Slashdot Mirror
Nielsen Collects FL Tax Breaks, Then Outsources Jobs
theodp writes "The poop is hitting the fan over tax breaks given to ratings giant Nielsen Co., which pocketed millions in Florida jobs-creation tax concessions but has turned around and dismissed hundreds of local workers after inking a $1.2B outsourcing deal with Tata Consultancy Services of Mumbai. Lou Dobbs is on the case. Lou may go even more ballistic once he sees the Nielsen-Tata pact, which assures Nielsen that OT worries are a thing of the past ('there shall be no additional charge for overtime work'), allows Nielsen to have unsatisfactory Tata hires replaced within 4 weeks of starting with no charge for the original or re-performed work, gives Nielsen up to 6 man-weeks of free labor when a Tata worker is replaced, and allows Nielsen to make 'any TCS Resource' disappear with no more than 5 days notice if their presence 'is not in the best interests of Nielsen.' Nielsen execs have launched a PR counter-attack, pledging not to bully 85 year-old ladies in future layoffs. In a Letter to the Citizens, Nielsen CEO David L. Calhoun explained that Tata won a 'rigorous competition' to get the job, failing to mention that Tata was also tapped by Nielsen EVP Mitchell Habib in his CIO roles at both GE and Citigroup."
Has anyone done an audit of EVP Mitchell Habib's bank accounts and lifestyle????
It might be nothing, but then again, it might not....
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
I was at Citigroup when Habib brought in Tata for a 2nd time. Initially, he brought them in for the credit card division. He was then promoted to CIO of North America and by then it was obvious to everyone that after what happened at GE and in our credit card division that there existed a quid pro quo arrangement between Habib and Tata. So there was no suprise when Tata was awarded the contract for all of North America, even though there was a 'competition' with at least 5 Indian outsourcing companies. I've got no idea if Habib thought that this move was really in the best interests of our company, I only know that he promptly left Citi for Nielsen right smack in the middle of all the resulting layoffs that he initiated. And anyone paying attention knew at the time that Tata and Nielsen would soon be working together, and every IT worker at Nielsen needed to get their resumes polished up in a big hurry.
Understanding is a three edged sword. - Ambassador Kosh Naranek, Babylon 5
This is what happens when a apathetic populace lets fascism or corporatism slide. Florida is well used to letting megacorps and others who let their money talk for them get their way. Accordingly, they're the first to be taken advantage of.
Florida's not the only one, certainly. The attitude of letting money talk is endemic all over the country. It's over the entire country. Corporations want cheap labor and will do what it takes to get it. They'd prefer slave labor, but compared to Americans, Indians are cheap enough to make the bottom line look good. Human rights mean NOTHING to them.
Unless the American people stop this, it's going to get worse. WE allowed this to happen. WE allow companies like Neilsen and Citigroup to take advantage of us like this. Accordingly, WE get reamed.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
You know, point them in the right direction... Sure sounds like fraud or scam to me...
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
People in India need to feed their families too.
Nielsen is in the business of gathering and selling information. You know, the "I" in "IT". And they have a very large IT division. So I have to respectfully disagree with you when you say that "They don't do techy things, make techy things or relate to tech at all."
Understanding is a three edged sword. - Ambassador Kosh Naranek, Babylon 5
Read the story. One Indian guy goes from American company to American company, merrily f--- over Americans to benefit Indians back in India. Has nothing to do with corporatism and everything to do with nationalism.
This is my sig.
I was under the impression that H1B-type visas were for skilled workers of which there was a shortage in the US. It goes against the entire purpose of the program to say 'We can't find people to fill these positions domestically, we have to import them.', and when these are jobs that are only available because the Americans currently doing them are being fired. This sounds less like a job for the Oldsmar city council and more like a job for Congress, to address this complete abuse of the visa program. Sounds like everyone should call their Congressperson and ask them to inquire with the INS about just how and why these visas were granted and continue to be granted to Tata Consultancy.
No private company should ever receive special tax breaks or subsidies for any reason. Instead, just lower business taxes so everyone has a chance to profit equally. Then these sorts of things wouldn't happen. It would also radically reduce the cope for corruption.
(The only necessary exception I can see to this rule is for National Security-specific products and research, since protection the citizenry is the primary function of government, and in many cases (nuclear weapons development comes to mind) that nature of the product produce precludes recoupment if R&D costs in the private sector.)
You won't get money out of politics until you get politics out of money.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Ratings Giant Nielsen Outsourcing Workers...
In other news: ratings indicate that television shows with a strong patriotic theme experiencing a marked decline in popularity.
Back to you Rob.
How the fuck news about the Nielsen company make the front page here? They don't do techy things, make techy things or relate to tech at all.
You're quite mistaken. Their business extends well beyond TV ratings.
A friend of mine manages a team of developers there. I'm sure interested in what's going on.
TATA is even in the backwoods of Indiana stealing IT jobs for India. I can tell you from experience many of them are extremely racist and only consider other Indians people.
It's time to say "Ta-ta" to Tata...
Yeah, call me protectionist, and queue all the rebuttals, but it's time to just knock this offshoring stuff off. I honestly think it should be made illegal at this point. Banned. For good.
We are gutting good jobs from our economy at a time when we truly can't afford it. We are watching CEOs and other greedy executives make off with literally millions of dollars by making these decisions that take food off the table for countless US families. The people who lose their jobs to crap like this then cannot buy goods and services in America. Guess what that does to the economy? But hey, those CEOs have their mansions and BMWs! They definitely have the mansions and BMWs!
My cell phone company uses an offshore support center. Recently, I spent 50 minutes trying to get two simple questions answered about my calling plan. The rep would "put me on hold while my issue was researched". We're talking REAL EASY questions, but they weren't addressed on the website (which was probably also offshored). This experience, by the way, has happened repeatedly with this provider's customer service. Note that my cell provider didn't lose anything - I'm locked into my plan, just like most other people who suffer from the cellphone cartels. They saved money by offshoring. But I lost 50 minutes of my life, because some bean counting boogerface decided to get himself a big bonus with his "cost saving offshoring" plan. I wish I could have spoken to someone in the US - someone who would then have money to buy stuff here, and who would have answered my question in perhaps only 10 minutes. I am a consultant who is paid by the hour. Should I bill my provider for the extra 40 minutes?
Some people think that offshoring will just raise the level of jobs we have here, and make more room for higher-level salaries. BULL! Where is the evidence? Sure, a select few get to play project manager or supervisor or offshore liaison, and the rest get to go home and wonder what to do with skills they have spent years honing. By the way, I know this might surprise some of you, but NOT EVERYONE wants to be a manager. Some people here would love to have those call center jobs (or those programming jobs, or whatever). Trust me, some people would really like to have them, especially now.
Darn it! Companies that made their fortunes on US ingenuity turn their backs on the US for a quick buck, and we continue to allow it to happen. It makes me sick and enough is enough. We are stupid, especially in the face of growing trade deficits, to send good jobs somewhere else. Wait, we peons are not stupid, it's the bigwig decision makers who AREN'T ACTUALLY HURT by the decisions. We should stop them. Congress should stop them. Which would be easy, if Congress wasn't attached to them at their wallet.
By the way, I have nothing against the folks in other nations to which we offshore this work. They are doing what I would be doing in their shoes - making their best play for these attractive jobs. If you walk up and hand someone an opportunity, you can't blame them for taking it. It's not their fault. It's OUR FAULT!
Not wanting to see our own economy gutted is not the same as being protectionist. This offshoring thing was a bad idea, ill-conceived and unethically promoted. Worse, it's been shamelessly allowed by our do-nothing Congress, and even condoned by brainwashed people who drink the "it'll free us up for more high-level jobs" kool-aid. If you run a business in the US, run it in the US. Employ people here. Between inexpensive overseas goods, offshoring of services, and oil, we seem absolutely hellbent to send every bit of value we can somewhere other than here. ENOUGH!!!
