8 ms·

I think that this is a good example of how racism, conscious and unconscious is making us worse at predicting the future. Ten years ago, so many Americans were

• eurticket 9y ago
  > I think that this is a good example of how racism, conscious and unconscious is making us worse at predicting the future. Ten years ago, so many Americans were making jokes about poor quality Indian code That statement is racist
• bruxis 9y ago
  In the tech sector at least, the relative salaries of employees located in India is still significantly lower than those in most America metropolitan locations. This overall reduced cost to a company is significant enough to invest in the market. As India is still considered a developing country, the quality of life, while debatable, would be considered a downgrade for many who could potentially be poached from other regions.
  • timthelion 9y ago
    "the quality of life, while debatable, would be considered a downgrade for many who could potentially be poached from other regions". Why would it be a downgrade. If they paid an American $120k a year to live in Bangalore, that would buy the American a nice villa, pay for several servants, and allow for frequent travel. In SF, that same money gets you a shoe-box apartment.
    • burger_moon 9y ago
      I guess you could also use that money to buy a diesel generator so you don't suffer from the daily power outages and you can buy a great water filtration system so you don't have to worry about ever drinking unclean water either.
      • iamnewhereqwer 9y ago
        Have you been to Bangalore?
        • as1mov 9y ago
          I live in Bangalore and I'd say he's correct. Bangalore might be better compared to other Indian cities, but nowhere near the level of a American city. There are issues with power outages, water quality/shortage, absurd traffic jams where you'll be stranded for hours, costly real estate and even rent.
      • whydoudodis 9y ago
        Much of Bangalore and modern Indian cities are almost at par with San Francisco as far as Infrastructure goes. How do I know this? I travel to India 3 times a year for work.
        • godzilla82 9y ago
          Sorry you are so wrong. What do you consider infrastructure? I have lived in the bay area and in Bangalore, I have no idea how you can even compare them in terms of roads, city planning, utilities agencies, Civic agencies etc. I think the exchange rate of your country's currency allows you to stay at top tier places when you visit India, that's why you'd experience India differently than Indians.
          • timthelion 9y ago
            Living in Prague, I visited the Bay Area recently. I've never felt more like I was in a 3rd world country. Not even when I was in the norther Czech Republic which is in REALLY bad shape. I mean, have you been to oakland? The place looks like a war zone.
  • eighthnate 9y ago
    > This overall reduced cost to a company is significant enough to invest in the market. Tech companies are especially inclined or incentivized to offshore work because their highest cost/liability sinks are their employees. Other sectors, a significant portion of their costs/liabilities are equipment, supplies, etc. Tech industry is unique in that their employees are their biggest liabilities. I know that tech companies have been struggling the past decade+ on trying to rein in their employee costs. HR departments have trying hard to lower employee costs. The move to bring in more women and minorities into tech is a commendable goal by FB, GOOGL and the tech industry, but it's also driven by rising employee costs. It's not spoken about widely and openly but these companies are desperate to get control over rising salaries/costs in the industry. Diversity is a great way to maintain and lower employee costs that have political/social benefits. Another way to lower costs is offshoring, but that has a lot of political/social costs. But profits are profits and costs are costs. The industry isn't going to stop offshoring because of bad publicity given how much they stand to gain.
• timthelion 9y ago
  As an example of this racism, I'd use this comment from the article: "It often takes 2 and sometimes 3 Indian employees to perform the role of the North America diluting the savings." https://nyti.ms/2yxCQGX https://nyti.ms/2yxCQGX
  • holydude 9y ago
    I did not even want to comment but I have to. You are very xenophobic towards americans. Every developed rich nation has this attitude when it comes to outsourcing and offshoring. But all of it is just anecdotal evidence (it goes both ways).You are not only forgetting about how economics work but also evidently omitting how that happened that US is so rich and can afford paying such salaries. I really do not want to elaborate more but todays tech companies create such huge social disparities in India that literally everyone wants to work in IT just to uplift himself from "3rd world poor" to EE standards.
