not checked, would actually go about killing people if it made a profit.).
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Hmmm.... I can't imagine why a place like the Bay Area where houses start at half a million dollars isn't competative with a place like India. Actually, I can't belive that the Bay Area is competative with anywhere is the world. If the damn tree-huggers in the Bay Area would allow high density growth which would lead to more affordable housing, the Bay Area could continue as the high tech center of the world.
---
You're assuming that the outsourcing of computerized technology represents
the demise of American technology know-how.
But the real issue here is that we will only lose our technology edge if we continue to protect industries that are bloated, inefficient, and
noncompetitive.
---
It's the workers that are being replaced, not the industries. I don't believe the american tech worker is bloated, inefficient, and noncompetitive. American CEOs, yes. I do believe it's the price differential in LAND that's driving this trend. No amount of extra schooling for americans will reverse it.
And you don't really believe we should out source the majority of our military personnel do you?
I am sure China would be interested in the contract.
---
I see no correlation. Why does the price automatically go up if a foreign buyer purchases land?
---
Capital does not have to be invested in ways that produce goods or services or jobs. It can be just sunk into land. Most business booms are closely shadowed by booms in land prices. Look at the valley. CEOs have to turn those stock options into something solid before everyone finds out what they are really worth.
I am not saying that's what foreigners will automatically do. Maybe they will buy a lot of designer jeans instead.
Free trade would benefit every nation, if it existed. But since one-sided trade benefits the nations that engage in it (they enjoy fuller employment), it's in their self interest to continue to engage in it.
Markets encourage cheating,
it's the tragedy of the commons.
I just don't think you'll get anything really remarkable out of people under those conditions. [In India]
Yep, one thing silicone valley proved to the world is that the best way to make coders work hard is to giveaway Boxters once a month, full flexible hours, free lunch, lattes sodas and snacks. Some even paid for rent.
This is directly responsible for the most incredible software ever created and so businesses that made billions in IPO money. And the fact that 98% of them does not exists anymore has nothing to do with the employees, the market was just not ready yet.
Seriously, I wonder if looking out the window of the train and see 100 million people living in shacks with no running water or electricity is not a better motivator than free soda cans and meals in the freezer. Personally I always preferred to pay for my own stuff, but avoid the "evil eye" if I go back home after "only" 8 to 10 hours of hard work.
we were schooled to believe that australia was, in addition to the largest island on earth, the least densely population nation on earth, which, according to this reference, would be about right, since the others aren't really ccountries by themselves.
by comparison, the US is about in the middle, world-wise.
How the hell is this troll / offtopic? It was a perfectly honest, relevent question! Please metamod as "unfair".
I would like to hear some stuff about management. Do companies just send an email with teh documents containing the requiremetns that the outsourced people have to adhere to?
Is that even possible?
Do you need a local presence to lead everything in proper paths?
You don't need to see my
I would love to see a highly technical test given to an MIT tech graduate and a "BangU" ("Bangalore University") graduate. Not to point fingers, but just as a matter of interest. I think it might be an eye-opener, whatever the results.
PS - I realize there mV6eot be a BU - that's why I put it quotes.
if you don't have the gut to rush the system and cheat like your advanced peers appear to be doing, then why do you think you are in any way better than they are? you are afraid to take a risk for whatever (ethical) reason, so you feel that others should not take this risk either. You are the weak!! you are growing nearer the chaff! you will be cut off and left to dry in the sun with me and the rest of the rest of the garbage awaiting extinction, who are incapable of cheating.
standard anonymous american coward, completely devoid in the bravery and resolute that formed the country you so easily defend.
if you are frusterated, be frusterated at yourself, for you are expending more effort for the same results, whereas you could be doing better things with your effort-time.
or better yet disregard my words, be defeated. I don't care.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
"3 entries found for lakh.
lakh
Lac \Lac\, Lakh \Lakh\, n. [Hind. lak, l[=a]kh, l[=a]ksh, Skr. laksha a mark, sign, lakh.] One hundred thousand; also, a vaguely great number; as, a lac of rupees. [Written also lack.] [East Indies]
Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, (C) 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.
lakh
\Lakh\, n. Same as Lac, one hundred thousand.
Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, (C) 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.
lakh
n : the cardinal number that is the fifth power of ten [syn: hundred thousand, 100000]"
source: www.dictionary.com. Its "English" english
you know
"I have this strange feeling that a month or two before election day, Osama Bin Laden will get "caught". Bush's ratings will skyrocket and he will win in a landslide! ;-)
Perhaps, I've seen "Wag the Dog" one too many times!"
Perhaps you've ripped off the same tired line people have been spewing since Saddam was caught. Trying to pass that off as an original idea at this point in time? Really.
Hope you register. Posting anon because I don't want to sign in as I am on a non-secure public machine. =P
Don't let other people get you down. Some people argueing with you here are in the upper class of people who have their heads in the ground. You make a lot of good points.
obselense??? i think you meant obsolescence....in English, that is..