Posted on 10/14/2004 8:47:17 AM PDT by Walkin Man
Google Founders on Hiring Trip to India
Oct 13, 3:18 PM (ET)
By S. SRINIVASAN
BANGALORE, India (AP) - Google Inc. (GOOG) founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin said Wednesday that some new features on the world's top search engine and other services will come from its research center in the southern Indian city of Bangalore, where they are on a hiring spree.
"One approach we are taking is that Bangalore is where we run a mirror exactly of what we have in the United States in terms of development," Brin told reporters in Bangalore, the capital of Karnataka state.
Page and Brin said they were visiting India looking for "extraordinary talented entrepreneurial people who want to make a big change in the world."
Researchers in Bangalore will work with their counterparts in Google's U.S. offices to conceptualize new services and develop software, they said.
This includes developing search engines that will present results based on speech input or drawings, ones that will work in more languages than at present, personalizing search results to suit individual preferences, and new features for Google's new e-mail service, they said.
Google set up offices in the southern Indian cities of Bangalore and Hyderabad earlier this year. Brin said Google was in fact "too late" in tapping Indian talent.
"We would have preferred to do it sooner. But there are only so many things we can do at once. It is a fast growing business," he said.
Their comments came in Bangalore, their third stop in India, after New Delhi and Hyderabad earlier this week.
Google, based in Mountain View, California, runs an Internet business that revolves around its search engine - which covers 4.3 billion Web pages.
During their low-key visit, the two shopped in New Delhi's Connaught Place, rode in a three-wheel motorized rickshaw in Hyderabad and spent time like a "couple of sophomore backpackers doing India," the Times of India said.
They also called on Indian President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam.
Krishna Bharat, who created Google's news service, is now busy hiring in Bangalore. "We don't have a cap (on how many to hire). We will take in as many people as we can, if they meet our global standards," he said.
So when I off-shore a manufacturing job to take advantage of a lower wage rate, my domestic productivity goes up? How?
Havoc, is that you?
It's Kudolov, comrade. Don't read him, ever. But even Nader gets it correct once in a while.
I must admit, for a reply based purely on emotion, that was well done.
Thank you for making the case for a dynamic labor market and structural change of production. The allocation of labor resources are being reallocated to their most efficient uses. See, markets do work just as learning can occur (as you have properly demonstrated).
Thats right, everything is great, pay no attention.
You belong to the "I Got Mine, FU" wing of the Republican party no doubt, the ones in control now.
You people will destroy the entire party in the end and the demorats will be there to pick up the pieces...shudder...
I've been there...it can last a couple hours sometimes. You'll be back though because I know that you know, deep down, that you're actually learning stuff here...and you're not even directly paying for it. There's a couple of economic terms that apply here: Free rider and positive externalities.
what is your method to measure domestic productivity (pick one, since I never know what you are going to do to work the numbers)?
Again, let's deal with reality: GM sends manufacture of a major subassembly to China (which they are doing), and the remaining workers on the US assembly line are now able to build more cars per hour by slapping that subassembled component into the chassis as it moves down the assembly line. All other things being equal, did GM's domestic productivity go up or down as a result of this?
So again, tell me that offshoring can't affect US domestic productivity.
What is amazing to me (just sticking with this example) - is that we know GM is doing this? Why are they doing it? Are they doing it because its costing them MORE money, and giving them LOWER productivity? Of course not, why would they do that.
First, the people working those nonsupervisory jobs make up the bulk of the middle class. Dismissing them as irrelevant and writing them off is the very thing that is placing this nations middle class in jeopardy.
This is a good example of the faulty analysis you rely on. The lower middle class aren't being dismissed as irrelvant. They are moving into the upper middle and upper classes. Likewise, the lower class are moving into the middle class.
the "high tech information age" thing is a fallacy. Tech and science jobs are no longer being created in the U.S.
Statements like that show exactly why your arguments can't be taken seriously. Ten years ago, Amazon.com didn't exist. Five years ago, Google didn't exist. Together these two companies alone employ probably over 50,000 people. Are you saying those don't count? How many other companies have been created in the wake of new technology that aren't nearly as big and fly under the national radar.
You're arguments are ridiculous. They seem more akin to the Democrats and labor union mentality than anything I'd expect to see here.
Because Iowa is still in play, I'll make the arrangements now and then drop the news in November. Or...wait how about December. What do you think, Rude, Thanksgiving or Christmas?
it works ONLY when new jobs are being created here in new, high multiple industries - remember the promise that the US would have "knowledge jobs" to replace manufacturing? OK, now we are sending those jobs offshore too. So what's left for the future?
The growth areas for employment tell the story: retail, government, education, travel and leisure, financial services, food service, health care. Your free market miracle is providing the US with service jobs for its future. That's where your whole model is breaking down. Or rather, you understand this is going on and you accept it. Which is fine, at least that's an honest position to take. But also accept the side effects of what that will bring to this society. That's all I ask of you guys - accept it, just don't tell us it isn't happening.
Qualifier: America first means Americans first except when I go to make a mutual transaction, trading things of value with someone else in the market place. In those cases, when it benefits me, it is not treasonous and not hypocritical. I am quite sure that everything inside my computer and in my home is American - including the raw inputs!
TFF!!!
No you did not, and I acknowledge that. It was not my intention to give the impression you did. But some of the rhetoric here begs the question, "What would you propose?" And the answer to that by some here would certainly be to make overseas hiring by American companies either illegal or prohibitively expensive. I think that's a misguided and short-sighted policy.
As I said before, if American companies are truly concerned that they can't trust the overseas environments in which they operate, then the trend will cease. However, I think this is a specious word of caution. There are no widespread reports of they type of problems you mention, American companies operating in India seem to have confidence in that environment, and the Bangalore and Hyderabad areas of India have gone to great lengths to ensure that they can cater to the needs of western businesses. They have taken great steps to win that business. They are not likely to jeopardize those contracts now that they have them.
Your concerns, I'm sure, are sincere, but they're mostly hollow.
Nice. From someone who is unwilling, or unable, to post any sort of numbers whatsover, I "work" numbers by merely posting them. As for your sub-assembly canard, if the remaining workers can build a vehicle more quickly by assembling sub-assemblies, what about the workers who built the sub-assemblies in the first place? Their jobs are off-shored, remember? In other words, they lost their jobs. In other words, their productivity fell to zero.
50,000 people? no way. amazon employs 7800, google 1900.
microsoft employs 50,000 people. Cisco employs 34,000.
Other than baseless speculation and hyperbole, do you have any reason to believe that India would try to steal the source code from Google? Would it be in their best economic interest to steal intellectual property from the businesses they're worked so hard to court?
Your hysteria is so risible it's almost pointless to comment on it.
GM is trying to raise their productivity as a corporation. the workers no longer employed by them, no longer count in their statistic. they now hold a job someplace else in the economy, as greeters for walmart, or no longer work at all because they have retired or they sell crap on EBAY - and have fallen off the stats.
either way, my example is what real companies are really doing to use offshore labor to increase their productivity. you can call it a canard if you like.
For God's sakes, I know that I've gone over this with you nearly six months ago on another thread. I took some guesses on where those jobs might be but if I really knew for sure, I'd could make huge money through investment. Restructuring is an age old worry and people like us have had these conversations before (just not on Internet forums - which is amazing by itself). We will develop new industries and we will be fine...it's the American way. I'm not the one in here saying we can't, and come to think of it, just how American is that attitude anyway?
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