IBM Now Has More Employees in India than in the US

Megalith

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Over the last decade, IBM has shifted its center of gravity halfway around the world to India, making it a high-tech example of globalization trends: today, the company employs 130,000 people in India -- about one-third of its total work force, and more than in any other country. While other big American companies like Oracle and Dell also employ a majority of their workers outside the US, IBM is unusual because it employs more people in a single foreign country than it does at home.

The company’s employment in India has nearly doubled since 2007, even as its work force in the United States has shrunk through waves of layoffs and buyouts. Although IBM refuses to disclose exact numbers, outsiders estimate that it employs well under 100,000 people at its American offices now, down from 130,000 in 2007. Depending on the job, the salaries paid to Indian workers are one-half to one-fifth those paid to Americans, according to data posted by the research firm Glassdoor.
 
Capitalism at work.
You know what actually is capitalism? IBM is slowly going out of business. IBM has had 21 straight quarters of declining revenue because of their short sided employment practices. They have continually shipped jobs because of cost and not skills, let go people with tribal knowledge on how to do stuff and have asked the remaining employees in the US and in some cases Europe to pick up the slack for the lower skilled labor while reducing the ability to provide services to their customers. This isn't a broad comment on outsourcing either, this is specific to IBM. The shareholders haven't punished IBM for their actions and they will pay too. I vote against the current leadership every vote. Unfortunately I don't own enough shares to matter. What i can tell you is I have specifically gotten IBM banned from several companies due to their terribleness with their consulting side of the business because they are absolutely horrible and unable to operate efficiently with the same tools they are trying to get customers to buy.

I opened my remark because outsourcing isn't a function of capitalism, that is a market function. It happens under any economic system and regulations are what have impacts on it, not economic models. Example Venezuela outsources labor to run their oil fields, etc. etc. etc.
 
Well, IBM is also a fraction of the company it once was.

I've been there, I was informed my contract was going to be allowed to expire after a one month extension so I could train the Team of Indian "engineers" that was going to replace me. I told my boss to go fuck himself. Literally.

I almost threw up on the way home, I was stressed beyond comprehension. When I got there and told my wife her response was "oh thank god" and picked me up and spun me around the kitchen.

My former employers tried to coerce me to train my replacements by withholding my termination payout. They tried to sue me for failure to fulfil my contract. They lost, I sued them for stealing my money. I won, and I even got punitive damages. Something that doesn't happen very often in Canada.

Now I build log homes. Do you know how much more fun it is to build log homes than make shitty old technology limp along eternally?

Right up until you get Lyme disease anyway. This has been a really shitty summer.
 
Executives make bad decisions, need to reduce costs, replace profitable segments of your workforce with foreign workers to reduce costs, profits go down, need to reduce costs, replace profitable segments of your workforce with foreign workers to reduce costs, get a bonus for saving the company, take a long vacation, retire with a golden parachute, pretend to be shocked when IBM declares bankruptcy a few years later
 
The funny thing is that wages are rising in India due to the influx of high paying jobs(by India standards) and a shortage of qualified workers. Some US firms are moving jobs back to the US due to the costs of maintaining a workforce half way around the world and the rising India wages.

Executives make bad decisions, need to reduce costs, replace profitable segments of your workforce with foreign workers to reduce costs, profits go down, need to reduce costs, replace profitable segments of your workforce with foreign workers to reduce costs, get a bonus for saving the company, take a long vacation, retire with a golden parachute, pretend to be shocked when IBM declares bankruptcy a few years later

One needed reform is for Corporate Executives and Board member's salaries and benefits to be paid into a rolling trust with a 5 year delay on payout. If a company goes bankrupt or suffers some kind of major screw up(data breach, criminal activity, etc) that happened on the Exec's watch, the trust pays the money to the victims or shareholders instead of the Exec.
 
The funny thing is that wages are rising in India due to the influx of high paying jobs(by India standards) and a shortage of qualified workers. Some US firms are moving jobs back to the US due to the costs of maintaining a workforce half way around the world and the rising India wages.



