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

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

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

"I've seen more full stack skills, polyglots (...) Companies want an FTE or two that replaces an entire off shore team"

Everything points to gaining breadth in order to "move up the value chain".

"US devs will further specialize in to ML, AI, speech, Big Data/Data Science"

In line with the previous statement, you mean increase their breadth, not specialize, right?

"Those areas are quickly being commoditized by the cloud providers, so they're within reach of most US developers."

What makes these areas more accessible to US developers than offshore?

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

#212

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 se…

And really all the blame has to be apportioned to the founding fathers and what not glorious terms used for the Indian IT body shopping industry leaders? (Kohli's, Murthy's blah blah)

Scw these forefathers for they started on a super negative note with a begging bowl (probably a hangover of multiple years of colonialism) and instead not being aggressive for high end work.

Just give me some work was the attitude these fathers started with, no wonder the son's will do the same. Like father, like son!!!

It is high time the narrative starts changing to cause a change in the mindset of young engineering students and this has to start at a very low level, from engineering schools. The first narrative is to show these forefathers in a more negative light, than positive.

>> It's time to move up the value chain or die.

Die, is the most likely outcome (7/10).

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

#213
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 had a recruiter after me with a €100k senior role in Berlin, I thought the market rate in Germany was nearing SV levels.

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

#214
post #182
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…

I am not talking about enslaving or forcing someone. I am employing and uplifting someones family who doesn't have other means of income.

Excuse me - we have gadgets here and at an affordable cost too. Some people do make conscious decision to avoid automation so we can employ and help others. We have a thought process here to buy from shops near by(albeit little costlier) instead of amazon'g the whole requirement so we can help people near by. Western lifestyle is not a definite one as an ideal one. Please understand that we can enjoy our lifestyle without any gripe. Why is it so hard to swallow?.

In my case - my mom is a cancer patient. I don't know whether i could afford a house nurse and cook in the west from a decent paying job. We got some positives too - that is what i stated.

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

#215
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…

Indian IT Outsourcing Industry ⊆ Indian IT Industry

India is a huge country with a huge population and a rapidly growing economy and a domestic market. Even if it was true a decade or two ago, should we still keep assuming that anything that affects the Indian IT industry is caused solely by the outsourcing industry.

Surely HN can stop having the same conversation every time anything regarding India and IT comes up. A claim like - All engineers/engineering effort/R&D in country X is obviously substandard based on my anecdotal evidence - followed by a discussion treating it as a valid argument.

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

#216
post #140

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.

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.

isn't a lot of the outsourcing connected to western markets and that very VC money?

i think it's all connected you'll find.

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

#218
post #149

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…

The thing is, lots of "cybersecurity engineers" are useless. There are also good ones. I wonder what the relative proportions of usefulness are.

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

#219
post #156

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…

There was a HN post about that “study” ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14156547 - be sure to read the how it works at Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/66kb3c/95_engi... ). There were some very questionable aspects to it and using it as a reference doesn’t reflect well.

Wow. I'd fire anyone who used these people to assess candidates.
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