7 ms·

Top global IT firms have more staff in India than home nations

46 points by indus 13y ago

cs702 13y ago
Companies like IBM are "American" only in the sense that (1) legally they are domiciled in a US state such as, say, Delaware; (2) physically they are headquartered in or near a major US airport; and (3) their shares are listed in a US stock exchange. In most other ways, these companies transcend national boundaries. For example, many of them book a substantial portion of revenues through complex networks of "offshore" subsidiaries to avoid paying corporate taxes in any jurisdiction.[1] -- [1] For example, see http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/04/28/business/Double-Irish-With-A-Dutch-Sandwich.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/04/28/business/Doubl... -- Edit: deleted reference to "Accenture," which is apparently legally domiciled in Ireland (thanks mschaef).
- Retric 13y ago
  How and where they pay taxes is a vary important distinction.
- mschaef 13y ago
  Accenture is technically "Irish". It used to be "Bermudan". In either case, they have so many employees in so many countries, it's hard to imagine pinning them down to a single home country.
  - xradionut 13y ago
    Us old timers remember them as "Andersen Consulting", the folks that got paid by our C-levels to drive the company into the ground...
- mathattack 13y ago
  Yes - they are very much multinationals both in customers and employees. I think the true sense of their being American (and this does include Accenture) is that is where they were founded, and did much of their early growth.
- skrebbel 13y ago
  IBM and Accenture are American in that that's where they were founded. This matters a lot: company culture is very different to change, and with the exception of departments that came forth of an acquisition, you can find elements of the founder's culture in most large multinationals. Of course there are exceptions, as there always are, but I guess that from an employee's perspective, IBM looks and feels like an American company very much. Same holds for how sales teams interact with customers. I would be interested in a comparison between experiences of Indian employees of Oracle and SAP, for instance. I have no clue, but I bet that it's tangible.
- hga 13y ago
  In all fairness, IBM is short for International Business Machines. Note how often they get dinged for their German branch "cooperating" with the Nazis (as opposed to ending up in the concentration camps themselves?).
geekam 13y ago
Just for your reference: 1 lakh (or lac) = 100,000 1 crore = 10,000,000
axyjo 13y ago
How about as a percent of the country's total population? India's certainly a larger country population-wise.
linux_devil 13y ago
Sample set is biased , and upon that it's quality which matters not quantity. While considering top firms like Google, Facebook,Linkedin, Twitter etc. , it turns out to be other way round. There is lot of scope of improvements , especially to boost start-up culture here in India.
anuragramdasan 13y ago
>> "There is a surplus at the entry level and salaries at this level have stabilized." That's a nice euphemism for "there are a lot of fresh graduates whom we really don't have to pay much". Considering that, the initial statement "It's a measure of India's strength in software services and the number of engineers it produces that some of the world's largest IT companies have more employees in India now than in their home countries." really isn't something to be very proud of.
- linux_devil 13y ago
  Can't agree more
gopalv 13y ago
How this is a big surprise? If the man you're looking for is one in a million, we've probably got a thousand of them for you to pick from. But I think there needs to be a defense made about cheap indian labour & why it works for american firms (more than the french or germans). I'm sitting in Bangalore right now and I can see why this happened. We all speak English, we grew up watching Simpsons and can quote Friends episodes by events. We're immersed in the culture so deep that visiting your parents is a culture shock. And the vast numbers are because there are a lot of bad engineers. There are a lot of good engineers - but a far lower fraction than in most other parts of the world. But if you are an employer who's hiring locally instead of contracting work to a cheap contractor, you can spend some time culling the bad ones and then the good ones were truly great value for money. My first job paid 250$ a month - for that pittance I was debugging ARM microkernels on an Ericsson phone. And that did pay the bills because of a few other advantages I had growing up - I had a cheap tax-payer funded education, but it was truly remarkable one beyond the textbooks. My CS grad education cost approx 500$ for 4 years, had good teachers. The tenured professors were great, particularly graph theory & compilers - awesome COBOL teacher, whose lessons are why I'm finding hadoop to be very interesting to work on today. The labs were good with mostly SunOS/Netware boxes & a few Xilinx boards donated by alumni. I even had to do 8086 assembly by hand in hex for my lab exams. My classmates included children of cab drivers, college professors, household help and of the filthy rich - we weren't equal outside college, but in class we were on the same level. Social class got scrubbed out of our egos and talent showed no correlation. And the EE course had 17 boys for approx 160 girls. But that said all of us were the top ~1% of the state educational system after the math-heavy entrance tests (I had to get a double digit rank in approx 5-6 million people, to qualify). Most of us spoke English as a first language (at least as good as one), nearly all of us bilingual (and not in the same languages) who were used to our English being misunderstood. This was something we all learnt to realize & work on our communication. On top of that my college had an FSF chapter (http://www.cetafi.net/modules.php?name=News&file=print&sid=147 http://www.cetafi.net/modules.php?name=News&file=print&sid=1...), I volunteered there for 2 months after college and even spent 2 years on an open-source project. I might have been good engineer material to begin with. But that cheap and rather real-life education I got made me competitive on factors beyond economics. And I assume there are at least a few like me around for the employers who want to dig through the chaff.
