Salesforce, Workday Are Hiring More Overseas To Save Cash (yahoo.com) 74
Software companies are under pressure to invest in new AI capabilities without denting profits. One increasingly popular strategy to keep costs low is to shift hiring outside the US. From a report:Â Salesforce and Workday are simultaneously cutting jobs and highlighting the cost savings from adding workers internationally. "Do we need to hire everybody in San Francisco?" Salesforce Chief Operating Officer Brian Millham said at an event hosted by Barclays in December. "Or can we think about other locations that are cheaper where we can get really incredible labor like India and Mexico City."
US-based employees at Salesforce dropped to 51% from 58% in the four years ending in January 2024. In early 2023, it announced a reduction of roughly 8,000 jobs. Earlier this week, Bloomberg reported that the San Francisco-based software company would cut more than 1,000 positions in large part to make room for new AI-focused hiring. [...] Human resources software maker Workday, based in Pleasanton, California, announced Wednesday that it would eliminate about 1,750 jobs. Last year, Chief Executive Officer Carl Eschenbach emphasized a new focus on expanding margins, saying hiring more in countries like Costa Rica would help in this effort.Â
US-based employees at Salesforce dropped to 51% from 58% in the four years ending in January 2024. In early 2023, it announced a reduction of roughly 8,000 jobs. Earlier this week, Bloomberg reported that the San Francisco-based software company would cut more than 1,000 positions in large part to make room for new AI-focused hiring. [...] Human resources software maker Workday, based in Pleasanton, California, announced Wednesday that it would eliminate about 1,750 jobs. Last year, Chief Executive Officer Carl Eschenbach emphasized a new focus on expanding margins, saying hiring more in countries like Costa Rica would help in this effort.Â
Enjoy that time difference (Score:4, Informative)
And the difference in the number of mandated holidays, legal leave allowances, and the cost of cultural differences.
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Developers in USA are so expensive without being any better than international developers. Hell, a dev in one of the tech hubs will be way more expensive than even just going over to Alabama, again with no difference in skill. The savings is worth it if you can find an effective async work style.
Having experienced such a team, those differences you identified really haven't mattered and in some cases have even helped.
North Korea has low cost... (Score:2, Troll)
They were already hired through middle-men...
Trump has understanding with Kim - they should be cheaper than the options mentioned.,.
Interesting ideas (Score:4, Funny)
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Re: eh (Score:2)
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They've been using the same stuff forever, it does the job, it's well-made, why change?
Also a lot of it looks cooler than something with a grid of buttons and an LCD screen.
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The best definition of "stupid" I've seen in a while is "taking action without asking 'what happens after that'".
We've been here before. These clowns are the same as the clowns from 25 years ago that did the same stupid shit.
My own company ran an experiment in having a development team in Portugal. They learned it was not working well, for whatever reason and disbanded it and brought those services under ownership back here in the US.
Salesforce et. al. have gotten so big, and the people that made them so
There's a Fix for This (Score:1, Interesting)
Simply abolish the income taxes. I mean, all of them - personal, corporate, capital gains, self-employment, payroll, estate, alternative minimum - all of them. Repeal the 16th Amendment. We can give Trump's tariff-centric approach a try. If that doesn't work out, then we could go to the luxury tax on new items (not used) for sale at retail (not wholesale) and services called the FairTax. As a luxury tax, the poor don't pay a penny, unlike the often-proposed counter to the FairTax, the VAT, which is
Re:There's a Fix for This (Score:4, Insightful)
Somehow I don't see how Tariffs or a tax on new items could possibly bring in the same amout of money to fund things like education and the military as income tax.
Also I don't see how cutting taxes will ever make american workers as cheap as indian workers unless you plan on crashing the economy.
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What makes you think anyone currently in leadership has any interest at all in funding education?
We've got a president who has explicitly pined for the 1890s as a "golden age" for America. You know, when robber barons ran the country, corporations didn't have to worry about pesky regulations, education was only for upper-class whites... and when most of the rest of the world saw the US as an easy-to-ignore little backwater.
