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Microsoft To Hire Thousands... In China
Perhaps the best answer to the question posed to Bernanke moments ago whether US unemployment is structural or cyclical comes courtesy of Microsoft, which announced earlier that it was set to hire "several thousand" workers. Sadly, the catch is that the hires will be in China.
From BusinessWeek:
Microsoft the largest software maker, will hire several thousand workers in China to support new cloud computing services and smartphones using its Windows operating system, Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer said.
The workforce (MSFT) expansion, from a current base of 4,000 staff, will take place during the next year, Ballmer said today at a press conference in Shanghai that was streamed live on the Internet. He didn’t provide a specific number for new workers.
China has become the fastest growing market (MSFT) for the company’s smartphone operating system, Ballmer said. The Redmond, Washington-based company will start a public preview of its Windows Azure service in the country next month, making Microsoft the first multinational to offer public cloud computing in the nation.
“I visited China last about one year ago in May and it is remarkable to me how much has changed,” Ballmer, 57, said. “At Microsoft this is an incredibly exciting time.”
For future Chinese employees of Microsoft it is a quite exciting time too. For those Americans who will not be hired by Microsoft as a result of this decision, it is not nearly as exciting. But at least those unhired workers can take solace that their E*trade daytrading P&L is green for the day.
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You mean like for cheap, sweatshop labor?
Doesn't Microsoft make SOFTware?
If you can't beat the hackers, hire them.
Right, because the corporate issue with the US labor pool isn't just price anymore.
The employment market is rapidly bifurcating into jobs Americans won't do and jobs Americans can't do.
Further entitlement expansion will probably fix that though.
As much as folks are upset that the jobs aren't in the US, it makes sense to hire local folks to do work on local projects.
It's neither rational nor feasible to expect English-speaking programmers in the US to build out the platform for China. Sure, much of the back-end coding is the same, however it's not easy to ensure US folks understand the rules/regulations as well as the Chinese culture to ensure that the programming meets all necessary legal hoops and is set up in a a way that Chinese users will see as customary and usable.
And it's not as if US folks are losing their jobs and having them sent overseas. This is an expansion of operations to bring established technology to a market that is growing rapidly and which currently MS has not fully expanded into.
Lastly, as was pointed out, it's not as "cheap" to live in China as it used to be. Food is still very reasonable, however consumer goods and room/board expenses have increased dramatically. This happens with any economy that heats up as there is a capital investment influx.
I'm not saying this article isn't newsworthy, but I don't think it's as sinister as one might surmise offhand.
They graduate more freaking engineers each year than we import new Mexican landscapers.. er, I mean Democrat motor voters.
Lastly, as was pointed out, it's not as "cheap" to live in China as it used to be. Food is still very reasonable, however consumer goods and room/board expenses have increased dramatically. This happens with any economy that heats up as there is a capital investment influx.
I'm not saying this article isn't newsworthy, but I don't think it's as sinister as one might surmise offhand.
In lots of areas it's not cheap at all, it's actually very expensive. China isn't the backwoods-land-of-sweatshops people seem to think it is. Though the corruption is more obvious than say the USA.
Sure, in parts it is really cheap and the labour is treated like slaves but that's also not different than areas of the US.
I know lots of people who prefer working in China rather than North America. Particularly Hong Kong but that's a whole other story.
If Microsoft is expanding in China it makes perfect sense to hire locals obviously.
Are you suggesting US programmers don't know how to setup cloud accounts for dual access...one for the user and the other for the Chinese government?
I think he may be suggesting that Microsoft doesn't know how to set up cloud-anything. Have you tried Azure? Is it just me?
I'll tell you what is Alchemical: Watching US industry chase profits in a nation still absolutely under the fist of the Communist Party of the Chinese People's Republic. Capital and technology grown very largely under the sponsorship of the US taxpayer via the Department of Defense, gets transfered to The Party, whether via Raytheon, General Dynamics, GE, or other, with the only apparent goal being the sustaining of the net margins of shareholder-owned corporations. The purpose of the transfers of capital and IP has nothing to do with increasing jobs, opportunity, in the US. And yet, to maintain leverage to assure the corporations that their Asia investments are safe, we taxpayers bear remarkable Department of Defense costs to contain Chinese expansionism? Sure, that's a good deal. Placing a pro rata DoD tax on corporations operating in China might be a sensible solution.
