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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."
Last paragraph of the article, from an India employee losing his (or her) job:
Yeah, there are a lot of U.S. employees familiar with that feeling. Welcome to the global market.
Personally, I find it just as offensive companies whimsically shift work forces, often at high personal and financial cost to employees caught unawares, whether it be in the U.S. or India. I'd like to say, "see how it feels?", but I find no satisfaction in that. I guess the global economy does apply globally. It really does become about money on ledger sheets, and little about the workforce and impact on people just trying to make a living. Meanwhile CEOs and other execs reap massive rewards, usually with little relationship to how well their company does because of these decisions.
(That said, the article is far too short on detail to understand exactly what prompted and triggered the change in plans for Apple.)
I guess a cheaper country was found
India and Apple obviously haven't been properly educated about the dangers of pulling out.
Two months severance pay in India = about $42 and 7 cents
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
When I first viewed the comments on this article, the quote at the bottom of the page was this:
The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of misery. -- Churchill
Do you figure that since socialism has gone bust, capitalism has had to take over the sharing of the misery?
This ain't rocket surgery.
"On May 15, Apple officials addressed us and were highly appreciative of the workforce and the task it would execute in India. I wonder why they never said anything even then," said another fired employee.
Seems pretty cold to me. In a lot of developing countries like this a job at a major multinational serves to support not just the family but the entire extended family. No doubt some of these people even had to quit other jobs to join Apple, and can't return. I worked many years for the international division of a large multinational and saw first-hand the culture of abusing foreign workers because management knew they could work them 14 hours a day and the people couldn't say or do anything about it. And since these people are all classified as "professionals" no one can swoop into the factory to blow the whistle, you have to work whatever overtime is demanded of you, for free. Pretty crummy if you ask me.
The only way 30 people could disappear overnight is if that hiring manager is a corporate officer. Speaking as one who has been in the "hiring manager" role in Silicon Valley for quite some time, it's pretty hard to get rid of people, even poor performers. Yes, California is an at-will state. California's courts, however, have proven to be very pro-employee. So, firing somebody in California usually requires lots of documentation.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Indian Giver comes to mind, it's funny, I just haven't figured out how yet. :P
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
You don't throw good money after bad when you get a losing poker hand. Perhaps they realized that their India operation was a mistake. I suspect that the beans will get spilled eventually.
With all this evil alien bacteria invading, perhaps it's a good move for the company?
If we can hit that bull's-eye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards... Checkmate.
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
Despite the HR blurb at the bottom of TFA claiming the Apple India crowd were doing well and all that, I imagine that it was questions of quality that led to the firing of the workforce. Apple's recent Aperture debacle, where it was discovered that Aperture was majorly inferior to Adobe's Lightbox in performance, features and quality probably resulted in a major shakeup in Apple's software development divisions. There have been a number of stories about companies having problems with outsourced software development, and I presume this is another one. My guess is that Apple will probably either increase the size of its Ireland operations or move the development to eastern Europe where the quality is generally known to be good.
That the technology transfer was not happening as smoothly as they thought it would, and the costs became an issue too. Having worked for Apple, then NeXT, then Apple/NeXT and finally Apple again, I have seen this problem long before it became fashionable to outsource oversees. It was true stateside between regions of this country, and even more so with language/cultural barriers in this global market. The axe swings many ways, this time back to another country, possibly back to the US.
. . .the US was too expensive and now India is as well. Time to move to an even cheaper place . . .
Thank God for Mississippi.
KFG
Holy fuck - that does it ... I'm going downtown and buying an Apple tomorrow.
I don't know which, maybe an Intel Mini, maybe an iPod - but something.
Good job Apple.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Most Indian CS majors (not talking about IIT grads here) come out just knowing C#/VB .NET. Its hard to train them to learn Objective-C or any other language they are used to since all of their CS skills are bound to a single language. Go to any job posting in India for .NET and you will get millions of programmers who know everythinhg about .NET. Ask for people who know Objective-C or anything non-Microsoft base, then you will get almost nobody. Its hard to find programmers in India with Mac OS x experiance, or even *nix experiance.
