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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

#81

Post by thanksgiving »

aNoob7000 wrote: post #6
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…

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.

Can you share some numbers? If you count colocation as cloud, I think there is a wide range of products and services you can use.

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

#82

Post by slovette »

ams6110 wrote: post #66
toomuchtodo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You’d be wrong. Our city does all its own fiber plant. It’s significantly less expensive than a recurring contract with a telco. Significantly.

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

#83

Post by cmurf »

adrya407 wrote: post #37
Daishiman wrote: post #9

Well, 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.

>Well, yeah, entry-level IT stuff was always a target for automation I see this as a progress. Since you replace the first-level IT stuff with automated processes, the now second-level IT stuff will sooner or later become first-level and so on. Therefore all the levels are pushed upwards and we tend to go to higher levels, no matter if we speak about developing, researching, improving etc.

At least in this case, 56,000 people in the 1st level lost their jobs. What's the total number of level 1's who matriculated to level 2? And is there a net job loss or are the laid off people finding other jobs that pay as well or better?

Without answers for these and related questions, it's uncertain if this is good progress.

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

#84

Post by MBCook »

ryanthedev wrote: post #77

The quality of the work has been subpar from what I have seen at my company. Though the biggest challenge is timezone problems and the sheer challenge it is to communicate. Though I'm sure people have had different experiences in their sectors.

The one time I worked with outsourced people from India or Pakistan (I don’t actually know which country the people were hired out of, could be somewhere else) was a disaster, but what do you expect when you get the absolute lowest bid you can?

I know other people have had great success stories, but you get what you pay for. Even if the cost-of-living is much lower that doesn’t mean that you can buy the bottom of the barrel people and expect it to be worth it.

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

#85

Post by maxxxxx »

Clubber wrote: post #60
myth_drannon wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know if this is still the case but the Eastern Bloc developers I have met years ago were all super strong in math and other science fundamentals. Very impressive.

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

#86

Post by shagie »

hkmurakami wrote: post #73
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

From the outside looking in ( and a handful of anecdotal encounters and work experiences) I feel like the educated Indian workforce is bifurcated between one cluster of brilliant hard working people and another cluster of... Bullshitters who try to project the visage of knowing what's going on. But maybe that's because for better or for worse India does have an articulate culture of speaking up for yourself, and thes…

It depends on what one's career goals are. From what I understand (I'm not Indian, but I've worked with many over the years), for a sizable portion of the workforce, the goal isn't to be senior programmer but rather management.

The way you get to management is by having people report to you and then get a new job higher up on the ladder at another company (it is my understanding that promotions from within the company are difficult compared to hiring outsiders).

One puts in time in grade, switching projects frequently to build up the resume. Unfortunately, this makes institutional knowledge at the client companies not something that is preserved easily.

(anecdote: when I was laid off to be replaced by someone from India, the 12 years of how the system works was transferred in 4 weeks of 4h a day meetings, 5 days a week (that was painful)... keeping in touch with my old coworkers, the person who replaced me left 6 months later and explained everything about how my job worked and what they learned in just a few days... who left six months later and only did one day of information transfer)

So, switch companies, go from developer to sr. developer in a year (2x 6 month projects) to team lead (with 5 people reporting - another year or so) to architect (with 3 team leads reporting - another year or so)... and you've got a manager.

If someone is on the track "I want to be a manager", switching projects frequently and never actually diving too deeply into the project is probably the best approach.

The technical people are harder to find. They're not switching jobs quickly and so they're unlikely to get hired into the project that the client sees. Maybe they're tapped as a "work on this 25%" but I know how that goes... it means one week out of the month you're catching up on everything for that project and trying to fend off context switches before you're not thinking about it for another month.

For the technical people, many of them are able to find a visa and move to the US for some extended period of time. This contributes to a brain drain in India. Also the indentured servitude aspect of the H1B visa means that there is less mobility and again, its harder to meet these people in random places. They do exist - and I've worked with a number of them... but I've worked with far more people who are in a position for six months to a year and then moving on to another contract at another contracting company.

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

#87

Post by jonknee »

ams6110 wrote: post #66
toomuchtodo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Cities have the advantage of building the roads and being able to lay whatever they’d like under them.

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

#88

Post by EmployedRussian »

Clubber wrote: post #54
pksadiq wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

You will.

There is a reason "fast typist" was not a required skill in any software jobs I've ever applied for, and I doubt developer strength has any correlation with typing speed.

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

#89

Post by forkjoin »

visarga wrote: post #43
forkjoin wrote: post #33

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 h…

Not entirely sure about your inferences from my comment, I didn't say there are not going to be jobs, of course there will be jobs. However, perhaps amidst the Artificial intelligence, jobs will require more creative, social , emotional intelligence. Thats where we need to skill up and point I made above was just to highlight that this re-structuring is not just relevant for todays low valued work but for the entire spectrum of whats a super-skill today and going to be "low valued" few years down the line. Also, I'd argue that in the context of your examples (which are slightly digressing from this thread), medicine and movies , reason why we have more doctors and actors could strongly be attributed to the socio-economic growth of the rising population, a lot more people can/need medical service and go to cinema that what we had 1000 years ago. Technology here solves the problem of efficiency and scale which is just complementing the progression.

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

#90

Post by Clubber »

EmployedRussian wrote: post #88
Clubber wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I've never met a good, experienced developer who was a slow typist. You will. There is a reason "fast typist" was not a required skill in any software jobs I've ever applied for, and I doubt developer strength has any correlation with typing speed.

It's not that fast typist is an indicator of a good developer, but a slow typist is an indicator of someone who hasn't spent a whole lot of time in front of a keyboard.
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