Wipro, Infosys, Tech Mahindra, Cognizant Slash Jobs
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Back in 2015 - https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/02/27/indi-f27.html
2014 - http://indianexpress.com/article/business/business-others/la...
2013 - http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/companies/less-than-5000...
The only reason this is being played up is the perceived notion of protectionist environment throughout the world (not only US). Then there is the whole thing about "AI" and automation.
Or if you want to go full tinfoil hat on this - It is a ploy to stop people from asking better pay or searching for a new job.
Are they doing something radically new involving machine learning which allows them to be much more productive?
Or have they refined or streamlined their scripting environments and automated build\deploy tools? Perhaps they have built a suitably large and mature framework of components from previous projects which allows greater code re-use? In these cases, using words like "Automation" and "AI" is just putting a new sticker on an old product.
Or are companies just using these buzzwords to give a positive spin to an event whose real reasons are actually more mundane and financial(weak market conditions, reducing bloat in workforce ). Maybe they are attempting to mask something more ominous like significant shift in the market away from offshoring?
For instance, consider the structural changes induced by the whole "cloud" phenomenon. In what is termed "legacy" infrastructure by the "cloud-minded", there is, classically, a whole caste (no pun intended) of operations and sysadmin people with a skill set of "installing servers", "keeping servers running", deploying software packages, applying patches, etc. A large stampede to cloud really does reduce a lot of this mundane but relatively skilled labour, in theory--it's one of the main selling points: lay off 80% of your sysadmin because the infrastructure mostly runs itself! To the extent that it doesn't, focus your operations efforts with a much smaller, leaner team of Cloud Rock Star Ninjas or whatever.
And "mundane but relatively skilled" is, as I understand it, the preferred area for classical Indian offshoring companies' labour arbitrage plays, since it's perceived to be the ideal target range, rightly or wrongly, for outsourcing by developed-world executives.
Then there's all the company that "cloud" has kept, whether conceptually or as a matter of timely coincidence, e.g. the slow fading of the distinction Corporate America makes between Operations and Engineering.
Longer term, they are trying to incorporate some learning algorithms to define a finite number of predetermined outcomes when those systems above spit out errors. A lot of this ultimately leverages error log analysis, known error databases, integrations to ServiceNow, and some scripts to take corrective action.
Traditional Windows system administration involves a ton of menial labor clicking through things according to procedures written down in Microsoft Word.
Maybe they are starting to operate more like tech companies with their Linux server fleets than SMEs with their Windows domains?
Dunno what the actual machine learning application would be.
Well they most likely not. But point here that they are losing lots of business so they would just not need that many people. If one read history it is the same pattern repeating first with textile, then component manufacturing in India. They think cost arbitrage is all it takes to become world leader. It works for some time and then labor saving techniques replace low cost labor.
Arguably continuous integration and deployment are forms of automation that eliminate developer jobs. It's not that there was a "run unit tests" job, but all developers got more productive so maybe a four person team could do the work of a five person team.
Or maybe that refactoring to migrate to the new architecture didn't require help from contractors anymore.
We are not even _near_ an age where we have working AIs sold to someone else. Watson is a real AI but it is an AI as a service, they don't sell watson clones and there is a reason, it is HUGE, hence you get the wit of Watson at a few $$$ per hour. This AI hype will go away soon and blockchain hype will start in a few months, "BLOCKCHAIN TO CAUSE MASSIVE LAYOFFS" "90% UNTRAINABLE IN BLOCKCHAIN"
these idiots don't stop for a moment and see if there is a need to train everyone in ML, if every dev in a company does ML who the f* will write other code?
XRP (ripple) seems to have the potential to disrupt a few thousands job in banking in the near future
More often than not, the bench exists to promise a customer that they have the people to "start yesterday" on the project.
The trouble with choking off the supply into the industry is that often the demand dies out as a result rather than increasing the price of a service - complete rewrites get shelved, new development gets postponed and sustenance projects use band-aids to treat bullet holes.
And that causes a trickle-up effect across the product companies selling into the industry - you don't sell new database licenses if billing systems aren't getting revamped and if that ripples continues, everyone upstream starts getting extremely frugal with their expenses.
Which is bad for the enterprise software ecosystem - the only folks who are likely to not notice that immediately will be small bootstrapped consumer companies, with real boxes to ship and lots of room to grow (or giant ones with room to grow, like a self driving car paid for by clicks).
I'm a bit apprehensive of drastic changes ever since I read the CA Budget (see last page of Economic Outlook[1]).
