Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
AI Software IT

Immigration Reform May Spur Software Robotics 146

Posted by timothy from the way-of-all-flesh dept.
dcblogs writes "The Senate's immigration bill may force the large offshore outsourcing firms to reduce their use of H-1B visa-holding staff, forcing them to hire more local workers and raising their costs. But one large Indian firm, Infosys, will try to offset cost increases with software robotics. Infosys recently announced a partnership with IPsoft, a New York-based provider of autonomic IT services. With IPsoft's tools, work that is now done by human beings, mostly Level 1 support, could be done by a software machine. Infosys says that IPsoft tools can 'reduce human intervention.' More colorfully, Chandrashekar Kakal, global head of Infosys's business IT services, told the Times of India, that 'what robotics did for the auto assembly line, we are now doing for the IT engineering line.' James Slaby, a research director of HFS Research who has been following the use of autonomics closely, wrote in a recent report that the IPsoft partnership may help Infosys 'reap fatter margins by augmenting and replacing expensive, human IT support engineers with cheaper, more accurate, efficient automated processes,' and by improving service delivery."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Immigration Reform May Spur Software Robotics More

Immigration Reform May Spur Software Robotics

Comments Filter:
  • As I recall a senior member of the BSI telling me when I was working on a research project that went towards the development of BS 5750 AKA ISO 9000. Sounds like Mr Kakal doesn't really understand either IT or Production engineering

    • Re:programming is not a prodcution line (Score:5, Funny)

      by SJHillman ( 1966756 ) on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @11:21AM (#43782969)

      Judging from the summary, they're looking to replace support more than production. I'm pretty sure this isn't a new idea... all you need is a cassette tape playing "Have you tried turning it off and on again" on a loop.

      • All you need is a cassette tape playing "Have you tried turning it off and on again" on a loop.

        Who holds the copyright on that phrase?

      • Re:programming is not a prodcution line (Score:5, Interesting)

        by h4rr4r ( 612664 ) on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @11:29AM (#43783083)

        Which is why 90% of the time support for something is totally worthless.

        Verizon wireless was rejecting some of the SMS we send our own employees. There is no one we could talk to who had any idea what to do. No customer facing person had any ability to tell us why they started doing this or if there was a process around it.

        • Re:programming is not a prodcution line (Score:4, Interesting)

          by gmack ( 197796 ) <gmack&innerfire,net> on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @11:38AM (#43783201) Homepage Journal

          At least they tried to help. When one of my customers stopped getting push emails on her Blackberry, I was told by Rodgers Mobility support that push email is an unsupported feature and the policy was that she could not report delivery problems to anyone.

          • Re:programming is not a prodcution line (Score:4, Interesting)

            by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @12:06PM (#43783549) Homepage

            I once had the displeasure of telling our client that the vendor (luckily not our company but our partner, so I could say "they" not "us") did not support the use of the "back" button in their web interface. Any support case that involved using it would be closed as not supported. For bonus points they didn't provide any functionality equivalent to it either, so of course everyone used the back button anyway where it did work. To me it's a bit like selling a four door car where the back doors are only for decoration and actually opening and closing the doors are not supported but I guess if you have enough lawyers and impenetrable contracts anything is possible.

            • To me it's a bit like selling a four door car where the back doors are only for decoration and actually opening and closing the doors are not supported but I guess if you have enough lawyers and impenetrable contracts anything is possible.

              That was the Jeep Cherokee if you ever took it off-road. People loved them.

        • Re:programming is not a prodcution line (Score:4, Interesting)

          by tnk1 ( 899206 ) on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @11:40AM (#43783225)

          We had a similar issue with some provider not accepting our texts. It may have been Verizon. We had to ask one of our managers who used to work at Verizon to call a buddy of his who still worked there. Turned out that they have a different message size than other providers or something, and that if we sent something to the usual 160 character limit, it would not send at all. It was an edge case, but I am surprised it never came up before.

          At this point, we need support companies that we pay that actually have employees who "know someone" inside the organization, because these big companies are about as transparent as muddy crude oil.

          • Verizon is a bit of a special case... (Score:5, Interesting)

            by Penguinisto ( 415985 ) on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @11:54AM (#43783387) Journal

            If you think that's bad, try getting help on a server issue when you're not a Verizon customer.