    • gourabmi 9y ago
      Let's not bring "disparity" into the picture after Nov 8, 2016 :P
    • timthelion 9y ago
      I am "xenophobic"? I was born in America and lived there the first 18 years of my life. I'm trying to not merely generalize, and therefore I went out of my way to cite an actual example of the attitude in question.
  • saint_fiasco 9y ago
    I am a foreigner who works for an American customer and I freely admit that I am not as productive as one of their in-house developers. This is because of things like communication delays, lack of documentation (of both their code and their business logic and practices) and generally the overhead of being in a separate team. Now that IBM has more people in India than in the US, maybe they will find that they face the opposite problem: US workers will have to adapt to their Indian counterparts instead of the other way around, so it will be more productive to hire an additional Indian than an additional American.
• gourabmi 9y ago
  Just a thought about the "huge" salary difference. Are you taking the Purchasing Power Parity(PPP) into account? I know that PPP is too macro for comparing very specific cases but it does steer the discussion in the right direction. Let's say, an engineer's monthly salary is $10,000 in the US and he can afford X level of arbitrary "comforts in life". To be able to afford the same X level of arbitrary "comforts of life" in India, he'd need just $3000 - $3500. These numbers are for illustration purposes only. Actuals will vary. of course.
  • zitterbewegung 9y ago
    Companies try to do that in America where they justify your income based on the fact you live in an area where you have high PPP. (Urbana,IL vs Palo ALto,CA) That doesn't make it right to do or that this behavior will get the high quality talent pool every company says they will hire. So why do you think that it will work in this case?
  • QAPereo 9y ago
    That assumes the person in question wants to live in India, not save to leave India.
  • 31reasons 9y ago
    No amount of salary will give you clean air and tidy streets. Some people will just prefer that as part of their package. But I guess few months / years of experience won't hurt westerners.
  • cybernytrix 9y ago
    When you talk about PPP, keep in mind to factor in housing and other modern lifestyle conveniences. These are very very expensive if you price it as a percentage of your salary. Even in the Bay Area, a Home is still 5-6X annual income of a typical software engineer. In India, it is more like 10-15X.
    • davesque 9y ago
      Sure, but aren't basic necessities less expensive in India?
• tryingagainbro 9y ago
  Racism isn't based on facts. BUT, Indians and [insert third world country citizens] do great--in a country like USA. Question: Now IBM charges probably $300/hour per programmer. Even if it is $100 and I understand that not every hour is billed, but why isn't IBM making way more money given Indian wages?
  • logfromblammo 9y ago
    Every Indian I have worked with in the US has been reasonably competent or better. Every Indian I have worked with remotely from India has been worse than useless. This suggests the hypothesis that the problem is with the work culture, rather than intrinsic to the workers. And that suggests that IBM is not making more money because IBM's work culture has not adapted well to changes in the global economy. It may be that they have shifted to India workers because they are no longer capable of monetizing their workers to an extent great enough to pay competitive salaries in the US, rather than some factor resulting from their reliance on India. It could also be both, creating a vicious feedback cycle. In short, problem is that IBM is IBM, not that IBM is full of Indians.
    • flachsechs 9y ago
      the problem is brain drain. asia does "send their best" because the US only accepts the best from asia. having oceans between you allows you to be picky.
• schnevets 9y ago
  Let's not forget a Western stereotype from 10 years ago: the deprecated specialist. Since the 80s, IBM has had a lot of bloat from poorly managed technologists who owned "the JDBC-based plugin for integrating AIX-based Lotus Notes servers with a COBOL-based mainframe that is only used by JP Morgan and the state government of Ohio". Despite the risk, it's easier to toss these responsibilities to a junior-level developer overseas than to maintain a 20-year veteran in the New York office.
  • snambi 9y ago
    Most junior developers will not even know that getting into a dead end job such as these are the end of their career. Sad!
