Live data from Hacker News

India’s IT industry laid off more than 56k employees this year

qz.com

41–50 of 420 posts

Re: India’s IT industry laid off more than 56k employees this year

#41
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think it comes from their culture, they are not used to work hard or to do something willingly. Cut the crap. India is a country of 1.3 billion people, don't peddle bullshit stereotypes. Not working hard doesn't come from the culture; it's quite the opposite if anything. >They are doing it if they must, if someone tells them that they have to do it. Maybe the firm you are dealing with doesn't pay the employees we…

What makes you say this? Don't stereotypes come from something? Do you think it's a coincidence that a stereotypical Asian American is reserved, disciplined, and good at math, and that Asian Americans in America make considerably more than any other race[1]? Btw, "Cut the crap" is an unprofessional, unproductive way to start a conversation. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_wage_gap_in_the_United_... Edit: To…

Stereotypes typically don't come from anything. The "stereotype" of an Asian male is someone who

* can't talk to women

* doesn't understand social skills

* has poor hygiene / manners

* values STEM above softer skills

* values hard work and effort

It's pointless to make these claims because such broad generalizations immediately break down the second you meet an Asian man. There's no way to know which (if any) of these stereotypes they uphold.

Some of these sterotypes have a positive bend: Poor social skills imply that they are reserved. Valuing hard work makes you a disciplined person. etc. But these stereotypes are still bad. They lead people to make unfair assumptions about Asian men because they are Asian. There's plenty of literature out there about stereotypes and prejudice and especially about the "model minority" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_minority

From there you may see why folks are downvoting you:

> A common misconception is that the affected communities usually hold pride in their labeling as the model minority. The model minority stereotype is considered detrimental to relevant minority communities because it is used to justify the exclusion of minorities in the distribution of assistance programs, both public and private, as well as to understate or slight the achievements of individuals within that minority. Furthermore, the idea of the model minority pits minority groups against each other by implying that non-model groups are at fault for falling short of the model minority level of achievement and assimilation

EDIT: And as a bonus (since that Wikipedia article is DAMN good) "Scientific studies have revealed that positive stereotypes have many negative and damaging consequences both socially and psychologically." The citations are in the article.

Re: India’s IT industry laid off more than 56k employees this year

#42

These 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.

>This can be seen from increase in placements in IITs this year.

That's probably because they are pushed by their families, "go and study IT, this is the best paid job at the moment". That doesn't mean that the value, skills, abilities of the new graduates will increase, I tend to believe the opposite.

Re: India’s IT industry laid off more than 56k employees this year

#43

Given the number of graduates who join the workforce every year in India, plus the traditional model of companies to maintain a bench for graduate engineer in anticipation of big contracts, the number doesn't look disproportionate. Apart from all the politics and shifting revenue targets (which are the culprit to a great extent), todays technology trends clearly indicates a lot of "high-valued" job are going to be re…

On the one hand you basically say things will change too much too fast:

> CBRE predicts 50% of occupations today will no longer exist in 2025

But on the other hand, things don't change fast enough:

> whats shall everyone do? skill up . Is that anything new in software development? Nopes

These two positions, change and no change, can't be simultaneously true. If there is change, then there are new applications where humans are needed. If there is no change, then human jobs remain untaken by automation.

There will never be a lack of jobs for people as long as people have desires and needs that are unfulfilled. Even if all our needs today are fulfilled, we create new goals and new entitlements for which we have to work.

Take, for example, medicine and movies - these two occupations existed as pre-modern medicine and theatre even 1000 years ago. But now, that we have automated many aspects such as blood tests, pill production, medical scanning, and in the case of movies, copying and broadcasting - they should reduce the need for doctors and actors, but instead, they increase 100x the number of doctors and actors. Why? Because we want more, much more than a millenia ago.

We have expanded our entitlement more than 100x and we're busier than ever, in the middle of automation. Believe in our desire for more, in our greed and ever raising entitlement! They'll keep us employed.

Re: India’s IT industry laid off more than 56k employees this year

#45
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think it comes from their culture, they are not used to work hard or to do something willingly. Cut the crap. India is a country of 1.3 billion people, don't peddle bullshit stereotypes. Not working hard doesn't come from the culture; it's quite the opposite if anything. >They are doing it if they must, if someone tells them that they have to do it. Maybe the firm you are dealing with doesn't pay the employees we…

Since you are an Indian too, I think your remarks are kind of subjective and your reply a bit harsh, but I'll add more facts that sustain my point of view. >Not working hard doesn't come from the culture Yes it truly does. Since every individual has inherited from the environment and has been cultured that he needs to do just what he is told (the minimum), this is how he grows. >Maybe the firm you are dealing with do…

how do you explain the anamoly of indians in virtually all top jobs from ceo's of microsoft,google,pepsi etc. to pulitzer winners? while i agree with you that culture does impacts work but may be its not "indian" culture and more of a "company"culture. Having said that i don't see any contribution of india in sports, i don't know why.

Re: India’s IT industry laid off more than 56k employees this year

#46
What I really don't understand is, I'm 1 guy with a very small SMB. I do everything myself and tried in the cloud.

Except from some maintenance, it just seems to be cheaper to upscale a VM in many cases.

The biggest cost at my work ( full-time job) seems to be management ( development too off course) and planning.

I'm not sure if the scale that cloud provides is required 90% of the times

Re: India’s IT industry laid off more than 56k employees this year

#47
post #5

There 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 hav…

Not to mention if your only competitive advantage is price, there always is or will be a source of labor that is cheaper than you. For example, a number of startups I work with are now moving their IT support and basic dev to the Philippines. The quality of work is equally bad or worse, but it's even cheaper than India and the language barrier is comparable.

So the Fortune 500 company I work for hired Verizon as its managed networking provider and their staff is all based in Manila. While others on my team complain about this I have to be honest, their support is top notch because the language barrier is non-existent. Compared to our in-house Indian IT support the language barrier is a stark contrast, I could only hope we move our corp system's support to the Philippines.

Re: India’s IT industry laid off more than 56k employees this year

#48
post #5

There 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 hav…

Not to mention if your only competitive advantage is price, there always is or will be a source of labor that is cheaper than you. For example, a number of startups I work with are now moving their IT support and basic dev to the Philippines. The quality of work is equally bad or worse, but it's even cheaper than India and the language barrier is comparable.

I noticed a lot of outsourcing work is going to Ukraine and Belarus. India got a head start because of English language but right now many devolopers in Eastern Europe speak fluent English as well.

Re: India’s IT industry laid off more than 56k employees this year

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>These people are mainly relatively unskilled Not only that I agree with that, but I'd like to add the fact that after 2 years of working in a team splitted in Romania and India, the working experience with Indian programmers is relatively difficult. It's not something isolated to an individual, all of my colleagues have been complaining that they would really like to work with someone else, but not from India. I thi…

A fun fact, if you may. Every company doing actual, industrial field work has huge problems finding people who are willing to do field work at Indian plants (and are qualified, obviously). If you know a field guy, ask him if he has had any experience there. Industry doesn't really matter...

For those of us who don't know any field guys with experience in India, can you elaborate?
Post reply on HN