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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

#261

Post by imhoguy »

taway20171214 wrote: post #76
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…

we're a small managed private+public cloud services provider and we only have 2 full time operations engineers to support 30+ client companies. we also have a handful of consultants that do specialized work, working a handful of hours each month. they seem to be serving a small cluster of customers each also. we could support 40, our existing 2 engineers are basically under-worked - we have 2 because it would be insa…

How do you want to do 24/7 with 1 full-time ops eng? Even 2 is small, do they take any time off?

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

#262

Post by kartickv »

tigershark wrote: post #155
JSONwebtoken wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention if your only competitive advantage is price, there always is or will be a source of labor that is cheaper than you. For example, a number of startups I work with are now moving their IT support and basic dev to the Philippines. The quality of work is equally bad or worse, but it's even cheaper than India and the language barrier is comparable.

Actually in Philippines pretty much everyone speaks a quite understandable English compared to the average Indian that thinks to be speaking a perfect English while the reality is quite different.

"Understandable" to you, based on where you live and what dialect of English you speak :)

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

#263

Post by kalleboo »

cm2187 wrote: post #230
Top19 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Developers need to stop making rookie mistakes

And how do you get them to do that?

You hire security engineers to do training, code reviews, internal pentesting...

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

#264

Post by kamaal »

tschwimmer wrote: post #245
kamaal wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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 los…

Citation on FlipKart and Ola being billions of debt? Not overtly doubting, but curious.

Debt is basically taking VC money. There is no way of paying it back, unless they go IPO. Paying it back through profits is a dead end here. People in India are just too price conscious, offer them gracious discounts and they will come to you. The day you stop they go where ever those discounts are. On the other hand they have tried playing the 'exclusive store' game. Its just not scalable, and whoever is try to sell eventually realizes they need a broader audience reach, and bailout immediately.

Now even if they have to go IPO they can't do it with their current financials. No public investor is going to put their money in a company whose first $15 - $20 billion in collection will go all to bail out VCs and remainder will go to subsidize customers's purchases.

Snapdeal is already toast. The real deal is you can't make losses forever, you have to make profits at some point and you have to make a lot of that to make up for early investors.

Ola and Uber are a totally gone case as far as India is concerned. Almost every family here owns scooters, and those who don't will take Uber and Ola as long as they beat auto rickshaw fares.

So here is the dilemma. Whether its Flipkart, Ola or Snapdeal. You are competing with road side hawkers and their profit margins. You can see where this is going.

Its just that India's purchasing power among the common middle class masses has to go up, and they need to stop thinking in terms of 'price first' approach. That won't happen anytime soon.

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

#265

Post by visarga »

forkjoin wrote: post #89
visarga wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the one hand you basically say things will change too much too fast: > CBRE predicts 50% of occupations today will no longer exist in 2025 But on the other hand, things don't change fast enough: > whats shall everyone do? skill up . Is that anything new in software development? Nopes These two positions, change and no change, can't be simultaneously true. If there is change, then there are new applications where h…

Not entirely sure about your inferences from my comment, I didn't say there are not going to be jobs, of course there will be jobs. However, perhaps amidst the Artificial intelligence, jobs will require more creative, social , emotional intelligence. Thats where we need to skill up and point I made above was just to highlight that this re-structuring is not just relevant for todays low valued work but for the entire…

I'll try another example. Let's say we automate cleaning of cities. Suddenly people are going to want drones that can trim trees and bushes, devices that can clean walls, bots that can scour woods and lakes for plastic and junk, and 100 other things that we didn't have the time and energy to do, but now are possible. Each of these applications need to be designed, produced, deployed and managed.

My point is that automation creates new applications, and thus, jobs that sit on top of it. Like SEO - who would have guessed what SEO is 25 years ago? And now there is a whole field. We create new desires, we raise our entitlement to the equal of what we can achieve, no matter how much it is.

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

#267

Post by antonmks »

tschwimmer wrote: post #242
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…

I have a cousin who has a small SaaS business out of Belarus, and he says the top end of what he pays his devs there is $500, which is quite a bit lower than the numbers you're quoting here.

I'm in Belarus now and I can confirm that a developer with fluent English and a few years of experience gets around $400 a month.

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

#268

Post by tejaswiy »

sandGorgon wrote: post #250
kamaal wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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.

I suggest you go and check the senior leadership on LinkedIn for the current stream of startups and large companies. Even more - we have expats actually building successful and highly funded startups in India. Take a look at Zoomcar, Zestmoney and CreditMate. India is extremely startup friendly for foreigners - maybe not as friendly as the US, but definitely more than Europe, China, etc. We are one of the world's lar…

That is still very much a small minority. For the average Indian programmer in the US, there's very little incentive to move back to India purely for professional prospects. Let's face it, I'd much rather code for Amazon in Seattle than Flipkart in Bangalore.

Other factors like the shitty visa situation (more and more people are chosing to move to Canada because of their permanent residency requirements), family ties and some more ethereal things like the pull of the motherland come into play. As an Indian in the US with maybe 70-80 people from my undergraduate class in the US, a grand total of one person went back to India to build a startup despite having a succesful career.

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

#269

Post by kamaal »

sandGorgon wrote: post #250
kamaal wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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.

I suggest you go and check the senior leadership on LinkedIn for the current stream of startups and large companies. Even more - we have expats actually building successful and highly funded startups in India. Take a look at Zoomcar, Zestmoney and CreditMate. India is extremely startup friendly for foreigners - maybe not as friendly as the US, but definitely more than Europe, China, etc. We are one of the world's lar…

Yeah sure. You can get senior leadership anything, as long as you pay 5x the market standard pay. This is for companies who are a net negative in profit.

'Funding stats' don't mean anything in this case where they have to keep dumping money never to see any returns. This will hurt the long term ecosystem even for genuine start ups. As investors will largely look at India as some kind of a money sink, where rogue upper managements splurge by paying big money salaries to their own.

>>We are one of the world's largest consumer internet and smartphone market

Is this why Tata Docomo is shutting operations. Jio is in the debt of the tune 1,25,000 crores and Airtel is enduring losses just to survive?

>>oh and with strong net neutrality guarantees.

We all saw how 2G lobbying went.

>>Everyone wants to tap into that. India is moving very differently now !

Tap into what? Losses?

>>who want to move back to India...

Most of them hold US passports, and will bail at any hint of trouble. They will continue to work as long as their obscene compensations are sustained. They did the same during the 2008 crash. Moved to India, made big money and moved back to US the moment the honey was sweeter there.

Let them put their money where there mouth is, give up US passports, take up Indians passports and work here. Until then nothing much can be expected from this loot-and-scoot crowd.

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