One needed reform is for Corporate Executives and Board member's salaries and benefits to be paid into a rolling trust with a 5 year delay on payout. If a company goes bankrupt or suffers some kind of major screw up(data breach, criminal activity, etc) that happened on the Exec's watch, the trust pays the money to the victims or shareholders instead of the Exec.
Shareholder are mostly to blame when thing s go south. Sure the executive are to blame but at time their hands get ties by over reaching shareholders. Shareholder are typically the ones that are short sighted.
 

"senator man took a bribe in hand and shipped my job to new deli"

TLDR: outsourcing this is whats killing the country. while we rested on our laurels every other country has been aggressively training their populous for high tech jobs.
 
It sure felt that way when i worked there. Although the data center arm is impossible to fully replace American workers.
 
TLDR: outsourcing this is whats killing the country. while we rested on our laurels every other country has been aggressively training their populous for high tech jobs.

So the unions were right all along?

The longer I live the more I realise how incredibly wise my grandfather was.
 
Not even close. One of the reasons jobs (manufacturing) initially left this country was due to the unreasonable union demands.

It's funny you should say that since the companies with unions are the only ones that aren't farming out jobs en masse. In fact historically it's non-union companies that close and move far more than union companies.

..It's almost like there's some group of people or organisation protecting those workers' jobs..

Of course in 2017 you just throw a corrupt politician a few million dollars and he'll make it so no labour contract in the state is legally binding. Then you can move all your jobs to India without getting sued.
 
I think this may play a part in that:

20170202_STEM.jpg


For a country with a population of 323M, those are abysmal numbers and you can't really blame these companies for looking elsewhere to fill their vacancies. Even when I was in college over a decade ago, most of the students in STEM were Asian/South Asian (either American or foreign born). I see a lot of anger from white people about this issue but the fact is the vast majority of them major in liberal arts when they go to college and want to party and when the real world hits them, they make up excuses. Meanwhile the rest of the world has woken up and is hitting the STEM fields hard.
 
working for pennies a day?

i believe it.

The west have a big issue in terms of software and for that matter other more natural science oriented parts. Also why you see so many foreign people working for Microsoft and other companies at US wages.

We simply educate for something else as a primary function. Finance, humanities etc.

Just as you dont base a high education requirement workplace in a rural low density area.
 
which means they have 2.6 million people who will take what they can get paid just so they can have a job.

advantage IBM. so pennies a day.

Well India and China have a rising middle class so they are rapidly developing nations with rising wages. The US on the other hand is a nation in decline.
 
Well India and China have a rising middle class so they are rapidly developing nations with rising wages. The US on the other hand is a nation in decline.

https://www.glassdoor.ca/Salary/IBM...354.0,3_IL.4,9_IN115.htm?countryRedirect=true

software engineer makes ₹743,957 in USD that's 11,000 a year.

that's not even close to livable.

pennies a day my friend.

For a US student, there is a lot more money getting a finance job than any other type that requires a high education. So guess what the smart people pick?

https://www.theguardian.com/busines.../23/brain-drain-unproductive-financial-sector

see above.
 
What makes International Business Machines an American Company anymore? Yes, I realize they are incorporated in the US (Delaware I think) but there should be additional criteria for international companies to draw benefits of being called an "American Company" My 2 cents at least.
 
This is a chicken vs egg argument. Why go into a STEM field in this country when the Federal government is actively working against you to suppress wages and rewards companies that outsource their work to other countries? STEM fields are the hardest fields to enter because of the educational requirements and people are choosing the easier options because the risk/reward ratio is out of whack in this country. You might be lucky to even get a job in this country and once you have one -- you eventually end up in a position in which you have to train your Indian replacement. There is zero need for the H-1B visa in this country except to reduce wages but companies continue to demand that the numbers be increased. If the labor demand was high in this country for any specific skill, the free market would take care of the problem by increasing salaries to a level where supply would quickly become available. If graduates knew that there would be high demand and high salaries in a certain field when they graduated, they would naturally choose these fields of study and we wouldn't need any foreign labor within 4 years. IBM has so many Indian workers because that's the cheapest place to get them. IBM is just a hollow shell of what it once was -- it's no longer a great company.

