But to play the devil's advocate I wonder that whether same argument that some use here to defend Foxconn jobs does not apply to Indian IT companies? The Foxconn jobs are too shitty for Americans, and it is not a big deal if they leave America. Is that not true for Indian IT outsourcing jobs? No self-respecting engineer in US or India would like to do that kind of work.
In my experience, yes this has often been the case - offshore contractor developers get the bug fixes, while fulltime developers get to build the new functionality.
I also agree that India has plenty of talented developers - but you'll find them working fulltime for Cisco/Amazon/etc., not for some crap place like Infosys.
Manufacturing something overseas because we don't have that kind of labor pool or capacity is one thing. But we have thousands of highly skilled, high educated software developers right here in the US. Apple, do the right thing and keep those jobs here. You have NO excuse!
Apple is an institution, not - whatever the elected officials such institutions purchase would have us believe - a person. It's what every corporation was designed to be: an amoral profit machine the sole purpose of which is to enable those with wealth to accumulate more of the same. As such, it doesn't need an excuse. All it or any company needs is an opportunity, and in a system where legislators and law are for sale, such opportunity requires nothing more than a line item in the government relations budget.
A corporation is the cultural equivalent of a chain saw ? a very powerful economic tool guaranteed to cause fatal damage to any society that fails to use it with sufficient safety procedures. Sadly, it's the dominant institution of our time and it's been quite awhile since the 1% got tired of suffering constraints as to where they can swing it.
The outsourcing of jobs in the midst of mass unemployment is just an awkward stage America is going through. All that work will come right back home just as soon as Americans are numerous and desperate enough to abandon our silly notions about rights and quality of life. We're nearly there already? The term "middle class" already invokes a quaint, "Father Knows Best" nostalgia. 95% of the current work force is engaged in a trend of doing more for less than will won't stop short of death. We're raising a generation which will lack the knowledge necessary for anything beyond sweatshop labor, and - more to the point - is growing up without witnessing any alternative other than that presented by the rich, beautiful fantasy people on the screen that keeps everyone quietly slogging in harness.
Will the next version of Mac OS X come with a built in Indian accent? It's not enough that I have to speak with somebody with an Indian accent whenever I call certain US companies who are greedy bastards and they outsource their support lines to foreigners who speak piss poor English that sounds like gibberish half of the time?
A lot of the recently insourced call centers don't speak the Queen's English with a perfect accent either. They have thick (often strongly Southern) accents that I can barely understand.
At least, many of the Indians make an effort to be understood.....
Good for you. A vast majority of this country could not.
Quote:
Originally Posted by dasanman69
Many German/Japanese cars are built in the US.
Yeah, a small portion of their global output. Often in super automated assembly lines (with outsourced components), located in the South, in right-to-work states (nothing wrong with that). Many senior managers I've spoken to in this industry complain about the less-than-great quality of US manual labor, as a result of which there is a tendency toward heavy automation.
By the same token, all the large IT companies from India - TCS, Infosys, Wipro - have a pretty impressive presence in the US. I am not talking about their sending over cheap Indian labor either: they employ significant amounts of US citizens here. Indeed, I am wiling to bet (I'll need to do more research to prove this), a company such as Infosys or TCS has a higher proportion of their global labor force located in the US compared to BMW, Toyota, VW, or Daimler-Benz.
Quote:
Originally Posted by dasanman69
The glass on iDevices is made in the US.
Really? Care to provide some evidence?
Most of the glass comes from Corning. While they still have some manufacturing here, a vast majority of their glass is produced in Asia.
Steve Jobs Rest his soul would NEVER NEVER NEVER approved of this what the hell is APPLE thinking.. they will just become like everyone else which is what Jobs spent a car rear avoiding. Not being like everyone else but a company who stands OUT.
Tim Cook and his boys SUCK you do this and it all goes downhill
Apple is an institution, not - whatever the elected officials such institutions purchase would have us believe - a person. It's what every corporation was designed to be: an amoral profit machine the sole purpose of which is to enable those with wealth to accumulate more of the same. As such, it doesn't need an excuse. All it or any company needs is an opportunity, and in a system where legislators and law are for sale, such opportunity requires nothing more than a line item in the government relations budget.