    • kd0amg 9y ago
      On the other hand, they've probably had a lot more early exposure to the idea that one is better off changing jobs every few years. After having three jobs in ten years instead of one, they're much less likely to be stuck with a non-transferable skillset.
      • snambi 9y ago
        So, you are saying that maintaining, some shit code written in the 70s and maintained by 10s of enterprise programmers, will result in better experience?
• tapatio 9y ago
  IBM is innovative? Lol.
  • gaius 9y ago
    They were once... They invented entire industries single-handed once. Now they are just trading on their old reputation, which they haven't deserved for over a decade now.
    • tapatio 9y ago
      Agreed.
• maxxxxx 9y ago
  I'll probably get in trouble for this but from my experience even in the US majority-Indian teams prefer hiring Indians.
  • throwaway0929 9y ago
    I guess that's because we get more Indian referrals from a team with more Indians. At least my current team is dominantly Indian because of this reason. Also, I personally feel there is fundamental difference is how Indians interview the candidates. Indian interviewers usually try to identify the weakness of a candidate (if there is a fullstack opening and the candidate's strength is more on the backend, the interviewer leans more towards frontend to identify the weaknesses of a candidate). Non-Indian interviewers most try to find the strengths of a candidate. When I attend interviews and see a panel with Indian names, I know that those slots suck. Of course exceptions apply for everything..just my observation being Indian working in Indian teams..
  • jrs95 9y ago
    This is pretty much true of any group, it would be absurd to deny it.
    • iamnewhereqwer 9y ago
      I'll probably get in trouble but russians don't like to hire russians.
      • maxxxxx 9y ago
        Discriminating against Russians is OK. No worries :-)
        • potlee 9y ago
          Technically this is true, sadly. Nationalities are not a protected group.
          • 9y ago
• jrs95 9y ago
  It's not like the stereotype is entirely fabricated. This was created by how Indian workers were used by corporations -- to cut labor costs without much regard to the quality of work. If they're doing the same thing in their Indian offices, it's not going to do them any good in the long run.
• Mikeb85 9y ago
  It's not racism, it's the fact that India's tech sector came up so quickly, there were so many engineers, probably not all with the same level of training, that lots of code probably was crap. Not because Indians can't code, but because the industry wasn't as developed as elsewhere. Obviously that can change over time, and it has. > This racism is again mirrored in the huge salary difference. Are those Indian workers really worth so much less? Corporations pay people what they'll accept. Since many Indians are essentially doing salary arbitrage between what they'd make in India and the US, they'll accept less. Also, cost of living in India is much lower. Literally none of what you've explained here is a result of racism, just economics.
• atarian 9y ago
  >Ten years ago, so many Americans were making jokes about poor quality Indian code and Indian accents. The idea of Indians actually working innovative jobs seemed laughable to many Americans. As someone who grew up in America during that time, this is the exact opposite that I was told by the media and teachers. We were taught that Indians were just as effective (if not more) than people working in the US and that we shouldn't select jobs that will be outsourced in the future (like programming). In fact computer science enrollment in many colleges were at an all-time low during that time because of outsourcing fear. So I completely disagree with your generalization that many Americans thought Indians were worse at programming.
  • tspike 9y ago
    This mirrors my experience. When I enrolled in a CS masters in 2006, I was repeatedly questioned why I would enter the field when all those jobs would be going to India.
    • gaius 9y ago
      Around that time I was one of 6000 or so laid off and the work sent offshore, at a financial services company. Anyone who'd lived and worked in that period will have seen their or their friends or colleague's jobs at risk for the same.