I think this may play a part in that:

20170202_STEM.jpg


For a country with a population of 323M, those are abysmal numbers and you can't really blame these companies for looking elsewhere to fill their vacancies. Even when I was in college over a decade ago, most of the students in STEM were Asian/South Asian (either American or foreign born). I see a lot of anger from white people about this issue but the fact is the vast majority of them major in liberal arts when they go to college and want to party and when the real world hits them, they make up excuses. Meanwhile the rest of the world has woken up and is hitting the STEM fields hard.
 
There is also the problem 95% of Indian CS grads can't write code that compiles per Automata and Aspiring Minds (testing platforms that most of the software industry uses). The reason most companies moved operations overseas had to do with proximity to resources and cost of resources. Asia had very loose environmental regulations as well as resources that were far more expensive or harder to obtain in the US. Labor, while cited a lot, has very little to do with total production costs. If the cost of resources, transportation and tariffs make producing goods for the US market cheaper (like auto production), the manufactures will move production to the US. The higher cost of labor can easily be offset by automation. During the peak of low Asian wages companies were saving money on tool and machining costs by literally having people manufacture everything by hand. This resulting in high product failure rates but the "Walmart method" of producing ultra cheap products could easily absorb the high turn over rate.

As for IBM, IBM was amongst the first major companies to adopt the Investor Centric business model. Currently everything IBM does is aimed at returning value to IBM shareholders. The play so many games with their stock valuation, I couldn't tell you what the actual value of the company is. IBM moved from producing hardware and software to mostly consulting services, but then they fired most of their consultants.... so I'm not certain what IBM does anymore. They are attempting to compete against Oracle in the SaaS/PaaS market, but I don't know anyone who is seriously considering them as competition. Currently most of IBM's revenue comes from investments. Whether Watson pans out, remains to be seen, however their ability to trade well above their projected growth makes them a consistently appealing company for investors.
 
which means they have 2.6 million people who will take what they can get paid just so they can have a job.

advantage IBM. so pennies a day.

Pretty much. These companies are not outsourcing because the talent isn't here, they're outsourcing because they feel that they can get 3 engineers in India at half the cost of 1 here (talent be damned).

It's all about the profit margins. Hence why the article clearly points out that IBM has been laying people off here while hiring like crazy in India.
 
We simply educate for something else as a primary function. Finance, humanities etc.
Well, for example, we probably produce way more lawyers than anyone else. So when your company can't compete, just sue 'em.

Big problem in America is that parents tell kids that they can be anything that they want to be, so those children dream of being all kinds of fun things. Other cultures push their children to fields that are more lucrative, and of course, the classes for those will be more difficult. American kids don't wan't to do anything hard. After all, they were promised that they could do anything they wanted, and that money wasn't important. By the time reality kicks them in the ass, they're already so in debt from their time at Snob U getting that worthless degree in art history or dead language literature, that they can't afford to go back and work for a degree in something that will actually pay for itself.
 
I think this may play a part in that:

20170202_STEM.jpg


For a country with a population of 323M, those are abysmal numbers and you can't really blame these companies for looking elsewhere to fill their vacancies. Even when I was in college over a decade ago, most of the students in STEM were Asian/South Asian (either American or foreign born). I see a lot of anger from white people about this issue but the fact is the vast majority of them major in liberal arts when they go to college and want to party and when the real world hits them, they make up excuses. Meanwhile the rest of the world has woken up and is hitting the STEM fields hard.

It also depends on the quality. A lot of the STEM graduates in India lack STEM "skills." Many have problems coding as well. When I was there for a trip, a few Indian friends mentioned a very large amount of corruption in the school systems and other sectors dumbing things down.. and then you also have diploma mills where degrees are given away easily. May be similar in China. The US also has these issues but on a smaller scale I'd say. That being said, India does have plenty of good schools there with a very large amount of STEM grads. Good for them that they have so many.
 
Not surprising considering how they screw over their US employees. Many of their contracted support techs for government call centers are paid minimum wage, and don't get PTO or insurance of any kind. They get away with it because of 3rd and 4th degree contracting. They SUCK as an employer.
 