A corporation is the cultural equivalent of a chain saw ? a very powerful economic tool guaranteed to cause fatal damage to any society that fails to use it with sufficient safety procedures. Sadly, it's the dominant institution of our time and it's been quite awhile since the 1% got tired of suffering constraints as to where they can swing it.
The outsourcing of jobs in the midst of mass unemployment is just an awkward stage America is going through. All that work will come right back home just as soon as Americans are numerous and desperate enough to abandon our silly notions about rights and quality of life. We're nearly there already? The term "middle class" already invokes a quaint, "Father Knows Best" nostalgia. 95% of the current work force is engaged in a trend of doing more for less than will won't stop short of death. We're raising a generation which will lack the knowledge necessary for anything beyond sweatshop labor, and - more to the point - is growing up without witnessing any alternative other than that presented by the rich, beautiful fantasy people on the screen that keeps everyone quietly slogging in harness.
A superb post in otherwise desolate landscape of juvenile, knee-jerk nonsense!
In the west, we want inexpensive products, but we also want high wages. The desire for inexpensive products means we must use whatever labour force provides the cheapest production.
Steve Jobs Rest his soul would NEVER NEVER NEVER approved of this what the hell is APPLE thinking.. they will just become like everyone else which is what Jobs spent a car rear avoiding. Not being like everyone else but a company who stands OUT.
Tim Cook and his boys SUCK you do this and it all goes downhill
I have just returned from India and buying Apple products in India is pretty much impossible. The only Apple store of note was the excellent iStore in Bangalore. They did not have the iPad camera connection kit I was after, but I did buy Isaacson's Jobs' biography for 800 rs ($16). (A store in Mumbai was selling them for $13, and not the fake 400 rs versions either.)
Apple stores are of course great, but India seems to have a completely different outlet system. I tried looking for Apple products (iPhone) in Madurai. I was directed to a market area, where every little shop sold mobiles (about 100 of them). Some had second-hand iPhones, but that was it. Indian's love these chaotic stalls.
Lots of Samsung being sold, even with pictures of the Apple iPhone (complete with Apple logo) with the Samsung label underneath!
I did find some more up-market shops where iPhone was being sold, but for 43,000 rs, around $860, which is more than in the US and even Australia.
Before one criticises India too much, it should be realised, it is the ultimate in capitalism and competition, and this pretty much results in chaos and confusion for the consumer. Hence companies that can tap into this chaos and confusion win. Cheap products (and I mean cheap and nasty) products are easily sold into such a marketplace, and high-quality products are the preserve of the high-end of town.
Apple needs to get its products out to the masses in countries like India.
By the same token, all the large IT companies from India - TCS, Infosys, Wipro - have a pretty impressive presence in the US. I am not talking about their sending over cheap Indian labor either: they employ significant amounts of US citizens here. Indeed, I am wiling to bet (I'll need to do more research to prove this), a company such as Infosys or TCS has a higher proportion of their global labor force located in the US compared to BMW, Toyota, VW, or Daimler-Benz.
Please do not defend Indian IT employees. They do extremely trivial stuff, the kind the AI/ NLP programs we used to have fun with in gradschool will hopefully replace in the next decade or so. More so, Indian IT people are indeed very unpleasant/ narrow minded to talk to, their world view is medieval, their English so pathetic, that even as an Indian I cannot properly communicate with them if their mother tongue is not the same as mine- limited vocabulary/ literal mindedness. Sure, I can have the same problem with a foreign taxi driver, but at least his world view is interesting, and he does not think that doing trivial maintenance (mechanical or otherwise) makes him better.
Indian IT people do trivial work. Does not automatically make them indispensable, but I would fathom moderately trained Mexican blue collar workers can do that as well.
Disclaimer: Born and brought up in India. See the earlier posted message.
It will be an especially bad sign if software positions in the US are cut, either through layoffs or attrition.
I've worked with Wipro, and while there are some nice people there, the technology standards of the company are dismal. Development and security were particularly bad. I will point out that the company is very large, and my experience was with one account. However, most of my horror stories were the same as other people I knew who worked with them.
