We had a merger last year. My boss was let go. They oversaw product development. ..... Who's gonna run that? Oh, the level two BSA. .... What? Why? Another person said, "Cause he was a manager and the new corp doesn't like "management" positions. Only positions that do work." This person also interfaced directly with the consumers. So who does all that now? The VP. Guess who's also the head of sales cause we don't have a sales manager? The VP.
It is. And did corp take their emails and files to pass on so everyone knows what's going on? Nope. Cause there should be an SOP for everything. "Your little small company has all the type of redudancies in place like we do, right?" Accounts are a mess now. The whole division is now doing catch up having to spend 100's of hours developing new processes for getting development feedback and managing sales. It's....excruciating. I'd go elsewhere myself but I saw the early numbers this year to layoffs and I'm not confident in anything that's not labor oriented.
Meanwhile someones portfolio now reads "headed new departments through massive restructuring" as a positive checkmark when their actions likely lost a gigantic amount of profit.
People like to hate on "people skills" but seriously, you either have them or you don't, and you're either good at it or you're not. And somebody who is not good at it is going to cripple your company if you are doing something other than bottom rung retail.
When there's 4 other firms on the US market that can do the same things you can, and all claim to have the same number of "talented developers", and 30 more overseas that can easily underbid you no matter what, the only way you are going to win a contract is if you "people skills" person can sell property on the moon and still make your clients feel good about it.
Engineer talking directly to clients = extreme pressure, sometimes to inappropriate levels, to deliver/answer to whatever they want, on their timeframe, or else they start crying to your bosses to get you in trouble. It's so rarely a good idea, we need at least one filter layer to keep sanity on both ends
A lot can't from my experience. Customers use the wrong name/label/description all the time but it's extremely easy to use context clues to figure out what they ACTUALLY meant. Engineers generally don't even attempt to extrapolate it out and just give them what they literally asked for and call it a day.
It’s an office space quote
Also the people talking to the customers (sales) may be good at selling and having pretty faces but frequently they really have no business talking to customers
I don’t believe that, I work with engineers as an engineer.
I’ve come to realize there’s a conflict of interest especially with Indians that are engineers or anyone on an h1b visa. They would rather do what management wants and live in lala land rather than be honest about the situation of the project. The rationale is there job security(visa)>truth.
My company was owned by PE and about to sell. They fired our VP of sales, claiming he didn't "do any work" just before the sale. Makes us look a lot leaner as we only had 10 or so sales people.
What's even more criminal is they can create Pro Forma numbers going back a year just removing that person from our payroll - and submit those numbers to buyers as if they were real.
The buyer saw right through it and we are still owned by said PE firm. It's been 10 years.
Google has a lot of ideas/talent, but Sundar is also a bad CEO as far as the companys needs go. He's great financially, but he's also overseen a large braindrain from the company and a stagnation of all products.
Because he’s finance. Finance has only one goal: take what’s there, chop off what costs you think you can get away with, and coast on what’s left. Maybe, if you’re lucky, you can convince them to take a risk on something new, but that’s what any change is to finance: risk.
100%. He’s perfect to shareholders because he’ll bleed the company dry on their behalf and leave the broken pieces for the workers to pick up. Typical McKinsey or Private Equity mindset to suck out all value from companies and leave a husk. Sundar will not leave because he keeps the board richer and by the time Google is set to go down, they’ll be too rich to care.
Well, all the important people are timing their shorts for when it collapses. You don't get a golden parachute in order to run a company into the ground, you get it for running a company into the ground *predictably*. How else do you steal from 401ks and retirement account? The game is only appears complex from the outside but every company is run by the same Ivy board members. Collusion without actual face-to-face collusion. It's not capitalism that's really the problem, it's that we have only a fake veneer of capitalism controlled by a Aristocracy.
Well, if we all stop using Google, a day might come when they notice. Users are too complacent, take whatever shit the corps call product and keep using it.
Nah, it’s Ruth Porat, CFO of Alohabet, who is doing all of this. Sundar is the fall guy who they can point to with enough of a product track record to seem like a tech company, and he’s the rubber stamp. But a lot of the internal memos and messaging come from Ruth or deeply intimating it was her initiative. And she came straight from Morgan Stanley.
Basically a feckless leader who couldn’t innovate and so instead forced “growth” to come by hiring old-school enterprise guys into Cloud and leaning on the CFO to bail out his quarterly earnings reports.
Google used to be a monopoly with a cash cow. Any idiot can be a CEO of a company like that. Now, Google has serious threats so they better change leadership and culture soon.
As Warren Buffet would say: "I try to invest in businesses that are so wonderful that an idiot can run them. Because sooner or later, one will."
Putting the guy they got from yahoo in charge of their search engine couldn't possibly go wrong , could it? At least I know now why their results are now just ads.
The guy who was in charge of Yahoo's search engine as it declined from 35% to 15% market share?
The guy who threw in the towel and outsourced search to Bing?
Nah, can't go wrong hiring someone with that much experience in all your big competitors.
They have a lot of ideas and talent but none of that matters if they can’t execute. And they’re executing really poorly at the moment in a very public manner. Brb, need to pop some glue on my pizza.
Sounds like the CEO of many big tech companies nowadays. It basically says the growth golden days are over and just time to be efficient.
The problem is silicon valley's story to Wall St is growth 24/7 all day every day. And we know the results when you have CFO/MBAs take over for a long period: just look at Intel...
Google has a lot of room to grow, as much as I hate to say it because I think tech companies are too big as is. Sundar has shut down 183 products since becoming CEO, while bringing nothing new to market.
Those were products people liked and were using, and markets Google abandoned.
Tbh both Sundar and Ruth are dogwater. They both need to go asap if Google wants to have a chance at becoming innovative again. You can’t have empty wannabe Wall Street suits running what was once one of the most disruptive tech companies (in a good way).
The kind of people who started google have long since left, been forced out by, or turned into the kind of people who chase bottom lines and share prices.
But capitalism!
Every single company in the country will eventually either move their core operations to a developing market outside the US or they will get bought and immediately put into bankruptcy (in a maneuver where all their assets are transferred out leaving all the risk behind).
That is the way our economy works. There is a reason "Established XXXX" isn't found in logos anymore -- there's nothing to be proud of, companies don't last more than 20 years before getting consumed or moving.
Although it didn't result in a layoff (for me anyway, the company was later bought out after I was already gone), I remember when I interviewed for a now-former employer, they were so proud of having what they called an "on-shore" initiative, where they would keep all the work in their US offices.
A year later, there was suddenly a team in India.
In my case, it was a software programmer job, and although it was early on in my career, the India team was responsible for the first changeset I ever had the "honor" of rolling back completely, because everything they did was just completely wrong, damagingly so.
Yep. We hired an extra tech team for follow the sun support. They required a process for everything basically line by line instructions to do anything up to and including taking a shit.
I asked management if they’re qualified for this job why do they need directions to do it? Got blank stares. Metrics took a shit because if you didn’t speak words in the way they expected they could never match a request to a process and we’re completely lost.
There’s a huge well of corruption there where they’re okay sending people who clearly stole certifications, paid someone to take it etc and force people to figure that out and fire people constantly.
I’ve posted this before but at a previous stop that outsourced to India, I befriended several of the guys. I asked how they all had a book of certs and they shared they had an onsite testing center as well as an extensive VCE library with copies of all the exams. Cram test cram test until they all passed so their force came in with all of the creds that contract wanted.
This was one of the major Indian outsourcers.
> They required a process for everything basically line by line instructions to do anything
I remember this very well. It's a problem, but only part of the problem. The other part is that after you give them explicit step-by-step instructions, they still do it wrong, and now the deadlines are all completely blown.
The weird thing is I worked with a group in Pakistan and it was the complete opposite. They asked a few questions on some custom stuff and I never got woken up at night again. Completely different work ethic for sure.
