India’s IT industry laid off more than 56k employees this year
qz.com
qz.com
The India firms haven’t really moved up the value chain much and thus there’s just less work there. They put fancy marketing on the front but their main product is still cheap labor for low value IT work. While there’s certainly advanced stuff happening in India, 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.
Having said that, the old Soviet / Eastern Bloc countries are very sharp. They were of course on the other side of the Cold War, which is what birthed most of our modern technology.
What do you mean?
If you are not accustomed to it, it can be a shock, but it certainly can lead to finding the best solution.
In fact, C++ devs from that region are the secret sauce to a lot of large codebases I've seen.
I've noticed this as well. Very strange that it is so "poor" but so talented. I guess that probably won't last.
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.
The companies you quote are not better than a middle grade outsourcing company in these regards, so they're not stealing their talents. If they are the best companies you could think of, that explains why you can find decent developers in the local outsourcing firms.
See https://magento.com/news-room/press-releases/digital-commerc...
They're not a WordPress plugin, and they are a large company.
I don't mean to be rude, but I don't think you know what you're talking about.
If you really get that much, you've got it better than all western Europe, except London and Zurich.
i think it's all connected you'll find.
A couple of times, even though that team does not have an officially important role, you would see stalls on major decisions until the remote team had a chance to weigh in.
After a couple of more years working remote, I may just go work for another lab again because its not too hard to find very interesting work, but the pay sucks (for non-degreed folks).
A senior dev can make 80k USD in India (before taxes) working for American, non IT services companies
I didn't take it, because I was getting way more in London at the time.
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
(There are some tax breaks you (or your clients!) can get for investing in IT, though.)
The only limitation these firms face in growing faster is getting their hands on talent.
Do you mean that as in "move" or as in "work long hours"?
Google has at least offices in Germany, too.
Google has offices in almost every countries but they are administrative offices with almost no employees. If you're a tech worker, you can only be in one of the very few tech locations.
But you are right, that those are not big major tech offices like the three mentioned. So most engineers in Europe would still be working out of London, Zurich or Dublin.
Relocating means leaving uncles aunts, cousins, mom, dad, grandma, etc. And any friends you have.
I've had to explain to many recruiters that leaving all my friends and family and my community as a whole is just not an option.
Changing country is changing everything.
I grew up in a weird household, with half my family with strong Irish accents and the other with strong NYC accents. When I moved away from New York, almost nobody could understand me at all for a few weeks. A few teachers thought I was a non-native speaker.
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 assuming they only can do is so demeaning. I get asked a lot - so who does the heavy lifting?. Nothing gives more satisfaction than to say - we do the engineering and it gets maintained by westerners in our organization.
Most large tech companies have engineering centers in India doing real work and there are quite a few Indian expats here doing serious engineering work.
I think the reputation you describe comes specifically from the low-cost IT outsourcing firms. My personal experience reflects this. I've managed and worked with large teams in India that did great work. My experiences with outsourcing firms haven't been as good.
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 engineering you describe continually leave the country for the U.S. and other markets.
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.
Bulk of you post is true. But lets give west the credit where they deserve. Most of us can't afford maids. May be you can. Even if we did, its more like jugaad. People in west don't need maids because they don't need maids to sweep the floor, they don't have 1 kg of road dust coming in from dug up roads unrepaired for years. Their homes are designed to make vaccum cleaners easily usable. They have cheap dishwashers, microwave ovens, washing machines and dryers.
You move to west your standard of living by default sees an upgrade at 0 cost. Roads, infrastructure, schooling, economic opportunity etc etc.
Now, of course these household servants perform valuable labour here. But where I'm from, a technologically advanced country- we've largely obviated household help. We have central HVAC, automatic dishwashers, washing machines, dryers, Amazon Echo, Nest, etc etc. There is no need for full-time maids, you see.
I'm sorry if this sounds smug, but it's true. Indians reminding westerners that they have maids is something that makes us smile knowingly. Residual colonialism in the 21st century doesn't impress us.
In fact, a lot of people will instantly regard those with maids as "probably assholes" in the US.
Excuse me - we have gadgets here and at an affordable cost too. Some people do make conscious decision to avoid automation so we can employ and help others. We have a thought process here to buy from shops near by(albeit little costlier) instead of amazon'g the whole requirement so we can help people near by. Western lifestyle is not a definite one as an ideal one. Please understand that we can enjoy our lifestyle without any gripe. Why is it so hard to swallow?.
In my case - my mom is a cancer patient. I don't know whether i could afford a house nurse and cook in the west from a decent paying job. We got some positives too - that is what i stated.
You are making a virtue out of this. This is really like the British saying they ruling over us was good for us because of english, railways and parks. So they were screwing us for our own good.
Most of these maids, work on hourly basis on slave wages. And are generally treated badly. There are even spaces in Restaurants where they have to sit outside while their masters indulge in fine dining. And other times most people give away old throw worthy food to them. There is no 'help' going on here.
>>We have a thought process here to buy from shops near by(albeit little costlier) instead of amazon'g the whole requirement so we can help people near by.
Kirana shops near my home are shutting down like no tomorrow after GST, and a DMart opened near by. Indians are known to think through their wallets.
>>Please understand that we can enjoy our lifestyle without any gripe. Why is it so hard to swallow?.
There is a big difference between getting seasoned or at best indifferent to problems, than having no problems.
>>In my case - my mom is a cancer patient. I don't know whether i could afford a house nurse and cook in the west from a decent paying job.
I hope she recovers soon. Yours is a different situation and I understand, most of us(Including me) have many reasons(in my case, old parents) to not move to the west. But I imagine if I was there my life would be way better.
Employing someone full time to clean and maintain house isn't really uplifting anyone in a societal sense. Option 1: 30 families eschew automation and hire a full-time maid. Option 2: 30 families own a vacuum cleaner and a dishwasher and hire a cleaner once every other week for 3 hours to maintain their house. The latter is what happens in western communities and it results in 29 more productive workers looking for gainful employment in the workforce. If you don't see why that is an uplifting thing for society, you should take a good hard look at your understanding of economics.
As for your anecdote of the family member with cancer, house nurses are indeed common and affordable in western societies, we generally call this service "hospice." And while I may not employ a cook, there are 150 restaurants in my city that will deliver meals to my doorstep within 30 minutes.
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.
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.
The quotes text was an observation without any judgement.
The rest of the post addresses how the Indian it industry started to boom and why they're losing so many jobs so quickly. Still no dismissal.
It's not that Indian doesn't have talent. It's just that it's not smart to outsource your main competency. So they're not doing that.
And yes, the code that one finds after the eventual disaster when something goes wrong is staggering.
My anecdote for this is... I worked at a retail company implementing a new point of sales system. For a year before and the first year I was there (different team) there was an Indian "sales engineer" team that the vendor brought in. They weren't able to get the system working and integrated with the existing devices (it has to work with this receipt printer, this mag strip reader, this magnetic ink reader... these are the types of sales that we offer that aren't part of the core system, all rounding of pennies must be in the favor of the customer (1000 pennies in the favor of 1000 customers costs less than one complaint), etc...).
When milestones were missed, rather than revising the estimates, for it, the sales engineering team brought in more people. Aside from this courting Brooks's law, it again increased billable hours.
Aside from not getting it working, when management canned that approach all of the institutional knowledge of how it did work up to that point was lost. The documentation that was provided was worthless (but they billed their time to create it).
Several months later, the project was started up again - this time with a fully in house team. About two months in to the year long deadline (and for us it was a deadline - not just a milestone), we commented to management that we were going to need help getting this running - there was too much to do and not enough time. Within a month we got some consultants from intertech ( https://www.intertech.com ). And while there was some ramp up time with that code base, they were helping and contributing within two weeks.
Once the system was on track for the rollout, a large phase 2 project was given to them - returns. The business logic behind returns wasn't simple (do you credit the money back to a card? what if the card is a visa gift card? cash? store credit? restocking fees (none if the item is in stock, some if the item has been discontinued), taxes (purchased in state A, returned at another store in state B), etc...). The backend system chosen to handle this was drools.
Now, a outsourcing company here has two choices they can make. They can either try to make something that only they know how to modify and keep milking the project with billable hours until its replaced by another company... or they can try to transfer that information to the client (with training sessions (billable hours) and good documentation (billable hours)).