Further, the development costs were actually very high if measured per unit output of functionality, as opposed to cost per hour. Essentially there were no savings at all. Apple is in California and this means working with people who are 11.5 time zones away. If they are willing to stay at work till midnight, they are by definition not the best available talent.
Is the Tim Cook way? I hope not, but I would not be surprised. Certainly he has no insight whatsoever into the software development process.
Please do not defend Indian IT employees. They do extremely trivial stuff, the kind the AI/ NLP programs we used to have fun with in gradschool will hopefully replace in the next decade or so. More so, Indian IT people are indeed very unpleasant/ narrow minded to talk to, their world view is medieval, their English so pathetic, that even as an Indian I cannot properly communicate with them if their mother tongue is not the same as mine- limited vocabulary/ literal mindedness. Sure, I can have the same problem with a foreign taxi driver, but at least his world view is interesting, and he does not think that doing trivial maintenance (mechanical or otherwise) makes him better.
Indian IT people do trivial work. Does not automatically make them indispensable, but I would fathom moderately trained Mexican blue collar workers can do that as well.
Disclaimer: Born and brought up in India. See the earlier posted message.
I could care less about where you're born and brought up. In any event, stop apologizing.
My post had nothing to with 'defending' Indian IT employees. I was talking about the presence of Indian IT companies in the US, compared to auto manufacturers.
Your level of comprehension is about as good as that of the 'Indian IT employees' about whom you complain.
Tim Cook ... has no insight whatsoever into the software development process.
That laughably stupid assertion - from some internet dude who thinks he knows more than a person with Tim Cook's background, experience, grooming, and responsibilities - is sufficient to invalidate just about everything you've said.
I'm to be convinced that we have quality programmers in any parts of the world in sufficient numbers. Lots of code is written in C++, which is one of the worst programming languages ever invented. In fact, still too much low-level C code exists. Objective-C is the best version of C, but even that is still hampered by C roots.
Still programmers hang on to these stone-age C-based tools (which is an assembler dressed in HLL syntax). We need more programmers trained in minimal and elegant languages like LISP, Algol, and for OO Smalltalk and Eiffel (for two different ends of the OO spectrum). But as David Parnas has observed, many programmers think that they are producing good code by writing in OO languages, and yet fail to design modules with clean and elegant interfaces.
This illusion is even worse when people produce UML diagrams (the C++ of diagramming techniques).
Parnas also has a 2002 update called The Secret History of Information Hiding, which I can't find in pdf right now (it is at ACM). He coined the phrase information hiding, which armies of C++ programmers think means hiding module data behind get and set functions, but that is not what is meant by information hiding.
As Parnas observes, it is not the quantity of programmers that is the problem, it is the quality.
People forget that outsourcing enables US companies to hire US workers.
Cut manufacturing in China?
Well Apple would lose its global competitiveness, which would result in poor sales, and Apple would be forced to downsize. Apple using China as a resource enables to to hire more American workers.
Now, the same thing can be said of hiring people in india. Apple can supplement their American work force with people in India. That doesn't mean that Apple is replacing workers in the United States. Apple could be creating jobs in india that would have never been created in the United Sates to being with.
Your level of comprehension is about as good as that of the 'Indian IT employees' about whom you complain.
Sure, it was my annoyance, and a little bit too much Pastis that was speaking. I could guess your your ancestry from your username, and I automatically assumed that you were defending them, which many nationalistic Indians do.
All the experience I have in outsourcing results in this : its better to outsource in rural towns of youre own country than to another country.
We have no problem at all with our divisions in Sherbrooke and Alma (Quebec, Canada) and the labor cost is still reduce by 30% compare to Montreal. On top of it programmers love it, some are able to live in the country while doing an hi tech job.
That laughably stupid assertion - from some internet dude who thinks he knows more than a person with the background, experience, grooming, and responsibilities that Tim Cook has - is sufficient to invalidate just about everything you've said.
There is nothing in the man's background, or his statements, that indicates an interest for the software development process, or any other creative endeavor for that matter. This is a guy who by his own admission watches only two TV channels, ESPN and MSNBC, and who by everybody's depiction is a spreadsheet junkie workaholic.
