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In a Symbolic Shift, IBM's India Workforce Likely Exceeds That In US
dcblogs writes "IBM has 112,000 employees in India, up from 6,000 in 2002, with an average wage of about $17,000, according to an internal company document. That wage level may seem shockingly low to U.S. IT workers, but it is in alignment with IT wages in India.The Everest Group said the annual wages generally in India for a software engineer range from $8,000 to $10,000; for a senior software engineer, $12,000 to $15,000, and between $18,000 and $20,000 for a team lead. A project manager may make as much as $31,000. IBM employs about 430,000 globally. According to the Alliance at IBM, the U.S. staff is at about 92,000. It was at 121,000 at the end of 2007, and more in previous years. It has been widely expected over the past year or two that IBM's India workforce was on track to exceed its U.S. workforce, if it hadn't exceeded it already."
What happens when corporations can no longer exploit global wage differences?
Time for a union
I would say having most of your workforce in India, especially when we are talking about decent jobs not factory slave, is far more than a symbolic change.
If this keeps going the only jobs in the USA will be retail, CEO and no job.
India Business Machines!
No, what's going to happen is that most Americans will give up on corporate jobs and turn to small businesses instead (the way it was back before WWII, when everyone outside the cities ran a small business or a farm).
Enabled by the internet, small businesses will be able to sell their wares anywhere. This is the future of the American workforce. Millions of small businesses, selling stuff all over the world. That, and blue collar workers like plumbers and mechanics, who'll always be needed.
If we manage to put together a true national healthcare plan, there won't be any reason for ANYBODY to work for a corporation.
Cheaper labor doesn't get you the same amount or quality of work. Replacing one coder with three coders 12 timezones away doesn't get the job done 3 times faster either.
You must be pretty poor if you think $80K/year is good money in most/any American city.
Yet those laws made everyone's life better and increased the buying power.
Who are you going to sell your goods if no one has enough money to buy fancy stuff?
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
In that scenerio, UPS/FedEx/DHL are the key components. Shipping product is much easier than ever, I can buy stuff from HK on eBay and get it in a week if they care to mail it out the same day. I no longer have to wait for my buddy to come back from Japan and his traditional trip to the Akihabara to see the latest gumstick sized IDE/SATA/Firewire/USB gizmo for USD22. I can probably browse their page and get it mailed. If they are with it, I can chat and avoid the Jinglish, mostly.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Um... No. Or at least, not exactly.
This didn't happen because of regulation alone. It happened because banks were encouraged to loan (i.e. create) money by issuing more and more debt (i.e. loans). The economic "growth" since the 1970s has been almost entirely debt-driven. This is obviously not sustainable and will one day lead to massive defaults at all socioeconomic levels.
At that point, things change. Personal wealth is defined largely by the wage/price structure ratio. If prices in the USA approximated those in India, India would lose that competitive advantage. What will undoubtedly happen after the next, inevitable economic crash, is a normalization of wage and price structures, particularly as regards real estate, professional services and capital equipment prices. At that point, the wage differential between the USA and India won't be worth mentioning.
The convergent model of state capitalism the world seems to be converging on should be able to handle this until we run out of affordable, energy-positive, hydrocarbon-based energy supplies. After that, all bets are off.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
For India and Pakistan to go to war.. That will help the U.S Economy. CIA go to work!!!!
As someone who works with ibm's india support on a daily basis... They are worse than terrible...
Most people working in India change jobs for better money much more frequently than in the US.
Going forward, technologies like Watson will probably eliminate all the level 1 (Help Desk, Support) jobs worldwide.
If high wages are such a problem, how come Costco can do it?
Wallstreet doesn't like it, they want Costco to lower the wages to the minimum to maximize short-term profits because just growing and making a decent profit ain't enough for shareholders... except Costco shares have gone up despite warnings from Wallstreet.
Wallstreet loves to squeeze everything to generate the max profit for shareholders this quarter... next quarter? They will will find another company to squeeze.
IBM can well outsource all the work but what happens to the knowledge? What stops an Indian company hiring IBM workers and creating Indian Business Machines? That is after all what Japan did with car production? First you make the parts, then you put the parts together and then you make your own parts and put them together and how is Detroit doing again?
Americans love blaming unions but North-West european countries (UK does not count) have strong unions and no problems with them. The Dutch Polder model was widely praised until right-wing POLITICIANS destroyed it, much to the chagrin of the supposed right wing business owners who just want to make a deal they can count them even if it costs a bit because uncertainty is WORSE for business then knowing a deal is going to cost you a fraction of a percent more in salaries.
The US needs to get over its love for Wallstreet, it is a leech and NOT a job creator.
You know the really funny thing? In Season 22 of the Simpsons we learn that he makes 70k a year... yet he is often shown in the series as a "poor" man who can't afford health care... 70k that is what its writers consider a low wage on which you can barely survive and are always struggling.
It shows you just how big the divide is. Wallmart workers make 24k a year if they are lucky. Costco make 50k. Both companies turn a profit. Which one do you shop at?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
That's barely above Wal Mart or Mcdonalds.
