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Countries that are reducing numbers of immigrant workers
- anilgulecha 9y agoNationalistic tribalism, such as we're seeing now, usually comes and goes as a cycle. My hypothesis: Increasing automation puts pressure on the job market, leading to such sentiment. We're seeing this effect, the world over. And India being the largest low-cost English-speaking tech-center will feel this effect the largest. I guess the silver lining is that this will stop the brain-brain from India, hopefully leading to a more stronger local tech and other industries.
- robjan 9y agoI wouldn't say it's all down to populism and tribalism. The company I worked for in the UK laid off over 1000 local IT staff and replaced them with people on Tier 2 visas from Tata Consultancy Services and Tech Mahindra who were willing to work for significantly less than our salaries.
- anilgulecha 9y agoAgreed that the replacement happens. I'm saying "give jobs to locals than outsiders" is tribalism. (Not saying if it's right or wrong -- just that it's by definition tribalism).
- robjan 9y agoNot sure if it's tribalism so much as protecting the local economy against salary arbitrage.
- godzilla82 9y agoAre the products of your "local economy" sold locally. If not, then you have no right to claim protection.
- en3rme 9y agoPeople don't want what's fair, people want what's better for them. I don't want my wage to lower just so people in the third world can live better because I, honestly, don't give a fuck about them. That's the sentiment that's rising lately.
- pimmen89 9y agoAnd this is where the tribalism comes in to play. At some point, governments have to do what's fair and not what the angry mob they represents want. White Europeans might've wanted colonialism hundreds of years ago, and to this day some people don't really care when their military commits war crimes against "them". It's hard for me to sympathise with the view that "the real unfairness here is that people born in miserable conditions are happy to do my job for less, so I'm the victim here".
- restalis 9y ago"At some point, governments have to do what's fair and not what the angry mob they represents want." Fair to whom? A government has to be fair primarily to their subjects. It's their subject's trust and resources that mandate government's power. Outsiders haven't contributed with nothing prior to their coming so it's unfair to give them equal amount of consideration about anything in the first place.
- geodel 9y agoUnfortunately rights are not much applicable in international matters. They are governed by laws which can benefit locals or treaties which can benefit both parties. I have seen in India even in same nation people from one state want to throw out people from different states as they are taking jobs and resources that are supposed for locals.
- superasn 9y agoBeing an Indian engineer myself the funniest part is that regardless of your branch/stream almost every person in my college got an IT job (your branch is decided by the entrance test). We had a saying about TCS in our college "trespassers will be recruited". And they asked chemical engineering and GK questions during the placement tests. It was so weird when I think about it now.
- pkaye 9y agoWhat are examples are branch/stream? Are they just different engineering majors like Civil, Chemical, Mechanical?
- andy1729 9y agoYes, branch/stream is same as majors.
- superasn 9y agoYes that is exactly it. Competition is really fierce in Indian engineering colleges. The ratio is 1 out 10K (or something similar) for getting into good colleges so you end up picking any branch you can get. I'm not sure how it is in other countries though.
- pkaye 9y agoKind of the same in the US. Some majors are "impacted" which means tougher to get in due to heavy demand. Computer science/engineering used to be tough to get into even 20 years back before the internet became popular.
- oceanghost 9y agoPeople recognize Indian engineers (competent or not, racism or no) as the weapons of wage suppression.
- SamUK96 9y agoI mean, when you put your "scum-bag profit or nothing boss" thinking hat on, it makes so much sense. You can hire these people, and they'll accept extremely noncompetitive wages (lowers wages), over-saturates the labour market (lowers wages), AND gives a nice boost to PR because on the outside it seems like this company is "diversely hiring from all backgrounds". Great!
- oceanghost 9y agoAll the people who didn't wear that hat-- got fired by the people who did.
- letitgo12345 9y agoWhile many Indians seeking employment abroad are impacted a lot by these changes, I don't think the sentiment behind these changes has much to do with Indian people per se. There's a global backlash against too much immigration in general. Indians are just caught in the mix.
- posguy 9y agoPeople are tired of the corporate owned politicians allowing companies to run roughshod over the laws, morals & expectations of society. This is expressed in many ways, from xenophobia to the rise of Bernie Sanders & Donald Trump. People don't want another corporate owned shill like either of the Clintons, both Bushes, and Obama, and I'd wager that Obama knew this in 2008, hence why he made sure his moderately grassroots organization was put out to pasture safely. We need to stop the union busting, bring back workers rights, prosecute Walmart & T-Mobile for their union response teams (where most potentially "infected" employees are fired), and fight for a better future. I think we should open our borders, but when it comes to employment we should strive to avoid what has happened in Canada, where low cost workers from overseas work at every single Tim Hortons.
- sanswork 9y agoIf they didn't want a corporate owned shill why did they elect a corporate shill? >where low cost workers from overseas work at every single Tim Hortons. This isn't reality I think you need to check your information sources.
- JetSpiegel 9y agoTrump shills for himself, while the others are much more nebulous.
- pimmen89 9y agoWe have to take it on faith because we have no tax returns to check who he owns money too.
- joelthelion 9y agoAll these returning engineers might be a great opportunity for India.
- stuaxo 9y agoThere will be a personal cost to many many of them becoming unemployed, but you are right - there will be some companies starting out this.
- newsat13 9y agoI hope the India govt moves fast now. The should take this opportunity to improve local infrastructure and put in reforms for a domestic software economy. The TCS, Infosys & Wipro helped kickstart the software revolution in India but they need to take this to a better conclusion than it is now. We need product based companies in India and we need a strong local domestic market. It needs to retain it's talent at home. Any Indians want to chime in on whether this is likely? I hear great things about Modi.
- intended 9y agoNo? The govt is already working really fast, and in general all govts have been working fast since 1991. Making a market and nation building is just hard stuff. How are you going to make product firms from scratch? By building a market? For that at the very least you need connectivity - the current govt has always focused on laying infra and highways. But that still means people need money to buy stuff, and we have a hugely messed up labor market with a strong dependence on agriculture. We're 50 years away from anything like what people may want to hear to have a "good" ending. But this is also a market for people who are able and capable of getting their hands and heads truly dirty.
- sreenadh 9y agoTCS, Infosys & Wipro are more of a sweatshops than innovative companies...
- geodel 9y agoThey weren't from day one. At some point the idea and implementation of cost arbitrage was itself innovation.
- throwaway31233 9y agoHow can they ? India's education system/institutions is meant/nourished to serve the English-speaking countries.
- ashwinaj 9y agoMaybe I'm cynical, but I don't see how India can move from a services/back office economy to product development until expats with such experience move back. Our education quality is pathetically dismal, infrastructure within cities needs improvement, red tape needs to go etc. We don't have enough risk takers and many of us are risk averse. I think the key is convincing expats to come back, which is hard.
- golergka 9y agoDespite the title of the article, I see one thing unmentioned: general reputation of incompetence. However, nearly everybody I know in IT, from different countries and backgrounds, knows "Indian code" to be a meme of not only bad quality but gross, mind-boggling incompetence. I don't have a personal experience with indian companies and/or engineers, so don't have a personal opinion on that matter. If anything, it seems strange to me to translate an opinion about outsourcing companies from a poor country to top engineers from that country immigrating abroad. But regardless of whether that opinion is valid or not, people believe it and it certainly has an impact.
- posguy 9y agoAll you have to do is go look at the cluster that projects like ASTPP are to see what low quality developers (in their case from India) get you. The project started with a solid technical foundation (Freeswitch, MySQL, Nginx), was built in PHP (not great), and they proceeded to break or mis-implement Least Cost Routing (you can't do an LRN DIP to find the underlying carrier, nor can you import a normal NANPA voice ratedeck), multi-domain (everyone is on one domain) and block selling under cost or at negative rates. It shouldn't be this hard, Freeswitch literally does most of this for you (LCR & multi-domain), it is just a matter of building a simple GUI on it.
- nol13 9y agoWhen you charge by the hour, competence is not a virtue. (dont really have any experience working with their code, but in general I'd say that the Indians I went to school with were the more competent of the bunch, if you want to compare grad students to undergrads at least)
- plaban123 9y agoThe bad "Indian code" is what the client is paying for. If you pay 1/10th of American salary to recruit developers in India who are at the bottom of the stack in terms of competency, what are you expecting?. Everything is magnified in India because of the population. We have bad coders to CEOs of American corporations. But this works as well. Thats why TCS, Infosys, etc are billionaire dollar enterprises.
- bendermon 9y agoAmerican salaries along with low taxes are way more attractive even compared to Nordic countries which apart from high taxes also have some of the highest living costs in the world. The whole debate on suppressing incomes is quite debatable. Though one can see the argument for people who have spent decades working exclusively on legacy systems. When these become cost centres, companies try and outsource them. The brief period that I spent working for an Indian outsourcer, I noticed almost every project was about maintenance of legacy systems.
- posguy 9y agoBringing in low cost foreign workers to maintain a system directly drags down the average wage, hurting Americans in the IT industry and lowering their income & benefits. Foreign workers are a tool that companies like to use to scare IT workers away from organizing & unionizing, keeping the Americans they do employ under foot and poorly paid. As an example, Kroger has a support center for its Fred Meyer brand of stores in Portland, OR. As of last year, they were paying $12hr while expecting in depth networking knowledge, familiarity with SUSE & SunOS, and the ability to write moderately complex scripts for these legacy systems. Comparatively, another employee who was transfered from Portland to Cleveland went from making a little over $14hr to $120k a year, as the market in Cleveland is apparently so barren of talent that poaching is a serious issue.
- bendermon 9y agoWhat you say is true, but as I mentioned that works only with legacy systems, which are often just cost centres. There are in general very few people who can work with or want to work with legacy systems and therefore does demand a very good pay but it does not add any value to the American economy.
- posguy 9y agoThese aren't legacy systems, just a few years back Kroger started moving off IBM 4690, which was a legacy OS. That is gone from most areas of the business at this point, hence the expectation to be familiar with SUSE.
- rebossz 9y agoVisas are essential only for jobs for which face-2-face spitting is deemed a must. I am a programmer. I do not remember to ever have done a project where this was the case. If the client insists on unimportant issues, already when just recruiting programmers, what is the likelihood that his project will NOT fail? Every piece of bullshit is always just the beginning. You should expect an entire avalanche of bullshit to follow after that. In that sense, Indian programmers who worry about visas, undoubtedly deserve to worry about them, while the ones who don't worry about visas, know exactly why they do not need to worry about them.
- usgroup 9y agoAs a small business owner, revenue streams are fickle these days. It makes pay as you go, zero hour labour alluring even if it's more expensive because it can be planned according to the revenue stream. This same discipline leads one to encapsulate work better. A senior data scientist goes for £700/d in London; theres a significant advantage to being able to use her counterpart in Delhi. It is salary arbing. It is also inevitable. Companies buy services that they could perform themselves more often than not, in order to keep focus on core business. After a certain price they don't. Forcing the immigrants away pushes up prices, which literally changes the internals of companies and how and what they buy over time. this is constantly afoot but there's an inherent risk that any given change may be for the worse.
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- palerdot 9y agoAs a matter of fact, in India, engineers mostly avoid service based Indian companies like Infosys, CTS, TCS unless otherwise they are in the extreme bottom end of the funnel (they just need a job) or at the extreme top end (disproportionate high pay). These firms are notorious for their carrot (probable on-site opportunities) and stick (mindless work hours clocking among others) approach, and their typical workplace is full of discontent and frustration. Just for an example, I have known people working there who were trying to game the clocking system by finding a bug that allowed them to leave early provided they clock before midnight from any of the offices which would increase their clocking hours. That aside, these firms are just a small part of the actual tech scene in India, except they have sheer numbers when it comes to the H1B process, which kind of projects these firms as representative entities of Indian engineers.
- guelo 9y agoIf India were smart they would copy China and ban Facebook, Google and the rest of the American web companies. This would have the effect of creating powerhouse Indian web companies similar to Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, etc in China which are now starting to break out to become global brands. India more than has the talent to pull this off.
- palerdot 9y agoChina didn't ban those web companies for using their local talent. They did it as part of their censorship practices. There are plenty of Indian people working now in Google, Facebook etc. Google CEO itself is an Indian. It would be extremely foolish of any government to ban any entity solely to create an alternative with the hope of utilising its local talent. In India, so far this kind of discussions is solely focused on getting tax concessions for home grown companies (like for Flipkart, Ola which are Indian Amazon, Uber respectively). Even then, they are faced with lot of flak, since their investor money is mostly from abroad.
- nrki 9y agoYou can't be serious. This would lead to absolute chaos. India is not China. It is an actual democracy, for a start.
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- n0pn0p 9y agoA rare example of government legislation being ahead of private sector practice.
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- threeseed 9y agoWhat a rubbish article. In Australia for example it has NOTHING to with Indians and the situation is basically the same in all the countries listed. It is pure politics within the right-wing governments in power caused by the rise of nationalism, the struggles of blue collar workers who have been left behind and the fear of terrorism. Politicians are so scared of being flanked by the right (e.g. Tony Abbott in Australia) that they are pushing the anti-immigrant angle at every opportunity. But if you look at the details you will see that any immigration changes are more about "feeling good" than doing anything substantive. For example recent changes in Australia have seen a "values" test added which is hilariously pointless. And in fact we have made it easier for highly skilled migrants to enter the country e.g. Indian IT consultants.
- masondixon 9y ago> Countries that are reducing numbers of immigrant workers Is this headline accurate? Are numbers of immigrant workers reducing? The H1B visa program is always over-subscribed more than 4x so if the number of applicants decreases, there is still the same number coming in. Every country looks to be trying to reduce low-skilled immigration which is fair enough. Its tiring these days that every headline is made alarmist by lumping all immigrants into one big group. Illegal immigration vs legal immigration is always referred to as simply "immigration". Low skilled vs high skilled = immigrant. Temporary working visa vs. foreign-born US citizen = immigrant.
- zac99 9y ago1.I don’t agree with the author, issue is local job loss due to immigration 2.Don’t forget Google and Microsoft CEO’s are INDIAN Engineers 3.Looks odd A Global leader Country advocating protectionism 4.Rather than job loss at micro level check How many Job loss due to wrong practice by companies to make more profits check “double-Irish” tax system used by Google, Apple and Oracle 5.Check Job loss due to scandals Enron,Lehman brothers http://www.accounting-degree.org/scandals/ http://www.accounting-degree.org/scandals/ 6.Yes its eye opener for Indians only focusing on services thats why we don’t have Baidu,Yandex and QQ What will happen If every country started nationalism, protectionism and avoids Products made by other countries? Who will hurt more?
- Kurtz79 9y agoI don't really get why the submission title was changed from the initial "Everywhere Indian engineers are unwanted," to the current one, since the former is the literal title in the linked article and its actual focus ? I'm all for having reasonable Politically Correctness on HN, it just seems weird in this case.
- contingencies 9y agoI met an Aussie guy here in Shenzhen this week who is quite wealthy indeed and who actually wants to spend money to bring some manufacturing to Australia from China. Unfortunately, he can't get a visa for the one (Chinese) employee who really needs it (to plan out the factory and begin many million dollars of investment), and can't get a reason why out of the immigration department. Nobody in Australia can do the job because they don't have experience with current gear (Australian manufacturing is today basically a few specialist, legacy facilities and some defense-related stuff only) and it's only documented in Chinese. Because the guy is wealthy and well connected and Australia is a small place, he managed to get some phone calls directly with the Immigration Minister, Mr. D., who essentially said "re-apply, I can't do anything". Meanwhile, the target region (with no jobs) has lost 200 planned jobs (including 30% committed to be allocated to disabled workers, and others likely to be allocated to challenged demographics such as aged workers) and the significant accompanying economic stimulation from the planned facility, and the guy is paying 10s of 1000s a month in opportunity costs. True story, this week.