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India's Infosys To Hire 10,000 American Workers After Trump Criticism (bloomberg.com)
India's Infosys said it plans to hire 10,000 Americans in the next two years, following criticism from the Trump administration that the company and other outsourcing firms are unfairly taking jobs away from U.S. workers. From a report on Bloomberg: Infosys, which employs about 200,000 people around the world, will expand its local hiring in the U.S. while adding four hubs to research technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. The first location will open in Indiana in August 2017 and is expected to create 2,000 jobs for American workers by 2021, the company said.
It seems like Infosys is trying to get ahead of any criticism regarding the way they use the H-1B program. I do systems integration work so we work with a wide range of these companies. I've worked with people and software from Infosys and TCS as well as the lower-tier guys like Mindtree and NIIT. The problem is that even if you bring the work to somewhere like Indiana, you can't change the fundamental business model and so you'll still get less than optimal service.
All of these consulting firms, whether they're body shops like Infosys and TCS, or white-shoe management consulting firms, operate on a very familiar business model:
- Rely on a gold-plated sales team and rockstar consulting team to sell the dream and come up with the initial proposal
- Once the deal is signed, replace the rockstars with fresh grads or less-than-rockstar experienced consultants for the client-facing stuff, like collecting requirements or delivering PowerPoints.
- In the case of an outsourcing, send in a group to collect all the information about the company's business processes. Body shops sending the work offshore typically use their H-1Bs for this task, while the fancy consulting firms fly in the graduating class of the Ivy League business schools; it's a very common first job for that crowd.
- Send everything that actually involves work offshore or to other cheap "delivery centers" to maximize the profit on the deal
The problem is that whether these cheap delivery centers are offshore or onshore, I think they'll have big problems staffing them with qualified people. Consulting firms squeeze every last dime out of outsourcing deals because they have to break even...and in many cases they have to support a huge raft of executive salaries with big expense accounts on top of that. Consulting firms think nothing of flying senior people in from wherever, for months at a time on full reimbursement, and their customers end up paying for that. When you get down to the people who would be working in Infosys's Indiana office, they're going to try to pay minimum wage or slightly above because the entire model is making the actual work cheap while putting a good face on for the customer.
I don't think I'd like to work there, simply because they have a reputation among experienced IT people and developers. Just because you move the people here doesn't mean the model changes. It will still be a body shop mentality where you're cranking out random Java or .NET code for some corporate website or managing a company's IT systems poorly from remote. At the very least, however, it is domestic entry level work for newbies. Hopefully those newbies will endure a year or two in the middle of nowhere, then use the experience to move on.
That's the weird thing about the Trumpster. He's a big talker and most of the things that he says are BS, but he's probably made more progress with getting companies to bring US jobs back to this country than the Obama administration did in the last 4 years.
Trump hasn't brought any meaningful number of jobs back to the US. He has however falsely taken credit for a bunch of decisions he had effectively nothing to do with. He certainly hasn't done more than Obama because he has done a reasonable approximation of nothing.
Trump's whole promise to bring back manufacturing jobs is based on a false premise. The only way to bring back substantial numbers of manufacturing jobs to the US would be for wages to fall relative to elsewhere. US manufacturing is alive and well but it's not labor intensive manufacturing. We make jumbo jets, not happy meal toys. The only way you get massive number of assembly line workers back to work is to drop wages by a LOT. Since that won't happen, Trump is telling yet another lie.
That doesn't mean that I like him or his policies, but I have to give credit where it's due.
When he actually does something to deserve credit then you should start doing that. No credit due so far.
I worked for a competitor - Keane, which was bought by an Indian Outsourcer but kept the keane name. They were bought by NTT as I was leaving.
It was a medium sized insurance company. They didn't like paying their IT staff the salaries they earned, let alone the generous retirement package they gave to everyone. They fired the IT staff and Keane hired them back, cutting the fat in the process.
They would hire graduates in India at 1/10th the salary, but then they would need to employ 10 of them to do the same amount of programming, and it was always poor, and I mean always.
On the infrastructure side we might find one good candidate out of 20, and of course the minute that person could find a better job in India they were gone, and not that I blame them.
The Business suffered, and the whole thing cost far more money than what they started with, but the line of CEOs, CFOs and CIOs that made the decision and stuck by it all left with very large salaries and golden parachutes, only to go off to the next financial services firm and do the same thing again. Its all a total shame. No one saves money on this stuff, it just sounds good.
Meanwhile salaries at Keane were completely stagnant. They would implement some bonuses for the very high performers that were onshore, but there were zero salary increases. I and other high performers could get better jobs elsewhere, and we did, leaving the company with only people they didn't really want.
Nope thats not how international business works. Union Carbide broke Indian safety laws and caused a gas leak which killed more people than Saddam ever did in his Chemical Weapons campaigns. Instead of standing trial the US embassy spirited out the Union Carbide execs in the middle of the night on a plane chartered for the embassy. Govts. support their multinationals even when they play hardball overseas. Indian govt has made it very clear they see the H1B as a trade issue and not an immigration issue and any restrictions on H1B and L1 will be retaliated on with tariffs on American goods being exported to India. e.g. India can do a China and ban Facebook, Google, Amazon from India. Local alternatives will grow (its not like Indians cant code. Most of the Facebbok,Google and Amazon code is written by Indians anyway). Facebook has more Indian users than the entire adult population of USA so its not a trivially small market.
India does not because it has free trade agreements with US. USA will not hamper the export of software dev services by messing with H1B because the tech lobby in the US does not want to be shut out of exporting services to India.
**Life is too short to be serious**
Companies who are quality-ignorant software cheapskates will probably be cheapskates with citizen labor also and suck no matter what, and end up later throwing yet more labor into the pile to put out fires they created themselves. Eventually it may sink the company. But in the shorter term, PHB's will do PHB things.
Table-ized A.I.
Never work for insurance companies or any other business that _sells_ pure commodities. They are run by and for the benefit of marketers, as that is all that matters.
When IT is just overhead, you get treated like pure overhead. Work somewhere that you job actually makes a difference.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'