            Back in 2006, I was working for a DoD contractor, and discovered that our order emails to suppliers were bouncing as spam if it went to a Verizon address. We tried for a solid week to call everyone we could possibly find at Verizon that could help, but either got stonewalled, referred to some useless person, or (most often) shoved into the standard customer tech support queue. Mostly we were treated like either a social-engineering attempt, an idiot, or something similar.

            Thing is, my employer ran the EMALL website, which all armed forces used to order anything which wasn't an actual weapon. Our index was bigger than Amazon's

            Finally, I gave up and spoke with the managers at DLA (Defense Logistics Agency), laying out the problem to date. We then put out a system-wide notice to all DoD suppliers that if they wanted to sell something to the military, they'd damned well better use something other than a Verizon email account. Two weeks later, Verizon came out of the blue, desperately calling us asking what they could do to help us out. Turns out they weren't fully RFC-compliant at the time; they fixed it pretty quickly once they realized that a lot of their DoD-supplier customers were suddenly asking them how much the contract ETFs came to.

            Sad part is, if my employer was some tiny company in BFE, there would likely still be a problem with the damned thing.

          • I had one Verizon Business phone support rep tell me that Verizon doesn't offer VoIP, so there was no way for her to transfer to the VoIP support group (which I had talked to many times before but had lost the number). So I asked her, "Does that mean we can stop paying you $2000/mo for a service you don't offer?". She hung up on me.

      • Judging from the summary, they're looking to replace support more than production. I'm pretty sure this isn't a new idea... all you need is a cassette tape playing "Have you tried turning it off and on again" on a loop.

        What seems sort of curious is that 'support' is what happens when software(sometimes hardware; but hardware at least has the decency to usually fail dramatically enough to just be swapped out, and would be hard to roboticize outside of a datacenter or something in any case) fucks up hard enough, or confuses the user hard enough, that an IT minion gets called in.

        Adding a layer of 'software robotics' to second-guess the existing layer of dysfunctional software just seems like a nightmare of cascading complexi

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Kjella ( 173770 )

          What seems sort of curious is that 'support' is what happens when software(sometimes hardware; but hardware at least has the decency to usually fail dramatically enough to just be swapped out, and would be hard to roboticize outside of a datacenter or something in any case) fucks up hard enough, or confuses the user hard enough, that an IT minion gets called in.

          No, first line support is often dealing with people that have a PEBCAK problem, not a software or hardware problem. Or at least not one related to what you're actually providing support for in a supported configuration. I suspect that many companies don't actually want a support line, if you have a problem they'd rather you get pissed and go somewhere else than tie up one of their employees - even your outsourced call center guy. Unless it's a big thing affecting many users in which case you probably know i

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by luder ( 923306 ) *

        You mean like this [youtube.com]?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 )

      As I recall a senior member of the BSI telling me when I was working on a research project that went towards the development of BS 5750 AKA ISO 9000. Sounds like Mr Kakal doesn't really understand either IT or Production engineering

      they're replacing call center dudes. not production.

      it sounds better if they call it IT business than call center business I suppose. it's meant for the bozos at hr/some fantasy land who read computer world.

      • Doing speech recognition to reliably detect say even the 20 most common problems with a help desk that might be harder than you think

        • It's increasingly common so it must not be too hard.

          Some companies I deal with have no human "escape hatch" option available any more.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by h4rr4r ( 612664 )

            I would then stop dealing with them.

            I have no tolerance for spending 20 minutes to get a 2 minute thing done. VZW's system is terrible. I want to pay the bill, it even offers to let you pay before you hear about your account if you select that it then tells you about your account before letting you pay. It was designed by a crazy person.

            • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

              by Anonymous Coward

              You know who *used* to have a bad ass system? Sony.

              You would call them up it would recognize your phone number (and what you have bought if you registered). It would ask you what you are calling about and route you to the correct repair center. If you had an open call it would route you to the same guy you were working with before and he would give you a status update. It was actually very cool to call them. No re-describing issues over and over no trying the same things over and over. *Then* they cha

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by gmack ( 197796 )

            Not that hard? It's amazing how many of them screw up badly.

            In UPS case the damn thing can't even handle my Canadian accent. Nothing so infuriating than to have to read my number, have the IVR repeat it back to me garbled and then have to tell the damn computer it got it wrong and then have to go through the process twice more before being forwarded to a support person to sort it all out. I've even tried changing my pronunciation from "Zed" to "Zee" .. still no dice.

