San Francisco university lays off IT workers, jobs head to India | Hacker News Reader

San Francisco university lays off IT workers, jobs head to India

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Can someone give an actual moral reason why this is bad?

Can you explain to me why where you geographically located needs to matter? Or why Americans should be or feel entitled to jobs? If someone is willing to do it cheaper, than a business is dumb to pay more just to reinforce nationalism.

This weird entitlement around jobs in America is strange to me. I appreciate the living hell out of my job, because I know it could be done by someone outside the US for cheaper (and my Company has a tech office in Bangalore). You can't appreciate something and expect it/be entitled to it at the same time.

Regardless of the rest though, that moral question is what matters - what is immoral about hiring people outside of your country? Why is nationalism considered a virtue?

It is if nothing else a bad look for technology workers, who are in the business of eliminating jobs. If a business can shed 50% of its payroll through efficiencies from technology, we cheer. If it can shed 50% of its payroll through efficiencies in sourcing, we break out the pitchforks. That's a morally incoherent position.

If you think technology won't be vilified, wait until the robots start flipping burgers and pumping gas (or electricity) at >10% market penetration.

Wasn't gas pumping one of the very first businesses to "automate" (by making customers do it themselves)?

Burgers already are done automatically at volume. Assembly is manual... Sometimes and partially.

A few reasons which may or may not apply to this situation. I don't agree with all of them, but they're worth a discussion I suppose.

* The "cheaper" country has fewer regulations. e.g. sweatshop labor that the local workforce can't compete with.

* The organization profits from the local community, its regulations, and populace but doesn't "give back" through jobs, etc.

* The notion of patriotism: as a community, we should put our interests first (and other countries will do the same). Obviously this is a waaaay bigger topic than can be addressed in a bullet point.

Not to mention the sub-standard-vs-US working conditions HCL has in India. Outsourcing to a sweatshop is bad karma.

A lot of the wealth in the west was created in some rather dubious ways viz. colonies and slavery. I wonder whether that wealth would carry "bad karma" as well.

The simple truth is that without laws explicitly forbidding businesses from engaging in such practices, the market WILL force them to engage in them. So we change the market using regulations to prevent such sort of a thing.

Do you have any source of these sub standard working conditions? I did a quick google search on HCL offices: https://www.google.com/search?q=hcl+offices&client=ubuntu&hs...

Or are you talking about work culture?

Sub-standard working conditions are a thing in the US too. A common thing.

Worker rights are overall very weak in most industries across the US.

Well,

* The "cheaper" country has super cheap healthcare options, where employer is not required to subsidize the premiums.

Could that be the reason why they dont lay off older employees in these "cheaper" countries with fewer regulations?

Immoral is a difficult judgement to make. But it is asymmetrically advantageous to the business.

The business can go anywhere to look for employees, an employee can't move to SE Asia and work at Foxconn.

This is not outsourcing, its geographical arbitrage. Barriers to the current employees make this possible.

You're asking an implicitly deontological question with an explicitly consequentialist answer. This kind of "outsourcing economy" has been tried, and we have observed mostly negative effects. It deskills the country which pays for the goods, creates trade imbalances that help to break down what's left of our international system, impoverishes the people who are disemployed, and exploits the people who are newly employed.

Worse, the gains-from-trade that economists say ought to occur are allocated entirely to the owners of firms and equities, rather than being redistributed to the former workers to help smooth out economic transitions.

>This weird entitlement around jobs in America is strange to me.

That's because America's not willing to spend any resources on retraining workers or redistributing wealth away from the owning class, so "jobs" are the one thing people absolutely need to stay alive.

> You're asking an implicitly deontological question with an explicitly consequentialist answer.

Found the philosopher

Loved your answer but adding some explanations for those of us not as smart as you:

Deontological ethics or deontology (from Greek δέον, deon, "obligation, duty") is the normative ethical position that judges the morality of an action based on rules. It is sometimes described as "duty-" or "obligation-" or "rule-" based ethics, because rules "bind you to your duty."

Consequentialism is the class of normative ethical theories holding that the consequences of one's conduct are the ultimate basis for any judgment about the rightness or wrongness of that conduct.

Gaaah, I should make some coffee. Big words come out when I don't drink enough caffeine to use small ones.

Or just use EasyWrite : http://easywrite.parishod.com/

Just to be clear, this distinction is of no help in deciding which argument one prefers. in particular, it is of no help in deciding which argument has the better basis in fact.

How are facts relevant to this question? Seems the answer depends on your vision of the world, and as a result multipke different sets of facts can be used to make each argument.

Is your vision of the world unconstrained by facts? Some 'facts' are more factual than others. Some facts are more relevant than others.

As you wrote, did you not notice that your second sentence (especially its final clause) answered your own question?

> Worse, the gains-from-trade that economists say ought to occur are allocated entirely to the owners of firms and equities, rather than being redistributed to the former workers to help smooth out economic transitions.

I think that this statement ignores the savings that consumers get as a result of this process.The use of international labor has absolutely reduced the prices of goods in the US.

I agree with most of the rest of what you said.

Can you site the savings consumers have gotten, or guarantee them in the future to the dollar? And will you agree to penalties if the savings aren't seen?

Lets not generalize here. Outsourcing when done right can be very beneficial to businesses and to the economy overall. Would you say that low wage textile manufacturing should have continued to be in America? A lot of the IT outsourcing is usually for repetitive tasks that people can be trained to do for, and they are, in countries like India. And its not just the unwillingness of the owning class/businesses to retrain workers, the workers are not willing to put in the effort to retrain as well.

> That's because America's not willing to spend any resources on retraining workers or redistributing wealth away from the owning class, so "jobs" are the one thing people absolutely need to stay alive.

I kinda agree with you here, however the alternatives to jobs seem to be some kind of UBI which seems too radical just right now (may change in the future though). Universal medical coverage and higher minimum wage is definitely not as radical.

I would say that free education would be an apt solution to the problem of retraining workers.

> low wage textile

Minimum wage in the USA is still higher than Asia, but you'd be surprised how many high end retailers use US based businesses to produce textiles. Time to market is much shorter (you avoid sea freight 3 weeks) and the iterative process when make changes occur at a faster rate when you're in the same time zone.

If you've ever worked with a IT development shop in India or China, maybe you understand the problems caused by the time difference and sometimes cultural differences.

>> This kind of "outsourcing economy" has been tried, and we have observed mostly negative effects. It deskills the country which pays for the goods, creates trade imbalances that help to break down what's left of our international system, impoverishes the people who are disemployed, and exploits the people who are newly employed.

I may not be disagreeing (it is hard to see if you are concluding in favor of the outsourcing actually being immoral), but some things to consider based on the economics that I do understand:

The country which "pays for the goods" didn't achieve the wealth to pay for the goods in a vacuum. There are some substantial economic forces at play here isn't it? E.g. Let us consider the dollar. Why exactly do people have faith in the dollar? It looks like it is being strengthened based on assumptions about the safety of the capital in "more developed" countries than the ones which cede this position. In general, "more developed" is equated with two things from what I have observed: "rule of law" and "productivity of capital". This intuition among countries ceding the position is probably based on historical observations, and there was certainly a point when a lot of capital took flight into a developed country because it had a good mix of capital productivity (an assumption that the money will multiply) plus rule of law (and another assumption that the government won't steal it). I am not suggesting the developed country "owes" anything back to folks who trust their capital with them, but you can bet that the people who sent their money to be exploited fully didn't do so out of the goodness of their hearts towards the folks in (in this case) USA. Particularly, the primacy of the dollar as a reserve currency probably has a lot to do with the (real and imagined) beliefs around its ability to clear out the economic deadwood by itself. In fact, the argument around morality here is a bit weird because it looks a little Tom Sawyer-ish - other countries are not really interested in paying for the privilege of painting the American fence if the only benefit is the approval of Tom Sawyer.

"Deskills the country which pays for the goods" - let us consider a thought experiment where somehow the output of the entire outsourced division could be turned into a SaaS, except the SaaS is headquartered in a different country. Is the deskilling nothing more than the progression of automation then? Doesn't it mean the real issue is with more and more technical and non-technical work getting submerged into the ocean of automation, leaving a smaller and smaller tip of the iceberg at the top? While technically this is deskilling, isn't it also merely a step towards an irreversible automation? Did the arrival of the automobile lead to a loss of horse driving skills in the overall economy? Or did the horse driving skills just become implicitly value-less?

