Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Indian IT, “You're Fired”

linkedin.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 175 posts

Re: Indian IT, “You're Fired”

#111

Post by kumarvvr »

mabbo wrote: post #15

I've never understood the ways that modern companies handle layoffs- call people into a meeting room one by one, tell them they're being let go, then escort them out of the building. It's not just that it's cold, but it builds a huge cloud of oppression for everyone else. I just watched this happen to a friend, and the guy who was sitting next to him is now saying "I could be next, better start talking to recruiters"…

It's because as far as the company is concerned, the employee and his neighbor are replaceable commodities, with their replacements able to handle their work with minimum business impact. That is how it is in most of the roles in most of the IT companies in India. They are in the services field, not the innovation or product or value addition field.

In industries where the company values the employee, this hardly happens. Of course I am excluding employees who have considerable access or reach, who can cause significant business impact, ex. financial sector.

But, whatever the company thinks of it's employees, it's a good practice to not humiliate the employee. Suing also doesn't work in India. So a service job in the IT sector is only a slight degree away from bonded labor.

Re: Indian IT, “You're Fired”

#112

Post by cat199 »

golemotron wrote: post #16

The pathology behind the hypocrisy is the obsession with values we see in corporations today. Let's be clear: work is something we do to provide for ourselves. It is a contract. That contract should not encompass a prescribed belief system, and that is exactly what 'values' are. In the past 30 years we've turned many work environments into quasi-religions where it is expected that employees adhere to particular sets…

> Doing your job well should be enough.

Define 'well' without some sense of 'values', and I might start to believe what you think here..

Otherwise I'm inclined to suspect your critique and resistance might simply be some sort of transferrence of wanting to maintain the dominant own anglo/protestant 'congregational personal piety' values in US culture to the more intrinsically communitarian sense required in this context - (assuming you are from US)

e.g. the philosophy of "I can believe what I believe and you can believe what you believe, I can associate or not associate with others who beleive the same thing, there is no 'correct' way, all things are valid so long as they are 'good', although I don't define 'good', because human nature is naturally good", etc, which is itself an intrinsic and communal set of 'values' embedded within the US culture that is directly traceable to the english/low-countries protestant reformation in combination with the values of enlightenment philosophy..

Agreed some companies get carried away with values lip-service without actually following through though, and, if I'm correct, perhaps this common mode should be the default.. but best to be aware of hidden bias..

Re: Indian IT, “You're Fired”

#113

Post by danmaz74 »

OliverJones wrote: post #73

In Indian polity, withholding relieving letters is brutal. It makes it very hard for the laid-off person to get another job: one must present a relieving letter to be hired elsewhere. Courts aren't a useful remedy for a worker with a family to feed: too slow and expensive.

Can you expand about these "relieving letters"? I didn't hear about those before...

Re: Indian IT, “You're Fired”

#114

Post by oblio »

pc86 wrote: post #29
kemiller2002 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some valid reasons for it. It's sad the way that it happens, but I've been there on occasion where they didn't do that. One stats guy decided he was angry that it happened . . . . he started deleting all the loss curve data we needed off of the network. There was a hurry to stop him which resulted in the network staff having to unplug all the cables from the routers. Hours of having to put the cable back in…

No amount of anger justifies that kind of behavior. If that's not criminal, it should be.

I'm pretty sure that's a criminal offense in most countries in the world. You're destroying company property, at least.

It's the best way to destroy your career and really become unemployable, even if you don't go to jail.

Re: Indian IT, “You're Fired”

#115

Post by syshum »

hyeonwho2 wrote: post #78
thedarkproject wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Switzerland it's usually 2-3 months notice, for both sides. Depends on what's written in your contract. But escorting people out after firing them seems very harsh and overdramatic to me. Never heard of such things in Europe.

Rationally, the company is trying to avoid employees stealing IP, corrupting files, and sabotaging work. But the social signal it sends is "we don't trust our employees, respect them as people, or value their original contributions to our business. They are just replaceable cogs in our machine."

>>>They are just replaceable cogs in our machine.

Which matches how most corporations see their employees

They are Human Resources, to be consumed like any other resource

Re: Indian IT, “You're Fired”

#116

Post by hpcjoe »

exelius wrote: post #99
code4tee wrote: post #5

The Indian IT situation has reached somewhat of a breaking point, hence the current situation unfolding. The real low level stuff is now being increasingly automated thus eliminating the need for cheap labor to do such tasks. At the same time the Indian firms never quite managed to broadly move up the value chain into more innovative and cutting edge areas, which is still very much the realm of local offices of their…

I have observed a different phenomenon: in the last 10 years, "startup culture" has swept over India. There is very little innovative or cutting edge being done in the US either outside of the universities (where many of the researchers are Indian) and a few big companies (Google, Facebook, et al -- who all have large engineering offices in India as well). Honestly, I find it easier to hire for skills like AWS, node.…

Hmmm ... at $dayjob-1, I watched one of the major Indian IT houses take over a large US companies infrastructure in the interests of cost savings. Driven in large part by your standard gaggle of very expensive (and often clueless) big name consulting firms.