ffrryuu 13y ago
Absolute advantage as work here.
eriksank 13y ago
India would have the talent and the headcount to be anything it wanted to be, if it were not for the one missing ingredient: the ability to leave people's freedom alone. Many of factories in China would now be in India. Larry Page is in the market for another location. Mark Zuckerberg undoubtedly too. If India painstakingly managed to develop the ability to rein in their paperwork kingdom, the so-called "license Raj", Silicon Valley would have moved there a long time ago already. Until now, India just can't. It is simply impossible to reduce the incessant harassments of their bureaucracy. They will terrorize everybody. At the same time nobody else will ever agree to put up with them and be terrorized. They will not move there. They will keep flying out the Indians instead.
- b0rka 13y ago
  The bureaucracy has indeed scared away a lot of foreign interest in the country.
  - AsymetricCom 13y ago
    Which is just fine because globalism would rape their country otherwise.
brianwawok 13y ago
What is the # of "good" developers in India? What is the # of "bad" developers in India? What is the # of "good" developers in the US? What is the # of "bad" developers in the US? This is a lot more of an interesting question.
- Mikeb85 13y ago
  In terms of sheer numbers India may very well be ahead in both categories...
nish1500 13y ago
It is the Indian mindset to solve every problem by hiring more people. Thanks to the shitload of cheap, unskilled engineers, this dream is economical. A friend had contracted one such company to overhaul his website. He has been co-ordinating with 4 - 5 people in the company, and it's been over a month, and these people can't write a simple 301 redirection without breaking his whole site. My friend happens to be a non-technical guy, so he can't see their shit. Sad.
- kamakazizuru 13y ago
  seeing this from an onshore perspective of an IT company - it's really not about "solving every problem by hiring people being an Indian mentality" - it's actually a caveat of the way the IT Services industry works. IT companies are at the end of the day more or less commodity traders. what is the commodity? Skilled (arguably) labour. The more you sell - the more you make - I've seen companies sell x+50% heads for a project that required realistically maybe even less than x. But if you're making 20% margin on each head - and the company buying the effort is still saving a few million over doing the same work onshore - everyone is happy.
u64type 13y ago
Now China has taken manufacturing jobs, and India is taking IT jobs.
clinq 13y ago
I bet even in the home nation, there are more Indian staff than native ones.
wbsun 13y ago
Wow, another 'China' is going to steal more jobs. lol
- kamakazizuru 13y ago
  this is not new - china has maybe been more in the spotlight - IT has been outsourced to India atleast for 2 decades now - those jobs are already "stolen" if you will. The real story if you care to put aside your bias though - is that a bulk of what these guys are doing is IT grunt work - stuff thats in IT terms "menial" - solving simple tickets, implementing basic CRUD stuff etc. Stuff that a good programmer in the West - wouldn't want to do - and would honestly be too expensive to do. Until you figure out how to automate it - you do it where it's cheap and labour is ready. Econ 101.
  - gaius 13y ago
    You're missing the second order effects. In the old days the route into the industry for non-traditional candidates was to start on the helpdesk or in QA and work hard and then get the nod to move across to engineering if you were good. One of the best managers I ever worked for got her start that way. But if this "menial" work is outsourced, where does that leave us in the West? Without one stream of high quality talent.
  - wbsun 13y ago
    It is not new, but it is getting worse now. The IBM case mentioned in the article is a good example. btw: most western developers also work on simple tickets and CRUD stuff, which is, ironically, the major functionality of most software.
kwanbis 13y ago
At the risk of being downvoted, my general experience with India teams is not that good. At a minimum not better than other countries workers, and in my last year experience, actually worst than non-india teams. And they don't seem to be that much cheaper. How good is it that they charge, lets say, 5 dollars an hour vs 10 dollars, if it takes them 3 times the amount of hours to do the same work? Maybe it is because each India worker is assigned to more projects than they can handle, maybe because they don't have the experience, I really don't know. Finally, their English skills are very much lacking, so that adds more time and errors to the workflow.
tn13 13y ago
Well, there is nothing surprising in it at the same time it is clearly not what that article is suggesting. -- It's a measure of India's strength in software services and the number of engineers it produces that some of the world's largest IT companies have more employees in India now than in their home countries. --

