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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.
I didn't think you could hire 10,000 new IT workers for minimum wage?
It's still a race to the bottom, now it's just going to be done in a way that's harder to criticize. I wonder how this will impact salaries and the job market.
"so far"? lol. You'll be happy with him regardless bud.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
They meant to hire 10,000 more in India and accidentally did it in Indiana, instead.
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
It's like Trump saying that he will actually donate money he raised for veterans, to veterans. Did not happen until somebody found out that he was not doing it and shamed him into following through.
These "commitments" from Infosys are about the same quality. If there is no law behind it, and they can bribe Trump by buying a condo in his tower at high price, then the matter is settled.
Some of you are under the illusion that Trump is working for you. When it is clear that he is working for himself and couldn't give two hoots about you.
Infosys is one of those companies abusing H1B visas, aren't they?
They're just trying to get the scrutiny off themselves?
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
If these companies broke US employment and immigration laws, then they need to be banned from operating in the US.
These guys are attempting to save their businesses - nothing more.
Tata, Infosys, Wipro, Cognizant and all the other body shops need to be taught a lesson - break the law and there will be real consequences to your businesses.
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.
That doesn't mean that I like him or his policies, but I have to give credit where it's due.
Except the jobs are still leaving, based on Trade Adjustment numbers some 10,000 will have left in his first 100 days. While there have been a few headline grabbing saves to which I'll give him credit, he's trying to stop the tide from going out by yelling at it and threatening to pee in it if it doesn't stop. Here's a link from CNN: http://money.cnn.com/2017/04/2...
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Are you certain all the employees of these outsourcing companies have valid credentials?
Are you certain these workers were not displacing American workers at lower wages?
Are you certain all these workers were either as qualified or better qualified than the workers they replaced?
Are you certain all these workers were working in the locations specified on the visa?
If not, then these companies were violating the law. It is the H-1B holder's responsibility to verify and validate these terms. Your defense of "we just responded to an RFP" will not defend you in a court of law.
These companies hold the visas - it is their responsibility to ensure the hiring company is not using them to violate labor laws.
"Just following orders" is not a good defense in court.
When they "discover" that they cannot hire/lure 2000 tech workers in/to Indiana, they will make the claim the indeed there is a tech labor shortage in the US.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
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.
I think you can blame those guys. It's not "just" responding to an RFP. Because of my work title, I get marketing and sales calls from the business end of these companies all the time (they want to convince me I need to put out an RFP, and that they can help write it). Trying to game the sales/business process isn't new, and could be considered firmly American. Where they lose me are the arguments that engineering labor is a commodity and that my business culture is less important than labor cost.
Now, keep in mind that I have never asked for anything from them. They come to me and my business partners making these arguments early and often to get us thinking about engineering a certain way. Enough effort like this can shift the standards in a field. They have made a concerted effort to set the standard for software to treat most programmers as commodities. Ultimately this is the problem. The standards they set for the field culturally and economically are not in the best interests of either the workers or the owners.
Also, they make it harder for me to get my PhD scientists H1-Bs when they need them.
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'm an American working for an Indian company - one of Infosys' competitors. You really can't blame the Indian companies as it's the onshore CIO who's outsourcing this stuff and the executive team who makes the decision to outsource to offshore. I've said it a buncha times - all we did was respond to an RFP. It's not Infosys' fault - since the standard of living is lower in India than it is here salaries are also lower. If you don't want Infosys, Wipro, Accenture and the like running your IT perhaps it's the American companies that need to consider hiring American. The other thing is that if offshore resources arrive here on an H1B visa they're free to seek other employment. IME onshore salaries are generally competitive or you lose people.
Great point. They could also actually create an in house IT org staffed with people who actual have a stake in the company's future. Anecdotally, I was talking to someone who was involved in an offshoring "train your replacement" effort. They trained the replacements on the exact procedures, which would work in 10% of the cases. They figured the offshore staff could learn on their own how to handle the other 90% once they were gone and let the company deal with the fallout. They were in compliance with the severance agreement to train them on the system and ensured they understood exactly how to operate it per the written procedures, which would work if there were no glitches in the data. It wasn't their fault if they routinely got bad data they could recognize it based on experience and besides, what good is it to tell them to call Sue and get her to fix it if she is gone as well? Another was called after being laid off to see if he'd come back to help fix the mess they were in when the new staff couldn't even do basic stuff, even though they had actually been trained in how to do it. Turns out customer relations and experience is more valuable than cheaper labor.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
You really can't blame the Indian companies as it's the onshore CIO who's outsourcing this stuff and the executive team who makes the decision to outsource to offshore.
