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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.
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.
.... got fed up being put through to some idiot in Bangalore who couldn't solve his own shoelaces whenever there was an issue who then had to escalate it 3 levels up before there was even a satisfactory response, never mind a solution. Of course IBM arn't the only ones guilty of this. You'd think companies would have started to realise now that outsourcing isn't always the solution to their problems, sometimes it IS the problem.
So now it stands for Indians Become Managers?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
*working* for ibm? entirely different story.
currently, India is starting to lose employee count since it is no longer a "low cost" supplier.
I'd argue that it makes sense to offshore to India, to Lithuania, to Africa, to Brazil. This is an information industry, and it is eminently portable to anywhere with decent connectivity. If there are some presumably temporary currency exchange, living costs or lifestyle differences that some tech company will exploit, in the race for the bottom then all tech companies will need to consider it.
The difference for me is that we pay a high premium for IBM, and expect #1 performance for that premium. If we are getting also-ran kind of performance for premium dollar, then you'll gradually lose revenue quarter on quarter.
Dear IBM, you're playing a game you can't win. Change the rules. Deliver premium performance so your existing price points can be supported, and you have delighted customers. Or shut the doors. Your choice.
"One team is even working with the producers of Sesame Street to teach vocabulary to kindergartners in Atlanta. "
This may be the first phase of bringing 1st line technical support jobs back to the US.
/aisle seat
Isnâ(TM)t the definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result?
This issue is nothing particular to IBM. It is simply the way of Globalization.
It is a predictable and repeating pattern.
A company leaves an area with high standards of living for a 2nd or 3rd world country in order to save money and increase their profit margins.
Other companies do the same.
2nd world economy grows, wages increase, standard of living increases.
Company moves to the next 2nd or 3rd world country since the current one is too expensive.
After a few cycles, the wages and standard of living in the original country should have reduced enough due to goods no longer being produced there that the company can relocate back to country 1 and start the whole thing over again.
They are basically locusts. Moving from place to place until they have taken every ounce of profit they can.
21 quarters = 7 years, so revenue declined starting from 2010. "The company's employment in India has nearly doubled since 2007", some "smart" analysts could draw many conclusions from those figures...
Welcome to Big Blue, India!
Maybe revenues are down *because* the work is being done in India and the overall IBM value prop is no longer there. Did that ever occur to the bean counters?
there's no place like ~
What's the surprise? US is 4% of the global population and 24% of global GDP. Why would you expect any worldwide company to have its workforce concentrated there based on those stats? Companies have no particular allegiance to the US, friends, and its a mistake to think they do anymore.
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.
"Our guys are doing great - even better than most of our Americans - and we've haven't experienced any of the problems purported here on Slashdot."
Yeah, thats what all managers say when all they're talking about is the cost savings, not the actual productive output. I've worked with plenty of coders from India (not born in the west) and they were uniformly rubbish. They're thought patterns were linear, as soon as they hit a problem they throw it upstairs instead of trying to solve it and for the most part their code could be served with a nice tomato sauce and meatballs.
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.
Is it 1983? Who cares about IBM?
"One team is even working with the producers of Sesame Street to teach vocabulary to kindergartners in Atlanta. "
It's not saying much about India.
It's not saying much about Atlanta either.
It's *certainly* not saying much about IBM...
I can tell you, living in Atlanta now, this is an improvement.
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The hollowing out of IBM is proceeding as described in Bob Cringely's book "The Rise and Fall of IBM. IBM is sacrificing everything for the sake of "shareholder value" including customer satisfaction, retention and long-term growth. The folks in the C-suite are counting their cash and packing their (platinum) parachutes..
Of course, depending on your perspective of *marker*, this is suspect.
From a "market to sell services to", certainly IBM is doing some stuff to India, but by and large it's using India workforce to support companies in other countries. While this can serve well when expertise happens to be in an inconvenient place to the customer, what IBM is doing is seeking lowest possible pay to even vaguely appear to be able to support their clients. Note this is *not* an indictment of India, wherever IBM went it would be seeking the cheapest, not the best that job market has to offer. So while very good India tech skill does exist, it's also beyond IBM's willingness to pay. When they do by luck get a good employee, they will lose them in a few months to a company willing to pay local talent what they are worth. Combining it with Offshoring is a way to smokescreen things so the client is either unable to tell what is happening, or would be accused of being racist at suggesting the reality.
