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

qz.com

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

#101

Post by hux_ »

menacingly wrote: post #67
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 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.

If they had a weirdly large supply you can be guaranteed an army of recruiters from FB, Amazon, Google et al would be lining up at campuses the way they do in India.

The only limitation these firms face in growing faster is getting their hands on talent.

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

#102

Post by halbritt »

navinsylvester wrote: post #70
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…

I doubt anyone in the silicon valley believes that.

Most large tech companies have engineering centers in India doing real work and there are quite a few Indian expats here doing serious engineering work.

I think the reputation you describe comes specifically from the low-cost IT outsourcing firms. My personal experience reflects this. I've managed and worked with large teams in India that did great work. My experiences with outsourcing firms haven't been as good.

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

#103

Post by blindwatchmaker »

One of the articles linking from this one (https://qz.com/964843/less-than-5-of-india-engineers-are-cut...) made me laugh:

> More than two-thirds of the candidates from the top 100 universities in the country were able to write “compilable code,” or that which does not throw errors when compiled into machine-readable code.

I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean? Most devs make typos or errors when writing new code at some point; the compiler spits out the reason (or your IDE helpfully points it out), you go back and fix it.

> One reason for the poor performance is the dearth of good instructors as well as misaligned college curriculums. “The school curriculum focusing on MS-Word, Powerpoint, Excel, etc., rather teaching programming using elementary languages such as Basic and Logo is also the culprit,” said Varun Aggarwal, the co-founder and chief technology officer at Aspiring Minds.

Basic and Logo? What in the world?

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

#104

Post by geofft »

TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #80
che_shirecat wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 con…

Duh. Making generalizations based on everyone of a race will be wrong. But if a large percentage of a race have certain cultural values, then amplified examples those values would emerge in the stereotypes, right? Or are we to believe that stereotypes all come from nothing?

> Or are we to believe that stereotypes all come from nothing?

This is a false dilemma. Stereotypes come from something, sure - but they don't necessarily come from accurate characteristics of the race. They may come from one of the many cultures that makes up the race. (As a child of immigrants from south India whose family has been Christian longer than Europe has been Christian, I have some opinions on your conflation of race and culture.) They may come from some particular subculture that happens to be interacting with the people forming the stereotype. They may come from what is essentially propaganda - national myths, folklore, religious traditions, etc. that reflected an older culture that people find useful to claim an identification with, but may not accurately represent any people. They may come from propaganda by the people forming the stereotype, as in the case of the "model minority" stereotype in the US. They may come from the reaction of the culture or the race to living under oppression by the people forming the stereotype, and not reflect the natural tendencies of the people if given their freedom. (For instance, the stereotype of Jews as greedy can be traced pretty directly to the old Christian prohibition - now seemingly forgotten - on lending money with interest, which left the profitable and necessary job of banking essentially reserved for whatever visible non-Christian cultural minority happened to be in Europe, regardless of any traits of that culture other than happening not to have such a prohibition.) They may come from accurate traits of the race or culture from a generation or two ago that are no longer accurate. There are lots of options here that you seem to be dismissing.

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

#105

Post by Spooky23 »

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.

You do all of the above. First you go to O365. Then you put your AD and ADFS in the cloud as a DR. Then you target other things where DR is useful.

After that, you opportunistically move stuff as it makes sense. Then squeeze every provider of software and services, and pick off the stragglers by moving to cloud/SaaS.

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

#106

Post by user5994461 »

hux_ wrote: post #101
menacingly wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If they had a weirdly large supply you can be guaranteed an army of recruiters from FB, Amazon, Google et al would be lining up at campuses the way they do in India. The only limitation these firms face in growing faster is getting their hands on talent.

Bullshit. Tech companies are not competing for worldwide talents. The companies you quote have at most 3 offices in Europe: London, Zurich, Dublin. The first thing a recruiter will tell you is to abandon your life and your family.

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

#107

Post by qaq »

bhouston wrote: post #91
menacingly wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> they have a weirdly large supply of very competent developers. I've noticed this as well. Very strange that it is so "poor" but so talented. I guess that probably won't last.

It's very far from "poor" when IT industry is concerned :). While pay rate is obviously lower vs US it's higher or on par with most EU countries. So for say Senior Java Dev (the pay is much more dependent on a stack vs US) making 66K - 72K which would be about half of what same person would be making in US (outside of SV), but tax rate will be around 3% vs 30% and cost of living is a fraction of what it is in US. When I was living in Ukraine my disposable income was like most of my salary vs in US it's a small fraction of my salary.

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

#108

Post by TheAdamAndChe »

geofft wrote: post #104
TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Duh. Making generalizations based on everyone of a race will be wrong. But if a large percentage of a race have certain cultural values, then amplified examples those values would emerge in the stereotypes, right? Or are we to believe that stereotypes all come from nothing?

> Or are we to believe that stereotypes all come from nothing? This is a false dilemma. Stereotypes come from something, sure - but they don't necessarily come from accurate characteristics of the race. They may come from one of the many cultures that makes up the race. (As a child of immigrants from south India whose family has been Christian longer than Europe has been Christian, I have some opinions on your confla…

I'm not dismissing what you're saying, and the fact that you're assuming that I'm just dismissing you is ridiculous. You're just assuming that because I don't immediately reject the discussion of stereotypes, that I'm some racist. It's just not true.

I'm really sad about the state of HN nowadays. Anyone not PC is downvoted incessantly. This is just another example of a vocal minority drowning out the silent majority on the internet sites that is contributing to our cultural extremism in our country. Not everyone with differing opinions from you is a racist.

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

#109

Post by ryen »

navinsylvester wrote: post #70
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…

>but assuming that so called home countries brains only can do serious engineering is quite short sighted.

I don't think thats the point he's trying to make. The Indian IT industry was designed and built for a certain type of labor/outsourcing market. It will take serious investment and attitude shift internally for local startups to grow and retain talent. Much of that talent that is able to perform the serious engineering you describe continually leave the country for the U.S. and other markets.

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

#110

Post by geofft »

TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #108
geofft wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or are we to believe that stereotypes all come from nothing? This is a false dilemma. Stereotypes come from something, sure - but they don't necessarily come from accurate characteristics of the race. They may come from one of the many cultures that makes up the race. (As a child of immigrants from south India whose family has been Christian longer than Europe has been Christian, I have some opinions on your confla…

I'm not dismissing what you're saying, and the fact that you're assuming that I'm just dismissing you is ridiculous. You're just assuming that because I don't immediately reject the discussion of stereotypes, that I'm some racist. It's just not true. I'm really sad about the state of HN nowadays. Anyone not PC is downvoted incessantly. This is just another example of a vocal minority drowning out the silent majority…

I did not downvote you, nor have I called you racist. I attempted to engage you in reasoned argument, and you are unwilling to engage in debate. Other people are not downvoting you because you're "not PC", they're downvoting you because you're not making cogent arguments, and anyone not making cogent arguments should be drowned out by cogent arguments.
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