The net result is that this former customer took a system that worked well, and replaced it with a system that doesn't. Add in frequent outages, "core team" changes on the IT side, and on the customer side (they fired all their internal developers and most of their support) ...

... This would make for a compelling "do not try this at home, kids" type case study. Somewhere in there, the expensive consultants made some other egregiously bad statements to the customer, resulting in a disastrous policy with regard to their core analytics.

I give them another 2 years before they reverse course and fire the IT firm and the consultants.

From my personal experience, the money you "save" is rarely worth the headaches associated with this. Call it a Pyrrhic victory. It looks like you are saving money. You really aren't.

This said, and going back to the OPs point, this change was inevitable. Automation is going to wipe out low level jobs in this space, and the most at risk are those whom have not adapted. The Indian IT firms have not adapted.

Re: Indian IT, “You're Fired”

#117

Post by shagie »

TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #87
shagie wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My previous job was in the north woods of the Midwest where there are fewer than 75k people living and the next nearest city of more than 25k is an hour drive away. There are several companies there, all hiring at all levels. There are opportunities for entry level work everywhere. However, the demand for living in urban areas with culture events changes the equation to one where employers have the ability to pick an…

You're speaking like someone who happens to live in or around one of the tech hubs of the Midwest. I also live in the Midwest, have several certifications, am 75% through an IT Bachelor's degree, and I have been unable to find tech-related work in the third largest city in my state. Just because your area happens to have work doesn't mean the rest of rural America does. There's a reason political extremists were near…

How about Eau Claire? Duluth? La Crosse? Iowa city? Marshal? Wausau?

If there is an influx of people to an area (Madison, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Rochester), entry level will be harder to find. This extends to a reasonable commute distance away.

If you have your heart set on the larger midwestern cities, you will need to look harder for the jobs (possibility to less traditional tech employers) and places where there are not "fabulous" roles to fill (instead of entry level code ninja with free coffee, entry SDET in a boring government office).

My first tech job after graduating with a 4 year CS degree was customer support - answering phones. Then I did QA for awhile. Then a startup as a sysadmin / webmaster where the paycheck bounced. Two years after I got my first tech job, I got an entry level programming job at a tech company doing internal automation.

Re: Indian IT, “You're Fired”

#118

Post by unityByFreedom »

TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #17

Many comments here are laughing about the irony of the outsourced labor becoming irrelevant, but it should kind of be worrying. Organizations are lowering the number of jobs to the point that only the most skilled and experienced workers get jobs. If there are no lower level positions for people to take on, how will the masses work their way up and improve? How can our local and global economies improve for everyone…

> If there are no lower level positions for people to take on, how will the masses work their way up and improve?

I agree with that. First time I thought about it was when Obama said we don't want those low skilled jobs. I felt that was too broad a statement. Don't we want all levels of jobs to enable people to enter at any level? For me, it was hard to go through school all at once with confidence that I would enjoy my job afterwards. I found I preferred to go to school for a bit, then work, then go back, then work again, then go back to studying again to refine my focus, interest area, and be able to follow current trends. In order to follow this pattern I needed to first experience a bit of low skilled manual labor.

Maybe everyone doesn't need to do that but I found it helpful.

Re: Indian IT, “You're Fired”

#119

Post by ColanR »

redleggedfrog wrote: post #61
emodendroket wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but there's no fundamental law of the universe that says we have to just accept that unconditionally and let them do whatever they please.

Or you need a revolution to overthrow the totalitarian regime(s). Just saying, there's always options, just depends on how motivated you are to change things.

It's called a startup.

Re: Indian IT, “You're Fired”

#120

Post by senthilnayagam »

2015-16 Was a subcontractor for a US startup which acquired another startup. We had to document the old code base and reduce the cost of operations.

Worked for over 7 months. Then the founder decided it was not worth it. He fired all the remaining tech staff(acquired startup) and people who managed us.

When followed up for pending invoices, we got a email with threatening tone, that they are investigating all the contracts signed up and payments for fraud.

So not getting paid also happens in many cases.

In another case in 2008 a Bay Area startup got bankrupt and systems engineers brought the racks and expensive chairs from office, and they were doing yard sale

Post reply on HN