Top global IT firms have more staff in India than home nations | Hacker News Reader

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

economictimes.indiatimes.com

46 pointsindus45 comments

Companies like IBM are "American" only in the sense that (1) legally they are domiciled in a US state such as, say, Delaware; (2) physically they are headquartered in or near a major US airport; and (3) their shares are listed in a US stock exchange.

In most other ways, these companies transcend national boundaries. For example, many of them book a substantial portion of revenues through complex networks of "offshore" subsidiaries to avoid paying corporate taxes in any jurisdiction.[1]

[1] For example, see http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/04/28/business/Doubl...

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

Accenture is technically "Irish". It used to be "Bermudan". In either case, they have so many employees in so many countries, it's hard to imagine pinning them down to a single home country.

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

IBM and Accenture are American in that that's where they were founded. This matters a lot: company culture is very different to change, and with the exception of departments that came forth of an acquisition, you can find elements of the founder's culture in most large multinationals.

Of course there are exceptions, as there always are, but I guess that from an employee's perspective, IBM looks and feels like an American company very much. Same holds for how sales teams interact with customers.

I would be interested in a comparison between experiences of Indian employees of Oracle and SAP, for instance. I have no clue, but I bet that it's tangible.

In all fairness, IBM is short for International Business Machines. Note how often they get dinged for their German branch "cooperating" with the Nazis (as opposed to ending up in the concentration camps themselves?).

Yes - they are very much multinationals both in customers and employees. I think the true sense of their being American (and this does include Accenture) is that is where they were founded, and did much of their early growth.

How and where they pay taxes is a vary important distinction.

>> "There is a surplus at the entry level and salaries at this level have stabilized."

That's a nice euphemism for "there are a lot of fresh graduates whom we really don't have to pay much".

Considering that, the initial statement

"It's a measure of India's strength in software services and the number of engineers it produces that some of the world's largest IT companies have more employees in India now than in their home countries."

really isn't something to be very proud of.

Can't agree more

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

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

Just for your reference:

1 lakh (or lac) = 100,000

1 crore = 10,000,000

How this is a big surprise?

If the man you're looking for is one in a million, we've probably got a thousand of them for you to pick from.

But I think there needs to be a defense made about cheap indian labour & why it works for american firms (more than the french or germans).

I'm sitting in Bangalore right now and I can see why this happened. We all speak English, we grew up watching Simpsons and can quote Friends episodes by events. We're immersed in the culture so deep that visiting your parents is a culture shock.

And the vast numbers are because there are a lot of bad engineers. There are a lot of good engineers - but a far lower fraction than in most other parts of the world.

But if you are an employer who's hiring locally instead of contracting work to a cheap contractor, you can spend some time culling the bad ones and then the good ones were truly great value for money.

My first job paid 250$ a month - for that pittance I was debugging ARM microkernels on an Ericsson phone. And that did pay the bills because of a few other advantages I had growing up - I had a cheap tax-payer funded education, but it was truly remarkable one beyond the textbooks.

My CS grad education cost approx 500$ for 4 years, had good teachers. The tenured professors were great, particularly graph theory & compilers - awesome COBOL teacher, whose lessons are why I'm finding hadoop to be very interesting to work on today. The labs were good with mostly SunOS/Netware boxes & a few Xilinx boards donated by alumni. I even had to do 8086 assembly by hand in hex for my lab exams.

My classmates included children of cab drivers, college professors, household help and of the filthy rich - we weren't equal outside college, but in class we were on the same level. Social class got scrubbed out of our egos and talent showed no correlation. And the EE course had 17 boys for approx 160 girls.

But that said all of us were the top ~1% of the state educational system after the math-heavy entrance tests (I had to get a double digit rank in approx 5-6 million people, to qualify).

Most of us spoke English as a first language (at least as good as one), nearly all of us bilingual (and not in the same languages) who were used to our English being misunderstood. This was something we all learnt to realize & work on our communication.

On top of that my college had an FSF chapter (http://www.cetafi.net/modules.php?name=News&file=print&sid=1...), I volunteered there for 2 months after college and even spent 2 years on an open-source project.

I might have been good engineer material to begin with. But that cheap and rather real-life education I got made me competitive on factors beyond economics.

And I assume there are at least a few like me around for the employers who want to dig through the chaff.

> And the vast numbers are because there are a lot of bad engineers.

> On top of that my college had an FSF chapter, I volunteered there for 2 months after college and spent 2 years on an open-source project.

