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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

#221

Post by cpitman »

Clubber wrote: post #54
pksadiq wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These people are mainly relatively unskilled. These companies are notorious for hiring entire batches of graduating students. I guess the best interview should also add a touch-type test and the candidate should require at least 30wpm or so (if typing is very much required for the work). When I was at college I have only seen less than 5 such students from the 250 total.

That's my secret tell to see if someone is a good, experienced developer or not. I've never met a good, experienced developer who was a slow typist.

Depends what you mean by fast. Anecdotally, I learned to use a computer well before anyone thought to teach me to type. I still type "incorrectly" (basically use only a few fingers, with my hands moving more than they should). So I am definitely slower than someone who is trained to type correctly.

But, I would like to think that I am both good and experienced. I picked up my bad typing habits while learning to program, after all.

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

#222

Post by kumarvvr »

deepaksurti wrote: post #212
kumarvvr wrote: post #206

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) Sc w 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 thes…

Yes. The narrative has to change. And frankly, the culture should move towards more risk taking.

Barring a few, most startups take a very conservative approach to expansion and investment.

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

#223

Post by kamaal »

navinsylvester wrote: post #214
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…

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…

>>I am employing and uplifting someones family who doesn't have other means of income.

You are making a virtue out of this. This is really like the British saying they ruling over us was good for us because of english, railways and parks. So they were screwing us for our own good.

Most of these maids, work on hourly basis on slave wages. And are generally treated badly. There are even spaces in Restaurants where they have to sit outside while their masters indulge in fine dining. And other times most people give away old throw worthy food to them. There is no 'help' going on here.

>>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.

Kirana shops near my home are shutting down like no tomorrow after GST, and a DMart opened near by. Indians are known to think through their wallets.

>>Please understand that we can enjoy our lifestyle without any gripe. Why is it so hard to swallow?.

There is a big difference between getting seasoned or at best indifferent to problems, than having no problems.

>>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.

I hope she recovers soon. Yours is a different situation and I understand, most of us(Including me) have many reasons(in my case, old parents) to not move to the west. But I imagine if I was there my life would be way better.

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

#224

Post by kamaal »

murukesh_s wrote: post #167
kamaal wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>The curriculum wont get updated soon enough to catch up with industry trends. No instituition. Not even in the US or any part of the world, will rewrite their syllabus and text books every time something the equivalent of React or Angular JS comes along. You generally teach the base skills from which much can be learned and grown. Also I don't understand this thing about asking colleges to train people in the lates…

> Not even in the US or any part of the world, will rewrite their syllabus and text books The situation is different in India.. Our schools, though are called the same name as institutions in US, are basically skill training workshops. Last time I checked there are 100000 graduates coming out of school in each state, and there would be at least a million engineering graduates produced every year throughout whole of I…

>>Our schools, though are called the same name as institutions in US, are basically skill training workshops.

All schools/colleges are that way. Unless you join a PhD program. Also in the west, emphasis on taking skill based courses is high. They even have a term for the other type of courses, they call it, Underwater basket weaving.

>>Last time I checked there are 100000 graduates coming out of school in each state, and there would be at least a million engineering graduates produced every year throughout whole of India.

Thanks to our population numbers. And why is this wrong. STEM education makes a person think, at-least, comparatively, more rationally than other courses do.

>>Remember there are no strict rules and things have to change with the changing world. India needs to think different than the rest of the world.

India is already doing enough. But at our scale everything breaks.

>>I mentioned ML/AI, and latest Data structures which is 100% relevant for any recent graduate to learn or at least be aware of.

Why only ML/AI? Because they are in demand now? A few days back it was Hadoop etc. Before that Java...

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

#225

Post by _jgdh »

pavanred wrote: post #215
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…

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.…

Reading HN comments about the Indian IT industry triggers the Gell-Mann effect for me. Few people know what they're talking about and those that do are usually at the bottom of the thread. Of course then I open all the other comment threads and consider the comments in those threads correct and well informed.