It also turns out that your reply points to exactly zero evidence that the guy knows anything about software development. If you know something I don't, you sure aren't saying it by calling me an "internet dude", which is what we all are around here.
Comments
You've found Apple's internal inventory and IT systems less stable due to a rumor of the possibility of future outsourcing?
Wow.
You know when you see some insects and for the rest of the day it feels like you have them on you when in fact there's none? Same thing lol
But to play the devil's advocate I wonder that whether same argument that some use here to defend Foxconn jobs does not apply to Indian IT companies? The Foxconn jobs are too shitty for Americans, and it is not a big deal if they leave America. Is that not true for Indian IT outsourcing jobs? No self-respecting engineer in US or India would like to do that kind of work.
In my experience, yes this has often been the case - offshore contractor developers get the bug fixes, while fulltime developers get to build the new functionality.
I also agree that India has plenty of talented developers - but you'll find them working fulltime for Cisco/Amazon/etc., not for some crap place like Infosys.
Manufacturing something overseas because we don't have that kind of labor pool or capacity is one thing. But we have thousands of highly skilled, high educated software developers right here in the US. Apple, do the right thing and keep those jobs here. You have NO excuse!
Apple is an institution, not - whatever the elected officials such institutions purchase would have us believe - a person. It's what every corporation was designed to be: an amoral profit machine the sole purpose of which is to enable those with wealth to accumulate more of the same. As such, it doesn't need an excuse. All it or any company needs is an opportunity, and in a system where legislators and law are for sale, such opportunity requires nothing more than a line item in the government relations budget.
A corporation is the cultural equivalent of a chain saw ? a very powerful economic tool guaranteed to cause fatal damage to any society that fails to use it with sufficient safety procedures. Sadly, it's the dominant institution of our time and it's been quite awhile since the 1% got tired of suffering constraints as to where they can swing it.
The outsourcing of jobs in the midst of mass unemployment is just an awkward stage America is going through. All that work will come right back home just as soon as Americans are numerous and desperate enough to abandon our silly notions about rights and quality of life. We're nearly there already? The term "middle class" already invokes a quaint, "Father Knows Best" nostalgia. 95% of the current work force is engaged in a trend of doing more for less than will won't stop short of death. We're raising a generation which will lack the knowledge necessary for anything beyond sweatshop labor, and - more to the point - is growing up without witnessing any alternative other than that presented by the rich, beautiful fantasy people on the screen that keeps everyone quietly slogging in harness.
Will the next version of Mac OS X come with a built in Indian accent? It's not enough that I have to speak with somebody with an Indian accent whenever I call certain US companies who are greedy bastards and they outsource their support lines to foreigners who speak piss poor English that sounds like gibberish half of the time?
A lot of the recently insourced call centers don't speak the Queen's English with a perfect accent either. They have thick (often strongly Southern) accents that I can barely understand.
At least, many of the Indians make an effort to be understood.....
... perhaps this world is smaller and more congealed than I think it is.
Maybe you need to get around a bit more.
I'd happily live without the combustion engine.
Good for you. A vast majority of this country could not.
Many German/Japanese cars are built in the US.
Yeah, a small portion of their global output. Often in super automated assembly lines (with outsourced components), located in the South, in right-to-work states (nothing wrong with that). Many senior managers I've spoken to in this industry complain about the less-than-great quality of US manual labor, as a result of which there is a tendency toward heavy automation.
By the same token, all the large IT companies from India - TCS, Infosys, Wipro - have a pretty impressive presence in the US. I am not talking about their sending over cheap Indian labor either: they employ significant amounts of US citizens here. Indeed, I am wiling to bet (I'll need to do more research to prove this), a company such as Infosys or TCS has a higher proportion of their global labor force located in the US compared to BMW, Toyota, VW, or Daimler-Benz.
The glass on iDevices is made in the US.
Really? Care to provide some evidence?
Most of the glass comes from Corning. While they still have some manufacturing here, a vast majority of their glass is produced in Asia.