[1] - http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/2016-17/pdf/BudgetSummary/Economic...
It was rumored that the company I was working had taken poison pill last time by having the ratio of benched workers and assigned workers to 50%:50%.
Their presence in our country was small, but they have multiple office campuses in India. One campus even have a separate building that if you walk to that building to work, people know you are benched.
Compared to other company that I worked, one of their value proposition is to have resources readily available if you want to start a project today, apart from having a dirt cheap offer. So yeah, benching a lot doesn't come as a surprise to me about those companies.
It is such baseless stuff which irks me every time, I have read from MANY papers that automation is doing this that without explicitly saying X automation firm screwed up the revenues.
I would like to see visible proof that "automation" is eating into the revenues, no report says that, they just say "automation and AI"
The journalists don't know difference between AI vs ML and everyone is acting as if "AI and automation" will destroy X firm, no, they won't. Anyone who works in the sw field would know that there are many manual things done in the project so much so that there wouldn't be an "automation firm" which would sell blah blah robots to do human work. It is way off into the future, if it'll ever happen. This madness has to stop.
edit: clarification about who they meant
A lot of these large IT companies relied on long term maintenance contracts for infrastructure and legacy software with unnecessarily large teams on self serving time and material (T&M) models. But these days, even large enterprises have to innovate to stay in the game and their experience with top end Agile consulting firms made them realize that you can do with much fewer people with automation and hiring better. On the other hand, the large IT companies got stuck with their old model and without training and experience on challenging projects, the talent atrophied even while having to eek higher salaries every year due to inflation and talent loss to startups and others.
However, the numbers being reported so far aren't huge compared to the employee sizes of these companies. For e.g. 5% layoff would actually be a reasonable trim on an annual basis. In that sense, the carnage hasn't started yet.
Each time something, which used to be done by humans, is done by a machine, that time spent doing that something is no longer payed to a human and only a fraction goes to the makers of the machine - that's the whole point of automation - reduce costs and increase productivity.
It doesn't lead to [more] humans being payed more money.
I think intuitively it makes sense, but coming up with undeniable proof is quite hard in the globalized economy - the effects of automation often happen further away in the supply-chain graph.
The 'modernized' company just stops importing or paying for X, because they can now do it 'in-house' for a fraction of what it cost them before.
The effect of that is that someone somewhere on the other side of the planet might not be able to find a job doing X as easily as they did before. Or their company goes bankrupt. Is it because of automation ? Could be.
It might create new opportunities, but those require newer and 'higher-level' skills - and as these opportunities arise, someone somewhere is already hacking away trying to automate them. And we're getting better and better at this, so the new opportunities are only available for a short period of time, until someone comes up with a brilliant new way of doing things. The software world is a great example.
I personally think it's very real and being in denial the way that many people in SV are, does not improve matters. We (the technologists) should at least ponder upon these questions and figure out solutions - otherwise we're leaving that in the hands of politicians, which serves as zero comfort to me.
We need to separate our discussion points.
I know that tooling is improving considerably, and rightly so, but that doesn't mean that IT companies will now be downsizing to 10 because of chef or puppet.
Whilst DevOps automation tools like Chef/Puppet/Ansible/Whatever have undoubtedly increased in popularity, very often they are just used as nicer ways to achieve the same thing IT professionals have been doing forever in shell scripts or similar.
This is purely speculation, but I wouldn't at all be surprised if US companies are simply less interested in hiring Indian outsource firms given the current climate and uncertainty around the future of work visas in the US. It's not hard to imagine such companies indicating they will spend less with these firms for the foreseeable future. I don't think anyone believes eventual reform of the H1B visa, the lifeblood of Indian IT firms in their biggest market, is going to be good for the Wipros of the world.
Exactly! The mgmt of the above stated firms sucks, they had no vision or a sense of direction, they make bad decisions and when they are asked questions like Sikka (infosys CEO was asked) Why do you earn millions per year and why do you take 50+% hike and still are unable to deliver then the hide behind "automation and AI" :)
it is mediocre CEOs and C*Os and a lot of other folks which are causing this downturn plus investors too, Google "eliott management letter" to get an indepth real reason behind this wave of "layoffs due to automation and AI".
You'd be surprised how many sys admins and especially developers have never written a shell script.
One of our code tests is to write a simple grep clone, the results seem to indicate that none have ever used a command line. Nearly every submission seemed to think that you could only pass one "-x" (x the placeholder) switch to a command.