  • jordanb 9y ago
    Yeah 2002-2005 or so the conventional wisdom is that there wouldn't be software written in America anymore -- that companies were going to beat a path to Asia just like they'd done in textiles and furniture. Economists explained that software is a highly "tradeable good" and Asia -- especially India -- was filled with millions of highly educated cheap programmers. Given that the number of people employed in software in America has remained constant since 2000, and that wages are about where they were then too, I think the evidence is that there has been a substantial "pressure release valve" effect going on. So while the most dire predictions of the 2000s haven't come true, it's also true that the confident optimism of the 1990s ill advised. I would say that software development has been good to me so far as a career, but I still think I would hesitate to encourage a young person in America to pursue it.
• padiyar83 9y ago
  >> By not paying a competitive salary, those IBM offices in India are lacking the deep experience of western programmers. 1. IBM offices and most multinationals do pay competitive salary in India. We have the same problem with retaining talent in India that we have in US. Its hard to retain good programmers. 2.Thanks to US immigration system, you do find a lot of folks with deep experience working for firms in US for years return back to India. They carry with them the best practices that they learnt in US. Some of these people also attend US universities. 3. At least the big fives (I don't know about IBM) have consistent coding and code review standards across geographies and use similar frameworks, deployment and monitoring tool chains. So there is not as big of an impact as you think on coding standards across geographies, be it Dublin, Sydney or Bangalore. It usually tends to be the same.
  • chrshawkes 9y ago
    But those policies derived from American companies. Say Indian Programmers takes those policies and apply them, will they become the next trend setters in the entire IT industry or will smaller engineering companies continue to set the trends and standards in the USA? I'm still banking on American workers to prove these companies wrong via innovation from within our borders, boycotting software companies who offshore American innovation and unionize or something to that effect to protect American workers here. My thoughts are not about race, creed, religion or anything against India or Indian Programmers, it's about protecting American workers for American families here and in the future.
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
• temp-dude-87844 9y ago
  Taking the commentary in this direction is unneccessary. In the 90s, the rise of outsourcing originating from the US and the rise of US-based H-1B-farms raised valid questions about the difference in production quality (in the historic, 'what-kind'-ness sense of the word); the wages paid in foreign countries with lower prevailing wages were predictably lower, as otherwise offshoring would have made little financial sense, and importing exceptional talent from overseas was always an option for those willing to pay for exceptional talent. IBM and other US firms do in fact pay locally competitive and generous (but not outrageous) salaries in India, as well as other foreign talent hotspots like Romania and Estonia.
• pavanky 9y ago
  > Ten years ago, so many Americans were making jokes about poor quality Indian code and Indian accents. If you thin this is 10 years ago, you should watch some threads here and on /r/programming about people on H1b visas.
  • flarg 9y ago
    I've actually worked with and managed international teams for a number of major consultancy companies and outside of silicon valley I don't see much difference in skillsets and proficiency between the US, Europe and India.
    • e59d134d 9y ago
      Thank you. This always bothered me as someone with Indian background. It seems like some programmer make assumptions about my code and I have to do a lot more to gain acceptance in some companies/teams. But on other hand, I have a theory. Indian firms write a lot more code. Their code quality distribution probably is same as any other group but since there is more code, a large percentage of overall bad code comes from India. It is kind of like some teams in a large organization write a lot of code but they are the one with the most bugs and they get punished. Another team that rarely has bugs but they don't write as much as code as others and are rewarded for introducing least number of bugs in production.
      • t1o5 9y ago
        I will chip in for what I feel about the supposedly bad code quality problem. Most of the US firms which outsources to India is looking for work to be done in an unreasonable amount of time. To make my point clear, if a story takes 8 points, it should be done in India for 3 points and at 1/4 the cost & hence. Both firms (outsourcer & outsourcee) are to be blamed for this (to look good on their Q4 reports). Not the programmer.
    • 794CD01 9y ago
      Right, which is why the people who assume there is one are racists.
