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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

#251

Post by jimmywanger »

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…

Yeah. Automation makes many webdev jobs redundant.

Let's say you have a restaurant or something. Before, you had to hire somebody to host/design your website. Now, Google/SquareSpace/Wix will do that for you. A lot of these sites also have payment options built in.

Sure, those sites you make automatically won't be so flashy as a personalized one. But, realistically, if you're a business, what you need is the location, hours, maybe a picture, and a list of what you're selling. That's something all these automated website generators provide.

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

#252

Post by astrange »

digitalzombie wrote: post #97
john_moscow wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, how does blockchain come into play with Danish municipal IT?

Only thing I can think of is a ledger. If it isn't about currency then it is some sort of ledger.

Maybe it's a clever way to pay property tax. There's no other use for a ledger that couldn't just be a database+transaction log.

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

#253

Post by xstartup »

I briefly worked as a contractor for one of the largest ad networks in the world and we outsourced 20K ad review jobs to South Asia over 3 year period. But then came advancement in machine learning and now you only needed a few people to review ads after the adversary networks flagged them.

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

#254

Post by jogjayr »

kamaal wrote: post #131
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…

Its strange that you take the names of CEOs and proceed to deduce that as a proof of them being good programmers. Most of them go to Ivy league engineering schools, and then Ivy league management schools. And then from there straight jump into management barely spending any time at all in engineering. And the whole reason why they do engineering is largely because they need a bridge course to get into a masters level…

> Lets talk of the Indian 1% when somebody in a Indian university writes some thing the equivalent of a Linux, Perl or FreeBSD.

Easy-peasy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_B._Shah

He didn't even go to IIT - regular University of Mumbai undergrad.

Here's another: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nehanarkhede/ - co-creator of Kafka, attended University of Pune for undergrad.

I'll grant you they both benefited from attending grad school in the US.

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

#255

Post by deepGem »

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.…

http://www.nasscom.in/sites/default/files/NASSCOM_Annual_Gui...

As per slide 2, IT outsourcing still is the largest contributor to the IT industry. It is not a subset. As per this report at least. I couldn't find any other credible sources.

"All engineers/engineering effort/R&D in country X is obviously substandard" This is obviously a very biased statement that suffers from the 'some/all' fallacy based on anecdotal evidences. Unfortunately the world works this way. What the majority sees and believes is what trumps, regardless of the truth.

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

#256

Post by danmaz74 »

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.…

I read the OP in a different way. In IT - as in pretty much every other field - there are many more low-level jobs than high-level ones. It's also much easier, and much less risky from a strategic point of view, to outsource the low-level ones than the high-level ones, so, most of those which were outsourced were the low-level jobs; we're talking about hundreds of thousands of jobs (millions?) here.

Many of those low-level jobs can be automated, while the high-level ones can't. As the cost of even low-level outsourced jobs goes up, and the cost of automation goes down, it's normal that lots of the most automated jobs get cut. Jobs of which India has a very high relative proportion, not because there aren't high-level programmers there, but because India has the strongest IT outsourcing industry in the World.

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

#257

Post by saurabhnanda »

adrya407 wrote: post #11
abhishek0318 wrote: post #4

These people are mainly relatively unskilled. These companies are notorious for hiring entire batches of graduating students. Situation in top tier colleges is lot better. This can be seen from increase in placements in IITs this year.

>These people are mainly relatively unskilled Not only that I agree with that, but I'd like to add the fact that after 2 years of working in a team splitted in Romania and India, the working experience with Indian programmers is relatively difficult. It's not something isolated to an individual, all of my colleagues have been complaining that they would really like to work with someone else, but not from India. I thi…

Just curious -- were the two team (Romania vs India) working on the same project? Were you paying them the same money? Did the team members have the same number of years in experience (in absence of a better comparitive metric)?

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

#258

Post by sumedh »

xstartup wrote: post #243
Clubber wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked with Belarusian developers and they were top notch. Belarus is very close with Russia and is considered the last dictatorship in Europe, so weigh that with a decision. Having said that, the old Soviet / Eastern Bloc countries are very sharp. They were of course on the other side of the Cold War, which is what birthed most of our modern technology.

I've had opposite experience. In my case, they were sharp but they were also toxic to be working in a team. So, we had to move our R&D centre to Poland.

> but they were also toxic to be working in a team

What do you mean?

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

#259

Post by bengrunfeld »

What is the chance that this is indicative of a larger trend in IT? i.e. That the "golden age" is coming to an end, and that with the downturn in startup investment, demand for IT professionals - even skilled ones - will rapidly shrink over the next two years, even in the Bay Area.

Fuck, I don't want to make only $60k again....

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

#260

Post by erikb »

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…

Wow, I'm very interested to read more from you. A lot of what you say seems to be the same in many companies I know. Do you write a blog or have considered it?
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