Considering the low-cost, high-quality talent pool that Bangalore offers, it is unclear why Apple decided to shut shop just over a month after it commenced operations.
The person that wrote this has never dealt with Indian tech support I take it.
I hear that europe is more heavily tilted towards socialism - especially France.
Actually most of the European policital forces usually mislabeled as 'Socialists' or even 'Communists' by US right wingers are actually modern Social Democrats who have become moderate to the point where they generally do not see a conflict between a democratic society with a capitalist market economy and their own goals which in turn means they have very little in common with Marxism, Communism or classical Socialism. To call political parties like the British labor party or even the German PDS/Linkspartei Socialists would actually be considered an insult by a true die-hard Socialist.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
This would be less disturbing if your screen name weren't what it is.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
Time to move back to the US.
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.
that the cost of outsourcing is higher than the hype tells it to be. A lot of businesses try to outsource to India, and while it might work better for some companies, I guess the cost of a = inferior customer satisfaction and b = more people needed for the same work equals c = higher costs in the long run. And since a is more important for Apple they've seen outsourcing is not a good idea.
Don't get me wrong over b, I guess there are great people out there, but first of all: they don't speak English very well (ever called an outsourced helpdesk and you know), second of all: they are not educated as we in the westerner countries, so they need to be educated more and longer on the job while we are supposed to get that education through our schools. It's not the inhabitants fault, but India is pretty close to a 3rd world country.
Next to that they also have a higher constant cost. TFA mentions shipping over some people for education in the states. They can do it 2 ways: ship someone from west -> east and pay big $$$ (250k/year) for someone willing to do that and ship over his family and belongings back and forth every 3-6 months for 30k/year and cover the costs over there for 50k/year. Or ship 20 people every month from east -> west for 2 weeks and cover their costs for 400k/year.
If you don't do it yourself and outsource your outsourcing to a "specialized" company, you'll see that the costs equal the costs you have here but without the hassle of outsourcing, keeping your customers happy only thing is that you have to keep in account the unions.
I don't know, while outsourcing could be helping keeping costs down, I think the only thing that should be outsourced is labour by hand without customer contact. This is not because the people over there don't have brains, but simply because of the differences in language and culture. They are trying to fix that too, but what do you think when you call the D-Link helpdesk and "Bob" speaks with an Indian accent and ask how the weather is down there in Ohio? Yes, they have cue sheets with different lines that people in the US would use, but it just sounds wrong, try it.
And just so I wouldn't break Godwin's law: why didn't hitler outsource his stuff to India?
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I know our last 2 contractors had to go through a two week trial period at the agencies expense and we kicked both of them back. We probably get just as many bad American contractors, but the whole point of exporting jobs or importing workers was that we gain talents that aren't available here at a lower price. If their skills and education are all suspect and have to be verified at a greater expense and difficulty than local talent why bother? Apple probably found the same thing.
So maybe some of that factored into the decision to cut and run. I guess the true story will come out eventually.
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.
Obviously you made a mistake in hiring them in the first place.
Firing people is bad for morale. It means that people shouldn't trust you. It means that your remaining employees should start looking for a different job.
Whenever I was a manager, I protected my employees. If they messed up, I coverred for them and helped them fix the problem. I have their back and I expect the same in return.
I think some people feel that because India is a long way away those employees don't matter. Only a sick kind of employer would feel that way. Once you hire someone you owe it to them to make it work.
There is absolutely nothing that entitles you to get a tech job. The Indians can do the same job you do at a much lower cost. I know if I was your boss, I would probably say something like... "Thank god the racist prick is out on the street where he belongs."
So now objecting to my job moving overseas is racist? I don't care what race the guy who's doing my job is. I'm opposed to sending the job where I can't follow.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
that should have been
"I'll say it for you, then: "See how it feels?". See how it feels?"