Tim Cook and his boys SUCK you do this and it all goes downhill
Apple is an institution, not - whatever the elected officials such institutions purchase would have us believe - a person. It's what every corporation was designed to be: an amoral profit machine the sole purpose of which is to enable those with wealth to accumulate more of the same. As such, it doesn't need an excuse. All it or any company needs is an opportunity, and in a system where legislators and law are for sale, such opportunity requires nothing more than a line item in the government relations budget.
A corporation is the cultural equivalent of a chain saw ? a very powerful economic tool guaranteed to cause fatal damage to any society that fails to use it with sufficient safety procedures. Sadly, it's the dominant institution of our time and it's been quite awhile since the 1% got tired of suffering constraints as to where they can swing it.
The outsourcing of jobs in the midst of mass unemployment is just an awkward stage America is going through. All that work will come right back home just as soon as Americans are numerous and desperate enough to abandon our silly notions about rights and quality of life. We're nearly there already? The term "middle class" already invokes a quaint, "Father Knows Best" nostalgia. 95% of the current work force is engaged in a trend of doing more for less than will won't stop short of death. We're raising a generation which will lack the knowledge necessary for anything beyond sweatshop labor, and - more to the point - is growing up without witnessing any alternative other than that presented by the rich, beautiful fantasy people on the screen that keeps everyone quietly slogging in harness.
A superb post in otherwise desolate landscape of juvenile, knee-jerk nonsense!
Thank you.
Oh well
Steve Jobs Rest his soul would NEVER NEVER NEVER approved of this what the hell is APPLE thinking.. they will just become like everyone else which is what Jobs spent a car rear avoiding. Not being like everyone else but a company who stands OUT.
Tim Cook and his boys SUCK you do this and it all goes downhill
Laureen, is that you?
Apple stores are of course great, but India seems to have a completely different outlet system. I tried looking for Apple products (iPhone) in Madurai. I was directed to a market area, where every little shop sold mobiles (about 100 of them). Some had second-hand iPhones, but that was it. Indian's love these chaotic stalls.
Lots of Samsung being sold, even with pictures of the Apple iPhone (complete with Apple logo) with the Samsung label underneath!
I did find some more up-market shops where iPhone was being sold, but for 43,000 rs, around $860, which is more than in the US and even Australia.
Before one criticises India too much, it should be realised, it is the ultimate in capitalism and competition, and this pretty much results in chaos and confusion for the consumer. Hence companies that can tap into this chaos and confusion win. Cheap products (and I mean cheap and nasty) products are easily sold into such a marketplace, and high-quality products are the preserve of the high-end of town.
Apple needs to get its products out to the masses in countries like India.
By the same token, all the large IT companies from India - TCS, Infosys, Wipro - have a pretty impressive presence in the US. I am not talking about their sending over cheap Indian labor either: they employ significant amounts of US citizens here. Indeed, I am wiling to bet (I'll need to do more research to prove this), a company such as Infosys or TCS has a higher proportion of their global labor force located in the US compared to BMW, Toyota, VW, or Daimler-Benz.
Please do not defend Indian IT employees. They do extremely trivial stuff, the kind the AI/ NLP programs we used to have fun with in gradschool will hopefully replace in the next decade or so. More so, Indian IT people are indeed very unpleasant/ narrow minded to talk to, their world view is medieval, their English so pathetic, that even as an Indian I cannot properly communicate with them if their mother tongue is not the same as mine- limited vocabulary/ literal mindedness. Sure, I can have the same problem with a foreign taxi driver, but at least his world view is interesting, and he does not think that doing trivial maintenance (mechanical or otherwise) makes him better.
Indian IT people do trivial work. Does not automatically make them indispensable, but I would fathom moderately trained Mexican blue collar workers can do that as well.
Disclaimer: Born and brought up in India. See the earlier posted message.
I've worked with Wipro, and while there are some nice people there, the technology standards of the company are dismal. Development and security were particularly bad. I will point out that the company is very large, and my experience was with one account. However, most of my horror stories were the same as other people I knew who worked with them.