You must be pretty poor if you think $80K/year is good money in most/any American city.
Probably not in the Bay area, NYC, Boston...
In smaller cities with lower costs for housing, shorter commutes, lower taxes, it's probably fine.
I would say having most of your workforce in India, especially when we are talking about decent jobs not factory slave, is far more than a symbolic change.
If this keeps going the only jobs in the USA will be retail, CEO and no job.
Always be service industry jobs until robots get better.
Be seeing you...
I understand that IBM wants to cut costs but with this scale work force migration to India, is that going to affect product quality ? I have worked with a ton of folks from India and I have absolutely nothing against Indians but I do see a difference in skill levels between American engineering grads and Indians (apart from those who come from the top institutions in India like IIT etc.) Most folks from India I have worked with are very sincere but they do not have a good understand of underlying concepts. Dont get me wrong, they are always willing to pick up, but there is always a ramp up time. My gut feeling is that since most guys in India opt for Engineering/Science backgrounds, sometimes we get folks that do not have their hearts genuinely in it.(I am sure there are folks who will show me that I am wrong about this.) The thing that is great about them is that they are willing to work night and day to get things done, but again that leads to patch work kind of solutions. Coming back to the main topic, has IBM had to undergo changes in its management style for India? Has quality been affected adversely or has it been better lately? There is also another thing about India. As good as the workers are in India, the government and the process itself can be a big hurdle. When you have to bribe 15 officials for every little expansion project, things can very easily get tied up in the bureaucratic process. How long is this effort going to be sustainable?
Still depends on the state you're in. In New York, $80k is indeed a pittance, but in, say, Georgia, or Kansas, both of which have large cities, that would probably be a really nice wage. It's definitely more than I make; I'm a network/systems/SAN administrator in a very densely populated mid-atlantic/northeastern state, we have over 50 servers and around 4,000 users or more, point being, it's not a ma and pa shop I work for. Then again, most of my peers do make more, they bargained better than I did when they got hired; promotions are virtually nonexistent here.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
As opposed to the CEO who pulls in $1.5 million after her pay doubled along with her $3.5 million cash incentive target? Maybe she should be taking a paycut first?
Canada too. Good friend of mine in Toronto worked for IBM Canada for years and lost his to our good friends in India.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Only if you want to drive over an hour to work. Try pricing housing near the job centers in those states. Decent housing near Atlanta or Augusta is not going to be cheap.
The I always stood for "international".
When I worked for IBM UK, I collaborated with colleagues in the USA, Canada, Japan, India, mainland Europe...
Are you stupid or a liar?
Companies with less than 50 employees are totally exempt.
India: 1.2B; USA: 300M
Amen brother! Let go back to the good old days when an employee that lost a hand in a machine could be shown the door and children were allowed to work 60 hours a week. Ahh... Even the the good old days of the 1950s where life expectancy was 20 years less so there was no need to take care of those useless old folks. No do-gooder social justice freaks trying to make sure people could eat once a day. Let's go back to the days when business was allowed to dump TCE and dioxins into aquifers and people had no recourse. Let's all wax nostalgic over the days when the Cuyahoga river could support a good fire.
Fuck all those Social Security leeches that paid in over their lifetimes. They don't deserve shit from us job creators that need our taxes cut. Ramen noodles and cat food are good enough for them if they have the poor sense to stay alive past their usefulness.
Well last time I looked a couple of years ago, the typical salary was more like $8,000. If this keeps going, Indian wages will probably reach parity with US wages in about 5 to 10 years time.
job based health care kills us jobs
I'd love to see an objective measurement of IBM's quality of service from 2002 to now, mapped against the shift to a majorly offshore work model. I work for a subsidy of a very large consulting competitor of IBM's, and are witnessing the same phenomenon - more and more offshore workers tacked on to project teams that just drag everything down. The more offshore we're shackled with (and I really mean that - we're given no choice by service line leadership) the worse we are able to deliver on our projects. The biggest issue for me is that once we've been able to identify the offshore rockstars - the fabled guys you can actually work well with, trust, and receive good quality work product from, they either get instapromoted to management or realize they can get more than just the 17k/year salary or whatever it is they're getting and GTFO. Either way you don't get to work with them for long. Then you get whoever's free in the pool when you're building a project team - no calling "dibs" on the right guys for the job. Quite often you just get a warm body who isn't familiar with the tech you're working with, the processes of project delivery, or will refuse to perform any work unless you have mapped it out to the click.
Yet those laws made everyone's life better and increased the buying power.
it did so temporarily, now we are going to loose it all because there aren't/won't be any jobs left here
Who are you going to sell your goods if no one has enough money to buy fancy stuff?
You have it backwards. They have stolen all of the US's manufacturing and are stealing our intellectual jobs, so no jobs for us in the US. In the mean time we bought all of their crap and none of our own supplying them with all of our money. So we have no source of income and we continue to lose money because we are sending it all to China and India. Our economy is now collapsing, they have all of the money manufacturing, as well as a market that dwarfs ours by a order of magnitude that own practically squat and want stuff. Those same people in China and India are now getting money from the manufacturing jobs they have taken from us so they will start being able to buy the stuff they are making their economy will be self-supporting.