For the in house people who were going to be maintaining the system, we got excellent training and documentation. If they got up and left the next day, we'd be able to maintain it with only a minor hiccup. The cost to maintain it with a few in house developers was going to be less than keeping consultants on all the time.
The moral here is that it wasn't so much the "we can provide a solution" that won over the project but also the "we have demonstrated our competence in the first phase and can furthermore provide training to you that will decrease the maintenance costs over the lifetime of the project." Even with the increase of initial billable time - it was going to be cheaper.
The value was not only in the demonstrated competence working with the in house team (rather than trying to do it all), but in providing all of the associated support structures and soft things that management can see as improving the value of the service beyond lines of code written.
We've adapted as a community to have a skillset and evangelize stacks that at minimum compliments off shore if not replaces them.
Simply put, after all the basic Dev and ops jobs left, we moved up the value chain.
It's a cycle and the off shoring firms will move up the value chain and US devs will further specialize in to ML, AI, speech, Big Data/Data Science, etc. Those areas are quickly being commoditized by the cloud providers, so they're within reach of most US developers. Furthermore, off shoring firms will likely be content to provide the cheaper, lower level rungs of the value chain.
Everything points to gaining breadth in order to "move up the value chain".
"US devs will further specialize in to ML, AI, speech, Big Data/Data Science"
In line with the previous statement, you mean increase their breadth, not specialize, right?
"Those areas are quickly being commoditized by the cloud providers, so they're within reach of most US developers."
What makes these areas more accessible to US developers than offshore?
For the last bit, I tried to hint at that in my original comment. People who achieve that breadth outside the US can normally negotiate directly with employers in the US. This can give them more money and gives the company a more stable resource. The bulk hires from Infosys, Tata, etc. don't have this luxury.
For US employees, there's both the drive to keep ahead of offshoring and the fact that so many US employers will invest in their employees. This class of offshoring companies that are suffering don't do that.
Which is another point: These are not intended to be generalizations of all offshore teams and offshoring companies. The more breadth and automation an offshore company leverages, the more resilient they are.
I don't doubt that Infosys and Tata will survive, but the sheer scale of their employment numbers is going to take a permanent hit and stateside devs are again going to need to become even more jack-of-all-trades with more than one specialization to stay ahead.
Behold, the birth of the TT skillset. /s
There was no "serious engineering" going on at any of the large Indian firms I dealt with. Boutique, for sure serious work.
The pervasive idea that westerners do seem to have, speaking from personal experience, is a bias against "cheap foreign labor." The actual problem is of course any company which poorly manages its external teams, and especially those companies which go for the lowest bidder, and then place that poorly equipped team in their Tier 1 customer support hotlines. I think this is very much a real problem, but the discussion surrounding it often invites offensive language, passionate nationalism, and stirs emotions in a way that distracts from the root of the problem.
I can't think of any way to combat it other than to come up with counter examples that paint the high quality teams in a good light, so that's what I'll continue to do. If a team does good work and I'm impressed by them, you bet my family and friends hear about it! It's not much of course, but I find it more constructive to focus on the positives and the potential solutions, rather than to concentrate on the negatives.
I am not contesting that you do serious engineering, but just stating your beliefs is moot.
>> There is this west fixation that serious engineering can't be done outside.
I guess this is just anecdotal and to counter with some more anecdotal experience, I (and a few I know) have been reached out from the west, seeking our engineering skills in the niche we operate. So what do we do know? Start believing the other way round, that serious engineering can't be done in the west!!!
>> we do the engineering and it gets maintained by westerners in our organization.
Don't you think you are believing just like the western engineers you were blaming?
There was lot of fluff that was hired during those outsourcing boom years and obviously they need to let go off the less talented but it’s not right to color everybody with the same brush.
If you are in a competitive economic space, you will even have sufficient motivation to learn.
This might be true for some teams, but in general the IT market in India probably has a similar skill distribution to the IT market in the US; such that the top 15% of the market is the most talented, and the rest is by definition less so. In the US, the top 15% of the market is in Silicon Valley, so if you consider India as a whole, it will not be as talented on average as Silicon Valley.
As with any anecdotal evidence, people have widely varying experiences. When I was working as a freelance web developer (2010-2014) at mid-market firms, I had universally bad experiences with Indian teams.
Wait. What? Sure, there's a concentration of talent in SV, but to simply say that the top 15% of all U.S. IT talent is there is pretty myopic.
I get your point overall (though I am not saying I agree). But, had to point out that you tossed out your belief as a "stat", as if it were some well-established fact.
Likewise, with your (admittedly) anecdotal observations on Indian teams. Pretty broad generalizations you seem to operate on.
We're entitled to our opinions, but what's ironic is that a worldview that rests on sweeping generalizations about groups of people is actually self-limiting.
If these Indian teams are equally as talented then where are all of the innovations created by these Indians?
India is a huge country with a huge population and a rapidly growing economy and a domestic market. Even if it was true a decade or two ago, should we still keep assuming that anything that affects the Indian IT industry is caused solely by the outsourcing industry.
Surely HN can stop having the same conversation every time anything regarding India and IT comes up. A claim like - All engineers/engineering effort/R&D in country X is obviously substandard based on my anecdotal evidence - followed by a discussion treating it as a valid argument.
Indian IT outsourcing has been the vast majority of cash flow into the Indian IT sector, that much is undeniable. There is some actually good Indian IT talent out there and it's picking up steam, but that's not where the money is yet.
And to the western/eruropean markets, Indian IT industry == Indian IT outsourcing industry. And the Indian IT outsourcing industry has developed a very strong negative stigma which I expect will completely kill it over the next ~5 years. Does the 'real' Indian IT industry have enough cash and momentum to survive that? Maybe, I'm not sure. One thing is for certain: all the low skilled IT workers which make up 95%+ of the outsourcing industry, they're all going to be permanently out of those jobs and new jobs like that aren't coming.
And from personal experience with those low skilled indian IT workers, I think it would be a miracle if even 1% of them are able to re-skill for the real engineering work that's now in demand. Not only that, but just the fact that you're in India is a strong signal that that you're terrible, even if you're actually not. 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.
tl;dr: In terms of economics, the Indian IT industry is the outsourcing industry, and that cash well is drying up fast. Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka saw the writing on the wall and bailed on a high note.
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.
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.
Good tests are not tests of any specific knowledge. They test reasoning and communication skills in a programming context.
But is it because it is hard to fake knowledge in other industries or is it because it is easy to find out programmer is faking?
If there's so many programmers who can't do fizbuz, are there as many managers, doctors, lawyers, etc who can't do basic stuff despite perfect CV?
Yeah, there are. Plenty of garbage doctors and lawyers out there who are allowed to continue practicing.
Here's why testing for developers exists:
1: They are incredibly important to business revenue. In a modern business, if a manager underperforms, nothing much happens. If your development team underperforms, you lose millions. So you try to get the best development team you can.
2: There's no meaningful standardized testing. A Lawyer passes the bar exam, a doctor has to pass board certification, while any idiot from backwater India can call themselves a software engineer. But its important to note that neither the bar exam nor board certification tell you anything about how good that person is in their field, they just say they meet the bare minimum requirements. In the case of IT, the bare minimum requirements happen to be much lower than what most employers hope to attract, so they resort to doing testing themselves. It's not a terrible approach, but it does discourage top talent from applying.
3: Skill disparity. There aren't many '10x' lawyers or doctors or managers out there, but there are plenty of such developers. This is partially related to my 2nd point but mostly just a consequence of software engineering being a creative task rather than a learned flowchart like law and medicine. As an employer, you want to come up with some signal to find the high performers.
I think the tests are annoying too. Still is ultimately called work for a reason, we show up to get things done that are challenging, sometimes unpleasant and often necessary.
As a developer who hires other developers, I don't place the value in testing on what a developer can code, but how quickly they can learn and how well they can solve problems and communicate - testing can help shed a light on non technical strengths or shortcomings.
A good test focuses as much on higher level analysis as coding. The majority of new developers with a few years of skills may not have developed quickly enough in this regards yet.
And turn it the other way around what if a potential employee insisted on employers doing a test.
Imaginin interviewing at uber and asking
"So MR Manger" what's the difference between a worker and an employee :-)
Or asking a series of q on the companies anti discrimination bullying discipline or grievance procedures.
Knowing a little more than non-technical employers doesn't place an inexperienced developer in a position of expertise, only knowing a little more than the guy testing them.