Further, the development costs were actually very high if measured per unit output of functionality, as opposed to cost per hour. Essentially there were no savings at all. Apple is in California and this means working with people who are 11.5 time zones away. If they are willing to stay at work till midnight, they are by definition not the best available talent.
Is the Tim Cook way? I hope not, but I would not be surprised. Certainly he has no insight whatsoever into the software development process.
Please do not defend Indian IT employees. They do extremely trivial stuff, the kind the AI/ NLP programs we used to have fun with in gradschool will hopefully replace in the next decade or so. More so, Indian IT people are indeed very unpleasant/ narrow minded to talk to, their world view is medieval, their English so pathetic, that even as an Indian I cannot properly communicate with them if their mother tongue is not the same as mine- limited vocabulary/ literal mindedness. Sure, I can have the same problem with a foreign taxi driver, but at least his world view is interesting, and he does not think that doing trivial maintenance (mechanical or otherwise) makes him better.
Indian IT people do trivial work. Does not automatically make them indispensable, but I would fathom moderately trained Mexican blue collar workers can do that as well.
Disclaimer: Born and brought up in India. See the earlier posted message.
I could care less about where you're born and brought up. In any event, stop apologizing.
My post had nothing to with 'defending' Indian IT employees. I was talking about the presence of Indian IT companies in the US, compared to auto manufacturers.
Your level of comprehension is about as good as that of the 'Indian IT employees' about whom you complain.
Tim Cook ... has no insight whatsoever into the software development process.
That laughably stupid assertion - from some internet dude who thinks he knows more than a person with Tim Cook's background, experience, grooming, and responsibilities - is sufficient to invalidate just about everything you've said.
Still programmers hang on to these stone-age C-based tools (which is an assembler dressed in HLL syntax). We need more programmers trained in minimal and elegant languages like LISP, Algol, and for OO Smalltalk and Eiffel (for two different ends of the OO spectrum). But as David Parnas has observed, many programmers think that they are producing good code by writing in OO languages, and yet fail to design modules with clean and elegant interfaces.
This illusion is even worse when people produce UML diagrams (the C++ of diagramming techniques).
http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring20...n/criteria.pdf
http://faculty.indwes.edu/bcupp/look...nas.Poster.htm
http://is.ls.fi.upm.es/docencia/proy...f_3_parnas.pdf
Parnas also has a 2002 update called The Secret History of Information Hiding, which I can't find in pdf right now (it is at ACM). He coined the phrase information hiding, which armies of C++ programmers think means hiding module data behind get and set functions, but that is not what is meant by information hiding.
As Parnas observes, it is not the quantity of programmers that is the problem, it is the quality.
Cut manufacturing in China?
Well Apple would lose its global competitiveness, which would result in poor sales, and Apple would be forced to downsize. Apple using China as a resource enables to to hire more American workers.
Now, the same thing can be said of hiring people in india. Apple can supplement their American work force with people in India. That doesn't mean that Apple is replacing workers in the United States. Apple could be creating jobs in india that would have never been created in the United Sates to being with.
Your level of comprehension is about as good as that of the 'Indian IT employees' about whom you complain.
Sure, it was my annoyance, and a little bit too much Pastis that was speaking. I could guess your your ancestry from your username, and I automatically assumed that you were defending them, which many nationalistic Indians do.
We have no problem at all with our divisions in Sherbrooke and Alma (Quebec, Canada) and the labor cost is still reduce by 30% compare to Montreal. On top of it programmers love it, some are able to live in the country while doing an hi tech job.
This is one thing Apple can do inside the USA.
That laughably stupid assertion - from some internet dude who thinks he knows more than a person with the background, experience, grooming, and responsibilities that Tim Cook has - is sufficient to invalidate just about everything you've said.
There is nothing in the man's background, or his statements, that indicates an interest for the software development process, or any other creative endeavor for that matter. This is a guy who by his own admission watches only two TV channels, ESPN and MSNBC, and who by everybody's depiction is a spreadsheet junkie workaholic.
It also turns out that your reply points to exactly zero evidence that the guy knows anything about software development. If you know something I don't, you sure aren't saying it by calling me an "internet dude", which is what we all are around here.