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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

#381
post #374
post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If this was attractive to tech folks, the hiring tests would include more business problem oriented questions than fizzing and buzzing And yet business people don't get any tests. No one else on the entire planet gets tests for almost every role opportunity they want to explore. So why do developers have to? Actually, I can answer that. The answer is because the overwhelming majority of a modern company's productiv…

I'm a developer. Possibly a little more experienced from the level of ad hominem negativity you're comfortable directing at others to feel better about one's self. A software developers union would be interesting. Accreditation from testing to be in a professional body will still have people who can hide among the work of others, but much less so. Also a challenge for a tech union would be the rapid changing nature o…

> I'm a developer. Possibly a little more experienced from the level of ad hominem negativity

Perhaps if you were actually more experienced, you wouldn't stoop to the ultimate irony of dismissing every point I made by attacking my tone. I stand by what I said, people like you are redundant in modern tech. I think when you tell yourself you're more experienced than me, you're conflating that with you being older and 'wiser' and less confrontational because your testosterone levels have dropped. The tech industry assigns a negative value to age and wisdom, sorry.

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

#382
post #365
post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thread is about a developer's issues with being tested during interviews, so I would say the potential employee is entitled if balking about being asked about their abilities to the extent that the employer is the one signing the cheque, and a basis for the employer being able to add value in exchange for salary is still being established. Knowing a little more than non-technical employers doesn't place an inexpe…

> If this was attractive to tech folks, the hiring tests would include more business problem oriented questions than fizzing and buzzing And yet business people don't get any tests. No one else on the entire planet gets tests for almost every role opportunity they want to explore. So why do developers have to? Actually, I can answer that. The answer is because the overwhelming majority of a modern company's productiv…

The funny thing is that for all your grandstanding about developer importance and productivity and what not, the only point you successfully manage to get across is that you are an obnoxious child that no one would wish to work with.

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

#383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cl…

For the first two, that's probably a better way to put it. Breadth and T-shaped skill sets are all the rage.

For the last bit, I tried to hint at that in my original comment. People who achieve that breadth outside the US can normally negotiate directly with employers in the US. This can give them more money and gives the company a more stable resource. The bulk hires from Infosys, Tata, etc. don't have this luxury.

For US employees, there's both the drive to keep ahead of offshoring and the fact that so many US employers will invest in their employees. This class of offshoring companies that are suffering don't do that.

Which is another point: These are not intended to be generalizations of all offshore teams and offshoring companies. The more breadth and automation an offshore company leverages, the more resilient they are.

I don't doubt that Infosys and Tata will survive, but the sheer scale of their employment numbers is going to take a permanent hit and stateside devs are again going to need to become even more jack-of-all-trades with more than one specialization to stay ahead.

Behold, the birth of the TT skillset. /s

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

#384

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 had also heard that many companies were moving contracts out of India due to the inevitable rise in cost and the existence of other regions willing to work for less. I've no clue how prevalent that is, though. It makes sense and should have been expected. Once a region handles anything (IT, manufacturing, whatever) for awhile, they get more experienced and skilled and start demanding higher rates, so if the low cost was the attraction in the first place, they eventually price themselves out. It is good to hear that India is responding in the right way, by forging their own path rather than relying upon contracts from foreign business. I look forward to see what develops personally (as a US developer)!

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

#385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think for all three, the basic SEO stuff is actually taken care of for you as well. I had zero interest in the services until I read that it meant I wouldn't have to consult yet another seo guide written within the last six months because I wanted to stand up something new.

Yes but for local businesses you also have to manage your product listings and your local listings with those $50 sites actually use the correct markup for local seo and is your browse structure optimised or even crawlable?

Yes - there's a difference between doing it yourself through the GUI for free because of website management tools and paying somebody 50 dollars an hour to hand modify forms and HTML for you.

Also, I believe unless you set the robots.txt file, most sites are crawlable, and SEO, like I said, is not really important for smaller businesses. Mostly they are existing customers who want to find out hours of operation and maybe any daily specials you might have, not somebody who stumbles across your site organically.

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

#386
post #374
post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If this was attractive to tech folks, the hiring tests would include more business problem oriented questions than fizzing and buzzing And yet business people don't get any tests. No one else on the entire planet gets tests for almost every role opportunity they want to explore. So why do developers have to? Actually, I can answer that. The answer is because the overwhelming majority of a modern company's productiv…

I'm a developer. Possibly a little more experienced from the level of ad hominem negativity you're comfortable directing at others to feel better about one's self. A software developers union would be interesting. Accreditation from testing to be in a professional body will still have people who can hide among the work of others, but much less so. Also a challenge for a tech union would be the rapid changing nature o…

Why the UK has several Unions the represent highly technical managerial and professionals and its the employers job to manage the competence or not.

Unions don't really want to get involved with being the accrediting body to many conflicts of interests.

Your right though that untrained people should not really be doing interviews let alone designing them.

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

#387
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…

> trained in cybersecurity

I don't think I've ever met anyone in cybersecurity who was "trained in cybersecurity". At least not anyone useful. They're all developers first.

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

#388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but for local businesses you also have to manage your product listings and your local listings with those $50 sites actually use the correct markup for local seo and is your browse structure optimised or even crawlable?

Yes - there's a difference between doing it yourself through the GUI for free because of website management tools and paying somebody 50 dollars an hour to hand modify forms and HTML for you. Also, I believe unless you set the robots.txt file, most sites are crawlable, and SEO, like I said, is not really important for smaller businesses. Mostly they are existing customers who want to find out hours of operation and m…

ROTFL sorry no I have worked on major sites and even if you use straight html you can screw-up your crawlability and using the latest trendy JavaScript frame works makes it a lot worse.

One major UK site made a simple mistake with the canonical tag on one of 12 websites cost them over £500,000 in lost traffic in lest than a week.

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

#389
Ah the same old argument that everything that can be outsourced is cheap and repetitive. But again we hate the outsourcing industry for taking away our jobs. Seriously why should someone retain you and pay you top $ in the first place, if your job was repetitive and lack specialized skills?

And I have hired & worked with multiple consultants at my company. The quality of the code consultants create is sub-par irrespective of their country of origin. The end of the day, there don't have any skin in the game, and care only about the billing.

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

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Reads to me like "We've significantly reduced the quality of life for our employees, but greatly increased profits!"

More part-time contractors who don't have steady work and fewer FTEs who are on constant call.

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