India’s IT industry laid off more than 56k employees this year • Hacker News Board

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

#301

Post by RandomCSGeek » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 10:52 AM UTC

sytelus wrote: post #292

I see a large number of bright Indian developers now staying back in country because its almost impossible to get H1B visas (that was actually the case even without Trump and now its getting much worse). This has started interesting trends in India. All of the sudden, now there is VC culture shaping up and I'm seeing lots of Indian developers doing their own startups. Indian newspapers frequently are putting spotligh…

As an Indian CSE student, I agree with this. But there's more. The downfall of IT industry, and general decrease in need of IT engineers, is finally decreasing the amount of students joining engineering.

Admissions on avg are 50% of capacity, with many colleges having less 30%. This will lead to closure of many sub-par quality colleges, which I hope will improve overall quality of Indian IT engineers.

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

#302

Post by knowThySelfx » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 10:58 AM UTC

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…

Whatever it is, there's still a shortage of skills everywhere in IT sector.

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

#303

Post by piva00 » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 11:01 AM UTC

scadge wrote: post #276

There are approx. 3.1 million employees[1] in India's IT sector. Is 56k (which is lower than 2%) so much? [1] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-approximate-number-of-IT-e...

I'd say that 2% of a whole industry being laid off is quite considerable, if 2% of the German car industry is laid off in a single year it'd be considerable, for example.

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

#304

Post by sideshowb » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 11:09 AM UTC

saguro wrote: post #300

sideshowb wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

badly implemented remote tests. Ftfy

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/4k994j/if_... This is how good talent views any kind of tests. I can't blame them. There is no other professional industry in the world, where candidates with 6+ years of professional success are asked to sit a god damned test every time they apply for a job. Insulting doesn't even begin to describe the problem with this concept. Don't get me wrong, I understand where…

Funny yes, but that's not even parodying a test, it's a checklist of buzz words. Which is below even what I'd call a badly implemented test.

Good tests are not tests of any specific knowledge. They test reasoning and communication skills in a programming context.

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

#305

Post by hsrada » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 11:12 AM UTC

kamaal wrote: post #290

hsrada wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> while contributing a net negative to the Indian economy (As their education is heavily subsidized at the Indian tax payers expense). Below a link to a study from '08 that tried to assess the contribution of IITs to the economy. Perhaps some numbers might change your mind? (It's incomplete but includes the executive summary.) https://www.ibef.org/download/Content_19dec.pdf Perhaps an article (from TOI nonetheless)?…

Amount of non-IITians running/starting industries far exceeds in number. And they don't get the same funding or training or any human resources help in return. Of course if you run institutions for decades eventually good people are going to come out of it. But by and large most IITs are largely places to train people, and send them to foreign countries. Why should the tax payers pay for them? An argument could be ma…

> Amount of non-IITians running/starting industries far exceeds in number. And they don't get the same funding...

Can you give me a source on this? One that compares the economic contribution of students from the next-10 colleges in India and finds it to be more than that of the IITs. Because otherwise, you're comparing different sample sizes and your statement becomes trivially true as a result.

> But by and large most IITs are largely places to train people, and send them to foreign countries.

Try looking up statistics of what % of students go abroad immediately after graduating from an IIT. Perhaps that might help you revisit this assertion.

> An argument could be made to spend this money to improve public schooling infrastructure in India.

The government's already spending 10x on that than they are on Higher Education. (2009) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_India#Budget How much would an extra 0.5x help.

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

#306

Post by RandomCSGeek » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 11:21 AM UTC

jorblumesea wrote: post #179

I truly believe offshore IT work was mostly a scam in the first place. The work they produced was of very low quality, and often was more expensive because you had to go back in and fix everything. The whole game was to overcharge western firms for cheap crap produced by shoddy programmers overseas. The IT outsourcing firms would pocket the difference. Come in and promise the world, overbill and underdeliver. Then th…

There are 3 types of companies here in India.

