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IBM Now Has More Employees In India Than In the US (newsindiatimes.com)

New submitter Zorro shares a report from The New York Times (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source): Over the last decade, IBM has shifted its center of gravity halfway around the world to India, making it a high-tech example of the globalization trends that the Trump administration has railed against. Today, the company employs 130,000 people in India -- about one-third of its total work force, and more than in any other country. Their work spans the entire gamut of IBM's businesses, from managing the computing needs of global giants like AT&T and Shell to performing cutting-edge research in fields like visual search, artificial intelligence and computer vision for self-driving cars. One team is even working with the producers of Sesame Street to teach vocabulary to kindergartners in Atlanta.

The work in India has been vital to keeping down costs at IBM, which has posted 21 consecutive quarters of revenue declines as it has struggled to refashion its main business of supplying tech services to corporations and governments. The company's employment in India has nearly doubled since 2007, even as its work force in the United States has shrunk through waves of layoffs and buyouts. Although IBM refuses to disclose exact numbers, outsiders estimate that it employs well under 100,000 people at its American offices now, down from 130,000 in 2007. Depending on the job, the salaries paid to Indian workers are one-half to one-fifth those paid to Americans, according to data posted by the research firm Glassdoor.

4 of 217 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Perhaps the government and corps... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

    Shanghai Bill's hatred of whites is well known in his SJW history. Please ignore his comment, otherwise you reply and he's going to get "triggered".

  2. Re: Globalization = Pure Capitalisim = Locustlike by dnaumov · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Not sure if you noticed it, but you are basically saying global corporations increase standards of living everywhere they go. Your attempt to make them look like the bad guys is backfiring spectacularly.

  3. Re:Given this track record of revenue decline.. by jellomizer · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Too bad you ACed your post. This deserves better moderation.
    The Indians are Smart hard working people... However they don't work the same way that Americans do, for an American Company like IBM it needs enough Americans in its rank to maintain its corporate culture, even if they green card Indian workers to the States and pay them the salaries of the Americans in the same positions, they would pick up the American Culture and how business is done here, then they could repatriate back to India after a couple years and know how to do things the IBM way.
    Such cost saving to deal with declining revenue, is the death spiral of a company. Because in essence you are getting what you paid for. So laying off Engineers with decades of experience, knowledge how to weed threw IBM bureaucracy, getting fired because they think a Mainframe Engineer cannot be easily trained to do IoT, vs Hiring some guy out of school with IoT on their Resume because they took a class on it, with little real life experience. In many ways this Mainframe guy with decades of expedience may be the perfect employee for this new technology. Because they are going to small devices with low Ram and low processing power, Just like the systems they worked on when they started.
    IBM is an American Company, and it will need to run like one, Forgien workers are OK for them, but if they start putting their core values away just for cost savings, they are just going to be on their way out.

    --
    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
  4. Terrible Metrics by coofercat · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Headcount is a terrible metric of anything - how many western jobs were lost to exactly one person in the developing world? Yep, 0.3-0.5. Pretty much every time a team of 50 in the west gets replaced, it's by a team of 100 or more in India.

    Headcount might be a headline-grabbing metric, but it's pretty terrible for anything else. How about revenue? That would probably be a better metric - and for the US, how much of that money earned internationally made it back to the US? With your crazy tax rules, not much, I'd guess.