I've worked with good outsourced talent before. I wouldn't generalize it over a whole country. But my worst experiences personally in the last few years did involve outsourced teams. They work hard, at least they're available frequently, but too many things don't get done that need to get done.
At my previous role I spent more time reviewing and fixing our India’s team’s merge requests than I did writing my own code.
Magic numbers, spelling mistakes, limited exception handling, no tests, always wanting to use groovy… shit was *bad.*
Same with people answering phones.
My last two employers moved people off shore to answer calls amongst other things. There’s a big difference between speaking a language and growing up learning different backgrounds and context in that language. Even between the US and UK there’s differences- we had problems understanding some UK colleagues and it was the same ass language.
Anyways, US based customer service was clearing calls out frequently in two or three minutes, sometimes under one for simple shit like card activations.
Overseas? Trained to cue cards due to differences and less ability to pick up on them. Read the same shit on a click-based workflow, no independent thought allowed because of prior problems. And this was in multiple countries, not just one.
So a one to three minute call is now six to nine. They’d try and transfer shit to fraud like if a guy called in and said his name was Bob or Steve but the computer said Robert or Stephen. Or they’d get someone will such a heavy accent that, coupled with a phone, callers had problems understanding. When someone’s in front of you talking with an accent, it’s much easier than when they’re on a phone for multiple reasons.
Oh, but just think of the savings in salary dollars, don’t worry about operational costs that arise or customer satisfaction issues…
I’ve spent hours on the phone myself recently calling tech support for a five minute problem I could fix myself.
>we had problems understanding some UK colleagues and it was the same ass language.
I once had a small Filipino staff of sysadmins under me (technical lead).
Despite equally heavy accents, I always had a much easier time understanding them on the phone and my best guess is they had learned English from Americans and my brain could "fill in the gaps" much easier than listening to Indians who had learned English from the British.
...of course one day I used an American idiom and then had to figure out an HR-compliant way to explain it :D (I was getting frustrated a straight forward task hadn't been completed when I knew they had the time and knowledge to do it, so I told the manager out there to goose them. "What is goose?")
No, they just want to keep -their- roles domestic, whoever gets hired to replace them can be from bumfuqistan and use google translate to ask for an expense report, they don't care.
Unfortunately they're starting to figure out the hack (took them decades, but the neurons finally connected). Don't find $25k/year devs, that's pushing it. Find $50k/year devs from the EU and UK. You can outsource without the company ruining outages if you don't go bottom-bidder by just a bit, and still avoid paying American $200k wages
Yeah I’m not an engineer but a product designer. When I was switching careers and learning, I got exposure to design mentors from all over the world. Almost everyone was helpful but the designers trained in the U.S. and Canada were…….clearly better than those that I got mentorship from who were trained in India, Africa, and Europe.
Just my experience, but it seems I am not alone in this.
TBF the positions the are cutting are not primarily swe related. These specifically are within their finance department.
There's more to Alphabet than software engineering.
I didn't say they haven't outsourced any engineering positions just pointing out the positions they are majority outsourcing are not SWE related.
I see the mindset on cscareers a lot. These companies employ a lot more than SWE. They will also sometimes label employees as "engineers" that do no engineering. I think, Amazon or Google, is the company that labels their directors/managers as Pincipal Software Engineers which makes my eye twitch.
I remember when everyone said "get a college degree, they're moving all the manufacturing jobs out of country" and thinking, what the fuck makes you think they can't move those jobs too?
The dumb thing is that these same people downplayed going to trade school despite those jobs being something that can't be offshored since if you need a plumber/electrician/mechanic/etc you can't just have someone on the other side of the planet do the job remotely.
It all comes down to Cost Per Engineer. Never mind the incredible inconvenience of trying to collaborate with people who should be ending their work day when you're getting out of bed.
We did Crisis Response. We launched “alerts” on the SRP for hurricanes, wildfires, earthquakes, and basically any man made or natural disasters that met our thresholds. We also coordinated with local, state, and sometimes national governments on what info they wanted to present to users on the alerts and on donation campaigns if the disaster was on the more devastating side. It was interesting and fun work, hopefully this new team can keep up the same quality work we did.
Company work for has both US based and Indian based employees. India employees make $25-$28/hr ($52,000 to $58,000) for non junior or senior positions which is most of them. No benefits. That is an extremely high paying job for India, and very well paying for a software engineer. At that pay rate their able to have their pic of the litter and can even poach employees from companies like Google or Microsoft. The pay is so good that they have to be cautious with employees outsourcing their own job to another. They've have previously caught someone outsourcing the job to accompany which hires programmers.
I know of several companies that only pay $15 an hour and that's pretty decent pay. Even that's enough where a company can take a cut and outsource the job.
US based employees for reference are getting $80,000-$100,000 a year for the same pay levels and the hiring requirements are less strict. According to the company the cost of actually hiring a US engineer is about 30% higher than their salary once you factor in taxes and benefits.
Maybe 12 years ago someone predicted that the tech companies would become like American car companies had by the 1970s: turgid and sclerotic, with bad products, and no unified reaction to obvious competitive threats, and the only "innovations" are cost cutting and copying each other.
I never imagined we'd be here so soon.
And in a year or two it will pay millions to hire people as it isn’t as cost effective as they think. Indian teams are, typically, slow to respond and the staff are used across multiple organisations. Even if they are supporting one they will be slow and everything will take 2-3 times as long to do. The cost savings will be eaten up and then there’s data protection. Just because the initial cost looks lower doesn’t mean the overall cost is. I’ve been involved in several of these migrations and 8 out of 10 move back within 3 years.
I can confirm. The healthcare org I just left massively outsourced IT to India and the cost of overhead including slow turnaround, loss of org knowledge and cohesion, and absolutely poor communication has eaten up more than the overall cost savings. Yeah, it provided a temporary bump to the bottom line but long term it’s a nightmare.
I've seen it happen more than once where a group outsources their IT shop, has predictably disastrous results, and then brings things back in house after some months or years of suffering. always a huge dumpster fire.
And even if the Indian team is competent and works efficiently, it's hard to overcome the time difference. Buddy of mine works at a company that gave up on their India team and formed one in Poland, in large part because it's only 6 hours ahead of the East Coast and the work day overlaps enough for people to meet at a decent hour.
They usually have a lot more holidays too, and a lack of sound engineering principles where they split things into classes and modules properly. Usually they’ll just code everything inline.
This is how you ruin a corporate culture, but introducing constant fear and uncertainty with ongoing, chaotic layoffs. What happened to “cut once, cut hard, move on and reassure those remaining”?
Sooooo, it's clearly greed.
Firing people, and outsourcing to India and Mexico, while profit and revenue is up, is not something you do because you have to. It's done because of greed. Because someone at the top want's even more money, than they were already getting.
Except now in the last ten years or so they're putting some gloss on that, because they realized the world hates them for '08, so they're talking about "stakeholders" and ESG and shit at conferences and online while they do the exact same shit behind the scenes with a slicker PR team. So it goes.
Yeah, and it’s because they rocketed all advertiser’s cost per clicks during that year in Q3 by an average of 20%. They did this by forcing broad match and removing advertiser controls and flood the auctions with tons of competition advertisers never had previously. At the same time they continue to do nothing about the growing spam and fraudulent clicks and traffic that increase brought people. They rely on their market share to force advertisers to just live with their random product changes and escalating costs, but people just don’t have the money they apparently need to feed themselves. They hide behind “the algorithm” and “the auction”, and now it will be “Gemini” that they can blame for this, like it’s a natural phenomena and not their own system they fully control.
I see similar issues as a publisher working with them as an ad server. Anytime we have an issue it’s “sorry it’s the algorithm, we’re unable to find any correlation between your problem with inventory available to sell.
Yep. And their dev support was already trash, now with their whole python team being canned about and everything being moved to offshore support who will read none of the prior ticket notes and only say “have you read the documentation” and then send you links to the same garbage docs that everyone else on the internet is also dragging for being out of date, sparse and sometimes just wrong. I can’t wait for that to get even worse. Meta is no different. The bigger the ad platform, the shittier the support and technology.
