IBM Moving Developer Jobs Overseas 1346
helixcode123 writes "According to the New York Times (also on Yahoo News), IBM is planning on moving a substantial number of high level jobs overseas to 'India and other countries.' IBM argues, in essence, that they need to do this to stay competitive. The article
quotes that Forrester Research '...estimated that 450,000 computer industry jobs could be transferred abroad in the next 12 years, representing 8 percent of the nation's computer jobs.'"
reduce costs? (Score:5, Interesting)
what's next (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I have a plan... (Score:3, Interesting)
And guess what, India is an Affirmative action country.
So what would happen if American's moved to India, protested for jobs under India Affirmative Action, and then requested US salaries since they are still US citizens working for a US company?
Implications to Organizational/National Security (Score:4, Interesting)
More outsourcing needed (Score:4, Interesting)
What are the boards going to do when they realize you can get a CEO for only 100k / year in India or Russia ? If Ed Whitacre (SBC) was replaced, the 82 million a year savings (yes, look it up) would nearly be enough to make SBC profitable, for the first time since they hired him !
Corporate Boards themselves are much cheaper overseas; in some cases you only have to go as far as Canada to get boards that work for a tenth the price of boards in the United States.
These changes are the inevitable reflection of the market, and passing laws against it just damages our competitiveness. American CEOs will always be able re-train to other jobs to stay competitive.
Best of all, the savings to the bottom line can be feed into tax-free dividends, which help keep the stock market strong.
The IPs of those who respond against this post or mod it down will be reported to Asscraft as Al Qeada agents.
Any thoughts on another line of work? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not going to get stuck like people in the muscle industries have in the last few decades, clinging to the shrinking number of jobs for less pay for more work. I'm still in a good position, it's time to start gearing up to switch to an industry that's not getting shipped overseas.
Whadya think? Management's probably good -- those fuckers will never reduce their own numbers or salaries, but I hate sitting in meetings and being useless. Health care? Big barrier to entry, though... What else isn't going away?
Re:nice! (Score:2, Interesting)
Okay (Score:2, Interesting)
An educated anybody can really do these jobs now. The investment in education is nowhere near as high anymore (no programmer will be paying off $80k for school, think 2k at most at CC), and the decentralizing of software development has made the language barrier a thing of the past.
So now what?
best Indian engineers come to US (Score:5, Interesting)
While it is true that many technical jobs have been moved to India, the best Indian engineers actual come to the US to have jobs here.
CBS's 60 Minutes had a segment on students of the ultra-competitive Indian Institute of Technology [cbsnews.com] a while ago. And apparently all the graduates from IIT want to come to the US.
Therefore, I have the thesis that technical jobs in the US are simply getting more and more advanced, whlie "easier" technical jobs are being moved overseas.
How ironic (Score:2, Interesting)
Yet when our "business model" (i.e., our strategy for making money) is challenged by a bunch of cheap programmers in some other country, do we "get used to it?" Do we bite the bullet and accept the fact that the world is changing, and programmers have become a cheap commodity? No. We sit here and whine.
We're all terrible hypocrites.
moving right along... (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe I should move to Bangalore, use my established clients to continue work in the US, and use the drop in my own housing/personal/family expenses to remain competitive. My old college roomie did a version of this -- telecommuting to consulting gigs in Los Angeles from a very nice house in Arkansas. I can think of half a dozen places to go that wouldn't suck at all. Hell, given the way the state & federal economy's been run into the ground here in the US ($450B+ deficit!), maybe my kids will get a better public education abroad.
Then again, I find that if I drop the price for my services below a certain level, then the client no longer respects the work as coming from an expert (and thus exclusive) source. It's sad to think that I tend to get the most abuse from clients to whom I've given cut rates. Maybe I should raise my rates? If I keep my fees well above the internationally-outsourced folks, but below the top decile (easy targets for that 8%), I should be in good shape, no?
J
Re:Get off your ass and learn. (Score:3, Interesting)
Why should I suck it up and get reamed up the ass so some overpaid CEO can get another multi-million dollar bonus for cutting costs again and providing yet another stellar earnings statement for the latest quarter?
We're not talking about the local iceman losing his job because everyone moved to electric refridgerators or the guy running the local Singer shop going under because no one makes their own clothes anymore. We're talking about the loss of jobs in a GROWING ECONOMIC SECTOR.