If the situation were reversed and IBM were sourcing talent from the US to non-US customers, IBM would be pursuing 20 year olds barely able to get degree-mill credentials in the US. They can't do so now because that would just be *too* obvious to american companies without the distance and culture gap to obscure things.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
After all the talk about "America First". Trump is definitely not making that happen. Whether it's because he doesn't know how to work the political scene, or he doesn't care when it comes to major corporations (even declining ones), it isn't happening. The irony is no matter how many times IBM tries to marginalize their operations, they seems to go further into decline, certainly in comparison to their glory in the sun during the home computer wars back in the 80's. What is likely to happen (as it's happened before) is IBM gets poor code for it's consultancy business, either because of poor communication or poor code from junior cheap developers (subcontracted at least once from India) and they have to resort to nearshoring (say people in Kansas) to fix the poor code they get back. This happened once already. Will be fun to see how this turns out.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
Exactly. And their only metric of concern is "cost" (not real costs, reported, adjusted costs and "value"). They do not care about actual product, or actual employee productivity. I've seen the "value" reports getting generated prior to quarterly and annual meetings firsthand - everyone is complicit. Just a few more years of trading bogus reports as actual success and managers and directors have moved on, so no worries for them.
The real issue is that smart ppl know that IBM is still charging top dollars for massive executive bonuses, while getting shoddy work that could be done at 1/2 to 1/5 of the price, if going with a pure Indian company.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Indian workers *can be as good or better*. However the ones IBM hires are *mostly* the ones who are note the best the labor market has to offer.
Not just IBM, generally any company going offshore (to any geo) is looking for cheap, and they forget that if you look *anywhere* for cheap, you won't get the best. When they offshore, they don't recognize realistic labor rates for the region, they don't recognize obvious degree mills and they chalk up any hard to ignore deficiencies during skill assessment to language or cultural gap.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
While I do agree with your sentiment, I have to admit that I take issue with your use of the expression
..the definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result?
. Every time I hear that I cringe.
https://www.psychologytoday.co...
To be clear, insanity is a legal term pertaining to a defendant's ability to determine right from wrong when a crime is committed. Here's the first sentence of law.com's lengthy definition:
Insanity. n. mental illness of such a severe nature that a person cannot distinguish fantasy from reality, cannot conduct her/his affairs due to psychosis, or is subject to uncontrollable impulsive behavior.
Careful there. I have admired the Indians that I have worked directly with and even married an Indian ( family from Chennai ). But, 1 of my past students pointed out something interesting. He knew that I enjoyed working with Indians, but then he pointed out that those coming to America, are the best of the best. Most are American educated so got top grades. However, back in India, their bachelor degrees in CS from most of their Universities are similar to an AA degree here . Worse, once an Indian gets a job, it is impossible to fire them over there even if totally inept. Now, there are exceptions to all of that. For example, my wife's grandfather started ITT Madras and it is now a top notch University. And there are other ITTs that are top notch to decent. To be fair, the majority of ITTs still remain as junk status, as does the vast majority of other indian universities. So getting good ppl in India IS hard and in general, if they are good, they leave India.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
IBM Global Business Services is a GLOBAL business. It's in their name. It's their mission.
Locustlike? IBM, like any very large corporation, is intent on dominating their market. Domination. Not just success. Because if you don;t dominate, some other organization will. And they will take from you. Just the way it is.
Now, the question is how you choose to succeed at your mission - exceptional customer service? Scraping the value out of every transaction? Underpricing the competition? Driving costs down to force profitability out of a mundane market offering?
I'm pretty fortunate, working for a Fortune 100 company that thrives by delivering exceptional customer service, making prudent but fearless cost decisions to drive profitability *AND* enable development of new and better product and services, and is lead by clear headed, fearlessly honest leadership at (almost) every level. No, I do not work for IBM, nor GM, nor any Internet company. But I remember a former employer who did business with IBM in the 80s, and he remembers meeting with submanager after submanager, in windowless offices, pleading for approval so he could GIVE IBM HIS MONEY. When Fat Lou Gerstner took over at IBM, he turned the elephant on a dime, and most of those submanagers disappeared. Shrinking the management force, for one thing, put IBM on a leaner cost footing, and that started the, for me, second heyday of IBM, when a small-mid businessman could get an IBM salesman pitching the System/3x, another one pitching the RS/6000, a third pitching their PC systems with Windows NTAS (or Novell, they weren't picky). And the RS/6000 guy would show you file serving to your PC users, and the System/3x guy would pivot to an AS/400 and include the PC Server card. Tough for a local VAR to get wedged in and make their pitch. Now IBM is pitching what, cloud services, like AWS? Azure? You can make your own 'cloud' in the telco room, since that's empty now.. I don't hear about much innovation from IBM GS, but that's because I work in an environment where IBM delivers open source platforms with expensive and obtuse management layers. Feh, we could have gone with Red Hat, but we would have bought them outright - cheaper in the long run.
