For Indian developers that's above average pay, and HCL has a heavy Indian presence.
Prices for developers outside of the US and Europe are actually quite low, and part of the reason is the low costs in other countries that let companies get away with paying less, and another part is that there's a lot of engineers available.
Even if the average engineer is not as good, there's so many engineers in India that companies have a huge candidate pool from just the above average ones.
Yes, HCL is one of the oldest Indian IT companies, the name stands for Hindustan Computers Limited. It would be very unlikely that they were contracting for janitorial services.
The painfully obvious answer is that the work is low skill. Why? Because the job market in the Bay Area is such that high skilled labor can easily and quickly find more gainful employment.
It doesn’t make it better for them to earn less, and a union is one way to group high and low skill labor pool such as the whole can have a better quality of life.
This is not true. There are a large number of contractors working at Google, Facebook and other companies in engineering and other skilled roles. Their contracts are from 3 to 6 months long.
If you're in a bind and need a job, you get placed quickly by one of the firms supplying contractors to the large companies. Since you're in a bind, you accept making a lower salary, which ends up being around 60-75% of the base salary of a full-time employee without any of the other benefits of being full-time.
>It doesn’t make it better for them to earn less, and a union is one way to group high and low skill labor pool such as the whole can have a better quality of life.
It is definitely better for some workers to make more than other workers. Is this really part of the argument in favor of unions? I always thought this was an anti-union straw man argument.
The painfully obvious answer is that the work is low skill
No, that isn’t obvious at all. Well it probably is relatively low skill for programming - because it’s HCL - but the reason it’s that low because this is indentured labour. Wipro, Tata even IBM are all in the same game.
We've been hearing this same argument for twenty years.
It scared me away from the industry, back when I was in college and the scaremongers claimed that all the software jobs would move to India and the U.S. programmers would be laid off en masse. It never happened, and in fact, many programmers got quite rich shortly thereafter. The tech companies play a significant enough role in the U.S. economy that I can't see the money disappearing "soon," short of Elizabeth Warren dismantling them.
Also, having worked for an old-school tech company that refused to pay its engineers competitively, I've seen firsthand how a strong engineering culture can crumble overnight. The good engineers migrated to better paying jobs and couldn't be replaced. The company dug its heels into the ground, and put more arrows behind marketing and middle management and low-cost contract engineering labor. And that went as well as you might expect. I'd be surprised if they're still around in a few years.
Software, unlike food or hardware, has a unique property: it can be replicated for free. Chefs have influence only on the meal they prepare now, while a software dev makes a "meal prototype" that's instantly replicated into every restaurant on the planet. When an airline chef makes a mistake, some passengers of that flight have to spend extra 30 mins more in a restroom. When a Boeing software engineer makes a mistake, all airplanes inherit this mistake and start crashing. When a neurosurgeon makes a mistake, one patient dies, but when a software dev who writes the software for x-ray machines makes a mistake, millions of people get cancer.
Your statement right there is racist as it assumes a general trait across all white men, not just the ones guilty of it. It's the same as saying all black men are bad fathers (because stereotype). Both are hideously racist statements.
It's a futile excercise because these tech people aren't the decision makers. You're blaming a waiter for how the restaurant is running its business. Those who make decisions are the big VCs (Sequioa capital and the co).
Who are those "white people" specifically? Can you talk about specific persons? For example, I'm white and I don't "use my whiteness to preserve my exclusive access to money" (would be nice to have such "exclusive access" though).
Yeah because anti semitism has long and violent history. White people have not been on the receiving end of systemic violence because of their whiteness -- they have perpetrated in and benefited from it.
Yours is a bizarre liberal conception of racism that totally ignores historical and material context, where you can just replace words in a sentence to prove it's racist. If you replace the word white in that sentence with another race, it has a totally different meaning, because the context is totally different.
White men DO have disproportionate access to money and power in the US, are you disputing that?
That's really low. I wonder what kind of work they do for Google.