IBM to train 40,000 IT students in China

Glad I am a hardware person. He go the software jobs. Who does IBM think they are fooling. Last time I checked, the software community was pretty smart. This means 40,000 jobs are going to China. This is like all the other "enhancements" to the plan. It ends up costing the employee money or they lose their job. And the executive are wondering why we cannot keep skilled people with less than 5 years in the company. What are the executives going to do when all the 25-year employees retire? Who is going to be there to do the work? Oh I see. The accountants think they can save money be taking a Chinese student right out of college and replace someone who has been with the company 20 years. Good trade. Maybe we can get two Chinese students for the price of one IBM US employee. That way the guys with the MBAs can actually increase output. I better stop now. I have seen this too many times. Take an experienced employee. Replace them with a young engineer just out of college with new skills. Just like fireworks. Brilliant explosion that just last until their next promotion or until they can get more money somewhere else.
Posted by Ed Suffern on Wednesday, September 08 2004 08:52 AM

Yeah, no doubt about it. They've already begun moving software work to India and that has been going terribly. The press reports and everything that they release all read like it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, but take it from someone in the middle of that mess, it isn't. Now we're going to add in 40K Chinese to that mess?

The folks at the top just don't get it. All they see is the bottom line. They don't understand the impact of having someone that is totally foreign to an industry trying to develop solutions for it just doesn't work. All they see is a "global resource" that costs $20 an hour vs a "US resource" that costs $80 an hour. They don't see that it takes 4 or 5 "global resources" to replace one "US resource". They also don't see that the "global resource" can't design their way out of a paper bag.
Posted by IBM_USER on Thursday, September 09 2004 01:39 AM

One of our greatest asetts seems to be to export our technology offshore. In the long run this is akin to shooting oneself in the foot. We will be left with nothing but poor paying service jobs. Let's instead do everything possible to educate and give jobs to our own first, to keep our country strong in the future. Our universities must cease to be a place to party and a center for serious research and study. Graduates should be required to intern in their field and be guaranteed access to jobs in their field. More emphasis needs to be placed on the sciences, math and technology in the early school years. Teachers must be given incentives to do well.
Educating our children is where the future of our great country lies, not in outsourcing in the name of chasing the buck.
Posted by RETCE on Thursday, September 09 2004 03:32 PM

this is a way to insert ourselves into the nascent infrastucture of a potential competing power. It's not all about bib Blue you know
Posted by flatscan on Thursday, September 09 2004 08:22 PM

This is a very good example of a truly global economy. With a global economy comes a global workforce. These days, there are no geogrpahic boundries to tap the human resources available to do a particular job. I am glad IBM is tapping the global people market.
Posted by HR on Thursday, September 09 2004 09:58 PM

"Glad I am a hardware person."

Do you think HW is safe? Think again! HW offshoring is still growing.

We are even now seeing accounting, legal, medical, and other specialties starting to be offshored. The jobs that remain are handed to NON-immigrant visa holders instead of Americans. Try working at Intel some time. American engineers are the minority.

And don't tell me for a moment American science and engineering grads are worse than Indian and Chinese grads. Ask yourself why all of them still want to come to the US to go to school? I went to grad school with many students who got their undergrad outside of the US. I never found them any better prepared or smarter. I did find they were more willing to cheat on tests, projects, and homework.
Posted by D. Stiuick on Friday, September 10 2004 05:43 AM

Outsourcing is the remedy that corporations found to the high turn over employment rate in the IT industry in the eighties and nineties where more programmers and IT professionals were asking for higher and higher salaries and benefits with no regard to loyalty to the companies that they worked. Now the chip has turned in favor of the corporations and if we want them not to outsource then IT professionals need to also not look for the quick buck and appriciate their employers more.
Posted by Ana Budejen on Thursday, October 07 2004 04:42 AM

Are you serious?

Most IT workers would love nothing more than to have an employer they could be loyal to -- but employers in the US gave up on loyalty to employees long ago.

Anyone in China who thinks American companies want anything other than cheap and disposable labor is in for a shock.
Posted by F Earl on Thursday, January 06 2005 03:47 AM