46 points by indus 13y ago

cs702 13y ago

Companies like IBM are "American" only in the sense that (1) legally they are domiciled in a US state such as, say, Delaware; (2) physically they are headquartered in or near a major US airport; and (3) their shares are listed in a US stock exchange. In most other ways, these companies transcend national boundaries. For example, many of them book a substantial portion of revenues through complex networks of "offshore" subsidiaries to avoid paying corporate taxes in any jurisdiction.[1] -- [1] For example, see http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/04/28/business/Double-Irish-With-A-Dutch-Sandwich.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/04/28/business/Doubl... -- Edit: deleted reference to "Accenture," which is apparently legally domiciled in Ireland (thanks mschaef).

Retric 13y ago
How and where they pay taxes is a vary important distinction.
mschaef 13y ago
Accenture is technically "Irish". It used to be "Bermudan". In either case, they have so many employees in so many countries, it's hard to imagine pinning them down to a single home country.
- xradionut 13y ago
  Us old timers remember them as "Andersen Consulting", the folks that got paid by our C-levels to drive the company into the ground...
mathattack 13y ago
Yes - they are very much multinationals both in customers and employees. I think the true sense of their being American (and this does include Accenture) is that is where they were founded, and did much of their early growth.
skrebbel 13y ago
IBM and Accenture are American in that that's where they were founded. This matters a lot: company culture is very different to change, and with the exception of departments that came forth of an acquisition, you can find elements of the founder's culture in most large multinationals. Of course there are exceptions, as there always are, but I guess that from an employee's perspective, IBM looks and feels like an American company very much. Same holds for how sales teams interact with customers. I would be interested in a comparison between experiences of Indian employees of Oracle and SAP, for instance. I have no clue, but I bet that it's tangible.
hga 13y ago
In all fairness, IBM is short for International Business Machines. Note how often they get dinged for their German branch "cooperating" with the Nazis (as opposed to ending up in the concentration camps themselves?).

geekam 13y ago

Just for your reference: 1 lakh (or lac) = 100,000 1 crore = 10,000,000

axyjo 13y ago

How about as a percent of the country's total population? India's certainly a larger country population-wise.

linux_devil 13y ago

Sample set is biased , and upon that it's quality which matters not quantity. While considering top firms like Google, Facebook,Linkedin, Twitter etc. , it turns out to be other way round. There is lot of scope of improvements , especially to boost start-up culture here in India.

anuragramdasan 13y ago

>> "There is a surplus at the entry level and salaries at this level have stabilized." That's a nice euphemism for "there are a lot of fresh graduates whom we really don't have to pay much". Considering that, the initial statement "It's a measure of India's strength in software services and the number of engineers it produces that some of the world's largest IT companies have more employees in India now than in their home countries." really isn't something to be very proud of.

linux_devil 13y ago
Can't agree more

gopalv 13y ago

How this is a big surprise? If the man you're looking for is one in a million, we've probably got a thousand of them for you to pick from. But I think there needs to be a defense made about cheap indian labour & why it works for american firms (more than the french or germans). I'm sitting in Bangalore right now and I can see why this happened. We all speak English, we grew up watching Simpsons and can quote Friends episodes by events. We're immersed in the culture so deep that visiting your parents is a culture shock. And the vast numbers are because there are a lot of bad engineers. There are a lot of good engineers - but a far lower fraction than in most other parts of the world. But if you are an employer who's hiring locally instead of contracting work to a cheap contractor, you can spend some time culling the bad ones and then the good ones were truly great value for money. My first job paid 250$ a month - for that pittance I was debugging ARM microkernels on an Ericsson phone. And that did pay the bills because of a few other advantages I had growing up - I had a cheap tax-payer funded education, but it was truly remarkable one beyond the textbooks. My CS grad education cost approx 500$ for 4 years, had good teachers. The tenured professors were great, particularly graph theory & compilers - awesome COBOL teacher, whose lessons are why I'm finding hadoop to be very interesting to work on today. The labs were good with mostly SunOS/Netware boxes & a few Xilinx boards donated by alumni. I even had to do 8086 assembly by hand in hex for my lab exams. My classmates included children of cab drivers, college professors, household help and of the filthy rich - we weren't equal outside college, but in class we were on the same level. Social class got scrubbed out of our egos and talent showed no correlation. And the EE course had 17 boys for approx 160 girls. But that said all of us were the top ~1% of the state educational system after the math-heavy entrance tests (I had to get a double digit rank in approx 5-6 million people, to qualify). Most of us spoke English as a first language (at least as good as one), nearly all of us bilingual (and not in the same languages) who were used to our English being misunderstood. This was something we all learnt to realize & work on our communication. On top of that my college had an FSF chapter (http://www.cetafi.net/modules.php?name=News&file=print&sid=147 http://www.cetafi.net/modules.php?name=News&file=print&sid=1...), I volunteered there for 2 months after college and even spent 2 years on an open-source project. I might have been good engineer material to begin with. But that cheap and rather real-life education I got made me competitive on factors beyond economics. And I assume there are at least a few like me around for the employers who want to dig through the chaff.