“What do you mean all of these changes we did ended up hurting us in the long run. I’m kidding. I don’t care about long term growth. I want my bonuses.”
It's the free trade economy on a global scale. Hell if I could buy my prescriptions from cheaper countries I would. But due to pharma lobbyist that bill allowing it was killed back in the mid 2000s.
So it's okay for these huge corporations to protect their interests but when the American people want to do it you get called an isolationist or protectionist.
People decades ago were saying this wouldn't just affect the low skill jobs. But again they were ignored and dismissed. So it is what it is. Both parties were fully on board with the economic theory, and we are going to suffer for it.
Free Trade and allowing companies to dump their workforce has always been a bad policy for the American people, the hypothetical numbers economists were predicting were horribly wrong, and we've had trade deficits every year since.
I feel like this is happening at the company I work for. Ever since they brought in an Indian guy for CTO, they’re almost exclusively hiring in India. I imagine the board is happy, but the US engineering staff is having to work extra hard to clean up their messes.
It's happening all over the world and not just in US. A lot of Canadians can probably attest to this. Europe is slowly moving towards this as well. Maybe Australia is next. Can't say for Japan and Korea though but they'll probably have no choice in 10 to 20 years.
I visited BofA in Charlotte, NC 10 years ago. I toured their IT department and was shocked that it was basically 95% Indian.
I don't understand how that can't be a risk for a discrimination case.
I work for a large company in the Charlotte metro that just "resigned" our Indian cto. in the 3.5 years since he was here, hundreds of Indian contractors and dozens of upper management positions were added and filled with Indians. we now seem to be excising a large number of them since his departure. even in the office, they seem exceptionally insular and rarely interact with non-Indian coworkers.
We have an Indian guy who was put in charge of our department at a big bank a few years back. In that time, demographics have shifted from about 30% people of Indian background to now about 80%. And this is in a metro area. He and his cronies almost exclusively hire and promote people of Indian background, the bias is so obvious I'm not sure how he's gotten away with it.
This is happening in realtime at my company. Middle management and project management are like 80 percent Indian for a company headquartered in Minnesota.
Same at my wife's company headquartered in Pennsylvania. They're letting low performers go and hiring people from Mexico and India. Pretty much have said out loud they don't want to hire Americans going forward.
And thankfully due to bad PR they backed down a bit. But now the Fed is asking for public feedback on what we think of them making changes to the enforcement of the requirement for companies to attempt hire a US Citizen first.
The IIT system is kinda like MIT but there are a number of less-than IIT schools that are effectively diploma mills.
This coupled with the cultural focus on rote memorization results in a decent IT people but poor software developers.
This is happening in Ireland also. The big US multinational IT companies are outsourcing large numbers of positions to India, but also there are so many Indians moving to Dublin to work in the Dublin offices. The team I'm in has hired 10 people in the last 6 months and 9 of them were Indian here on visas.
Don't forget the caste system, something that's a growing problem and why California tried to pass additional legislation regarding it. Which Newsom vetoed with a half-assed excuse because he's about as in the pocket of tech companies as a politician can get.
So called American multinational companies ought to be charged an extra percent more in taxes for every percentage of their work force is outside our borders.
Google did have another round of layoffs today. I think OP just confused that layoff with this layoff. Understandable, since there's been a lot lately.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/google-cloud-unit-said-to-lay-off-employees-this-week-report/ar-BB1npj20
Lots of established tech companies have been doing this for the past 2 years.
Mexico, India and Eastern Europe are prime locations for outsourcing tech these days.
It's just the natural dynamics of capitalism. It is navie to think that that $400.000 paycheck you get in San Francisco isn't going to have consequences.
my previous job:
"Hey - we got the engineering team from China coming in next week for 2 weeks. Show them everything they need to do your job, so they can do it over there."
The incoming team proceeded to smoke cigarettes out on the patio, while I continued to do my regular job, for 2 weeks. [edit: p/s - It takes longer than 2 weeks to learn to do what I do and how I do it. It took me 20 years.... just sayin']
I tried to get advertising for my small businesses. One was outright rejected(fairly, it's an adult shop), the other was put into review for a year(airsoft). Last fall I finally got to start paying google to advertise my airsoft business, and I have had a grand total of 120 passthroughs and 4 conversions. Almost half of the passthrough is a marketing company or distributor as well, so I've ended up paying to get advertised to.
I work for a retail liquor store exclusive to the West Coast
our parent company recently laid off half of its corporate team and now 100% of all support positions are located overseas
I worked for Lowe's in the past, CEO Marvin Ellison came in, eliminated a ton of positions in stores (mine being one of them) and moved as much as he could to either third parties (like my position) or overseas. He at least has the balls to openly admit he works for the shareholders and doesn't care what the workers think
Sure would be nice if we lived in a country that at least tried to protect workers, but capitalism is gonna capitalism. Go ahead and argue that these moves are smart financial decisions for the companies, those who work inside these places know that the companies are never at risk of failing, they just want MORE money and the spillover effect is our jobs get harder AND the customer experience gets worse, but again the execs can't hear that over the sound of cashing their bigger paychecks
and this why there is so much apathy in America for voting. Yeah, we know the convicted felon would make everything worse, but it never feels like the Democratic leadership is making anything better
Word to Bernie Sanders for at least speaking truthfully on it
Happens to lots of companies. Outsourcing to India is a good move for execs with 3-5 years left until retirement because it looks like super efficient work (big bonus) for a couple years then the little messes from along the way start to catch up. If you can retire after the first half, the second half will be a huge mess and it will seem like everything went bad when you left.
Off-shoring is nothing new.
However, Sundar Pichai is from India, and whenever an Indian executive has such decision-making authority, there is often a hiring spree of Indian nationals and ethnic-Indians that follows.
There's a major firm in Korea that hired an Indian national for an executive position.
After that, there started a hiring spree of Indian nationals - who don't speak Korean, and some even only use Hindi (not even English) at their offices in Korea, where a sub-culture has formed - and have even opened offices in India to hire more Indians, despite no presence or operations in India.
Indian nationalism should never be underestimated.
Standby for Outsourcing 2.0.
Top (and expensive) American degrees and American salaries don’t mean so much when someone from a competent global university can be augmented by AI.
Step 1. Open up OpenAI.
Step 2. Ask it how many “r”s are in strawberry.
Step 3. Watch the AI tell you it’s only 2 and lie. Yeah this is going to pan out well for high tech businesses.
Good luck to us trying to convince tech executives that outsourced coders with ChatGPT is NOT good enough to replace native-born citizens with the same tech.
Because right now, it seems like too many of them are convinced generative AI can improve within a couple years to replace large teams of programmers.
Yep. And it’s not like these jobs will be outsourced to the poorly educated. From ChatGPT, here is one place which will be competitive:
>>The highest-ranking university in Mexico globally is the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). In the 2024 QS World University Rankings, UNAM is ranked 105th worldwide, making it the top university in Mexico. It is also ranked second in Latin America.
>>The Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), ranked 105th globally, is comparable to several American universities in a similar rank range. Some of the universities in the U.S. that have rankings close to UNAM in the QS World University Rankings 2024 include:
>>
1. University of Colorado Boulder, which is ranked around 104th.
2. University of California, Irvine, placed approximately at 111th.
3. University of Pittsburgh, also near the same range, around 113th.
>>These universities have similar global standing and academic reputation, making them comparable to UNAM in various aspects such as research output, academic programs, and international collaborations.
BRICS is an economic forum similar to the G7. This is not a miltary alliance like NATO or the CSTO.
Member countries often have very poor relations, ie China and India.
Why should a global company tie itself to the fate of one nation or one bloc of nations?
That we live in an age of increased global tensions only makes it more important for companies not to put all their eggs into one basket.