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You have a good point.
And if only a few people get educated you can bet that wages will decrease a great deal and companies like salesforce might stick around. The people will be poor and stupid though, but that's a benefit for some people. Serfdom was great for the people who owned the serfs!
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AC for obvious reasons. Need to speak my mind.
Nope. That's a load of hogwash.
Tariffs are extremely regressive.
Everyone has to pay taxes to support society, and the income tax is one of the best ways to do this because it taxes those who are more able to pay a higher percentage of their gross income.
Income taxes need to stay. They need to remain progressive. A flat tax hurts the poor more than the rich.
If income taxes were abolished, employers would use the opportunity to adjust everyone's salary down.
Good
Re: There's a Fix for This (Score:2)
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We don't need VAT. We don't need income tax. We need a federal property tax that includes bank and brokerage accounts. You want a $1M painting st home? Great! Pay a property tax on it every year like the poor do when they register their cars or try to own a home.
The effect of that is that you don't own anything, and are instead renting it from the government.
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Sounds like a fair resolution to the problem of original property if you ask me. By that I mean the moral hazard that comes from the original enclosure of the property in violation of the NAP.
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Good luck getting the 16'th amendment repealed. It takes 2/3 of both houses of congress and 3/4 of the states to amend the US constitution. Short of a physical coup 'd etat. It ain't gong to happen.
Alternatively, it takes an obsequious rubber-stamp session known as the 119th Congress to abdicate their power to a modern-day Caligula, and a judicial system uninterested in upholding the constitution against it's plain-language meaning.
As it turns out, that might be exactly what we have on hand. Welcome to the churn.
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Yes, import tariffs are
Re:There's a Fix for This (Score:5, Insightful)
I used to be for FairTax, but I realized I was a bit naive on its effects and would like a bit more research/honesty about its long-term effects.
I'm concerned that it will disproportately tax low-income people, who must spend all their money, versus the high-earners who have more flexibility in finding ways to defer those taxes into something more beneficial. It's important to not expand class disparity even more than we already have.
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If you study the FairTax, you find that each person who legally resides in the country, including foreigners on work visas, get enough money from the government to pay the FairTax on spending up to the poverty level for their living situation - single, married, married with X dependents, etc. So, in fact, poor folks pay exactly $0 FairTax. Contrast this with the payroll taxes that exacts 15.3% of the earnings of even poverty-level folks, when you add in the fictional "employer's share" of the payroll tax
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Its not welfare. It's simply offsetting tax on goods and services below the poverty level. They pay the tax every month when they spend, they get it back next month. Just goes 'round and 'round...
Re: There's a Fix for This (Score:1)
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What is not logical about relieving the poor of the tax burden? If you don't, you just end up relieving them of their poverty thru some other welfare system. And yes, we will do it, because this is the USA, where we don't purposefully let people starve. So use the tax system to relieve taxes on the poor, maybe they'll use that money in some better way, like education (incidentally, education is exempt from the FairTax, because it is treated as an investment in yourself, and investments are not taxed) o
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Oh my goodness, tell us you have no idea how this works without telling us you have no idea how this works.
Where do you think corporations get the money to pay corporate taxes? NO, IT IS NOT FROM THE EXECUTIVES AND OWNERS. What they do is to raise prices to the public for their goods or services, lower or fail to raise employee wages, and / or limit or cease paying dividends to stockholders. In all 3 cases, those people are us, us, and us. WE PAY CORPORATE TAXES. It doesn't grow on trees. Corpora
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You can relieve taxes from the poor, by taxing corporation and the ruling class an amount that makes sense. Go back to the 50's and let me know what rate you think it should be.
You've been drinking the Koolaid. There is no such thing as a "tax on corporations", or any other business. That's merely an operating expense that is passed on to the purchaser of their product or service. It's a hidden tax on YOU.
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You've been drinking the Koolaid.