Cheap labor? China? check that RMB pal.. it's 6.14ish to the dollar.. $50 a month dormatory living cheap labor is so last decade.
Cheap compared to Western labor. Boohoo, corporations can't get Chinese and Indian workers to dance for a nickel all day.
A lot of engineers in China. As long as their work is for the Chinese market, no problemo. It won't be, of course, and the off-shoring and re-importation to the American market -- without penalty -- will see the continued deterioration of the American middle class. Like all these big corporations, Microsoft is seeking lowest wage absolute advantage vs. real 'free trade' which seeks comparative advantages.
Former Assistant Treasury Secretary Paul Craig Roberts does a great job of addressing these issues.
Stop spending your money on Microsoft products. Problem solved...
What are you posting with? A Foxconn Hecho in China iMac/Powerbook?
Check out the Allspark... (custom-made, by me!!)
Latest from the man, Paul Craig Roberts:
http://www.corbettreport.com/interview-665-paul-craig-roberts-on-the-eco...
Pity those Chinese engineers! Learning how to program in the Windoze environment with Microsoft's tools...they won't be good for anything else in the aftermath!
For future Chinese employees of Microsoft it is a quite exciting time too. For those Americans who will not be hired by Microsoft as a result of this decision, it is not nearly as exciting. But at least those unhired workers can take solace that their E*trade daytrading P&L is green for the day.
This needs to hit mainstream, and a national boycott of these SOB's products.IF there was ever a time when the Fed needs to STEP in on huge companies,now is the time.WAY past time to slam the tax loopholes shut on these multi billion dollar traitors.
NSA Chief: You guys did such a bangup job with domestic computer security, we'd sure appreciate it if you went over to China and gave us a hand there.
Somehow the US Bureau of Lies and Scams (BLS) will include that as positive employment in their numbers.
Don't you know how many welfare clerks this means a paycheck for?
People going to work in China, civil unrest for the west, "winning". - 85 billion per month on the backs of current and future taxpayers, all to line the pockets of paper-pushers and to maintain the appearance of a solvent banking system and stable petro dollar.
How much longer can the bread be maintained? Who will buy those bonds now (will 85 billion become 120 billion shortly)? - The only questions that really matter now.
Ancient astronaut theory suggests, the aliens will save us (or harvest us). We're ripe for the pickin.
“I visited China last about one year ago in May and it is remarkable to me how much has changed"
Really? No one has said this sentence in the last 15 years. Most people come back and say nothing is going on there. #sarcasm
Microsoft is one of the worst tech companies out there. Their products completely suck. Compare Microsoft Link to Google+ Hangouts and Voice. Microsoft has you buy expensive and clumsy software to get a worse experience than the browser based and free Google products. They suck. Windows 8 sucks. Word and Excel just get worse. Microsoft sucks. Microsoft has been working on Internet Explorer for years and years before Google came along with Chrome and it completely sucked. The biggest update to Explorer ever was simply making it look like Chrome and still it sucks compared to Chrome. Same thing with Bing. Microsoft does everything late and more expensive. Oh, I know! I want a phone with a Microsoft operating system because, you know, they suck at everything else so why not experience the pain of using Microsoft shit on my phone too? They suck. These people will just end up being unemployed anyways. Congrats China.
Hahahha are you a software dev. by any chance ?
I was an electrician and I worked constructing/upgrading MS facilities and I saw the slide (they always were very 'dogged' competitors as opposed to innovators).
So what happened? What did I see?
The parking garages were filled overwhelmingly with the same, insipid color of cars! They all wanted to be/look like Bill and they chose in a near 4 from 5 ratio... wait for it...silver cars.
