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I guarantee you, the Infosys Support Analysts at my company do not have the option of creating a "startup" any more than a plantation worker can start a plantat

I guarantee you, the Infosys Support Analysts at my company do not have the option of creating a "startup" any more than a plantation worker can start a plantation.

Chris2048 10y ago
Why? lack of money? Maybe if wages increased...
- supercanuck 10y ago
  because the vast majority are doing support tickets stuck in a support center at a company like South California Edison, Verizon or Dow Chemical working with Enterprise Software like Oracle, Informatica, SAP etc. They are four to a room in an apartment in Minnesota where they send 3/4 of their paycheck back to India to support their family. In your mind, you are thinking of the 10-15% working in Silicon Valley as coders with people skills.
  - Chris2048 10y ago
    And if wages increased? I'm going to disregard those with families, it's hard for anyone to compete with dependents. Also, are you talking about Americans, or workers on visas? It sounds like the latter, but I was talking about the former, i.e. American IT workers can keep wages/conditions up by choosing startups if things start to drop, in a way I doubt agriculture workers could.
    - BoorishBears 10y ago
      Your mention of "dependents" made me smile. I'm from Ghana, and from what I understand Ghana and a lot of other countries with these immigrants share the common theme that when people say they're "supporting their family/people back home", "family" is not the meaning that the IRS gives for a dependent, it's very literally everyone who's back home. For example, decades after moving to the US parents still support dozens of family members back home, not just siblings, but their own parents, cousins, nephews, even people from the same village who aren't necessarily family. Of course on the flip side those are the people who rally together to get them to the US (at least that's how it was for my parents and some other family I've known). It's a support system where people who come to the US are then able to fund things like education that will bring the next generation closer to the standard of living they left to the US for in the first place. I suspect to workers supporting "family" in that position who don't even have financial security for themselves wouldn't even dream of something like packing it all up living out of a van and bootstrapping their dream startup. In all the years it took my parents years to even get to something considered financially secure, they still had people counting on them back home, I can only imagine the position of those counting someone who just got here on a visa, often at considerable cost relative to what wages are where they come from, meaning they needed help from family.
- kamaal 10y ago
  Why what? Why they can't start a start up? Well then there are reasons hard to understand unless you understand the socio-economic context in which a lot of people grow up in India. Not the kind of ones who you see come to US universities for higher education. But there are a lot of other exceptionally brilliant people who come from poor families, to whom any opportunity is precious. Parents come from poor families typically from rural setting having worked often in hard conditions all their lives and made unbelievable sacrifices so that their kids can get some decent education and a shot at working at regular job that pays well. The kind of poverty I'm describing doesn't exist in US, so it will be hard for you to understand. Its not the $40K/year working-at-walmart/McD poverty. Its way worse. Now when you look at this from the beginning to the end. Such people have to work on whatever opportunity they get, at whatever costs. No matter how hard they have to work. No matter how many extra hours/day they have to put, No matter how many weekends they have to show up at work. None of it matters. Because its all an opportunity so rare people before you didn't get. Which is why I find names like 'yes-men' or the kinds used in some parent posts in this thread offensive. Unfortunately there are a lot of upper middle class Indian who themselves don't understand this. Some people just don't have the luxury to make decisions they way others have. If you are in a position to afford education in a US university, or quit your job and work on a start up. Or quit your job and do something else because your boss asked to you put in extra hours at work. You are already in a very different plane of luxury and will likely not understand why its not easy for others to do the same.
  - sidlls 10y ago
    > The kind of poverty I'm describing doesn't exist in US, It most definitely does. In the US there is "working class poor" (the kind you describe with the $40k/yr McJob), and then there is _poverty_: lack of adequate housing (e.g. shanties with pest infestations), lack of adequate clean water (not just occasionally, either, but consistently), lack of adequate food ("food insecurity", which is a terrible description for "we go without one or more meals regularly during the week, and sometimes have to beg for charitable food from neighbors or food banks"), and so on. These folks also typically don't have access to anything like sufficient education. The notion that "third world style poverty doesn't exist in the US" is a great propaganda victory for the wealthy elite here, but it's just not true.