            My only thought is that they either do

            • I've even tried changing my pronunciation from "Zed" to "Zee" .. still no dice.

              Perhaps the problem is that you were using "z" as a number?

            • Agree... they didn't use your native vocabulary.

              Try saying it as "zero". "Zee Roh".

              It's one of those odd differences in dialect between our versions of english.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by zlives ( 2009072 )

      but but, it will be cheaper!? my software robot, Pascal, written in assembly, likes to think of it self as a program... how quaint.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tattood ( 855883 )

        but but, it will be cheaper!?

        It will if US companies skip the middleman (Infosys) and just use IPsoft themselves.

  • This story tells me nothing.

    • Re:Wut? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 ) on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @11:26AM (#43783053) Homepage Journal

      "The autonomic tools that IPsoft makes are designed to bring software robotic automation and machine learning to routine IT functions, such as help desks, operations and infrastructure management. In other words, with IPsoft's tools, work that is now done by human beings could be done by a software machine."

      it's either more automatic phone reply machines or possibly more of the way of doing business where instead of calling an amazon guy to setup you a new server, you use their tools to deploy the server yourself and amazon doing a robo-call to test if you're the person you say you are and instead of calling amazons support you look up their faq on their site.

      dressing it in 10 paragraphs of bullshit makes a better article - for computer world. also it makes it sound more unique, which it certainly isn't, since we've been using amazon for a while with zero human interaction with sales, support or anyone.

      • The company I retired from laid off about 5k people-- found it had to hire about 800 of those back (and is having a hard time getting suck.. people... to take those jobs).

        It's designing it's order entry system to allow it to lay off most of its ma and customer support (another 8000 or so people). But it's SO obvious about it that its losing the good staff which is ironically slowing down the automation.

  • Voice based customer support sucks and some times you have to get to a real person to get stuff done.

    • Voice based customer support sucks and some times you have to get to a real person to get stuff done.

      Indeed; apparently those who think this is some great new innovation have never had to call in to Verizon Business' IVR... or maybe they're the assholes that run it.

      In short - It's fucking torture.

  • Software Robotics?!? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Mr. McGibby ( 41471 ) on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @11:27AM (#43783055) Homepage Journal

    I think that's called software. No robotics needed.

  • Wipro and Infosys two companies that should die (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Virtucon ( 127420 ) on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @11:28AM (#43783069)

    Both Wipro and Infosys are the worst in terms of H1-B visa abuse and should not be allowed to operate in this country.

    http://profit.ndtv.com/news/industries/article-us-senator-accuses-infosys-wipro-tcs-of-abusing-h-1b-visas-321282 [ndtv.com]

    But, unfortunately they're connected with Washington's elite and throw money around in DC to keep things like the H1-B program alive. Remember that during the next election cycle.

    • Infosys does something else that american companies used to do with Aramco.

      They bring a bunch of infosys people over, warehouse them near the client, and pay them indian wages. They keep them in the country for six months-- preferably from july to december so they can keep them in the country for six months until the next july.

      Then they ship them back home. They were never american employees to begin with. They were indian employees. Which leaves us competing here with experienced software developers wo

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by stenvar ( 2789879 )

        Do you by T-shirts? Jeans? Cars? DVD players? Computers? They're all made overseas by companies that do it more cheaply than we do. If that didn't happen, they'd be much more expensive. So why does this become a problem all of a sudden if it's software development?

        • Take away all the dishonesty and watch the cost "differential" evaporate into thin air.

          In addition, those guest workers are sought for having the status as indentured servants, something not associated with citizens in the properly functioning (and non-distorted by guest workers/illegals) job markets of First World countries like the US.

          A few decades ago, McCarthy would have rightfully put you and these companies in their place for siding with enemies of the United States of America.

          • Take away all the dishonesty and watch the cost "differential" evaporate into thin air.

            Foreign programmers are willing to do the same job for less money; where's the "dishonesty"?

            In addition, those guest workers are sought for having the status as indentured servants, something not associated with citizens in the properly functioning (and non-distorted by guest workers/illegals) job markets of First World countries like the US.

            The workers Maxo-Texas was referring to are short term visitors that find out cus

            • Re:It's a problem since it's based on fraud and ab (Score:4, Insightful)

              by Maxo-Texas ( 864189 ) on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @12:30PM (#43783821)

              Wages are leveling out.