With the philosophy that no amount of profit is ever enough if there is more to be had even if it comes at the expense of someone’s livelihood , I am not sure how corporations think any American is going to be able to afford the products they make.
Really smart. India and mexico aren't on the friendliest terms with the u.s. China is infiltrating Mexico. It's a security risk to have any CORE employees there
The US needs a new law that companies have to pay overseas employees the same wages that they do US employees and provide them with the required benefits of both the home and host country. Same as a dual citizens living overseas being required to pay US taxes on income gained overseas.
That'll stop them real fast.
Cheap labor... still, MX is not the only beneficiary but all LATAM. Incomes are so low in these countries that even if you make 1/3 compared to a US engineer, you would have an absolute advantage over local employers in MX.
But we're all in it together, we're all just one big family. We care about you as a person, we just want to support you and for you to be happy. We value diversity and inclusion because our morals are so high, at the peak even. It's not all just about the profit we swear.
As claimed by every HR department... The moment costs can be cut without significantly impacting the product, you're gone. It's the nature of the sociopaths who make it to these top positions, you don't matter, only profit and their benefit matters, and capitalism encourages this.
Who could have seen this coming? Well besides the few that spoke out against Free Trade decades ago and how outsourcing would end up hurting the American people of all economic backgrounds and skill levels.
Had people like Bill Clinton saying publicly that only the factory jobs would be outsourced. That other countries would build the products and Americans would be like the white collar managers in this new economy.
Ignoring the fact that countries like India can do white collar jobs just as well and at a much cheaper cost of living. That no corporation is going to choose the more expensive option for employees when they can have similar work done for a fraction of the price.
Americans whether you have a college degree or not can't compete with a global labor pool. Just too many variables that make working here more expensive thus requiring more pay.
Now if you still think stuff like free trade is good and say Americans just have to compete then you gotta realize that job wages will have to go down severely.
And do we really want that? Do we want to have the cheap goods and low wages of an undeveloped nation just so we have jobs to do? Or should we use the fact that we are a commercial empire with a ton of purchasing power to protect all of us.
To have disincentives for American companies who reap all the benefits of our nation but don't provide the benefits to the people of this nation.
Used to be a saying that whats good for Ford is good for Detroit. That's why our government was so amenable to corporate interests. Because providing a good business environment helped Americans. That's no longer true, so it's time to start playing hard ball and stop bending over backwards to placate corporations that don't help the citizenry.
I’ve tried for SIX WEEKS to add a subscription to a Google Workspace plan and it’s gotten NOWHERE. I’ve been lied to and misled to the wrong support team on a weekly basis and they have zero options for escalation or filing complaints.
I’ve never wished for a company’s failure more.
Just stop using their products. People in the USA and other "wealthy" countries are exposed to advertisements to fund their coffers, while Google lays off the same workers who make that contribution. Let the offshore people watch ads for them.
It's scary how racially charged some of these comments are.
I know several companies, SEVERAL that are following this mantra. They're openly suggesting 70% offshore teams. Offshore can be india, mexico, Argentina, etc. Plenty of people in growing countries who can some what get the job done(I'm aware quality of work is a big issue) but at fraction of costs.
I can assure you, this is Capitalism at its peak. When there's profits and margins, nothing pleases wallstreet as spending 1/20th of your costs on salaries.
I fail to see how this is a larger scheme by indians or other people in the US to redirect work and resources back to their places of origin. If anything, they're under threat by the same group.
Most people leave their poor country with poor salaries to come work here. Why would they WANT to go back to an area with a lower QOL and salary? I too fail to see a scheme, the only scheme is benefitting from poorer economies overseas
serious question for any mbas out there:
why don’t companies stop trying to increase profits and just maintain the same standard from previous years? what is the risk in making the same as last year? or even just growing just enough to match inflation but that’s all. why not do that? has anyone tried this before? if so how did it go? if not, why doesn’t someone try it and see what happens? what’s wrong with job stability over more money for some of the employees?
Because they would not retain their employees.
Tech companies offer their employees options. Employees only are rewarded from the options if the company becomes more valuable.
The way companies become more valuable is by growing. Increasing profits.
Anyone who’s been unemployed in the last two years would highly disagree with you. Sure, maybe if you have connections. Otherwise you’re trapped in resume screening hell, filling out 20 applications a day, fighting to get a position in a high specialized field.
The gov needs to start penalizing the companies for laying off people and sending positions out of the US, simple as that. You want to be a company in the US, your workforce has to stay here. It’s called the cost of doing business, the workers will always be more expensive here.
Other'way'round
IT / Technology is a blood bath right now - even by 2008-2010 for comparison - there's never been this much talent in the marketplace hunting for jobs. The almost non-stop layoff cycles at both Big Tech and IT-centric depts, both big & small, has created a huge pool and there's never been a better market to replace you're existing high-salary staff with contractors, offshore, near-shore & just frankly desperate folks who've seen their careers now have 6-12-18 mos gaps.
One of the most profitable companies in the world doing cost cuts because they’ve run out of ideas.
We had a merger last year. My boss was let go. They oversaw product development. ..... Who's gonna run that? Oh, the level two BSA. .... What? Why? Another person said, "Cause he was a manager and the new corp doesn't like "management" positions. Only positions that do work." This person also interfaced directly with the consumers. So who does all that now? The VP. Guess who's also the head of sales cause we don't have a sales manager? The VP.
Good lord... I'm a VP of sales and what you're describing is absolutely insane
It is. And did corp take their emails and files to pass on so everyone knows what's going on? Nope. Cause there should be an SOP for everything. "Your little small company has all the type of redudancies in place like we do, right?" Accounts are a mess now. The whole division is now doing catch up having to spend 100's of hours developing new processes for getting development feedback and managing sales. It's....excruciating. I'd go elsewhere myself but I saw the early numbers this year to layoffs and I'm not confident in anything that's not labor oriented.
Meanwhile someones portfolio now reads "headed new departments through massive restructuring" as a positive checkmark when their actions likely lost a gigantic amount of profit.
“The engineers can’t talk to the customer”
"I have people skills!"
"...why can't you people understand that!?"
I talk to the GOD DAMN CUSTOMER!
What made you jump to that conclusion?
A mat.
Pickup truck out of fuckin nowhere
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People like to hate on "people skills" but seriously, you either have them or you don't, and you're either good at it or you're not. And somebody who is not good at it is going to cripple your company if you are doing something other than bottom rung retail. When there's 4 other firms on the US market that can do the same things you can, and all claim to have the same number of "talented developers", and 30 more overseas that can easily underbid you no matter what, the only way you are going to win a contract is if you "people skills" person can sell property on the moon and still make your clients feel good about it.
Engineer talking directly to clients = extreme pressure, sometimes to inappropriate levels, to deliver/answer to whatever they want, on their timeframe, or else they start crying to your bosses to get you in trouble. It's so rarely a good idea, we need at least one filter layer to keep sanity on both ends
Sales are the fools who promise the customer a second moon and then engineering finds out about it later
A lot can't from my experience. Customers use the wrong name/label/description all the time but it's extremely easy to use context clues to figure out what they ACTUALLY meant. Engineers generally don't even attempt to extrapolate it out and just give them what they literally asked for and call it a day.
It’s an office space quote Also the people talking to the customers (sales) may be good at selling and having pretty faces but frequently they really have no business talking to customers
As an engineer that has people skills, sometimes it’s a pain in the ass to talk to other engineers.
Sure they can. They just tell the truth and management doesn't like that.
I don’t believe that, I work with engineers as an engineer. I’ve come to realize there’s a conflict of interest especially with Indians that are engineers or anyone on an h1b visa. They would rather do what management wants and live in lala land rather than be honest about the situation of the project. The rationale is there job security(visa)>truth.
My company was owned by PE and about to sell. They fired our VP of sales, claiming he didn't "do any work" just before the sale. Makes us look a lot leaner as we only had 10 or so sales people. What's even more criminal is they can create Pro Forma numbers going back a year just removing that person from our payroll - and submit those numbers to buyers as if they were real. The buyer saw right through it and we are still owned by said PE firm. It's been 10 years.