They have sucked our economy dry and will now simply sell to their own people. They will do just fine without us.
As for us in the US what will happen? Lets take a look at Detroit now stretch that across the country. The worst part is there is not much we can do about it, or let me correct that... there is not much we are willing to do about it. We can't declare war they have more people and make all of our equipment, we cant cease all foreign imports because of free trade agreements and treaties. We could apply tax's and tariffs on all foreign goods but much of that is baned by those trade treaties anyway and we don't have the facilities to supply the demand and it would cost us a whole hell of alot more. We could try breaking unions and lower the pay for pretty much all jobs essentially do exactly what china has done to us but the unions have lots and lots of money which they ca pay the people in power to keep form happening. So we are pretty much screwed
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
90% of Americans have a personal income of less than $80K/year. So no, you have to be pretty rich to think $80K/year isn't good money.
Everyone knows that large corporations (all that I have worked for anyway, including IBM) have so much bureaucracy and obstacles that it raises costs. Probably true in India, too, but at least the wasted time doesn't cost as much. Sometimes, Dilbert is too true to be funny. Make that most times.
We enjoy a higher standard of living because of global wage differences. Many countries do this. Let alone, having worked with individuals from said country, many found it easier to live on their home wages at home that supposedly equivalent wages here. Most of that came from expectations, I guess.
So your going to have to alter their society to increase their costs, one way to do that would be to keep pushing their wages up but that would introduce social instability as inflation would follow the new buying power of all those earners.
Then you would need to work on the country providing them..... well eventually as you raise one country up another comes up to take its place and the guy at the top hopefully kicks themselves up another notch starting the whole.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
But I think there will be many more winners than losers.
Maybe.
But here's the thing, the economists say that the pie gets bigger and as a result, everyone's living standards increase.
Yes?
But, in the US, our living standards have been decreasing for over a decade.
What the economists seem to miss is that at least in the near term, the World's economy can't grow fast enough to compensate for all the billions of people entering the World's economy. In other words, wages have nowhere to go but down. Add in technology - like communications being dirt cheap - and we're headed for not a very good place in the US - for the average person. The 1% elite (sorry about the '1%' but it's a quick approximation of who I'm talking about) who have money all over the World will do very well and hence; the rich will get even richer.
Am I advocating protectionism? NFW!
Do I have a solution? Nope - I'm not smart enough. I'm just smart enough to see that the economic groupthink is wrong - at least for a few decades. Maybe in a 100 years, we'll all be living at standards that will make Bill gates look like a pauper, but until then, we're headed for some troubling times.
The median wage in NYC is $35k, anyone who looks down on 230% of the median wage is an entitled fool.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
By decree, we are ordered to use outsourced programming. Our core competencies are seen by our company as industry specific and coding talent is seen as general talent, like a secretary. So we end up outsourcing a lot to a firm in India.
And what we got was crap. Now the fault is not entirely theirs. But in speaking in areas where they are at fault... The code is crap. I am in charge of audting the code we get back from them and it is mind boggling bad. To understand this more, I inquired to what schooling the "engineers" had gone through. It was about trade-school level, above high school but AA degree at most, which is not sufficient given the liabilities in our industry. Still 5 coders for the price of one domestically should still have some benefit? Well a lot of that got eaten away by the QA procedures that had to be put in place. Now the code we get is tolerable, and the Indian business is on track to (if they take additional clients) become an actual Indian Business Machines. Still there are enormous challenges. After going through all the effort we did to get usable code form the relationship, I'd rather have just hired a couple domestic coders. But we would not have the QA team that they now do. True, we would not have needed it, but now that it exists it is reusable. I am not allowed to see how much internal strife there is, I only get to see what their approved output (after QA) is so I don't know how much churn there is. What I do know is 5 $20k Indians still do not equal one $100k domestic engineer.
Unless your company can weather a rocky start of a relationship like this (who can these days, especially when things are outsourced to be done faster) I don't recommend outsourcing. We still won't let them in our core code base because we need expert code, but they are free to write extensions to the core.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Very true, even here within the USA. However, that's not the point. The point is all that degrees of quality of our labor have become more expensive through over-regulation.
Exactly. Individuals differ, and price differences allow you to buy higher in the market overseas.
I think the Slashdot hivemind would like to think that all coders are the same, but... in my experience, looking at the individual's abilities and qualities is the most important criterion for hiring.
All other stuff, like degrees and experience, are proxies for that. How good of a coder is this person?
There's also a lot of obscuring this scale through trendy knowledge, like the huge influx of people who are good at PHP or Ruby but not very good at practical problems outside the web.
IBM is a 'service company' these days. That means they basically run call centers. So IBM having a lot of people in India is not surprising nor even an amazing fact.
No! It's a *SIG*. Keep the Special Interest Groups away! (Con joke!)
You can't raise wages across the board without also increasing costs.
This is why our "increased buying power" is going to imported goods from China.
For over a decade, consumer goods got really cheap compared to how they were in the 1990s. This was the boom in third-world manufacturing in India, China, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, etc. It mirrors the boom in Japanese goods that enhanced lifestyle in the late 1960s and 1970s.