If a company wants an inhouse dev team they'd do so without "automation and AI", the thing is, they don't and that's why enterprise software companies are formed.
Sure, I can bake my own bread, grow my own vegetables, mine coal for electricity myself, but I don't. I do what I do best and leave the other stuff to others. It is upto companies to decide if they want to build infra for them.
Yea, very true, The ratio of (Engineers / Managers) need to substantially increase over here.
I've seen it myself doing MSP work. Crappy old system breaks with every program update, every windows update, the wind blows the wrong direction, etc, etc. Client updates to new computers with SSD, new software based partially/mostly in the cloud. Full and correct integration with active directory. Their complaint load can easily drop 5 to 10 fold, mostly from less legacy software issues.
I'm sure you've heard about those people with 10 years of experience that are unable to code fizzbuzz? They hide out in those large corporate environments.
Specially taking into account the type of assemments being done to the employees, or which R&D unit is driving the main products (e.g. WinDev vs DevTools).
Yes, places like Microsoft System Research are great, but that is just a unit from the whole corporation. Same applies to the others.
Well the Indian IT companies have been growing for the last 30 years so they must be doing something right.
Many people managing software teams or budgets don't understand the coding business at all. Those people are like vegetarians running steakhouses.
I am not sure why are you so confused, that is how pretty much all for profit companies work or was it a poor attempt at sarcasm?
the parent points out that this market inefficiency exists because the people making purchasing decisions are not technically competent enough to truly evaluate the vendors that are selling them these development contracts.
A company can make money selling a bad product, it happens all the time; and its a well know phrase in finance that 'markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent'
So you are telling me that these Indian outsourcing companies who have been growing for 30 years with billions of dollars in revenue is all because they are selling a bad product.
So the Indian companies are like wolves eating feeble Western companies like lambs. Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds.
After that they are perfectly fine not having IT people around.
The time each company had a set of developers to sit around and help them on as needed basis, is gone and won't be coming back.
Those that want to keep around onsite development need to upskill their social skills, and also be able to bridge between developer, architect and business relations.
I've never seen this work in practice. It always takes almost as many people to properly maintain a solution as it did to build it, there is no "done" state where the can get rid of the developers. It was accepted as far back as the mythical man month that maintenance is where the vast bulk of software costs are.
> Those that want to keep around onsite development need to upskill their social skills, and also be able to bridge between developer, architect and business relations.
At this rate we're about a decade a way from expecting developers to be one man corporations.
... accepted by companies run by people who read the Mythical Man Month.
Then there's the rest of the corporate world. These things you say are absolutely true, and yet not a day goes by that a company isn't learning that lesson, quite expensively--or better yet, failing to learn that lesson over and over.
Those companies see software development as a cost and not something that need to be kept around.
Usually we also don't have someone sitting on our building to repair the doors when they get broken, we call someone to repair or replace them, when the need arises.
> At this rate we're about a decade a way from expecting developers to be one man corporations.
If you are living in an European country this has already happen long time ago.
In countries like Portugal, many companies are hiring developers on "Green receipts", which are literally one man corporations.
Similarly in countries like Germany and Switzerland, many consultants are freelancers, or work for a consulting company that plays the same role as agents do for sport and movie industries, giving them a fee. Also expected to be an one man corporation from the customer point of view.
The glorified idea of the developer that codes all day long on his cubicle/desk without anything else to worry about is long dead, at least in western part of the globe, when targeting the industries that don't sell software.
The sad reality is that the way software is delivered at enterprise level, there is hardly any company that can be shown as example of excellence.
Only price and the output of applications matter, not how they are running inside.
Is it visible there?
Avoid terrible resellers and body-shops.
The market has dried up. There are springs of Windows, Oracle, NetSuite, Java and other Turn-of-the-Century technology, but new customers are fewer and fewer. Of those are a fraction who want/need bargain-grade Global IT Support.
Combine the declining presence of IT with manual administration interfaces, and it really is no great mystery.
it also makes it easier to bring them later (after 1 year) into US on L1 without all these limitation of H1 like prevailing wage, yearly cap, spouse of L1 can work, GC seems to be easier (at least that seemed to be the case 10 years ago when I last paid attention to immigration)
Find some new, better friends.
>...newer areas such as digital and cloud, which require engineers to engage with clients instead of working remotely
Does that mean trends in remote work contribute to a measurable erosion of their collective markets? Or that their workforces cannot function in a face-to-face environment?
Eastern Europe seems to be quite popular.
Link to desktop site.