If you are referring to non technical folks not being skilled at hiring for technical positions, I agree to the point that this is a common challenge where non tech people are put in charge of digital transformation, among other things.
Even highly competent and technical teams can struggle with testing incoming hires we.
An interesting idea is contemplating if tech people will be able to learn and transform business skills easier than non techs business folks might be able to learn tech. If this was attractive to tech folks, the hiring tests would include more business problem oriented questions than fizzing and buzzing. It's still a little surprising how few developers can do this in any country, so it might remain an inconvenient test and filter for a while yet.
And yet business people don't get any tests. No one else on the entire planet gets tests for almost every role opportunity they want to explore. So why do developers have to?
Actually, I can answer that. The answer is because the overwhelming majority of a modern company's productivity is up to the performance of the developers. The business guys get away with under-performing because their underprformance is not a significant factor on the bottom line.
The commonplace testing of developers has nothing to do with ratios of good to bad developers, or the relative ease of assessing developer skill compared to other professions. It has everything to do with the fact that developers drive the lions share of modern business value so they've been singled out for shitty treatment with testing and kaggle competitions and similar garbage. I really hope to see a software engineering union rise in the next few years which cracks down on this and empowers developers to negotiate relative to their actual value in modern business.
People like you aren't needed in the world of high tech. Your role is redundant.
Though I would agree that asking we have a business problem how would you solve or improve on what we do now is a much better q to ask.
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 of software development compared to other unionized industries to maintain a baseline. Not the first time it's been thought about.
Non tech positions are even harder to test for at hiring. Especially since so many hr, accounting jobs themselves are requiring increased digital transformation skills of knowing how to select and implement business systems.
Tech hiring interviews were designed largely by tech people.
The real hilarious part is seeing a non tech hr person try to buy a hr software system and implement it. Being the subject matter expert no longer means an ability implement and roll out programs as it used to - its a growing issue that requires people who can understand and work with detail.
Working with details requires an ability to care about the plight of others, organizations and their processes to prove to lower the suffering of people at the hands of their employment environments.
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 'wiser' and less confrontational because your testosterone levels have dropped. The tech industry assigns a negative value to age and wisdom, sorry.
Attitude carries one past those with just skill and knowledge.
Learning to channel energy instead of raging at others is the ultimate productivity.
Unions don't really want to get involved with being the accrediting body to many conflicts of interests.
Your right though that untrained people should not really be doing interviews let alone designing them.
It’s very hard to guarantee that every first-round interview includes a seasoned lie-detector. A coding exercise is an imperfect, flawed, sometimes insulting approach that’s better than the alternatives.
When done right, it can be a nice conversation about coding, algorithms, and how to collaborate. And prove that the candidate can code.
Personally, I don’t mind being interviewed with a coding exercise even though I could be many of my interviewers’ parent. I love programming and talking about programming with programmers! And it gives me a chance to interview my potential future collaborators in a setting that’s less structured than a sit-across-the-table Q&A.
In my experience, someone who refuses or takes offense at a well-framed coding exercise is probably not going to be someone you want on your team. By well-framed, I mean introduced in a way that’s not insulting on the face of it, like a multi-hour takehome exercise before even meeting the candidate and talking about the job and why you are interested in them as a candidate. That’s just lazy interviewing and I wouldn’t want to do that either.
> In my experience, someone who refuses or takes offense at a well-framed coding exercise is probably not going to be someone you want on your team.
In my experience those who refuse are the top of the top. We adapted our interview and intake process to accommodate these people (usually with a more stringent and goal oriented probation period), and it was the best thing we did in terms of resourcing. The people we took on through this stream ended up being by far the best performing bang for buck employees. They are opinionated and snobby, but that's a good thing, because they actually care about their respective fields enough to have strong opinions. They don't waste time with tests and coding challenges.
Those who are opinionated and snobby, even if they are the best preforming, may not be the best fit in many environments. A not insignificant portion of a senior developer's time can be spent mentoring people - and the snobby person may not be the best choice for that.
If the goal is to hire a team of one - great. If the goal is to hire into a team of half a dozen in what would be termed an enterprise development - the refusal to take a programming test may and work with the process rather than rebel against it may act as a strong indication that the person isn't going to be a good fit.
Alternative version:
Interviewer: Are there any tables you construct in spare time and expose for public use?
Carpenter: huh?!
Interviewer: To proceed we will need you to construct a chair for us, for free.
Carpenter: [starts throwing chairs]
The analogy isn’t right because you’d need a similar carpentry task that takes 30 minutes like fizzbuzz (that should really take 5 minutes). It would be like asking a carpenter to put together their workstation from a disorganized shop. A pretty reasonable request.
Lots of people complain about this approach, but it is confusing as not a single good programmer has ever been bothered by coding screens. Who are these people who get upset? And where are their GitHub portfolios? Are there that many bullshitters who aren’t confortable enough in their skills to spend less than an hour on coding problems as part of an interview?
A model based on a training set of 12, surely encompasses all biases accurately of a population of 10s of millions.
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.
As per slide 2, IT outsourcing still is the largest contributor to the IT industry. It is not a subset. As per this report at least. I couldn't find any other credible sources.
"All engineers/engineering effort/R&D in country X is obviously substandard" This is obviously a very biased statement that suffers from the 'some/all' fallacy based on anecdotal evidences. Unfortunately the world works this way. What the majority sees and believes is what trumps, regardless of the truth.
Many of those low-level jobs can be automated, while the high-level ones can't. As the cost of even low-level outsourced jobs goes up, and the cost of automation goes down, it's normal that lots of the most automated jobs get cut. Jobs of which India has a very high relative proportion, not because there aren't high-level programmers there, but because India has the strongest IT outsourcing industry in the World.
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, hours, maybe a picture, and a list of what you're selling. That's something all these automated website generators provide.
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.
Also, I believe unless you set the robots.txt file, most sites are crawlable, and SEO, like I said, is not really important for smaller businesses. Mostly they are existing customers who want to find out hours of operation and maybe any daily specials you might have, not somebody who stumbles across your site organically.
One major UK site made a simple mistake with the canonical tag on one of 12 websites cost them over £500,000 in lost traffic in lest than a week.
If you start making a lot of money, you'll have enough to hire high priced consultants. If you're just starting up and concentrating on your actual busines, not IT, you shouldn't be worried about the best web framework.
Also, for businesses just starting up, you just need simple HTML. The only information you need to expose are hours of operation, address, and a list of services/goods with prices. Everything else can come later, when you're getting enough business to justify it.
My main point is that small webdevs are going to start getting starved for work. They're getting replaced by generated HTML which do a good enough job for free.
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.
Admissions on avg are 50% of capacity, with many colleges having less 30%. This will lead to closure of many sub-par quality colleges, which I hope will improve overall quality of Indian IT engineers.
The ship and kidnapping reference to slavery is in poor taste, It might be easier to get your point across and help people be more open to exploring your perspective if you weren't so easy and loose with colloquialisms that are rooted in something that likely doesn't represent you.
And generally, when someone takes a criminally low level of pay for their high skill labor, all workers, domestic and international, suffer.
[0] This is the other side of the coin, career American engineers being fired and "forced"(for their severance) to train cheaper Replacements https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff... And Disney is just one example - tons of US companies "clean house" when they get frustrated at a high operating budget.
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 to come. The cheaper labor is getting g more specialized and expensive.
I fully agree. I hope these rates increasing will help the talent in this entire industry price itself better.
Other countries can obviously incentivize people and startups like the US does, and that may slowly close the culture gap, but the US is already way ahead in capital. It's also hard to justify incentivizing an industry which already makes more than most of a country does via capital injection. When half the country is food insecure, the 2-10th percentile of the country getting handed government money doesn't go over well, anywhere.
As someone who worked for a long time on H1b (at startups in US), I realized only later how shackled I was compared to even high skilled immigrants from other countries!
I think with tighter immigration restrictions in US and EU, its been amazing to see many product companies popping up in India (instead of just the IT services industry).
US is sitting on a golden egg (of H1b engineers in US). If US makes it difficult for Indian immigrants, sure the immigrants will lose in the short term, but long term it is good for Indian and Indians.
When I went to college in North Dakota, there was a similar feeling with kids from North Dakota getting technical degrees (computer science, engineering, medical) and then moving to Minnesota and getting jobs there as opposed to keeping that knowledge in state.