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

#226

Post by kamaal »

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…

>>it is more aspirational to join Paytm, Ola, Zomato in India than to work for a US based outsourcer.

Its hilarious you mention this. Those companies are in double digit billion $ debt, with no sight of returning even a single $ in profit back to their investors. Snapdeal recently bombed. Ola and Flipkart are next.

>>It is not even a competition anymore

Competition between whom. IT services firms haven't posted a loss making quarter in their history. And Product firms in India haven't posted a profit making in their history. Which is the real trash here?

>>I'm able to very easily get highly qualified Indians in Silicon Valley to move back and work on something cool in India.

They won't unless you beat Bay Area salaries and award stock options graciously. And that will happen only if you have massive VC backing. Also no one is going to quit their job in a first world country for loss.

>>This is the reason that nobody in India (incl the govt) gives a shit about the H1B rule changes in the US.

A lot of people do.

>>The entire focus of the IT industry is shifting to move up the value chain.

Increased salaries on VCs expense doesn't mean we are moving up the value chain.

>>We are trying to build more Freshdesk in India and sell them to the world... Rather than body shopping.

We were doing that before as well. The IT services firms you see today all started as product companies. In fact they were doing far more tech intensive work than the current breed of product companies will ever do. Most old IT services were early product companies that made banking sotware, embedded systems products and other stuff.

The start reality in India is without a VC pumping billions of $s and then ready to write off, all of it. You largely depend of debt(Why do you think real estate is so hard in India), or you have to bootstrap. If you bootstrap you need the financial discipline of a demon. You certainly can't pay Bay Area salaries to build MVP apps and write HTML/JS.

Most embedded systems start ups which are not in VC fashion catalogue pay peanuts even today.

The sad part of software engineer salaries in India is either US companies pay it, or VCs pay it. If you have to bootstrap, you have to pay atleast 5x less than what somebody like Flipkart pays today.

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

#227

Post by kamaal »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #176
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.

That is because of our English speaking skills. We can communicate better than the Chinese.

Also the fact that most people have good English speaking skills, means a lot of HBO and Star Movies watching as kids, which gives a good idea about American slangs, culture and other things in general.

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

#228

Post by kamaal »

sandGorgon wrote: post #192
siddharthdeswal wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is not incorrect. YMMV obviously...but I stand by what I say. However you misunderstood the reason - they are not coming because of me . They were coming back anyway because they want to work in India and build something here. That was my point all along - I'm not uniquely positioned. It's happening all over.

>>They were coming back anyway because they want to work in India and build something here.

As a former NRI, who stayed in the US. Not one person I know has/or-is moving back because they want to 'build stuff here'.

Most of the times its unworkable visa situations, old parents or something on those lines at play.

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

#229

Post by sirclueless »

navinsylvester wrote: post #214
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…

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…

From an economic standpoint, this doesn't sound very uplifting. Any full time servant you hire is probably going to have less social mobility than you, and less education. And they are necessarily going to earn a fraction of your wages.

Employing someone full time to clean and maintain house isn't really uplifting anyone in a societal sense. Option 1: 30 families eschew automation and hire a full-time maid. Option 2: 30 families own a vacuum cleaner and a dishwasher and hire a cleaner once every other week for 3 hours to maintain their house. The latter is what happens in western communities and it results in 29 more productive workers looking for gainful employment in the workforce. If you don't see why that is an uplifting thing for society, you should take a good hard look at your understanding of economics.

As for your anecdote of the family member with cancer, house nurses are indeed common and affordable in western societies, we generally call this service "hospice." And while I may not employ a cook, there are 150 restaurants in my city that will deliver meals to my doorstep within 30 minutes.

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

#230

Post by cm2187 »

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…

I am not sure throwing more people at the problem will help. Developers need to stop making rookie mistakes. Parameterize all queries, question input coming from the client. Pretty much every major data leak was the result of someone doing something stupid like setting the permissioning to public on a repository rather than not being staffed to do it right.
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