I am a software developer at a major American university. I do good work because I am immersed in the culture of higher education, which is nothing at all like private industry. Both faculty and administrators are significantly different in their needs and ways of doing things than in the private sector. They have always been and always will be. "Running the college like a business" is an oft-repeated punchline used to describe people that just don't understand the system and are bound to fail.

My point is that software development requires both the creator and the customer to share an appropriate context in order to produce the desired results without error or miscommunication. You can't simply plug in development like a USB stick and expect the same results every time.

One caveat: our college town is in a very rural area, and housing costs outside of town are dirt cheap. I cannot imagine the financial burden to support staff in a horrendously expensive city like San Francisco. Because of this, we can afford a larger headcount, and provide an excellent service.

Of course, tribalism is the primary motivator here, but I think there are a couple other economic and moral arguments to be made against unbridled globalism.

From an economic perspective, much of international economic growth is based on confidence rather than rational analysis of economic situations. Credit markets underpin everything we do, and we have seen what happens when a lack of confidence undermines an entire global credit system (e.g. It causes a global economic crisis). A steady outflow of jobs from a currently wealthy country could potentially undermine consumer confidence in that country, which would in turn decrease consume spending and the tolerance for risk in that country, which could prompt a credit shrink in the short- to medium-term, meaning that in aggregate, everyone might be worse off. Now, in the long-term, things would generally even out, but it stands to reason that achieving that globalization without such a rock to confidence in wealthy countries (perhaps in a slower or government-assisted way) immediate negative effects might be mitigated and the ride might be smoother for everyone.

On the moral side of things, one could make the argument that it's morally inconsistent to allow manufacturing and services to move to countries where labor laws and political/societal conditions are sufficiently transgressive in the eyes of the public. This is kind of a tricky idea to pick apart and is a bit fuzzy but I'll try to give an example. Consider a company that makes shoes in a country with strong labor protections for children and low corruption in government. If that company were to move operations to a country where children are regularly exploited to drive down manufacturing costs (and the company makes use of this cultural/societal condition), a resident of the former country could make a strong moral case that this company should not be allowed to continue selling its goods in that country, because the supply chain is tainted. This is a very common situation (Nestle, for instance, is notorious for these kinds of ethical violations). Once again, in the long term increased industrial economic activity in a region will generally cause it to become wealthier and improve labor protections, but in the short- to medium-term it is not unreasonable to oppose the transfer of manufacturing and service operations to places where workers are not entitled to rights that people in a wealthier/more-protected country might consider fundamental. This is unlikely to be the case for offshoring IT jobs to Bangalore (although one could potentially find gripes with systemic corruption in India), but is more common in textile-exporting countries in South-East Asia.

I'm right there with you in thinking that one human being is no more entitled to a job than another just by the section of ground he happened to be born on, but we live in a complicated world that is in a suboptimal configuration, and unbridled globalization might not be the most effective way to achieve more equity universally.

>moral reason why this is bad?

Article didn't seem to suggest this is an issue of morality. Where did you make that connection?

Just because the article did not mention it, it does not follow that there is no moral dimension here.

It's this type of thinking that plays right into the hands of a Trump. His message is "America First" and it obviously resonated with enough people.

The real question is if you interpret it as country interest or people interest first. If remains to be seen which side will happen.

People have to finally learn that it is not the message that is important, but the result.

>Can someone give an actual moral reason why this is bad?

Because the work conditions in other countries are driven by practices we see as immoral.

A developer job in India isn't likely a job that is considered immoral, but what they demand for compensation is largely drive by all the other jobs and the wages for those jobs, many of which are at least illegal in the US (below minimum wage, illegal work conditions, many regulation violations).

For an exact example, the minimum wage in India is a little over 2 dollars per day. If I could hire people in the US for that price, I could definitely lower the price I would need to be compensated to achieve a certain quality of life. But people would argue me hiring people for $2 a day would be immoral.

Yet the developer in India can do that, and as such, commands a lower price. By paying them, these such practices are supported.

(Now to be exact, I don't mean to suggest that every developer has an army of minimum wage workers at their beck and call. Instead, their entire lower cost of liven is driven by many things we consider immoral.)

It is like paying a supplier who is violating both laws and morals to give you a cheaper price for the product. You could try to say that technically you aren't violating the law and just buying the cheapest product, but many would not consider such actions to be moral.

Many many many American business already source products from countries with dubious regulations, worker protections etc. The crusade against blood diamonds was only the most visible and successful effort against this. Just take a look at all the Textiles imported from Bangladesh, Seafood from Vietnam, Canned fruits/veggies/everything from Thailand...do you think workers in those countries have the same kind of worker protections as US workers?

I'm not trying to pass judgement here, simply trying to point out that a lot of what we take for granted is already built on the back of people working in bad conditions. (Not even starting to talk about Foxconn and stuff here...)

>Many many many American business already source products from countries with dubious regulations, worker protections etc.

That we as a society tolerate this is something I've wondered about for a long time. If I buy something cheap made by child labor, people just say I'm price savvy. If I use child labor, and not just the kid working for a little pocket money, people see me as a monster. Yet by funding it I support it comparable to engaging directly in the action.

>I'm not trying to pass judgement here, simply trying to point out that a lot of what we take for granted is already built on the back of people working in bad conditions. (Not even starting to talk about Foxconn and stuff here...)

Yes, and for as long as this has been happening, there have been people saying we need to stop doing it. Why should our consumption support labor standards that exploit people and grind them down, rather than lifting them up?

Not sure about a moral reason, but the political reason is that I cannot walk into the Indian unemployment office and get benefits, or I can't just get off the plane and get a job.

So long as we have countries as political units, this will be the reason. Countries are by and large semi-closed systems in terms of economics, do it would make sense we protect our own economy, just like the majority of big economies do.

It's odd that people complain about US "protectionism" but on the other hand complain about US imperialism while also ignoring how protectionist and nationalist a place like India is.

>>So long as we have countries as political units, this will be the reason. Countries are by and large semi-closed systems in terms of economics, do it would make sense we protect our own economy, just like the majority of big economies do.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news to you. But US itself pursued globalization policies to cut the influence of USSR during the cold war. Globalization was a US political project gone crazy during the internet years.

In fact no one reaped more benefits at the world stage than US.

Even as we speaking now. US has more to benefit from H1-B and other Visa systems. You don't really want all these highly trained brains from India to go to other places.

>>how protectionist and nationalist a place like India is.

India has let in far more foreign business in the recent past than US ever will.

If you are a US business making insane tens of billions worth profits selling stuff in India. Its really not a lot to ask the company in question to hire a few Indians to run their operations in India.

Sorry but globalization not only benefitted the US but everyone. Even places like Haiti and fidji have benefitted from globalization, including most notably east Asia with the foremost exemplars of Japan and China. Remember India when she was part of the non aligned axis and how "well" she was doing? That's right, globalization has helped more people around the world than anything else but people try to pretend only the US benefitted from this policy. However, the US did underwrite most of the costs of making this happen.

When it's your job getting outsourced you'll suddenly find that you care about this issue.

I don't care if by some fluke my job gets out sourced and it would be a fluke if they could find someone working remotely with my architectural and soft skills.

My financial stability doesn't come from my job, it comes from my skill set and my network that allows me to relatively quickly get another job. I work hard to keep my skill set from being easily commoditizable.

I find it baffling that you'd assume morality is at all involved in this for those who subscribe to the more nationalist / anti-immigrant / anti-outsourcing ideas.

It's about money.

If I'm an American developer, I want as few developers to be available so that my wages rise.

If I'm BigCo, I want as few competitors selling the same products so that my prices can rise.

What's hard to understand about why people would support these types of movements?

It's as simple as "I want more money and I don't really care about other people who's lives I'm not experiencing."

>>If I'm an American developer, I want as few developers to be available so that my wages rise.

The door for this has closed quite a while ago. These days with a laptop and a internet connection there are a lot of things you can learn and do.

Basically we lowered the barrier to entry big time.

In fact many of us have a job today because of this low barrier to entry.

Now to expect the door be shut right behind us is in a way morally wrong. Nor the way how things work.

If you are in your career for more than 5-10 years and the only thing that you can offer to a potential company is the ability to Sling code, why shouldn't your job be outsourced? Being able to sling code is a commodity.