Admittedly, I need to relax a bit. My typing fingers hurt.
My comments are my own, and do not represent the views of my employer, my spouse, my children, or my cats.
Parent is not a troll. He's just telling the truth. When an Indian man always hires the same Indian company to do his work for 3 different American firms, it's ethnic/racial favoritism plain and simple.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That'll buy you a huge sweatshop in Florida full of foreign workers. Why does a ratings company need 1.2B in outsourcing services anyway? This must be a corrupt deal. Somebody's getting a BIG kickback.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
How the fuck news about the Nielsen company make the front page here?
They don't do techy things, make techy things or relate to tech at all.
You mean like http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/ ?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
The poop hits the fan? What kind of vulgar expression is that?
trumps nationalism
if someone can do what you can do for a cheaper price, the market gravitates to take advantage of that. not much protectionism will prevent that
people talk about politicians and laws fixing these things. there's not much a politician can do to stop the basic laws of supply and demand, there's not many laws that can be enforced against rules of economics without hurting the entire economy
the economy changes. protecting the jobs of steamboat captains or horseshoe blacksmith doesn't mean much when people start using trains and cars. you change with the world, adapat, and new opportunities present themselves. or you whine loud enough so that politicians protect your steamboat captain's job. which, under increasing pressur eof irrelevancy every day, loses its lustre and its income anyways, because the entire economy of steamboats is drying up
CHANGE, motherfuckers, do you speak it?
rather than complain about a job leaving the usa, why not train for a job that can't be outsourced? that makes more money?
you may now pillory me into oblivion. but go ahead. i hate you. i hate the story summary. to me, it represents the worst of the usa: fat whiners with a sense of entitlement. you're the worst of this country, the lowest character
i actually think outsourcing strengthens the country. it forces people to retrain. people seem to think getting one stupid job and entrenching yourself in that position for the rest of your life is some sort of nirvana. its not. its stagnation, mentally and financially. but it is nirvana for people who want to do nothing in their lives but shuffle paper on a desk and get paid more than their worth
change has risks. and plenty of people who lose their jobs to outsourcing will never get a job that pays that well ever again. such people are usually useless overpaid dead wood anyways. they deserve to work at mcdonalds, they got the higher paying job by mistake in the first place. and outsourcing is the rational economic change that shoves them down to where they belong on the economic ladder. of course they whine about that
meanwhile, anyone with any real skill and brains moves on, makes more money. the good float to the top, the shit sinks, whining and moaning the whole time. protectionism is for the weak. you're weak if you depend upon protectionism, you're the worst of this country. risk is challenging, it works your brain like a muscle. if you are too weak to stomach that, go clean toilets
those who whine the loudest, to me, represent nothing but the worst of the united states: "if i whine loud enough i get what i deserve"
no, asshole. you rise or sink based on your abilities and challenges are GOOD for you. they build you like rsistance to a muscle. or they kill you, in which case you are a weak loser who deserves no more than to be a grave digger
you don't deserve anything in life. you aren't entitled to anything. you work, you take some risk, you shut up and play the game called life, and you eventually make your mark. or you bitch and whine and moan about this or that not being fair. because you are fucking loser
now mod me into oblivion, you flabby whiny fucking losers at life. anyone with real skill is busy shutting up and moving on to better pastures and living their fucking lives. but anyone who knows nothing better, nor will know any better, than the jobs that were outsourced are sinking in their socioeconomic status, as they fucking DESERVE
fuck you flabby whiny losers. fuck you all. the worst of this country
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
...and we in Australia thought AWAs were bad news! A few years of the Nielson Workplace Agreement down here would have had everybody gagging for AWAs as sweet relief!
"My SO is Indian,"
How are indian chicks in the sack? Do they really know all that Kama Sutra stuff? Or is that just in HBO movies?
Are they open to anything? Or really uptight (like my wife).
Do you propose banning or highly taxing all imported goods? Even just sticking to software, that'd have a lot of consequences. For example, Ubisoft is a large French videogame company, with additional offices in Canada, which sells a lot of games to the American market (as well as elsewhere). Would you support protectionist measures that aimed to increase the market share of EA at the expense of Ubisoft? If not, how do you distinguish this case?
I'm a US citizen and worked for TCS for a short time (first job). I found it to be a horrible experience. My Indian coworkers were friendly; I had no problem with any of them personally. But I found the quality of the work to be horrible. Simple applications took way too long to get done. Ex. 8 to 16 hours to make a ASP .NET to display a few fields from a database, come on. Enhancements/maintenance to existing apps were a nightmare due to rampant copy/paste. Yikes - but at least I got out...They didn't seem to be trying to produce junk, but nonetheless...Anyone with similar experiences?
So... Is anyone alleging that a crime has been committed here? As in, saying the specific law that was broken? ... doing something that is legal ...
Or is this another case of accusing somebody of
If there is evidence of a crime, the perhaps something can be done... otherwise, like it or not, you are harrassing somebody for doing something that is not illegal.
The article really doesn't make clear which it is. Legal? Or Illegal?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Now you can say tatas on TV.
Does that mean we also kick out everyone who has offshored to the US? When someone like, say, Toyota, wants to open up a plant in the US (who has 5 currently) do we tell them to fuck off because we are against offshoring? Or are we hypocrites about it and we are ok with offhsoring so long as the jobs come here. If that's the case, why should foreign countries allow that? Why not mirror image our policies against us?
Also how do you define it? Is it only offshoring when a US company moves jobs overseas? How about if they just stop producing something themselves and instead buy it from a foreign vendor? How about imports in general (where something is designed and produced in another country)? What about US companies that are owned by foreign conglomerates (like Blizzard, who is owned by Vevendi Universal)?
This is not a simple issue. We are well past the days where something was made by one guy and sold in one town. Global trade is incredibly complex. So if you are anti-globalism first you need to decide what precisely it is you are against. What things are ok and what aren't and at what levels (by levels I mean is it ok for something to happen inter state but not inter nationally). Once you've done that, you need to look and see what the consequences of that are. There is no action without cost. Make sure you understand what the downsides (direct and indirect) of such a thing would be, don't pretend like it's all roses.
Finally, doesn't it seem a bit supremest to tell everyone else "Well we got ours, we aren't going to help you get yours,"? I mean you seem to be all down on the rich in the US hording wealth, but yet you seem to be suggesting the US as a whole should do the same thing.
This isn't a simple issue, and thus if you think a simple solution works, you are probably wrong. I'm not saying what is going on now is right, I'm not saying it's wrong, I'm saying that you need to take the time to understand the whole picture. It isn't a simple case of jobs leaving the US, it is a complex case of trade becoming more and more global and more intertwined.
They took our JOBS!
Show a man some news, distract him for an hour. Show a man some mod points, distract him for the rest of his life.
How much can you save outsourcing a call center operator - $30k per year ?
How about saving some real money and outsourcing the board of directors.
Nullius in verba
a classic bait-and-switch?
I for one welcome our new Indian overlords.
GHEE HAW!
This is more insightful than may seem on the surface.
Due to a history of mega-mergers, there is less and less competition among this class of corporate actor: executives and directors. Meanwhile they increase competition to insane levels among the working class, such that we 'compete' with people who could never show up at a rally outside the employer's offices and who have scant civil and labor rights to begin with (and perhaps even less in a trans-continental employment situation).
If I read this (table A1 p117) the top four employment categories are 1) Manufacturing 2) Retail 3) Health Care and 4) Hotels. Do any of these sound safe from outsourcing? Not to me.
The US invested mightily and fostered the genius it took to create it's amazing economy. India did not, they can do that now if they want. They will catch up eventually, but why on Earth would you help your competition? Maybe it's not about America, maybe it's about greed which, contrary to neo-con oversimplified-theory-so-the-senator-from-Nebraska-can-understand-it isn't always good.