That's my unscientific, anecdotal theory of the lack of MS creativity.
Rule #1 Blend in
Rule #2 See rule number 1
I like silver cars because ... well it's silver ... and gray/silver blends into the haze in the distance.
If you have never seen MS Sharepoint, by chance, then do yourself a favor and don't even make direct eye contact. It will change you forever, and not in a good way.
You can get a sense from the free e-book: Nine Circles of Hell: Frontend Development for Sharepoint (cant paste link with this device). You'll think he's exagerting if you haven't been exposed to it. If you have been exposed to SP then you'll know that what he says is true.
If it was print book, the takeaway quote for the jacket would be: SP is a monolithic CMS on crack.
Here's the link:
The Nine Circles of Hell: Front-End Development for Sharepointhttp://jkymarsh.com/theninecirclesofhell/
The author approaches it from the viewpoint of a front-end developer who isn't particularly good with the Microsoft tools. He even mentions Javascript in a seemingly positive manner, the product of a gazillion security flaws. I think the author was trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, figuratively speaking.
I worked with Sharepoint 2003, 2007 and 2010. It worked just fine for the corporate environment within which I functioned. Maybe it doesn't work for everyone, but for corporate collaboration and as a corporate data front end it worked well. I did, however, mostly stick with the tools out of Microsoft.
Sorry you had a bad experience with it; I didn't. And no, I do not own any MSFT.
I've worked with it. Front-end and back-end.. It is astonishing horrible.
Don't even get me started.
So all in all, I guess Microsoft is sucky. Silver car sucky.
kudos, great microsoft rant. it felt good.
Okay I went to a meeting and came back now gold is down. WTF just happened?
you got bernanked
What did he say that hammered it?
I think he said "Uh" one too many times.
Doc here is what he actually said. He said they need to be extremely accomodative for an extraordinary period of time. However it's important to note that down the road our deficits and debt will explode due to demographic reasons so fiscal policy needs to be addressed. Despite being accomodative for an incredibly lengthy period of time, the fed will decide in several weeks whether to scale back policy. But by Labor day the will have either announced or not announced a change in policy based on economic factors that they can't determine until after they have happened. But they continue to monitor the economic factors in advance of them happening so that after they have taken place the fed can decide what should have happened prior to them taking place.
Now take that information and use it as best you can.
It makes more sense the way you said/typed it! :>D
Sorta, maybe could taper.
Gold always goes down when the chairsatan speaks. That is the most amazing coincidence in the world. Markets up and gold down - it is a wonderful world for Bernanke.
Yeah, but when I left gold was up over $25 when he promised moar. He must have said something to monkey hammer it.
I blame Nixon and Kissinger.
The new America: outsourced sweat shops in Bangladesh, slave labor assembly factories in China and shell corporations that pay zero corporate taxes on overseas earning. Corporations too big to tax or follow labor laws or criminal fraud statutes . Leona Helmsley said "only little people pay taxes." She got jail time on bogus tax evasion charges. Media icon Steve Jobs buys off the IRS with deferred kickback jobs to top IRS staffers and his shell overseas corporations pay no taxes at all, with the approval of slime U.S. Senators like Carl Levin.
The Chinese know Windows operating systems better than they do anyway.
Lock Bill and Linda Gates along with their treasonous Monsanto foundation in a Chinese prison and don't let them out. Ever.
So we are going to give China the task with syncing and security over MSFT cloud solutions for businesses? Sounds like a great idea.
Remember when Shrub put the federal government on Windows standard, and everyone hollered about its vulnerability to hackers?
This is more efficient. Build the security breaches directly into the products.
Get off microsoft products
Thats exactly why nothing will change for the better.
Slave Labor in China, India and Co only support greedy corporation who are not HIRING in USA and EU.
Bring the jobs and production back and hire people, and everything will get better!
How else can they offshore employment and profits to avoid paying career salaries, Obamacare costs, and taxes?
