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

201–210 of 420 posts

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

#201

Post by Viper007Bond »

wyclif wrote: post #182
kamaal wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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…

This is an important point. As a westerner living in Asia now, I'm always amused by the maid-mongering that goes on here: "Oh, do you have a maid, a driver, and servants?" These are widespread status symbols in Asia. Now, of course these household servants perform valuable labour here. But where I'm from, a technologically advanced country- we've largely obviated household help. We have central HVAC, automatic dishwa…

fjsolwmv: Maybe 100 years ago. I don't know anyone or even heard of anyone with a maid. The closet thing is paying someone to come clean your house once or twice a month for an hour or two and that's pretty inexpensive.

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

#202

Post by Viper007Bond »

fjsolwmv wrote: post #185
wyclif wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an important point. As a westerner living in Asia now, I'm always amused by the maid-mongering that goes on here: "Oh, do you have a maid, a driver, and servants?" These are widespread status symbols in Asia. Now, of course these household servants perform valuable labour here. But where I'm from, a technologically advanced country- we've largely obviated household help. We have central HVAC, automatic dishwa…

People in USA have maids as status symbol too

Maybe 100 years ago. I don't know anyone or even heard of anyone with a maid. The closet thing is paying someone to come clean your house once or twice a month for an hour or two and that's pretty inexpensive.

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

#203

Post by matte_black »

Top19 wrote: post #149
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 le…

China has one cyber security engineer per 22k Chinese and United States has one per 35k Americans. To match China we need to increase our amount of engineers by about 60%, or increase the effectiveness of an engineer by about 37%.

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

#204

Post by cinquemb »

wyclif wrote: post #193
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why wouldn't you just work remote and solve that problem?

This is what I chose, but there are some tradeoffs: there was a biomedical engineering in Cincinnati, OH company who recruited me that I interviewed with that wanted to hire me (and I was very interested in the work seeing as it was stuff that I did but in another field), but they wanted me work onsite…

After a couple of more years working remote, I may just go work for another lab again because its not too hard to find very interesting work, but the pay sucks (for non-degreed folks).

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

#205

Post by Karupan »

Sadly, it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. As an Indian IT guy, I was lucky enough to work in product companies all my life. My many friends in the service industry haven't had that luck. I've heard horror stories and I've sworn not to work for bodyshop firms.

I feel its a systematic issue - too many IT related courses and seats in colleges, companies hiring for head count rather than quality, a huge number of maintenance projects which provide little scope for learning, etc.

Sure the employees do share a part of the blame, but only a part. There is no incentive for them to change anything in a highly bureaucratic environment, so this vicious cycle will continue. I just hope the industry as a whole learns and adapts before its too late and millions lose their job.

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

#206

Post by kumarvvr »

This is fundamentally a value-addition adjustment. For many IT engineers, their value addition to the project/client/company is very limited, primarily because most of them are from degree mills and most of them join an IT company for reasons other than to really work on IT stuff.

There are awesome Indian IT people out there and most of them are gobbled up by product firms like Microsoft, Facebook, Google, etc. IT services firms are mostly left with mediocre IT guys whose eye is mostly on "on-site" positions.

Like many have said, it's going to get even more ugly and sincerely I feel this sort of adjustment is required for Indian IT companies to be ready for future challenges and future demanding work. They have to shed their bodyshop images if they have to be taken seriously. It's time to move up the value chain or die.

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

#207

Post by akhatri_aus »

fellellor wrote: post #144
user5994461 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're missing the point though, the point s/he's trying to make is Capgemini doesn't undervalue the price of labour.

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

#208

Post by constdragon »

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…

Most people in India don't seem to be bothered by a brain drain and don't treat it as a problem as such.

You have to remember that India has more than a billion people and struggles to find work for all of them.

I was surprised to see (in contrast to other countries trying to stem brain drain) that its a stated goal by the Indian prime minister that they want to see some 50 million (more than the population of many countries?!?) workers sent abroad in the coming decade. Whether it eases their unemployment issues or if they see it as a genuinely beneficial strategy is not clear to me. A bit of both I guess.

This plays into another very interesting phenomenon. Indians tend to look up to the western world a lot and I think it shows in their approach to tech.

For example, if you ask most Indians who the top tech people in their country are they'd probably mention Indian CEOs of western tech companies in the US. This is in very stark contrast to say, China, where their own entrepreneurs such as Jack Ma are most influential.

That is to say, rather than build their own ecosystem or companies most Indians aspire to work for Western firms and deeply synthesize their economy to them.

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

#209

Post by deepaksurti »

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…

>> We believe we do some serious engineering.

I am not contesting that you do serious engineering, but just stating your beliefs is moot.

>> There is this west fixation that serious engineering can't be done outside.

I guess this is just anecdotal and to counter with some more anecdotal experience, I (and a few I know) have been reached out from the west, seeking our engineering skills in the niche we operate. So what do we do know? Start believing the other way round, that serious engineering can't be done in the west!!!

>> we do the engineering and it gets maintained by westerners in our organization.

Don't you think you are believing just like the western engineers you were blaming?

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

#210

Post by paulie_a »

unclebucknasty wrote: post #159
jitl wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 avera…

>In the US, the top 15% of the market is in Silicon Valley Wait. What? Sure, there's a concentration of talent in SV, but to simply say that the top 15% of all U.S. IT talent is there is pretty myopic. I get your point overall (though I am not saying I agree). But, had to point out that you tossed out your belief as a "stat", as if it were some well-established fact. Likewise, with your (admittedly) anecdotal observa…

That South Park episode on smugness is relevant to the gp
Post reply on HN