I bet India has some very very bright people. Probably bright enough to be CIO or CEO of a major company. Probably bright enough to be a lobbyist. Oh right, CEO's are unique individuals with rare qualities that only their buddy CEO's at the club can recognize and set the compensation for.
So anyway, H1-B visas for lobbyists and CEO's. And tax this wanker's bonus back because lynching is apparently forbidden or something.
On the other hand Lou Dobbs scares me. I dunno, like a xenophobic populist or something.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
All religions, not just those which you don't believe in.
These cults, popular and otherwise, have kept us from achieving so much. Of course, religious apologists always trundle out stuff such as "[insert famous scientist] was religious!", as if it proves that famous (or good) scientists became so because they were religious.
They ignore the fact that, say, Newton for instance, may have been even more productive than he already was if he'd not devoted a large chunk of his life to Religious obsessions. Giordano Bruno may not have been burned at the stake for heresy (because he was silly enough to publicly state that the Earth orbits the Sun...). Galileo would probably have had a better time of it too.
Not to mention that most of those people lived in a time when not having religion usually meant having nothing at all because, in those dark days, people were often discriminated against for being non-Religious.
We as a species should have finally frown up and left religion and similar mumbo-jumbo behind us. Alas, too many still cling to the hope that their flavour of imaginary superfriend in the sky will prevent them from having to take responsibility for their own lives.
Yeah it does. The executives in his wake are getting a kickback that's why they are playing the game "pass the almighty buck", that it borders on fraud and includes ripping off the taxpayer just sweetens the pie. Make promises, sign contracts, doesn't matter by the time the legal system catches up with him the damage will be done and the money safely squared away.
America has been singing the praises of capitalism for so long now that all these other economies are starting to sing along and produce the kind of executives that corporate America loves. Let's not attempt to put corporatism on a pedestal and say 'this is nationalism', this is globalisation, this is capitalism doing what it does best, benefiting the few at the expense of the many.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Tata will have agreed to the terms to get the business. Nielsen may well be disappointed at the actual execution. A seemingly common trend within Indian outsourcing companies seems to be the eagerness in which they will pitch for work without considering the implications of the requirement. I worked on a project a couple of years ago where one of the biggest Indian consultancies had undercut a major IT services company by 30% to get the contract, but then found that they needed hardware and expertise with it to get the job done, and consequently hired the IT services company to provide it. The attitude to manpower was also interesting: if for example they needed an Oracle DBA, the manager would call the HR department in Bangalore and say 'find me someone with Oracle on their CV', and someone would step off the plane a couple of days later. If they proved not to be up to scratch (quite rare, as most of the staff were at least good at one thing), they would be back on the plane fairly quickly. I don't think Nielsen will be losing out having such a clause in their contract, and Tata certainly don't see it as losing out, just the way they and the other major Indian consultancies run their business.
everything that is not made by american it workers is shitty. you have used the word shitty 4 times in your post, as if there is some magical rule of nature that says stuff that is made in india (or other 'shitty' places) has to be 'shitty'. maybe you are shitty, and therefore having problems ?
take me for example. i have quit industrial engineering education midphase, got into computers, taught myself programming, started freelancing.
and without holding any degree, i am charging clients all over the world $40/hour for the work i do, and everyone is happy. they have to be, because they come for more. and that is despite im a turkish citizen, and turkey doesnt have a very good reputation on the internet.
so its basically down to the individual to make it or mess it. if you are talented, reliable enough you can basically work anywhere as an i.t. worker, including the middle of your living room, regardless of where you are on the face of the world. thats the magic of internet.
ah, but if you are wanting to get a 'secure' job at a company getting paid $80 a buck, working like how people worked back in 1960s, and make a nice living, you can forget it. those times are past, and globalization has nothing to do with its passing. the rising level of greed in all societies killed the reasonable understanding of work/pay ratio, corporations want to make you work more and pay less as people want to make more money and get more material possessions.
Read radical news here
"A free market is an unregulated market, with no government subsidies, bailouts, handouts, or funding, where the customers ultimately are responsible for the successes or failures for business based on whether they patronize them."
Sorry but there is no such thing as an unregulated market, "the market" is a system and by definition a system has rules. The 'free' part in 'free market' does not mean free from interference/change/rules, in fact the "free" part is a reference to a rule of the market that says everyone is free to participate in the market. Without rules to determine who owns what and who can/can't use force to uphold the rules, the 'market' part of "free market" is meaningless.
Some things work well under your definition of the "free market" but some such as transport and health don't. After all there is a vast difference between running an airport/hospital and swapping home grown vegtables with the neighbours. I'm not suggesting you personally adhrere to a rigid ideology, but to assume regulation and government interference is always a bad thing is to deny the importance of things as trans-US railroads, the Panama canal, the moon landings, equal pay for women & blacks, etc.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
so its about the wages ?
noone gives anyone a guarantee of good wage employment when they cram the classrooms for courses on the profession that is in demand at THAT point in time. and when hordes of people go out with degrees from that field and satisfy the demand, wages naturally fall.
thats the same with every kind of field, not only i.t.
back in 90s there havent descended any divine declaration that says i.t. workers were to get huge paychecks in contrast to everyone else. when the demand went down with the bust, so did the wages.
we are still lucky in that there is still a demand for i.t. work. it might have been a no demand situation.
Read radical news here
people expect good pay and guaranteed employment if they put long time into studying in a field. this is as such in my country too, where people think that the government has to provide all college graduates with jobs. they think putting their children through the college is a mandate for the government to find their kids jobs.
naturally it aint so, and its hypocritical. they have chosen to put their kids through college, knowing that due to mechanics of free market, that would bring an added value to their kids, and have their kids go past the other kids who didnt attend a college. they are all fine with this added value part of the free market, and other kids being left behind.
but they are not happy with the supply/demand part of the market when it comes out that despite they made their kid study for 10+ years, if there is not a demand in the market for that kind of talent, their kid will go unemployed.
hypocrisy. at its best.
Read radical news here
what the FUCK is u.s. doing in iraq in the first place ? explain this first.
Read radical news here
where are you going to send all your exports with that protected economy of yours, when trade partners of u.s. also start to go protectionist ?
you are saying that you basically want your country to go cccp. do you think other countries are stupid enough to let you export to them in favorable terms, without you giving something back in return ?
Read radical news here
or have ZERO understanding of economics.
you are saying that you want to prevent importing of any goods. so all goods that are sold in your country are going to be produced by american companies.
where are you going to sell all your surplus to generate the wealth you need to maintain your life standard ?
arent you in the know that the major reason the world is at this point in civilization, sending probes to moon and talking to each other thousands of kilometers away with computers, because we have invented the concept of TRADE ?
do you think other countries will buy your goods like idiots, whilst you are barring them from selling their stuff and services in your country ?
are you a moron or have you taken no economics or history classes ?
Read radical news here
he goes rather too extreme with the darwinist survivalism, but he has a point in that there is a great deal of people who just want to train themselves doing some stuff mediocre and get a high standard of living guaranteed just because of that.
its not just like that in the u.s. either. even in turkey that is as such. people go to colleges that are founded in the boom of 90s (hundreds of makeshift colleges and universities were founded in that decade) and expect to have a good life guaranteed just because they got a signed degree. and they make a fuss when they see that they dont get it. and yell around saying that college graduates are being left unemployed or underpaid.
the fact is quality university graduates are still getting high paying jobs without being even a month in the open. 4-6 top universities and colleges of the nation are still in very high demand. reason ? well, the degree actually holds a meaning.
i see that its the same in u.s.. someone gets a signed degree from someplace, and instantly think they are entitled to high life or guaranteed pay. well, it aint so. it aint so anywhere in the world in the times we are living in. you have to make yourself stand out of the crowd, if you want to be rewarded.
Read radical news here
there are many countries who provide far bigger incentives to corporations. if you create such an environment, your companies would speedily run away to other countries.
