hmm, sounds just like SF or NYC.
That is 20 times their salary. I'd say that's a higher multiplier per unit salary, than for the US. Also note that living just outside the city (as people in the US do) isn't always an option, unless you are up for a 2+2 hour commute daily.
By way of comparison, plenty of people in the UK entering their first IT job would make less than the equivalent of 25,00,000!
I also hire directly for our own office in Mumbai from time-to-time, so I know that market rates are.
Just look at any jobs board - even for experienced devs, its rare to find such high paying jobs, e.g.
> SRM University sets new placement record of 6064 on Day 1
> The highest offer was from Wipro 1641, followed by TCS 1611, Cognizant 1506 and Infosys 1306.
You can imagine the quality of interview when they have interviewed at least 1500 students on a single day.
So the average salary is 8.98 lakh. Unlike what you might like to believe there are many non-IT people working in IT, specially in places like IBM. So their salary will be even lower than 8.98 lakhs.
Most freshers get near to Associate Systems Engineer. The salary range is between 3.7 lakhs to 8.65 lakhs. This is farcry from what you believe it is. Yes, there are colleges whose salaries are pushed to the limit thanks to the startups but majority are not as well of as you might think.
Yeah, I concede. For some reason, I had the belief that IBM is one of the better paying company in India, but it pays on the level of inferior consultancies.
50k salary 1.5-2mil GBP for a well size 2 bed in a good area.
Apparently you can get a 2-bedroom flat in Bexley for £150,000....
The 10 cheapest places to buy in London: where to find the best-value homes in the capital, from Barking and Dagenham to Hounslow http://www.homesandproperty.co.uk/property-news/buying/londo...
> "As it turns out, Bob had simply outsourced his own job to a Chinese consulting firm. Bob spent less than one-fifth of his six-figure salary for a Chinese firm to do his job for him."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jan/16/software-devel...
Everything can be done cheaper by getting it done in another part of the world. Should it be? Sometimes the answer is yes, at other times, not.
Imagine for a second that 50 years from today (when say India is in a place where the US is today), many Indian jobs are outsourced to another country. Same thing.
Are people allowed to go to Walmart and choose to buy something for less money than the mom and pop store? Are traders allowed to take advantage of pricing differentials in different markets? Are employers allowed to relocated outside of San Francisco to find less expensive employees?
You can try to stop the market from reaching equilibrium...but I have a feeling you won't win in the end, at least not without some help from the armed forces.
IBM has been laying off people in the US (and maybe elsewhere too) for several years, every now and then. I have been in the software field for many years now, and have been reading the industry news for a long time, that's how I know it. I remember even way back, I used to read the news in Indian and foreign IT magazines, every now and then, that IBM (and other US companies too) were laying off like 10K, 20K, or more workers at a time. And it was not always because of outsourcing jobs to India, in many earlier cases it was before outsourcing even started.
But it sort of reinforces my point that companies do layoffs. Sure, some Indian companies have started doing it too, whatever the pros and cons may be.
Founders and CEOs in the US like the ability to hire and fire, and the idea of employment at will. Some employees, less so.
India has historically been a country where paternalistic management practices were common, and firing was seen as something to be avoided as far as possible, considered as a big deal, the news and impact of it to be minimized or played down (I know this last point is so to some extent in the US too), and as a huge social stigma (for the person being fired or laid off). That has been changing some recently, due to Western influences. There can be both pros and cons to the matter. Don't have a final viewpoint on it.
Edited to change "been a company" to "been a country".
Edit: Quoting myself:
>India has historically been a country where paternalistic management practices were common, and firing was seen as something to be avoided as far as possible
This is also the case in government service - as in, in India, for long, and maybe even nowadays, it was almost impossible to fire a government employee, whatever the reason. Job security (along with poverty) was a huge reason why, in earlier years, many, or even the majority of people preferred government jobs - because even though the pay, environment, perks were all mostly shitty - though getting cheap owned or rented housing was seen as a good perk by many - again, a house was seen as a major asset to strive for - you could not be easily fired from your job. In a country with devastating annual floods / droughts (both still the case) / somewhat frequent famines, poverty, etc., those were factors to be considered. I remember even a classmate of mine (this was many years later than the start of the period I am talking about - the start was at Indian Independence or even years before), exulting to a few of us friends that "I 'got' DOTE!" (where DOTE == Department Of Technical Education", meaning that he got a "seat" in a government engineering college, meaning that if he did his stuff even just adequately, a secure lifelong government job was guaranteed - as witnessed by his answer when someone asked him why he went for it - his answer in one word was - "security" (of livelihood, of course, not computer security).
Name another country circa 1911 that could have produced IBM and enabled it to acquire such vast global scale at its peak. There are only a handful of nations that can even be considered as possible.
IBM came out of the US for the exact same reason Fairchild, Intel, Cisco, Silicon Graphics, Motorola, Texas Instruments, HP, Sun, Xerox, AMD, Apple, Qualcomm, etc. all did.
By that reasoning, IBM is outsourcing from the US for exactly the same reason virtually all the other companies you listed are.
Sure, something about the US helped them to exist and thrive. And something about the US is helping them to outsource.
The argument cuts both ways.
Of course. Most of the outsourcing has been about labor costs. The US has among the highest labor costs on the the planet, the nations (Vietnam, China, India, Mexico, etc) that the US has heavily outsourced to - whether manufacturing or IT - are or were far lower net cost nations to do those outsourced things in.
What's cutting against the US is mostly obvious: incomes are very high, infrastructure costs are far too high (impacts almost everything in the cost structure in the US, from transportation to manufacturing), the effective corporate income tax rate in the US is among the highest (while many developed nations are aggressively lowering their rates), vast & rapid growth in economic regulations over the last 30-40 years, large expansion of general burden on business formation over that time (taxes, regulation, red tape, abusive zoning laws, etc.; leading to far lower dynamism in the US economy, weak productivity growth, perpetually falling new business formation, etc).
It was no accident.
The IT industry is the first truly global industry. I can do my job from a coffee shop in NYC, a mountain monastery in Tibet, or a beach in Cancun. I just need my trusty laptop and WiFi access.
And yet, even though I'm the same person, doing the same work, I get taxed differently, I pay different prices for the same goods, and the cost of living is vastly different. Why should I be "allowed" to do work for IBM from the NYC coffee-shop but not the from Cancun beach? Would the product of my brain's labor be vastly different? Does me hopping on a plane and committing code from a different longitude and latitude make me a less-deserving person?
And yes, Indian jobs should get outsourced to another country - if it makes sense. Why not? Why do we have "protected" classes of people? And who gets to decide who's protected?
Software is truly unique like that - you can collaborate with people you've never seen face-to-face, different perspectives, different cultures, but all working towards a common goal. I'm not aware of any other industry you can do that.
And you expect IBM to just sit there quietly, while told, "Hire Jim, not Srinivas, because although Srinivas can do the exact same work for 1/10th the cost, Jim, being American, is a more important human being, your competitive advantage be damned" ?
Check for example CyberCity in Port Louis, Mauritius.
Quite a few Indian helpdesk centers have moved there.
So I think the real takeaway here is that IBM is no longer a US based company, per se - but now is just a global tech company.
And you might even say they are the first of the giants to just be simply a "lobal tech company" -- while many a startup are already "global" or virtual as it were -- its just an interesting shift in the timeline of IBM as a company.... and thus relevant and of note when looking at the company IBM itself.
Considering this, how is the number of employees in India and US even a relevant question. Isn't it similar to say why is there more manufacturing workforce in China when compared to US for company X? We know why, it costs less for the company and the client, and taking advantage of it opened up new markets/demand.