
Top global IT firms have more staff in India than home nations - indus
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/ites/top-global-it-firms-have-more-staff-in-india-than-home-nations/articleshow/25282762.cms
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cs702
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/Doubl...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/04/28/business/Double-
Irish-With-A-Dutch-Sandwich.html)

\--

Edit: deleted reference to "Accenture," which is apparently legally domiciled
in Ireland (thanks mschaef).

~~~
mschaef
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
Us old timers remember them as "Andersen Consulting", the folks that got paid
by our C-levels to drive the company into the ground...

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anuragramdasan
>> "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
Can't agree more

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nish1500
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
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.

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geekam
Just for your reference:

1 lakh (or lac) = 100,000

1 crore = 10,000,000

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gopalv
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=1...](http://www.cetafi.net/modules.php?name=News&file=print&sid=147)),
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.

~~~
wil421
> 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.

I have to disagree I find that a lot of people from India do not pronounce the
syllables in the way that a native speaker does.

~~~
a8i
> in the way that a native speaker does

You are aware that native speakers can have (sometimes wildly) varying
accents, right?

There are inarguably millions upon millions L1 English speakers in India. The
fact that the English they speak isn't identical to the one you speak doesn't
really change that fact.

~~~
wil421
Well I dont have trouble communicating with the majority of people in the US
no matter where they are from or even the UK and Europe. But I do have a
problem understanding the Indians that I am talking to 10+ hours a week.

I am not trying to bash people from India here its just that I have more
trouble communicating with so called "English as first language too" speakers
than other groups.

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linux_devil
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.

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tn13
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. \--

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brianwawok
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
In terms of sheer numbers India may very well be ahead in both categories...

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

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

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u64type
Now China has taken manufacturing jobs, and India is taking IT jobs.

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ffrryuu
Absolute advantage as work here.

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eriksank
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
The bureaucracy has indeed scared away a lot of foreign interest in the
country.

~~~
AsymetricCom
Which is just fine because globalism would rape their country otherwise.

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

~~~
kamakazizuru
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
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.

