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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

#51
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…

For some background, the 'model minority' myth that you're perpetuating here is being increasingly rejected by the Asian-American community because its both reductive and dehumanizing in its characterization ('Asians are all inscrutable math wizards that get straight A's but are essentially invisible in any romantic or leadership capability') and most often trotted out by race supremacists in some twisted form of concern trolling as a way to attack other minority groups who are seen as less subservient. Asian-americans are often seen in america as the "perpetual foreigner"[1] no matter how far they go to integrate, and the 'model minority' myth just makes integration and the freedom to be treated as an 'American' _individual_ so much harder - unlike Caucasians in the US who in their virtue as the majority demographic do not have each and every one of their actions/behaviors scrutinized as being representative of "white people."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotypes_of_East_Asians_in_...

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

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've worked with some Ukrainian devs and they were very smart guys

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

#53
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…

I am part Indian (albeit ethnically, not culturally) and work in finance. I always had a great experience working with Indian bankers, investors and VCs. The stereotypes puzzled me. Then I spoke to a few IT outsourcing/consulting companies. It’s horrible. Starting sentences with “no” even when agreeing, jargon-laid bullshitting, lying about simple things, overt sexism ( e.g. if my female colleague asks a question, th…

[deleted]

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

#54
post #30

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.

> These people are mainly relatively unskilled. These companies are notorious for hiring entire batches of graduating students. I guess the best interview should also add a touch-type test and the candidate should require at least 30wpm or so (if typing is very much required for the work). When I was at college I have only seen less than 5 such students from the 250 total.

That's my secret tell to see if someone is a good, experienced developer or not.

I've never met a good, experienced developer who was a slow typist.

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

#55
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…

>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]?

You are stating a set of what you believe as stereotypes of "Asian American[s]" and then citing a wage survey. There seem to be a lot of assumptions you are making.

What would you define as "Asian" in this scenario? Do you consider all people living in America having some form of roots in the entire continent of Asia, Asian?

Next, are you attributing personal traits listed by you as: reserved, disciplined, and good at math, which equates to "make[ing] more than any other race". Do those traits really do that?

The comment that you posted, from my own personal experience, is disheartening because it attributes qualities to a broad set of peoples and cultures which may or may not be related. Even if you might consider some things like being disciplined as positive, it's disempowering because it removes each "Asian" person's ability to achieve based on their own merit.

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

#56
post #17

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…

> 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…

Yup. First company I worked for had a team in India and they couldn't do a damn thing. The next company had some REALLY great talent in India. Having local managers helped. Paying market rate instead of bottom dollar helped.

Another problem with outsourcing to India is now so many companies do it just because XYZ other company does it -- no regard for quality. Just copying the moves someone else does isn't enough. You need to understand WHY and HOW to do it well.

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

#57

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.

Mainly relatively unskilled is an understatement. I have a bit of contact with DXC (based in bulgaria, iirc) through a customer. We usually get someone with 'expert X' or 'senior Y' as a job title who lack the most basic skills in debugging and problem solving. It mostly ends in them 'taking a break' (during the call) and in the end we have to do their job.

I don't take an issue with doing their job, but I'm still baffled how DXC can function like that.

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

#58
post #14

It'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…

Public sector municipal... doing what exactly? That doesn’t sound like a traditionally high tech market. Maybe your use case is atypical.

There is often a significant amount of data flowing around in the public sector. When there is a constant baseline of a task to be done for the foreseeable future, it is often less expensive to fill that with a FTE rather than a contractor or consultant.

Things from the city jail management (transferring to state or federal when appropriate - or to the hospital and back - or to the court and back, etc...), payroll (and staffing management), data mining, managing assments of property, scheduling housing or business inspectors, budget forecasting based on weather models, keeping track of all the permits and where they are in the process...

There is lots of places where information technology has a role. Not necessarily high tech, but rather managing the information that is flowing through the system to make sure that the proper data goes to the proper places.

Its not going to be glamorous, but it sure beats paper and excel spreadsheets in email.

While big consulting shops may be brought in from time to time to do a project - the role of integration that software with the existing systems often falls to a FTE employed by the city, state, or whatever. Keeping that institutional knowledge about how things work is often priceless (well, you can put a price on it - how long does it take to figure out the system that Stan left behind... and if that's a consultant doing that, how much are they billing you for that discovery work?). In many public sector shops, the preserved institutional knowledge that a team may have can easily run into the collective century or more. That is a lot of understanding of how things work that can't be effectively outsourced.

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

#59

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

The cost benefit is that if you are small, most of it is free, or near free. It gets expensive when you scale, but if you use fabric instead of VM's, it's nearly effortless compared to hiring two or three top notch net admins and running / renting a datacenter for eternity.

The hook is at small scale, the catch is at medium/large scale. For Azure, licensing is included.

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

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've worked with Belarusian developers and they were top notch. Belarus is very close with Russia and is considered the last dictatorship in Europe, so weigh that with a decision.

Having said that, the old Soviet / Eastern Bloc countries are very sharp. They were of course on the other side of the Cold War, which is what birthed most of our modern technology.

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