              My main point of irritation is that I can't legally buy movies, medicine, software development packages, and many other products for the extremely low price the same corporations legally sell them to indians and chinese for.

              I have to pay $19.99 for a movie selling legally in china for $2.49.
              I have to pay $5.00 a day for blood pressure medication selling legally in india for 10 cents.

              It's ILLEGAL for someone to buy a bunch over there and ship it back here and sell the movies for $3.49 and the pills for 20 cents (100% mark up).

              A few years ago Microsoft was GIVING development suites to indians free while I had to pay $750 for the same product.

              Indian wages (as of novermber 2012) were going up 20%. China is seeing 12% to 100% annual wage inflation.

              It's been a long painful walk, but sometime in the next 4-8 years it won't be worth it to offshore any more. These automation programs are a leading edge. Infosys also is trying to rebrand themselves from being a company that sells legions of code monkeys and grunt programmers to a company that sells managers and ceos. That's also a sign of the increasing wage structure.

              I was lucky. I lived on half of what I made since 2000 and I was able to retire early. Now I do massage therapy, draw, and paint for fun. I'm looking at doing some programming for fun but haven't done so yet. Either Libreoffice (I read they are friendly), or Android (for my dnd game), or some kind of board gaming table software.

              • My main point of irritation is that I can't legally buy movies, medicine, software development packages, and many other products for the extremely low price the same corporations legally sell them to indians and chinese for.

                I agree that it's irritating. But I don't think it's rally all that serious. Differences are mostly for patents and copyrights, and those will go away as wage differences disappear.

                It's been a long painful walk, but sometime in the next 4-8 years it won't be worth it to offshore any more

                • I don't think it's been painful at all. We're actually much better off than we used to, and the fact that the Chinese and Indians have developed as well as they have makes us all a lot safer.

                  Faust got a better deal for losing his soul.

                  Things are worse for gutting our own industries - in ways not seen before at this scale. Inviting hostile Second and Third World countries has made the world less safe given their predisposition to making things more dangerous and less free.

                  • Things are worse for gutting our own industries

                    We haven't "gutted" our industries; US manufacturing is stronger than ever before. It's just that other parts of the economy have grown even faster.

                    Inviting hostile Second and Third World countries has made the world less safe given their predisposition to making things more dangerous and less free.

                    The world is safer than ever before: there is less violence, fewer armed conflicts, much leas threat to US interests, and less hunger.

                    If you start with delusional be

        • okay, I'll bite.

          I used to buy T-Shirts made in the USA, but I can't anymore because most of the garment workers in this country were laid off because of imports that were dumped into this country. Does anybody remember the "Look for the Union Label commericals?"
          There was a place called the Garment District in NYC, thousands of workers making clothes for the US consumer. That's gone.

          Jeans? Humm, Levi Strauss stopped making jeans in this country back in the 80s. So, you're right I can't get Levi's but Wra

          • You seem to want some kind of guarantee of long term stability, but that doesn't exist in an era of rapid technological change. On the other hand, you also seem to think it's a disaster when the current jobs disappear, but it isn't. And you're blind to what's actually going on in the economy; for example, you think only in terms of manufactured consumer goods, when America's manufacturing sector is bigger than ever, but happens to be making higher value products that you don't really see. You simply can't p

            • It's not a question of that, it's a question of wholesale exportation of jobs overseas to get 1) cheaper labor 2) avoid government regulation 3) dodge taxes. There's lots of reasons why things cost more to produce in some countries vs. others. Because kids are small, they can get into small areas so why not use them in the manufacturing process for say ships? I can see Korean kids getting into all of those nooks and small areas. That's a niche market isn't it?

              It's not like it hasn't all been done before [historyplace.com]

              • It's not a question of that, it's a question of wholesale exportation of jobs overseas to get 1) cheaper labor 2) avoid government regulation 3) dodge taxes

                Good! If US voters can't get the US government to scale back some of its excessive taxes and regulations, maybe international competition can.

            • What entitles businesses to have a better status in the world than the people that work for them? Why should the United States have to bow before the world in order to prosper?

              You seem to want some kind of guarantee of long term stability, but that doesn't exist in an era of rapid technological change. On the other hand, you also seem to think it's a disaster when the current jobs disappear, but it isn't.