It took me a while, but I think I've developed enough architectural and soft skills to not be lumped in the pool of easily outsource code slingers.

So now you'd be outsourced to a manager, analyst and a "code slinger" in India? (and your manager too)

It is always a question of price and achievable quality. One works against the other, partly.

Realistically, do you see management and architects being outsourced to India en masse?

Yes

I can imagine a 1960s steel-industry manager making a similar statement.

You can relatively easy draw a schematic and decide exactly how you want a piece of steel to be made. Have you ever seen a successful software project development and maintained based on a spec and not based on constant interaction between the customer and some tech lead?

Have you noticed how the customers are moving their work to other countries? Your argument becomes one for moving the software development, including its management, with it.

This is somewhat beside the point, however. The people my hypothetical steel-industry manager is based on failed to imagine how the world was going to change and could not imagine that people in less-developed countries could be as competent as themselves.

Then there is AI. It has taken a long time, but it is coming.

Because of tribalism. You care for your own community and in return, your community cares for you.

US govt (a proxy for US community) cares for US citizens and US citizens have a mechanism to ensure that it continues to care for them. Indian govt (a proxy for Indian community) doesn't care about US citizens and they do not have any mechanism to make it care.

So until we all truly believe in "global community" and have mechanisms to ensure that there is a legitimate proxy for global community to care for everyone, its better to stick to your own community.

p.s. Even US might be a very big entity to have any sense of cohesion (and hence the polarization we see). Probably, we need smaller regional entities having bulk of the duties/responsibilities/powers, with federal govt performing only a minimal set of functions. But thats a separate political debate.

> US govt (a proxy for US community) cares for US citizens and US citizens

On paper. But it seems like over decades it's become "US govt supporting businesses" which is ok as long as business leaders are somewhat altruistic, which is clearly not the case.

Originally coming from a developing country, the amount and quality of services offered by various levels of US Govt is astonishing compared to what I used to get from my country of origin. [eg. reliable public infrastructure like good roads, 24hr electricity, clean air, clean water; libraries; national parks; heck even travel protection programs like STEP while traveling abroad]. If you think all that amounts to nothing, or just amounts to "supporting businesses", try spending 5-6 years as a resident (not tourist) in some developing country.

I did high school and college in India, so I understand your sentiment. Unlike developing countries which are now investing in their infrastructure/people, the US on the contrary is not investing in them as they used to (eg., education, technical training etc.). From what I was told by old timers, companies actually had training programs for their employees. Minus a handful of companies no company provides these kinds of benefits.

All companies at the end of the day look at their bottom line and see employees as a liability rather than an asset and this eventually hurts the middle class.

I might be able to give you an actual moral reason.

Let me start with the concept of free participation in labor markets. I think there's a strong moral case to be made that people should be free to choose what they wish to study, and how and where they wish to work, in response to market signals. Nobody owes you a job, nobody owes you an employee. If you aren't paying enough to entice people to work for you, you need to pay more or improve working conditions. If you aren't able to entice people to pay you what you want, you need to improve your skills, accept worse working conditions, or change fields.

We tend to frame this in economic terms - it's best when workers are free to choose higher value jobs, but sure, I see it as a moral issue. Telling people that they must work as software developers in the valley as a condition of living and working in the US is a moral issue. If that person would prefer to open a sandwich shop, sell real estate, write novels, or clean teeth, that's that person's business. To me, if they prefer to do this over writing software for Facebook - or UCSF - that is a sign that the market is working just fine. Economically, I don't like the idea that corporations would gain control over the immigration system to coerce would-be immigrants into certain jobs. But morally, absolutely, it's a violation of basic human rights and dignity to tell them they aren't allowed to quit their jobs and do something else in response to their personal interests and market signals.

I've framed this in terms of immigrant rights, but yes, of course, it absolutely hurts US citizens and permanent residents who currently work as software developers or other IT role, when the government creates a parallel immigration system, run and controlled by corporations specifically designed to bring in workers from overseas who are allowed to work as IT specialists but not in other fields. And again, yes, I think there's a moral case to be made that it is wrong to single out IT workers for this sort of marketplace disadvantage.

I don't really think American IT workers are asking for special government protections. They're just asking for the ordinary protections that cover every other field - that the conditions for coming to the US as an IT worker be the same as a drywall installer or dental hygienist. Immigrants come to the US and decide what to study and what professions to pursue. Some may go into IT, some will go into other fields. So far, I see no problem at all.

But a system controlled by corporations that can be used to force would-be immigrants to work in IT or software development as a condition of living in the US, that can be revoked by the corporation and result in deportation for the worker?

Sure, I can make a moral case against that quite easily.

I've kept saying this to everyone who supports closing/limiting H1B (or other immigration forms): if companies cannot hire here (at a reasonable price), they will hire there. Moving an IT department is easier than ever. Startups are now doing it too - I know many having a R&D location in India, China, East Europe. All these new policies against immigration will accelerate the process of "hiring there".

An important point, not well-covered. The employees worked for UCSF Medical Center, which is a corporation affiliated with UCSF. It's not actually a university- it's a hospital. There is a huge, weird overlap between UCSF and UCSF Health/Medical Center.

Also, UCSF Health is known for having merged with Stanford Health (they claimed both of them would go out of business if they didn't merge), laying off its entire staff, then rehiring them with a limited contract, and then un-merging: https://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?artic...

(disclaimer: I was a PhD student at UCSF during the debacle).

Sounds like incompetent management led by MBAs gone wild. Imagine all the cost savings guys.

I would argue competent and effective management by people who view profits worth more than ensuring everyone can enjoy life. These people aren't idiots, they understand game theory, supply and demand and cost cutting to the point they are paid absurd amounts to do the work they do. In my opinion, techs problem is that the builders/maintainers trust leadership not to cut off their heads. Only friends are safe.

The reason that they are paid a lot is because they can justify their pay in terms of cost-savings. If you have a large company paying tens of millions in salary and you cut out a few jobs you can save the company a million dollars. For that you can justify a 1% pay, say 150k or 250k.

Funny thing is the tools are dumb in that they can't actually predict the long-term and mid-term effects of bringing on such a change. And this is a text-book case of that because they have reverted back to independent entities. Like for instance knowledge lost. How do you account for that? Loss of morale? How do you account for that. Communication problems, etc. etc. etc. All these things can be a competitive advantages or disadvantages for a corporation. They can potentially make or break a company.

In fact someone should create an AI called MBA AI to do this sort of shit and make a killing doing it. Just replace idiot MBAs with their dumb tools with an AI. It should be simple enough to automate to generate cost saving estimates and so on. Without actually being able to predict the actual outcome in any meaningful way.

I will finally add that in the end Jurassic Park was caused by an underpaid IT contractor.

I worked in IT at a university for 7 years. I do not see this saving money over the 5 year term. It probably would have made more sense to relocate the IT staff out of the Bay area to a less costly location, but still be in the same time zone and able to be on site if needed. Looking at the map, the university looks land-locked and unable to expand. The idea of getting more office or classroom space by eliminating onsite IT was probably enticing, in addition to the expected cost savings.

Of late I have felt that this is the technique used by companies to get ride of older and expensive employees. A few years later they'll find that outsourcing is not worth it , and start hiring younger people again. That's a cheaper way to reduce healthcare and other costs that the employer has to pay for every employee

I think you're right and you can spot check it by looking at some of the photos of the laid off workers in various articles about this move. They all appear to be in their 50s at least.

Many more jobs have been outsourced to India through American companies like HP, IBM, DELL.

Is outsourcing a problem worth mentioning only when a company incorporated in India gets such contracts?

Or, is there a subtle hint of racial/country bias against Indians?

I ask this because I never see such damning articles when whole departments/section of companies are closed when outsourced to American companies. And circumstances are very similar.

Older employees cost company more because of America's awesome healthcare and insurance system. Techn knowledge gets commoditised and automated so quickly, these older employees are almost always phased out by outsourcing the jobs.

It's just that when the company getting that contract is Indian, all hell breaks loose.

Yup there's definitely a tinge of racism there. Even the word "outsourcing" has a "send it to a cheap third world country" feel to it.

I remember talking to an American company who was doing all the design and web development for an Australian company. So I said "ahh so they outsourced and offshored it to you" and they got very defensive about how it wasn't outsourcing. Even though this is the textbook definition of outsourcing and offshoring.

