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IBM Shifts 14,000 Jobs to India
Omar Khan writes "The New York Times reports, 'Even as it lays off up to 13,000 workers in Europe and the U.S., IBM plans to increase its payroll in India this year by more than 14,000 workers.' Slashdot previously covered the black-and-blue strike, in which the union wondered, 'if other cost cutting mechanisms could achieve the same effect without cutting so may jobs.'"
Similar arguments apply to illegal aliens from Mexico. Under the aegis of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), illegal aliens flood into the USA and have essentially destroyed the wages in the market for unskilled labor. The normal market forces in the USA are now influenced/destroyed by Mexican government policies that have obliterated the economic opportunities and standard of living in Mexico. Without illegal aliens, the Americans working as unskilled labor would enjoy a sudden and dramatic boost in their wages, enabling them to actually buy medical insurance.
When American politicians tout free trade and claim that the American market remains a free market, they completely ignore the non-free market which is interacting with our free market and which is destroying the normal market forces in a (our) free market. The rub is that no one seems to care.
Free trade advances free markets in only one scenario: (relatively) free markets like the USA interact with other (relatively) free markets like Eastern/Western Europe, Canada, and Japan. To maintain genuine free trade, we should close our markets (including the market for services like labor) to India, China, and their ilk until those nations establish free markets. We lose nothing by championing genuine free trade.
Sure, sometimes the means is, but this time? Those 16000 jobs still exist, they'll just be held by different people. Presumably those in India need to feed their families as much as those in the EU - seems morally neutral to me.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
[This is purely anecdotal, not meant to be prejudicial]
The biggest difference I've ever noticed is mostly cultural.
It seems that Americans are more used to questioning and saying things like "are you sure you really want to do it this way??", whereas Indian programmers just seem to do what they're told, regardless of whether it makes sense.
For example, my wife works at a large financial firm as a project manager. They had to stop giving new development to an Indian company they were working with because the work turned out to be barely functional. This was mostly due to the specs not being complete. She said she almost never got questions about the requirements and just received a bad product at the end. This same company was exceptional at porting older applications to newer technologies and they still do that today. They just don't get new work.
Granted, the root cause of the issue was bad requirements, but American designers/developers would have balked at it and questioned it more, resulting in a better product.
(NOTE: Some of this hesitation is probably due to fixed-price negotiations and time limits along with time zone differences and the difficulty of back-and-forth requirements gathering with people in a different part of the world. YMMV)
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
You are dumping all Indians into one basket. That is both stupid and insulting. You have the cheap Indian software which is "you get what you have bargained for".
That is shit.
And here is an example of what happens if you outsource to there: Lucent spectacular VOIP failure. It was the market leader, it outsourced all of its software development on it to India around 1998 and it was no more in 6 months.
There is also the expensive ones. The ones which cost about as much Europeans and Americans. You once again get what you have bargained for. Worked with some of these and I have been about as happy as with any American or European subcontractor.
You should not really put all of them under the same label
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
I don't believe programmers in India are "worse" than programmers here. It's mostly a difference in communication and coding style.
I know a couple people from different companies that have had to work with contractors in India; sending pieces of a project back-and-forth electronically. The common theme I hear them talk about is the different in coding style and the like. That alone makes it a real p.i.t.a.
However, some have worked with firms that were just horrible (which could have easily happened if they went with a US firm).
One friend's company handed off a project they were working on in-house to a group in India because they were getting swamped with work. The contract stated that they'd own the code and what-not, which was a biggie since this was a project that was going to evolve in the coming years. While the product worked, the actual source was useless to them; they didn't follow the company's IT section's normal routine of documentation and there was a lot of spagetti code.
However, this sounds like an issue with a specific companies/contractors/etc and not with the country. The idea that some IT have that India is "sub-par" comes from stories of the occasional bad firm along with people's experience with the culture/language/algorithm barrier.
" That's why you see small businesses closing left and right, while Starbucks and Wal-Mart open yet another store in your area."
I wont win any mod points for this but ya know bashing Wal-Mart is easy but the fact is that company is successful because they play by the rules of the game and they play really well.
You should watch the bio on Sam Walton on Biography channel. I despise rock star CEO's that walk in to multibillion dollar companies and run them in to the ground. That is not Sam or the Walton family. He and his family started with next to nothing and a tiny five and dime retail store in a small town in Arkansas. They succeeded because:
- They worked really hard, and I mean really worked as in they all stocked shelves and drove around finding products to sell at good prices
- They gambled everything they had on their business multiple times and they could have easily lost it all numerous times
- They were ruthlessly efficient, it can be cruel especially to workers and suppliers but if you are not you dont succeed in retail.
- They gave people what they want, they sold the products people wanted at the best price in town. That is the classic definition of competition in retail. They did't win through bombing their competitors, or cheating or anything else. They competed, the competed well and they won.
Yea it sucks that they stock their shelves with Chinese goods but the fact is if they didn't someone else would and they would go under. Fact is Chinese goods are way cheaper than American made goods and you can't change that now unless we start restoring trade barriers or push American worker's wages down to 30 cents an hour.
Yea it sucks that they dont pay their employees very well. But you know what, running a cash register and stocking shelves are some of the lowest skill jobs around, especially in the era of bar codes and RFID. Fact is if I dont go to Wal-Mart I go to a grocery story with do it yourself checkout. You see even I can scan bar codes, feed money in to a cash register and put my groceries in to a sack, so I dont see the value in subsidizing a unionized grocery worker to do something that requires no skill. You do have to kind of wonder about the sanity of unionized grocery store workers commanding some of the best wages and benefits in many small towns. They are people with no actual skills and in free markets people are supposed to get paid based on what their worth. Grocery store workers are not worth a lot.
The other thing you need to appreciate about Wal-Mart is they have probably the most sophisticated and efficient computerized supply chain on the planet. They have giant computers in Arkansas that track every transaction in every store and make sure the right goods arrive at the right place at the right time. Your mom and pop store cant compete against that, in retail, inventory management determines the winners and losers, not sentimentality. Wal-Mart now has economy of scale almost no one else can match but the fact is they Walton's still beat their competition when they were in one five and dime in Arkansas because they worked really hard and they played to win.
All in all the Walton family are an American success story. If you are going to ridicule and crucify them for succeeding you are basicly ridiculing every aspect of Capitalism. Its is a deeply flawed system in a lot of ways, but so are all the others. The Walton's are just grand masters of the system they live under.
@de_machina