Are you honestly trying to say an entire nation was "drinking the koolaid" for decades? Extremely high tax rates on the wealthy is a real thing in America for a very long time.
yhere is no such thing as a "tax on corporations", or any other business. That's merely an operating expense that is passed on to the purchaser of their product or service. It's a hidden tax on YOU.
Same thing with regulations. Those corporations are just going to poison our water and serve us rotten, diseased food anyways. Just get rid of all those pesky regulations and use an unelected illegal immigrant to do it, too!
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You've been drinking the Koolaid.
Are you honestly trying to say an entire nation was "drinking the koolaid" for decades? Extremely high tax rates on the wealthy is a real thing in America for a very long time.
yhere is no such thing as a "tax on corporations", or any other business. That's merely an operating expense that is passed on to the purchaser of their product or service. It's a hidden tax on YOU.
Same thing with regulations. Those corporations are just going to poison our water and serve us rotten, diseased food anyways. Just get rid of all those pesky regulations and use an unelected illegal immigrant to do it, too!
Duck, dodge, and try to change the subject. I said nothing about taxes on the wealthy or regulations on business. I said that there is no such thing as a tax on business. That is just a tax on you, the consumer, in the form of higher prices. And this hits the poor and middle class more than it does the wealthy. So if you truly want to be progressive stop taxing businesses.
How does that Koolaid taste now?
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Then stop the businesses from raising prices. Using anti-trust law to create competition, have the government form a rival business to bring down prices.
More duck and dodge as you try to change the topic.
Taxes on businesses are necessary and should be raised immediately.
I thought you didn't want them to raise prices? Because that is exactly what will happen when they pass this additional expense to you, the consumer. Worse, using your own aforementioned standards, it's a regressive tax. Do you have some secret desire to stick it to the poor?
Taxes on business are not "necessary". Just raise the taxes on individuals because we are the ones who pay it regardless.
Quit whining about taxes like a little bitch
You really trying to tell me that you've never complained abo
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The prebate exists for this exact reason. If the prebate amount isn't high enough, you adjust it, just like we currently do with income taxes. It's
Re:There's a Fix for This (Score:5, Insightful)
Repeal the 16th Amendment. We can give Trump's tariff-centric approach a try. If that doesn't work out, then we could go to the luxury tax on new items (not used) for sale at retail (not wholesale) and services called the FairTax. As a luxury tax, the poor don't pay a penny, unlike the often-proposed counter to the FairTax, the VAT, which is regressive as hell. The FairTax is progressive. Moreso than the income taxes when the payroll taxes are considered.
The poor largely already don't pay much in income tax. The poorest 50% contribute about 2.5% of all income taxes. So, any tax changes motivated by altruism toward the poor are meaningless and almost exclusively proposed by non-poor people.
Of course, the big thing to keep in mind is that if we expect to keep total collections in dollar amounts the same, then we're obviously collectively not going to pay less in effective taxes. The only way to do this fools ourselves into thinking we can do this is via accounting tricks by shifting the taxes into inflated prices (due to tariffs) instead of income or sales taxes. Companies, foreign or otherwise, are not going to altruistically swallow tariff costs any more than any of us would. 100% of tariffs will be passed on as higher prices, which means that tariffs are effectively sales taxes, which are generally regressive.
One other thing to consider. Trump is shooting himself in the foot with tariffs. Increased sales taxes don't show up in federal inflation numbers, but increased prices due to tariffs do. So, Trump is effectively ordering future inflation numbers to increase. The stock market is waking up to this reality, which is further negative PR for Trump.
And the FairTax fully funds Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid forever - there would be no such things as those programs going bankrupt.
In 2023, individual income taxes were $2.2 trillion. That compares with $1.6 trillion in social security and medicare payroll taxes. Currently, tariffs account for about $80 billion. Any plan to replace social security and medicare payroll taxes will need to almost match the current income taxes.
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I'm old enough to remember some of the wingnut trolls around here bleating about tariffs being a "negotiating tactic" and that we would not actually see them happen.
Can we please believe them when they tell us who they are now?
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"The poor largely already don't pay much in income tax."