Like all bubbles, it popped. The post-1990s bubble is popping very slowly, but it's going. And when it does, the USA will have to re-develop its industries.
Nope. I'm a CEO. What does get your job done faster though is hiring that really bright coder 12 timezones away with good English skills at local prices that are "sky high". Intelligence isn't limited to the USA and grabbing that talent before it fleas to a country with better conditions can pay off big time!
Well, this is likely to get me marked troll, but ...
Somehow I'm doubting your Ivy League Education which landed you your position as a CEO.
Perhaps it's your spelling of "flees" as "fleas".
You strike me more as a somewhat less educated sock puppet, and/or a non-native English speaker who has not bothered learning English well enough to communicate at the level a CEO must communicate in order to be an effective show pony for the board of directors. Nice attempt at passing yourself off as a CEO in the US, though.
From what I recall, tech support workers earned about $8000-10000, and new programmers may earn that little (and many intern for 3 months to a year), but most with 2+ years of experience are a bit more expensive than that. About 5 years ago, we were hiring average workers and it was around $15k-16k by my guesstimate, but due to poor quality and attrition I've heard we usually hire better workers and get about 2 for each US worker now, prompting a move to China, where we get 4.
This is the result of our regulatory policies, which convinced us that we could print money by command, and not the cause of our overvalued labor. However, it didn't help the situation.
Are you stupid or a liar?
He's an AC, I'm guessing both.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Decent housing near Atlanta or Augusta is not going to be cheap.
I lived in downtown Atlanta for over a year while in grad school, and rent on my apartment was only $900 a month, in a good area of town (Inman Park). I had a friend living in Virginia Highlands that paid only about $500 a month (my apartment was better, but hers wasn't bad). With a roommate, living downtown in Atlanta is even cheaper. And for the record, right now I would kill to even make half of $80,000. In fact, I'm only asking about $30,000.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
And the end game is always the same. The smart guy learns what he needs to get the job done, is connected with the customers and soon figures out that he doesn't need a "CEO" slurping up the cream. That's also how IBM lost the Space Shuttle Software Development contract to Ford Aerospace. They didn't seem to learn from that either.
It will comfortably support a family of 4 in north-east Florida.
There is a war going on for your mind.
First, Costco needs employees here because its stores and distribution are here, so this question is for the most part irrelevant.
Next, Costco is based on using lower numbers of employees thanks to its warehouse model.
Finally, this is a customer-service based business where all workers are client-facing. They're being paid more than average to keep competition for those jobs high.
Part of what makes this difficult is that Costco is a growing concern, and so right now, it's flush with cash because it's replacing other types of businesses (notably Walton concerns).
If Costco weren't localized and customer-facing, these restraints might not apply.
Not coding, but there is at least one *large* CATV company in the US that was burned so badly via contracting system design work to India, that they quit doing it completely.
I know this cause I've been fixing their screw ups.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Nothing like a false dilemma to start off the day.
There are other solutions for those problems, most notably lawsuits.
However, if for the child, a job that pays in exchange for 60 hours a week, represents a financial boost, that could be a good thing. It's better than languishing in poverty.
Life expectancy mainly rose because of medical improvements, and I think it's only about ten years since 1950.
It has never been illegal to neglect people and allow them to die.
This is probably better handled through expensive high-profile lawsuits. They are damaging and tend to force companies to pre-emptively avoid infraction. I am not opposed to regulation in this area but feel it could be better handled than the red-tape snarl that is today's regulation. I might be in favor of an agency that did for-profit lawsuits...
If this keeps going the only jobs in the USA will be retail, CEO and no job.
Oh I don't know, IBM could save a lot of money by outsourcing the CEO's job to India.
Alliance@IBM = Communications Workers of America: http://www.endicottalliance.org/
The Communications Workers of America: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Workers_of_America is a labor union for communications and media workers; if you read the previous link, you'll see that it's the largest, with about 700,000 employees under their purview.
I'm rather certain that software engineers don't count as communications workers, although I'll agree that communications workers are being displaced, as more and more telephone companies turn into providers of dumb internet pipes.
The interesting thing to note is that their dues are typically set to about 1.3% of your gross pay: http://www.cwa-union.org/pages/what_does_cwa_mean_for_att_mobility_employees , are not tax deductible, and get deducted from your post-tax pay.
Now the fun part! For a typical salaried software engineer in California, between state and federal income tax, you re paying nearly 50% of your income in taxes. The average salary for an engineer at IBM in the US (average, meaning band 6) is ~$100,000/year. So that works out to $1,300/year in union dues, if they are successful, which is ~$2,500 of your pre-tax dollars, or double the 1.3%, were it taken off your net, instead.
But the really fun part is what 120,000 workers at IBM being unionized would mean to them: 120,000 * $1,300 = $156M/year in additional income to the union.
I'm guessing that these people are either used to dealing with people who are bad at math, unlike engineers, or they believe engineers are fairly gullible, and can be used as a replacement source of income, as their traditional milk cows run dry over time.
