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Apple Pulls Out of India
tanveer1979 writes "Barely 3 months after it commenced India operations, Apple has decided to pull out its software operations from Bangalore. The employees will be given a severance package which is equal to two months' pay. The sales and marketing operations will remain on (these consist of around 30 people) but the software and support will be completely pulled out." From the article: "Apple had set itself a hiring target of 600 by the year-end. After a gala induction ceremony on April 17, the operations team went to Transworks for training. Some of the managers were about to leave for the US for further training when they were asked to stay put."
heh, if you want to feel small, insignificant and just like a number, there's no place better to go than a Fortune 500 company. I work for a very large bank, and I have absolutely no illusions about what I am to them.
The company had commenced operations in April and hired about 30 people for its subsidiary
In Silicon Valley, a one cough by a hiring manager can cause 30 people to disappear overnight. Thirty people in India represented less than a million dollars worth of pocket change to Apple. The story in really, "What were they attempting to do in the first place?"
Have you Meta Moderated t
I'm surprised the parent post got marked insightful.
It's not the Indian programmers' fault that US programmers' jobs get outsourced to them. So it's not exactly medicine they're delivering. US jobs get moved to India because US capitalists want to increase their profits by getting the same job done for less money in India.
Banu
Many companies are coming back to the US for Software Engineering. Especially mid size companies. The company I work for also recently canceled its dealings with its Indian outsourcing firm. They had two reasons:
1) In 2001 with benefits, a decent Software Eng:
$60/hour in USA versus $5/hour in India
In 2006 with benefits, a decent Software Eng:
$60/hour in USA versus $25/hour in India
No longer worth the hassle of communication problems and slow response time to fixing defects.
2) Quality of their work was awful. This seemed to be due to major attrition problems. The attrition rates at the firm we were using were like 50% a year. Even their manager's were job hoping. So nobody really cared about quality since they knew they would be long gone to better pastures before it caught up with them.
Mass outbreaks of prosperity. Why is this so scary? If wages were pretty much the same in all countries, you would never again have to worry about your job being outsourced, and you wouldn't have to listen to lectures about children starving in China either. Granted, you'd probably be able to afford fewer toys, but I am pretty sure you would not starve to death.
Can you call a thing paradise if, in order for it to exist, someone else has to suffer? And in fact can you call the life the average U.S. geek lives paradise anyway? I mean, if you're one house payment away from the street and pulling down $120k/year, is that really a desirable situation? It's just crazy.
This is slightly offtopic, but let me explain the state of affairs on Indian Software Services companies. This is not about product companies which operate here.
I guess I'll be the only Indian in the world who'd wish this outsourcing boom would settle.
Why?
Because we have contributed nothing to computing, technically or in research. This is more about the attitude of Indian software services companies. Infosys, TCS and the like, relegating writing software to a BPO styled operation. Cut and Paste mechanics, unhealthy and ugly code. 95% of coders here plain suck. I really hope software dev automation gets a breakthrough, so these guys lose their jobs (for which they are not qualified anyway).
These companies are surely helping India with jobs, but they have done _nothing_ for computing. (How many Indian Open Source products do you know!)No contribution to open source, and full scale leeching. Meanwhile, revenue is upwards of $2billion, profits $600 million plus. Yet.
Damn, I dont wanna think about it.
Btw, this is not a problem with Indian techies, there are so many of them working in research (abroad and in India) who are really good.
Your joke has a lot of insight to it. About 3 months ago I called apple care, which used to be the best damed tech support around, and the guy on the other end gave me so much obviously wrong information that I have doubt that knew anything at all about the Mac. On a brand new Quad (I was having monitor problems) he suggested that I didn't have the right video card to run a 23" screen, and suggested I install an older video card that wouldn't even fit in the PCI Express slots. I was flabbergasted at his handling of the problem, he paid no attention when I informed him that his solution would never work. Not only did I file complaint through the normal channels, but my reseller filed a complaint through their Apple rep. Worse tech support experience ever. I've had better service with ISP support.
