Maybe in another 10 years, India will be that lucrative a destination! Not yet.

Why do we let kids go off to college, just so they can become redundant employees? Just let kids go straight from high school and into a program that teaches them one program and BAM! Your on the same level as some guy who spent years in college working on a CS degree.

America’s best and brightest leave their homes and everything familiar to them to move overseas and start a new >life,

Like Anand Giridhardas ? Unlike Jhumpa Lahiri kinds of yesteryears, I doubt whether the global generation is fraught with such angst.

when IBM was ‘kicked out’ of India in 1977 by the Janata Party government, many Indian employees of IBM had an option to move to the US, for jobs similar to the ones they might have been doing in India, but at US wages.

Not really. They were offered 1-year to 1.5 year conditional appointments at the end of which they had to re-apply. But then you see those days, a green card was a lot easier if one came to the US with a job. Even then not many accepted the offer. My uncle decided to shop around the various IBMs the worked over, and finally chose IBM-Germany and thereon to IBM-Australia. Gulf Oil offered far better terms when they moved out of India in 1963. All Indian employees (my late dad included) were offered a posting in Canada or the Southern USA. My mom being the living expert (since her dad still worked in the UN those days) advised my father against it!

wow. never knew that. do you know if many took up the option.

Not much left to outsource from IBM US to IBM India.

Not all lay offs are due to “Outsourcing”, especially in IBM in this case – quite a few are due to the current situation of stagnant US market and in many cases,its ‘cuz of the market is contracting.

A good number of jobs (resource action) were from Sales & Distribution. And you can understand, how these affected employees from S&D, can truely go & make impact in the growing regions – if they take up the Project Match option seriously – that is.

BTW – IBM India has approx 75K employees – next only to US in terms of employee count and by some estimation, there’s not much left to outsource from US to India.

Just to add some more context to this – when IBM was ‘kicked out’ of India in 1977 by the Janata Party government, many Indian employees of IBM had an option to move to the US, for jobs similar to the ones they might have been doing in India, but at US wages. It only took 30 years, but IBM is now more an Indian company than it is an American one (if judged by number of employees): so the logic is the same, but the countries have switched roles. Workforce globalization? What workforce globalization? Wage convergence, what wage convergence?