India’s IT industry laid off more than 56k employees this year • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by kamaal » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 3:50 AM UTC

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #117

The issue has to do with Institutions & services firms here in India. It is normal to see IT Engineers (coders) define they career as X programmer where it's now time for every programmer to have full-stack skills and treat programming language as a drill-bit in a tool-box. Since the services companies benefited earlier by recruiting a graduate and training them to be X programmer for life, the institutions didn't ha…

Its strange that you take the names of CEOs and proceed to deduce that as a proof of them being good programmers. Most of them go to Ivy league engineering schools, and then Ivy league management schools. And then from there straight jump into management barely spending any time at all in engineering. And the whole reason why they do engineering is largely because they need a bridge course to get into a masters level management degree. Once you get into a Ivy league management school, going wherever from there is essentially a networking activity not exactly a great indicator of your engineering performance. It helps to have friends in high places.

Management positions have long been seen as replacements for IAS.

The 1% you talk about parse XMLs at Google and Microsoft. The 99% parse the same XMLs at services firms. The 1% thinks they are special because of a association with a certain Ivy league brand name.

Lets talk of the Indian 1% when somebody in a Indian university writes some thing the equivalent of a Linux, Perl or FreeBSD.

Lets not over glorify these placement agencies as some institutes of engineering excellence.

For what its worth the 99% what people generally berudge look down upon essentially is employed in Indias space programs that sends probes to mars and moon, built bulk of Indias pretty advanced tech defence infrastructure.

Only thing IITians are good at is self worship.

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

#132

Post by krinchan » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 3:53 AM UTC

grad_ml wrote: post #121

krinchan wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious engineering can be done outside, sure. But after years of competing with Indian outsourcing, US engineers have really upped their own skills. Sourcing that talent from India isn't cheaper because it's so rare those engineers can demand similar prices to US engineers and still get a job and an H1-B. Without Infosys. Or Tata.

I'm sorry, what kind of engineers "after years of competing with Indian companies have upped their skills"? Just curious.

Overall, I've seen more full stack skills, polyglots, and a willingness to tailor design and stacks to the problem. Companies want an FTE or two that replaces an entire off shore team and we accommodate to avoid off shoring.

We've adapted as a community to have a skillset and evangelize stacks that at minimum compliments off shore if not replaces them.

Simply put, after all the basic Dev and ops jobs left, we moved up the value chain.

It's a cycle and the off shoring firms will move up the value chain and US devs will further specialize in to ML, AI, speech, Big Data/Data Science, etc. Those areas are quickly being commoditized by the cloud providers, so they're within reach of most US developers. Furthermore, off shoring firms will likely be content to provide the cheaper, lower level rungs of the value chain.

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

#133

Post by qaq » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 3:55 AM UTC

user5994461 wrote: post #127

qaq wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a good number of product companies that have large offices there (Magento, Samsung, GitLab, Wargaming, Grammarly, Ubisoft and a ton more) plus large outsourcing companies pay well and are generally working on large scale serious products

Magento is a wordpress plugin, or similar enough. Hardly a large company. Samsung is a big hardware company, I'm not sure what they would have in software job but why not. GitLab is a fully remote company, they don't recruit anywhere specifically. Their full disclosure on their (low) salaries and losing customer data is certainly driving away the senior folks I know. Game companies are the shithole of the industry, t…

I am not sure I follow :) the logic. This is a random list of product companies that I remember it's a small fraction of companies with large dev. offices in Ukraine. GitLab was a Ukrainian startup and has a large number of developers in Ukraine. Samsung had about 700 developers as far I remember. The compensation trends have very low correlation to how things are in US. The largest local $ making companies are mainly gambling, crypto and porn but they are not very public although many of them a really huge.

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

#134

Post by Abishek_Muthian » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 3:57 AM UTC

kamaal wrote: post #131

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #117

The issue has to do with Institutions & services firms here in India. It is normal to see IT Engineers (coders) define they career as X programmer where it's now time for every programmer to have full-stack skills and treat programming language as a drill-bit in a tool-box. Since the services companies benefited earlier by recruiting a graduate and training them to be X programmer for life, the institutions didn't ha…

Its strange that you take the names of CEOs and proceed to deduce that as a proof of them being good programmers. Most of them go to Ivy league engineering schools, and then Ivy league management schools. And then from there straight jump into management barely spending any time at all in engineering. And the whole reason why they do engineering is largely because they need a bridge course to get into a masters level…

There's a reason for me quoting the CEO's as 'fun note', the context of my statement is complete different.