" India was probably more of a contingency if they couldn't expand in Cupertino."
I don't think it's related to the expansion: the expanded campus won't be ready for a few years, so cancelling the plans in India now leaves a big gap.
Steve Jobs won't settle for quickly erected generic office space. That would be wildly out of character for the guy who had I. M. Pei design a floating staircase for NeXT headquarters, and who built that whole glass cube Apple store thing on 5th Ave.
It'll probably be 18 months before he signs off on a design by some 'name' architect. (For the sake of Apple's employees' vision, I hope it's not some blindingly reflective (yet old hat and ultimately boring) titanium-sheet Frank Gehry design.) It'll probably be another 6-12 months before the foundations are laid.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
the software and support will be completely pulled out
I wonder... I am an apple service tech and we have lost our dial-in support for service assistance in leu of an ichat-like support from... you guessed it... India. I talk to Chetan quite a lot but the names are very clearly all Indian. (they don't do like some tech support places, where you get someone with a hip-deep Indian accent who introduces himself as "Greg". Ya right...) A few times I've asked them where they were located, and it was of course some city in India. They do seem to be "otherwise occupied" when I chat with them, with 3-10 minute "ping times" on their answers being common. I also asked one of them one time, how many people are you chatting with right now? He says NINE. wow. Indians apparently have one thing on me, an amazing ability to multitask to the extreme.
While the people we are chatting with are actually quite capable and do a good job, they are being pushed much too hard to offer the level of service we were used to by the US reps on the phone. I don't know if that's Apple demanding it, or the Indian phone support business offering a no-questions-asked calls-taken-per-hour rate.
I seriously wonder though if this includes the service support also. I would like to see it go back to the old ways. If they are doing it, I would not be surprised if it were based on the feedback that they are receiving on their quality of service. "Sweatshop" work is never high quality.
If it's just the customer support that's being moved back, best guess would be the customers do not like talking to someone that they clearly can tell is not even in the same country. I know it slightly irks me when I call some support/help number and get someone from India. (why is it always India? why can't it be Russia or Japan or Africa?) I think that even if the person on the line is knowledgeable and helpful, knowing it's someone from India (or any other country really) tends to put people in the mindset that they are not receiving high quality support, possibly because they know that the support person is probably receiving a very small wage compared to what it would be in the 'states.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I am an Indian. I agree with the observation but disagree with the generalization. I lot of people I knew in India were indeed strongly oriented to the MS tool chain (not even Borland). I, on the other hand have tried just about every major programming language and most programming paradigms. To put in context, I do NOT have a CS major. I am a physician who programs/sys-admins as a GRA around 20hrs/week to pay for a PhD in the US. But I would have still programmed as a hobby (and have for about 14 years now) even if I did not have this need.
...
My reasons for this behavior are
1.) Most Indian developers see programming as a lucrative career. So it is strictly business for most of them. Most devs of this kind don't go home and continue to program for "fun". It's work. If you can't sell your Haskell skills, no point in acquiring them.
2.) The educational institutions have evolved this way too. Most devs learn programming, not from college (even if they have a CS major) but from independent training centers that train you in job focused skills but not the whole "Computer Science" theory. The training is strictly main stream IT (to emphasize again - not CS). I on the other hand, am a geek, self-taught, learned programming for the sake of programming and even lectured a few Masters classes on Software Engineering and HCI.
3.) Finally the disagreement. Why generalize on Indians?. Now that I am in US, every non-geek programmer I have seen here is not much different either and is just as hopelessly married to his language. However, US citizens tend to follow their hearts when it comes to profession. The economy allows it. So geek / non-geek programmer ratio is more favorable. In India, you don't have that luxury. People follow the money (for good reasons). They do work hard at the skills but you can only get so much into it if you are not inherently passionate about it.
If you want good Indian programmers, scope them out and do your own interviews and select them just like you would locally (perhaps only possible if you have an Indian branch for your company). That outsourcing corporation will not cater your non-generic needs.