NB: For full disclosure, I was a band 9 engineer at IBM before leaving them, and the CWA picketed our offices, which were the offices of a small company which IBM had acquired, to try and unionize us, as well. They had not a chance in hell.
All of your questions are addressed here, except:
I think physical and sexual abuse have always been illegal.
US property managers, landlords, real estate holding companies, grocers, farmers, and other interests and providers decide to drastically cut costs of everything they manage, manfuacture or otherwise provide.
Until then, quit complaining about Americans with large wages and outrageous benefits. That is a gross stereotype which is simply not true for the vast majority of American workers (of those who actually have jobs, no thanks to outsourcing in India and elsewhere).
Back home IBM is one of the top 10 companies utilizing H1-B visas.
And companies keep complaining they can't find enough locally grown peasants with the skills they need.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Name the plan and company.
Show your work.
Birth control is included by 99% of plans as it saves them from paying for births.
Costs for many would go down anyway, as the insurer must now spend a minimum amount of money on care instead of executive bonuses.
Cheaper labor doesn't get you the same amount or quality of work. Replacing one coder with three coders 12 timezones away doesn't get the job done 3 times faster either.
Didn't we just have this argument? How is the quality of work argument any more valid here, now that there are time zones involved? Do time sones have some magic deleterious effect on worker productivity that mimics aging?
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/11/28/017239/silicon-valleys-dirty-little-secret-age-bias
I've seen a lot of this as well. The jobs that are getting outsourced now are those where the quality of the worker does not matter so much as ability to memorize, repeat and achieve high rates (more than high accuracy). Good observation on your part.
Companies cannot grab talent in general on the market, no matter if it is locally or in a foreign country. Hell, they cannot even recognised talent when they have employed him for years, locally.
So thats where the so called "job creators are"
Lets get this over with... Fuck Off
Not everyone wants to live in a little shoebox. I meant look at the price of homes in those areas.
For frame of reference, an average day laborer in India makes about $0.50 USD/day.
I visited there recently, and a $12 pizza at the local Pizza Hut was a luxury few Indians have experienced. Their large was smaller than a medium here.
Your actions on earth echo in eternity.
Heil Hitler, Mein Kommandant!
Lets get this over with... Fuck Off
I sure hope they figure out a way to outsource your job as all CEO'S do is usually fuck up shit and get paid for it.
Lets get this over with... Fuck Off
OK, lets go back to 1980; before Reaganomics, the average CEO salary was 10x the average worker. Today it is around 350-400x. Even by those standards, Costco's CEO is taking more than 20x the average employee. Many pollution control and employee welfare measures were in place by then, and the baby boomers didn't need to worry that the Social Security system was built like a Ponzi and they had not bred enough progeny to sustain it. I know for a fact that I will never see most of these unfunded social welfare programs as they exist today, no matter how much the government promises (right now obligation is over 1 million per taxpayer to get funded - I'll take that bet any day).
During a co-op stint and also fresh from college I worked for a time at the IBM Cambridge Scientific Center in Kendall Sq. Back then, the Center had some sort of mission to interact with, assist, and leverage the local academic scene - MIT and Harvard students and researchers mostly. This posting makes me wonder if the company has now also given up on US universities and is spending its time, attention, and $ on Indian schools instead? It's amazing how far this company has fallen since back in the day (meaning prior to the mid-80s) when an IBM job was one that you had for life (there was a "no layoff policy") and one you could be reasonably proud of. In my numerous co-op gigs with them I learned more than I ever did at my (very good) engineering university. I suppose now that the kind of expertise and training that I was the beneficiary of is being provided only to overseas engineers.
The man who dies rich dies disgraced. -- Andrew Carnegie
IBM sells mostly services/software to corporations...which have a ton of money to spend, regardless of employee salaries.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
There was no mention of "for a programmer". And that's a great argument you end with, nice change or words to make it irrelevant as well.
Mea Culpa - Costco's CEO is earning about 10x his employees average ($17/hour is about 33k-34 a year and he makes about $350k, though he does have 150 million in stock that is additional pay)
Good for you but I gotta say, I think it's really cheesy and laughable when someone calls themself the CEO of a little startup or mom & pop operation. If I somwehow had the cash and time to start a company I think I'd hold off calling myself the CEO until I had at least 50 employees.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Funny how they never do that. I figure you could hire a guy at least as good as Steve Elop for something in the US minimum wage range and save about the cost of a low-end fighter jet each year.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
My wife is a software product manager for a start-up that in part uses developers based in India (from a major Indian consulting company).
Employees in the US gather requirements and plan the development (product manager and dev leads). Very simple development tasks (often web-based UI elements) go directly to india. Slightly more complex dev tasks are "de-risked" by dev managers in the US (i.e. "use this interface", "use this data structure", etc.) and then communicated to India for development. The most complex development tasks tend to be done by US developers (one who is just out of college, but still more knowledgable than most of the Indian developers). Many QA tasks are also done in India.
Like any good manager, you have to know your employees' strengths and weaknesses, and maximize everyone's potential productivity by assigning the proper tasks to the proper people.