It also depends on the quality. A lot of the STEM graduates in India lack STEM "skills." Many have problems coding as well. When I was there for a trip, a few Indian friends mentioned a very large amount of corruption in the school systems and other sectors dumbing things down.. and then you also have diploma mills where degrees are given away easily. May be similar in China. The US also has these issues but on a smaller scale I'd say. That being said, India does have plenty of good schools there with a very large amount of STEM grads. Good for them that they have so many.

You know this quality argument simply does not hold up and is an excuse many US workers used in the past (e.g. Japan when it was up and coming and now China/India) as justification for not being competitive. Many tech executives have gone on record saying there aren't enough qualified US workers (keyword: qualified) because of the lack of STEM graduates. People think they can spend 4 years partying at college with a liberal arts degree and then should get paid 100k/yr because they're American and White and then reality tells them otherwise. So then these guys end up on the unemployment line or join the alt-right blaming everyone but themselves for their shortcomings.

This is a chicken vs egg argument. Why go into a STEM field in this country when the Federal government is actively working against you to suppress wages and rewards companies that outsource their work to other countries? STEM fields are the hardest fields to enter because of the educational requirements and people are choosing the easier options because the risk/reward ratio is out of whack in this country. You might be lucky to even get a job in this country and once you have one -- you eventually end up in a position in which you have to train your Indian replacement. There is zero need for the H-1B visa in this country except to reduce wages but companies continue to demand that the numbers be increased. If the labor demand was high in this country for any specific skill, the free market would take care of the problem by increasing salaries to a level where supply would quickly become available. If graduates knew that there would be high demand and high salaries in a certain field when they graduated, they would naturally choose these fields of study and we wouldn't need any foreign labor within 4 years. IBM has so many Indian workers because that's the cheapest place to get them. IBM is just a hollow shell of what it once was -- it's no longer a great company.

This is just an excuse IMO, I'm a STEM graduate and continued advancing until I had an advanced degree (M.D.) and there's nothing stopping others from doing the same thing. My parents came here as immigrants with everything working against them compared to people that have been in this country for generations:

https://www.usnews.com/info/blogs/p...o-depend-on-foreign-workers-to-fill-stem-jobs

While the 2016 STEM Index shows increases in STEM degrees granted and STEM hiring, America continues to have a shortage of STEM workers. There were 30,835 additional STEM graduates and 230,246 additional STEM jobs from 2014-2015.

"While our universities are producing more STEM graduates, many of these students are foreigners on temporary visas," said Brian Kelly, editor and chief content officer of U.S. News. "Despite significant public and private investment, we are still not developing an American STEM workforce to fill the jobs of the future. It's clear that we need to focus our efforts on getting more kids, particularly women and African-Americans, interested in pursuing STEM at a young age."'
 
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It seems to me IBM doesnt do much these days. They have a whole bunch of patents they sit on and wait for someone to
You know this quality argument simply does not hold up and is an excuse many US workers used in the past (e.g. Japan when it was up and coming and now China/India) as justification for not being competitive. Many tech executives have gone on record saying there aren't enough qualified US workers (keyword: qualified) because of the lack of STEM graduates. People think they can spend 4 years partying at college with a liberal arts degree and then should get paid 100k/yr because they're American and then reality tells them otherwise. So then these guys end up on the unemployment line or join the alt-right blaming everyone but themselves for their shortcomings.

Well, liberal arts degrees are pretty useless. You'll find these types of people on both left the and right who blame everyone but themselves. As for a STEM shortage, it depends on the market segment:

https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2015/article/stem-crisis-or-stem-surplus-yes-and-yes.htm
 
If the labor demand was high in this country for any specific skill, the free market would take care of the problem by increasing salaries to a level where supply would quickly become available. If graduates knew that there would be high demand and high salaries in a certain field when they graduated, they would naturally choose these fields of study and we wouldn't need any foreign labor within 4 years. IBM has so many Indian workers because that's the cheapest place to get them. IBM is just a hollow shell of what it once was -- it's no longer a great company.

SO MUCH THIS. Real median wages, adjusted for inflation, have been growing at less than 0.1% annually since the 1970s. Zero point one percent.

If demand for labor is so damn high, raise the f'ing wages. But no, we can't let the peons win, can we?

