At 08:33 13/08/96 -0700, James A. Donald wrote:

...

the fact that an engineer who is subject to the power of the Indian government is not worth very much, as is demonstrated by the fact that companies with Indian engineering teams often spend a lot of money to get their employees out of India.

Demand for Indian programmers is less than supply not because capital has somehow failed to flow to India, but because an engineer in India is not free to produce the value that engineers elsewhere are free to produce.

At 07:00 PM 8/14/96 +0600, Arun Mehta wrote:

Whoa! In economies that are highly de-coupled, incomes and prices can easily find quite different equilibria.

So? What does this have to do with the price of fish? Are Informix campuses "highly decoupled economies". The fact is a company like Informix has a campus in India, and it has campuses in the US that are largely staffed by Indian teams, and it will pay big bucks to get its people out of India, even though it has to pay them more than ten times as much in the US. An Indian programmer doing the same job for the same company is more than ten times as valuable to that company if he is not subject to the power of the Indian government, as proven by that companies actions. Plainly Informix does not like the power of the Indian government, which is no surprise as a few years ago just about every company on earth utterly detested the power of the Indian government and would not touch the place with a ten foot pole.

India has its faults, but it still is a relatively democratic and free country.

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