Kick IBM, HP, et al, out of the US to India where they belong. India can have them. The US can treat the patent portfolios with all the respect and care that Asian giants have treated US patents in the past.
Seastead this.
If that happened to me I would be getting a raise or walking.
Robert X. Cringely says the worker shift will result in firing most IBMers now working for IBM. Says it is part of a plan. See cringely.com blog entries from October, 2012.
Right until one of the big multi-national corporations decides to get into your niche. At which point there is no way in hell you can compete on cost. And lets be honest, most people buy on cost.
So, let me get this straight. We're using actual India numbers from an IBM memo versus estimated numbers coming from a pro-union group with an agenda/axe to grind with IBM to make this assertion? Look, I'm not in favor of offshoring any more than the next person, but at least use apples-to-apples comparisons if you're going to make it the basis of a thesis.
hiring that really bright coder 12 timezones away with good English skills ... and grabbing that talent before it fleas to a country
Unlike you then, it's flees not fleas.
My answer has the potential to come off as a troll, but here goes: socialism.
The political elite don't care as long as the lazy, poor and retired continue to the vote them back into power. Screw the working class that is currently paying taxes.
It is a short-sighted view that cause harm to everyone in the end.
Bearded Dragon
Don't believe it? Neither did I, but the numbers don't lie: Costco's profits for last year and their revenue from membership fees were about the same amount of money. Quoting from the article:
Their annual membership fee revenue exceeds their net profit--which is to say that the actual business of selling stuff is operating at a loss. They're charging you an annual fee to buy stuff at or near cost. That's a model that works really well with their basically affluent customer base, and not incidentally, a model that allows you to worry a bit less about your cost of sales.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
So according to you retired people are lazy? Nice.
Your reading comprehension is poor.
"The lazy, poor and retired." I am listing three different classes of people that dependent on government entitlements. This does not preclude an individual being a member of more than one of the above groups.
Bearded Dragon
Have gnu, will travel.
So you're saying that all programmers are in the top 10% of American personal income?
I don't care who you are or what you do, but $80k a year allows someone to live a comfortable life in America. If someone can't live well with that amount of money, they are spending money frivolously, have personal vices, or they are probably dumb.
Every law that's made, every committee that meets, every rule that must be followed, every union... they all increase our costs. Other places are more competitive
... so what?
You know what decreases costs even further? Legalized slavery. Of course, quality also plummets, so you can only use it for jobs where that's tolerable (but then we've already been conditioned to tolerate a very significant drop in quality from outsourced manufacturing, so long as it's cheap). But the costs!
By your argument, therefore, if some country in the world were to legalize slavery and start using slave work force to drive manufacturing there, then everyone else should do the same in order to "remain competitive". Have you considered that it's not all about costs? The goal of our societies is not to maximize the raw economic output; it's to provide for a stable, fair and prospering society for its members.
Measures that increase the overall output while allocating all the benefits from that output to a select few, rather than spreading them more evenly throughout the entire working population, are counter-productive to that goal. That's precisely why we have things like minimum wage laws and 8-hour work week, and other labor and environmental regulations. They're there to make sure that, while pursuing economic efficiency (which is still a worthwhile goal!), economic actors don't use people as disposable resources.
$80k is pretty good money for those of us living in the state of New York outside of NYC.
the jobs are gone and never coming back. IBM = Indian Business Machines.
I also means that IBM code quality will be low, as programmers are paid by the kb in India.
Then how will the US pay for its imports? The headline is subtly wrong. The Indian IT workers aren't paid $17k, they're paid in rupees. This MATTERS.
When a US company pays for its outsourcing or its imports, it pays in foreign currency (it's supplier might do the currency exchange work and take the risk, it doesn't change the argument). That means it has to find someone with rupees who wants dollars. Why would such a person exist? Because he wants to buy US goods, invest in the US, or lend to the US. And if the importer can't find such a person, if that market doesn't balance, then that salary in rupees suddenly isn't in your headlines as $17k any more, it's more.
Notice, too, that the more the US borrows from abroad the bigger a wedge it drives between its imports and exports. China has been so willing to lend to the US for the converse reason: so it can export more than it imports and develop its industries. Start paying those debts back - whether through debt reduction or domestic saving increases - and there'll be more work in the US (but it might not feel so good, because the US will be consuming less but producing more).
Just be glad you're not in Spain, Portugal or Greece, locked in to an inappropriate currency union. They imported more than they exported for years, financed by borrowing (public in Greece, private in Spain, not sure about Portugal), and local salaries rose to match. With no currency to fall/inflate the only way to get the balance back is through wage cuts - and that's a process that's painful, uneven, unfair and slow.
And I guess....we saw exactly that in this last election.
I forgot who said it, but it went something like...a democracy dies as soon as more than half of the population can vote themselves money from the public coffers...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
No the post I replied to in its entirety was:
Note, no mention of programmers or desk jobs. And you changed "pretty good money" to "a lot of money" - the threshold for "pretty good" is lower than that of "a lot" so you changed my claim before going with the insults.
