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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

#141

Post by kamaal »

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.

We are/were already there.

Use some thing like Lisp and Functional programming really well and 99% of all the current programmers can be put out of job.

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

#142

Post by victor106 »

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…

This was true about 10 years ago. But these days I find indian teams are equally as talented as Silicon Valley.

There was lot of fluff that was hired during those outsourcing boom years and obviously they need to let go off the less talented but it’s not right to color everybody with the same brush.

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

#143

Post by kamaal »

victor106 wrote: post #142
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…

This was true about 10 years ago. But these days I find indian teams are equally as talented as Silicon Valley. There was lot of fluff that was hired during those outsourcing boom years and obviously they need to let go off the less talented but it’s not right to color everybody with the same brush.

I simply see this as fruits of cheaply and easily accessible internet and affordable Laptops. Bulk of the tech there is, is open source and you can learn anything from any corner of the world.

If you are in a competitive economic space, you will even have sufficient motivation to learn.

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

#144

Post by fellellor »

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.

If you bothered to read my comment, you'll see that's what I was saying in the first place.

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

#145

Post by jitl »

victor106 wrote: post #142
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…

This was true about 10 years ago. But these days I find indian teams are equally as talented as Silicon Valley. There was lot of fluff that was hired during those outsourcing boom years and obviously they need to let go off the less talented but it’s not right to color everybody with the same brush.

> Indian teams are as talented as Silicon Valley

This might be true for some teams, but in general the IT market in India probably has a similar skill distribution to the IT market in the US; such that the top 15% of the market is the most talented, and the rest is by definition less so. In the US, the top 15% of the market is in Silicon Valley, so if you consider India as a whole, it will not be as talented on average as Silicon Valley.

As with any anecdotal evidence, people have widely varying experiences. When I was working as a freelance web developer (2010-2014) at mid-market firms, I had universally bad experiences with Indian teams.

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

#146

Post by mdani »

grad_ml wrote: post #126
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…

This is plain BS. I don't recall any CS department in India (and I know 100's) teaching, MS-word, Logo, Basic, Powerpoint, excel etc. However, I did TA'ed at Rice University, TX, Excel course for freshman.

Here school means elementary, middle school,high school etc. where they teach MS Word etc. In India, CS departments are in “colleges” also called “schools” in US so this may not be bullshit for the reason you stated.

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

#147

Post by kamaal »

navinsylvester wrote: post #122
ryen wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 engi…

> at the big scale the top R&D and engineering work still generally occurs in the home countries that were sending work to India and there’s little evidence that these jobs could, at scale, be done successfully by the Indian firms offshore. I was talking about this outright dismissal without any ground. > Indian IT industry was designed and built for a certain type of labor/outsourcing market. Indian IT industry got…

>>And also - we can afford couple of maids in a decent paying job and have a better lifestyle here than the west can afford.

Bulk of you post is true. But lets give west the credit where they deserve. Most of us can't afford maids. May be you can. Even if we did, its more like jugaad. People in west don't need maids because they don't need maids to sweep the floor, they don't have 1 kg of road dust coming in from dug up roads unrepaired for years. Their homes are designed to make vaccum cleaners easily usable. They have cheap dishwashers, microwave ovens, washing machines and dryers.

You move to west your standard of living by default sees an upgrade at 0 cost. Roads, infrastructure, schooling, economic opportunity etc etc.

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

#148

Post by seanmcdirmid »

victor106 wrote: post #142
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…

This was true about 10 years ago. But these days I find indian teams are equally as talented as Silicon Valley. There was lot of fluff that was hired during those outsourcing boom years and obviously they need to let go off the less talented but it’s not right to color everybody with the same brush.

Existentially or universally?

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

#149

Post by Top19 »

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…

Are you kidding me?

All of those operations people should be immediately trained in cybersecurity and deployed literally anywhere in the country.

If you’ve seen the latest password dumps and how bad they are, cybersecurity is getting worse if anything.

Also, as of 2015 the Chinese had 60,000 dedicated cyber security engineers. This year the US I think has 9,000, maybe less, and they can’t even protect the US, much less the rest of the world (unlike the globally deployed US Navy).

Ops people are so important.

NOTE: I actually am an AWS Engineer and I like moving to the cloud, but still.

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