Read radical news here
I think to say that nobody is inherently superior is wrong to say. People do have different skills. But I suppose what you meant to say is that it is wrong to generalize across entire countries/ethnicies/populations. I just would prefer it if people were more precise with their meaning, it would avoid a lot of unnecessary discussion.
Personally I do not have any experience working with Indians. But from what I have been told by several friends who do work with them on a regular basis, it does appear that they are somehow less capable of or trained in thinking for themselves and creativity, requiring exact instructions. Whether this is true on a larger scale however, I cannot say.
Wow, that summary is very emotionally biases. Is Lou Dobbs working for slashdot now?
Nielsen has not broken any laws. Read the articles. The incentives they received are directly proportional to the number of employees they have in the city. The more they fire, the fewer incentives they get.
Finally, if Tata can do the work better and cheaper than the Floridians then they are going to get the contract. That is what freedom of the market means.
1) the firm I work with, we went through a turn around of 10+ coworker out of Mumbai
2) 8 out of 10 could not code out of a paper bag, making obvious error that anybody having more than 1 week of experience should not do, and NEVER EVER testing what they produced before delivering (sometimes it did not even COMPILE).
3) after years of saying "everything is fine" management finally admitted they did not get from outsourcing the benefit they waited for (hint : it costs them 2 millions more in operation instead of the waited 10 millions money spare)
4) that was not an isolated case, the problem is that just like in the boom of the internet bubble anybody was calling themselves coder when in reality they had no idea on really developping software. The result was that there were a lot of people could not code out of paper bag in my own country either. I think the same is happening locally in India where the one which can code get better paid job / develop stuff,whereas the cheap guy which NEED to learn is put out to outsourcing departement.
I am sure there are many case where outsourcing was successful (who knows maybe a majority), but after seeing my firm declaring it was a success to the outside world, and only after 4 years admitting internally it was failed for the main objective, I begin to suspect many of the success touted by consulting firm are not that successful in reality.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
how is it troll to ask an unjustified invasion of a country, when someone brings it up as an excuse for something else.
Read radical news here
For you are the person that sucks up to the boss, people feign respect for you, but you sicken them. You say 'why not train for a job that can't be outsourced' which is ok, but forget that some people choose a profession because they have a passion for it or want a simple life, you step on them because you feel nothing but contempt. You will probably be used by management to sack your co-workers and then be sacked yourself disguising the resulting insecurity with the anger of being deceived. You are a hypocrite and you will probably hate yourself for being so naive and passionless so much that it will probably give you cancer one day.
The good Americans fear you, the strong Americans hate you because you are the American that makes people hate America. You will step on anyone that gets in your way, without compassion or mercy. You are exactly the type of person this corporation wants, I predict a bright future for you, Welcome to Tata!
I see it happen a lot here in my area, but rarely are their any ramifications attached.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If you believe Wikipedia, they started out as "classic" outsourcing company but do significant own research and software development today:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tata_Consultancy_Services.
I don't think they have shown up as major product vendor in IT yet (in the sense of complete software packages you can buy off the shelf), but with the development capacities that are listed in the Wikipedia article it should be only a matter of time.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Posting anon since I've modded..
I'm a grad student who double majored in math and history, now doing neural modeling. I spend several hours a day trying to stay informed. But it doesn't quite work, because the mainstream media doesn't produce the same SNR than they did in decades past. This results in a free-for-all for those who don't need to comply with laws/regulations to push their strange positions, and many believe them. Until we decide to reform commercial speech into the 'you must not lie' category, we're still screwed
Money and Politics look to be inseparable, but beyond that, there are good reasons to give subsidies to many development projects... So long as they manage to give a decent financial plan (unlike nearly every stadium...)
Most residential areas in the US are controlled by either a single board or housing authority these days. Both arrangements focus on maximizing value for owners in the short term, rather than considering further development.
One of the biggest problems that the US is going to have to overcome is taking the near suburbs and turning them into cities.
The wages of 1960s were at the level which finally allowed the "middle class" to form in America and for most people to be comfortably prosperous. What you are saying is that most Americans should expect to be dirt poor in this new "global economy", forever looking at their parents and grand-parents as those who were the final successful generation. Could you explain why is this supposed to be a benefit to the American populace? Why should not they demand that their government use all those stock piles of nuclear weapons to eradicate this new "global economy"? And this is not some theoretical musing here. All that xenophobia, lashing out abroad against any perceived foreign "enemy", increasingly viciously totalitarian political rhetoric and the like are fundamentally tied to this new, every day more depressing, "global reality". How is this a good thing for most people, again?
the wages in 1960s was the result of post ww2 situation. half of the world was destroyed. especially europe and japan. these were industrial nations that were the competition. iron curtain went up in eastern block, they totally got out of economic circulation. there was a huge need for every kind of produce. america was not destroyed. it produced, and there was the market, and it sold. result was an economic boom that resulted from extraordinary circumstances. it couldnt last however, and as other countries rebuilt their infrastructure, competition came back, both in production and consumption of raw materials. us was not the main buyer of resources anymore, prices also went up as a result.
Could you explain why is this supposed to be a benefit to the American populace? Why should not they demand that their government use all those stock piles of nuclear weapons to eradicate this new "global economy"?
first of all u.s. is not the only country that has nukes, and in the event of such an 'eradication' of that global economy us would also be destroyed. the illusion of 'missile shields' and whatnot are, illusions. even if 4 nukes land out of 200 launched against your country is still annihilation of half of your populace and huge cities turning inhabitable.
second, the 'global economy' is the reason we are able to get to a global production level to raise civilization to the point that we are able to talk with computers over distances of thousands of kilometers and send probes to the moon. growth and progress is only possible with participation. civilization went forward only in proportion to the extent of participants in its activities. the globalization is the product of last 50 years, and if you check those years out, you can see that the life standard of entire world rising exponentially compared to the thousands of years preceding, even though the distribution of that prosperity is not yet perfect.
third, it benefits american people because this situation IS real. post 60s boom was an extraordinary circumstance that will never happen. it was kinda a reward for america, in a manner of speaking, for the labor it undertook in the war against fascism. yet, the reward was a period, and it ran out. the advantage of current situation is that, because it is real, if you adapt to this new situation, you dont need to worry about the future anymore. because you will be surviving in a global, competitive world, and therefore there can be nothing to disturb the balance. yet, it will require working harder than 1960s, thats for granted.
Read radical news here
I figured he would want to go back. Apparantely he had a great experience there. I'm suprised he had Nielsen be his travel agent.
I was wondering the other day why no one has proposed an outsourcing tax, at least not that I've heard of?
I've never liked the idea of outright banning something. I prefer the approach of incentives.
First, provide tax breaks to spur economic development. I realize it's currently a fad to want to tax the hell out of companies. However, money going to taxes means money not going to employees. High taxes have never helped anyone but the government and in the long run it hurts them too when companies go out of business or move away; look at Michigan.
However, in addition the these tax breaks institute a series of tax-based penalties for companies that violate certain conditions. One of them being outsourcing. If a company outsources jobs that could be filled by Americans they get taxed so heavily it wipes away any cost-savings they might have enjoyed.
The section on overtime says that the person doing overtime must be compensated by other time off instead of money.
So this is a way to get additional capacity on part of the Nielsen without actually having to pay for it. Well someone has to pay... guess who that is?
Think of it this way if you could produce 10,000 widgets a day and suddenly you need to produce 40,000 widgets a day, you would have to invest in excess capacity and plan for it. Or you can make a deal with the machine supplier to lend you more widget machines for a couple of weeks/months so you can make more widgets.
What happens under this no overtime agreement? Your manager comes to you and says, can you work this weekend? You can take Monday and Tuesday next month. So you being a good team player say ok. Great. No one had to pay extra, and you got your time off. WRONG.
1) Your weekend, where the rest of your family is free is now taken away.
