Pensieri di un lunatico minore

Letting amateurs deal with numbers

I couldn’t help but comment on this absurd blog posting that Google News picked up:

Now, what this means is that IBM is dumping its American work force–particularly its American technical work force. The SEC doesn’t require reporting on the immigration status of employees, but I think if we could get figures on the number of H-1b/L-1 guest workers, green card holders and naturalized citizens being employed by IBM in recent years, it would be a safe bet that the number of Americans born in the USA that have been employed by IBM in recent years has gone down significantly. I would seriously question the ability of IBM management to get key information at this point without relying heavily on sources of data that may be skewed by ethnic and national nepotism. Can IBM really guarentee the security of software systems developed in India?

Seriously? Based on an International Herald Tribute article that discusses how IBM grew the workforce 8% last year¹. The level of both xenophobia and ignorance demonstrated is amazing. IBM employees 127,000 in the US, with a population of 298,444,215. That represents 1 in 1/2350 people in the country. Compare this to India, where IBM employees 52,000 in a population of 1,095,351,995. That ratio is 1/21064, or approximately 9x lower ratio. How this translates to the alarmist wording of the author is beyond my grasp. I would be shocked if India’s workforce wasn’t growing faster than the US. The Indian economy is growing faster than the US economy, which is 100% predictable when comparing a fully developed nation and a developing nation.

It would also be important to note that the composition of the workforce in India, from both a professional and pay-scale level, is quite different than that in the US or Europe. Security has little, if anything, to do with the nationality of the developer—much to the surprise of the US Government—and more to do with the process surrounding its development, testing and audit.

If you read about the organization that is responsible for this writing, I think you’ll find the prototypical xenophobic rantings of many in this country. There are plenty of things to be worried about without projecting our own failings onto other people. Where the US fails to compete it is almost always because of our own behavior. How this drivel ended up in Google News, I’ll never know.

The thing is, IBM is major US government contractor–and a major corporate welfare recipient. Does it really make sense for the American people to do that kind of business with what is essentially a foreign company?

Seriously? IBM in 2005 paid $7.45 billion in taxes to governmental entities in the United States, which is almost double what was paid to the rest of the world combined. I’m not sure it’s really fair to call a company that puts that much money into the coffers of the government a “foreign company”. IBM is a global corporation, but it is predominantly in the United States from a capital perspective.

This kind of inflammatory financial writing is pointless. If you can’t put basic numbers together, you have no business writing about business.

¹ This level of growth is gigantic in a company the size of IBM.