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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

#61

Post by jmalicki »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #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

That's exactly the point... there's less for you to manage (at least at reasonable scale) - you leave management of those people and processes up to Amazon (or whoever your cloud provider is), so you can focus on your core business and not get distracted by managing getting new servers, backups, recovery plans, etc... it "just works".

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

#62

Post by Cheyana »

john_moscow wrote: post #38
eksemplar wrote: post #2

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…

Out of curiosity, how does blockchain come into play with Danish municipal IT?

I work in municipal IT in the US and I was wondering the same thing.

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

#63

Post by carlsborg »

adrya407 wrote: post #11
abhishek0318 wrote: post #4

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 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…

Google and Microsoft and even trading firms like DE Shaw for example have hundreds of engineers in India. Hiring talent is difficult at smaller outsourcing shops, the economics demands that you hire at low wages. Your perspective is severely limited.

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

#64

Post by Clubber »

naravara wrote: post #22
axiom92 wrote: 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…

>Maybe the firm you are dealing with doesn't pay the employees well enough, which in turn causes demotivation? This. I had the same complaint about the India based team I had to work with, until one of them came on rotation to the states, we had a beer together, and he told me all about the working environment they have there. Nightmarish commutes, extremely nitpicky and punitive performance management, no commitment…

Plus, massive turnover.

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

#65

Post by Clubber »

rconti wrote: post #56
axiom92 wrote: 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…

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. Yo…

Managers at the level that makes that decision get bonuses for cost cutting. The cheaper the firm, the bigger the bonus. By the time the house of cards crashed, it either wasn't their crash (sales problem) or they've jumped ship to cost-cut at another company.

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

#66

Post by ams6110 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #25
chickenfries wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big cities have all sorts of IT needs. And they employ a lot of contractors. Firms like IBM and Palantir make a lot of money contracting for government IT contracts...

Some cities even have their own networking team, as running their own fiber plant and all that entails (traffic lights and other devices that need comms) is usually cheaper than renting out copper or fiber from your local telco.

I'd be extremely surprised if that were true. Cities like to do this sort of thing because it expands headcount but I doubt it makes sense financially if you account for all costs.

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

#67

Post by menacingly »

myth_drannon wrote: post #48
JSONwebtoken wrote: post #36

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 don't think Ukraine is catching up to India, it's just different work. In my experience, the typical job going to Ukraine is a different breed. If you can deal with the time zone and language barrier, they have a weirdly large supply of very competent developers.

In fact, C++ devs from that region are the secret sauce to a lot of large codebases I've seen.

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

#69

Post by shagie »

mac01021 wrote: post #50

Honest question: is that a lot for a whole country?

Whole country? No. In the crash of 2008, there was one week in October with 20k jobs lost ( https://techcrunch.com/2008/10/24/19683-tech-layoffs-and-cou... also mentioned on that page is 24k jobs eliminated when HP and EDS merged ( https://www.computerworld.com/article/2532995/it-management/... )).

56K jobs in India? Not that significant overall. 56k jobs from seven of the big names of Indian IT jobs? That's another story - http://www.livemint.com/Industry/4CXsLIIZXf8uVQLs6uFQvK/Top-... (which is referenced in the first paragraph but doesn't dive into).

> Information technology (IT) companies in India are in the midst of the industry’s largest retrenchment drive, with seven of the biggest IT firms planning to ask at least 56,000 engineers to leave this year.

> The number is at least twice the employees laid off by the companies last year, reflecting their under-preparedness in adapting to newer technologies and dealing with the fallout from US President Donald Trump’s protectionist policies.

> The companies include both Indian and multinational firms with a large footprint in India.

> The seven companies—Infosys Ltd, Wipro Ltd, Tech Mahindra Ltd, HCL Technologies Ltd, US-based Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp. and DXC Technology Co., and France-based Cap Gemini SA—and which together employ 1.24 million people, plan to let go of 4.5% of their workforce in 2017.

Though note that last bit... together, they employe 1.24 million and this reflects under a 5% layoff overall.

That article goes into a bit more of the numbers and corporate structures that are getting disrupted with this layoff.

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

#70

Post by navinsylvester »

code4tee wrote: 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…

Might be the case with many IT services firms but assuming that so called home countries brains only can do serious engineering is quite short sighted.

I head an engineering team from India and our team is local talent for a firm which is outside India. We believe we do some serious engineering.

There is this west fixation that serious engineering can't be done outside. I am not saying it isn't true on most cases but assuming they only can do is so demeaning. I get asked a lot - so who does the heavy lifting?. Nothing gives more satisfaction than to say - we do the engineering and it gets maintained by westerners in our organization.

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