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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.
currently, India is starting to lose employee count since it is no longer a "low cost" supplier.
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.
There's lots http://bigblueblues.wikifoundr...
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
I have moderator points, but I can't find "+1 Math is Hard" in the list, so I'm commenting instead. It may be time to replace the batteries in your calculator, it thinks that there are 3 quarters in a year.
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 ~
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?