Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

qz.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 420 posts

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

#171

Post by eru »

user5994461 wrote: post #112
qaq wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Whe…

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.

I've gotten offers for somewhat more for Amsterdam (with booking.com).

I didn't take it, because I was getting way more in London at the time.

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

#172

Post by y4mi »

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…

> I was talking about this outright dismissal without any ground.

The quotes text was an observation without any judgement.

The rest of the post addresses how the Indian it industry started to boom and why they're losing so many jobs so quickly. Still no dismissal.

It's not that Indian doesn't have talent. It's just that it's not smart to outsource your main competency. So they're not doing that.

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

#173

Post by eru »

user5994461 wrote: post #106
hux_ wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The first thing a recruiter will tell you is to abandon your life and your family.

Do you mean that as in "move" or as in "work long hours"?

Google has at least offices in Germany, too.

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

#174

Post by seanmcdirmid »

user5994461 wrote: post #118
carlsborg wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep, any Indian with decent would have long run away from sweet shop to go to a software company.

I know you meant sweat shop, but I find the typo hilarious.

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

#175

Post by eru »

nocoder wrote: post #169

To me, one of the indications that Indian IT is out of ideas & unlikely to move up the value chain was a string of stock buybacks this year by all major players. I believe a company invests in stock buyback when it feels that it does not have any other better uses of the money. Basically, they dont have/ can't find avenues to invest money where the shareholder growth will be much better than buyback.

Just as an aside: economically stock buybacks are equivalent to dividends, but get a better tax treatment in most jurisdiction.

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

#176

Post by seanmcdirmid »

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…

As an aside, India seems to have much more international level manganent talent than say China.

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

#177

Post by siddharthdeswal »

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…

You're way off on Magento.

See https://magento.com/news-room/press-releases/digital-commerc...

They're not a WordPress plugin, and they are a large company.

I don't mean to be rude, but I don't think you know what you're talking about.

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

#178

Post by [deleted] »

eru wrote: post #171
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.

I've gotten offers for somewhat more for Amsterdam (with booking.com). I didn't take it, because I was getting way more in London at the time.

[deleted]

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

#179

Post by jorblumesea »

I truly believe offshore IT work was mostly a scam in the first place. The work they produced was of very low quality, and often was more expensive because you had to go back in and fix everything. The whole game was to overcharge western firms for cheap crap produced by shoddy programmers overseas. The IT outsourcing firms would pocket the difference. Come in and promise the world, overbill and underdeliver. Then the client is stuck with your crap and needs to pay you to maintain it.

It was on a matter of time before companies figured it out. Add to that advances in automation and the move to the cloud, and this was guaranteed to happen.

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

#180

Post by siddharthdeswal »

blocked_again wrote: post #157
sandGorgon wrote: post #154

These are mostly outsourcing companies. India's IT industry is realigning towards domestic markets and #MakeInIndia companies - it is more aspirational to join Paytm, Ola, Zomato in India than to work for a US based outsourcer. It is not even a competition anymore - I'm able to very easily get highly qualified Indians in Silicon Valley to move back and work on something cool in India. This is the reason that nobody i…

> I'm able to very easily get highly qualified Indians in Silicon Valley to move back and work on something cool in India. We understand your sentimence. But please don't exaggerate too much :)

I'm Indian and I agree with you. Parent overdid it a little bit. People gives many shits about the H1B, and it isn't that easy to pull Indians back from the US.

Relatively easier than say ten years ago, but not at the level of bravado that parent exhibits.

Post reply on HN