See how it feels?
007: "Who are you?"
Pussy: "My name is Pussy Galore."
007: "I must be dreaming..."
He didn't say as a result of, he said meanwhile. Meaning CEOs and other execs do reap massive rewards from their companies, but not necessarily as a result of outsourcing, often a cost-saving strategy of dubious effectiveness.
Mr Jobs just sold $295,000,000 worth of Apple stock.
In 1992, CEOs held 2 percent of the stock of US corporations, nowadays they own 12 percent. In less than 15 years, CEOs (not including other executives, just CEOs), have 'earned' themselves 10 whole percent of corporate America. If the division of pay were entirely fair and equitable, Steve Jobs and his fellow CEOs must be responsible for exactly one tenth of all the wealth created by anyone at all who works for a large corporation.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
Let this be a lesson to anyone who thinks Apple is somehow different, hipper, or cooler than the average multinational corporation. They think with their bottom line too.
"You've been iSourced!"
Table-ized A.I.
If you think a big company is bad about treating you like a number, join the Army.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
There's no such thing as job security through obscurity.
It's a joke, laugh.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Someone in California or Texas could follow their job to Wyoming or Georgia. I did it moving to Cincinnati. Following that same job to Bangalore is nigh impossible, for a number of reasons.
Well, AC, you know what? In today's global marketplace, nothing entitles you to keep your tech job for longer than three months if your corporate benefactors have a mood swing. Welcome to the party, glad you're here, let me take your coat.
Last number of years, Americans working in tech have had the blade of Indian outsourcing dangled over their heads, customarily as blackmail to force longer hours on fixed salaries. When there's just no more blood to be squeezed from the stone, boom, time to pack up, lay off and ship.
Meanwhile - and I'm saying this from experience working for a large American telecom that fired damned near everybody a few years ago to restock with cheap Indian labor - the Indians coming in would take all this as a show of cultural and intellectual superiority over us pampered, lazy Americans. Not all Indians, but certainly more than enough to carry the stereotype. We Americans have spent the last five years being barely tolerated by Indian coworkers touting the "get used to it, global economy, cheaper and better" dogma.
Now suddenly you're starting to sound like union men! Think it's shitty that Apple changed their minds? I've read other comments in this story pointing out that folks in India have extended families to care for, that they probably had to quit jobs they couldn't get back, etc etc etc. Well, the knife cuts both ways.
You guys weren't being aggressively competitive. You guys were simply used. We know how you feel.
Thing is, as we had to explain to our families why our jobs were being sent overseas, we knew the cold truth that you guys are learning now. It was never about better, or even about as good. It was about being okay while being cheaper. A lot cheaper. Period. Corporations did it because it's easier to look competent short term by cutting costs than by increasing income, and the unfortunate truth is that the American economy right now is still pretty much driven by cost cutting. It was also inevitable that, sooner or later, the incentive would begin to evaporate as those outsourced employees started asking for more money.
A few years ago Dilbert did a strip where our boy tells PHB, "I have some disturbing news. We outsourced our customer service function to India a few years ago. Apparently, they subcontracted the job to Mexico. Then Mexico subcontracted to Vietnam, who subcontracted to the Philippines. . .. who subcontracted it to us. It turns out that we're the lowest-cost provider, because we lie about our hold times. In summary, we pay ourselves to hose ourselves. Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
PHB: "We should raise prices?"
That's it in a nutshell. Again, welcome to the party - chips and dip are in the corner.
For the record, I agree that doing a three-month cocktease in India was a shitty thing for Apple to do. But then, so was bottom-dollar outsourcing it to begin with. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
A recent trend is for companies to get out of cheap engineering off shoring deals and move the jobs back to the US in rural areas--called Farm Shoring. The cultural differences are obvious to anyone who has used an India off shored help desk. The work force targeted in the US is rural non-technical people who are being trained to do low level support. Expect a small return to computer science majors at rural colleges. India and other places are countering by trying to teach their workers more of the US culture including language variations such as 'Texan', New Yorker, the South etc by holding dialect classes where their students practice sounding like different parts of the US.
