3 ms·

> Don’t read too much into IBM, Accenture, CapGemini as being American companies — all of them have very large bases in India and they use H1 visa to get low co

> Don’t read too much into IBM, Accenture, CapGemini as being American companies — all of them have very large bases in India and they use H1 visa to get low cost Indian workers on the client side in US. I've never seen anyone prove the claim that tech firms (or any companies for that matter) use H1B workers for cheap labor. Also, this paragraph is just garbage "Don't read too much into it..." as if we should just trust the author.

fwiwm2c 10y ago
Author here. Though IBM hasn't officially confirmed this themselves as they have stopped calling out the number of employees in each of their countries, but there have been several pieces out there corroborating the size of its Indian workforce exceed their US ones (and these articles are more than 4 yrs old when IBM US workforce was still large and the recent layoffs hadn't happened): http://nypost.com/2013/10/05/ibm-now-employs-more-workers-in-india-than-us/ http://nypost.com/2013/10/05/ibm-now-employs-more-workers-in... http://www.computerworld.com/article/2493565/it-careers/in-a-symbolic-shift--ibm-s-india-workforce-likely-exceeds-u-s-.html http://www.computerworld.com/article/2493565/it-careers/in-a... IBM, Accenture and CG make a large amount of their revenue from IT outsourcing [1] where their largest competitors are TCS, Infosys etc. They can't win the cost game without having a significant presence in India and getting some of their employees client side. [1] http://revenuesandprofits.com/how-ibm-makes-money/ http://revenuesandprofits.com/how-ibm-makes-money/
- bguillet 10y ago
  > Don’t read too much into IBM, Accenture, CapGemini as being American companies — Nitpick, but yeah, CapGemini is French ;)
- mikereilly01 10y ago
  IT outsourcing is not an H1B problem. If they are hiring Indian workers in India, it has absolutely nothing to do with H1B visas. A comment above discusses that Accenture seemingly used Indian workers on H1B, but also alludes to simply outsourcing work to India. These problems are significantly different and arguing for H1B reform based on international hiring practices is misleading. I'm not saying the H1B system isn't a problem, but I don't think your "sources" backup your claims. All of your sources are about hiring in India, not hiring Indian workers in the US.
ep103 10y ago
As someone who worked at Accenture, I'm not sure how to prove it? It was literally the entire business model. It was made quite clear to me, as an American hire, that I was a white american face to slap onto projects to talk to clients, and to act as educated engineering quality control / failsafe, for all work done in India or by Indians that they would fly into the US and rotate according to whatever the legal requirements were for each individual. When I left, they had completely stopped hiring in America all together. Instead, they were focusing on hiring in Monterey, Mexico. When I asked how they were going to get these new "developers" to work on stateside projects, I got to learn about the logistics of literally buying and driving school buses full of 'developers' over the US - Mexican border on a weekly basis.
- mikereilly01 10y ago
  It doesn't necessarily sound like any of this is H1B related, it's just job outsourcing. I'm not saying it isn't a problem in it's own, but it's not relevant here. If they were indeed hiring Indian workers on H1Bs, and paying them less than their counterparts, then we can complain about that. Outsourcing != H1B problems. Also, anecdotal, but the work I shipped out to India when working for KPMG was absolutely not work I wanted to be doing and being able to send it to colleagues in India to complete was pretty nice from my admittedly small world view at the time.
  - ep103 10y ago
    H1B was just another way to outsource. The ran entire departments for some companies. And at those departments, the IT for would be a mix of people offshore and H1Bs that constantly rotated back and forth between the two countries.

fwiwm2c 10y ago

Author here. Though IBM hasn't officially confirmed this themselves as they have stopped calling out the number of employees in each of their countries, but there have been several pieces out there corroborating the size of its Indian workforce exceed their US ones (and these articles are more than 4 yrs old when IBM US workforce was still large and the recent layoffs hadn't happened): http://nypost.com/2013/10/05/ibm-now-employs-more-workers-in-india-than-us/ http://nypost.com/2013/10/05/ibm-now-employs-more-workers-in... http://www.computerworld.com/article/2493565/it-careers/in-a-symbolic-shift--ibm-s-india-workforce-likely-exceeds-u-s-.html http://www.computerworld.com/article/2493565/it-careers/in-a... IBM, Accenture and CG make a large amount of their revenue from IT outsourcing [1] where their largest competitors are TCS, Infosys etc. They can't win the cost game without having a significant presence in India and getting some of their employees client side. [1] http://revenuesandprofits.com/how-ibm-makes-money/ http://revenuesandprofits.com/how-ibm-makes-money/

bguillet 10y ago
> Don’t read too much into IBM, Accenture, CapGemini as being American companies — Nitpick, but yeah, CapGemini is French ;)
mikereilly01 10y ago
IT outsourcing is not an H1B problem. If they are hiring Indian workers in India, it has absolutely nothing to do with H1B visas. A comment above discusses that Accenture seemingly used Indian workers on H1B, but also alludes to simply outsourcing work to India. These problems are significantly different and arguing for H1B reform based on international hiring practices is misleading. I'm not saying the H1B system isn't a problem, but I don't think your "sources" backup your claims. All of your sources are about hiring in India, not hiring Indian workers in the US.

ep103 10y ago

As someone who worked at Accenture, I'm not sure how to prove it? It was literally the entire business model. It was made quite clear to me, as an American hire, that I was a white american face to slap onto projects to talk to clients, and to act as educated engineering quality control / failsafe, for all work done in India or by Indians that they would fly into the US and rotate according to whatever the legal requirements were for each individual. When I left, they had completely stopped hiring in America all together. Instead, they were focusing on hiring in Monterey, Mexico. When I asked how they were going to get these new "developers" to work on stateside projects, I got to learn about the logistics of literally buying and driving school buses full of 'developers' over the US - Mexican border on a weekly basis.

mikereilly01 10y ago
It doesn't necessarily sound like any of this is H1B related, it's just job outsourcing. I'm not saying it isn't a problem in it's own, but it's not relevant here. If they were indeed hiring Indian workers on H1Bs, and paying them less than their counterparts, then we can complain about that. Outsourcing != H1B problems. Also, anecdotal, but the work I shipped out to India when working for KPMG was absolutely not work I wanted to be doing and being able to send it to colleagues in India to complete was pretty nice from my admittedly small world view at the time.
- ep103 10y ago
  H1B was just another way to outsource. The ran entire departments for some companies. And at those departments, the IT for would be a mix of people offshore and H1Bs that constantly rotated back and forth between the two countries.