India’s IT industry laid off more than 56k employees this year
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Re: India’s IT industry laid off more than 56k employees this year
#2It'll probably get worse for a lot of people. I work in the public sector, in a municipality. Our IT department has been relatively big on the server side, utilizing consultants ever so often to ensure best practices.
To be honest I'm not an operations guy, and never have been, but I do work in management and my good friend who heads the IT department is struggling to find new roles for the operations people as we're heading into the cloud. It's quite obvious to be frank, but without on premise servers we don't as many need techs to run our setup, and we'll probably need a lot less consultants as well as Microsoft offers this as part of the Azure package.
Financially it'll save us around 16 million Danish annually, which is roughly 32 jobs, and that's just operations.
In development things are changing as well. When we did our first webpage it was a huge project, involving a lot of developers. The most recent one didn't require a single developer because we used a standard product that one of our designers happened to know.
Not that it's all bad. We're looking for people who do blockchain, machine learning and big data, as well as project-managers who understand both digitization and business. Of course these requirements will pose a significant challenge for a huge part of the "traditional" IT workforce, which unfortunately isn't very business savvy or mathematical. I mean, parts of it is certainly very good at math, but typically not the people we can afford in public IT.
Re: India’s IT industry laid off more than 56k employees this year
#31.3 Billion People and a significant number of that work in this industry.
Re: India’s IT industry laid off more than 56k employees this year
#4These people are mainly relatively unskilled. These companies are notorious for hiring entire batches of graduating students.
Situation in top tier colleges is lot better. This can be seen from increase in placements in IITs this year.
Re: India’s IT industry laid off more than 56k employees this year
#5There will be many more. The India IT sector’s main play was cheap labor for low value-add IT tasks like basic dev or ops. The play a while back was to move day-to-day ops jobs to this cheap labor. Now the play is to automate this work so the jobs are disappearing. E.g when you move to the cloud with good architecture you don’t need tons of people pushing buttons and tweaking servers all day long.
The India firms haven’t really moved up the value chain much and thus there’s just less work there. They put fancy marketing on the front but their main product is still cheap labor for low value IT work. While there’s certainly advanced stuff happening in India, at the big scale the top R&D and engineering work still generally occurs in the home countries that were sending work to India and there’s little evidence that these jobs could, at scale, be done successfully by the Indian firms offshore.
Re: India’s IT industry laid off more than 56k employees this year
#6It'll probably get worse for a lot of people. I work in the public sector, in a municipality. Our IT department has been relatively big on the server side, utilizing consultants ever so often to ensure best practices. To be honest I'm not an operations guy, and never have been, but I do work in management and my good friend who heads the IT department is struggling to find new roles for the operations people as we're…
When you talk about the cloud, do you mean SAAS, PAAS, or IAAS? I'm asking because we looked into moving our infrastructure to the cloud and the numbers just didn't add up. We've started to move some application to SAAS but most of the stuff just doesn't make sense to move to the cloud.
Re: India’s IT industry laid off more than 56k employees this year
#7The claim is that India will be the third largest economy in 2032, as China becomes #1.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-26/china-to-...
Hopefully, this is simply a wake up call as the economy grows and diversifies.
Re: India’s IT industry laid off more than 56k employees this year
#8Are the legions of "recruiters" constantly spamming my phone and inbox part of IT? I won't shed a tear for them.
Re: India’s IT industry laid off more than 56k employees this year
#9Well, yeah, entry-level IT stuff was always a target for automation because the human component should have been almost completely unnecessary from the start.
As the industry matures and execs and staff become aware of the degree of automation that's possible, they also understand that a lot of the services offered by consultancy services are mostly fluff and way to add FTEs.
Re: India’s IT industry laid off more than 56k employees this year
#10System integration is a proximity job. The last mile of a software delivery.
With no physical access to their top market (H1B reform), it will continue to be tough. Capgemini, which has about the same headcount, will end with 30% more revenue than Infosys in 2017. Accenture, x3.4 the revenue for only x2 the headcount.
With limited access to market with better hourly rates, they would continue to struggle. Unless they bet on more vertical market, selling licenses of software they own or have shares in, which is exactly their current strategies. It may work.