There's an argument that isn't racism here.

In AU->US outsourcing, the motivation for outsourcing is not to drive down labor costs, because labor costs are clearly higher in the US. The only reason to outsource from AU to US is if people in the US can do it better.

This is the opposite when we talk about outsourcing from an advanced country to a developing country. The rationale is always cost, and specifically cost of labor.

It's always about driving the cost of labor downwards. And so workers in the outsourcing country resist---absolutely---because the ultimate aim is to undermine their wages and living standards.

> reason to outsource from AU to US is if people in the US can do it better.

That's rarely the case More often it's about follow-the-sun

Are you talking about the cultural definition of outsourcing? Then you're just bolstering my point. In fact, in just making the assumption that people only outsource to the US because the US does it better, and the reverse (only because it's cheaper) to developing countries, there is an implicit bias in assuming that. Here's the dictionary definition. (There's no mention of developing country.)

out·source ˈoutˌsôrs/ verb gerund or present participle: outsourcing obtain (goods or a service) from an outside or foreign supplier, especially in place of an internal source. "outsourcing components from other countries" contract (work) out or abroad. "you may choose to outsource this function to another company or do it yourself" synonyms: contract out, farm out, subcontract, delegate "maintenance jobs are outsourced"

Outsourcing is the same no matter which country you do it with. If you outsource to India trying to get a .NET developer for $20k, you get garbage, same as you would get if you wanted to pay $20k for a .NET programmer in the US. If you pay good rates, you get good people, developing country or not.

I'm not talking about culture, I'm talking about wage rate. Outsourcing from AU to US is not a threat to AU wages because US wages are higher. The US can not compete with the AU on the price of labor, it can only compete on quality.

Conversely when work is outsourced from a country with high wages to one with lower wages, this is a threat to the wage rate in the higher wage country.

>>In AU->US outsourcing, the motivation for outsourcing is not to drive down labor costs, because labor costs are clearly higher in the US. The only reason to outsource from AU to US is if people in the US can do it better.

As an Indian who was in the trenches during the call center craze during the 2000's.

Let me tell you our American managers used to often tell us the real reason for outsourcing to India was rarely if ever cost. It was scale, it was really hard to find college degree holders, and many times engineers in thousands of numbers to work on doing things like taking calls all night in the US.

Apparently a lot of people in the US won't do jobs like these because they think its beneath their station.

Not true. They won't do the job at the salary offered as it is a soul crushing job. If it were properly salaried according to that...

Also why would a phone and script operator need a degree? You heard a nice excuse and feel good lie.

>>why would a phone and script operator need a degree?

Your resume won't even go past the screening phase if you don't have a degree for a call center job in India.

I had a Bachelor's in Electronics and Communication Engineering.

There are likely no significant financial gains to be made outsourcing to Australia. It is super expensive here for everything.

Not an even comparison.

Can't be more true. There won't be any outrage if the jobs were outsourced to Hungary or Estonia where cost is comparable to India. Because subconsciously, Western power and western people needs poor brown/black nations to make themselves feel better.

"America's awesome healthcare and insurance system" Huh?

Its pretty awesome if you have a good employer provided plans and can afford to buy the best plans. Sucks if you can't.

We have some of the best healthcare in the world. Many of the rich elite from around the world fly into the US for treatment.

We do however have a problem with accessing that healthcare. How do you allocate limited resources? We chose capitalism to decide.

True. Healthcare quality is "probably" great, if one can afford it. And that indirectly means if the employer can afford to subsidize your health insurance premiums so that you can afford that amazing healthcare.

"How do you access limited resources?" Why are the resources limited? How about making medical education free (paid by US taxpayer), so that only those who want to serve in the field of medicine will become doctors, and go on to earn a good living if they are good doctors?

Why not generate 100x medicine graduates than current number?

Problem is with crony capitalism. Doctors dont want over supply of doctors. Insurers are happy with constrained supply of healthcare. Richer people are happy with what they can afford.

Not rich and aging population gets screwed!

Sorry sarcasm wasn't apparent. I despise the costs associated with healthcare in US. Often, outsourcing happens because healthcare costs of an aging department shoots up and company cannot fire the employees because of higher insurance costs.

Hence, outsource --> downsize --> feign realization that "oh outsourcing sucks" --> hire younger team with less costs for insurance.

I'm always curious about the math behind the cost savings in these types of off-shoring arrangements. I'm sure I'm missing something here, but if the HCL contract is for $50M, and they're claiming savings of $30M, that means that the expenditures for the original 97 employees+contractors would have worked out to approximately $825,000 per head, on average. ($80M / (49 + 48))

Now I know wages in the Bay Area are skewed, but even all in with benefits I'm sure that's much higher than the salaries of the replaced individuals.

Best to those being replaced, I'm sure they'll be picked up by smarter employers.

EDIT: Thanks to @jt2190 and @ar-jan for pointing out that I forgot to divide by 5, which gives a much more reasonable answer. It's a little too early here... ;)

You forgot to divide by five years.

165 000 USD per head, on average. $80M / (49 + 48) / 5

Edit: the savings likely also include things like benefits, office space, administration, etc.

It's for a 5-year period, so about 165,000 per head per year, on average.

The devil is in the details for these things. Unless you have a really smart contract negotiator, the scope is usually fubar. Every correction is a change order, and every change order is $.

Well, all we hear about anymore is the great "shortage of tech workers", so this shouldn't be a huge problem. These folks will simply waltz into any number of area tech firms tomorrow and find jobs with all these companies "struggling to find talent", am I right?

The problem is that it is actually a "shortage of (cheap) tech workers". Quality is expensive, and companies don't want to pay for expensive american tech workers when they can cut costs by paying for cheap overseas tech workers.

Hence also the magic phrase "fiduciary duty" that absolves everyone of wrongdoing (if any) in making such decisions.

The problem for US tech workers is that Eastern Europe is already ahead and India and China are catching up.

Writing a web app can be done by anyone in the world. Writing a driver and understanding intricacies of an operating system, fewer. Creating and implementing new algorithms? Well...

Sucks to be them. US somehow killed its huge research advantage enjoyed by years of successful brain drain from all over the world.

Here's my anecdata. It matches my experience trying to hire.

I went to tech meetup last week. about 100 people showed up. The company whose office it was in said before the night's presentation that they had about 30 jobs they were looking to fill and if you wanted one go talk to the guy in the back of the room. During the break before the second presentation they let anyone hiring get up and announce their job offers. There were around 70 jobs available over all. At that point the organizer had the bright idea to ask "who here is actually looking for a job?" Not a single person raised their hands

Two thoughts. "Are you looking for a job?" is probably the wrong way to start the conversation with a good worker who could be lured away for the right price or with a more interesting project.

And I bet not one of the jobs being advertised listed a salary.

Considering it was a tech meetup, was it possible that the people there were there to....meet people, not recruiters? Maybe?

I know I don't generally go to meetups with the express purpose of looking for a job.

Although maybe if someone dropped a juicy high wage job offer for a dream job in my lap, then that's a different story. I doubt that's what was being offered, though. Notice I said job offer, not an invite to go through whatever long and arduous process these companies probably have, only to probably get passed over because I didn't answer one algorithm question just perfectly.

Now if you called it a job fair, or hiring event, or something like that, maybe you'd get a different crowd of people.

Ye olde 'We need talent!', which really means they want competing talent to lower the cost of it.

UCSF is one of the wealthiest medical research institutions in the world. It's stunning they can't support an in house IT staff.

Granted, in my experience University IT staffs are generally pretty awful. Usually, each individual lab will have one or two people with a lot of Linux experience who end up doing all of the actual work.

Contrast this with the Texas Medical Center (largest in the world [1]) in Houston where the cost of living is dirt cheap.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Medical_Center

I wouldn't say it's dirt cheap. The Medical Center in particular is in a very wealthy area of Houston and is across the street from Rice and a neighborhood of $1M+ homes.

The dirt cheap homes are 20 miles out in the suburbs or in very high crime areas.

You're exaggerating greatly. Almost the entire Houston metropolitan area is less than 20 miles from the Medical center.

Plenty of homes are near the Medical center. Nearly all of Houston is "dirt cheap" when compared with San Francisco's price bubble.