1. The likes of TCS, Wipro and Infosys. These have a huge workforce and literally hire in wholesale. Even this month, Wipro hired something like 50 students from a nearby college. They don't look for your programming skills or even CS theory knowledge. Nope. They hire based on marks, group discussion, English skills and even looks. Basically, anything that is not related to CS. Hell, they even hire mechanical engineers. In my college, students got placed this year because, a. They had good relations with faculty. b. Looks(for women) c. Acting "friendly" to a middleman(applies to women) If you deal with these companies, I guarantee you, you'd get a poor product.

2. smaller outsourcing companies. Some of these are good, some of these are bad. Again, some manager might hire a student because she looks hot, while some other might genuinely look for skilled students. I'd suggest dealing with these companies, after getting good feedback about them from someone.

3. Startups. These are few, but the number is growing. I hope to get selected in one of these.

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

#307

Post by murukesh_s » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 11:21 AM UTC

kamaal wrote: post #278

murukesh_s wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Why only ML/AI? Because they are in demand now? NO only that, but because it can be the new IT. Java, Hadoop etc are only languages and frameworks, that had at most a life span of a decade. But ML/AI is a whole new world. If things are going to be progressing in the current pace, then ML/AI could have a big impact on the world as the personal computers did and can be the next big thing of this century. All this aut…

>>But ML/AI is a whole new world. For almost all programmers who will eventually work with this thing, they will mostly use some frameworks to do it. The real math behind all this stuff is quite old. There are already courses available to do that. Indian statistical institute offers beginner to advanced courses in statistics which you can take, they have been available for decades now. Anything that you will likely d…

>>For almost all programmers who will eventually work with this thing, they will mostly use some frameworks to do it.

Frameworks only provide part of it. In the case of AI, they just provide a general way to represent neural networks. Each use case need a different type of network with hundreds of parameters fine tuned and trained. Of course you can download pre-built algorithms and model zoos, but they are at best couple of years old.

Also do you think that the best things will be available under a framework? There are open source frameworks (like Tensorflow), but you will be surprised at the amount of research under progress and what portion of it is available for public. For e.g. look at the amount of work that China is doing in the field (And available for public scrutiny) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhp47v5OBXQ.

India (or any other Country) could do proper research in the area or end up buying these stuff from other countries, provided they give state of art technology to others. Just imagine a drone or an army of drones equipped with such AI technology can survey 24/7 and instantly take down your enemy even across a country.

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

#308

Post by sbmthakur » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 11:29 AM UTC

sytelus wrote: post #292

I see a large number of bright Indian developers now staying back in country because its almost impossible to get H1B visas (that was actually the case even without Trump and now its getting much worse). This has started interesting trends in India. All of the sudden, now there is VC culture shaping up and I'm seeing lots of Indian developers doing their own startups. Indian newspapers frequently are putting spotligh…

I concur. I feel that these H1B restrictions will help India in the long run. Instead of doing some mediocre coding job in the U.S., the same people can stay in India and change the face of the country.

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

#309

Post by FLUX-YOU » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 11:31 AM UTC

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…

>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 heading into the cloud.

He ought to look at more security based roles to fill that gap, unless that's a separate department for you guys.

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

#310

Post by RandomCSGeek » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 11:31 AM UTC

prakashdanish wrote: post #168

As a final year undergraduate, this scares me a lot. Not sure why this made such big news because this is pretty much evident once you talk to a majority of cs undergrads, they literally have no idea and interest in cs but are in it because it is, well, 'trending'.

As a final year undergraduate, this makes me happy. Finally the trimming that IT industry badly needs is happening.

And as a domino effect, admissions are also falling. I hope shitty colleges, like the one I belong from, close down.

Surely, I am having bad time too. I haven't found a job yet. And despite applying to 50-100 companies, hardly 1-2 replied. But I gotta keep trying, hopefully I'll find a job one day. If not, well, it's better not to worry about things out of control. One can always do something to pass that day, and hope for a better tomorrow.