I have been offered jobs by IBM in the past. For my field, they don't pay market rate. When I brought this to the attention of the recruiter the only response he could muster up was "but...but...we're IBM!". Big fucking deal. Back in the 80's when they still had a pension and a no layoff policy and were committed to training their employees and not outsourcing every Tom, Dick and Harry to Bangalore maybe it meant something. Those days are long gone. Now their management spend their days scheming how to offshore some more jobs and suck another ounce of marrow from the bones of their US based employees. Fuck you Ginny.
I'm had to deal with IBM's software. Their "Banking Transformation Toolkit" is nothing but an expensive piece of shit. Although that's apparently built by IBM's Chinese workers.
The average teacher salary in 1990 for NY was $42k source, much less an in-demand technology job in 2012. You're goddamned right a programmer is "entitled" to "look down" on that salary (read: expect a fair wage).
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. -- Susan Ertz
Or should I say, my employers - a reasonably large UK-based IBM reseller. We resell them (ha!) into the third world. We have to deal with IBM's outsourced Indian operations, they are appallingly bad. The people speak English well enough but theres no motivation to do anything that doesnt address their Key Performance Indicators - ask for a payable balance, you get it instantly, ask for a copy document, you get it instantly, query an allocation, dispute a delivery, ask for support - blanked. phones get 'cut off', emails go unanswered, proof of dispute gets ignored then requested again in triplicate.
I cant see IBM putting up with this indefinitely - we're important enough a customer to have direct contacts in IBM USA and we've called them in on the problems we're having...
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
What makes me wonder is what would happen to the standard economic models should nuclear power advance a few generations (such as getting thorium reactors operable), or even fusion.
At the minimum, cheap energy would at least get us multilevel hydroponic farms for intensely dense organic food growth. Even in areas of low to no water, that can be solved by desalination.
As for recycling, given technologies to obtain gasoline from CO2 in the air (although it takes a lot of energy), would be able to keep our petroleum based infrastructure going and actually end up carbon positive.
The biggest limiter on our economy in the US these days is hydrocarbon fuel availability. Since 2010, I've been seeing the cycle of a recovery starting, gas prices going up, said recovery stalls, gas prices fall almost back down, but hit a low at 2-5% more than the last ebb, and the cycle beginning again.
I think my professional millionaire job will be safe for the foreseeable future, except in those countries with high inflation rate or with a currency with an exchange rate that is not on near-equal footing with either the US dollar, British pound sterling, or the Euro.
So one little shift in currency or economic variables in the wrong direction and they effectively just gave everyone in India a 20% raise for example. Yeah, that's a great way to run a company. Why don't they pull all their money market funds and put them in bitcoins and gold too. Those are slightly more stable than inter-country economics. Apparently their accounting dept likes to live on the edge.
The biggest limiter on our economy in the US these days is hydrocarbon fuel availability. More accurately, hydrocarbon ENERGY availability. Conflating hydrocarbon supply with energy supply is misleading. NET energy yields have been declining since the first wells were drilled and it doesn't take a genius to understand that Canadian bitumen as hard as a hockey puck that has to be steam heated just to be extracted is going to yield less net energy than a West Texas well less than a thousand feet deep that yields light sweet crude. This has some oddly counter-intuitive implications. We could actually increase our oil supply by a great deal and only barely increase our aggregate energy supply by pursuing very low energy yield hydrocarbons.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Horseshit.
"Consumer Directed Health Plan"
Also known as a "Health Savings Account". Basically, you get the shittiest, most barebones insurance, and you get a savings account that can be fed by an automatic deduction from your paycheck.
My former employer tried to institute that last year. They experienced major brain drain as a lot of people were pissed off and left for far less shitty companies.
Tell that to the executives first.
Yes, there was. That was the context the discussion was happening in.
If someone can't live well with that amount of money, they are spending money frivolously, have personal vices, or they are probably dumb.
Or they live in a large city with a high cost of living.
I would love to see you look for doctors that only make $35k.
You mean treating workers like PEOPLE increases costs?
Go fuck yourself with your "These things raise costs!" bullshit. You know what else "raises costs"? Clean air and water.
IBM is currently doing an assessment of our company and giving recommendations of what we should change, keep etc.. They have told us we should have at a minimum %40 of development in house (go up from %20) and %60 offshore (down from %80) but ideally it should be 50/50. Hmm sounds like they need to take their own advice and change themselves internally to 50/50 at the ideal....
The Truth is a Virus!!!
Whatever tech jobs cannot be offshored, are being inshored - i.e. filled by visa workers.
Unless you have a top secret clearance, or something, learning tech just means you are preparing to train your H1B replacement.
http://www.beyondajoblessrecovery.org/2009/11/16/can-unions-and-strikes-still-make-a-difference/index.html
====
Here is an article about how workers and strikes in a recession:
"Europe's Strikers More Scarce in the Recession"
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1914328,00.html
"In the U.K., the Office for National Statistics says there were just 756,000 working days lost to strikes last year, way down from the million or so days lost in 2007. As of May, the figure stood at just 32,000 days for 2009. Even assuming an upsurge in the summer, that's a long way from the kind of industrial mayhem Britain saw in 1979, when almost 30 million days were lost to strike action. It's a simple case of reasoning, experts say. "When workers feel confident in their job security is when they are more likely to strike," says Gregor Gall, a professor of industrial relations at the University of Hertfordshire."
