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Many on HN seem to dislike Infosys, but let's not let that cloud larger, far more important issues: Most importantly, it sets very dangerous precedents of U.S.

Many on HN seem to dislike Infosys, but let's not let that cloud larger, far more important issues: Most importantly, it sets very dangerous precedents of U.S. federal government interference in the free market and in business decisions, and of economic nationalism worldwide: * Today you might like who the federal government is picking on and threatening; tomorrow you might not. Do we want politicians making decisions for businesses and controlling the free market? We can count on the politicians making political, not economic decisions. It's like the worst of over-regulation, but with no legal framework or process to restrain it. * Americans like it when jobs come to the U.S., but the U.S. long has been the standard-bearer of international free trade. If the U.S. stops promoting it, others likely will backslide quickly. Why shouldn't India demand the same of U.S. companies? (If your argument is fairness and how bad Infosys is, then you looking at factors that don't determine international trade practices.) When they demand that U.S. jobs move to their countries, will there even be a net gain in jobs? All that will result is moving jobs back and forth not to increase productivity and find market efficiencies, but for political reasons. It will create market inefficiencies, which could (for example) raise costs for Infosys customers (including U.S. customers), reduce Infosys' overall employment, reduce profit for Infosys shareholders, and reduce overall productivity for the economies involved. It's surprising how quickly the terms "free market" and "free trade" have disappeared from HN.

specialp 9y ago
Politicians made a decision to help the "free market" by making an exception to immigration rules with H1B visas. H1B visas were intended to address a shortage of highly skilled tech workers. They were not intended to supplant US workers, nor provide a readily accessible pool of low wage IT workers. H1B abusers like Infosys use H1B to hire 90% of their staff. They then undercut US workers and cause them to be laid off while their cheaper H1B visa foreigners took jobs on US soil. Pretty much every government in the world regulates immigration. And if you ask a business which country has less favorable business rules, that would be India which is amongst the worst in the world.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > H1B visas were intended to address a shortage of highly skilled tech workers. They were not intended to supplant US workers, nor provide a readily accessible pool of low wage IT workers. Yes, they were. In a market, a "shortage" is meaningless without reference to a price level, and the only way to address a shortage at any given price level is to add additional supply from sellers willing to sell below what the necessary price would otherwise be for the final quantity traded. Adding more workers at the "prevailing wage" means increasing the quantity traded without increasing price, which inherently favors the buyers of the good (labor, here) over sellers. Structurally, the "abuse" by Infosys, et al., and the suppression of wage growth for highly-skilled labor is exactly what H-1B is designed to support, not just a loophole in the design but the fundamental, basic, high-level structure of the program.
nine_k 9y ago
Free market is incompatible with permission-based visas. We did not have it. If we did, Mexican agriculture workers, for example, would compete unrestrained with the US workers, without a need for a visa. H1B visas were intended to allow highly educated and qualified workers to work in the US, for a wage in par with local similarly qualified workers. Such people are in short supply worldwide. The problem with Infosys is that it tended to neither bring in highly qualified workers, nor pay them comparably to the US market.
- makrakamar 9y ago
  There are smart Indians and dumb Americans, and also the other way around, but that is less relevant in this case. How will Donald Trump force American employers to prefer the demographic of dumb Americans to smart Indians? It is not that simple to achieve that ...
shubhamjain 9y ago
"Free Trade" is similar to freedom of speech. While arbitrary checks are damaging, there have to be rules to inhibit the abuse. "Let the market run free and everything will be right" sounds good in theory, but that implies that we will be better off without anti-trust laws, and minimum wage rules. In that case, what would stop companies from colluding to fix prices? It's easy to derive another conclusion from your premise. It'll create market inefficiency, which will allow other promising companies to compete, which can potentially raise the quality of the end-result. Possibly, Infosys' customers could be better served by more competent engineering force.
- hackuser 9y ago
  > "Let the market run free and everything will be right" sounds good in theory, but that implies that we will be better off without anti-trust laws, and minimum wage rules. I agree; it should not be taken to an extreme and I didn't mean it in an ideological sense. But there is value to 'free' market competition; it's a useful tool and also provides freedom, in the sense of liberty, a core value of our society. Government intimidation of businesses is almost always a bad solution to the problems; law and regulation are democratic and much more just. Infosys isn't the first - remember the businesses whom Trump claims to have intimidated about their factory locations. > It'll create market inefficiency, which will allow other promising companies to compete, which can potentially raise the quality of the end-result. Fundamentally, that's not the result of inefficiency. It's called "inefficient" because it costs more for worse outcomes. It's a very predictable, well-tested outcome.
ENGNR 9y ago
Sometimes ideas go a bit too far beyond useful and need to be pulled back, adjusted and then moved forward again. For example it's great the labor can move freely between borders at the senior level, but is it really desirable for seniors to compete with juniors? Should companies make a profit from arbitrage between the bargaining power of someone on a temporary visa vs a permanent visa? It seems like an arbitrary and not very useful divide that has a very real market effect
- devdas 9y ago
  So allow proper freedom of movement and juniors can compete with juniors.
rodionos 9y ago
The 'dislike', as you put it, is more based on their gaming the H1-B system. It's much less caused by RIFs associated with outsourcing per se. Unfair competition in free markers makes people conclude that the system is setup against them.
pandaman 9y ago
Border control is literally the purview of the USG. States do not have this power. Businesses even less so. The precedent had been set in 1865. Business are still free to make a decision to be subject of the law or to GTFO (e.g. take the business to a country, which allows uncontrolled immigration).
product50 9y ago
Seriously, shut up. Infosys has only 1 agenda and strategy - to differentiate based on cost based on low wage workers it is able to hire in India. Because of companies like them, H1 visas themselves are so scarce these days. These companies apply for visas in bulk, pay just over prevailing wage, get their employees to come to US (often displacing higher paid US employees) etc. It is honestly a shame that US allowed this happen for so many years. Think about so many highly qualified international candidates/students who aren't able to secure their H1 visa because companies like Infosys chose to install their $60k worker in US. I have no sympathy at all for them. India is free to reciprocate but I seriously doubt there could be a situation where workers in India are paid more than their American counterparts for it to have any tangible impact.
- dang 9y ago
  > Seriously, shut up. It breaks the site guidelines to post uncivilly and we ban accounts that do it, so please don't. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
  - product50 9y ago
    Sorry. I apologize to the original poster too. Just that I have one a couple of friends who had to leave US after their graduation, even after they secured good jobs, because of visa lottery. So, sometimes, it is difficult for me maintain decorum in my comments.
digitalzombie 9y ago
Free market and Free trade doesn't make it no border or no country. USA is still a country and they can impose certain thing to their advantage if they want to. If they wish to prioritize their citizens first then so be it. Also the main point is the abusive H-1B Visa. It is not free market when foreign workers cannot negotiate wage between companies. American citizens cannot compete against a foreign workers when the foreign workers cannot shop for salary. It's corporate slavery. > All that will result is moving jobs back and forth not to increase productivity and find market efficiencies, but for political reasons. It will create market inefficiencies, which could (for example) raise costs for Infosys customers (including U.S. customers), reduce Infosys' overall employment, reduce profit for Infosys shareholders, and reduce overall productivity for the economies involved. > It's surprising how quickly the terms "free market" and "free trade" have disappeared from HN. You're really just economic arm chairing. You harp such libertarian things but you don't address the core issue. H1-B visa and those people inabilities to negotiate wage which artificially lower Americans salary (my salary, I've seen it first hand and I've heard from it from my buddies). Hell I don't even know if you know the issue at all other than using this to harp about libertarian idealism.
CriticalSection 9y ago
> Do we want politicians making decisions for businesses and controlling the free market? So a visa only available to workers with a certain skill set that chained them to companies is the free market? > It's surprising how quickly the terms "free market" and "free trade" have disappeared from HN. Because a phrase like "free market" is propaganda and meaningless. That the word free is attached to it is part of the propaganda element, what's the alternative, an unfree market? And the word market is the meaningless. How is a market selling radishes in the USA for dollars today different than a market selling radishes in the USSR for rubles in 1951? They're the same thing. What's different is production, namely who controlled it - in the USA, production is overwhelmingly owned and controlled by heirs who do not work and who spend their days jetting to things like the Fyre Festival in the Bahamas - in the USSR production was not controlled by that class.
- Terr_ 9y ago
  > Because a phrase like "free market" is propaganda and meaningless. Well, if not propaganda, at least ambiguous, yeah. Adding on to that: If there's any group that distrusts the modifier "free", it's techies who've seen enough open-source stuff to remember "free as in beer" versus "free as in speech".
nvarsj 9y ago
You're being downvoted, but I think you raise some some good points since a lot of people believe what you're saying. I think the main misconception is that there is a "free market". The US government, and most governments around the world, have been heavily interventionist since at least WWII. This was born of necessity - the Great Depression was largely the outcome of capitalism left unchecked. After WWII the U.S. economy was in tatters. Truman and Eisenhower both took very aggressive interventionist policies to keep the economy afloat. Similarly, with the cold war, the U.S. invested heavily in basic research, much of which is the basis for the tech industry as we know it. This economic policy hasn't changed much since WWII. Most industry in the U.S. has been subsidised. Most of U.S. foreign policy has revolved around protecting U.S. interests - which is our economy, things like our energy sector and interests in farmland in places like Brazil. Agribusiness still gets huge subsidies, making Mexican farmers unable to compete, leading a large part to the poor conditions in our neighboring country and the bleed over effects here. And on and on. A "free market" is a complete illusion. Globalisation was just another means to promote economic interests. It was nothing to do with some free market ideal, outside of propaganda. It was a means to exploit cheap labor in other countries to the benefit of our own economy. Unfortunately, it is mostly to the benefit of white collar jobs and corporate interests. Unchecked globalisation has decimated the working class in the U.S. and much of Europe, and also cost us generations of knowledge on producing goods. Infosys is another example of this - it hits a bit closer to home for us programmers. Fortunately engineering is not so easy to offshore or replace with cheap labour, as it requires highly trained people. And demand outstrips supply. If offshoring had worked, we would all be a lot more unhappy about the effects of globalisation.
- hackuser 9y ago
  I agree with much of what you say. Most entertaining to me is that I'm the one who used to post such things on HN. It's amazing how quickly the pendulum has swung from extreme libertarian to progressive left. Personally, I think any ideology is dangerous. The "free market" should be a tool - good at some things, bad at others - and not an ideological dogma. I don't think it works well when enterprises cannot fail, a necessary part of the free market; so public safety, health care, basic utilities (e.g. water), etc. aren't good problems on which to apply the free market tool. It's also not useful for goods that shouldn't be distributed based on ability to pay, such as basic infrastructure (roads, phone, Internet), education, basic nutrition or health care. But it is an excellent tool for many purposes, and has a moral basis - it provides for the liberty of the business owners to do what they want with their property. I didn't agree when it was a dogma, and I don't agree that it's unimportant. It's essential. > Globalisation was just another means to promote economic interests. It was nothing to do with some free market ideal I strongly disagree. Free trade is a fundamental of free market economics, in theory and reality. It's just interference in the free market, this time at an international border instead of inside it (consider: would it be different if it happened at U.S. state borders? Urban borders?). If I'm making cars and must pay more for worse steel, simply because the worse steel plant is in one location and the better one in another, that wastes economic resources: It wastes the car manufacturer's money, which could go to something more useful such as more jobs, better cars, or payments to shareholders; it wastes the car buyer's money, which could have purchased a better car (i.e., with better steel); it wastes much of the resources put into the inferior steel plant, which could go to more productive uses (look up comparative advantage); and it deprives a productive enterprise, the better steel plant, of resources that it fairly won on merit in the marketplace. The fact is that the better steel plant uses the money more efficiently, freeing up for better uses the extra money that would be consumed making bad steel and funding the people who built the better mousetrap. You probably want your mousetrap to succeed on its merits, not on whether the President happens to like you. But there is a serious issue with the free market's (including free trade's) impact on labor. My way of looking at it is that capital can move much more quickly than labor: A factory can move much more quickly than its workers can (either to the new factory or to equivalent jobs). The economy is there to serve people, so that should be addressed. > The US government, and most governments around the world, have been heavily interventionist since at least WWII. This was born of necessity - the Great Depression was largely the outcome of capitalism left unchecked. After WWII the U.S. economy was in tatters. Truman and Eisenhower both took very aggressive interventionist policies to keep the economy afloat. While I agree with much of your point, parts of that history are time-shifted. The Great Depression began in 1929 and FDR took office in 1933. That's (roughly) when the heavy intervention began, and it took place until the end of WWII (1945) - though much of the intervention during WWII was for a different reason, to use the nation's economic resources for war materials. Post-WWII (though maybe not the next day) the U.S. economy was robust. The 1950s, including under Eisenhower, were possibly the greatest economic boom in U.S. history, and it continued until roughly the 1970s. Heavy regulation, intervention and taxes - though not at the scale of the Great Depression - which continued until the early 1980s, was not due to economic necessity, but possibly due to a belief in democratic government.

specialp 9y ago

Politicians made a decision to help the "free market" by making an exception to immigration rules with H1B visas. H1B visas were intended to address a shortage of highly skilled tech workers. They were not intended to supplant US workers, nor provide a readily accessible pool of low wage IT workers. H1B abusers like Infosys use H1B to hire 90% of their staff. They then undercut US workers and cause them to be laid off while their cheaper H1B visa foreigners took jobs on US soil. Pretty much every government in the world regulates immigration. And if you ask a business which country has less favorable business rules, that would be India which is amongst the worst in the world.

dragonwriter 9y ago
> H1B visas were intended to address a shortage of highly skilled tech workers. They were not intended to supplant US workers, nor provide a readily accessible pool of low wage IT workers. Yes, they were. In a market, a "shortage" is meaningless without reference to a price level, and the only way to address a shortage at any given price level is to add additional supply from sellers willing to sell below what the necessary price would otherwise be for the final quantity traded. Adding more workers at the "prevailing wage" means increasing the quantity traded without increasing price, which inherently favors the buyers of the good (labor, here) over sellers. Structurally, the "abuse" by Infosys, et al., and the suppression of wage growth for highly-skilled labor is exactly what H-1B is designed to support, not just a loophole in the design but the fundamental, basic, high-level structure of the program.

nine_k 9y ago

Free market is incompatible with permission-based visas. We did not have it. If we did, Mexican agriculture workers, for example, would compete unrestrained with the US workers, without a need for a visa. H1B visas were intended to allow highly educated and qualified workers to work in the US, for a wage in par with local similarly qualified workers. Such people are in short supply worldwide. The problem with Infosys is that it tended to neither bring in highly qualified workers, nor pay them comparably to the US market.

makrakamar 9y ago
There are smart Indians and dumb Americans, and also the other way around, but that is less relevant in this case. How will Donald Trump force American employers to prefer the demographic of dumb Americans to smart Indians? It is not that simple to achieve that ...

shubhamjain 9y ago

"Free Trade" is similar to freedom of speech. While arbitrary checks are damaging, there have to be rules to inhibit the abuse. "Let the market run free and everything will be right" sounds good in theory, but that implies that we will be better off without anti-trust laws, and minimum wage rules. In that case, what would stop companies from colluding to fix prices? It's easy to derive another conclusion from your premise. It'll create market inefficiency, which will allow other promising companies to compete, which can potentially raise the quality of the end-result. Possibly, Infosys' customers could be better served by more competent engineering force.

hackuser 9y ago
> "Let the market run free and everything will be right" sounds good in theory, but that implies that we will be better off without anti-trust laws, and minimum wage rules. I agree; it should not be taken to an extreme and I didn't mean it in an ideological sense. But there is value to 'free' market competition; it's a useful tool and also provides freedom, in the sense of liberty, a core value of our society. Government intimidation of businesses is almost always a bad solution to the problems; law and regulation are democratic and much more just. Infosys isn't the first - remember the businesses whom Trump claims to have intimidated about their factory locations. > It'll create market inefficiency, which will allow other promising companies to compete, which can potentially raise the quality of the end-result. Fundamentally, that's not the result of inefficiency. It's called "inefficient" because it costs more for worse outcomes. It's a very predictable, well-tested outcome.

ENGNR 9y ago

Sometimes ideas go a bit too far beyond useful and need to be pulled back, adjusted and then moved forward again. For example it's great the labor can move freely between borders at the senior level, but is it really desirable for seniors to compete with juniors? Should companies make a profit from arbitrage between the bargaining power of someone on a temporary visa vs a permanent visa? It seems like an arbitrary and not very useful divide that has a very real market effect

devdas 9y ago
So allow proper freedom of movement and juniors can compete with juniors.

rodionos 9y ago

The 'dislike', as you put it, is more based on their gaming the H1-B system. It's much less caused by RIFs associated with outsourcing per se. Unfair competition in free markers makes people conclude that the system is setup against them.

pandaman 9y ago

Border control is literally the purview of the USG. States do not have this power. Businesses even less so. The precedent had been set in 1865. Business are still free to make a decision to be subject of the law or to GTFO (e.g. take the business to a country, which allows uncontrolled immigration).

product50 9y ago

Seriously, shut up. Infosys has only 1 agenda and strategy - to differentiate based on cost based on low wage workers it is able to hire in India. Because of companies like them, H1 visas themselves are so scarce these days. These companies apply for visas in bulk, pay just over prevailing wage, get their employees to come to US (often displacing higher paid US employees) etc. It is honestly a shame that US allowed this happen for so many years. Think about so many highly qualified international candidates/students who aren't able to secure their H1 visa because companies like Infosys chose to install their $60k worker in US. I have no sympathy at all for them. India is free to reciprocate but I seriously doubt there could be a situation where workers in India are paid more than their American counterparts for it to have any tangible impact.

dang 9y ago
> Seriously, shut up. It breaks the site guidelines to post uncivilly and we ban accounts that do it, so please don't. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
- product50 9y ago
  Sorry. I apologize to the original poster too. Just that I have one a couple of friends who had to leave US after their graduation, even after they secured good jobs, because of visa lottery. So, sometimes, it is difficult for me maintain decorum in my comments.

digitalzombie 9y ago

Free market and Free trade doesn't make it no border or no country. USA is still a country and they can impose certain thing to their advantage if they want to. If they wish to prioritize their citizens first then so be it. Also the main point is the abusive H-1B Visa. It is not free market when foreign workers cannot negotiate wage between companies. American citizens cannot compete against a foreign workers when the foreign workers cannot shop for salary. It's corporate slavery. > All that will result is moving jobs back and forth not to increase productivity and find market efficiencies, but for political reasons. It will create market inefficiencies, which could (for example) raise costs for Infosys customers (including U.S. customers), reduce Infosys' overall employment, reduce profit for Infosys shareholders, and reduce overall productivity for the economies involved. > It's surprising how quickly the terms "free market" and "free trade" have disappeared from HN. You're really just economic arm chairing. You harp such libertarian things but you don't address the core issue. H1-B visa and those people inabilities to negotiate wage which artificially lower Americans salary (my salary, I've seen it first hand and I've heard from it from my buddies). Hell I don't even know if you know the issue at all other than using this to harp about libertarian idealism.

CriticalSection 9y ago

> Do we want politicians making decisions for businesses and controlling the free market? So a visa only available to workers with a certain skill set that chained them to companies is the free market? > It's surprising how quickly the terms "free market" and "free trade" have disappeared from HN. Because a phrase like "free market" is propaganda and meaningless. That the word free is attached to it is part of the propaganda element, what's the alternative, an unfree market? And the word market is the meaningless. How is a market selling radishes in the USA for dollars today different than a market selling radishes in the USSR for rubles in 1951? They're the same thing. What's different is production, namely who controlled it - in the USA, production is overwhelmingly owned and controlled by heirs who do not work and who spend their days jetting to things like the Fyre Festival in the Bahamas - in the USSR production was not controlled by that class.

Terr_ 9y ago
> Because a phrase like "free market" is propaganda and meaningless. Well, if not propaganda, at least ambiguous, yeah. Adding on to that: If there's any group that distrusts the modifier "free", it's techies who've seen enough open-source stuff to remember "free as in beer" versus "free as in speech".

nvarsj 9y ago

You're being downvoted, but I think you raise some some good points since a lot of people believe what you're saying. I think the main misconception is that there is a "free market". The US government, and most governments around the world, have been heavily interventionist since at least WWII. This was born of necessity - the Great Depression was largely the outcome of capitalism left unchecked. After WWII the U.S. economy was in tatters. Truman and Eisenhower both took very aggressive interventionist policies to keep the economy afloat. Similarly, with the cold war, the U.S. invested heavily in basic research, much of which is the basis for the tech industry as we know it. This economic policy hasn't changed much since WWII. Most industry in the U.S. has been subsidised. Most of U.S. foreign policy has revolved around protecting U.S. interests - which is our economy, things like our energy sector and interests in farmland in places like Brazil. Agribusiness still gets huge subsidies, making Mexican farmers unable to compete, leading a large part to the poor conditions in our neighboring country and the bleed over effects here. And on and on. A "free market" is a complete illusion. Globalisation was just another means to promote economic interests. It was nothing to do with some free market ideal, outside of propaganda. It was a means to exploit cheap labor in other countries to the benefit of our own economy. Unfortunately, it is mostly to the benefit of white collar jobs and corporate interests. Unchecked globalisation has decimated the working class in the U.S. and much of Europe, and also cost us generations of knowledge on producing goods. Infosys is another example of this - it hits a bit closer to home for us programmers. Fortunately engineering is not so easy to offshore or replace with cheap labour, as it requires highly trained people. And demand outstrips supply. If offshoring had worked, we would all be a lot more unhappy about the effects of globalisation.

hackuser 9y ago
I agree with much of what you say. Most entertaining to me is that I'm the one who used to post such things on HN. It's amazing how quickly the pendulum has swung from extreme libertarian to progressive left. Personally, I think any ideology is dangerous. The "free market" should be a tool - good at some things, bad at others - and not an ideological dogma. I don't think it works well when enterprises cannot fail, a necessary part of the free market; so public safety, health care, basic utilities (e.g. water), etc. aren't good problems on which to apply the free market tool. It's also not useful for goods that shouldn't be distributed based on ability to pay, such as basic infrastructure (roads, phone, Internet), education, basic nutrition or health care. But it is an excellent tool for many purposes, and has a moral basis - it provides for the liberty of the business owners to do what they want with their property. I didn't agree when it was a dogma, and I don't agree that it's unimportant. It's essential. > Globalisation was just another means to promote economic interests. It was nothing to do with some free market ideal I strongly disagree. Free trade is a fundamental of free market economics, in theory and reality. It's just interference in the free market, this time at an international border instead of inside it (consider: would it be different if it happened at U.S. state borders? Urban borders?). If I'm making cars and must pay more for worse steel, simply because the worse steel plant is in one location and the better one in another, that wastes economic resources: It wastes the car manufacturer's money, which could go to something more useful such as more jobs, better cars, or payments to shareholders; it wastes the car buyer's money, which could have purchased a better car (i.e., with better steel); it wastes much of the resources put into the inferior steel plant, which could go to more productive uses (look up comparative advantage); and it deprives a productive enterprise, the better steel plant, of resources that it fairly won on merit in the marketplace. The fact is that the better steel plant uses the money more efficiently, freeing up for better uses the extra money that would be consumed making bad steel and funding the people who built the better mousetrap. You probably want your mousetrap to succeed on its merits, not on whether the President happens to like you. But there is a serious issue with the free market's (including free trade's) impact on labor. My way of looking at it is that capital can move much more quickly than labor: A factory can move much more quickly than its workers can (either to the new factory or to equivalent jobs). The economy is there to serve people, so that should be addressed. > The US government, and most governments around the world, have been heavily interventionist since at least WWII. This was born of necessity - the Great Depression was largely the outcome of capitalism left unchecked. After WWII the U.S. economy was in tatters. Truman and Eisenhower both took very aggressive interventionist policies to keep the economy afloat. While I agree with much of your point, parts of that history are time-shifted. The Great Depression began in 1929 and FDR took office in 1933. That's (roughly) when the heavy intervention began, and it took place until the end of WWII (1945) - though much of the intervention during WWII was for a different reason, to use the nation's economic resources for war materials. Post-WWII (though maybe not the next day) the U.S. economy was robust. The 1950s, including under Eisenhower, were possibly the greatest economic boom in U.S. history, and it continued until roughly the 1970s. Heavy regulation, intervention and taxes - though not at the scale of the Great Depression - which continued until the early 1980s, was not due to economic necessity, but possibly due to a belief in democratic government.