There was a real push to try and keep these people from moving to Minnesota. At the time, my three best friends and teammates were all from various parts of rural North Dakota. All ended up with engineering degrees. All said the same thing, "Why would I stay here and get paid $40K when I have a masters degree in Mechanical Engineering, when I can take a job in Minnesota and make $80K?"
As for higher end work being done in India, I don’t think anyone doubts there are highly skilled people in India or that there are examples of successful startups, but that’s not where the Indian economy is in regards to tech (hence why the jobs are shrinking). The question is if the Indian tech economy can shift its export product away from low value-add work and that’s a very hard move to make—both because, today, the momentum is in the wrong direction and western firms have had very bad experiences with Indian outsourcing and thus even if they do outsource higher-end work it will likely go to other more up and coming countries in tech.
Flipkart was founded in 2007. Ola soon after. This H1B visa issue is more of past 2-3 year issue. Admittedly it will have some impact. But definitely not the narrative you paint.
He was denied h1b visa in 2007, came back to India, started a company that created jobs in India.
The last 2-3 years it feels like its become extreme because: 1) Too much noise in media about new POTUS being hard on immigrants 2) A rising US economy means more demand for engineers. So there's more need of engineers, H1b or not. Hence more companies are getting effected by lack of access to such talent.
To be honest I'm not an operations guy, and never have been, but I do work in management and my good friend who heads the IT department is struggling to find new roles for the operations people as we're heading into the cloud. It's quite obvious to be frank, but without on premise servers we don't as many need techs to run our setup, and we'll probably need a lot less consultants as well as Microsoft offers this as part of the Azure package.
Financially it'll save us around 16 million Danish annually, which is roughly 32 jobs, and that's just operations.
In development things are changing as well. When we did our first webpage it was a huge project, involving a lot of developers. The most recent one didn't require a single developer because we used a standard product that one of our designers happened to know.
Not that it's all bad. We're looking for people who do blockchain, machine learning and big data, as well as project-managers who understand both digitization and business. Of course these requirements will pose a significant challenge for a huge part of the "traditional" IT workforce, which unfortunately isn't very business savvy or mathematical. I mean, parts of it is certainly very good at math, but typically not the people we can afford in public IT.
After that, you opportunistically move stuff as it makes sense. Then squeeze every provider of software and services, and pick off the stragglers by moving to cloud/SaaS.
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 expensive.
Similarly it wouldn't make sense to move our SQL cluster into Azure just for the heck of it. However when our SQL server license is up for renewal, the move to the cloud will be the best financial option.
In development the story is a tad different. Our operations wizards can't do everything that our developers (both our own but also on open scourge components) require. We're almost 100% Microsoft in operations, but we run 370 different systems and some of these run in Linux, php, nodes, python and so on. By utilizing the cloud, we won't need a certified red hat guy on premise because Microsoft (or Amazon) will handle things like patch management and security updates. Or in other words, it's more expensive to run our applications on a SAAS platform than on our own servers, but it gives us much more freedom to chose and build the applications to support our primary business of meeting the needs of our employees and citizens.
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?
But cities of a sufficient size (pulling up Chicago because its probably larger than the sufficient size), you find https://webapps1.cityofchicago.org/traffic/about.jsp
> Chicago has about 2900 traffic signals throughout the city. About 470 of these signals are interconnected through a fiber-network that facilitates the centralized monitoring and control of signal operations. Whether interconnected or not-interconnected, the signals are programmed to synchronize with signals immediately around it so that vehicles will pass through the intersections most efficiently. New signals are added and old signals are modernized every year depending on the need and availability of funds. While OEMC/Traffic Management Authority is responsible for maintaining the signal coordination and timing, Division of Electricity at CDOT is responsible for the maintenance of the signals and CDOT is responsible for the physical design, construction, and timing of signals.
It appears that the City of Chicago maintains their own. As noted there, that is maintained by the division of electricity ( https://www.cityofchicago.org/city/en/depts/cdot/provdrs/tra... ), which also maintains all street lights and signs. When one gets to a point where the municipality knows that there will always be work for some number of people - its cheaper to hire those people permanently than contract it out. This also provides a better SLA for the city (tax payers get rather annoyed if the street light is out and the response from City Hall is "we told the contractor about it, but they haven't responded yet - its the holidays.")
Things from the city jail management (transferring to state or federal when appropriate - or to the hospital and back - or to the court and back, etc...), payroll (and staffing management), data mining, managing assments of property, scheduling housing or business inspectors, budget forecasting based on weather models, keeping track of all the permits and where they are in the process...
There is lots of places where information technology has a role. Not necessarily high tech, but rather managing the information that is flowing through the system to make sure that the proper data goes to the proper places.
Its not going to be glamorous, but it sure beats paper and excel spreadsheets in email.
While big consulting shops may be brought in from time to time to do a project - the role of integration that software with the existing systems often falls to a FTE employed by the city, state, or whatever. Keeping that institutional knowledge about how things work is often priceless (well, you can put a price on it - how long does it take to figure out the system that Stan left behind... and if that's a consultant doing that, how much are they billing you for that discovery work?). In many public sector shops, the preserved institutional knowledge that a team may have can easily run into the collective century or more. That is a lot of understanding of how things work that can't be effectively outsourced.
There is a company who've build an organizational component on blockchain tech. This may seem odd to a lot of people, but we're required by law to keep a bi-temporarily record of how our organization looked and who held responsibility for what areas and cases. So far he only option has been an old mainframe system, and it doesn't integrate too well with other components such as the pay-system. I'm not sure if blockchain will carry this responsibility, a lot of other companies are struggling to meet our demand on non-blockchain and it's an extremely hard market to enter, but the blockchain based solution came first, and is currently the only option, do who knows.
we could support 40, our existing 2 engineers are basically under-worked - we have 2 because it would be insanely irresponsible to have just 1, aside from company ownership (which is able to do the work also, if needed). if we absolutely had to, we could cut that down to 1 full time guy. let that sink in; 1 full time guy to manage 40 customers.
having said that, we're still growing as a business, because we've embraced the new reality, but it hasn't been without turnover and pain. we're also putting money into developing products.
the kicker is, even with the R+D, we're more profitable now than 5 years ago, with LESS ops folks (ostensibly less people to do the actual work, though we all know that's not what's really happening). i imagine the same exact thing is playing out with larger in-house staff, as you describe.
this is the new model. WAY more output from less but higher paid full time people, small networks of high-$ specialized consultants, and smaller firms and IT groups working in mercenary fashion. embrace it, or you will bleed yourself dry in less time than you think.
More part-time contractors who don't have steady work and fewer FTEs who are on constant call.
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 less the rest of the world (unlike the globally deployed US Navy).
Ops people are so important.
NOTE: I actually am an AWS Engineer and I like moving to the cloud, but still.
And how do you get them to do that?
You hire security engineers to do training, code reviews, internal pentesting...
So we have to make do. :)
I don't think I've ever met anyone in cybersecurity who was "trained in cybersecurity". At least not anyone useful. They're all developers first.
As someone with background in "cybersecurity". Most "cybersecurity" is automated now. Also, you need heavy background in math/computer science and programming background for cybersecurity. Something most Operations/IT people do not have.
> If you’ve seen the latest password dumps and how bad they are, cybersecurity is getting worse if anything.
That really has nothing to do with "cybersecurity". It's just operations "best practices".
> 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 less the rest of the world (unlike the globally deployed US Navy).
It depends on what a "cyber security engineer" is.
> Ops people are so important.
Sure. But it's also a highly automatable position too.
> NOTE: I actually am an AWS Engineer and I like moving to the cloud, but still.
AWS engineer? Do you mean you work for amazon or you work for a company that uses AWS?
He ought to look at more security based roles to fill that gap, unless that's a separate department for you guys.
> 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 code at some point; the compiler spits out the reason (or your IDE helpfully points it out), you go back and fix it.
> One reason for the poor performance is the dearth of good instructors as well as misaligned college curriculums. “The school curriculum focusing on MS-Word, Powerpoint, Excel, etc., rather teaching programming using elementary languages such as Basic and Logo is also the culprit,” said Varun Aggarwal, the co-founder and chief technology officer at Aspiring Minds.
Basic and Logo? What in the world?
COMP 100 teaches students how to use common software for organizing, searching, and computing on information, with an emphasis on business-related tasks. It introduces engineering design via a medium-sized team project. The course examines
databases — Microsoft Access spreadsheets — Microsoft Excel
However it was upto the students to explore more outside of what is taught in the curriculum. Even if you are not willing to actually learn programming you can still get good enough marks in both theory and practical exams. We had four practical projects but most of the projects were widely "purchased" from ready-made shops instead of the students doing it themselves, and the instructors were not competent enough to figure out if the projects are copied or self-made.