I guarantee you, the Infosys Support Analysts at my company do not have the option of creating a "startup" any more than a plantation worker can start a plantation.

Chris2048 10y ago

Why? lack of money? Maybe if wages increased...

supercanuck 10y ago
because the vast majority are doing support tickets stuck in a support center at a company like South California Edison, Verizon or Dow Chemical working with Enterprise Software like Oracle, Informatica, SAP etc. They are four to a room in an apartment in Minnesota where they send 3/4 of their paycheck back to India to support their family. In your mind, you are thinking of the 10-15% working in Silicon Valley as coders with people skills.
- Chris2048 10y ago
  And if wages increased? I'm going to disregard those with families, it's hard for anyone to compete with dependents. Also, are you talking about Americans, or workers on visas? It sounds like the latter, but I was talking about the former, i.e. American IT workers can keep wages/conditions up by choosing startups if things start to drop, in a way I doubt agriculture workers could.
  - BoorishBears 10y ago
    Your mention of "dependents" made me smile. I'm from Ghana, and from what I understand Ghana and a lot of other countries with these immigrants share the common theme that when people say they're "supporting their family/people back home", "family" is not the meaning that the IRS gives for a dependent, it's very literally everyone who's back home. For example, decades after moving to the US parents still support dozens of family members back home, not just siblings, but their own parents, cousins, nephews, even people from the same village who aren't necessarily family. Of course on the flip side those are the people who rally together to get them to the US (at least that's how it was for my parents and some other family I've known). It's a support system where people who come to the US are then able to fund things like education that will bring the next generation closer to the standard of living they left to the US for in the first place. I suspect to workers supporting "family" in that position who don't even have financial security for themselves wouldn't even dream of something like packing it all up living out of a van and bootstrapping their dream startup. In all the years it took my parents years to even get to something considered financially secure, they still had people counting on them back home, I can only imagine the position of those counting someone who just got here on a visa, often at considerable cost relative to what wages are where they come from, meaning they needed help from family.
kamaal 10y ago
Why what? Why they can't start a start up? Well then there are reasons hard to understand unless you understand the socio-economic context in which a lot of people grow up in India. Not the kind of ones who you see come to US universities for higher education. But there are a lot of other exceptionally brilliant people who come from poor families, to whom any opportunity is precious. Parents come from poor families typically from rural setting having worked often in hard conditions all their lives and made unbelievable sacrifices so that their kids can get some decent education and a shot at working at regular job that pays well. The kind of poverty I'm describing doesn't exist in US, so it will be hard for you to understand. Its not the $40K/year working-at-walmart/McD poverty. Its way worse. Now when you look at this from the beginning to the end. Such people have to work on whatever opportunity they get, at whatever costs. No matter how hard they have to work. No matter how many extra hours/day they have to put, No matter how many weekends they have to show up at work. None of it matters. Because its all an opportunity so rare people before you didn't get. Which is why I find names like 'yes-men' or the kinds used in some parent posts in this thread offensive. Unfortunately there are a lot of upper middle class Indian who themselves don't understand this. Some people just don't have the luxury to make decisions they way others have. If you are in a position to afford education in a US university, or quit your job and work on a start up. Or quit your job and do something else because your boss asked to you put in extra hours at work. You are already in a very different plane of luxury and will likely not understand why its not easy for others to do the same.
- sidlls 10y ago
  > The kind of poverty I'm describing doesn't exist in US, It most definitely does. In the US there is "working class poor" (the kind you describe with the $40k/yr McJob), and then there is _poverty_: lack of adequate housing (e.g. shanties with pest infestations), lack of adequate clean water (not just occasionally, either, but consistently), lack of adequate food ("food insecurity", which is a terrible description for "we go without one or more meals regularly during the week, and sometimes have to beg for charitable food from neighbors or food banks"), and so on. These folks also typically don't have access to anything like sufficient education. The notion that "third world style poverty doesn't exist in the US" is a great propaganda victory for the wealthy elite here, but it's just not true.