2) Monday and Tuesday a month from now was probably relatively quiet. So you traded relatively quiet time for a really busy time
3) Management gets free excess capacity without having to pay for it. So they get away with less investment in people and process and resource planning.
What if you said no? I will not work this weekend I want to spend time with my family? You will no longer be a team player and won't get promoted. So the people who will do well under this culture will be people willing to sacrifice all their time for the good of the company.
All this because of one line in one agreement between a company that needs services and a company that provides services that says, overtime will be compensated with time-off sometime later.
This isn't surprising, as just this past Friday I heard a story on the business report on how Nielsen is being seen as less and less relevant by the big media companies.
All they do is track about 12000 households and only track television, whereas people get shows on TV, internet and cell phones, and most homes get more than the basic networks.
Apparently the media companies are trying to work with all the set top box folks to collect all viewing habits in much larger populations through the boxes, cutting Nielsen right out.
The report even said that Nielsen has always acted like they were the only game in town and frequently ignored the media producing companies when they asked them to change things.
So now they are hurting and looking to save a few bucks.
I am a member of the IWW; which might be considered by some to be a radical union mostly geared towards those who work manual labor; however, I joined the wobblies as a sysadmin because it is hard to find IT worker unions and the only serious engineering unions I know of are those afforded all academic folk. Does anyone here on Slashdot belong to any unions dedicated to protecting us engineering and IT folk, or is it time to find one? The AFL-CIO's power derives from the long manifest of its varying industries and we too might be better to unite under a single banner to fight for those rights that we think ought to be universal like affordable medical care, reasonable minimum wage laws and perhaps a maximum wage as well.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
no country lets other exploit him that freely. china is buying u.s. govt bonds and financing u.s. federal debt exclusively, in staggering amounts. therefore it is being let to act the way it does.
for other countries, china is letting them to its market, and they are buying its products.
trade means trade. in literal sense. you give and take. what you give and what you take may be different as in the example.
Read radical news here
You want to know the reason everyone is paying over 4 bucks a gallon for gas? All of this outsourcing
to China and India is the real reason behind it. When you start pumping most of our manufacturing over
to these countries it greatly increases the demand for energy driving up demand for fuel. Speculation
has little to do with it the root problem goes back outsourcing. Every single American worker should
be pounding on congress to stop this idiocy. Not only are these companies sending jobs overseas but
at the same time they are tightening the noose on us at home by causing us to pay increasingly more for
energy.
You always hear from the media that the increase in energy demand from China is causing the increases. Well
the only reason China has more demand for energy is because all of our manufacturing jobs are now there.
Our govt needs to be trampled on for allowing this to happen.
Got Code?
If you make a big enough deal, a large, almost-untraceable lump sum can easily be thrown back to an executive pushing the deal... especially if they have bank accounts or relatives in the country where the outsourcing is being done. :)
This adds an incentive to inflate budgets, because the existence of such kickbacks means that anything you can get added to the budget can find its way to your back pocket.
Obviously for this to work you need a pretty intimate relationship to the outsourcing firm, but I'm sure this happens (I've had deep suspicions about certain situations).
you had me at #!
...That the US only tolerates a playing field tilted in its favour. It's called "globalisation" and it means "we will buy your stuff cheap (or better yet we'll just co-opt it [NAFTA+]), you will spread our advertising and cultural poison throughout your film and TV networks without resistance, and your (relatively poor) population will helplessly buy our junk [Coca-Cola, Windows] like so many zombies. We'll pocket the margins to maintain our inflated, unsustainable, perverse 1st World lifestyles, and pay for the wars that this disparity inevitably causes."
Then we all wake up. Right?
you had me at #!
Let's make all foreign franchises illegal.
WE lN THE ClVlLl5ED W0RLD D0 N0T NEED 5TARBUCK5 T0 SELL U5 C0FFEE 0R MCD0NALD'5 T0 5ELL U5 JUNK F00D. Our local product is just fine, thanks. That is all.
you had me at #!
and it's unethical and maybe even illegal under US law. Many companies will fire you for doing that.
It appears to me that most posters are falling prey to one of these two fallacies:
a) Moving jobs out of US is bad for the US economy. This is false because of two major reasons. First, when Indians spend their new salaries, they do it mainly on electronics and cars, and guess who owns a majority of these companies -- the First World nations. A significant amount of the money is coming back to the developed nations.
b) A jobless American worker cannot contribute to the US economy. That is partly true and that too in the very short term. It will be interesting to check what happened when most of the manufacturing was moved to China, Taiwan and Korea. The dollars involved there were much more than those in outsourcing, after correcting for inflation ofcourse. Seems to me that the US survived that phenomenon alright. Free market dictates that if others do not want your goods or skills, then you have to evolve and invent. Americans have been the pioneer in this, so I do not know what the hue and cry is all about. The Indian government, on the other hand, generally is much more conservative and highly averse to change and evolution. The poo will really hit the fan in India when the outsourcing is itself re-outsourced to places like Phillipines and Vietnam. It is already happening.
I say this with much conviction because I am an Indian myself and have had quite a few contacts in the contact-center industry over the course of 2-3 years.
America will ride this storm like it has before. The timing of all this with the Iraq thing and the oil prices make this appear much worse than it actually is.
I've done work with several outsourcing companies but can tell you that I've never seen more incompetence than the Tata folks.
As a consultant for a *major* retailer's credit services group, I managed projects with Citi/Tata resources and never had an implementation that went smoothly.
We have country of origin labels on manufactured goods, why not for our software / data management as well? I believe that American consumers should have the right to know if their financial data is being "managed" outside of the US.
JAGga.me ----> Producing video games addressing emotional health and wellness issues affecting teens.
Might be VERRRY interesting. We already know about the widespread "write for us and we'll look after you" corruption of journalism (Enderle, etc), but what about the endemic bias towards MS in corporates in the face of so many better alternatives? Something smells very bad, why doesn't anyone think to look for a dead body in the dumpster??
I can't be the first person to wonder, especially in the wake of the OOXML/ISO corruption scandal. That did shine some light on cockroaches and MS "soft bribe" practices.
you had me at #!
--W.C. Fields
The whole point of the this kind of tax break is to do a special favor for a business so that it will locate in your state rather than a different state that would charge them the same tax rate as everybody else.
I'm all for things like tax breaks for enterprise zones, because they address a real need. The intent, at least, is to increase the overall development pie by addressing persistent problems of underdevelopment. And the tax advantages are available to anybody who's willing to locate there. But this kind of sweetheart deal isn't about expanding the pie, it's about scamming a bigger slice than you'd deserve under and impartial tax system. It's a race to the bottom that is driven by people who, without any visibly conscious sense of irony, complain that the government interferes too much in private economic decision making.
If you want to be a sharp, you'd better be the sharpest, most ruthlessly cynical crook in town, because otherwise that larceny in your heart makes you ripe pickings for somebody just a wee bit slicker. The whole foundation of the 419 scam is that blinded by greed and narcissistic admiration of your own cleverness, you will eagerly send money, without any security, to a party you know is untrustworthy. In fact you are counting on that party to act in an untrustworthy way. In the light of cold reason, this is obviously incredibly stupid. While I might spare some bit of sympathy for an 80 year old grandmother who wants to leave a bit more nest egg to her grandkids, somebody elected to public office really should display more brains than to expect treatment for themselves better than that they deal to others.
So spare a little outrage against Nielsen and Tata for the supposed "victims" in this scam. I hope they're run out of office.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
That site seems to be 404-compliant. Did they outsource that too?
There are all sorts of governmental statistics to look at as regards cost of living references, but I have a few anecdotals to put it into perspective. First, we will use minimum wage versus common stuff as the baseline, and because modern tech life revolves around energy costs, everything is related to it in a major way so it is a good reference. I will really round this off and negate local regional differences, etc, because this is just a very general USA reference mostly from my memories and a few fast google look it up references, mostly for current prices. Baseline rough figure then is 1 hour and 1 dollar, now 1 hour and 7 bucks, and I am being purposely conservative in both directions, making the earlier figures seem worse, and current figures seem better by some small amount, so if there is any exaggeration it is in favor of living today so it won't seem biased towards "the good old days".
