Posted on 12/22/2003 3:31:35 PM PST by Willie Green
For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.
America Online (AOL) is planning to open a small development shop in Bangalore, India, but the giant Internet service provider hasn't worked out the details of how many Indian developers it would hire or what projects they would work on.
AOL began advertising to hire a global program manager to coordinate software development teams in the U.S., Dublin and Bangalore on Dec. 10, a day after the company announced it was eliminating 450 software development jobs in California. About 100 of those employees were offered jobs elsewhere in the U.S.
Asked what functions the Bangalore developers would perform, AOL spokesman Jim Whitney said the company was only considering a Bangalore branch at this point. Asked what functions the Bangalore developers could perform that the laid off California workers could not, he answered: "It's really a little too early to get into that."
The Bangalore jobs would be unrelated to the California layoffs, Whitney said.
"There's a talented work force there, and some cost savings that could be achieved," Whitney said of a decision to hire Indian developers.
The AOL presence in India would be "relatively small," Whitney said. AOL hasn't yet determined what development projects the Bangalore office would work on, he added. The opening of the Bangalore development shop is "still a few months away," he said.
By establishing a development facility in India, AOL would join dozens of other tech companies that have already done so, including IBM, which plans to move more than 4,700 programming jobs to India and other countries, according to media reports earlier this month. In July, Yahoo set up a development center in Bangalore, and the company expected to hire 150 engineers there by the end of 2004.
Organizations representing U.S. workers, most notably the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers-USA, have decried the moves as contributing to unemployment among the country's technology workers.
AOL already has about 200 developers working in Dublin, Whitney said.
Uh huh, sure.
Oh joy, AO hell, India style, just what the world needed. /sarcasm
I wish America's biggest export wasn't jobs.
You should track the next wave of comuter science: grid enabled high performance computing on demand. This will require a whole new look at computing and will obsolete languages like java and "N-tiered" Web applications. The government is likely to plow a bil a year into this starting next year. the Euros are set to put up a good 300 mil Euros into over the next few years.
The US programming market will slow down abit for corporate application over the next two years but after that there will be a explosion in the field. And yes, some of that will be overseas. But much of the money and business orientation that the indians have put together will not carry them over to this new world. We are moving on to a new paradigm in computing and it is a revolutionary as the move to the web. This new space has a whole other set of problems. I am not worried about India in the medium term, and I have been in the business for 30 years.
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