No, I really can blame both. If someone pays a hit-man to kill his spouse, I want both of them to be punished. The hit-man certainly shouldn't be able to claim he was just responding to an RFP.
In the case of Infosys, they are even more complicit since their marketing and sales claim they are providing a quality service when in fact they are preying on either inept management or ineffectual board / shareholder governance.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Most visa workers are not immigrants. Some may become immigrants, sure, but they are two different things.
Table-ized A.I.
Most visa workers are not immigrants. Some may become immigrants, sure, but they are two different things.
In January 2010 there were 12.6 million permanent visa (green card) holders in the US. (source) In 2013 there were about 1.4 million temporary visa holders working in the US. (source)
While not all green card holders are working, it is clear that most visa workers are immigrants. Probably around 80-90%. All temporary visa holders are not immigrants, by definition, but that is clearly not what you meant since you used the word "most". Then again I don't think you knew what you meant, or understand the actual definitions of these terms.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Or for the dollar to fall. But that would be bad for WalMart and others who manufacture in China.
The dollar falling would make imports more expensive and exports cheaper but it won't bring more than a marginal number of labor intensive manufacturing jobs back to the US unless it falls by scary huge amounts. The US dollar would have to positively plummet to make it worth the effort to bring that manufacturing back to the US. The economic hardship that would result in the interim would be horrifying. A slightly weaker dollar is not necessarily bad but for it to fall enough to make it worthwhile to bring labor intensive manufacturing jobs to the US something very bad would have to happen.
Basically the assembly line jobs that didn't require a college degree from the 1950s-1970s are gone forever. People lust for them out of misplaced nostalgia but it's a world that no longer exists. We still have a huge and growing manufacturing economy but like farming it employs a relatively small percent of the population and it is likely to shrink further as a percent of the total workforce. The stuff we make is capital intensive rather than labor intensive. The future of the US manufacturing economy isn't in making little toys you buy at Walmart. It's in making complicated advanced products. The important thing is to not let new capital intensive manufacturing jobs leave the country. We need to encourage as many highly educated immigrants to come to the US as possible. Fund as much research as possible. That is the only way the US will avoid a reversion to the mean during the next century economically.
I was very recently working for Infosys, the company is horrible, their intranet for everything is a nightmare. I would never work for them again. They are all very nice, but their internal management is clueless and most projects are staffed only by overseas workers because the management make sup ridiculous requirements project positions so they can claim they were unable to find a worker in the US for the job.
The "92 million unemployed Americans" was a number that right-wing echo chamber tossed about during the Obama Administration to argue that unemployment figures were wrong and Obama was doing absolutely nothing for one-third of America being unemployed. That number is true but misleading. The majority of those 92 million Americans are children, college students and senior citizens. Only ~6 million are unemployed adults looking for work. Trump is also doing absolutely nothing for those 92 million Americans.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/09/16/trumps-absurb-claim-that-92-million-americans-represent-a-nation-of-jobless-americans/
As for coal mine jobs, Trump promised to bring them back. Those jobs are never coming back. Coal miners make nice props for ceremony signings of executive orders at the White House.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/02/climate/coal-jobs-prove-lucrative-but-not-for-those-in-the-mines.htm
I did time for one of those Indian companies. The work was training the offshore team to do the work of the America workers who had been RIFFed. The Americans had to assist with the training or lose their termination compensation. They (the Hyderabad-based IT company) wouldn't allow remote work so I had to move to NJ for a 6 mo contract. They wouldn't pay for travel or any relocation costs. Their people were flying to & from India pretty regularly. They wouldn't offer or cover cost of my Healthcare (COBRA at that time). Time spent filling out time cards and entering hours into their dogshit time tracking system were not billable. Pay rate was 1/3 lower than what HAD been my minimum. I was desperate for anything at the time. And they offered to hire me away from the company I was subbing for, which was forbidden by the contract.
It was not a good experience.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.