Not to mentiion sucking subsidies from foreign governments. Direct expense forgiveness and direct cash payment the way they demand from local governments. Only more, more, more.
The past two weeks in retrospective ::
1. Benghazi cover up announced and all officials exhonerated.
2. IRS scandal brought to light and all responsible will be "let go / fired / 'My service is up next month anyways" or my fave "I PLEADS DA' FIZZZIFFFF"
3. AP / AG scandal, with an Attorney General who knew he knew nothing of what he actually knew when he knew he had known it.
4. The White House has changed it's story about all fronts because they get their fucking INTEL from CNN apparently or other highly regarded media sources.
5. The Corrupted Reserve Bank announced it will never stop spending against our GDP to the world hand over the fist in their bums.
6. Immigration bill passed today. That's fun, that should really help the massive mind fuck of our entitlement systems. Good on ya' mates.
7. American companies announcing the hiring of 7k in China, well that's fine, every business owner and protests should be done against all microsoft products.
Conclusion :: All I can say is that I never imagined seeing our country, yeah OUR fucking country, in this type of state of affairs; whilst the level of apathetic misunderstanding is mind boggling.
"Forward!"
Bullish!
Other than that, pretty sure Lincoln luvvved the play! :>D
We don't need technology jobs anymore.
Unions want more teachers, policemen, firemen and public jobs to fill the void.The Fed can just print whatever money it needs and hand it to China for real products.
The US prints money and hands it China and others for real goods. Sounds like a good deal to me.
Why work or produce anything?
Soon there will only be robots. with no one left to buy the products they make.
The unions that made things were crushed by Reagan in the 1980's.
The wealthy have grown wealthier, at everyone else's expense, ever since.
No connection, of course.
Finding cheaper workers in China might be one thing, but I suspect MSFT simply is fed up importing the Chinese and Indian workers into the US.
I would guess that 70% of all software engineers in the US are foreign born. The US simply does not have enough engineers.
I'm an engineer, but ain't no way I'm gonna do anything to help Microshaft!
And when he says smart phone, he means, we need a despotic jurisdiction for embedding tracking chips in all our phones to better service our customers( slaves)
Let me fix that for you:
"...we need a despotic jurisdiction for embedding tracking chips in our phones to better serve our Masters."
Did you hear how the new Xbox has builtin voice and face recognition, so that when you walk into a room - It will quickly recognize you and your commands... Very convienient - being connected to the net 7x24 and all....
Did you hear how the new Xbox has builtin voice and face recognition, so that when you walk into a room - It will quickly recognize you and your commands... Very convienient - being connected to the net 7x24 and all....
Big Bro in your bedroom...............perrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrfect.
It's not like those new smart televisions, laptops with webcams, smartphones, tablets, et al can't already spy on us if you let them. And it's not as if most of the under-30 crowd cares, since they couldn't function in an offline mode themselves. As far as intrusiveness goes, Xbox One only extends the envelop, it doesn't seem to introduce new threats to privacy. If you buy one, just make certain there are no chips on the motherboard that have 'NSA' stenciled on them.
1 billion intelligent, hard working people vs. 300 million serfs addicted to cheetos, porn, and watching sports on the teevee.
You do the math.
America is soon to get a wakeup call, or more like reveille from the drill instructor: "Reveille! Reveille! Reveille! Get your lazy asses up..."
Like I keep saying, in 20-30 years, there won't be any fat people in the United States.
Dead EBT cards is a kind of diet...
Since the government has backed Monsanto, the march towards nothing but empty calories seems like it will lead to anything but a lean future. Unless they are lean due to malnurishment.
Am I the only one it doesn't make sense microsoft is hiring "thousands of workers" anywhere?
What about all their current workers? Why do they need "thousands" more? Do they kill all their current workers with every new iteration?
They are a software company, are they getting into hardware?
They've been nibbling around the edges of hardware for a long time, and that isn't even counting the Xbox or the new RT tablets. Keyboards, mice and webcams have been some of their primary hardware products.