Slashdot economists, sheesh! (Score:2, Interesting)
Think of what happened to this country when all the "great" manufacturing jobs and textile jobs and all the other jobs went to foreign nations over the last 50 years? We pay them in dollars and ultimately, the only place where you can spend dollars is in the USA. The world gets rich with our money and so do we. Thats economics kids. Americans have had this bitch for a long time and we end up crying all the way to the bank.
Now if it is my job or your job, its a damn stark reality. Salaries may plateau or go down. Too many became IT personnel in the 90s, they will get weeded out. But there will always, always be service industry jobs in this country for lower wages. If evolution weeds you out you may find yourself in one. It sucks to be you. But thats freedom folks, freedom to succeed, freedom to fail.
Remember one thing about economic collapse, it will happen only if those in power allow it and they will only allow it if it is to their benefit. I can't see this as likely anytime soon. Have faith in our little corporate plutocracy. And work harder, stop reading so much slashdot!
Re:I'm going to go down for this. (Score:2, Interesting)
Why not subsidize IT workers too?
Let's not forget the 550 billion tax cut that was suppose to create 2 million jobs...which works out to about 275,000 dollars per job...the hell with the tax cut, lets just subsidize 7 million US jobs that pay about 75,000 instead of giving the tax cut away? that will keep lots of developers bringing in a pay check and keep our geeks out of trouble....
just a thought
Re:reduce costs? (Score:1, Interesting)
I blame the need to maintain a high standard of living and artificially high salaries for what is, after all, not a particularly difficult discipline. You want job and industry protection but "free" enterprise at the same time? The USA might be powerful, but the rest of the world would soon bankrupt it if a trade war started.
Re:I have a plan... (Score:5, Interesting)
You have a bank. That bank runs on a mainframe. That mainframe is programmed in something like COBOL or somesuch. There's a problem getting COBOL programmers. Not many people want to learn or work with COBOL any more, so when these existing programmers retire or die (which will cause the pool of COBOL programmers to dwindle 15% in the next decade), they're going to be hard to replace. But in India there's a crapload of people willing to do the work. It would be considerably cheaper to outsource the maintenance on the existing system than it would be to rewrite it in flavor-of-the-month language/platform, so to India the jobs go.
Yes, throw in the factor of "lay of tons of people about to retire and outsource them now" and the situation gets all shitty, but why doesn't it ever occur to people that sometimes the jobs are outsourced because no one wants to do it anymore?
A place I interviewed at outsources their document imaging to India - and the nature of the business meant that millions and millions of documents are done this way. True, they saved a lot of money by not paying rows and rows of Americans a minimum wage, but the other problem was that there simply weren't enough Americans willing to do it, period.
Time for some poeple to reflect... (Score:3, Interesting)
Wake up.
At some point you have to pick a side, do you want free/cheap software, or do you want a day job that pays more then minimum wage to develop software? You can't have software be both free and cost lots of money at the same time.
IBM and others have figured this out before you did. Don't be mad, just pick another career, and try not to make that one free too
Re:best Indian engineers come to US (Score:1, Interesting)
On a reasonable salary for an engineer in a place like San Francisco, San Jose, or New York, that engineer will have a nice apartment, no savings, and a reasonably comfortable life, IF his wife works at a similarly high-paying job.
I imagine that the Indians who are planning to come here are looking for either an opportunity to start a business, or for resume fodder and a better accent. Anything else they could get at home, and more of it.
Re:Disturbing... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, the poor there become middle class and get health care...
Until Monolithic Software Co. decides that they're paying these people too much to stay competitive in a recessed market. So they all get fired, plummetting their domestic economy down the tubes and returning them to third-world-nation status alongside such paragons of stability and wealth as America and Canada. Meanwhile, a bunch of programmers and accountants and analysts in impovrished Fooistan, willing to work for peanuts an hour so they can feed their families, begin the slow climb upwards to middle class and the cycle repeats.
That's not capitalism, its looting and pillaging, pure and simple. The barbarians of the 21st century aren't frothing fur-clad hordes banging on the gates and waving swords. They're rich people in business suits being let through the gates by the mayor and waving money.
I'm all in favour of raising the standard of living of third-world-nations, but exploiting them and looting them of their talent and natural resources isn't the way to do it.