• IntelMiner 9y ago
  >Ten years ago, so many Americans were making jokes about poor quality Indian code and Indian accents It's hard to not fall into this trap in certain fields of IT. To the point it's almost not regarded as racist Though as a Systems Admin, outsourcing is considered more of a joke than anything. The lowest bidding contractor wins, and the people they hire are absolutely abysmal. If contracting companies did the same thing, but hiring a 100% "American workforce" (or British/Australia/etc), and they did an equally mediocre job, I'd suspect the derision would shift accordingly There's a lot of smart Indian people. They're no "better" or "worse" than the rest of us. They're just a larger sample size that get tarred with that brush
  • gaius 9y ago
    Right - the factor is not anyone's race, it's the concept of outsourcing itself.
• pjmlp 9y ago
  There are quite a few European consultancy companies that are actually owned by Indian multi-nationals. They don't poach devs, rather acquire a full development unit.
• tdeck 9y ago
  I don't think IBM is a good example, because they've been exactly the kind of low-quality Infosys style body shop that people make jokes about. The only difference is that IBM is mining out their reputation (built up all through the 20th century up until the 1990s) in order to charge inflated prices to clueless enterprise customers. Remember, they were the ones that charged the TSA $1.4 million for a left/right randomizer app. If you've ever used a piece of 21st century IBM software, you probably don't remember the experience fondly. There are companies doing great work in India (Zoho comes to mind). Why would anyone want to use IBM as the representative of Indian innovation?
• pathseeker 9y ago
  >This racism is again mirrored in the huge salary difference. Are those Indian workers really worth so much less? Nobody anywhere in the world is paid what they are "worth". They are paid whatever is necessary to keep them at the company. In other words, as an employee the competition is other employees in the same market. It has nothing to do with racism, that's just intellectually lazy. >By not paying a competitive salary, those IBM offices in India are lacking the deep experience of western programmers. Paying a higher salary doesn't suddenly make the Indian workers smarter. It just makes the job more attractive to where the stronger experience is (currently the US).
• taysic 9y ago
  > Ten years ago, so many Americans were making jokes about poor quality Indian code and Indian accents. The idea of Indians actually working innovative jobs seemed laughable to many Americans. But there wasn't actually strong evidence that Indians were less good at doing cutting edge research. Where are you getting this info from? I have grown up in America and never heard of this.
• abiox 9y ago
  > Ten years ago, so many Americans were making jokes about poor quality Indian code did they? either way, i think you're equivocating. it's not a "racial" or "ethnic" connotated "indian code" that some people sometimes discuss. it's more in the domain of economics, geopolitics and "IT body shops". everyone has seen brilliant indians accomplishing great things. > The idea of Indians actually working innovative jobs seemed laughable to many Americans. this seems like a strawman. ten years ago, people thought IT in america would cease to exist in any meaningful capacity because of outsourcing. > This racism is again mirrored in the huge salary difference. Are those Indian workers really worth so much less? this doesn't make much sense to me, so some clarification would help. you cannot directly compare an absolute number in two economies. you can't even meaningfully do it between (say) san fransciso and knoxville. > One thing is certain to me, that low salary is hurting IBM. By not paying a competitive salary, those IBM offices in India are lacking the deep experience of western programmers. again, you cannot pay a salary that is absurdly huge and completely incongruent with the local economy - be it within india, the us or any other place. at least, not on a large scale. if you payed a wage translated directly from san francisco to india, your purchasing power would be massively inflated over the vast majority of people with "normal" salaries. it also means that the burdens and inefficiencies of international work would not be offset, and so IBM and others probably wouldn't even be there in the first place. > In the pictures, everyone there is Indian, and that hurts the company as a whole. Diversity is more than just not being all white. Diversity means not being exclusive to any background and ethnicity. it's india. talking about "diversity" and "white" as you are doing is just... well, it seems rather ignorant, parochial and prescriptive. > Edit: I have yet to hear of anyone (European or American) from the sectors I work in, being poached to work in India. unless you're planning on staying permanently, it's not an economically advantageous thing to do. not necessarily because of the salary relative to local norms, but rather when you return to a the US or Europe or wherever, your savings accrued will be less than if you had stayed.