Slashdot Mirror
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.
They meant to hire 10,000 more in India and accidentally did it in Indiana, instead.
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
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.
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**