Eric Bielefeld wrote: <begin extract> One other thing I didn't like was the computer operations was usually run from India. Many of the people were very sharp, but it was very hard to understand them. </end extract>
Unfamiliar accents are hard to understand; and Americans in particular often have difficultry with them because they mostly live in monoglot, albeit not necessarily anglophone, environments. It helps to try to remember that the person whose accent you find difficult may well be having difficulties of the same kind with your accent. What helps even more is some considerable facility in more than one natural language, but that is not something that most Americans ever acquire. In the past Timothy has argued that market forces will over time adjust IBM salaries upward where they are too low. This does not always happen. The market for displaced, ageing IBM z/OS sysprogs in those parts of the world where the number of mainframe shops is declining steadily has almost none of the characteristics of a traditional 'free' labor market. Moreover, the time frame in which such competitive pressures operate, when they do operate, is often, even usually, very like that 'long run', in which Keynes reminded us that we shall all be dead. IBM throve for many years when its personnel policies were much less hard-nosed, even paternalistic; and its current practices, while they are not nearly so savage as those of other companies in other industries, have been very effective in influencing the ablest of the young to seek employment at Google instead of IBM. Worse, corporate cultures get what they deserve. Labor-market immobility in Western Europe and the other rigidities it brought in train resulted from legislation designed to protect employees from what was perceived to be 'capitalist greed' , and it is now quite likely that as stultifying employment regulations are dismantled there they will be salvaged and exported to the United States to be reerected here. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