What should be taught in modern day schools should be Assembly (to get the basics), C/C++, ML/AI, Java, Algorithms and Data structures (Can't stress this enough - even a full year can be dedicated for this) and have at least one project each semester and have all projects scrutinised by external faculties.
No instituition. Not even in the US or any part of the world, will rewrite their syllabus and text books every time something the equivalent of React or Angular JS comes along.
You generally teach the base skills from which much can be learned and grown.
Also I don't understand this thing about asking colleges to train people in the latest tech that is out there.
In almost all cases I have seen, you are way better off hiring good generalists than one trick ponies.
The situation is different in India.. Our schools, though are called the same name as institutions in US, are basically skill training workshops. Last time I checked there are 100000 graduates coming out of school in each state, and there would be at least a million engineering graduates produced every year throughout whole of India. Remember there are no strict rules and things have to change with the changing world. India needs to think different than the rest of the world.
Did I mention Angular or React? I mentioned ML/AI, and latest Data structures which is 100% relevant for any recent graduate to learn or at least be aware of. React and Angular are just libraries and any one can learn them if they have solid programming base.
But ML/AI is a very different beast as they require you to have good solid understanding of mathematics, statistics, probability theorem etc, which is difficult to acquire outside without spending considerable amount of time.
All schools/colleges are that way. Unless you join a PhD program. Also in the west, emphasis on taking skill based courses is high. They even have a term for the other type of courses, they call it, Underwater basket weaving.
>>Last time I checked there are 100000 graduates coming out of school in each state, and there would be at least a million engineering graduates produced every year throughout whole of India.
Thanks to our population numbers. And why is this wrong. STEM education makes a person think, at-least, comparatively, more rationally than other courses do.
>>Remember there are no strict rules and things have to change with the changing world. India needs to think different than the rest of the world.
India is already doing enough. But at our scale everything breaks.
>>I mentioned ML/AI, and latest Data structures which is 100% relevant for any recent graduate to learn or at least be aware of.
Why only ML/AI? Because they are in demand now? A few days back it was Hadoop etc. Before that Java...
NO only that, but because it can be the new IT. Java, Hadoop etc are only languages and frameworks, that had at most a life span of a decade. But ML/AI is a whole new world. If things are going to be progressing in the current pace, then ML/AI could have a big impact on the world as the personal computers did and can be the next big thing of this century.
All this automation and job loss that the original article saying would be nothing if AI comes into full effect. There could be serious job losses all over the world. And with the biggest of population in the whole world, India would be the worst affected.. It is best for any country's interest to progress in AI so that they could have a say in future policy related to AI, not to mention getting more jobs related to that field.
Few of the several fields that could be affected by a combination of AI/Robots/Automation that I could think of ->
> Manufacturing / Factory workers > Defence personnel > Agriculture > Auto drivers (Taxi, Truck, Rail, Ship whatsoever) > Teaching (Virtual teaching) > Construction (Ready-made materials combined with smart machines) > Medical professionals (X-Ray diagnostics etc) > Doctors (though far-stretched but could be possible)
Why now? No body have solid answers when or will this happen, but if you look closely it's been only couple of years that machines got the ability to beat humans in at least few tasks we figured would require advanced intelligence, including accurate visual/speech recognition. That coupled with smart robots, and automation could replace a large percentage of existing jobs. Self-driving cars are a proof of this. This is little scary, but not alarming if there are proper policies in place. Any country need to be in the forefront of this technology or else can get sidelined really quickly.
For almost all programmers who will eventually work with this thing, they will mostly use some frameworks to do it. The real math behind all this stuff is quite old. There are already courses available to do that. Indian statistical institute offers beginner to advanced courses in statistics which you can take, they have been available for decades now.
Anything that you will likely do with ML/AI will likely involve using a framework today.
>>All this automation and job loss that the original article saying would be nothing if AI comes into full effect.
We don't even know if that kind of AGI is possible, let alone achieving it anytime soon.
Heck we haven't even come close to defining what AGI is.
Frameworks only provide part of it. In the case of AI, they just provide a general way to represent neural networks. Each use case need a different type of network with hundreds of parameters fine tuned and trained. Of course you can download pre-built algorithms and model zoos, but they are at best couple of years old.
Also do you think that the best things will be available under a framework? There are open source frameworks (like Tensorflow), but you will be surprised at the amount of research under progress and what portion of it is available for public. For e.g. look at the amount of work that China is doing in the field (And available for public scrutiny) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhp47v5OBXQ.
India (or any other Country) could do proper research in the area or end up buying these stuff from other countries, provided they give state of art technology to others. Just imagine a drone or an army of drones equipped with such AI technology can survey 24/7 and instantly take down your enemy even across a country.
Needless to say, I and a group of my fellow students went immediately to the department chair. He was fired shortly thereafter. He was an astounding example of total incompetence. I decided to look into these "2 PhDs" he was supposed to have. Both were from Bangalore University. It didn't take much to find their CS department website (which looked like it had been built by an elementary school kid) and the academic requirements necessary to get such a degree. To get a basic CS bachelor's degree you needed high school level math and 2 classes about CS. To get a PhD you needed a full year. As far as I could tell the school had a good medical program, and decided to open a Computer Science diploma mill on the side. I was stunned.
Some good came of it, though. After that, every prospective candidate to become a new professor had to give a presentation to upperclassmen on a topic of their own choosing and submit to being questioned by the upperclassmen. To replace the inept man with 2 PhDs we hired a guy who only had a Masters degree but who had several years experience in the industry, so he could bring some manner of "this is how its ACTUALLY done in the real world" to things. Worked out great, at least from a students perspective.
It was on a matter of time before companies figured it out. Add to that advances in automation and the move to the cloud, and this was guaranteed to happen.
The real question is why it would be in temporary decline this year.
Can you point out similar scams which have been running for 30 years where revenue kept on increasing in billions
The level of incompetence I have seen is absolutely mindblowing - to the point of me thinking, I must be part of a hidden camera prank...
I employ several Indian FTE developers, who are great, so it is not the "India"-sticker, that is the problem - it is the culture in the large, Indian IT-services companies, that is completely broken.
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 to CS. Hell, they even hire mechanical engineers. In my college, students got placed this year because, a. They had good relations with faculty. b. Looks(for women) c. Acting "friendly" to a middleman(applies to women) If you deal with these companies, I guarantee you, you'd get a poor product.
2. smaller outsourcing companies. Some of these are good, some of these are bad. Again, some manager might hire a student because she looks hot, while some other might genuinely look for skilled students. I'd suggest dealing with these companies, after getting good feedback about them from someone.
3. Startups. These are few, but the number is growing. I hope to get selected in one of these.
The better product startups all look for "IIT/NIT/whatever other brand college" students. Snapdeal, for eg, first switched the application engineer position that I applied for to other secondary positions, and then rejected me when I asked for the original position on this basis. There is no guarantee that you will find good things in other startups. I realize now that these companies have no better way of screening candidates, because the candidate pool quality in India errs on the side of less than decent. Doesn't justify the bait-and-switch but oh well.
If you do end up like I did, make sure that atleast the peer group in your startup is exceptionally talented, and that the startup is good with tech. The pay is shit in these kinds of startups (for eg those running as a small service company, but building their product behind the scenes), but the idea is to become really good at what you do and then jump ship to a good product startup.
Also, if you are still in college, it helps to have GSoC under your belt.
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.
>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.
Don't think I've seen this idea explored before. Maybe the numbers show it is completely idiotic (I did basically come up with it in the shower). Guess its my new conspiracy theory of the month.
Situation in top tier colleges is lot better. This can be seen from increase in placements in IITs this year.
I guess the best interview should also add a touch-type test and the candidate should require at least 30wpm or so (if typing is very much required for the work).
When I was at college I have only seen less than 5 such students from the 250 total.
I've never met a good, experienced developer who was a slow typist.
You will.
There is a reason "fast typist" was not a required skill in any software jobs I've ever applied for, and I doubt developer strength has any correlation with typing speed.
But, I would like to think that I am both good and experienced. I picked up my bad typing habits while learning to program, after all.
By fast, I mean not two finger typing and can probably touch type. You know a slow typist when you see it. It's like being behind a slow person on the highway, it's excruciating.
