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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

#411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are you in college? You will find that 3 is not all rosy as it seems to you right now, if you are not from a top tier or atleast decent tier college. I was like you back in college when I realized that heading to TCS etc was a dead career path from the start. The better product startups all look for "IIT/NIT/whatever other brand college" students. Snapdeal, for eg, first switched the application engineer position tha…

So did you make it to a good company?

Yes, I'm still in college, although I'm in final year, so only 6 months left. What you said is true, I realize that most companies are ignoring my resume(as I am not from IIT/NIT, I am not even from a autonomous institute). But I hope I can at least get placed in small scale startups, or small product businesses.

Wish I had concentrated more on OSS contribution/ side projects rather than competitive programming. Let's see what happens now. But I'm sure I won't join the likes of TCS. Worst case, I'll become a Uber driver.

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

#412
post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why blind CV screening and remote tests in hiring are crucial. We all have these biases and sometimes the candidates that pass those phases are surprising.

Remote tests put off actually good talent, they are insulted by that kind of waste of time. As for biases, bias isn't inherently bad. Bias is critical to how neural networks operate in ML. Removing bias is to intentionally discard valuable observational data and harm your rate of success.

> I've seen Indian IT workers with CVs 3 times the size of mine and glowing recommendations from past employers, and most of them failed fucking fizzbuzz. After you deal with a dozen people like that, you just start to subconsciously dismiss Indian candidates because chances are, they're gonna be another one of those.

A model based on a training set of 12, surely encompasses all biases accurately of a population of 10s of millions.

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

#413
post #381
post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 '…

Email me, happy to compare how much experience we might have and the relevance.

Attitude carries one past those with just skill and knowledge.

Learning to channel energy instead of raging at others is the ultimate productivity.

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

#414
post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope such hardball tactics will set up those companies to fail at their digital transformation they are undertaking anyways. All labor, skilled or not, local or not, deserve basic dignity and respect. The reality sadly is some groups have to work much harder for much less and it is leveraged against not only them, but other groups too. Seeing freelancer rates worldwide slowly creep up may be a significant of things…

> All labor, skilled or not, local or not, deserve basic dignity and respect. I fully agree. I hope these rates increasing will help the talent in this entire industry price itself better.

It has been surprising me how much easier it has been to find remote talent solely on mutually being developers and starting with a foundation of respect (and clear specs). Communicating and working together well is needed especially for remote work.

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

#415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you talk about the cloud, do you mean SAAS, PAAS, or IAAS? I'm asking because we looked into moving our infrastructure to the cloud and the numbers just didn't add up. We've started to move some application to SAAS but most of the stuff just doesn't make sense to move to the cloud.

SAAS and parts IAAS. We've already moved our operations to a "private" cloud we run on servers we rent, but we're positioning ourselves to go full scale Azure. Business case wise it doesn't make sense to move just to go cloud. When we moved into the rented cloud we did it instead of replacing our old servers that were end of life. This meant we saved money over all because buying and running your own hardware is expe…

> Or in other words, it's more expensive to run our applications on a SAAS platform than on our own servers, ...

But isn't this just because the initial up front investment for your existing on prem infrastructure has already been spent, and that they are unlikely to all reach eol at the same time? Over time, won't the cost savings of the cloud model make up for the on prem write-off plus the costs of re architecture-ing for cloud? What sort of workloads do you never see moving to IaaS, where the costs of rearchitecturing are just too high? Any opinion on the new VMW on AWS offering, it's pricing, etc?

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

#416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

nice guess, but it's the owners who pick up the slack, i.e. me and my partners. we don't have junior people on the payroll i.e. people who would be frequently on call.

second, we manage run-of-the-mill web applications, not a bunch of internal IT stuff that is constantly breaking due to user abuse and poor planning. two different types of clients.

the problem with running a small tech company is you get accused of all of the downsides of a big company, but enjoy none of the associated upsides.

so in your mind, i'm an evil capitalist squeezing every last dime out of my workers, but at the same time, i'm unreliable. in reality none of these things are true, because it's my company and my responsibility to run it.

do you see how that works? this is how large companies get away with terrible practices -- because nobody gives business to the smaller ones, usually for reasons that are made up on the spot, like you just did.

keep that in mind next time you talk to a small vendor.

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

#417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you in college? You will find that 3 is not all rosy as it seems to you right now, if you are not from a top tier or atleast decent tier college. I was like you back in college when I realized that heading to TCS etc was a dead career path from the start. The better product startups all look for "IIT/NIT/whatever other brand college" students. Snapdeal, for eg, first switched the application engineer position tha…

So did you make it to a good company? Yes, I'm still in college, although I'm in final year, so only 6 months left. What you said is true, I realize that most companies are ignoring my resume(as I am not from IIT/NIT, I am not even from a autonomous institute). But I hope I can at least get placed in small scale startups, or small product businesses. Wish I had concentrated more on OSS contribution/ side projects rat…

You can still do OSS contributions and make small side projects to get noticed. The likes of us merely start X years behind the likes of those that go to a prestigious engineering college when it comes to work. X is as big a gulf as you let it be. Factor that into your growth and make of it what you will.

>I'm sure I won't join the likes of TCS

TCS is fine if you're fine with maintenance work and/or want to pivot into doing an MBA or something similar. However, even TCS etc are laying off a lot of people and will probably shrink their "bench" pools greatly in the near future, due to the death of outsourcing.

>I'll become an Uber driver

I'm sure it won't have to come to that, but yes, the job market slowdown is real.

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

#418
post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why blind CV screening and remote tests in hiring are crucial. We all have these biases and sometimes the candidates that pass those phases are surprising.

Remote tests put off actually good talent, they are insulted by that kind of waste of time. As for biases, bias isn't inherently bad. Bias is critical to how neural networks operate in ML. Removing bias is to intentionally discard valuable observational data and harm your rate of success.

I've had and seen this discussion many times, but haven't actually seen that much real world evidence. We don't have people dropping out of our interview process because of our tests, and we use them from all roles from customer support to C-suite roles.

Most developers with some seniority who I speak to believe they are an important part of an effective hiring process for developers, and are humble enough to take one. That said, we don't "insult" them with fizz buzz, we have a test that takes some thinking, and allows the best candidates to show off their skills.

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

#419
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> at the big scale the top R&D and engineering work still generally occurs in the home countries that were sending work to India and there’s little evidence that these jobs could, at scale, be done successfully by the Indian firms offshore. I was talking about this outright dismissal without any ground. > Indian IT industry was designed and built for a certain type of labor/outsourcing market. Indian IT industry got…

> And also - we can afford couple of maids in a decent paying job Which is nothing to be proud of, the maids are affordable because lot of poor people did not have the same privileges like you had.

Yea why do Indians always brag about having maids. That's disgusting.

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

#420
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And also - we can afford couple of maids in a decent paying job Which is nothing to be proud of, the maids are affordable because lot of poor people did not have the same privileges like you had.

Yea why do Indians always brag about having maids. That's disgusting.

Unfortunately the poor people who are usually illiterate are treated as a lower class.

The rich or upper middle class kids while growing up see that they and their parents can order the maids to do almost anything and so when the kids grow up they see the maids as a class of people who are not equal to them.

It becomes a status issue as well if you say you dont have maids then your affluent peers will think you are weird or that you cant even afford a maid.

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