From what I've read, they're actually trying to become more of a cloud services company. I consider that a new form of vaporware and using it is similar to putting one's PMs in a bank deposit box. Just my opinion on 'the cloud'.
This news aside, China is going to kill Micro$oft, and rightfully so.
China is the largest producer and consumer of PCs. At some point the Chinese will announce that their PCs will hence with come stock with a Chinese made OS--variant of Linux, etc.--and poof goes M$.
And mark my words, the Chinese will one day own Boeing.
If all of the industry is done in third world countries employing people for nothing and resulting in huge unemployment in the multi nationals major markets who exactly will the paying customers be?
A question that keeps coming up! The infinite growth model of market share, market value, and an unlimited resources has no other course but collapse.
I pirate Microsoft products for home use and use CentOS on dozens of production servers. Shitty company with an even worse licensing model.
Fighting evil with evil creates, well, more evil.
Here's a reason why:
Even though employee salaries are increasing through the roof in China. For qualified IT workers it's already hitting US levels. And even though there are benefits that must be paid. And even though it's damn near impossible to fire employees without serious financial penalties..... the cost of healthcare, even at the best levels is far cheaper than the US (and quality higher). Employees are not living exceeding their means and are comfortable. And for the up and coming IT workers, there is a massive supply which is HIGHLY qualified. To bring them over to the US (as is typically done) is not cheap. The retention rate is falling as they explore other options and their replacements require another massive investment.
The main point here is this: The people needed simply do not exist in the US, and even if the Chinese are graduating from US colleges, they see more opportunity in China now. Simple as that. A qualified coder easily pulls in $80k in China. And $80k in China goes a hell of a lot further than $100k in the US.
The shift some anticipate has already happened. Chinese who worked in the US and rose through the ranks have been sent back to China as managers and have brought up local talent as managers. The only expats are skeleton crews at the IT companies now, keeping an eye on things on behalf of the VPs back in the US who are next in line for being knocked out in favor of Chinese. I give it 3~5 years tops to see that happen at major MNCs. The vast majority of high-level vestige foreigners in China speak no Chinese and live in expensive bubbles demanding expensive perks that even the most highly qualified locals would not go after.
For smaller firms, that has already happened. The GM is already Chinese, and any JDs out there for Senior Directors and VPs demand fluent Chinese+English. The age of "token white guy" is nearing an end. The eventual end game will be skeleton crews in the US mainly focused on sales and probably server farms to keep the stock market happy that the data is safe in the hands of the US domestic espionage rather than Chinese corporate espionage.
Ya heard that shit before. 'The quality of Indian engineers is way better!'
Rinse repeat 'the quality of XXX engineer is better!' And all you stupid middle management fucks eat it up and waist billion moving shit offshore just to have it blow up in your faces.
Meanwhile I'm sitting back collecting a fat paycheck fixing thier fuck ups, and bringing back the code state side. And gm is in china because they have a law that only chinese made cars can be sold in china. And probably the same for microsuck.
One factor for the lack of sufficient native IT expertise in the US is the advent of the H1B, championed by the likes of Bill Gates. My son switched his major from IT to something else because at the beginning of this century salaries were being pressured downward by the non-US workers. Maybe he should have continued, since he's fluent in Chinese and halfway there genetically. He could have gotten a job there, perhaps.
Extra points awarded for the mention of US domestic espionage (I assume you mean governmental) rather than Chinese corporate espionage, although there is no sense in differentiating between corporate and governmental where China is concerned. The PLA is everywhere it needs to be.
"A qualified coder easily pulls in $80k in China."
Total BS
Go check out what IBM, Oracle, MS, VMWare and others pay for team leads in China. It's really nothing special. Once they start hitting over $80~$90k, they begin pushing for a relocation to the US for $100~$120k. Some jump on board, most take about a year or two to discover they are being screwed. They either jump ship and hope for a better package elsewhere, or they come back to China as management for even higher. The worker visa system is used in a way to lock them into contracts. My own wife was pushed to a US package before we were married. Once they discovered she would get an instant green card, they stopped pushing... On the plus side, they bumped her to a much higher level team that is too critical to poach to the US, mainly because she started sharing the facts about how shit the relocation package actually was. And unlike the US, she cannot be fired/terminated/slowtracked or punished in any way for doing so.