All will get it in the end...... (Score:1, Interesting)
For years now small to med bussiness has been the big driver of jobs, not the IBM's of this world. With All the advances in Manuf. and technology it will soon be possible to make some pretty cool stuff with a small amount of folks, but margins will be low, so NO high salaried CEO to sit around "Do the vision thing", play golf and diddle his secretary.
These times are a changin
Re:reduce costs? (Score:3, Interesting)
Frankly, I think that large corporations are a threat to humanity in general. Once decisions are more than 3 steps removed from the execution wierd things happen. Once a company gets "big" they generally try to become "efficient", and that is about the point where they start cutting corners on wages and the environment.
If this finally forces America to wake up and realize Big Business is a heartless, souless enterprise that is bent on enriching it's corporate officers at the expense of all else, that would be a Good Thing.
UNIONIZE (Score:5, Interesting)
Why aren't we unionized? What are the actual benefits, downsides, and what does it take to get there?
This is obviously the beginning of a downward spiral, so I say we should act now while we have a chance.
This is part of a larger problem in which everyone looks out for #1. If we would only concider our actions on the scope of our community (speaking nationally), things might be different... from copyright laws to workforce management.
Re:I have a plan... (Score:5, Interesting)
Programming is simply a commodity. I oughta know, I am a programmer. My job will go overseas sometime soon. I'm just trying to make as much money as possible beforehand, in the opes that I am prepared.
I'm a programmer too, and I find little logic in your comment. Why should a company which is based in the U.S. be allowed to benefit from the infrastructure here while offshoring jobs? Why should the company get a free ride when their employees no longer pay U.S. taxes or pay into Social Security, and the company no longer pays the mandatory matching contribution? Sure, the company might make more money in the short run (and shareholders in whatever country make a few pennies), but it is at the expense of the American taxpayer. Companies that offshore their labor should do the right thing and offshore their headquarters and management as well, so they can adequately supervise their operations.
Since U.S. executive compensation is so horribly out of whack compared to the average worker's in comparison to the rest of the world (over 500:1 at last count), why aren't the executives' jobs offshored first? That would be the most logical place to start cutting costs and improving profits. And if managerial brains are not a commodity, what is? IBM's position is: "Ooh, ooh, other companies are doing it, so we gotta do it too." I liked the old IBM better. Then they had real management that appreciated the fact that the current employees made the company what it was.
Re:I have a plan... (Score:5, Interesting)
Originally it was just to protect sugar growers, but after corn syrup became the number one sugar substitute, it's now used to keep domestic sugar prices higher than corn.
Why would this be that important? Well because the first political primary is in Iowa, of course, corn capital of the world. Historians will look back at the US and wonder why in the hell corn farmers had such a huge impact on the policies of the most powerful nation in the world.
Re:From Central European perspective... (Score:1, Interesting)
I am in Ukraine, I get a 500 USD salary, and it's not a Western company, my apartment is $200 and I live away from parents. My girlfriend works as well, she earns about $200. And Ukraine is more retarded than Poland, as far as I know.
Re:I have a plan... (Score:4, Interesting)
India has around 1500 distinct dialects of 110 languages, of which 19 are official. When Indians with different languages want to speak to each other, especially about technical matters, they tend to use one of the official languages: English.
Incidentally, language is one of the barriers for hiring cheap overseas help -- in some situations you want someone with more than an average English language skill, and while there are lots of really good linguists in India and elsewhere, they don't tend to stay to work a tech job at $150-300 biweekly pay. Thus you get error messages in Indlish stating "[process name] failed to restarted", "Error is occurred" and default menu choices for nine different languages -- all Indian. I'm not kidding -- these are all real life examples from major apps I work with daily, where the development has been outsourced
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*Art
Work harder? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I have a plan... (Score:1, Interesting)
Be careful what you wish for...
Re:I'm going to go down for this. (Score:1, Interesting)
And the government is helping - screw stopping free trade, how about using some of our tax money to subsidise health insurance so companies don't pay for more insuring their employees than they'd pay to hire an Indian town? Or by promoting science and arts in schools, instead of politically correct histories of the US? Or stop promoting college for everyone, and start funding technical institutes like every other country has - no need to take a womens study class to write code is there?
It's not all the fault of the companies (though I'm not alleviating them of all the blame) that are doing the outsourcing. There are other causes for any problem, learn to look further away from the issue to see what else could be contributing.