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

#135

Post by kamaal » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 3:58 AM UTC

user5994461 wrote: post #119

fellellor wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are entirely different business models - services vs products. Companies aren't always successful in making such transitions.

Infosys, capgemini and accenture are all service companies, re selling employees by the hour. They don't develop their own products.

Infosys has a good product offering. And generally spins of its successful products into separate companies.

They also have a fairly successful banking product called Finacle.

Tata by the way also has a lot of product work going on. Wipro too.

Many services firms also do pretty high tech work by the way. Even things like Chip design.

Just because they don't blog and tweet about it, or talk about it in conferences doesn't mean they don't do good work.

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

#136

Post by pritambarhate » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 4:00 AM UTC

mac01021 wrote: post #50

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

No. Frankly demand for "skilled" IT professional is high as ever. Even in traditional tech like .net and Java(spring).

This is just some big IT staffing companies cleaning house.

Source: Anecdotal - I work in Indian IT. In fact hiring for at least 10 positions at my company. It's mainly the skills gap. At these big companies people get stuck in routine jobs and don't keep up with changing tech landscape.

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

#137

Post by kamaal » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 4:04 AM UTC

shagie wrote: post #86

hkmurakami wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compan…

This is spot on. The incentive system so much more promotes management careers that anybody who wishes to go down the tech path comes across as stupid.

Its very common in services companies to treat tech people as somebody who don't have the chops to do prestigious management work.

Do this for sufficient number of years and eventually you will have very few people who want to do any real work and most will want to be managers.

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

#138

Post by grad_ml » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 4:05 AM UTC

shagie wrote: post #129

grad_ml wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, what kind of engineers "after years of competing with Indian companies have upped their skills"? Just curious.

I would contend that engineering FIRMS have upped their skills with more emphasis on soft skills and management feel goods (having people on site tomorrow if asked, training and such. They’re offering a larger value proposition at a higher cost when management has realized that lowest bid doesn’t necessarily mean best value.

Very fair argument. Let's dissect the argument, engineering firms have improved their soft skills and value proposition. Assuming these firms are US based and all american, then by going popular wisdom here, how can american firms possibly have poor soft skills than Indian firms! I'm sure there were many instances when quality received from Indian firms were abysmal. However, imo, it's sort of online propaganda-ish that Indian firms are terrible choice, compared to american vendors. Pick and choose your best anecdote. I recall, months back, there was some incident at BA(british airways, I suppose) and whole incident was spinned as Indian contractors in India messed up. Later, VP of the company, clarified that mistakes were made locally(read UK). I feel hatred rather than facts, largely dominate HN, Reddit opinion.

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

#139

Post by murukesh_s » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 4:05 AM UTC

blindwatchmaker wrote: post #103

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 c…

What is said is partially true. The curriculum wont get updated soon enough to catch up with industry trends. However Basic and Logo or Excel is not true. I graduated in 2004 and Java was the most prominent language we used, followed by C++ and then C. All of these are very relevant even today.

However it was upto the students to explore more outside of what is taught in the curriculum. Even if you are not willing to actually learn programming you can still get good enough marks in both theory and practical exams. We had four practical projects but most of the projects were widely "purchased" from ready-made shops instead of the students doing it themselves, and the instructors were not competent enough to figure out if the projects are copied or self-made.

What should be taught in modern day schools should be Assembly (to get the basics), C/C++, ML/AI, Java, Algorithms and Data structures (Can't stress this enough - even a full year can be dedicated for this) and have at least one project each semester and have all projects scrutinised by external faculties.

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

#140

Post by qaq » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 4:07 AM UTC

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #120

user5994461 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

70k gross is more than what a senior developer would get anywhere in Germany or France. If you really get that much, you've got it better than all western Europe, except London and Zurich.

Parent is still in an inflated labor bubble. In most of the US outside of the major cities it can be a struggle for experienced engineers to break 80K. I had to walk away from a lot of hideously low priced opportunities when I lived in the mid-west.

In Ukraine it can not be inflated by definition as there is basically 0 vc money. The companies are profitable and are paying market rates.