              Why should long-term stability not exist along with technological change? There are plenty of people that do better when long-term stability is guaranteed them - and through forms of labor that allow them to fully use their potential.

              To simply sweep people under the rug and to believe on blind faith that *something* else "not seen"

              • What entitles businesses to have a better status in the world than the people that work for them?

                Businesses don't have a "better status"; businesses are just collections of people and collections of investors.

                Why should the United States have to bow before the world in order to prosper?

                We're not "bowing" before anybody. We should uphold our Constitution. And free trade is an essentially American project; it is something we have forced the rest of the world into, for our own good and for theirs.

                Surrender you

    • ...Remember that during the next election cycle.

      Are you suggesting that we vote out the incumbents?

      But but... my party! I can't let those other guys into office because they'd be worse!!!

      The system is broken, I know that. But I consider myself morally responsible, so I have to vote for the lessor of two evils!

    • All the force on K Street won't matter if Wipro/Infosys/etc. and their lobbyists have a very bad day with the explicit disclosure of why. Just explain to the public that their fraud and all their misdeeds (public and otherwise) on national television if someone complains. It's a desperate measure, but someone brave enough to do it would gain the confidence of millions of US citizens defrauded out of jobs; it would be the "Icarus falling out of the sky" moment for the abuse of guest workers of any skill le

      • LOL, I miss K street. Thing is one time I was going through town late one night in a cab. We were going up North Capitol to my apartment (way north of the letter streets) and when we got to M street I remember the Crack Whore coming up and banging on the driver door. The driver just sped off. Great place DC, especially late at night.

  • If H-1b visas are being requested for level 1 support jobs, the FBI should investigate the requesting companies for fraud.

  • Support is already heavily automated (Score:3)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @11:36AM (#43783169) Homepage

    We already have "knowledge bases", "community support", and support outsourced to Far, Far Away. Microsoft did some work with Bayesian statistics to find out which questions a support tech should ask first. Much software already "phones home" to send trouble reports and crash dumps. There's been some good work on automated crash dump classification, to group similar crash dumps together and send them all to the same maintenance programmer.

  • Not even... (Score:3)

    by EvilSS ( 557649 ) on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @11:57AM (#43783419)
    "With IPsoft's tools, work that is now done by human beings, mostly Level 1 support, could be done by a software machine."

    Software Machine? From my experience most first level support could be replaced with a batch file or python script. 99% are just following a script, or worse, just act as some sort of very faulty speech-to-text interface for turning a phone call into text in a ticket and tossing said ticket over the wall to the next level of support.

  • Good (Score:3)

    by Karmashock ( 2415832 ) on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @12:11PM (#43783601)

    We need more automation in general.

    I know this means some low level jobs evaporate. But it also means companies aren't having to pay for those jobs anymore which means their priorities will shift to getting trained labor. And that means either companies will start focusing more on actually training their own labor a bit more which they can afford if they're not paying for low end labor. Or the universities will at least get somewhat competent at preparing people for the work force.

    People whine about automation but its pointless. Its the future. Deal with it.

    • We need more automation in general.

      People whine about automation but its pointless. Its the future. Deal with it.

      I don't know if I'd say it's the future, because someday the Luddites might win. It is, however, the only way that we can increase or even maintain (in the face of more expensive natural resources) our standard of living. It does cause short term pain, and you shouldn't deny that reality. However the rate of job loss is less than when they ship whole factories or industries offshore. The automation also provides a genuine permanent increase in productivity, rather than the supposed comparative advantage of

    • Low level jobs. You mean jobs that are low paying. They are only low paying because the companies set the price. There are far too many companies that are not willing to pay a living wage to people that work for then, while they re-up on their membership to the country club. As things are going now, companies will try to automate everything, until they find that they have fired people to the point that there is no longer anyone to buy their product. They go out of business and scramble to get a low paying j

      • No companies do not set the price any more then companies set the price for a pair of socks or the cost of a taco.

        Its an interface between two parties.

        In an employer employee arrangment, the worker is actually the seller. Just as the taco vender is the seller of the taco.

        What happens if the taco vender wants to charge too much for his tacos? The consumer shops around and buys a cheaper taco. Now you could say your tacos are really good and are worth the extra money. Well, that's your opinion. Things are wor

  • , work that is now done by human beings, mostly Level 1 support, could be done by a software machine

    MUAHAHAHAHAHAAAHAHAHAHA. Oh, sorry, you were serious. Oh well, MUAAHAHAHAHAHHAAAHAH!!!!