Another huge issue is that the banks, rather than being the roads on which business gets facilitated and done, have become the be-all-end-all of everything. Banks don't exist to help businesses anymore, they exist to suck more and more of the profit out of everything else. Banks take home something like 30% of all corporate profits. That's idiocy, they're strangling everything else around them.

The 10 biggest lenders along made $30B last quarter alone.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...-pre-crisis-peak-in-u-s-despite-all-the-rules
 
It seems to me IBM doesnt do much these days. They have a whole bunch of patents they sit on and wait for someone to


Well, liberal arts degrees are pretty useless. You'll find these types of people on both left the and right who blame everyone but themselves. As for a STEM shortage, it depends on the market segment:

https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2015/article/stem-crisis-or-stem-surplus-yes-and-yes.htm

So this article sums it up nicely and apart from PhD's looking for jobs or tenure postitions in certain fields (e.g. chemical/biomedical engineering), other STEM fields (the one's most people talk about here) have plenty of jobs:

  • In the academic job market, there is no noticeable shortage in any discipline. In fact, there are signs of an oversupply of Ph.D.’s vying for tenure-track faculty positions in many disciplines (e.g., biomedical sciences, physical sciences).
  • In the government and government-related job sector, certain STEM disciplines have a shortage of positions at the Ph.D. level (e.g., materials science engineering, nuclear engineering) and in general (e.g., systems engineers, cybersecurity, and intelligence professionals) due to the U.S. citizenship requirement. In contrast, an oversupply of biomedical engineers is seen at the Ph.D. level, and there are transient shortages of electrical engineers and mechanical engineers at advanced-degree levels.
  • In the private sector, software developers, petroleum engineers, data scientists, and those in skilled trades are in high demand; there is an abundant supply of biomedical, chemistry, and physics Ph.D.’s; and transient shortages and surpluses of electrical engineers occur from time to time.
  • The geographic location of the position affects hiring ease or difficulty.

They also make a good point about geographic positions (e.g. you won't become an oil engineer living in Massachusetts vs Texas). This is a huge country with plenty of opportunity if people really look for it. But like I said, many people are lazy and/or entitled because of who they think they are and when they don't get what they think they deserve (e.g. 100k+ a year with benefits) they rage and join the alt-right.
 
I told my boss to go fuck himself. Literally.
Bravo. That made my day. As another Canadian working for a three letter company that thinks they can "best shore" their way to success. That cheered me up, briefly.
Have seen roughly 90% of my co-workers be replaced with cheap, largely inept, overseas muppets over the last decade and a half.
 
I find this interesting in light of the article I read a few months back somewhere about IBM courting Apple again and stating they would exclusively have Mac's in their offices or some such.
 
Maybe we should ask Watson how to get these jobs back in America?
 
It's funny you should say that since the companies with unions are the only ones that aren't farming out jobs en masse. In fact historically it's non-union companies that close and move far more than union companies.

..It's almost like there's some group of people or organisation protecting those workers' jobs..

You mean like the US auto companies who moved much of their manufacturing to Canada and Mexico?

And like how the unions protected the many of the construction jobs here in California.... Oh wait, they didn't. Instead they supported Democrats who supported illegals, and over the years most the union jobs & unions disappeared.
 
But like I said, many people are lazy and/or entitled because of who they think they are and when they don't get what they think they deserve (e.g. 100k+ a year with benefits) they rage and join the alt-right.


Entitled? Rage? I think you just described the alt-left.
 
Well, IBM is also a fraction of the company it once was.

I've been there, I was informed my contract was going to be allowed to expire after a one month extension so I could train the Team of Indian "engineers" that was going to replace me. I told my boss to go fuck himself. Literally.

I almost threw up on the way home, I was stressed beyond comprehension. When I got there and told my wife her response was "oh thank god" and picked me up and spun me around the kitchen.

My former employers tried to coerce me to train my replacements by withholding my termination payout. They tried to sue me for failure to fulfil my contract. They lost, I sued them for stealing my money. I won, and I even got punitive damages. Something that doesn't happen very often in Canada.

Now I build log homes. Do you know how much more fun it is to build log homes than make shitty old technology limp along eternally?

Right up until you get Lyme disease anyway. This has been a really shitty summer.
Your wife picked you up? Mime can barely lift groceries.
 
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