This is not true. The poor are taxed at 15.3% for the payroll taxes, which are income taxes that would go away under the FairTax. They may not mean much to the middle class and above, but a poor person making $10K / yr has $1,530 going to Washington, DC when it could otherwise maybe be buying him some mechanics tools. The payroll taxes are hideously regressive. All the income taxes are immoral, being simple stealing conducted by the government,
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You make a valid point, except that a lot of the poor people I know are actually receiving SSI payments rather than being on a payroll that takes ou
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"The poor largely already don't pay much in income tax."
This is not true. The poor are taxed at 15.3% for the payroll taxes, which are income taxes that would go away under the FairTax. They may not mean much to the middle class and above, but a poor person making $10K / yr has $1,530 going to Washington, DC when it could otherwise maybe be buying him some mechanics tools.
Not even close. The bottom 50% pay an effective rate of 3.3% [taxfoundation.org]. Obviously that includes a lot of middle class people that we wouldn't consider poor. The truly poor pay less than 0% because they get credits. According to Pew [pewresearch.org], those who earn less than $30k/year pay less than 0% after credits.
The payroll taxes are hideously regressive.
Uhh, no. The marginal rates are not regressive, and the actual amounts paid are not regressive. Not even close. Maybe payroll withholdings could be viewed as sort of regressive if you really squint, but only because
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Trump is shooting himself in the foot with tariffs.
No he's not. I mean sure it will be bad for a lot of the people who voted for him, but they'll figure a way to blame it on the deep state, globalism, the Democrats, Hilary, Hunter Biden's latop, the woke, trans people and Californians. It will push them even closer together.
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"The poor largely already don't pay much in income tax."
Just this one point. This is what Warren Buffet is talking about when he says he pays less tax than his secretary.
His secretary gets hit with "payroll tax" which is 7.65% that is designated as "Employee's Share" and another 7.65% that is misleadingly labeled "Employer's Share but which the employer siphons off from the employee's revenue stream, an amount that would rightly be paid to the employee were it not for that tax.
So the employee gets hammered
Why would we give a try to something (Score:3, Informative)
Tariffs have absolutely nothing to do with white collar jobs of American software companies because there's nothing being imported. I mean for fuck sakes it's an American company.
Meanwhile if you get rid of income tax all that does is shift to the tax burden to regular consumers. This is exactly what Trump's trying to do with a national sales tax. The problem wit
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Tariffs have absolutely nothing to do with white collar jobs of American software companies because there's nothing being imported. I mean for fuck sakes it's an American company.
You have fallen in the trap if you thought that.
Do American software companies buy computer hardware? Office supplies? Do they have company vehicles? *Everything* an American company buys get more expensive because of tariffs, because even if they bought all supplies American made, the cost of making things locally costs more if those manufacturers need to buy anything from overseas.
Until the day Americans do *everything* locally, starting from mining their own ores inside the country, to processing the
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When growth runs out (Score:2)
Just cut salary. Genius level business.
Hey, look at that! (Score:2)
They've discovered off-shoring! They're brilliant!
Everything old is new again (Score:2)
Hmmm maybe AI isn't coming for our jobs! (Score:5, Insightful)
If these companies really thought AI could replace humans, they'd be doing that, instead of offshoring.
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Drop-in general purpose human replacing AI hasn't arrived yet. But just the mere threat of it has many businesses acting to reduce risk and conserve cash. Easiest way to swap in AI is to treat it like an outsourcer. You still need people to manage to doublecheck the work generated. If so, then the next logical step is to take the intermediate step of replacing US staff with outsourced staff. It'll make any future layoffs super easy, since nobody in the US is going to care about a bunch of Costa Ricans
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so the domestic market is unable to absorb the deluge of people being dislocated from a number of sectors
No, this is simply not true. Tech sector unemployment is the *lowest* in 2 years, down to 2%. https://www.computerworld.com/... [computerworld.com] If that's your definition of the market being "unable to absorb" the "dislocated" people, then bring it on.