That's probably because they are pushed by their families, "go and study IT, this is the best paid job at the moment". That doesn't mean that the value, skills, abilities of the new graduates will increase, I tend to believe the opposite.
So even if families pressure their kids, they will not be able to get an admission in these institutes unless they demonstrate required skills.
Here are past exam papers - https://www.jeeadv.ac.in/Archives-Past-Que-papers.html
For value, skill, and ability, please google the research done by the students at these universities and the firms that hire these students.
I don't take an issue with doing their job, but I'm still baffled how DXC can function like that.
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.
India's IT industry is realigning towards domestic markets and #MakeInIndia companies - it is more aspirational to join Paytm, Ola, Zomato in India than to work for a US based outsourcer.
It is not even a competition anymore - I'm able to very easily get highly qualified Indians in Silicon Valley to move back and work on something cool in India.
This is the reason that nobody in India (incl the govt) gives a shit about the H1B rule changes in the US. The entire focus of the IT industry is shifting to move up the value chain. We are trying to build more Freshdesk in India and sell them to the world... Rather than body shopping.
It is going to be a time of massive upheaval as a lot of jobs will be lost - both as a consequence of the US pushback on visas as well as the change in strategic focus.
We understand your sentimence. But please don't exaggerate too much :)
Relatively easier than say ten years ago, but not at the level of bravado that parent exhibits.
However you misunderstood the reason - they are not coming because of me. They were coming back anyway because they want to work in India and build something here.
That was my point all along - I'm not uniquely positioned. It's happening all over.
As a former NRI, who stayed in the US. Not one person I know has/or-is moving back because they want to 'build stuff here'.
Most of the times its unworkable visa situations, old parents or something on those lines at play.
Even more - we have expats actually building successful and highly funded startups in India. Take a look at Zoomcar, Zestmoney and CreditMate. India is extremely startup friendly for foreigners - maybe not as friendly as the US, but definitely more than Europe, China, etc.
We are one of the world's largest consumer internet and smartphone market ... oh and with strong net neutrality guarantees. Everyone wants to tap into that. India is moving very differently now !
In the last week, I have had 2 conversations with CXO level leadership of companies in the Bay Area, who want to move back to India and build startups here. I get to do this a lot because I run one of the earliest YC funded companies in India (when it was "special" for YC to fund an Indian startup). I end up being the sounding board for a lot of CXO level talent moving back to India.
BTW - Indian startups form the second largest pool for YC applications now (after the US). Not sure what the funding stats are.
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 and some more ethereal things like the pull of the motherland come into play. As an Indian in the US with maybe 70-80 people from my undergraduate class in the US, a grand total of one person went back to India to build a startup despite having a succesful career.
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.
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 :)
'Funding stats' don't mean anything in this case where they have to keep dumping money never to see any returns. This will hurt the long term ecosystem even for genuine start ups. As investors will largely look at India as some kind of a money sink, where rogue upper managements splurge by paying big money salaries to their own.
>>We are one of the world's largest consumer internet and smartphone market
Is this why Tata Docomo is shutting operations. Jio is in the debt of the tune 1,25,000 crores and Airtel is enduring losses just to survive?
>>oh and with strong net neutrality guarantees.
We all saw how 2G lobbying went.
>>Everyone wants to tap into that. India is moving very differently now !
Tap into what? Losses?
>>who want to move back to India...
Most of them hold US passports, and will bail at any hint of trouble. They will continue to work as long as their obscene compensations are sustained. They did the same during the 2008 crash. Moved to India, made big money and moved back to US the moment the honey was sweeter there.
Let them put their money where there mouth is, give up US passports, take up Indians passports and work here. Until then nothing much can be expected from this loot-and-scoot crowd.
Engineers are still Indians
Its hilarious you mention this. Those companies are in double digit billion $ debt, with no sight of returning even a single $ in profit back to their investors. Snapdeal recently bombed. Ola and Flipkart are next.
>>It is not even a competition anymore
Competition between whom. IT services firms haven't posted a loss making quarter in their history. And Product firms in India haven't posted a profit making in their history. Which is the real trash here?
>>I'm able to very easily get highly qualified Indians in Silicon Valley to move back and work on something cool in India.
They won't unless you beat Bay Area salaries and award stock options graciously. And that will happen only if you have massive VC backing. Also no one is going to quit their job in a first world country for loss.
>>This is the reason that nobody in India (incl the govt) gives a shit about the H1B rule changes in the US.
A lot of people do.
>>The entire focus of the IT industry is shifting to move up the value chain.
Increased salaries on VCs expense doesn't mean we are moving up the value chain.
>>We are trying to build more Freshdesk in India and sell them to the world... Rather than body shopping.
We were doing that before as well. The IT services firms you see today all started as product companies. In fact they were doing far more tech intensive work than the current breed of product companies will ever do. Most old IT services were early product companies that made banking sotware, embedded systems products and other stuff.
The start reality in India is without a VC pumping billions of $s and then ready to write off, all of it. You largely depend of debt(Why do you think real estate is so hard in India), or you have to bootstrap. If you bootstrap you need the financial discipline of a demon. You certainly can't pay Bay Area salaries to build MVP apps and write HTML/JS.
Most embedded systems start ups which are not in VC fashion catalogue pay peanuts even today.
The sad part of software engineer salaries in India is either US companies pay it, or VCs pay it. If you have to bootstrap, you have to pay atleast 5x less than what somebody like Flipkart pays today.
Now even if they have to go IPO they can't do it with their current financials. No public investor is going to put their money in a company whose first $15 - $20 billion in collection will go all to bail out VCs and remainder will go to subsidize customers's purchases.
Snapdeal is already toast. The real deal is you can't make losses forever, you have to make profits at some point and you have to make a lot of that to make up for early investors.
Ola and Uber are a totally gone case as far as India is concerned. Almost every family here owns scooters, and those who don't will take Uber and Ola as long as they beat auto rickshaw fares.
So here is the dilemma. Whether its Flipkart, Ola or Snapdeal. You are competing with road side hawkers and their profit margins. You can see where this is going.
Its just that India's purchasing power among the common middle class masses has to go up, and they need to stop thinking in terms of 'price first' approach. That won't happen anytime soon.
1. the entire IT outsourcing industry is ~$150 billion large and employs ~3.9 million people.
2. the top 7 largest IT companies employ ~1.3 million people
3. I cannot calculate the exact revenue of the top 7 companies because they are part of larger groups (e.g.: TCS, Wipro). But the Top IT companies headcount and revenue
a) Infosys: ~200,000 employees ($10 billion revenue)
b) Wipro: ~180,000 employees ($7.7 billion)
c) TCS: ~390,000 employees ($17.5 billion)
d) Capgemini: ~200,000 employees (I don't know)
e) CTS: ~260,000 employees ($13.5 billion)
f) Tech Mahindra: ~120,000 lakh employees ($4 billion)
Stories like these come around routinely in the April-June timeframe (every year!) around appraisal time. This '56000' number is simply a random quote 5% of the entire workforce of the top 7 companies. I have seen different media outlets report the numbers as 28,000 this year to 200,000 in 3 years. Honestly, they don't know nor do I.
FWIW, I run an outsourcing testing services firm in India. I am too small to feel market trends. However, I have been reading and talking and interviewing several candidates across India. I can tell you that the tension has been palpable for the last 8 months or so. Many senior folks are feeling a quiet sense of desperation. I don't know if the media sentiment started the tension or if the ground reality is indeed going to force layoffs of senior employees.
Coupled with racist immigration laws in USA this is helping smaller companies like mine to attract far superior talent. I was engineer number 1 in a Machine Learning division of an American company. I negotiated with my employer that I will move the whole division to India, hire in India at American salaries and deliver results.
Since then our ML division is running pretty smoothly and I am able to poach the brightest kids on the block.
The imminent collapse of India's outsourcing industry will be good for India's homegrown tech sector as brighter kids will move to work on tougher and more India specific problems.
With falling birth rates in developed countries and racially charged environment I think the future of tech will be determined by China and partly India and not in silicon valley.
It is normal to see IT Engineers (coders) define they career as X programmer where it's now time for every programmer to have full-stack skills and treat programming language as a drill-bit in a tool-box.