    On a serious note, those of us who are in the knows, who have done some type of IT work, we know that that is bullshit. Tier I support has never been done, and can never be done with a IVR system.

    For example, let's consider IVR systems, which is where these supposed "software machine" silver bullets can fit in. Call your cell phone or cable provider, and you will see that at most, what you get is an IVR system that leads you to an specialist (or sometimes someone who is reading a script of instructions) after the IVR has tried to collect some basic problem description that, in theory, helps facilitate the specialist.

    That is all.

    Let's call the IVR system a Tier-0 support system (or more appropriately, a routing system that takes a customer to actual Tier I support.) That is all. It's only when a human being in Tier I support fails at resolving the issue, that Tier II and Tier III get summoned. One would have to create one hell of an expert systems to barely begin to mimick Tier I support for the general-case type of problems.

    All you would do is piss the customer. Case in point, look at AT&T and Bank of America, and other cell providers. They are phasing out IVR systems (or severely reducing them) in favor of actual human beings (couple that with a minor shift away from offshore call centers, but that's another story.)

    And that is just for mundane tasks.

    'what robotics did for the auto assembly line, we are now doing for the IT engineering line.

    Yeah, because IT is like pulling levers or flipping burguers (no offense, since I once pulled levers and flipped burguers.)

    Serious question: Do they even know what the hell robotics mean?????

    I bet they actually do but they are simply latching to the next buzzword (since manufacturing and robotics are the hot pancakes of the day), hoping for the next business-type offsourcing dumbass to actually fall for it.

    Up next on Fox News, they invented software-based monkey coders (and thus circumvented Turing's Halting Problem.)

  • Quality of Indian H1-Bs have fallen drastically. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @12:32PM (#43783841) Journal
    Compare to the pre 2000 era, the quality of H1-Bs from India has fallen dramatically. Family ties, food and entertainment preferences, increasing availability of imported stuff, increasing wages due to local economic growth etc have created a very good working conditions for the top quality Indian engineers. So many/most of them prefer to stay back. Labor is cheap in India, so these guys/gals employ cooks, servant maids and drivers and get plenty of free time to enjoy the money they earn. The heavy influx of Indians in the pre 2000 sent back real down to earth feedback about life in America. "Uninterrupted power, running water, clean air, cars, air conditioned homes etc etc. But no servant maids, you clean the toilet yourself". Many younger generation Indians, especially girls refuse to come to USA, because often the dirty task of cleaning the bathrooms fall on the wives. All this has led to a drastic reduction in the quality of people still willing to come to USA.

    Most people who are still coming to USA fall in two categories. Some of them still love the freedom, opportunities and the general law and order and free markets etc. The other set is people who did not make the top cut in India, so trying to improve their chances by adding American experience to their resume.

    Pretty soon all the goodwill earned by the top notch graduates from IITs, IISc and National Institutes of Technology, in the 1990s and early 2000s would have been totally spent. May be it has already happened. Now the fresh Indian H1-Bs are often seen as malingering, incompetent but with highly inflated ego. So even if the H1-B quota is raised to infinity, if the American corporations wise up, most of these visas will go unused. But Corporate America has to wake up first.

  • The best and the brightest (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Hmm, so H1B's go to the best and the brightest 1st line support engineers that can be replaced by software, really?

  • then why do we have the problems in the first place?

    Seriously, if the problems are that easy to solve, then why aren't they pre-emptively detected and repaired by some of the bloatware installed on enterprise machines these days?

    I strongly suspect that this will simply be slightly more sophisticated automated call routing with voice recognition - in otherwords, just a way of delaying the costly, but still inevitable, point where one needs to talk to a human with a clue (i.e. knows where to route the ticket)

  • if he doesn't want to be sued for making false statements regarding his company's outlook, since Infosys is a public company and no one, including Infosys is going to do for IT what manufacturing did for the assembly line.

    Programs (robots ) can't write bespoke programs or even troubleshoot existing ones better than say LINT and realistically are as far away from that goal as human-level general cognition type AI has always been, which is to say a it's still a mere pipe dream.

    It's not like there aren't team

Slashdot Top Deals

Man is an animal that makes bargains: no other animal does this-- no dog exchanges bones with another. -- Adam Smith

Close