Actually, I think you have it completely wrong. Firing poor bad employees shows that you know what is going on and will not tolerate BS. More often than not, the complaints I hear from people are almost always do to a boss who will not act firmly. This means protecting good employees and FIRING the ones who are not up to par. Yeah you can spin it as the managers fault for hiring the person, but if you wanted to avoid that, you'd still have an idiot working with you. I enjoy my free time and therefore do not want to have to fix all their crap. Been there, done that. People lie, cheat, and steal, but once you figure it out, FIX THE SITUATION!
If you don't want to be living one mortgage payment from being out on the street, DON'T! Learn to live within your means. Put 25% of your money into your retirement account. Buy a house where you can pay your mortgage payment and then some, or rent a place you can afford. Drive a late model auto. Don't spend $4,000 a year on the latest tech toys. Bring your lunch to work instead of eating out all the time.
EXCERCISE SOME FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY! If you make $120,000 a year and are one mortgage payment away from being on the street, it's because you're being stupid with your money.
paintball
Because employees would react. If they said "we're thinking about closing" or "things aren't working out as expected" then at least a few employees would just bail, or worse. No company wants that -- if there is a chance to salvage the situation, then they would prefer the employees never even knew how close they came to being laid off. Especially if a few employees leaving could damage the potential turnaround. And if there is no chance to salvage the situation, then they want those employees to still be around long enough to finish whatever needs finishing.
I'm not suggesting that how corporations treat employees is good. I'm just telling you what the thinking is. In fact, I hated that thinking so much that I quit my first high-level job. I'd been a manager of Web teams for most of my career. I got a job with Sabeer Bhatia (the Hotmail guy), and he brought me on as a Director. I sat in all/most of the upper-management meetings. I heard all sorts of private discussions, not meant for the rest of the employees. I knew when the product had serious issues that would hurt our funding. I knew when there was trouble with an investor. I knew when the management team was in conflict. It was never a good idea to let employees in on the issues. I learned that quickly. The first few times there were issues, I took my team to lunch and let them know. You cannot believe the fallout, swift and sure. I grew to hate it. I had to lie to employees when they would ask about rumors. I was supposed to have been doing that all along, anyway (well, maybe "lying" is too harsh because I'm bitter about it, I'm sure a more seasoned person would have simply said "none of your business" to every single rumor or TMI kind of question -- but for me, that just gets uncomfortable when you know the person has a family and will be out of work in a month). Eventually I quit. At my next job, the hiring manager was curious why I was going for a job as a manager of a small team when I was clearly moving up into Director & VP level work. I realized I'd rather be with the rest of the employees, not knowing about the sheer volumes of crap that hit the fan daily.
As I get older, I get better at things, of course. I'm self-employed now, and I have a subcontractor for the times when the work is too plentiful. If I don't have work for the subcontractor, I just say so. If he ends his business relationship with me due to it, I'll deal with that. I try not to make too big a deal out of anything. But I'm also not running a company with 10,000 employees. If things go bad for me, the impact is tiny.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
In industry generally you outsource when you have a large batch of work to do and you don't want to ramp up inhouse. In the software business this generally means finding someone to churn out mountains of code.
The resulting mountains may look good on the monthly sloc metrics but its not what you want to see as an engineer. If a programmer comes back to me and says he made the required changes and produced negative 200 lines of code I would be happy.
One reason that a company like apple might decide not to proceed with something like this is that mass production is not really what they are looking for.
I don't have any problems with India specifically and I think we are going to see more of this situation where the large packages of work, which are less interesting for me anyway, going off shore.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I might be missing your point, but it seems that you are saying that US companies are selling their products throughout the world and therefore should offer work to the people of the world because they sell to the world. But then you appear to be saying that the products sold by those companies are pirated in those countries. So, it appears that you are saying that those countries aren't really purchasing the products, they're stealing them? Then, following your logic, I believe, why should those companies offer work in those countries if they make no money there due to piracy?
