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

#391

Post by lawnmover » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 6:47 PM UTC

navinsylvester wrote: post #70

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…

Might be the case with many IT services firms but assuming that so called home countries brains only can do serious engineering is quite short sighted. I head an engineering team from India and our team is local talent for a firm which is outside India. We believe we do some serious engineering. There is this west fixation that serious engineering can't be done outside. I am not saying it isn't true on most cases but…

Same old china is a giant bodyshop story. And even now many fail to acknowledge how seriously they are in their R&D.

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

#392

Post by lawnmover » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 6:57 PM UTC

kamaal wrote: post #264

tschwimmer wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Of course you sir will be considering all non-profitable startups as in debt. Such a genius you sir.

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

#393

Post by lawnmover » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 6:58 PM UTC

throwaway7749 wrote: post #238

I'm sorry, but all "talent" I've worked with in India has all been very lousy and in retrospect makes total sense. You get what you pay for. I recently left a software company due to their codebase. Low and behold it was constructed by a bunch of cheap worker ants. Sorry, not for me.

Checks out with the name.

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

#394

Post by qaq » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 7:14 PM UTC

user5994461 wrote: post #366

qaq wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure I follow :) the logic. This is a random list of product companies that I remember it's a small fraction of companies with large dev. offices in Ukraine. GitLab was a Ukrainian startup and has a large number of developers in Ukraine. Samsung had about 700 developers as far I remember. The compensation trends have very low correlation to how things are in US. The largest local $ making companies are mainl…

I mean that good developers will migrate toward local companies that have good work conditions, good money, good projects, and good co workers. The companies you quote are not better than a middle grade outsourcing company in these regards, so they're not stealing their talents. If they are the best companies you could think of, that explains why you can find decent developers in the local outsourcing firms.

Well the above to one extent or the other have all of the above but outsourcing companies are on par as far as perks. I am working for fairly large public US company and all of the above mentioned have nicer offices and more perks :). The reason I mentioned these is because they are to some extent well known.

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

#395

Post by otakucode » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 7:39 PM UTC

blindwatchmaker wrote: post #103

One of the articles linking from this one ( https://qz.com/964843/less-than-5-of-india-engineers-are-cut... ) made me laugh: > More than two-thirds of the candidates from the top 100 universities in the country were able to write “compilable code,” or that which does not throw errors when compiled into machine-readable code. I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean? Most devs make typos or errors when writing new c…

When I was in college, back in the late 1990s, my university hired a new professor in the Computer Science department. He had 2 PhDs. In addition to wanting us to copy and paste all of our C++ code into Microsoft Word, blow the font up to 32 point size, and print it out in order to hand it in, he taught us the incorrect way to use cin, assigned homework to use it, and then informed the class that if you looked the answer up in the book and your code worked, you would get an F for not following his instruction.

Needless to say, I and a group of my fellow students went immediately to the department chair. He was fired shortly thereafter. He was an astounding example of total incompetence. I decided to look into these "2 PhDs" he was supposed to have. Both were from Bangalore University. It didn't take much to find their CS department website (which looked like it had been built by an elementary school kid) and the academic requirements necessary to get such a degree. To get a basic CS bachelor's degree you needed high school level math and 2 classes about CS. To get a PhD you needed a full year. As far as I could tell the school had a good medical program, and decided to open a Computer Science diploma mill on the side. I was stunned.

Some good came of it, though. After that, every prospective candidate to become a new professor had to give a presentation to upperclassmen on a topic of their own choosing and submit to being questioned by the upperclassmen. To replace the inept man with 2 PhDs we hired a guy who only had a Masters degree but who had several years experience in the industry, so he could bring some manner of "this is how its ACTUALLY done in the real world" to things. Worked out great, at least from a students perspective.

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

#396

Post by astrange » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 7:51 PM UTC

kamaal wrote: post #141

adrya407 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Well, yeah, entry-level IT stuff was always a target for automation I see this as a progress. Since you replace the first-level IT stuff with automated processes, the now second-level IT stuff will sooner or later become first-level and so on. Therefore all the levels are pushed upwards and we tend to go to higher levels, no matter if we speak about developing, researching, improving etc.

We are/were already there. Use some thing like Lisp and Functional programming really well and 99% of all the current programmers can be put out of job.

That would be impressive. What do you think programmers do all day?

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

#397

Post by jimmywanger » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 8:07 PM UTC

walshemj wrote: post #388

jimmywanger wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As I pointed out, crawlability and discovery isn't really important for "Mike's hoagie shop."

If you start making a lot of money, you'll have enough to hire high priced consultants. If you're just starting up and concentrating on your actual busines, not IT, you shouldn't be worried about the best web framework.

Also, for businesses just starting up, you just need simple HTML. The only information you need to expose are hours of operation, address, and a list of services/goods with prices. Everything else can come later, when you're getting enough business to justify it.

My main point is that small webdevs are going to start getting starved for work. They're getting replaced by generated HTML which do a good enough job for free.

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

#398

Post by yakitori » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 8:48 PM UTC

As someone here has already mentioned, it's more likely due more tech and indian tech especially moving towards clouds for the derivative cost savings ( less manpower ).

This happened in the US as well. Lots of IT positions got cut as companies consolidated much of their backend to cloud services.

But I wouldn't hold my breath on cheaper indian tech industry losing any steam and I'd still betting H1-B visas are only going to be delayed.

India has seen an increase, not a decrease, in FDI ( primarily directed to their tech sector ). It means that foreign companies/governments/etc are still investing in the indian tech sector.

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

#399

Post by yakitori » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 8:57 PM UTC

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…

> All of those operations people should be immediately trained in cybersecurity and deployed literally anywhere in the country.

As someone with background in "cybersecurity". Most "cybersecurity" is automated now. Also, you need heavy background in math/computer science and programming background for cybersecurity. Something most Operations/IT people do not have.

> If you’ve seen the latest password dumps and how bad they are, cybersecurity is getting worse if anything.

That really has nothing to do with "cybersecurity". It's just operations "best practices".

> 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 less the rest of the world (unlike the globally deployed US Navy).

It depends on what a "cyber security engineer" is.

> Ops people are so important.

Sure. But it's also a highly automatable position too.

> NOTE: I actually am an AWS Engineer and I like moving to the cloud, but still.

AWS engineer? Do you mean you work for amazon or you work for a company that uses AWS?

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

#400

Post by thedarkproject » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 10:05 PM UTC

saguro wrote: post #352

shagie wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That really depends then on what one is hiring for. An entry level position? Mid level? Senior? or Rock Star? Those who are opinionated and snobby, even if they are the best preforming, may not be the best fit in many environments. A not insignificant portion of a senior developer's time can be spent mentoring people - and the snobby person may not be the best choice for that. If the goal is to hire a team of one - g…

If you're hiring for 'enterprise development' you're already outside the interest zone of actually talented developers, so that works out I guess. If you're doing 'enterprise' just pick up a bunch of guys with Agile and Cisco certificates, indian outsourcing will also do just fine.

This might be the single most arrogant comment I've ever read on HN. At least those enterprise developers perform actual engineering instead of copy pasting the newest JS framework tutorials and pushing pixels around like all the boot camp hipsters without proper CS education nowadays.