Awesome re: FSF chapter and Open Source. If more Indian programmers did things like this (as well as start disruptive businesses) to show they're passionate about software, rather than wanting to be an engineer because it's a "respectable profession" Indian programming would be on the up and up and the world would be better for it.

You may bump into some of them here? - http://www.thestartupcentre.com/

Um... Why is it inappropriate to suggest that one might bump into passionate and talented programmers at the startup centre?

> Most of us spoke English as a first language (at least as good as one), nearly all of us bilingual (and not in the same languages) who were used to our English being misunderstood.

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

> in the way that a native speaker does

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

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

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

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

No kidding, and even if they speak English as a "first language", the cultural upbringing often makes more get lost in translation than in communication with, say, Mexicans who have a much worse grasp of English but much more in common with US culture.

Well put. I have worked closely with latinos when I was working in restaurants and it was very easy to communicate back and forth even if one of us didnt speak the same language. They never sounded like they were talking out of a 1920s dictionary, words no one uses in normal conversations.

just as a brit would say an american doesn't speak the same way they do. English doesn't belong to the Americans or Brits or Australians or whoever else - English is a global language and is spoken differently in every corner of the world. What makes it native for many Indians is the fact that they grew up speaking that at home with their family - may not be the way you spoke or heard it - but that doesn't stop it from being native - nor does it stop it from being English!

I agree that brits / americans / australians might have an easier time understanding each other. But that probably has to do more with exposure to each other than anything else. Simply put - you've only really dealt with Indians for maybe 2 decades as a nation? give it time - soon you'll understand them too.

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

But they can be understood. And they do speak well, apart from the funny (to us) accent. I personally find it more palatable than southern American accents, and more understandable than Caribbean accents (and I'm married to a Caribbean woman!), but that's just me...

Must be just you but I can understand a Southerner or someone from New York or Boston, UK/AUS/NZ/Canada any day of the week compared to Tarun I talked to this morning. I am talking about business conversations not people using slang or localized words/sayings.

When I worked in tech support, I spoke with a lot of different people with a lot of different accents. The issue I discovered between Southern accents and Indian accents is, Southerners tend to talk slowly. That helps me process what they're trying to say (although their slang still throws me). The Indians I spoke to tend to speak English very quickly, more quickly than most Americans I know. The accent might be more understandable, but the speed combined with the accent makes it hard to get enough time to process the words before you're supposed to have a response to them.

Oh my, this is funny.

What would work for the Indians is the English English cliche of British civil servants -- everyone understands English if you make a point of speaking sloowwllyy and e-nun-ci-ate cleeaarrllyy.

(Not a native speaker, even if I've read mostly in English since I was a teenager. Which was a while ago.)

Well business people tend to speak better in general and 'put off' the accent most of the time. Indians and Caribbean people included.

Like the way that we have American English, British English, Singapore English, India also has its own flavor of Indian English.

Also like how American and British English spell some words differently (color vs colour), Indian English also has that spelling difference. You can't really say they're wrong, just..different.

It has its own Wikipedia page too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_English

Well if its on wikipedia then we know it must be official.

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

Well, there is nothing surprising in it at the same time it is clearly not what that article is suggesting.

-- It's a measure of India's strength in software services and the number of engineers it produces that some of the world's largest IT companies have more employees in India now than in their home countries. --

What is the # of "good" developers in India? What is the # of "bad" developers in India?

What is the # of "good" developers in the US? What is the # of "bad" developers in the US?

This is a lot more of an interesting question.

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

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

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

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

Absolute advantage as work here.

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

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

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

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

this is not new - china has maybe been more in the spotlight - IT has been outsourced to India atleast for 2 decades now - those jobs are already "stolen" if you will. The real story if you care to put aside your bias though - is that a bulk of what these guys are doing is IT grunt work - stuff thats in IT terms "menial" - solving simple tickets, implementing basic CRUD stuff etc. Stuff that a good programmer in the West - wouldn't want to do - and would honestly be too expensive to do. Until you figure out how to automate it - you do it where it's cheap and labour is ready. Econ 101.

You're missing the second order effects. In the old days the route into the industry for non-traditional candidates was to start on the helpdesk or in QA and work hard and then get the nod to move across to engineering if you were good. One of the best managers I ever worked for got her start that way. But if this "menial" work is outsourced, where does that leave us in the West? Without one stream of high quality talent.

It is not new, but it is getting worse now. The IBM case mentioned in the article is a good example.

btw: most western developers also work on simple tickets and CRUD stuff, which is, ironically, the major functionality of most software.

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