Since the services companies benefited earlier by recruiting a graduate and training them to be X programmer for life, the institutions didn't have a reason to adapt to changing times because 99% of their students were placed in these companies and remaining 1 % in Google, MS etc. [Fun note - Sundar, Satya, Shantanu, Sanjay Jha , George Kurian etc. belong to that 1% and yet capable enough climb to the top-most seat.]
But I wouldn't buy the 'Indians not hardworking' stereotype,for an average Indian every opportunity in their life has to be fought for with thousands (some times millions) of other competitors. I've seen several people who were the first graduate from their entire family history while living in a hut and create a sustainable life for them; thanks to these services companies.
But it's time for a change, Institutions should build skills which make their students recruit-able by startups.
Management positions have long been seen as replacements for IAS.
The 1% you talk about parse XMLs at Google and Microsoft. The 99% parse the same XMLs at services firms. The 1% thinks they are special because of a association with a certain Ivy league brand name.
Lets talk of the Indian 1% when somebody in a Indian university writes some thing the equivalent of a Linux, Perl or FreeBSD.
Lets not over glorify these placement agencies as some institutes of engineering excellence.
For what its worth the 99% what people generally berudge look down upon essentially is employed in Indias space programs that sends probes to mars and moon, built bulk of Indias pretty advanced tech defence infrastructure.
Only thing IITians are good at is self worship.
It's almost as though you've got an axe to grind with people having any respectable pedigree.
Below a link to a study from '08 that tried to assess the contribution of IITs to the economy. Perhaps some numbers might change your mind? (It's incomplete but includes the executive summary.)
https://www.ibef.org/download/Content_19dec.pdf
Perhaps an article (from TOI nonetheless)? - https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/IITians-contributi...
Before you dismiss these with whatever reason, perhaps you can show some data to back up your point?
An argument could be made to spend this money to improve public schooling infrastructure in India. And people coming out of that obviously would contribute way more. The scenario is a net loss for Indian tax payers. This is way more in lost opportunity costs.
Most of these arguments sound very similar the arguments against privatization in 1980s India. You can talk of the benefits of using tax payers money to manufacture bulbs while you don't invest the same money else where, where some thing real can happen.
Please feel free to run IITs using fees or whatever endowments you can get. Also most of these people harp day and night about how awesome they are, makes sense to generate some IP, sell that and make some money to fund themselves.
Can you give me a source on this? One that compares the economic contribution of students from the next-10 colleges in India and finds it to be more than that of the IITs. Because otherwise, you're comparing different sample sizes and your statement becomes trivially true as a result.
> But by and large most IITs are largely places to train people, and send them to foreign countries.
Try looking up statistics of what % of students go abroad immediately after graduating from an IIT. Perhaps that might help you revisit this assertion.
> An argument could be made to spend this money to improve public schooling infrastructure in India.
The government's already spending 10x on that than they are on Higher Education. (2009) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_India#Budget How much would an extra 0.5x help.
Easy-peasy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_B._Shah
He didn't even go to IIT - regular University of Mumbai undergrad.
Here's another: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nehanarkhede/ - co-creator of Kafka, attended University of Pune for undergrad.
I'll grant you they both benefited from attending grad school in the US.
Also the fact that most people have good English speaking skills, means a lot of HBO and Star Movies watching as kids, which gives a good idea about American slangs, culture and other things in general.
There are awesome Indian IT people out there and most of them are gobbled up by product firms like Microsoft, Facebook, Google, etc. IT services firms are mostly left with mediocre IT guys whose eye is mostly on "on-site" positions.
Like many have said, it's going to get even more ugly and sincerely I feel this sort of adjustment is required for Indian IT companies to be ready for future challenges and future demanding work. They have to shed their bodyshop images if they have to be taken seriously. It's time to move up the value chain or die.
Scw these forefathers for they started on a super negative note with a begging bowl (probably a hangover of multiple years of colonialism) and instead not being aggressive for high end work.
Just give me some work was the attitude these fathers started with, no wonder the son's will do the same. Like father, like son!!!
It is high time the narrative starts changing to cause a change in the mindset of young engineering students and this has to start at a very low level, from engineering schools. The first narrative is to show these forefathers in a more negative light, than positive.
>> It's time to move up the value chain or die.
Die, is the most likely outcome (7/10).
Barring a few, most startups take a very conservative approach to expansion and investment.
As the industry matures and execs and staff become aware of the degree of automation that's possible, they also understand that a lot of the services offered by consultancy services are mostly fluff and way to add FTEs.
I see this as a progress. Since you replace the first-level IT stuff with automated processes, the now second-level IT stuff will sooner or later become first-level and so on. Therefore all the levels are pushed upwards and we tend to go to higher levels, no matter if we speak about developing, researching, improving etc.
Without answers for these and related questions, it's uncertain if this is good progress.
> Preparing the ground for layoffs, each of these seven companies has already put a higher number of employees on notice by awarding them the lowest ratings. Cognizant has placed more than 15,000 employees in the lowest category (bucket IV), and Infosys has placed more than 3,000 senior managers in the category of employees needing improvement.
This isn't 56k entry level jobs. This is 56k jobs up and down the structure of the companies.
> As IT companies start working on newer technologies such as cloud computing, they are fast moving from a people-led model, which means they need fewer employees. Meanwhile, many of the IT companies have embraced automation tools to perform the mundane, repeatable tasks that were performed by an army of engineers earlier.
> “The entire pyramid structure (organizational structure) is getting disrupted,” the second HR head cited earlier added.
> That speaks of a bigger problem, said an expert.
> “What required 50 programmers, analysts or accountants 5 years ago can be done by a handful of smart thinkers and much smarter systems,” said Phil Fersht, CEO of US-based HfS Research, an outsourcing-research firm. “If I were Prime Minister Narendra Modi, I would be very concerned that a whole workforce generation needs reorienting to address work activities that are growing in demand.”
None of the articles speak to where the people who have lost their jobs are going.
Use some thing like Lisp and Functional programming really well and 99% of all the current programmers can be put out of job.
[1] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-approximate-number-of-IT-e...
From https://www.bizjournals.com/bizjournals/news/2017/02/17/tech...
Computer, electronics and telecommunications companies shed more than 90,000 jobs last year, compared to nearly 80,000 in 2015, according to a new report out from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a global outplacement firm based in Chicago. Tech layoffs accounted for 18 percent of the total 526,915 U.S. job cuts announced in 2016.
Computer companies were hit especially hard; layoffs in the sector were up 7 percent in 2016. Dell Technologies (NYSE: DVMT) was responsible for much of the uptick when it converged with EMC last year and cut thousands of positions. Intel (NASDAQ: INTC), IBM (NYSE: IBM), Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) also shed jobs, with Intel laying off 12,000 employees, or 11 percent of its workforce, per the report.
I feel its a systematic issue - too many IT related courses and seats in colleges, companies hiring for head count rather than quality, a huge number of maintenance projects which provide little scope for learning, etc.
Sure the employees do share a part of the blame, but only a part. There is no incentive for them to change anything in a highly bureaucratic environment, so this vicious cycle will continue. I just hope the industry as a whole learns and adapts before its too late and millions lose their job.
With no physical access to their top market (H1B reform), it will continue to be tough. Capgemini, which has about the same headcount, will end with 30% more revenue than Infosys in 2017. Accenture, x3.4 the revenue for only x2 the headcount.
With limited access to market with better hourly rates, they would continue to struggle. Unless they bet on more vertical market, selling licenses of software they own or have shares in, which is exactly their current strategies. It may work.
They also have a fairly successful banking product called Finacle.
Tata by the way also has a lot of product work going on. Wipro too.
Many services firms also do pretty high tech work by the way. Even things like Chip design.
Just because they don't blog and tweet about it, or talk about it in conferences doesn't mean they don't do good work.
Though the biggest challenge is timezone problems and the sheer challenge it is to communicate.
Though I'm sure people have had different experiences in their sectors.
I know other people have had great success stories, but you get what you pay for. Even if the cost-of-living is much lower that doesn’t mean that you can buy the bottom of the barrel people and expect it to be worth it.
https://www.topechelon.com/blog/how-much-do-recruiters-make-...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-26/china-to-...
Hopefully, this is simply a wake up call as the economy grows and diversifies.
> CBRE predicts 50% of occupations today will no longer exist in 2025
But on the other hand, things don't change fast enough:
> whats shall everyone do? skill up . Is that anything new in software development? Nopes
These two positions, change and no change, can't be simultaneously true. If there is change, then there are new applications where humans are needed. If there is no change, then human jobs remain untaken by automation.
