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

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

qz.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 420 posts

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

#291

Post by walshemj »

eru wrote: post #171
user5994461 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've gotten offers for somewhat more for Amsterdam (with booking.com). I didn't take it, because I was getting way more in London at the time.

I looked at Amsterdam as they had/have some nice tax incentives for expats. And as I had the max no of years in the UK state pension I could built up a Dutch pension as well.

Holland also has Mortgage interest relief so you could rent your UK property out and buy a property in Holland with some nice tax breaks

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

#292

Post by sytelus »

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 spotlights on these young trailblazers and writing stories of their struggle and triumphs. There are startup events, meet ups and conferences going on virtually every week somewhere. And in fairly short amount of time, India has racked up some huge successes like Ola, Gaana, Oyo, Flipkart with stories to match with their SV counterparts. This scene is very different from what I had known 5-10 years ago where India held massive number of IT professionals but top 10% of talent pool kept getting drained out of the country. Despite having largest number of IT professionals, country was without its top talents and consequently without any products and startup vision. The scarcity of H1B visa had been magical for Indian startup scene and if this trend continues, US software dominance should have contender in future.

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

#293

Post by walshemj »

jimmywanger wrote: post #251
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…

Yeah. Automation makes many webdev jobs redundant. Let's say you have a restaurant or something. Before, you had to hire somebody to host/design your website. Now, Google/SquareSpace/Wix will do that for you. A lot of these sites also have payment options built in. Sure, those sites you make automatically won't be so flashy as a personalized one. But, realistically, if you're a business, what you need is the location…

and will those sites rank properly in search engines

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

#294

Post by walshemj »

matte_black wrote: post #203
Top19 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

China has one cyber security engineer per 22k Chinese and United States has one per 35k Americans. To match China we need to increase our amount of engineers by about 60%, or increase the effectiveness of an engineer by about 37%.

and what exactly are these "cyber security engineers" doing in china or is this just a fancy title for those monitoring the take from china's surveillance state

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

#295

Post by sideshowb »

saguro wrote: post #287
danpalmer wrote: post #284

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.

badly implemented remote tests. Ftfy

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

#296

Post by walshemj »

kalleboo wrote: post #263
cm2187 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure throwing more people at the problem will help. Developers need to stop making rookie mistakes. Parameterize all queries, question input coming from the client. Pretty much every major data leak was the result of someone doing something stupid like setting the permissioning to public on a repository rather than not being staffed to do it right.

> Developers need to stop making rookie mistakes And how do you get them to do that? You hire security engineers to do training, code reviews, internal pentesting...

Experience is the way to "stop making rookie mistakes"

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

#297

Post by kamaal »

sandGorgon wrote: post #285
tejaswiy wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is still very much a small minority. For the average Indian programmer in the US, there's very little incentive to move back to India purely for professional prospects. Let's face it, I'd much rather code for Amazon in Seattle than Flipkart in Bangalore. Other factors like the shitty visa situation (more and more people are chosing to move to Canada because of their permanent residency requirements), family ties…

In your case it's one...in my case its a dozen. But then, I'm from IIT Bombay - we have always been nuts ! But even the "one" is more than what used to exist earlier. A US job used to be the epitome of what you could achieve in your career. It's no longer the case. I wouldn't presume to comment on you...but do think about it. It's brilliant out here and we would love for you to come and do the same.

Not sure if you are from CS. But IIT Bombay CS, batch is like the going choice for the top AIR in JEE. Also the program and the prestige associated with it is life long aristocratic privilege. Things like funding, and other support from network and alumni get a whole lot easier.

But even with that much going on for you, I still wouldn't recommend returning for something like this. Not unless you had a US passport in hand.

And for most people who go to US don't have even anything close to this going on for them. So you do the math :)

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

#298

Post by baybal2 »

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…

You can partially thank failing Russian economy and depreciating rouble.

Indian outsourcing firms were not that cheap to begin with. Their target market were companies that will choose to outsource even when net monetary benefit does not exceed say 15%.

Now Russian outsourcing companies pop here and there, billing US companies not 85% of the US market rate, but 50% or less.

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

#299

Post by jimmywanger »

walshemj wrote: post #293
jimmywanger wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Automation makes many webdev jobs redundant. Let's say you have a restaurant or something. Before, you had to hire somebody to host/design your website. Now, Google/SquareSpace/Wix will do that for you. A lot of these sites also have payment options built in. Sure, those sites you make automatically won't be so flashy as a personalized one. But, realistically, if you're a business, what you need is the location…

and will those sites rank properly in search engines

Who cares? There's a difference between "really good" (spendy) and "good enough" (free). If you're a small business, you don't really need SEO. You just need to provide information to your customers.

You can of course pay for SEO, but that's my whole point. At some point, you're not willing to pay $50(USD) an hour to get the last few percent of profit, especially if your gross income is fairly small.

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

#300

Post by saguro »

sideshowb wrote: post #295
saguro wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

badly implemented remote tests. Ftfy

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/4k994j/if_...

This is how good talent views any kind of tests. I can't blame them.

There is no other professional industry in the world, where candidates with 6+ years of professional success are asked to sit a god damned test every time they apply for a job. Insulting doesn't even begin to describe the problem with this concept. Don't get me wrong, I understand where the need for testing came from, but that doesn't change the fact that actually good candidates are put off by it and tend to dismiss employers who do it.

Post reply on HN