As for crime, Houston is safer than SF proper and doesn't have San Francisco's vagrancy problems, which are as much a product of the city fathers as of the vagrants themselves.

I don't think that's a fair comparison at all. Having been in both places (currently live in Houston) we have a bad vagrancy problem that has only recently been addressed due to the superbowl.

Furthermore keep in mind the list price on a house in Houston isn't indicative of the true cost. There is a 3-5% property tax that is paid out annually. I currently pay $14,000/yr in property tax against a $320k mortgage. That's after homesteading discount and disputing the property value appraisal to be lower than what I actually paid for it.

> I don't think that's a fair comparison at all.

How much income tax do you pay in Texas vs California?

California [1]:

1% on the first $7,850 of taxable income.

2% on taxable income between $7,851 and $18,610.

4% on taxable income between $18,611 and $29,372.

6% on taxable income between $29,373 and $40,773.

8% on taxable income between $40,774 and $51,530.

9.3% on taxable income between $51,531 and $263,222.

10.3% on taxable income between $263,223 and 315,866.

11.3% on taxable income between $315,867 and $526,443.

12.3% on taxable income of $526,444 and above.

Texas [2]: Texas residents pay no personal state income tax.

[1] http://www.bankrate.com/finance/taxes/state-taxes-california...

[2] http://www.bankrate.com/finance/taxes/state-taxes-texas.aspx

> There is a 3-5% property tax that is paid out annually. I currently pay $14,000/yr in property tax against a $320k mortgage.

Yes, that's high. However, consider what $320k gets you in SF vs Houston. With $320k I can get a decent sized house in Houston vs a tiny studio in SF (if that).

One state is not necessarily better than the other. They are making trade offs. These trade offs benefit you depending on your lifestyle and circumstances.

Of course they can afford it. They choose not to.

$30 mil over 5 years is almost rounding error for UCSF.

Here's the public budget for UCSF : https://www.ucsf.edu/about/ucsf-budget

EDIT: With $1.3B of their income coming from government money, it seems pretty sleezy to turn around and send some of that income out of the country, especially when you have the slogan: "UC San Francisco is a thriving contributor to the local economy"

Longer term, outsourced IT costs for larger projects are not lower than having staff. The cost savings could be in outsourcing infrastructure too, although the way medical systems are required to be maintained in US it's hard to imagine they'd move their stuff to AWS, or if they did whether it would be much cheaper.

Curious to know of real reasons - maybe some internal politics? Or maybe they had issues with staff skills/retraining?

Incentives related to increased cash flow, lack of domain knowledge of the management teams, and a good "packaging" and sales from the outsourcing companies that is hard to compete with internally as all the warts and pimples are visible...

Not sure if this applies to edu, but here's the way it normally seems to work in corporate:

Aspiring manager decides to hitch his or her wagon to offshoring IT initiative. Manager hires consulting firm to handle details / take fall if it goes poorly. Switch-over normally goes well. Cost savings are demonstrated in year 1.

Manager gets promotion / bonus because of fine job he or she did. Consulting firm gets paid because they delivered. Offshore IT appears to be working well.

In year 2, company finds out there's an extremely frequent business interaction with IT that wasn't covered by the contract (because management lives in a land of abstracted rather than actual business processes). Offshore IT bills them an arm and a leg for it. Repeat this for every change request. Service also seems to degrade as new faces are substituted in on the offshore side (B team for A team).

In year 3, company needs to migrate to a new business system. Offshore IT (under current contract) is revealed as utterly incompetent for something this complex. Offshore IT will happily sign a new contract to make it happen, if company is willing to pay more.

In year 4, company is still attempting the migration. After signing the migration contract, offshore assigned more competent resources. However, it is revealed there is now no one left at the company with deep expertise in the system (the person who worked on it for 20 years was let go during the offshoring) to interface with offshore IT experts. And of course nothing was documented.

In year 5, the migration is still ostensibly underway but has generally been accepted as failing. The offshore IT initiative is now regarded as a more expensive boondoggle that delivered worse service.

The manager moved on somewhere around year 3.5, securing a better position based on his or her track record with successful IT offshoring. Which they are then asked to do for their new employer.

The consultants are also in strong demand, based on their track record of successful IT offshoring initiatives. Any problems that occured when they were no longer involved obviously can't be attributed to them.

Tl;dr - pump and dump with a department of employees and people's lives

This is so very true based on my experiences with pharma. The only addition I'd make in year 1 is that most of the company is told that everything will be business as usual. It's not "BAU" because the Offshore IT team brings new processes and there is often a cultural mismatch. The business teams then decide to be uncooperative and work as much as possible outside the bounds of IT for the next 4 years. This makes the environment even more poisonous for all involved.

> However, it is revealed there is now no one left at the company with deep expertise in the system (the person who worked on it for 20 years was let go during the offshoring) to interface with offshore IT experts. And of course nothing was documented.

I've lived this a couple of times. If given time, the newbs can usually figure it all out, on the companies time (and $$$), and at the expense of forward momentum in the market and customer good will. Oh that IE6 client? Yeah that REALLY has to change now.

But these costs are hard/impossible to quantify, and who wants to pay these high priced developers anyway?

I have this exact experience with offshoring in my company. The management became convinced that more people = faster/better and that quality of resourcing wasn't a thing. So we now have to manage about 20x the number of people, and the people change every day. We strongly suspect that we are being used to train these offshore people because as soon as they start delivering reasonable quality things, they move off the project and get replaced with a new incompetent person.

We are left with two options: let the project fail due to incompetent resources and take the fall as the only remaining in-house IT staff; or waste time training the resources and proving that the offshore model works.

What made you immediately dismiss the cost savings from outsourcing staff? In what way is that reason not 'real'?

There's a lot of nuance with these decisions. There's a few factors at play.

- It's attractive to management to displace accountability. As a CIO, you pay a vendor for an SLA, and have an entity to blame when you have a problem who isn't in your scope of responsibility, whom you can fire or otherwise penalize.

- You get to put the budget for maintaining the existing services in a box. Instead of keeping stuff running, you invest your time, energy and money on project work that is perceived to deliver new value.

- There may be undisclosed labor issues that you can't fix without firing everyone.

- "Cheaper" doesn't necessarily mean lowest cost. No C level type wants a smaller budget.

Think about why you pay Amazon for S3 vs. going out and renting a cage and buying a SAN. It's a similar thought process, with a similar affect on employment.

One thing to note here in HN is that, competitiveness of many a business is on the table because of this state of affairs. This is really so. The opportunity to organically develop technology with the business is always lost if the CIO skill is mostly that of a Purchasing Manager. Outside contractors will easily sell you a "roadmap" that looks nice and modular for management, with only contracts to manage :-)

Engineers need to get smarter, learn something from marketing and management, develop and protect their ideas, and move on to new business strategies for themselves.

You're exactly right. There's a line that gets crossed where a CIO is really an operations guy. Usually that means that technology is seen as a cost center, and often the CIO is working for the CFO.

When you read about fucked up states of affairs in the Federal government and Fortune-500 companies, it's usually because of attitudes like this. The most successful companies use technology to make money, the run of the mill use technology to spend it.

AWS has HIPPA compliant offerings.

Yes, and dedicated instances, and allows you to write all the code you need to encrypt everything... Cheaper - this is not however, in either infrastructure or skilled engineering costs (plus medical and finance orgs are skittish of AWS as it is).

When blue collar workers getting outsourced comments here are usually full of pontification on capitalism and shareholder interest.

When it comes to service workers some commentators are nearly gleeful at the prospect of job losses and cost savings by ai never mind it's decades away if at all.

Individualism can only take you so far. Without meaningful community and social structures based on common good and mutual respect the lack of empathy and sometimes open disrespect of other peoples life conditions will ultimately come back to bite you.

Good luck to those losing their jobs, and good luck to the university staff and students - you're going to need it. HCL is terrible.

All University IT departments I have interacted with were terrible too. Universities simply cannot pay market-level salaries for IT staff because it would turn the whole pay-pyramid upside-down. The ones who stay, spend most of their time making sure their work is neither cheap nor good: You cannot use the cloud! but you can have this VMWare virtual from 2009. You need to store 500TB? we don't have it but don't you dare to use S3. To get stuff done you have to essentially run a shadow IT group. Let's see how the UCSF experiment turns out.