In general, this is part of the ongoing downward spiral for labor that is just getting started. As automation increases, like through better robots or 3D printers, and as improved designs come along that take less effort to put together or last longer, there will be even less need for paid labor. So, the people who still have jobs will be afraid to strike or in other ways rock the boat. So, they will let themselves be exploited more and more just to keep food on the table. Because worker usually get fringe benefits, and because it takes money to hire and train workers, even as unemployment rises, it makes economic sense for companies (up to a point near collapse) to work the workers they have even harder, for less money, than it does to hire more workers, even at low wages. Increased worker suffering (including by worker's families and communities) becomes just one more negative externality that business owners can pass on to society, socializing the costs of their business while privatizing the profits.
Possible counters to this trend include:
* government regulation of working conditions including hours (like in France);
* a basic income so that workers have a choice not to work (forcing employers to make jobs better to attract workers); and
* companies realizing that overworked workers produce products with lower quality or less innovation, and so voluntarily limiting hours and improving working conditions.
So, it would seem that strikes will be less and less likely in the future as a general trend, although it is possible that one big national or global strike might happen at some point when people realize that major positive social change is going to be now or never.
Any strike will be pointless in the long term unless it is about structural reform in our economy and society. Just striking to get slightly higher pay (or just to keep what one has) or to get slightly better benefits, which has been useful to many groups in the past, is not going to be very effective in the long term if these other trends continue towards decreasing the value of labor relative to automation and improved design.
What good is it to get more money and more benefits for fewer and fewer remaining workers while they wait for their own jobs to be lost to automation and improved design? Yet, this has been the strategy of most unions for many years. The failure of the US American automakers in Detroit shows how, in the long run, unions creating private welfare states within individual corporations does not work well anymore for union members or anyone else in society these days. The companies become less competitive relative to other companies that pay less and embrace automation and better design, and so they fail, taking all the union jobs with them.
We are possibly past the point where union actions related to single companies make much sense. If unions are to have any major role i
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Yeah, last time they offered me a software engineering position, it was for $30K a year less than the manual tester position I was in at the time. That was only three or four years ago, and they'd already lost everything that made them such a desirable company to work for. They might have been able to offer significantly less than market back when they had awesome benefits and a pension plan. That stopped about the same time that their philosophy that "We answer to our employees, our customers and our shareholders, in that order" did.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Cripes...$30K less? That's the sort of thing you'd expect from a start up...but at least there you've got a chance to strike it big if they go public. Come join India Business Machines and get the chance to train your successor who's about to make $17K while you're out on the street. No thanks.
Whether earning more than 90% of Americans still classifies one as poor, is a tangent in which the details of programmers is irrelevant. Just like it has nothing to do with IBM and India too.
But the really fun part is what 120,000 workers at IBM being unionized would mean to them: 120,000 * $1,300 = $156M/year in additional income to the union.
So what?
Your whole argument is begging the question that unions are bad to start with, and would therefore be worse with more money and therefore influence.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Enabled by the internet, small businesses will be able to sell their wares anywhere.
I don't wish to burst your cosy bubble, but how do you think all those small internet businesses are going to compete with someone like Amazon who can sell cheaper than you and with faster delivery?
There is a reason why corporations exist. "Economies of scale" isn't just a management buzzphrase.
Not everyone can be a software developer selling their stuff directly over the net.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I sure hope they figure out a way to outsource your job as all CEO'S do is usually fuck up shit and get paid for it.
Well, apart from the ones who make the company a huge amount of money like they're employed to do and get rewarded for achieving, yes.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
You know what decreases costs even further? Legalized slavery.
Don't give the bastards any ideas. I've seen plenty of "libertarians" here say that anti-slavery laws are unconstitutional and should be repealed.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I would love to see you look for doctors that only make $35k.
He didn't say that $35K was the median in every profession. The point is that if the overall median wage is $35K, then a lot of people are getting by on less than $35K, so $80K must by any definition be comfortably off.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
This is all missing the point that we are not talking about just programmers. If the average programmer's salary is (say) $150K, that says nothing about whether $80K is impossible to live well on where the median is $35K.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Well we've got numbers, surprise & the patience to wait you out. We've also agreed with 2 of your neighbors that we'll leave them alone if they stay out of it, and most of the rest seem to hate you anyway.
Yours,
the hungry mob.
P.S. That tattoo looks shit.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Yeah, but it's more than that, the OP said "You must be pretty poor if you think $80K/year is good money...". That's so crass and out of touch with the majority of peoples experience that it's almost on the same level as Romney. You apparently don't have to have billions to be out of touch with your fellow man, just a large sense of self entitlement and a blessed life. It amazes me how much the tone of so many slashdot posts has changed over the last couple years when it comes to money. Perhaps it's just that folks who started out with slashdot are now to the point in their career where they're making a significant wage and are far enough removed from their poor college days that they are starting to forget what it was like to not have loads of money, but I personally find it sad.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
But Mitt said it was only up to 47%?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway