From: Arun Mehta <amehta@giasdl01.vsnl.net.in>
Date: Thu, 15 Aug 1996 05:33:08 +0800
To: "James A. Donald" <cypherpunks@toad.com>
Subject: re: National Socio-Economic Security Need for Encryption    Technology
Message-ID: <1.5.4.32.19960814164931.0033e60c@giasdl01.vsnl.net.in>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 08:49 14/08/96 -0700, James A. Donald wrote:
>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?

I was trying to explain how incomes and prices happened to be
lower in India, which is the reason why companies like Informix
like to hire Indian engineers.

>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.

I imagine (not knowing why Informix does what it does) that the
reason might have something to do with:

1) Bringing the programmer closer to the customer, to understand
the problem better, or to commission the software, debug it under
working conditions, whatever
2) If a team in the US is working on the project as well,
sometimes it helps to have the entire team physically proximate.
3) With team members far away, you may have concerns about
security of confidential information.

I could think of another reason or two.

>
>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.

Could you please be more precise? In what way does the "power of
the Indian government" intrude? You use the term "proven" rather
loosely... there could be other explanations for the company
wanting to move its employees around.

>
>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.

Huh? Yes, we do have a bureaucratic state, which is infuriating,
and not just to the companies, but we've always had lots of
companies happy to be here. This is a big market, and a nice
place to live (and not just the natives say so).

>Under democracy, people get the government they deserve and 
>get it good and hard.

True -- democracy is a learning process, and the lessons
sometimes come hard. I don't know of any other way to learn.

Arun Mehta Phone +91-11-6841172, 6849103 amehta@cpsr.org
http://www.cerfnet.com/~amehta/  finger amehta@cerfnet.com for public key