But then the same limitations are passed on to the outsourced services, and it's even less flexible because it's not just a "because I say so", it's also a contract...

They could pay what is justified if they wanted. University pay is usually topped by sports coaches (and not just head coaches, at many universities numerous assistant coaches make more than any executives at the school and all academic staff).

There is no reason IT staff couldn't be paid at market rates. Poor management of IT is due to poor management not because "Universities simply cannot pay market-level salaries for IT staff."

Right. There are nonsense "administrators" who make similar salaries to junior devs, but they can't afford market rates. I'm sure whoever is in charge of this bound-to-fail offshoring makes at least that much as well.

Paying market salaries for IT would mean that the people who generate the income for the university/medical system (football coaches through merchandise, doctors through billable services, faculty through grants and teaching) would often be paid less then the personnel they hire. No board of regents will approve this.

Which of course tells about the thinking of boards of regents.

Myself, I've often personally hired people who I have to pay more than I get paid.

"University pay is usually topped by sports coaches (and not just head coaches, at many universities numerous assistant coaches make more than any executives at the school and all academic staff)."

Coaches & sports staff at the high level you are referring to, are NOT funded by the university budget. They're funded by specific athletic funds that is from sports revenue & that boosters pay into.

This is not an equivalent scenario - you're basically saying that a University should go set up an IT Booster Fund and have interested parties pay into it in order to pay these market rates - which they wouldn't (would you? I sure wouldn't).

"The other problem with the salary comparison is that Alabama taxpayers aren't paying Mr. Saban, and so his salary doesn't take any money away from professors. One of the benefits to come out of the rampant commercialism of college athletics is that media conglomerates and sneaker companies are willing to pay huge sums for the broadcast and apparel rights. Thus, Mr. Saban will be paid out of Alabama's $70 million athletic budget, with little or no impact on academic departments."[0]

[0] http://web.archive.org/web/20160325043141/http://www.wsj.com...

But who pays for the infrastructure of the sports, from what I've seen of stadium and amenities investments it's almost always the public that pays for that, and in that case the state does pay a lot to the athletics funds. One have to be real careful when thinking that the abstract budgets are not related.

UCSF doesn't even have any sports teams...

A sincere question: Why have IT involved in those things? Just flood the place with wi-fi, put an RJ45 in every room, and good luck. That's how it is in my house, both personal and business use, and it works just fine.

Most of the staff are buying their own computers anyway, because academic employers don't pay for computers. My spouse won't let IT touch her computer because they screw it up. Her lab still uses thumb drives to move data between computers.

At the worst, IT creates hurdles like you describe. At best, a university does need some services, such as to let students sign up for courses, and maintain their records. But even those services could be outsourced. My daytime employer doesn't maintain those services at every work site, but either outsources them or manages them at a centralized location.

In a certain sense, a university in SF is like a person who wants to live in SF but isn't in a lucrative enough field to afford it. Such a person (e.g., a teacher or a baker) would simply leave town, but the university wants to maintain its presence.

Likely for security among other reasons. As soon as someone uses something like Dropbox with a weak password and it's hacked, then the university's data is out there or at a minimum it is perceived as the university leaking. Or a thumb drive with personal information of staff/students is lost and then leaked by the finder.

> Why have IT involved in those things?

It depends on the context of their use. For example, a neuro-imaging lab wants storage space and processing power. They need to store somewhere between 500GB and 50TB of data they'll gather over the course of a multi year experiment. They'll need a few powerful computers to run a data analysis pipeline on the data. None of the people involved are computer janitors, the best they can do is maybe set up their home wi-fi and write programs in Matlab and R.

As the lab PI, you have a few choices but also a few constraints. For one, the IRB told you that all of the data you generate has to stay "secured." You asked them what they meant by that and they told you that it had to be locked up in your lab. Does this mean the cloud is out? The IRB doesn't know what the cloud is, but "stored on some server in Ireland" sure doesn't sound like "locked up in your lab."

How do you solve the rest of your problems? Do you just go down to Best Buy and buy a bunch of hard drives? They don't sell a 50TB hard drive. How do I even make such a thing?

Absent an IT staff, you now have a PhD-MD and their grad students sitting around googling about RAID and Linux. They'll try to create some system on their own to hold scans of peoples brains and other kinds of PII and they'll try and make it all work in house because all IT does is flood the place with wi-fi and run the RJ45 in the room.

Or maybe the PI could hire his own IT company? Then they notice that the six other PIs in his building also hire their own IT companies and they start talking about pooling the costs...

... in many places you are not even allowed to setup your own wireless network and connect reauthorized equipment on the university one.

As well you shouldn't. Name any employer nowadays that would allow that.

That's the difference between "university IT" and "research computing". Those are typically two separate groups. Think of it as the difference between running the IT (helpdesk, support, backups) at a tech company vs. running a cloud datacenter. You need both, and they are both "technically" IT, but they require very different skill sets. What they are talking about here is pretty standard corporate IT. I'm not sure if the outsourcing contract involves the hospital's EMR or not, but for those numbers, I'd guess not.

In my experience, once you start using the terms "high performance" or "cluster" university IT starts to push the problem back on to the lab or over to research computing. If the university doesn't have a research computing group, then you have a whole lot of other issues.

There are still plenty of research computing staff at UCSF.

Edit: slight wording change about IT (see below)

"University IT" is more than a helpdesk, and also requires services like storage, backups, networking and monitoring.

It's very cost effective to host these in a university data centre. They probably get a good deal on power. The Internet connection costs a token amount at a few peering points. Petabytes of research data probably already needs a fancy backup system, adding some documents isn't going to increase the cost of that by much. There are already staff who deal with hardware.

I know this... I was just trying to make an analogy for others. (Poorly, it seems)

It's the same IT structure that you'd have at any major company of the same size. And even at that scale you have good IT departments and bad ones.

However, it can be rare for the University IT systems and research systems to share too much infrastructure, aside from maybe a building with common networking and power. For one thing, University IT typically supports Windows desktops and servers while research systems are by and large Linux/Unix based. They also have different security requirements. Research usually doesn't deal with PHI, and so doesn't have the same backup security concerns that IT does.

In the specific case of UCSF, they already made the decision to offsite all of their business systems (I think it was because of local power costs, seismic concerns, and lack of a modern datacenter). But they still maintain some research computing onsite, but it is not centralized.

What I described is taken directly from a scenario that happened to me personally while working in a neuro-imaging lab. The lab didn't have any research computing support, neither did their department, neither did their college. The university had an IT department.

The CS department had research computing support, but it was in a totally different college (and about a mile away on campus). In my story, university IT had solutions for the scenario I described.

And really, their computing requirements are far from a "research computing" group. You just need to store 50 TB of data ("I forgot how to count that low?!") and have a single 8 or 16 core computer to do some number crunching. The entire setup could (and did) fit in a half rack in the neuro-imaging lab (which is what they wound up doing).

Not all University IT is horrible, especially in areas with less tech overall. I've been at a few places on the West coast and in the Midwest. While it can be pretty hit or miss, overall, I'd say the Midwest schools have better IT. And it's pretty much why you'd expect - academia can't pay market level salaries in Silicon Valley. If you're good at running a data center, you're not going to do it for a university in California. If you're in the middle of Indiana though and want to play with high performance computing, there are only a few places to go. For example, Indiana University has always had top notch IT. They value that as a core strength of the University and it shows... their president is even an old head of IT.

Terrible compared to what? Uni systems are invasive and shitty pieces of software. Its not like the current staff was doing a great job.

I know they are terrible but there are certain tasks which don't need much expertise. I bet it would mostly be support work. The reasons companies outsource is because it reduces management overhead and let them focus on their main task. Moreover, outsourcing means they get SLA's on support tasks which could have been pending long while done internally.

Sometimes outsourcing a department does makes sense. Now whether you replace it with human workers or automation and whether you go offshore is upto your choice. I'm sure they must have considered different bids before picking this one.

Yesterday when it came to outsourcing of jobs, Trump only said 'China', 'China', 'China'.

I don't know what magical spell has India cast over Americans that all American politicians have become totally stone blind to the fact that how damaging India has been to outsourcing of jobs from America to India and how many highly skilled/educated Americans have been left without jobs due to India's usurping of jobs.