ffrryuu 13y ago

Absolute advantage as work here.

eriksank 13y ago

India would have the talent and the headcount to be anything it wanted to be, if it were not for the one missing ingredient: the ability to leave people's freedom alone. Many of factories in China would now be in India. Larry Page is in the market for another location. Mark Zuckerberg undoubtedly too. If India painstakingly managed to develop the ability to rein in their paperwork kingdom, the so-called "license Raj", Silicon Valley would have moved there a long time ago already. Until now, India just can't. It is simply impossible to reduce the incessant harassments of their bureaucracy. They will terrorize everybody. At the same time nobody else will ever agree to put up with them and be terrorized. They will not move there. They will keep flying out the Indians instead.

b0rka 13y ago
The bureaucracy has indeed scared away a lot of foreign interest in the country.
- AsymetricCom 13y ago
  Which is just fine because globalism would rape their country otherwise.

brianwawok 13y ago

What is the # of "good" developers in India? What is the # of "bad" developers in India? What is the # of "good" developers in the US? What is the # of "bad" developers in the US? This is a lot more of an interesting question.

Mikeb85 13y ago
In terms of sheer numbers India may very well be ahead in both categories...

nish1500 13y ago

It is the Indian mindset to solve every problem by hiring more people. Thanks to the shitload of cheap, unskilled engineers, this dream is economical. A friend had contracted one such company to overhaul his website. He has been co-ordinating with 4 - 5 people in the company, and it's been over a month, and these people can't write a simple 301 redirection without breaking his whole site. My friend happens to be a non-technical guy, so he can't see their shit. Sad.

kamakazizuru 13y ago
seeing this from an onshore perspective of an IT company - it's really not about "solving every problem by hiring people being an Indian mentality" - it's actually a caveat of the way the IT Services industry works. IT companies are at the end of the day more or less commodity traders. what is the commodity? Skilled (arguably) labour. The more you sell - the more you make - I've seen companies sell x+50% heads for a project that required realistically maybe even less than x. But if you're making 20% margin on each head - and the company buying the effort is still saving a few million over doing the same work onshore - everyone is happy.

u64type 13y ago

Now China has taken manufacturing jobs, and India is taking IT jobs.

clinq 13y ago

I bet even in the home nation, there are more Indian staff than native ones.

wbsun 13y ago

Wow, another 'China' is going to steal more jobs. lol

kamakazizuru 13y ago
this is not new - china has maybe been more in the spotlight - IT has been outsourced to India atleast for 2 decades now - those jobs are already "stolen" if you will. The real story if you care to put aside your bias though - is that a bulk of what these guys are doing is IT grunt work - stuff thats in IT terms "menial" - solving simple tickets, implementing basic CRUD stuff etc. Stuff that a good programmer in the West - wouldn't want to do - and would honestly be too expensive to do. Until you figure out how to automate it - you do it where it's cheap and labour is ready. Econ 101.
- gaius 13y ago
  You're missing the second order effects. In the old days the route into the industry for non-traditional candidates was to start on the helpdesk or in QA and work hard and then get the nod to move across to engineering if you were good. One of the best managers I ever worked for got her start that way. But if this "menial" work is outsourced, where does that leave us in the West? Without one stream of high quality talent.
- wbsun 13y ago
  It is not new, but it is getting worse now. The IBM case mentioned in the article is a good example. btw: most western developers also work on simple tickets and CRUD stuff, which is, ironically, the major functionality of most software.

kwanbis 13y ago

At the risk of being downvoted, my general experience with India teams is not that good. At a minimum not better than other countries workers, and in my last year experience, actually worst than non-india teams. And they don't seem to be that much cheaper. How good is it that they charge, lets say, 5 dollars an hour vs 10 dollars, if it takes them 3 times the amount of hours to do the same work? Maybe it is because each India worker is assigned to more projects than they can handle, maybe because they don't have the experience, I really don't know. Finally, their English skills are very much lacking, so that adds more time and errors to the workflow.

tn13 13y ago

Well, there is nothing surprising in it at the same time it is clearly not what that article is suggesting. -- It's a measure of India's strength in software services and the number of engineers it produces that some of the world's largest IT companies have more employees in India now than in their home countries. --