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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."
I guess a cheaper country was found
India and Apple obviously haven't been properly educated about the dangers of pulling out.
I'd like to say, "see how it feels?",
I'll say it for you then. See how it feels?
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.
No.
I am a developer in India. All my college buddies are too. Not one of us gets less than $800 per month. And that's the 'entry level' for our number of years(3) in the industry.
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.
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
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.
They don't give a fuck- they'll make their money in the short term, and damn the long term.
Of course wage convergence isn't a bad thing- so long as it converges up, increasing the standard of living in the third world while not hitting the first too badly. It doesn't seem to be going that way though.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
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
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.
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.
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.
That's like Associate VP. I mean, A 16-bit slashdot id... looks like you're doing great work :)
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.
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
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.