I think that I may be a bit confused due to your language skills.
" 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.
You can do all that and more and still be up a creek if you have a run of bad luck. Hell, you could be a VP earning 300k a year and enough money saved up for six years worth of bills and be royally screwed by the loss of your job and any of these events:
The last can be a real bitch, because states get matching funds from the federal government for the child support they collect, so they have a strong incentive to collect as much as possible. It is difficult to have payments reduced in the event of a job loss and in any case might be set based on what you "should" be making. Some of the more draconian states will even seize your car, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you have to drive to get to your job.
Because being paid above-average Indian wages in India will buy you a better standard of living than average or below-average wages in America?
I'm from the UK, and I recognise that although, on exchange rate terms, I could probably get a higher income by working in the US, the extra costs (including social costs) would probably cancel out most, if not all, of the benefit. Of course, the smart thing is probably to work in the US for a short period of time, save as much as possible, then either retire in a cheap part of the world or use your previous highly-paid employment as evidence that you should be as highly-paid in a cheaper part of the world. That all sounds like a bit too much hassle for me, though...
What goes around comes around, as they say. I've been amused by many companies over the years who thought they could save a huge bundle of money, when in reality the staff employed in those functions they want to move makes up perhaps 20% of their organisation but makes the most impact. Do people in a foreign country answering your calls, where it is totally obvious they know not even the most basic things about where you live (and you have waste time and money repeating things twenty times), does that sound good and make you want to use that company? I'll quote Joel Spolsky and Pradeep Singh:
1 7/sr=1-2/qid=1149421474/ref=pd_bowtega_2/202-73591 57-8712641?_encoding=UTF8&s=books&v=glance
(Here's something Pradeep Singh taught me today: if only 20% of your staff is programmers, and you can save 50% on salary by outsourcing programmers to India, well, how much of a competitive advantage are you really going to get out of that 10% savings?)
You also have the additionally huge costs of training those new employees, or outsourcing organisations, up in the ways of the organisation, the products, the technology and you also spend huge amounts of wasted time and money on communication. I've known many banks who've had that experience. A poor call centre worker gets the warm ear treatment from a customer in Europe, US, Canada etc. because the website is throwing up errors and he/she can't complete a transaction. A call is logged and there is a series of frantic phone calls and e-mails to the outsourced programming company in India, who needless to say, haven't got the faintest idea what they're talking about. Also (and this happens even in outsourcing companies situated in the same country but in another part) because they are not physically located in the heat of battle, and within on-site reach, they just don't give a shit. They'll do it when they've got time.
In short, you need to have your support functions in your company with you completely, and they need to be as close to your paying customers as you can get. If there is a market in India for your products then by all means get close to your customers and open offices in India. Idiot CEOs and boards still have this ridiculously stupid fucking idea that the world is a place separated only by a common language - English. I think even British, American and Australian people can agree that that is most certainly not true. I suggest these idiot board members go and read the number one, definitive guide on running a multinational company properly:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/18619769
What happened here is difficult to tell from the article, but maybe Apple had that sneeking suspision that maybe it just wasn't going to work.
Senior Frac
There are "H-1Bs for lawyers". H-1Bs are for any "speciality occupation" - the US Government site (the first response you get if you Google "h-1b") has the official government definition:
A specialty occupation requires theoretical and practical application of a body of specialized knowledge along with at least a bachelor's degree or its equivalent. For example, architecture, engineering, mathematics, physical sciences, social sciences, medicine and health, education, business specialties, accounting, law, theology, and the arts are specialty occupations.
So, if you kill the H-1B, you are basically preventing educated foreigners in all of these fields from entering the country to work. Of course, American lawyers, doctors, architects, etc are somewhat protected by the idiosyncrasies of American law, medical practice and building codes. Programming languages and software design methodologies are a worldwide standard. Bear in mind that it goes both ways, though - American programmers can work in europe tomorrow if they wanted to, but American lawyers would have to learn the legal system first.