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Uh... that's weird. According to the WSJ, tech sector unemployment has hit 5.7%.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/i... [wsj.com]
"The unemployment rate in the information technology sector rose from 3.9% in December to 5.7% in January, well above last monthâ(TM)s overall jobless rate of 4%, in the latest sign of how automation and the increasing use of artificial intelligence are having a negative impact on the tech labor market.
The number of unemployed IT workers rose from 98,000 in December to 152,000 last month, a
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This CompTIA article from today updates their tech sector unemployment number from 2% to 2.9%. Lower than national average unemployment, but higher than in January. Still a big gap between 2.9% and the 5.7% in the WSJ article.
https://www.comptia.org/newsro... [comptia.org]
" Tech employment off to a strong start as hiring momentum continues, CompTIA reports
Feb 7, 2025
Three of four key employment metrics were positive for the month
DOWNERS GROVE, Ill. â" Technology companies and employers throughout the economy added
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It's no doubt all in how they slice the data.
Whether it's 2% or 5.7%, both of those numbers are still very low. Until recently, 5% unemployment was considered to be "full" employment, meaning that the 5% represented people who were in transition.
When we start to hit double digits, we can start to worry.
Sad (Score:2)
I support the government taking steps against these two companies for being traders and threats against the american dream.
It's not just India (Score:1)
The Congressional budget Office proved that private insurance costs us an extra half trillion dollars a year. That money is going somewhere. Yeah you're paying a lot of it but your employer is paying a lot of it too. And don't think they haven't noticed.
Return to Office? (Score:5, Interesting)
"Do we need to hire everybody in San Francisco?"
Oh, wow, isn't that a 180-flip from the "We cannot work effectively if everybody is not in the same office!" battle cry just last year when RTO mandates were in fashion?
Now, after everyone came back to office, they found out that it was actually pointless? Perhaps management needs to go back and read what they wrote last year to see how clueless they are?
Anyone still believes that RTO mandates were NOT just a quiet layoff?
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I think pretty much everyone understands that recent RTO initiatives are designed to induce attrition. Regardless of benefit in getting people in to the office, the main objective is to get people to quit so they don't have to go to the trouble of filing a WARN notice, and paying severance and unemployment. Otherwise why have people show up to offices without enough space to hold them?
Yahoo and IBM used the same tactics previously prior to covid in order to force out senior employees who were costing too
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"Do we need to hire everybody in San Francisco?"
Oh, wow, isn't that a 180-flip from the "We cannot work effectively if everybody is not in the same office!" battle cry just last year when RTO mandates were in fashion?
Now, after everyone came back to office, they found out that it was actually pointless? Perhaps management needs to go back and read what they wrote last year to see how clueless they are?
Anyone still believes that RTO mandates were NOT just a quiet layoff?
They weren't just about getting people to quit... they're also about enforcing control. Making it harder for people to look for a new job, putting people under the watchful eye of managers, making it difficult to run that errand during your lunch break so now you have to take time off for it. Not to mention the benefits to the commercial real estate sector, to which your boss no doubt gets a kickback for.
The problem that the RTO hawks found is that the dead wood stayed... the good people who could easily
Dumping those that brought you (Score:2)
Hey!
That pale blue glowing monstrosity atop their phallic downtown San Francisco high-rise isn't going to be seen from across the bay on it's own! That shit costs money!
Remote work indeed (Score:2)
If an employer embraces the idea that their staff can work completely remotely, then sourcing your workforce globally is the logical next step, and there's very little downside. Why would you not? The world is much different these days, and the average skill level of commodity technical folks is mostly similar. If a work packet has no competitive advantage in it, then cost reduction should be right up front.
I can only speak to my own experience over the last couple of decades, but the days of overseas worke
Re: Remote work indeed (Score:2)
been there, done that, it failed (Score:2)
buy american and hire american (Score:1)
stop buying things made oversees, physical or digital. imagine if we never shared our technology with non europeans. imagine if stopped trying to babysit the 3rd world. we would living in star trek utopia and probably have bases on the moons of jupiter by now.