Back when I first started driving, a minimum wage job got you 4.5 gallons of gasoline, now it gets someone 1.5 gallons roughly. A new basic transportation car cost around 1200-1500 hours of labor, now it is 2100-2500 hours (although in real terms it is higher because loan periods are much longer). A decent enough (new) starter home was around 15,000 hours labor, now it is over 30,000 hours (again, although in real terms it is higher because loan periods are much longer). Bread was 5 loaves to the hour, now it is around 2.x something. Burger on sale was similar, 5 lbs for one hour, now, say cut that in half, it is twice as high usually. Insurance is just completely out the window, guys used to just show up cold calling door to door and it was cheap, IIRC, typically around 10-15 hours a month, today around 40 hours. And so on that direction, basically, most of life was loads cheaper, it is similar with electricity and heating costs. You just didn't worry about it, even at minimum wage, contrast with today, two incomes typically needed and both well above minimum wage to maintain that sort of parity in a household. Heck, might as well hit on ancient traditional measurement of wealth, price of gold. Around 35 hours labor per ounce then, now around 130, varies daily lately. Silver was an exact 1 to 1, because they still had one ounce (1 hour labor), halves, quarters and dimes coins in common circulation, now it is around 3 hours minimum wage labor per ounce and the vast amount of people in the US don't own any wealth of that traditional kind except for some over priced jewelry.
Conversely, what is really cheaper now and stands out by a wide margin is electronics, a shirt pocket transistor radio was 20 lowball-60 hours labor (not joking either, 5 to 10 times that in the 50's), now it is 1/7 of one hour at the dollar store for an entry level cheap portable pocket radio. And we all can see how computers and so on changed. Electronics have made the largest advances, no comparison with anything else.
FWIW, rough calculations, closed track, YMMV, etc. bottom line is, except for cheaper electronic gadgets today, it was a lot cheaper to live normally then. It has gone downhill in a lot of ways, and in particular since the huge wave of shipping manufacturing overseas, which also corresponded to the first oil pricing shocks, a double whammy that hit the blue collars and lower wage earners the most, and when the economic bears first sounded the alarm that to continue would lead to mass national bankruptcy.. People have the illusion from higher salaries today that they are so much better off, in reality, that is all it is mostly, an illusion, heck, look at college education costs! And today's savings and debt ratio is just gone, it doesn't exist, it is a lot more debt, personal and private, then savings. It is so far skewed it isn't important except in the sad abstract, we basically have no true savings in the US, none really, and all that theoretical stock "worth" sitting in 401ks is not even remotely able to be translated back into real goods and services in anything en masse on dema
So, yes it is exploitation.
You have a very curious version of exploitation. By that scale, you could complain about the midwest. On average the midwest has lower wages than the coasts, but proportionally lower living expenses as well.
By your comments, you seem to prefer that the worker in india NOT get that $1k/month job. Honestly enough, this is an educated Indian, so he's likely to get another job. Maybe one at $600/month. That means he can't afford as much to pay for other trinkets - and the collective effect is more people stay at the suckiest subsidence levels.
You can of course say that it isn't exploitation, but helping them by funneling money into their society. But the truth is, that as long as there is a huge salary difference for the same amount and type of job, there is exploitation going on.
In my mind, your exploitation = willing trade. We benefit, they benefit, we're both happy. Realistically speaking, this will also result in a downward push on our wages(I think we're lucky we've been merely stagnant), and an upward pressure on theirs. If you look at the mean/median for India and China, you'll find that their wages have been increasing at far above inflation. Which is to be expected. This will continue until China/India have modernized and pretty much eliminated the subsidence farmer class. If shipping costs remain high, that will relax the pressure to outsource jobs long before that, but by then they'll have enough internal economy to keep the process up.
And the grandparent was correct. These companies are employing workforce at below minimum wage salaries. Why are they allowed to sell products in the US?
Free trade laws, they're being paid well above minimum wage in their country, and the cost of living is such that paying them US minimum wage would be somewhat silly in that you'd have telemarketers and tech support people making more than the local doctors?
globalization is of net benefit to everyone. It's just that, as we were the top dogs, it's of the least benefit to us.
I don't read AC A human right
Some indian outsourcing companies are bringing indians to US for 3 months on tourist visa. They work here, learn the job, and go back. This is illegal; they cannot work on tourist visa in the US.
Where is the government?
Mitchell Habib is NOT of Indian origin / Indian -- the parent is either tolling , or is just ignorant. It should be modded down.(Just because a name is non-american does not make it Indian-- the parent could have easily googled the name to find out that it is Arab/ Lebanese in origin)
My analogy is perfect: change.
Perfect? What are you? One of those guys who can't admit you're wrong even when you are? You live in a forced form of denial at all times when truth doesn't line up with the hate-talk you barf on people? Gotta be right because it just hurts SOOOOO much to admit that you are wrong? Listen up: Nobody's perfect. Not you or anybody, so give it up. This is kindergarten stuff, buster. "Change" isn't an analogy. Your analogy about steamboat captains was what the poster was writing about, so don't try to slide out from under that. Nobody's buying it. You're only smart in your head.
And steamboat captains? Dude. That would be relevant if we were talking about new technologies advancing the marketplace. Outsourcing is about taking existing technology, shipping the related jobs to nations where people are valued like garbage, and then breaking the technology so it doesn't work as well if at all, just so that a few fat cats can get fatter. There's not innovation based on passion for new ideas. That's exploitation based on pure greed. But to you, you've got the 'perfect' analogy going there? What are you? A Republican?
Colbert said it best; Everybody knows reality has a liberal bias.
But that's okay. You're not capable of getting it anyway. You hate me and everybody who doesn't agree with your myopic views. Actual hate. Said so yourself. Your whole post was filled with it. Yeah. That's healthy. Go do some more of that and die young because of it. Do the world some good. That's about as close to perfect as you're gonna get.
If you are a nerd by profession, then this is some of the most relevant news that slashdot publishes. The current work visa scam, perpetuated mainly by Microsoft, and a handful of Indian staffing companies, effects IT workers almost exclusively.
It is very clear to me that IT work today is going the same way as manufacturing work in the 1980s. I don't think there is anything that can be done about it. But, if you are informed, you can may be able to make better decisions with your life and career.
I work for Nielsen, and internally we're not happy about this either. There's no reason why anyone in the field should have to call a scripted goon in Dubai for an answer, when it used to be policy that in order to work in field support, you had to be IN THE FIELD for at least a year. I guess that got thrown out the window... Also, when you were sick of the field, Oldsmar was the twinkling light to move on and up to... I guess not anymore...
That is what the h1b globalist constantly argue: capping h1bs denies the USA the "best and brightest." H-1Bs are almost exclusively Indian.
So if Indians are the "best and brightest" then why are no companies like: Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, Apple, ect. started in India? It seems that all India wants to do is provide cheap staffing for other countries.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
real solution displaced Nielsen workers? Hunt down Mitchell Habib and harass the holy shit out of him. Picket his houses (no doubt he has more than one), harass him whenever he goes out in public, and generally make his life a living hell. Do the same to any other executive that promotes outsourcing. It's time for mob rule to make a comeback, since the government no longer represents the people.
Nice to see somebody who understands the actual situation.
Yes, but luckily, as many people have pointed out, the cost of fuel, and the rising middle-class and freedom to communicate in China will squeeze the cost of Chinese produced goods by both inflating the wages cost to produce, and the cost to transport.
It's also interesting that $4 gas has done something that politicians have been to feeble and cowardly to do, and that's start to force Americans out of their stupidly large, environment-destroying, gas-guzzling idiot-mobiles.