At home, compared to an H-1B worker, you have immense advantages - the ability to freelance without an agency (H-1Bs cannot take on freelance gigs at will, they have to do it through a contracting company or else pay a visa transfer fee for each company they want to work at), plus the ability to start your own company. What are you waiting for? Outcompete!
In reference to your parent post, if the immigrant IT workers had to "jump through the same hoops the immigrant physical laborers do", then they wouldn't come to America. They would either stay in their own countries and start companies, or move to another competing country with a less Draconian immigration policy. If America shuts its doors to talented, hard-working immigrants, the top immigrants will just go to European countries instead. I know a very bright, hard-working programmer who can't take his US job until October (due to H-1B quota being reached), so he took a job in England until then. His American company still wants him so much that they are prepared to wait until October for him. So, what happens in the meanwhile? Uncle Sam loses out on a couple months' taxes on his $80,000+ income and my friend helps the English company expand, outperform American companies and create more jobs in England.
Of course, I hold an H-1B, so I am biased. I do know, though, that I have helped my company expand and hire more American workers. I don't think we are directly competing though - I am a music video director.
Bruce Allen
...like?
Like India won't give you a work visa. Several Americans have tried and been denied.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
You know, even at the top of the heap, executives and senior managers sometimes get the boot suddenly and without pity, just like this. Look at what happeneed to Carly Fiorina. As Charles DeGaulle said once, when being begged to run for another term as President of France, "the graveyards are full of indispensable men." Everyone is a replaceable cog in a giant machine, and nobody should be surpised or discouraged because of it. If you don't like it, start your own company where you can be the undisputed kingpin.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/4515/945/
http://www.ciol.com/content/search/showarticle1.as p?artid=84773
http://services.silicon.com/offshoring/0,38000048
The company stressed it isn't cutting any US jobs, noting that its ranks are growing both in the United States and overall. The Apple representative said: "Our call centres in Austin and Sacramento also continue to grow."
Moaners can read this too :c e=NLT_MGT&nlid=23
http://www.computerworld.com/blogs/node/2648?sour
Why does yahoo do this
Apple has never been a huge H1-B backer, but Bill Gates is MR. H1-B. He's now lobbying Congress to allow in almost unlimited numbers of foreign programmers - anyone with an American Masters degree, e.g. How they will flock! What Bill wants, Congress rushes to do, and Bill has always loved flocking American programmers!
s / (may require your sitting through a sponsor's animated ad)
...
Doc
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/05/26/visa
What's good for Bill Gates...
The Microsoft mogul says America needs more foreign engineers and programmers to compete. Critics say it's all about cheap labor.
By Rebecca Clarren
Salon Magazine
Generally, industry lobbyists are quick with statistics and reports, but in this case it appears they weren't needed. Neither Microsoft nor Intel would reveal how many Ph.D.s or master's students they hired last year, and how many they need for next year. When the companies and their lobbyists were asked what data and reports they showed Congress to convince them of the need for these new visas, they reported that they don't have any reports and statistics. Marcus Courtney, president of WashTech/CWA, a tech workers union, says as long as they have Bill Gates on their side, "they don't need to use anything to substantiate their arguments."
"William Gates was in Washington, lobbying -- a pretty high-priced lobbyist -- to come talk about the needs of Microsoft, a marvelous company, high-tech, enormous advances for America -- he wants more people with Ph.D.s and wants a larger quota of visas for those people to come in," Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., the bill's author, told Salon when asked what data the industry had shown him. "We have accommodated that. And we have created more opportunities for people to come in who are students."
Such ardor for Gates flows from both sides of the aisle. When asked about reports and data presented to convince Democrats on the Judiciary Committee that the U.S. didn't have the workforce it needed to fill these jobs, Tracy Schmaler, spokesperson for the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, responded: "Did you know Bill Gates has been pretty high-profile on this?"