Re:I have a plan... (Score:3, Interesting)
ehhh, you didn't know IBM management back then...
where do you think the real PHB's came from?
I dont care, companies that outsource to other countries to whore out for dirt cheap wages will end up suffering as the quality goes down Massively.
Look at tech support and customer service lines. you cant understand 70% of them, and they make promises they fully dont intend to keep.
I always dogged Dell, now they are killing themselves as word of mouth of how lousy their india based tech support is 100% worthless. I know 4 people that have sent their Dell's back within the 2 weeks of first recieving them. and they loudly tell everyone to never buy a dell. many more grumble about how worthless dell support is and every one of them mention "I can't understand them" most of the time. It's the accent thing and it does take a bit to get used to.... but it infuriates a customer that just spent $800.00 on a now dead machine.
That kind of customer treatment will bury that company within 2 years as word of mouth spreads.
Re:I have a plan... (Score:2, Interesting)
You want to know something? Steel is still made in Pittsburgh. It's just not the low-grade, kiloton a day of cheap (in quality and price) steel that people think of when they bemoan the death of the "steel industry". Instead of huge steel plants churning out the same consumer-grade steel day after day, there are a number of smaller, independent steel plants. They make small batches of expensive specialty steels that require a lot of technical expertise to produce correctly.
Software's probably going to go the same way, eventually. Probably not to the same extent, but to some degree. Companies like IBM and Microsoft and others will move development of the cheap, commodity software offshore. Those software companies and software developers that remain in the US will spend less time working on commodity software and more time working on specialty solutions - vertical market, business-critical software.
Re:Maybe it's time to get realistic. (Score:1, Interesting)
Middle Class is Obsolete (Score:1, Interesting)
In times of international confrontation the role of the middle class was to stabilize the society and standing united against less efficient competing economic alternatives. Now that this confrontation is over and capitalism has won the role of the middle class as stabilizing element is no longer worth its cost.
I for one welcome our new overlords, the Turbo Capitalists.
Re:I have a plan... (Score:3, Interesting)
good things will happen. (Score:3, Interesting)
One is enough and what employment will replace it? (Score:1, Interesting)
Other issue with India, China and Vietnam is that these nations are not so labour ruled as is North America.
So my question is, what will replace Computer Software/Hardware Development in North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand?
How can I consume with out income? So,plan to sell in the nation you employ because we here who are unemployed will not be able to purchase the New Software or Electronic Gadget. What is the reason if it will give no Return on Investment.
is IBM playing a game? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Get off your ass and learn. (Score:2, Interesting)
There are a lot of posts here which stereotype both Indians and Americans. My view is
a) Americans are among the hardest working/disciplined people I have seen - more than Indians in general, and far more than Europeans.
b) Indians have done well in software because of hard work, knowledge of english, and flexibility in adapting to new software/methodologies. The flexibility is one area where I feel US workers often lack. Indian engineers are more willing to work in different cultures, learn / use new software quickly etc.
c) A visit to Bangalore will dispel any feeling that the software engineers here are "slave labour" - they are neither dumb, nor are they exploited. They are smart, urban, english speaking and usually in about the top 2-3% of the Indian population in terms of living standard.
d) Working in an Indian software company is exciting. My own company does business in 70 countries, on all types of software and hardware. This is creating a breed of Indians who are comfortable working anywhere in the world, and who have learnt in the last 10-20 years what it takes to be globally competitive. This breed will transform India in the next few years.
e) For an American software engineer who is out of job due to ousourcing, calls to work harder or to suddenly become innovative would be the unkindest cut. Whos to say that he/she was not already working hard and being innovative? The root issue goes beyond software - how long can the huge living standard differential sustain itself, once countries like India and China start adoping rational and growth oriented policies? This is in effect what has happened in India in the last 10 years and China in the last 20. Once the huge workforces in these countries become globally competitive, there will have to be some corrections. In fact, even within India there is a huge difference developing between the fast-developing southern states and the less well-developed northern states. This problem goes beyond just one industry or one country. It's almost natural that the haves feel threatened when the have-nots start moving up in the world. And it is only natural that the have-nots want to "have" their share of prosperity as well. The only reasonable end-state I can see is a world where we use a different yardstick for progress than just money. Till that happens I dont see this conflict ending.