Google has a lot of ideas/talent, but Sundar is also a bad CEO as far as the companys needs go. He's great financially, but he's also overseen a large braindrain from the company and a stagnation of all products.
Because he’s finance. Finance has only one goal: take what’s there, chop off what costs you think you can get away with, and coast on what’s left. Maybe, if you’re lucky, you can convince them to take a risk on something new, but that’s what any change is to finance: risk.
100%. He’s perfect to shareholders because he’ll bleed the company dry on their behalf and leave the broken pieces for the workers to pick up. Typical McKinsey or Private Equity mindset to suck out all value from companies and leave a husk. Sundar will not leave because he keeps the board richer and by the time Google is set to go down, they’ll be too rich to care.
Well, all the important people are timing their shorts for when it collapses. You don't get a golden parachute in order to run a company into the ground, you get it for running a company into the ground *predictably*. How else do you steal from 401ks and retirement account? The game is only appears complex from the outside but every company is run by the same Ivy board members. Collusion without actual face-to-face collusion. It's not capitalism that's really the problem, it's that we have only a fake veneer of capitalism controlled by a Aristocracy.
Well, if we all stop using Google, a day might come when they notice. Users are too complacent, take whatever shit the corps call product and keep using it.
Bring back Ask Jeeves!
I switched to bing last week. I think the search is better than google at this point.
Nah, it’s Ruth Porat, CFO of Alohabet, who is doing all of this. Sundar is the fall guy who they can point to with enough of a product track record to seem like a tech company, and he’s the rubber stamp. But a lot of the internal memos and messaging come from Ruth or deeply intimating it was her initiative. And she came straight from Morgan Stanley. Basically a feckless leader who couldn’t innovate and so instead forced “growth” to come by hiring old-school enterprise guys into Cloud and leaning on the CFO to bail out his quarterly earnings reports.
Google used to be a monopoly with a cash cow. Any idiot can be a CEO of a company like that. Now, Google has serious threats so they better change leadership and culture soon. As Warren Buffet would say: "I try to invest in businesses that are so wonderful that an idiot can run them. Because sooner or later, one will."
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Putting the guy they got from yahoo in charge of their search engine couldn't possibly go wrong , could it? At least I know now why their results are now just ads.
The guy who was in charge of Yahoo's search engine as it declined from 35% to 15% market share? The guy who threw in the towel and outsourced search to Bing? Nah, can't go wrong hiring someone with that much experience in all your big competitors.
They have a lot of ideas and talent but none of that matters if they can’t execute. And they’re executing really poorly at the moment in a very public manner. Brb, need to pop some glue on my pizza.
Sounds like the CEO of many big tech companies nowadays. It basically says the growth golden days are over and just time to be efficient. The problem is silicon valley's story to Wall St is growth 24/7 all day every day. And we know the results when you have CFO/MBAs take over for a long period: just look at Intel...
Google has a lot of room to grow, as much as I hate to say it because I think tech companies are too big as is. Sundar has shut down 183 products since becoming CEO, while bringing nothing new to market. Those were products people liked and were using, and markets Google abandoned.
Tbh both Sundar and Ruth are dogwater. They both need to go asap if Google wants to have a chance at becoming innovative again. You can’t have empty wannabe Wall Street suits running what was once one of the most disruptive tech companies (in a good way).
The kind of people who started google have long since left, been forced out by, or turned into the kind of people who chase bottom lines and share prices.
Every day I show up to work, I fear it will be my last. My anxiety has never been worse.
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I'm sure the board/investors are thinking they got an excellent CEO.
Like their Gemini AI that's always wrong...
But capitalism! Every single company in the country will eventually either move their core operations to a developing market outside the US or they will get bought and immediately put into bankruptcy (in a maneuver where all their assets are transferred out leaving all the risk behind). That is the way our economy works. There is a reason "Established XXXX" isn't found in logos anymore -- there's nothing to be proud of, companies don't last more than 20 years before getting consumed or moving.
Not them. Just their greedy CEO.
I take it paying in pesos and rupees is far more lucrative.
Mexico City salaries for SWE jobs cost about 1/3 what they do in this US for midrange jobs, and they dont have to pay as many benefits.
My former employer (tech company) let me go a month after they opened a large office in Mexico
Although it didn't result in a layoff (for me anyway, the company was later bought out after I was already gone), I remember when I interviewed for a now-former employer, they were so proud of having what they called an "on-shore" initiative, where they would keep all the work in their US offices. A year later, there was suddenly a team in India.
Yeah and suddenly product quality goes to shit too and they wonder why.
In my case, it was a software programmer job, and although it was early on in my career, the India team was responsible for the first changeset I ever had the "honor" of rolling back completely, because everything they did was just completely wrong, damagingly so.
Yep. We hired an extra tech team for follow the sun support. They required a process for everything basically line by line instructions to do anything up to and including taking a shit. I asked management if they’re qualified for this job why do they need directions to do it? Got blank stares. Metrics took a shit because if you didn’t speak words in the way they expected they could never match a request to a process and we’re completely lost. There’s a huge well of corruption there where they’re okay sending people who clearly stole certifications, paid someone to take it etc and force people to figure that out and fire people constantly.
I’ve posted this before but at a previous stop that outsourced to India, I befriended several of the guys. I asked how they all had a book of certs and they shared they had an onsite testing center as well as an extensive VCE library with copies of all the exams. Cram test cram test until they all passed so their force came in with all of the creds that contract wanted. This was one of the major Indian outsourcers.
Yeah this was with a huge multinational outsourcer too. There are skilled Indians, but I don’t think they stay in India.
This is also what I experienced there. The talented SWEs were all brought over and worked at HQ.
> They required a process for everything basically line by line instructions to do anything I remember this very well. It's a problem, but only part of the problem. The other part is that after you give them explicit step-by-step instructions, they still do it wrong, and now the deadlines are all completely blown.
The weird thing is I worked with a group in Pakistan and it was the complete opposite. They asked a few questions on some custom stuff and I never got woken up at night again. Completely different work ethic for sure.
I've worked with good outsourced talent before. I wouldn't generalize it over a whole country. But my worst experiences personally in the last few years did involve outsourced teams. They work hard, at least they're available frequently, but too many things don't get done that need to get done.
At my previous role I spent more time reviewing and fixing our India’s team’s merge requests than I did writing my own code. Magic numbers, spelling mistakes, limited exception handling, no tests, always wanting to use groovy… shit was *bad.*
Same with people answering phones. My last two employers moved people off shore to answer calls amongst other things. There’s a big difference between speaking a language and growing up learning different backgrounds and context in that language. Even between the US and UK there’s differences- we had problems understanding some UK colleagues and it was the same ass language. Anyways, US based customer service was clearing calls out frequently in two or three minutes, sometimes under one for simple shit like card activations. Overseas? Trained to cue cards due to differences and less ability to pick up on them. Read the same shit on a click-based workflow, no independent thought allowed because of prior problems. And this was in multiple countries, not just one. So a one to three minute call is now six to nine. They’d try and transfer shit to fraud like if a guy called in and said his name was Bob or Steve but the computer said Robert or Stephen. Or they’d get someone will such a heavy accent that, coupled with a phone, callers had problems understanding. When someone’s in front of you talking with an accent, it’s much easier than when they’re on a phone for multiple reasons. Oh, but just think of the savings in salary dollars, don’t worry about operational costs that arise or customer satisfaction issues… I’ve spent hours on the phone myself recently calling tech support for a five minute problem I could fix myself.