There will never be a lack of jobs for people as long as people have desires and needs that are unfulfilled. Even if all our needs today are fulfilled, we create new goals and new entitlements for which we have to work.
Take, for example, medicine and movies - these two occupations existed as pre-modern medicine and theatre even 1000 years ago. But now, that we have automated many aspects such as blood tests, pill production, medical scanning, and in the case of movies, copying and broadcasting - they should reduce the need for doctors and actors, but instead, they increase 100x the number of doctors and actors. Why? Because we want more, much more than a millenia ago.
We have expanded our entitlement more than 100x and we're busier than ever, in the middle of automation. Believe in our desire for more, in our greed and ever raising entitlement! They'll keep us employed.
My point is that automation creates new applications, and thus, jobs that sit on top of it. Like SEO - who would have guessed what SEO is 25 years ago? And now there is a whole field. We create new desires, we raise our entitlement to the equal of what we can achieve, no matter how much it is.
Medicine has indeed changed. But plenty of other occupations - manual farming, blacksmithing, even full-time life in a religious communities - have all-but disappeared. (That latter "occupation" holding a very non-trivial percentage of the population for at least a thousand years.)
Jobs exist when there's a perceived market for their output. No one is going to argue that today's software dev practices can't be improved and streamlined with AI, or even with dumb automation.
So the lower tier of IT jobs will indeed go. And it will not be replaced by new jobs for those with an equivalent (low) level of talent.
There's actually something like Maslow's Hierarchy of desirable outputs from jobs. On the lowest tier you have dumb musicle, which is easily automated with animal help and then by machine aid. At the top you (probably) have political leadership - not because it's necessarily genuinely productive, but because it's good at making itself appear critically important. Between those extremes you have various layers that rely on different blends of muscle, IQ, original creativity, ability to command resources, people skills, strategic political skills, and persuasive abilities. (...Not an exhaustive list.)
Mechanisation starts low and moves high. Muscle is easier to mechanise than IQ, but a lot of "high IQ" work is repetitive, and easier to mechanise than work that requires strategic political skills and persuasive ability.
Bottom line: it's all vulnerable. No one's job is irreplaceable. Not even the privileged "jobs" at the top of the hierarchy, which are really just pure resource accumulation.
56K jobs in India? Not that significant overall. 56k jobs from seven of the big names of Indian IT jobs? That's another story - http://www.livemint.com/Industry/4CXsLIIZXf8uVQLs6uFQvK/Top-... (which is referenced in the first paragraph but doesn't dive into).
> Information technology (IT) companies in India are in the midst of the industry’s largest retrenchment drive, with seven of the biggest IT firms planning to ask at least 56,000 engineers to leave this year.
> The number is at least twice the employees laid off by the companies last year, reflecting their under-preparedness in adapting to newer technologies and dealing with the fallout from US President Donald Trump’s protectionist policies.
> The companies include both Indian and multinational firms with a large footprint in India.
> The seven companies—Infosys Ltd, Wipro Ltd, Tech Mahindra Ltd, HCL Technologies Ltd, US-based Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp. and DXC Technology Co., and France-based Cap Gemini SA—and which together employ 1.24 million people, plan to let go of 4.5% of their workforce in 2017.
Though note that last bit... together, they employe 1.24 million and this reflects under a 5% layoff overall.
That article goes into a bit more of the numbers and corporate structures that are getting disrupted with this layoff.
This is just some big IT staffing companies cleaning house.
Source: Anecdotal - I work in Indian IT. In fact hiring for at least 10 positions at my company. It's mainly the skills gap. At these big companies people get stuck in routine jobs and don't keep up with changing tech landscape.
Not sure why this made such big news because this is pretty much evident once you talk to a majority of cs undergrads, they literally have no idea and interest in cs but are in it because it is, well, 'trending'.
And as a domino effect, admissions are also falling. I hope shitty colleges, like the one I belong from, close down.
Surely, I am having bad time too. I haven't found a job yet. And despite applying to 50-100 companies, hardly 1-2 replied. But I gotta keep trying, hopefully I'll find a job one day. If not, well, it's better not to worry about things out of control. One can always do something to pass that day, and hope for a better tomorrow.
I still believe qualified engineers had no problems keeping their job or finding a new one. In any country.
No wonder that unqualified employees will always be laid off at some time.
There are some jobs I've had in the past that didn't pan out, and I'm glad they didn't because I wouldn't have grown if I had stayed in them.
Except from some maintenance, it just seems to be cheaper to upscale a VM in many cases.
The biggest cost at my work ( full-time job) seems to be management ( development too off course) and planning.
I'm not sure if the scale that cloud provides is required 90% of the times
The hook is at small scale, the catch is at medium/large scale. For Azure, licensing is included.
Can someone please explain what processes those two terms involve. Does automation mean writing Unix shell scripts and setting it up under Cron. But that has been done since very long time. I see don't get what digitisation and automation mean.
Round about the same time, around mid 1980s, people were tiring as they were watching west take leaps way ahead of India. There were a few companies building products and providing services to many firms back then. They were not exactly very successful but they managed to hang on. Until 1992, when India opened up its markets. Import regulations were relaxed, and FDI was encouraged. Round about the same time, US and Europe was gradually outsourcing bulk of its work to India. These companies thanks to double benefits of both the sides of domestic and international economy, now experienced run away success. Early employees tasted success and growth never witnessed in the history of Indian economics. Companies grew 100% YoY. Head counts increased by 2x every year. Most employees came from middle class to lower middle class families. These were promoted in waves after waves, year after year. You could easily net a decent mid to senior management position in 5 - 7 years. They also got to travel abroad frequently, some of them even settled in US and Europe. Land prices in Bangalore and rest of India were at scrap levels. Dollar exchange rate to rupee was 35-40 rupees. So you had a lot of value available for bird feed prices. Salaries of course were gargantuan. While the ordinary Indian worker made a average of 5 - 10 K a month, Im talking of the really well of ones. Software and IT folks made in lacs, bonuses came in lacs. Stock options came in crores. Back then these kind of riches were unheard in Indian middle class households, unless you came from politics or bribe giving government jobs.
IT jobs now became the most sought after jobs in India. Needless to say this also caused a lot of bad habit to creep into most companies. Almost everybody aspires to be a manager. Largely because the perks are just too awesome, all you have to do is forward emails, circulate memos, approve leaves and do appraisals. It was the Indian private company equivalent of posh sought after Indian administrative services jobs. You get paid disproportionately more in all possible ways, Salaries, bonuses and stock options. You also get to travel business class frequently. Think of it like fully paid luxury vacation every few months.
Companies now have layers and layers of dead wood unproductive management, consuming too much resources and providing little to zero value in return. Most junior level folks are completely unmotivated to pursue a hard career in tech due to dismal financial prospects. Many mass immigrate to west to catch up on lost years. Every time US has a recessions these companies benefit as work gets outsourced. When US economy is good they get shafted.
VCs and US firms largely pay Indian salaries. Start up scene is not bright either. Most are started by Ivy league folks and graciously over spend all the cash on paying fat salaries to people from the alma mater. In short, with money drying up and automation coming in. Management jobs are getting eliminated. Not enough free money to go around. Many junior level testing and first/second line support jobs too are going. Next crash will be ugly. People will lose homes, jewelry will be sold. Kids will be pulled out of international schools.
They can't be reskilled and re-employed for the same reasons why someone weighing 150 kgs can't one just wake up and run a ultra marathon. Too much of entitlement.
Lastly this is just a repeat of the decade of the 1990s. With liberalization bulk of the people got shafted the same way.
Free money never did any good to people on the longer run.
They're laying people off at modem speed!
This happened in the US as well. Lots of IT positions got cut as companies consolidated much of their backend to cloud services.
But I wouldn't hold my breath on cheaper indian tech industry losing any steam and I'd still betting H1-B visas are only going to be delayed.
India has seen an increase, not a decrease, in FDI ( primarily directed to their tech sector ). It means that foreign companies/governments/etc are still investing in the indian tech sector.
And I have hired & worked with multiple consultants at my company. The quality of the code consultants create is sub-par irrespective of their country of origin. The end of the day, there don't have any skin in the game, and care only about the billing.
Is it less demand from US firms due to slowdown? Market saturation? Shifting needs?
I recently left a software company due to their codebase. Low and behold it was constructed by a bunch of cheap worker ants. Sorry, not for me.