As an ex-inhabitant of the UK, $10 gas over there has done quite a bit of good in making people use public transport, and drive smaller car for shorter journeys.
-- "It's not stalking if you're married!" My Wife.
Maybe I'm missing something, but how can you cheat someone of a tax concession.
Here is the deal: I give you a huge tax break specifically because you are going to bring tech jobs to my area. You take the tax breaks, the outsource the tech jobs to another country.
How can you not see that as cheating?
The off-shoring and work visa scams affect other fields as well. But I think it's fair to say that IT is the field that is getting slaughtered now. In the 1980, manufactured jobs were devistated, now IT has it's neck on the chopping block.
Occam's razor: off-shore labor is a lot cheaper, therefore employers will off-shore every possible job. If you do your job sitting in front of a computer, then your job can probably be off-shored - if not now, then certainly in the near future.
Furthermore, the simple laws of supply and demand dictate that the few jobs that are not off-shored, will have a glut of qualified applicants. The experienced developers who have their jobs off-shored, will clearly try to leverage their existing training and experience into the few remaining IT jobs that can not be easily off-shored. This causes a glut, and drives down wages.
The IT worker glut will be increased even more by improved automation of information system maintenance, standardization of software, and non-IT specialists who are increasingly sophisticated with information technology.
There can be nothing to stop this devastating trend, due to the following:
1) Corrupt USA politicians
2) USA IT workers are not willing to organize
3) Influential corporations have effectively distorted the issues
So there you go, it's as simple as that.
IMO: this trend is presently in it's infancy. The present trend has very little to do with the present economic slump. In fact, when the US economy recovers, this trend will accelerate even faster. The present situation for US IT workers is much better now, than it will be five years from now.
Message to the Uniformed: Life is not Fair.
When you were growing up you most likely heard that "life is not easy" and "life is not fair". Well, this is just another example.
To the uninformed... This kind-of shit has been going on forever, in one form or another. Its just the internet/Printing Press that is bringing the knowledge of this shit to the masses.
There is nothing you can do really except find your own place in the world. Its tough, but it is possible.
I've never heard it said so eloquently as from the mouth of Bernie LaPlante:
"You remember when I said how I was gonna explain about life, buddy? Well the thing about life is, it gets weird. People are always talking ya about truth. Everybody always knows what the truth is, like it was toilet paper or somethin', and they got a supply in the closet. But what you learn, as you get older, is there ain't no truth. All there is is bullshit, pardon my vulgarity here. Layers of it. One layer of bullshit on top of another. And what you do in life like when you get older is, you pick the layer of bullshit that you prefer and that's your bullshit, so to speak"
Please note: that bls statistic only refers to the demand side of the equation. To see the whole picture, you also have to consider the supply side. India has 4X the US population, and India alone is cranking out 495,000 BSCS graduates every year.
Furthermore, according the BLS:
Also, I have to wonder where the BLS gets it's information:
Robert Half! Asking Robert Half if it's a good time to go into IT is like asking Century 21 if it's a good to sell your home.
http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos267.htm
Here are some more numbers:
"H-1B Visa Numbers: No Relationship with Economic Need"
According to a new study from the Center for Immigration Studies: the number of H-1B visas approved in the computers and engineering fields greatly exceeds any reasonable number reflected by economic demand.
http://www.cis.org/node/222
"High Tech Industry Laying Off American Workers While Seeking Huge Increase in Guest Workers"
http://www.fairus.org/site/PageServer?pagename=research_may08nl02
Gains in US high tech employment more than offset by off-shore worker visas
http://tinyurl.com/3pj2c3
IT job security plummets five times faster than nationwide average
http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/edu/2008/033108ed1.html
Studies Indicate IT Labor Shortage is a Myth
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1081923#PaperDownload
This according to a well researched article at baselinemag.com:
http://tinyurl.com/yoy2rw
I see that its the same in u.s.. someone gets a signed degree from someplace, and instantly think they are entitled to high life or guaranteed pay. well, it aint so.
How silly of us to imagine to that $80,000 in student loans, and four of the best years of our lives might actually be worth something. If a technical degree is not supposed to useful in the workplace, why bother?
But that's not to say it's legal either.
I think Nielsen may have broken their contractual agreement, they can possible be sued. But, technically, that is not a "crime."
What really gets me is that the company, if the article correctly describes, is subverting the entire principle of tax breaks. It does not matter what part of their labor they outsource and to whom, but not paying their fair share and getting a free ride on tax payers of Florida is atrocious.
Even if India were an open market, it does not excuse companies taking such tax breaks.
They're crap because the best Indian talent doesn't go to Tata. Don't take my word for it, go to a company that's outsourced to Tata.
It's like going to Accenture attempting to find the top software development people. It doesn't work that way.
But back to the point, anybody who does business with Tata (or any of these firms) ends up pissing off people within the company and their customers, but some MBA is happy because he/she keeps chanting "metrics metrics" as if that helps.
Or would we be better off if the whole world is rich and innovating?
That's presuming they even are, and they aren't. They are the world's equivalent of a broken Xerox machine. Low quality copies, at a high rate.
The alternative is keeping those two countries continue with hundreds of millions of people living in absolute poverty (under $1 per year).
They'll still be in poverty.
At this point, one stops looking toward other countries and at saving one's own country.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
The not-so-good economy.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Are Nielsen actually sacking US workers and importing cheaper foreign labour into the US to do the jobs, on visas that are supposed to only be for specialists whose expertise is lacking in the US, and who are filling a gap in the market that can't easily be filled by locals?
In this case, the company clearly isn't having to import the labour to fix a local skill shortage, if they're only creating the vacancies for those H-1B guys in the first place by sacking their existing employees.
It sounds like their corporate visa sponsorship forms may be slightly ficticious.
So who investigates cases of misleading visa applications? Would that be Homeland Security?
If a company is found to be abusing the visa system, does that mean that they can be booted out of the scheme, and can lose the ability to get US work visas for all their other foreign employees? Including their foreign staff who have genuinely criticial skills?
If the penalty was that their European legal and management and technical guys couldn't get automatic US work visas, that could hurt. Someone should suggest it.
Eric Baird
I highly recommend The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria (ISBN 9780393062359). Here's what he has to say about India. Note that Mr. Zakaria was raised in Mumbai:
So this really addresses what I think American & European software developers have noticed and American and European managers ignore: that for the most part, Indian software is uninspired, not thoughtful, poorly designed, and poorly written. This begs the question, why do American managers ignore this? Answer: capitalism. Modern capitalism (say, from the 1980s on) has been a race to the bottom. Quality is cut in favor of cost cuts, which shareholders unanimously reward. Managers have first been rewarded for "cost-savings" by replacing native developers with "five times as many" offshore developers for "the same amount of money!!!one1!" This sometimes coincides with the rise of Indian- and Chinese-American managers, who, by nature of their heritage, know this "cheat", and so suggested it before their own native counterparts even realized there was a world outside the country.
Once they have been rewarded for "saving money" by company officials -- who don't see the drop in quality be
So let me get this straight, you want me to spend my time answering your questions, so your company gets paid and I get the warm feeling that I've benefited television. Sorry my time is billable unless I elect to donate it. Television is not charity to which I donate.
After amusing myself with extended variations of the above, I admitted I don't own a television. This is even accurate, my wife came with one however; and from time to time, we'll watch a DVD from Netflix together.
Hm. You're right. Life isn't fair. --Because it seems to favor me all the time. In fact, it seems to shower with glory several of the people I know. Charmed lives. It does, however, seem to consistently punish others. It it interesting to note that those it punishes tend to carry with them a self-punishing nature or a dismal life philosophy like Bernie LaPlante's.
Here's a truth for you to add to your pile. . .