And to those bleeding hearts who highlight scarce attempts of Indian companies hiring in US - don't forget the fact that such job numbers dwarf the amount of jobs that have been outsourced to India. And for those karma-believers who think that one day India will taste its own medicine when they outsource to poorer nations than India - let me tell you something: India is one nation that will never,ever outsource its own jobs to other nations (mickey mouse examples won't count).

How the heck can IT folks from US/Canada/UK and other such nations compete with India (and in some cases with Philippines) where wages are so low that if we here in the Western World were to work with such wages, we would need to have 3 jobs to make our ends meet.

The wages in india IT are growing at a pretty high rate.

Does DevOps engineer in India make US $120,000? Does Java programmer in India command US $100,000? Does a system admin. in India command US $90,000?

> Does Java programmer in India command US $100,000?

2500 USD to 15,000 USD

http://www.payscale.com/research/IN/Job=Java_Software_Develo...

That data is just wrong, and not what people get paid in major IT players, which are more likely to get these projects.

The empirical formula for a new hire is $3000 * years of Experience. The median starting Salary is $4500 ~ $5000, and the salary usually caps out at $25000, and people above that payscale are usually considered architects.

The DevOps in my company is in Pakistan. They make $10 an hour.

I'm on the other end of things, but never got a satisfying answer to why should I earn a cent less than someone US based (remote, traveling nomad whatever) just because I push commits from a different ISP.

Because the market wills so. (Actually, you're at the mercy of your employer.)

Also high competition for perceivably cheap candidates.

For one, I don't think just because you can exploit entire groups of people you are right to do that. The market could command lower wages for <underprivileged group> and it would not be right. It just happens overseas employees are protected by no one.

What I find more interesting though, is that remote first companies behave the same. way E.g. look at GitLab salary calculator[0]. How does that make sense assuming a rational market?

[0] https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/developer/

Perhaps because you don't need to:

- pay $250K per child in college costs

- pay 25K/year in health insurance

- pay $3K/month for a small apartment

This is the sentiment I usually see but how are one's expenses or expected living standard is relevant regarding compensation for work? Imo it is very hard to argue against equal work => equal pay. At least from a moral pov.

Btw that is a lot of incorrect assumptions about expenses, including where someone's children might want to go to college, globally fixed costs like work equipment and cloud services, not to mention goods which are actually cheaper in the US.

This is a good point. At a prior company we pulled our outsourced IT from India and went to the Philippines. Even there wages were quickly rising, and there was constant turnover as people job hopped for more money.

I finally convinced the company to just hire a couple people locally, and they were much better off for it.

> I don't know what magical spell has India cast over Americans that all American politicians have become totally stone blind

Trump and every other American politician do not talk about it because the trade deficit between India and USA is not as big as China. Also, 9 out of 15 top internet companies in India are from USA. So like China, India is not a protectionist country and this outsourcing is a part of free trade.

Btw,Welcome to Capitalism!

> Trump and every other American politician do not talk about it because the trade deficit between India and USA is not as big as China. Also, 9 out of 15 top internet companies in India are from USA. So like China, India is not a protectionist country and this outsourcing is a part of free trade.

The day we hear Indian companies have outsourced jobs in India to outside of India, then your point will be valid.

This is not capitalism and is certainly not free trade - it is simply one-way trade and the problem lies with the Western World who have propped up the Indian economy by handing over jobs that should have remained in the West over to India.

> This is not capitalism and is certainly not free trade

It most certainly is, sadly.

> handing over jobs that should have remained in the West

Capitalism recognises no "should" other than the market.

> Indian companies have outsourced jobs in India to outside of India

Does it matter whether the jobs were in India in the first place? India is certainly an export market for the US: https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/south-central-asia/india

Three billion dollars of aircraft! That's got to be worth a job or two at Boeing or Lockheed-Martin. And then there's a little note at the bottom:

"Sales of services in India by majority U.S.-owned affiliates were $16.4 billion in 2011 (latest data available), while sales of services in the United States by majority India-owned firms were $9.3 billion."

pjc50 says:" Capitalism recognises no "should" other than the market."

And therein lies the rub for the USA: capitalism is not the be all and end all of our existence as a nation. Somewhere down the road we lost the notion that there was an implied social contract between a nation and its citizens. And that contract must take precedence over unfettered capitalism.

USA citizens thought the social contract included protection from competition with 2nd- and 3rd-world workers who are paid 2nd- and 3rd-world wages. But MBAs, economists, and "globalizers" believed that no such protection should be provided.

The USA's citizens lost the argument w/o knowing it was going on. The asymmetry in the situation puts only upside into the hands of the MBA/globalizer and downside into the hands of the USA worker:

MBA/globalizer - "I'll make mega-mega-megabucks if I can produce widgets abroad! I'll be a god* billionaire!"

Other would-be MBA/globalizer down the street - "If MBA/globalizer doesn't produce widgets abroad, then _I_ will do it! I'll be a god* billionaire and MBA/globalizer will be out of business!"

US citizen worker - "I'll lose my job and be penniless if anyone produces widgets abroad!"

Guess which ones put the most money into USA'S political campaigns over recent decades!

There is no question that China has a "China first!" policy. In contrast, the USA has forgotten that it once had a "USA first!" policy as part of its social contract. The USA should restore that policy and make it economically explicit. Otherwise, why have a nation-state at all? If we don't go "USA first!" then we will be little more than a protective nest for an extremely wealthy few.

[Edit: I was somewhat reluctant to add this, but several of the few extraordinary wealthy I have spoken to have literally whispered:]

But that might not last long. The USA populace would likely revolt, kill the extremely wealthy and start all over again.

Some, and possibly many, wealthy persons apparently fear the judgement of the crowds, pitchforks, torches and finally death at the hands of the mob! How wonderful must be extraordinary wealth that one begins to fear for one's very existence and that of one's children!

Don't worry, they will hire paramilitaries (not from US even) and beat everyone to the ground with them. Even gun laws are no good against trained military. The US would then be even more fully de facto police state.

Or they could just move, leaving a poor country behind.

Only if the military and the police rebelled would the revolution have any chance. Even in the US.

(People may be temporarily suckered by hypocrites and liars by omission.)

Are you truly interested in debate or just jealous Pakistani( based on your HN history) who can't fathom India getting successful ?

>How the heck can IT folks from US/Canada/UK and other such nations compete with India

They can compete by doing a better job. A lot of people who have outsourced to India have run into problems and regretted it.

Absolutely. I've worked with dozens of remote teams in India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, and every single one of them has produced absolute garbage work product, and the project management is very much CYA and do-as-little-as-possible. On paper it's nice to give them a list of things to be completed overnight, but in actuality it's never done.

Random web service times out once? Don't do any more work on anything, even stuff that doesn't use that service. Bill the full 8 hours though, of course.

Have a question about some tangentially related business process? Stop work until we get an answer, bill the full 8.

Oh, someone is actually checking our commits? The guy that wrote that is on vacation, sorry.

Oh, someone is actually checking our commits? Delete and recommit entire files, now it's impossible to see the volume of work complete.

At my current gig we picked up about 40 offshore developers and ended up dropping every one of them within the first year. We're still remote but US only at this point.

>I don't know what magical spell has India cast over Americans that all American politicians have become totally stone blind to the fact that how damaging India has been to outsourcing of jobs from America to India and how many highly skilled/educated Americans have been left without jobs due to India's usurping of jobs.

The "usurping" of jobs is because American companies are fine with driving down wages.

Infosys, Tata, etc in addition to being horrible bodyshops that treat their people like garbage are also some of the larger lobbying groups in the US. I know Infosys alone donated something like 3+ million dollars to the Clinton Foundation.

Many campaign donors effectively tossed millions into the trash this last election cycle by backing the losing candidate.

Good news: it isn't a total loss; the Clintons and the Clinton foundation are now rich b/c everyone thought Hilary Clinton would win the election.

Do not forget that even a losing candidate has quite some pull in the party.

And Democrats will not forget about the support.

The average american who maybe lost a factory job 10 years ago, or who's parents made a good living working for a Ford factory in the 60s.. is mad about manufacturing leaving the country. There are millions of people with low education unable to make a living wage. That is where the anger is.