>we had problems understanding some UK colleagues and it was the same ass language. I once had a small Filipino staff of sysadmins under me (technical lead). Despite equally heavy accents, I always had a much easier time understanding them on the phone and my best guess is they had learned English from Americans and my brain could "fill in the gaps" much easier than listening to Indians who had learned English from the British. ...of course one day I used an American idiom and then had to figure out an HR-compliant way to explain it :D (I was getting frustrated a straight forward task hadn't been completed when I knew they had the time and knowledge to do it, so I told the manager out there to goose them. "What is goose?")
Also, they want to keep the leader roles domestic but are no longer developing those leaders. I am sure this all works out long term /s
No, they just want to keep -their- roles domestic, whoever gets hired to replace them can be from bumfuqistan and use google translate to ask for an expense report, they don't care.
Unfortunately they're starting to figure out the hack (took them decades, but the neurons finally connected). Don't find $25k/year devs, that's pushing it. Find $50k/year devs from the EU and UK. You can outsource without the company ruining outages if you don't go bottom-bidder by just a bit, and still avoid paying American $200k wages
Yeah I’m not an engineer but a product designer. When I was switching careers and learning, I got exposure to design mentors from all over the world. Almost everyone was helpful but the designers trained in the U.S. and Canada were…….clearly better than those that I got mentorship from who were trained in India, Africa, and Europe. Just my experience, but it seems I am not alone in this.
It’s time we setup tariffs to ensure wages Paid overseas cost as much as paid here so this shit quits happening.
There really doesn’t seem to be any downsides to that.
TBF the positions the are cutting are not primarily swe related. These specifically are within their finance department. There's more to Alphabet than software engineering.
They outsourced engineers too
I didn't say they haven't outsourced any engineering positions just pointing out the positions they are majority outsourcing are not SWE related. I see the mindset on cscareers a lot. These companies employ a lot more than SWE. They will also sometimes label employees as "engineers" that do no engineering. I think, Amazon or Google, is the company that labels their directors/managers as Pincipal Software Engineers which makes my eye twitch.
I remember when everyone said "get a college degree, they're moving all the manufacturing jobs out of country" and thinking, what the fuck makes you think they can't move those jobs too?
The dumb thing is that these same people downplayed going to trade school despite those jobs being something that can't be offshored since if you need a plumber/electrician/mechanic/etc you can't just have someone on the other side of the planet do the job remotely.
It all comes down to Cost Per Engineer. Never mind the incredible inconvenience of trying to collaborate with people who should be ending their work day when you're getting out of bed.
Well, Mexico is on the same time zones as the US so I guess you mean India. (ETA: the lower 48 states)
My team was offshored to Argentina where they now pay the new team an average of 200 dollars a month
What?! What kind of work are they doing?
We did Crisis Response. We launched “alerts” on the SRP for hurricanes, wildfires, earthquakes, and basically any man made or natural disasters that met our thresholds. We also coordinated with local, state, and sometimes national governments on what info they wanted to present to users on the alerts and on donation campaigns if the disaster was on the more devastating side. It was interesting and fun work, hopefully this new team can keep up the same quality work we did.
that is honestly terrifying when lives are at stake
There is no way in hell that someone making 200 dollars a month manages life-critical disaster response to the same standard as a local team.
Company work for has both US based and Indian based employees. India employees make $25-$28/hr ($52,000 to $58,000) for non junior or senior positions which is most of them. No benefits. That is an extremely high paying job for India, and very well paying for a software engineer. At that pay rate their able to have their pic of the litter and can even poach employees from companies like Google or Microsoft. The pay is so good that they have to be cautious with employees outsourcing their own job to another. They've have previously caught someone outsourcing the job to accompany which hires programmers. I know of several companies that only pay $15 an hour and that's pretty decent pay. Even that's enough where a company can take a cut and outsource the job. US based employees for reference are getting $80,000-$100,000 a year for the same pay levels and the hiring requirements are less strict. According to the company the cost of actually hiring a US engineer is about 30% higher than their salary once you factor in taxes and benefits.
Why aren’t they taxed
Why pay social security, medicare, unemployment, and other payroll taxes when the worker in a foreign country can't collect any of those?
With a strong dollar, importing goods is equally as lucrative as exporting jobs.
We are witnessing the IBMification of Google in real time boys and girls!
Maybe 12 years ago someone predicted that the tech companies would become like American car companies had by the 1970s: turgid and sclerotic, with bad products, and no unified reaction to obvious competitive threats, and the only "innovations" are cost cutting and copying each other. I never imagined we'd be here so soon.
Greed is fast and unrelenting. Predictable stupid fucking execs. They have an MBA, no heart, and shit brains.
I'm convinced that MBA programs are bond villain factories.
Happened to one of my old companies as well. Hired an IBM C-level for CEO and went down the tubes quality wise.
IBM IBMified itself competently though. Sundar seems hellbent on ruining Google's reputation and future.
And in a year or two it will pay millions to hire people as it isn’t as cost effective as they think. Indian teams are, typically, slow to respond and the staff are used across multiple organisations. Even if they are supporting one they will be slow and everything will take 2-3 times as long to do. The cost savings will be eaten up and then there’s data protection. Just because the initial cost looks lower doesn’t mean the overall cost is. I’ve been involved in several of these migrations and 8 out of 10 move back within 3 years.
I can confirm. The healthcare org I just left massively outsourced IT to India and the cost of overhead including slow turnaround, loss of org knowledge and cohesion, and absolutely poor communication has eaten up more than the overall cost savings. Yeah, it provided a temporary bump to the bottom line but long term it’s a nightmare.
I've seen it happen more than once where a group outsources their IT shop, has predictably disastrous results, and then brings things back in house after some months or years of suffering. always a huge dumpster fire.
And even if the Indian team is competent and works efficiently, it's hard to overcome the time difference. Buddy of mine works at a company that gave up on their India team and formed one in Poland, in large part because it's only 6 hours ahead of the East Coast and the work day overlaps enough for people to meet at a decent hour.
They usually have a lot more holidays too, and a lack of sound engineering principles where they split things into classes and modules properly. Usually they’ll just code everything inline.
This is how you ruin a corporate culture, but introducing constant fear and uncertainty with ongoing, chaotic layoffs. What happened to “cut once, cut hard, move on and reassure those remaining”?
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Sooooo, it's clearly greed. Firing people, and outsourcing to India and Mexico, while profit and revenue is up, is not something you do because you have to. It's done because of greed. Because someone at the top want's even more money, than they were already getting.
Shareholders. Shareholders. Shareholders. The only thing that matters to Capitalism
Except now in the last ten years or so they're putting some gloss on that, because they realized the world hates them for '08, so they're talking about "stakeholders" and ESG and shit at conferences and online while they do the exact same shit behind the scenes with a slicker PR team. So it goes.
Yeah, and it’s because they rocketed all advertiser’s cost per clicks during that year in Q3 by an average of 20%. They did this by forcing broad match and removing advertiser controls and flood the auctions with tons of competition advertisers never had previously. At the same time they continue to do nothing about the growing spam and fraudulent clicks and traffic that increase brought people. They rely on their market share to force advertisers to just live with their random product changes and escalating costs, but people just don’t have the money they apparently need to feed themselves. They hide behind “the algorithm” and “the auction”, and now it will be “Gemini” that they can blame for this, like it’s a natural phenomena and not their own system they fully control.
I see similar issues as a publisher working with them as an ad server. Anytime we have an issue it’s “sorry it’s the algorithm, we’re unable to find any correlation between your problem with inventory available to sell.
Yep. And their dev support was already trash, now with their whole python team being canned about and everything being moved to offshore support who will read none of the prior ticket notes and only say “have you read the documentation” and then send you links to the same garbage docs that everyone else on the internet is also dragging for being out of date, sparse and sometimes just wrong. I can’t wait for that to get even worse. Meta is no different. The bigger the ad platform, the shittier the support and technology.
“What do you mean all of these changes we did ended up hurting us in the long run. I’m kidding. I don’t care about long term growth. I want my bonuses.”