You get what you ask for. Your unconscious beliefs are regularly realized. --It's true! I see it every day. Understanding that the universe works to provide the experiences we seek, and more importantly, the experiences we believe are possible and which we deserve. . , understanding that opens up the gear box of reality. It allows us to fine tune our internal mechanisms. If the same difficult things keep happening, we can ask, "Why? What is it about me which keeps returning me to this same series of experiences?" --And this allows us to make adjustments.
The really interesting part, the part which I find both amusing and kind of difficult to watch, is that it encompasses the belief systems of the Bernie LaPlante's of the world. If one believes that Life is Unfair and Miserable, then guess what? It will give you exactly that. Luckily, Bernie LaPlante's belief system occupies a little sub-box on the system tree; his fundamental rule system is not universal, it applies only to himself and others like him. The curious thing is that I've seen people defend to ridiculous lengths their bleak, self-punishing beliefs as though misery and dreariness are prizes of some kind. Better to be miserable than wrong, even if being wrong means freedom!
I've railed against this kind of thinking in the past, but I don't bother anymore. I understand it, and probably shouldn't even comment because I strongly suspect that in many cases holding these kinds of apathetic and often outright nihilistic beliefs is necessary for some people in order for them to execute their Karma. --That is, if you've been dabbling in the dark side and you've got a lot of negative debt to pay off in this life, then one way to do it is to avoid following a course of happiness and self-fulfillment. And anybody who points to the cage door and says, "Uh, you know, it's not locked. You can walk out of here any time you like," when you're deliberately (on some unconscious level), doing time for personal reasons. . , well that person needs to be blocked out and shut up and ignored because he's not really doing you any service.
So good luck with whatever you're dealing with. Carry on. --But for the record, in case anybody else is reading who might unnecessarily be living a lousy life, you do happen to be wrong. There are other options, and very simply, (notwithstanding the necessity for working within the confines of objective reality), you do indeed get what you ask for in life. Happens all the time. And that's about as fair as it gets.
-FL
Interesting that I got a Troll mod for restating the GP's statement from the perspective of another country, which is doing some pretty awful stuff to the United States (not to mention some other places, just ask Tibet.)
Oh, we're heading for an economic "adjustment" of Biblical proportions, all right. The problem that most people just don't seem to grasp is that we're gong to have a very hard time with it. We've thrown away a lot of very critical manufacturing infrastructure (mostly sold to China after they destroyed the domestic outfits that originally used it.) Not only are the machines themselves gone, but the people and institutional knowledge is gone with them. That's very hard to acquire, often it takes decades or longer. China was fortunate in that they could pillage our industrial economy for the knowledge they needed: I guarantee you that they will not be so generous in return.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Ok you whiny bitches, let me give you the lowdown on why H1B is in place.
We pay your fucking Social Security cheques, your tax breaks, and your tax refunds.
H1bs do NOT get medicare benefits. We do NOT get SS benefits when we retire. We do NOT in anyway infringe on your benefits like illegal immigrants do, despite your frigging prejudices.
We DO pay tax at the standard rate - we do NOT get to pay tax at the married rate, we MUST pay at the rate of singles.
We do NOT get special tax credits and refunds, like the one that occurred this year. Not even if we are teachers in your public schools (like my friend). Not even if our children are American. Nope. None of that.
We DO get to pay for your refund and special tax credits though.
We do NOT get welfare, that is a lie told by many against immigration. I know - I earned too much for WIC when I was pregnant with my first child. I also do not qualify for any state scholarship for daycare for that 'American' child.
See, that's the key - we earn 'too much' to take any 'benefits', we're immigrants so we don't qualify for any special tax credits/refunds or any of the other benefits (like in state tuition), but we're also residents, so we pay county, state, and federal income, property, road, sales, and other taxes. And full college tuition.
So WE pay for YOUR unemployment, so your government can lower taxes for citizens while WE subsidize YOU. WE pay for YOUR retirement, so you don't have to. WE pay for Medicare, so YOUR government can spend away on it.
Did you also know that maternity leave is NOT a required benefits for us?
WE get a supposedly higher income, at less income tax than many of us pay in our semi-socialized home countries.
Of course, we now learn that we will spend most of that money on basic healthcare that some of us still can't afford (even if our corps pay for half of it).
Posted as AC because I will NOT stay past my visa end date for anything. You can take your country and keep it, I will go back to mine and lobby/protest until we can finally stand up to the US/EU and stop sending our teachers/nurses/doctors to your shores to repay our 'debts' to you.
During his (Mitchell Habib) tenure at Citi the only thing that was created by him was extreme chaos and distrust (though the ranks), throughout the technology and business areas of the organization. Only one of his direct lieutenants remain (hopefully he too will leave soon) this person continues to dismantle and disrupt the organization, several of his hand-picked subordinates have left under "questionable" circumstances during the dark of night.
I find it interesting that he has such tight relationships with the Tata Consultancy Services of Mumbai organization. I thank Lou for taking up the task of asking and probing into the details of this "suspiciously convenient arrangement" and if he has the interest time and ability to investigate Mitchell's financial relationships relative to these types of transactions. Solely for the purpose of maintaining the highest level of purity and complete transparency in the business relationship.
I have never worked directly with Mr. Habib nor have I ever directly reported to, nor have I ever had a conversation with him. I make this comment solely from the perspective of an outsider looking in, and one that has had an opportunity to visit with his associates and management. I am a firm believer where there's smoke there's fire, someone needs to take an appropriate look into these activities.
The curious thing about free market proponents is that they LOVE the free market as long as they are securely protected from it.
Yet the moment their living is subjected to the free market, suddenly there are a series of reasons why it shouldn't apply to them. Then the word "free" is suddenly traded with "fair."
Historically, the free market leads to massive accumulation of wealth to an elite, oligopolies, low employment rates and low salaries once the worker market disappears and there are only a few companies that can set the price on salaries, goods and services.
Your version of the free market is in fantasy land. There hasn't ever been such a thing as a "free" market as you describe it, the same way as Communism has never been tried.
Historians came up with a cool trick to distinguish theoretical communism with the real thing: what the USSR lived with is called "real" communism. And it was a failure.
Back to the free market. What you are talking about is theoretical free markets. "Real" free markets always have the government helping one sector over another.
Ironically this control of government in the advantage of big companies falls within the logic of the market itself: if you have the money to buy the government and change the rules, you do so.
Why do free market proponents forget this little detail?
don't blame the chinese for that, blame the short sightedness and the stock market instead. Nobody forced those American companies out of business, Americans did. Instead of going for quality they went for price, the rest, as they say, is history.
America used to be the industrial backbone of the world, but being market driven, marching in lockstep to the quarterly reports you've thrown your industrial capacity and your engineering talent under the bus of short term profits.
MP3 Search Engine
What bugs me is, they tried to claim that it was a good thing.
"We don't need manufactering"
"we're a service economy"
"manufacturing should be done in the 3rd world"
Well, the way we're going, we're likely to BECOME a 3rd world country!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
While it may be true that the US has stacked the deck in their favor in the past, I believe it is naive to think that every other country is not attempting to do the same. So the pot calling the kettle black rings hollow.
The point missed was the mention of the Fair Tax (www.fairtax.org). It is something that would produce in the US a result akin to what took place in Ireland when they changed their tax structure. Fortunately for the rest, those in power in the US are more interested in lining their own pockets than in boosting the US economy. Otherwise the would be moving forward on the Fair Tax.
I don't believe the post was a whine, it was just a statement that we have a solution that money grabbing politicians are avoiding.
In a place beyond time and space, in a land far better than this, look for me there...
I don't know if it will ever come to pass but if oil and by extension transportation becomes expensive enough there just might be a halt to all of this.
Wall-mart, mcd's and so on all operate by the grace of cheap transportation, if that disappeared they'd have to rethink their businessmodels real fast or they'd be faced with some pretty stiff competition from the locals again. It'd be the 70's in reverse.
MP3 Search Engine