When an India bodyshop comes in, and displaces 50 people making 100k a year.. and they have to go find a new job making 100k a year within a month, there is much less outrage. The general rust belt population in the US is not going to go to bat for lawyers getting paid less, or IT workers making 10 or 20k less. Their parents made 60k working at a Ford factory, and now they make 20k working for a carwash. They are the ones that are outraged.

whose parents

brianwawok says:> "manufacturing leaving the country. There are millions of people with low education unable to make a living wage. That is where the anger is."

That's not the only place the anger is!

I can no longer buy good hand tools like those made in the USA during the 60s. Since then, neither China nor India (nor any other rising nation except Taiwan) have produced hand tools comparable to those formerly available from the USA.

Remarkably, most of my USA-made hand tools from the 60s still work but nothing lasts forever and accidents do happen. At least I can still get high-quality German, French or Japanese tools.

Business schools taught international economics theory to MBAs, who proselytized and burned down the barn (i.e., the USA's manufacturing capability) by globalizing everything in sight. MBAs in finance engineered a series of disastrous economic collapses, each larger than the previous. While the USA has "enjoyed" center-stage in this circus, I would have preferred that we, as a nation, avoided such a sordid business history.

Were it possible to do again, I would put most of the MBAs (along with all political science students) onto concrete boats and let the Navy use them for target practice. India and China would be much poorer but also would have avoided much upheaval. And I could buy good hand tools which, of course, is all I care about!

So let's talk about handtools.

Clearly some people value this. I know people that go to garage sales just to get vintage better made hand tools. So clearly there is some kind of demand for this.

Why do we not have a hand tools startup come in, and offer 1960s quality hand tools for a price premium? Choices are:

1) They literally cannot be made today. Say the type of steel is different, or there is some physical reason they cannot be built.

2) They can be made, but the price is so high - not enough people would pay for it, and the company would go under.

3) This is a ripe opportunity, and we just need a startup to come along an exploit it.

I am going to rule 1 out without more proof. So down to 2 choices. How much are people will to pay for really nice hand tools? 2-5x the autozone tools price?

I think thats because China takes away a lot of manufacturing jobs. Manufacturing in India is yet to take off.

China manipulates its currency, disregards WTO standards and blatantly prevents foreign companies from dominating their market. Not to mention you have to hand over your company secrets to them if you need their 1.3B market access.

On the other hand, India is much more transparent and follows open market, Any foreign company can freely operate there without being feared of getting disadvantaged over local competition.

Btw, USA and other western power blatantly bullies India and other third world countries alike. When India started making cheap solar panels, USA dragged them to court. In the 90s, India started producing cheap fertilizers for their farmers.. oops, big daddy us doesn't likes it because it hurts the interest of Monsanto. So stop playing this US vs Them game.

Such nation of hypocrites. Takes proud in Democracy and free market capitalism but hates when it plays out on the world stage.

Not to mention: the US continue billions in dollars of farm subsidies for corn, wheat and cotton making them artificially cheap and thus making farmers of other nations (especially India) noncompetitive in the global market.

When I sell my products/services to others, globalization is good but when others sell their products/services to me, globalization is bad.

"I don't know what magical spell has India cast over Americans"

This is a common question esp. among Pakistanis ("m23khan" is someone from Pakistan living in Canada, available from his HN comments). Please let me explain. (1) India is the biggest democracy in the world. US is the oldest democracy. We share common values like liberty, equality, secularism. (2) India has the potential to be largest growth market for American companies (think Android, Uber, American defense companies, etc.). (3) No Indian has been involved in terrorism attacks in US. (4) Indians integrate in US much faster than other immigrant communities, reasons could be familiarity with English, belief in freedom of speech, etc. (5) Significant contributions made by Indian-Americans - look at their work as Professors, as doctors, as CEOs, as journalists. (6) In spite of sharing many values with US, India is not afraid to distance itself from American policies when they do not agree, e.g. India said no for troops in Iraq, led the non-aligned movement during Cold War. My guess is that America respects a principled country more than a country which keeps asking for more $ while pointing a gun to its own head.

So it should not be difficult to understand why India is considered as an ally by US.

Great response.

It is more likely that India can be invaded if all goes wrong, but China would easily withstand US military nowadays.

In other words, Chinese negotiate from the position of strength in all regards. And they do want to keep control of their economy and their internal market.

What is this? Civilization 2 or something. HN too is subject to such juvenile commentary like Reddit, I suppose.

India frequently gives contracts to build nuclear power plants, metro railways, and a bunch of other infrastructure projects to foreign companies, including American companies. Indian also has a bunch of big data projects, like a national data registry to which US companies contribute.

If India can survive outsourcing of her jobs to American companies, America surely wouldn't perish by outsourcing American jobs where it makes perfect business sense to do so.

Hopefully that school doesn't have a CS or IT program, 'cause that's a pretty strong wave-off for people considering what career to go for.

Quote from UCSF "... I.T. costs have nearly tripled between 2011 and 2015"

This is the real story. The ballooning salaries and cost of living in San Francisco from the tech boom has completely blown UC's budget out of proportion.

These people are not downtrodden factory workers in some midwestern town losing their livelihoods. They are highly qualified IT workers in the hottest job market that has ever existed anywhere. They will all have job offers in weeks.

What's the work involved in these jobs?

If it's being done remotely it can't be any physical maintenance as that'd require being on site.

Just because the company is based in India doesn't mean all the staff is. There is probably "remote hands" or light network engineering on site with the bulk administration being done remotely.

UCSF just finished migrating all of their business systems to a remote datacenter (Washington state). These two events are probably linked. Running a data center in the heart of SF isn't a good plan for a variety of reasons, so my guess is the logic was "if the hardware isn't here, do the people need to be?"

(Not saying that's a good plan)

> "It's a downgrading of services and a slap in the face for the customers," said Ho

I'd express my sympathy - but these statements tend to be incorrect and said out of frustration. Infact, there is a higher probability for improvement in service and customer experience - provided it is maintenance work and the control point decisions are not outsourced. However, if customer-experience depends on cultural experience - the story could be different. And in this case HCL is a reputed organization (not too different from the likes of TCS, Infosys)

> as a way to save $30 million over five years.

Doesn't happen and/or highly unlikely to occur. What happens is: They start saving initially. After some time their costs start rising, but they are still saving. In parallel, the company (to whom they outsourced) starts cross-selling. This new expense doesn't affect the savings figure - afterall they are spending on "something new". Well this "something new" costs higher. Slowly - outsourcers start outsourcing decision making (and sometimes managers get themselves fired). And then the tables turn over. Later the outsourcer is so much dependent that its hard and costly to take jobs back in, because it requires a business-system overhaul. And the company would make sure (by resolving some pain points) that you are not firing them and keep tolerating them. Nothing specific to India here, it happens with Indian consulting cos and with US-based consulting cos. The only difference is that the latter provides slightly better quality at a 50-80% higher cost.

A lot of criticism of how bad it will be with the outsourcing company, but clearly the real worry is local people losing their jobs to foreigners. Why blame the university? It's not a charity. If anyone really cares about the workers who lost their jobs, they can look up their address and mail them a check.

Seems like you may have missed the whole, "Give a man a fish..." thing growing up.

Not GP, but there is a sliver of sound logic in the call to put your money where your mouth is.

Why not start a charity/non-profit that assists such victims of outsourcing? I'd think unemployment benefits were supposed to do that. And that is not too far from you, me and all other taxpayers writing a check to such folks. Is it?

Not the GP, but because starting a charity/non-profit that's worth a damn takes a ridiculous amount of work, and in areas I'm not terribly proficient in, and I have a plethora of other things that I would like to do with my limited time on earth.

I already have about 100+ things I'd love to create, contribute to, or accomplish, if only I had the time and money to do so. I do what I can, but that list just keeps growing, not shrinking.

Hidden secret is http://business.rediff.com/report/2009/sep/24/indians-among-...

Open secret you mean.

I think it's deceptive to frame this as Indians stealing American jobs. It's more like American engineers are being overpaid at the expense of UCSF patients and CA taxpayers.

American engineers are being overpaid, or Indian engineers are being underpaid?

I think this question should be discussed alongside the question of why US healthcare is so expensive and inefficient compared to the rest of the world.

because we don't do the same thing that we do in IT like importing doctors, meds ect.

Why isn't anyone talking about the lack of funding for universities and educational institutes? Isn't that too a part of the problem?

Or is there no lack of funding?

The goal is opex obviously.

Try hiring Politicians on H1B

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