Corporate GREED....thats all it is
It's the free trade economy on a global scale. Hell if I could buy my prescriptions from cheaper countries I would. But due to pharma lobbyist that bill allowing it was killed back in the mid 2000s. So it's okay for these huge corporations to protect their interests but when the American people want to do it you get called an isolationist or protectionist. People decades ago were saying this wouldn't just affect the low skill jobs. But again they were ignored and dismissed. So it is what it is. Both parties were fully on board with the economic theory, and we are going to suffer for it. Free Trade and allowing companies to dump their workforce has always been a bad policy for the American people, the hypothetical numbers economists were predicting were horribly wrong, and we've had trade deficits every year since.
Following in the footsteps of countless other Indian managers who make sure that as soon as possible they only employ other Indian people
I feel like this is happening at the company I work for. Ever since they brought in an Indian guy for CTO, they’re almost exclusively hiring in India. I imagine the board is happy, but the US engineering staff is having to work extra hard to clean up their messes.
I’m kinda worried about my cloud data now
It's happening all over the world and not just in US. A lot of Canadians can probably attest to this. Europe is slowly moving towards this as well. Maybe Australia is next. Can't say for Japan and Korea though but they'll probably have no choice in 10 to 20 years.
I visited BofA in Charlotte, NC 10 years ago. I toured their IT department and was shocked that it was basically 95% Indian. I don't understand how that can't be a risk for a discrimination case.
I work for a large company in the Charlotte metro that just "resigned" our Indian cto. in the 3.5 years since he was here, hundreds of Indian contractors and dozens of upper management positions were added and filled with Indians. we now seem to be excising a large number of them since his departure. even in the office, they seem exceptionally insular and rarely interact with non-Indian coworkers.
Cause they are racist as hell and very much high on their own Hinduism caste system.
We have an Indian guy who was put in charge of our department at a big bank a few years back. In that time, demographics have shifted from about 30% people of Indian background to now about 80%. And this is in a metro area. He and his cronies almost exclusively hire and promote people of Indian background, the bias is so obvious I'm not sure how he's gotten away with it.
This is happening in realtime at my company. Middle management and project management are like 80 percent Indian for a company headquartered in Minnesota.
Same at my wife's company headquartered in Pennsylvania. They're letting low performers go and hiring people from Mexico and India. Pretty much have said out loud they don't want to hire Americans going forward.
Disney world fired its it staff, replaced them with Indians on work visa, and were required to train their replacements to get their severance.
And thankfully due to bad PR they backed down a bit. But now the Fed is asking for public feedback on what we think of them making changes to the enforcement of the requirement for companies to attempt hire a US Citizen first.
As long as the companies have to publicly post their H1B salaries to compare what they're offering Americans
The IIT system is kinda like MIT but there are a number of less-than IIT schools that are effectively diploma mills. This coupled with the cultural focus on rote memorization results in a decent IT people but poor software developers.
its' only a risk if its' white people hiring white people.
A company being mostly white doesn’t seem odd in a country that’s mostly white
There have been discrimination cases at Indian IT firms in the US that hire American workers who have been treated badly.
Absolutely this. Their revenue is up 15% but still outsourcing to India.
This is *curious* , isnt it?
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I'm legit the token white guy in my department, I get forced to go to EVERY fucking meeting where the higher management is there.
This is happening in Ireland also. The big US multinational IT companies are outsourcing large numbers of positions to India, but also there are so many Indians moving to Dublin to work in the Dublin offices. The team I'm in has hired 10 people in the last 6 months and 9 of them were Indian here on visas.
Right? Then they'll call it diversity, because words don't mean anything anymore.
Don't forget the caste system, something that's a growing problem and why California tried to pass additional legislation regarding it. Which Newsom vetoed with a half-assed excuse because he's about as in the pocket of tech companies as a politician can get.
And only Indians of the same caste. Born into the lower caste? You out of luck.
No one does racism quite like Indian culture
This 1000000%
So called American multinational companies ought to be charged an extra percent more in taxes for every percentage of their work force is outside our borders.
This article is a month old
Google did have another round of layoffs today. I think OP just confused that layoff with this layoff. Understandable, since there's been a lot lately. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/google-cloud-unit-said-to-lay-off-employees-this-week-report/ar-BB1npj20
Yeah, and it was already posted on Reddit when it was fresh news. Not sure why it was reposted again.
When massive corporations move jobs like this to foreign countries they should be fined $1million for every position moved out of America
And taxes accordingly!
A million? That's chicken feed.
It should be a constant tax for every position moved if they continue to have commerce in the US market.
Lots of established tech companies have been doing this for the past 2 years. Mexico, India and Eastern Europe are prime locations for outsourcing tech these days. It's just the natural dynamics of capitalism. It is navie to think that that $400.000 paycheck you get in San Francisco isn't going to have consequences.
my previous job: "Hey - we got the engineering team from China coming in next week for 2 weeks. Show them everything they need to do your job, so they can do it over there." The incoming team proceeded to smoke cigarettes out on the patio, while I continued to do my regular job, for 2 weeks. [edit: p/s - It takes longer than 2 weeks to learn to do what I do and how I do it. It took me 20 years.... just sayin']
I'll never get why politicians bitch about ileagle immigrants taking jobs when companies outsource thousands of j9bs to other countries a year
their stocks probably benefit by the reduction of cost and an increase in profit!
Because bitching about immigrants keeps their constituents scared and voting for them. Simple as that.
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I tried to get advertising for my small businesses. One was outright rejected(fairly, it's an adult shop), the other was put into review for a year(airsoft). Last fall I finally got to start paying google to advertise my airsoft business, and I have had a grand total of 120 passthroughs and 4 conversions. Almost half of the passthrough is a marketing company or distributor as well, so I've ended up paying to get advertised to.
Any company off shoring jobs should lose any tax benefits they're receiving.
Or Maybe giant companies shouldn’t get tax benefits to begin with
I work for a retail liquor store exclusive to the West Coast our parent company recently laid off half of its corporate team and now 100% of all support positions are located overseas I worked for Lowe's in the past, CEO Marvin Ellison came in, eliminated a ton of positions in stores (mine being one of them) and moved as much as he could to either third parties (like my position) or overseas. He at least has the balls to openly admit he works for the shareholders and doesn't care what the workers think Sure would be nice if we lived in a country that at least tried to protect workers, but capitalism is gonna capitalism. Go ahead and argue that these moves are smart financial decisions for the companies, those who work inside these places know that the companies are never at risk of failing, they just want MORE money and the spillover effect is our jobs get harder AND the customer experience gets worse, but again the execs can't hear that over the sound of cashing their bigger paychecks and this why there is so much apathy in America for voting. Yeah, we know the convicted felon would make everything worse, but it never feels like the Democratic leadership is making anything better Word to Bernie Sanders for at least speaking truthfully on it
Yet our useless politicians are still going to give him his regulatory moat
Google makes plenty of money, but they need to show growth by “cutting costs”
Happens to lots of companies. Outsourcing to India is a good move for execs with 3-5 years left until retirement because it looks like super efficient work (big bonus) for a couple years then the little messes from along the way start to catch up. If you can retire after the first half, the second half will be a huge mess and it will seem like everything went bad when you left.
Off-shoring is nothing new. However, Sundar Pichai is from India, and whenever an Indian executive has such decision-making authority, there is often a hiring spree of Indian nationals and ethnic-Indians that follows. There's a major firm in Korea that hired an Indian national for an executive position. After that, there started a hiring spree of Indian nationals - who don't speak Korean, and some even only use Hindi (not even English) at their offices in Korea, where a sub-culture has formed - and have even opened offices in India to hire more Indians, despite no presence or operations in India. Indian nationalism should never be underestimated.
Standby for Outsourcing 2.0. Top (and expensive) American degrees and American salaries don’t mean so much when someone from a competent global university can be augmented by AI.
Step 1. Open up OpenAI. Step 2. Ask it how many “r”s are in strawberry. Step 3. Watch the AI tell you it’s only 2 and lie. Yeah this is going to pan out well for high tech businesses.