IBM is gone mediocre on a global basis. They can make a profit until someone finds a way to overwhelm them. In the interim they cut costs and pretend to harness energy overseas they cannot find in the US. And they may be right, because the energy in the US is focused on exciting cool things, and IBM is now just one voice among many shouting 'I'm cool! I'M COOL DAMMIT!'.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
The "I" stands for international
IBM used to make real adding machines ( in fact, Hitler used IBM equipment for counting, sorting, etc the ppl that went to death camps ). Now, without them, they are unable to make intelligent choices.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
About 13% of the population are foreign-born.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Yet their payroll in India is a quarter of that of the US employees. Yee-haw.... More money for IBM. Lay off those US based moochers :) you can do it ! On the more serious side where or when this will end ?
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The more I know people, the more I love animals
This is not my experience at all. Coders who come to America to live and work are just as good as anyone else here. It's actual offshoring, whether to India or eastern Europe, where the quality of work suffers. And the worst programmers I've run across were born and raised in the USA. But the problem with them wasn't just that they couldn't code, it was that a bias in favor of those who conform to the American "hacker" stereotype (i.e. works crazy hours while sucking in mountain dew and saying technical sounding gibberish) allowed them to confound less technical coworkers into believing that the problem was actually really hard to solve. It has always dismayed me that inept system developers can look like heroes by staying up long nights hand-holding their crap systems through inevitable crises. Whereas if your code runs quickly and silently and you don't look stressed out, your bosses think you aren't working hard enough.
I do not have a signature
Thank you. I'm so sick of hearing this "definition" of insanity. While doing the same thing over and over expecting different results might be insane, so are lots of other things.
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Agreed. Most of my foreign-born coworkers here in the US have been very good at their jobs. And none of them have been the worst I've encountered (leave that to Americans). But when off-shoring to groups in other countries (not just India), problems arise. I think the search for cost-savings in IT via off-shoring is usually self-defeating since it only focuses on a single obvious tangible metric for a SMALL portion of the entire effort. The people who do this tend to show themselves as penny-wise-pound-foolish in other areas as well. I've seen guys who drive cars that cost more than developers make in a year complain about a few bucks here and there around the office for furniture or get really directly involved in the color or placement of a single button on a web page. It's a grasping after control, since they really think of software development as magical and the only thing they really do understand is how much they are paying in salary.
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It's five for the price of one!
India Business Machines? Didn't they used to be a technology company or something?
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
When a company is mostly in another country should it not receive that same tariffs by treaty as a "foreign" corporation would?
Indian
Bowel
Movements
This may be the first phase of bringing 1st line technical support jobs back to the US.
When IBM bought Tivoli they implemented a level 1 support team to answer the phone and open cases for us. And we started seeing cases with shit like "yowzij" (usage) and "dragon drop". And this is why I.B.M. is S.H.I.T.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Good as I am sure now we are going to see cheaper rates now from IBM .... BAHAHA who am I kidding
http://saveie6.com/
THe problem is pure greed.
Not in hiring Indians per say, but still charing 10's of millions of dollars and getting someone whose only experience is working help desk instead of an enterprise architect with 15 years experience for projects.
So a normal project that would cost $250,000 IBM wants to charge $10,000,000 but doesn't even include architects or maybe one senior level guy and the rest help desk gurus still studying for the MCSE implementing it.
Gee customers are going elsewhere. I can't imagine why? There is nothing wrong with going to cheap to India to save $$$$. What is wrong is charging a premium for it. If I want to pay $10,000,000 instead of $250,000 then dammit I want 15 year experienced architects with a world wide portfolio working at Google, Akamia, and other top end institutions for that price for my project. If not then I am going to go $250,000 and going INFOsys if I do not care about quality
http://saveie6.com/
Depending on the job, the salaries paid to Indian workers are one-half to one-fifth those paid to Americans,...
As most of us know, dealing with India-based help desks is among the worst experiences ever!
So, it seems that IBM would be rendering services/products with the same relative, considerable low quality.
It's a shame to have to subject clients to the torture of India's workforce output.
Given their proclivity to butcher any second language, imagine what IBM documentation will look like now!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
Well gee-golly, if Hitler was for it must be objectionable!
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Computerworld had the story: https://www.computerworld.com/...