Critics of the bill, mainly academics and those who represent American tech workers, say they have no voice on this issue; that Congress has been blinded by campaign contributions of big companies. In 2004, Microsoft alone spent $9.46 million on lobbying and hired 16 different firms; it listed immigration as one of its top issues on lobbying disclosure forms, according to data from the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics. That same year, computer and Internet industries spent $70.5 million on lobbying.
"There is no greater case study to understand corporate power in politics," says Courtney of the tech workers union. "I could give you 75 reports that prove that H-1B is a horribly flawed program that hurts American workers, but it doesn't matter. As long as Bill Gates says there's a shortage, and that's it, thanks for playing, game over, try again next session."
These articles don't often mention it, but when companies move out of India it's because Indians are too expensive and Chinese are now the cost winners.
From everything I've read about Steve Jobs, this makes a lot of sense.
Here you have a man who is a total perfectionist. Obsessed with quality, down to the very last detail.
My guess is that some high-up Businesshead Suit Guy whispered in his ear, "Y'know, Steve, we could save a lot of money by outsourcing...."
Steve was probably reluctant at first, but then the Businesshead Suit Guy hyped it up with a bunch of Thomas-Friedman-speak, "This mind-blowing business practice will revolutionize how the world does business, like what corned beef did to sliced bread! Everybody and their brother is doing it! You don't want to be the guy who invented the pet rock! You want to be the guy who invented the pet WORLD! Don't get left behind! Outsource, outsource, outsource!"
Steve was probably like, "Oh, alright, I'll give it a shot. We'll start small, and see how it goes."
So he commits a small amount of money to his India project. Lo and behold, what he gets back is crap, and he's like, "What is this? This is crap! The quality is terrible! There are a million little widgets that are all in the wrong place. This little graphic thing was off by a whole 5 millimeters. 5 millimeters! My customers will hate it! I can't even get anyone on the damn phone to fix it! Every time I want bring someone to task over this, all they can talk about is their damn contract! Hey Businesshead Suit Guy? Where the hell are you?"
Unfortunately, Businesshead Suit Guy is nowhere to be found. He took the big fat bonus that he got from saving the company so much money through outsourcing, and is off vacationing someplace exotic.
Possibly even in India. I've heard that money goes a lot further down there.
There are a lot of wrong numbers floating around here... Let me set a few things right. The average Indian salary in the non-tech sector is around 80USD. This is for a guy who's got a few years of experience behind him. The average for somebody who's put in about twenty or thirty years is about twice as much (175USD). 80USD also happens to be the official minimum wage for any government employee - the guy who sweeps the streets, the people who work at government offices, post offices, utilities etc., make that in a month. The new economy brought about a lot of changes as far as salaries go - you could be young, very young indeed and earn in a month what most people do in ten. So the guy above who makes 800$ a month is actually an overpaid fish. Fish? They work in these big glass walled buildings (supposedly to reflect the buildings in Silicon Valley) with their airconditioners on while the rest of the country breathes fresh air out open windows. But that's another story. So does the guy who earns 80$ a month starve and live in penury as some other thread here seems to follow? No, not at all. Costs in India are low: food, clothing and shelter cost almost nothing. The guy on 80$ a month probably has his own house, a motorbike, eats out regularly, watches movies a lot, puts his two kids to school and still saves money for his retirement. Now the guy who's earning 800$ a month has to keep up appearances and buy a fancy overpriced apartment, overpriced car, eat at overpriced restaurants and so on until he hasn't much left to keep. So we have here the irony of the whole situation the tortoise keeps slogging away at his minimalist salary but his job goes on forever while the hare earns quick and burns quicker with his job on the line all the time. A lot has changed in Bangalore - prices have gone through the roof, property has become dear, peak hour traffic is tremendous but all have their own levels of making a life. I noticed another thread here that mentioned that the middle class guy in India lives terribly but that's according to western standards of living, hygiene and circumstance. The middle class guy with a steady job and salary in India today, is king, whatever you might think about it.