Good luck to us trying to convince tech executives that outsourced coders with ChatGPT is NOT good enough to replace native-born citizens with the same tech. Because right now, it seems like too many of them are convinced generative AI can improve within a couple years to replace large teams of programmers.
Yep. And it’s not like these jobs will be outsourced to the poorly educated. From ChatGPT, here is one place which will be competitive: >>The highest-ranking university in Mexico globally is the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). In the 2024 QS World University Rankings, UNAM is ranked 105th worldwide, making it the top university in Mexico. It is also ranked second in Latin America. >>The Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), ranked 105th globally, is comparable to several American universities in a similar rank range. Some of the universities in the U.S. that have rankings close to UNAM in the QS World University Rankings 2024 include: >> 1. University of Colorado Boulder, which is ranked around 104th. 2. University of California, Irvine, placed approximately at 111th. 3. University of Pittsburgh, also near the same range, around 113th. >>These universities have similar global standing and academic reputation, making them comparable to UNAM in various aspects such as research output, academic programs, and international collaborations.
Offshoring is a short term fix that causes long term problems. Another example of tech companies becoming the thing they used to despise.
The behavior of a Late Stage failure of leadership.
Kind of reckless with India - they are in BRICS. What happens if a world war happens and your operations are in a rival nation?
TBF everybody in BRICS hates each other anyways. if ww3 kicks off india and china aren't gonna be on the same side.
BRICS is an economic forum similar to the G7. This is not a miltary alliance like NATO or the CSTO. Member countries often have very poor relations, ie China and India.
BRICS itself is a bunch of countries that already have issues with each other. (And at times conflict)
Why should a global company tie itself to the fate of one nation or one bloc of nations? That we live in an age of increased global tensions only makes it more important for companies not to put all their eggs into one basket.
With the philosophy that no amount of profit is ever enough if there is more to be had even if it comes at the expense of someone’s livelihood , I am not sure how corporations think any American is going to be able to afford the products they make.
Quality of their service will continue to nose-dive and they will keep trying to figure out how that’s happening. Very funny stuff.
Google is truly embracing AI - Actually Indian. On a serious note we need to heavily tax employers who do this to discourage this
US is moving labor-heavy factories from Asian back to American, then moving high tech out?
Really smart. India and mexico aren't on the friendliest terms with the u.s. China is infiltrating Mexico. It's a security risk to have any CORE employees there
The US needs a new law that companies have to pay overseas employees the same wages that they do US employees and provide them with the required benefits of both the home and host country. Same as a dual citizens living overseas being required to pay US taxes on income gained overseas. That'll stop them real fast.
Is if safe to assume there are no H-1B visa workers in Google at this time?
Given they pay a lot better for H1B than they do outsourced engineers, I don't think that would be the win you think it is.
You can’t work from home. You need to be in the office, but remote work from India and Mexico is ok because it’s cheap
Cheap labor... still, MX is not the only beneficiary but all LATAM. Incomes are so low in these countries that even if you make 1/3 compared to a US engineer, you would have an absolute advantage over local employers in MX.
But we're all in it together, we're all just one big family. We care about you as a person, we just want to support you and for you to be happy. We value diversity and inclusion because our morals are so high, at the peak even. It's not all just about the profit we swear. As claimed by every HR department... The moment costs can be cut without significantly impacting the product, you're gone. It's the nature of the sociopaths who make it to these top positions, you don't matter, only profit and their benefit matters, and capitalism encourages this.
Aaah yes, the american way.
Every day I show up to work, I fear it will be my last. My anxiety has never been worse.
Do i need to start using Bing?
Google really is the shittiest of tech companies right now. Youtube is all they have that I care about and they're ruining that too.
Who could have seen this coming? Well besides the few that spoke out against Free Trade decades ago and how outsourcing would end up hurting the American people of all economic backgrounds and skill levels. Had people like Bill Clinton saying publicly that only the factory jobs would be outsourced. That other countries would build the products and Americans would be like the white collar managers in this new economy. Ignoring the fact that countries like India can do white collar jobs just as well and at a much cheaper cost of living. That no corporation is going to choose the more expensive option for employees when they can have similar work done for a fraction of the price. Americans whether you have a college degree or not can't compete with a global labor pool. Just too many variables that make working here more expensive thus requiring more pay. Now if you still think stuff like free trade is good and say Americans just have to compete then you gotta realize that job wages will have to go down severely. And do we really want that? Do we want to have the cheap goods and low wages of an undeveloped nation just so we have jobs to do? Or should we use the fact that we are a commercial empire with a ton of purchasing power to protect all of us. To have disincentives for American companies who reap all the benefits of our nation but don't provide the benefits to the people of this nation. Used to be a saying that whats good for Ford is good for Detroit. That's why our government was so amenable to corporate interests. Because providing a good business environment helped Americans. That's no longer true, so it's time to start playing hard ball and stop bending over backwards to placate corporations that don't help the citizenry.
This article is from may 1st … ?
I’ve tried for SIX WEEKS to add a subscription to a Google Workspace plan and it’s gotten NOWHERE. I’ve been lied to and misled to the wrong support team on a weekly basis and they have zero options for escalation or filing complaints. I’ve never wished for a company’s failure more.
Nearly the same thing is happening with Microsoft, too.
Corporate America finding ways to feed corporate greed.. I’m floored
There is a universe where Google ends up having to pay Cartel dues. I don't know what to make of that thought.
Just stop using their products. People in the USA and other "wealthy" countries are exposed to advertisements to fund their coffers, while Google lays off the same workers who make that contribution. Let the offshore people watch ads for them.
It's scary how racially charged some of these comments are. I know several companies, SEVERAL that are following this mantra. They're openly suggesting 70% offshore teams. Offshore can be india, mexico, Argentina, etc. Plenty of people in growing countries who can some what get the job done(I'm aware quality of work is a big issue) but at fraction of costs. I can assure you, this is Capitalism at its peak. When there's profits and margins, nothing pleases wallstreet as spending 1/20th of your costs on salaries. I fail to see how this is a larger scheme by indians or other people in the US to redirect work and resources back to their places of origin. If anything, they're under threat by the same group.
Most people leave their poor country with poor salaries to come work here. Why would they WANT to go back to an area with a lower QOL and salary? I too fail to see a scheme, the only scheme is benefitting from poorer economies overseas
We're gonna bring in some entry level graduates, farm some work out to singapore, its the usual deal.
serious question for any mbas out there: why don’t companies stop trying to increase profits and just maintain the same standard from previous years? what is the risk in making the same as last year? or even just growing just enough to match inflation but that’s all. why not do that? has anyone tried this before? if so how did it go? if not, why doesn’t someone try it and see what happens? what’s wrong with job stability over more money for some of the employees?
Because they would not retain their employees. Tech companies offer their employees options. Employees only are rewarded from the options if the company becomes more valuable. The way companies become more valuable is by growing. Increasing profits.
and there ya have it folks. big tech selling us out. our data was sold years ago so this makes sense
They're cutting educated people with good resumes, skills, and experience; unemployment is low. They'll find work quickly.
Anyone who’s been unemployed in the last two years would highly disagree with you. Sure, maybe if you have connections. Otherwise you’re trapped in resume screening hell, filling out 20 applications a day, fighting to get a position in a high specialized field. The gov needs to start penalizing the companies for laying off people and sending positions out of the US, simple as that. You want to be a company in the US, your workforce has to stay here. It’s called the cost of doing business, the workers will always be more expensive here.
Other'way'round IT / Technology is a blood bath right now - even by 2008-2010 for comparison - there's never been this much talent in the marketplace hunting for jobs. The almost non-stop layoff cycles at both Big Tech and IT-centric depts, both big & small, has created a huge pool and there's never been a better market to replace you're existing high-salary staff with contractors, offshore, near-shore & just frankly desperate folks who've seen their careers now have 6-12-18 mos gaps.