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

#121

Post by grad_ml » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 3:34 AM UTC

krinchan wrote: post #116

navinsylvester wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Serious engineering can be done outside, sure. But after years of competing with Indian outsourcing, US engineers have really upped their own skills. Sourcing that talent from India isn't cheaper because it's so rare those engineers can demand similar prices to US engineers and still get a job and an H1-B. Without Infosys. Or Tata.

I'm sorry, what kind of engineers "after years of competing with Indian companies have upped their skills"? Just curious.

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

#122

Post by navinsylvester » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 3:35 AM UTC

ryen wrote: post #109

navinsylvester wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>but assuming that so called home countries brains only can do serious engineering is quite short sighted. I don't think thats the point he's trying to make. The Indian IT industry was designed and built for a certain type of labor/outsourcing market. It will take serious investment and attitude shift internally for local startups to grow and retain talent. Much of that talent that is able to perform the serious engi…

> 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 shaped by the demand. You wanted cheaper options and you got provided one.

> It will take serious investment and attitude shift internally for local startups to grow and retain talent.

Pay good and you will retain talent.

> Much of that talent that is able to perform the serious engineering you describe continually leave the country for the U.S. and other markets.

Please speak for yourself. The west fixation does not apply to all folks. We get to do awesome engineering work here so don't have to be in a foreign land to do so. With remote teams coming into the picture having a preset notion that a team has to be local is an outdated mindset. And also - we can afford couple of maids in a decent paying job and have a better lifestyle here than the west can afford.

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

#123

Post by kamaal » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 3:36 AM UTC

abhishek0318 wrote: post #4

These people are mainly relatively unskilled. These companies are notorious for hiring entire batches of graduating students. Situation in top tier colleges is lot better. This can be seen from increase in placements in IITs this year.

>>Situation in top tier colleges is lot better.

Situation there is even more worse. Most of them are job hoppers who hop job after job.

Most people from IITs I know don't even a single full project on their resume.

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

#124

Post by smnrchrds » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 3:37 AM UTC

user5994461 wrote: post #112

qaq wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very far from "poor" when IT industry is concerned :). While pay rate is obviously lower vs US it's higher or on par with most EU countries. So for say Senior Java Dev (the pay is much more dependent on a stack vs US) making 66K - 72K which would be about half of what same person would be making in US (outside of SV), but tax rate will be around 3% vs 30% and cost of living is a fraction of what it is in US. Whe…

70k gross is more than what a senior developer would get anywhere in Germany or France. If you really get that much, you've got it better than all western Europe, except London and Zurich.

True. For that much money you could hire instead in Canada and not deal with language or time zone barriers.

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

#125

Post by jmspring » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 3:38 AM 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…

I've had amazing outside outsourced engineering done both in India and Eastern Europe. In the case of India, it was with a specialty firm. The big job shops, be they in India, Philippines, etc. have a limited life cycle as outsourcing for basically "crud" apps goes by the wayside.

There was no "serious engineering" going on at any of the large Indian firms I dealt with. Boutique, for sure serious work.

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

#126

Post by grad_ml » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 3:40 AM 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…

This is plain BS. I don't recall any CS department in India (and I know 100's) teaching, MS-word, Logo, Basic, Powerpoint, excel etc. However, I did TA'ed at Rice University, TX, Excel course for freshman.

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

#127

Post by user5994461 » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 3:42 AM UTC

qaq wrote: post #111

user5994461 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And a lack of job prospects in the region. The decent developers have no alternative but to work in the local outsourcing shops.

There is a good number of product companies that have large offices there (Magento, Samsung, GitLab, Wargaming, Grammarly, Ubisoft and a ton more) plus large outsourcing companies pay well and are generally working on large scale serious products

Magento is a wordpress plugin, or similar enough. Hardly a large company.

Samsung is a big hardware company, I'm not sure what they would have in software job but why not.

GitLab is a fully remote company, they don't recruit anywhere specifically. Their full disclosure on their (low) salaries and losing customer data is certainly driving away the senior folks I know.

Game companies are the shithole of the industry, the worst conditions and pays, worse than Indian sweet shops and failed SV startups. There is no sane job or career to be made there.

Back to the point. You're going to work in a consulting shop, soon enough.

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

#128

Post by X86BSD » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 3:43 AM UTC

56,000? That’s it? That’s literally like one city block in Delhi. I think they will survive.

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

#129

Post by shagie » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 3:45 AM UTC

grad_ml wrote: post #121

krinchan wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious engineering can be done outside, sure. But after years of competing with Indian outsourcing, US engineers have really upped their own skills. Sourcing that talent from India isn't cheaper because it's so rare those engineers can demand similar prices to US engineers and still get a job and an H1-B. Without Infosys. Or Tata.

I'm sorry, what kind of engineers "after years of competing with Indian companies have upped their skills"? Just curious.

I would contend that engineering FIRMS have upped their skills with more emphasis on soft skills and management feel goods (having people on site tomorrow if asked, training and such. They’re offering a larger value proposition at a higher cost when management has realized that lowest bid doesn’t necessarily mean best value.

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

#130

Post by negativ0 » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 3:46 AM UTC

mythrwy wrote: post #34

adrya407 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>These people are mainly relatively unskilled Not only that I agree with that, but I'd like to add the fact that after 2 years of working in a team splitted in Romania and India, the working experience with Indian programmers is relatively difficult. It's not something isolated to an individual, all of my colleagues have been complaining that they would really like to work with someone else, but not from India. I thi…

I'd sure hate to be judged by the "Average" American.

american people who judge indians is pathetic, and the fact the they feel "superior" is really funny. i bet that with the same education an indian is way more smart than an american.

most of the comments in this thread are bullshit.