If you want to see that change, here's what you have to do:
Nationwide single-payer healthcare with providers and drug companies getting a jackboot to the neck to lower costs back to global standards.
Greater employee benefits to make it more worthwhile and lower employee stress
Greater investments in basic infrastructure, which reduce commute times, expand work-radius and shatter the enclaves of hilariously overpriced living requirements to live even remotely close to work.
None of these will ever happen though, as the US has apparently lost its balls.
Nothing is more american than hiring out-of-country employees for our companies.
These treasonous corporations investing in dictatorships should be banned from doing business in the west.
Free market philosophy at work: those are US American jobs shipped away.
The beauty of an 'american' world. You never know how duplicitous a human being can be until you've met an 'american'.
This is to support Windows Phone in China. Not a well informed piece of writing. Disappointed.
This reminded me of a US State Department cable published by Wikileaks. It was a report from the Shanghai embassy with some remarks about Chinese employment policies back in 2009 after the financial meltdown. It is interesting to contrast the treatment of US workers by US companies compared to their treatment of Chinese workers:
"The major U.S. corporations that comprise the U.S.-China Business Council are limiting layoffs even though they are feeling the effects the economic downturn, Godfrey Firth, Chief Shanghai Representative of the U.S.-China Business Council told Econoff on February 10, 2009. In contrast to 2001 when--following the burst of the tech bubble--U.S.-based multinationals did not include China operations in their planning for worldwide workforce downsizing, over the past several months China operations have been part of the calculation, Firth said. Nonetheless, the layoffs have been limited, said Firth, in the range of hundreds of employees out of a workforce of thousands for a typical company" [At the time in the US, there were massive layoffs being announced almost daily]
"U.S. corporations are handling layoffs differently in China than they would in the United States, said Firth. In China, companies do not announce job cuts, and then send out pink slips. Instead, managers quietly go around to employees and discuss options--for instance, early retirement."
"Firth suggested that U.S. corporations are feeling indirect pressure from Beijing to keep layoffs to a minimum. He cited high-profile press coverage given to Premier Wen Jiabao's State Council meeting on employment of college graduates as an example of signaling this message to Chinese and foreign enterprises."
"While local governments are clearly aligned with the top leadership's employment concerns, said Firth, they had "done a 180" on national energy efficiency goals. Whereas a year-and-a-half ago, local governments were insisting that new foreign investment should meet high energy efficiency targets, these days "they could care less," said Firth. Environmental issues are also "out the window," he said."
Looks like the Chinese are getting what they wanted.
I'd be happy to see Microcrap moved to China, lock, stock, and barrel, and take Gates and Ballmer too. In fact, can we just export the "elites" all at once, like on cruise ships or something? Better yet, container ships. How about this: the US will trade China all our so-called "elites" and they just forget about all that debt we owe them? How about it?
so let's see...
somehow the richest years for the u.s. of a. based corps were the last two...
people who are foolish enough to save money pay for that privilege...
the world is being destroyed by progress...
it snowed here today...
i think tomorrow is thursday...
but i think today is tuesday...
so all things are good.
"china: aka the worstlyest mostlyest pollutedest place on the planet that in and of itself will lead the charge into the abyss of the frozen dry planet"
a quote from wiki-this 2020.
05-22 17:21: U.S SERVICE HAS NOW FINISHED, PLEASE SWITCH OVER TO THE ASIA CHANNEL...
"microsoft"
that's what my first wife called me.
:(
This is surprising?
Everybody wants it cheap.
USA worker at 20/hour or china at 1/10 of that?
This is surprising?
Everybody wants it cheap.
USA worker at 20/hour or china at 1/10 of that?
Not surprising. Small example, a friend's webpage/hosting company dumped almost all employees and hired overseas.