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Wipro, Infosys, Tech Mahindra, Cognizant Slash Jobs
- whitefish 9y agoThis will lower salaries in India for IT professionals. As a result outsourcing to India will become more attractive.
- taylodl 9y agoThat ship has done sailed. American firms have learned what makes sense to offshore and what doesn't. Hence the carnage.
- nradov 9y agoAmerican firms learned that once they have thousands of resources in India it's more cost effective to just hire them as direct employees instead of going through an outsourcing company. In the long run this probably works out better for everyone, except the owners of the outsourcing companies.
- trhway 9y ago>it's more cost effective to just hire them as direct employees it also makes it easier to bring them later (after 1 year) into US on L1 without all these limitation of H1 like prevailing wage, yearly cap, spouse of L1 can work, GC seems to be easier (at least that seemed to be the case 10 years ago when I last paid attention to immigration)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- falkoooo 9y agoWell german firms aren't there yet in my opinion. They propagate offshoring as the opportunity to lower costs by 90% while preserving the same quality. In my company the last "transformation" talk made clear that no department will be left untouched in the next off and near shoring activities..
- dredmorbius 9y agoP.T. Barnum citing short-cycle natality statistics on line 2.
- monkmartinez 9y agoI am not that old, but I remember reading a headline like this on Slashdot once... The results have been less than stellar. When my non-tech enabled friends complain about tech support, it's usually with a fake Indian accent. I think the "IT professional" in India has hurt quite a few off-shoring companies.
- deciplex 9y ago> When my non-tech enabled friends complain about tech support, it's usually with a fake Indian accent. Find some new, better friends.
- rohan1024 9y agohttp://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/pink-slips-galore-wipro-infosys-tech-mahindra-cognizant-cut-india-jobs-117051100156_1.html http://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/pink-slip... Link to desktop site.
- dang 9y agoThanks. Changed to that.
- osrec 9y agoI suppose it was a long time coming. Why send your work half way across the world, for it to be done/corrected 3 times over with often poor results, when you can do it once and do it right onshore. In my experience, offshoring is the absolute epitome of a false economy!
- flukus 9y agoThe type of company that hires these companies don't have the corporate structures necessary to build decent software either. They'll build crap 3 times over with poor results and cost more doing it. I'm sure you've heard about those people with 10 years of experience that are unable to code fizzbuzz? They hide out in those large corporate environments.
- osrec 9y agoYes, I've come to the realisation that large corporations are where the spirits of good developers go to die...
- muro 9y agoMicrosoft, Apple, Google, FB and other places with awesome devs are also large corporations :)
- abalashov 9y agoI'm pretty sure the parent posters were referring to large corporations whose core product is not technology as such, although even there, you'd be surprised (or maybe you wouldn't). You don't have to get far from MS/Apple/Google/FB/etc. to walk into an alternate universe of complete mediocrity, where engineering and development are viewed as cost centres and/or fancy forms of typing...
- flukus 9y agoEven within those companies lurk a lot of mediocrity, either acquired or homegrown. MS and Google have had some stinkers over the years, apple seems better, but the probably keep the worst of it internal.
- einrealist 9y agoSadly the article does not specify whats automated and slashing these jobs. I suppose the majority of these terminated positions are service roles, like help desks / call center?
- flukus 9y agoA bash script? Wouldn't be the first time it's beat out a team of software developers, especially systems that high level execs decide they need.
- raverbashing 9y agoWhy write a bash script when you can employ 5 java developers and take 10 times longer?
- pixl97 9y agoI would guess customers simply getting off legacy systems and farming many services off to cloud providers.
- jalayir 9y agoNot sure about the quality of this piece. One company, Cognizant, is obviously in some form of trouble. The others are laying off a few hundreds/thousands jobs, on a base of 100K+ employees, as part of the performance review process. There's also no mention of hiring being reduced for any of these companies.
- sumanthvepa 9y agoMost of us in the Indian IT industry, have probably seen the writing on the wall for about close to 6-8 years now. One way Indians can handle this adversity is to switch from working for service companies to working for firms that build product.The silver lining, although a very tenuous one, is that venture capital and private equity inflows into India in the areas of e-commerce, digital marketing, fintech and software automation have been steadily increasing over the last decade (although not in 2015-2016.) That provides opportunities for experienced professionals -- the cohort that seems most affected. Those with the experience of managing people, technology and operations may find the downturn easier to navigate.
- pjmlp 9y agoAs far as I understand even Indian companies are now offshoring to other countries in the Indian Ocean, with IT salaries lower than in India. Is it visible there?
- sumanthvepa 9y agoCould be. There is nothing sacrosanct about Indian workers. (Or any others for that matter) The reason I was advocating that folks with experience and talent seek out product companies, is that as a group, they are less sensitive to worker wages. A talented programmer, product manager, marketing executive or ops person will have at least an order of magnitude greater impact on the company's bottom (or top line) than they would in say a pure body shopping IT outsourcing company. So as an entrepreneur, for the right candidate, I have no problem paying 2x the market rate. A good employee will more than make up for the extra cost. In the outsourcing business though, the business model is very sensitive to labor costs. Not so with product firms.
- pjmlp 9y agoI got that idea, talking with some Indians while travelling in Mauritius a few months ago.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- thewhitetulip 9y ago> which is moving towards increasing automation, use of artificial intelligence It is such baseless stuff which irks me every time, I have read from MANY papers that automation is doing this that without explicitly saying X automation firm screwed up the revenues. I would like to see visible proof that "automation" is eating into the revenues, no report says that, they just say "automation and AI" The journalists don't know difference between AI vs ML and everyone is acting as if "AI and automation" will destroy X firm, no, they won't. Anyone who works in the sw field would know that there are many manual things done in the project so much so that there wouldn't be an "automation firm" which would sell blah blah robots to do human work. It is way off into the future, if it'll ever happen. This madness has to stop. edit: clarification about who they meant
- ramshanker 9y ago>>They don't know difference between AI vs ML<< Yea, very true, The ratio of (Engineers / Managers) need to substantially increase over here.
- thewhitetulip 9y agoI did not mean the people working in IT, I meant the journalists, they just say "AI is eating the world" without knowing anything. "automation and AI" are eating into the revenues. Why exactly is building these "automation" so much that the revenues are getting affected?
- pixl97 9y agoMaybe these crappy IT consulting firms make a large amount of their income from selling the 'same fix' over and over again. When the customer moves to a newer system the number of legacy problems drops dramatically, and the new systems can scale far beyond their current needs before capacity problems increase billable hours again. I've seen it myself doing MSP work. Crappy old system breaks with every program update, every windows update, the wind blows the wrong direction, etc, etc. Client updates to new computers with SSD, new software based partially/mostly in the cloud. Full and correct integration with active directory. Their complaint load can easily drop 5 to 10 fold, mostly from less legacy software issues.
- gopalv 9y agoHaving worked for one of those names, I have to guess that this is probably clearing the bench rather than removing employees with billings. More often than not, the bench exists to promise a customer that they have the people to "start yesterday" on the project. The trouble with choking off the supply into the industry is that often the demand dies out as a result rather than increasing the price of a service - complete rewrites get shelved, new development gets postponed and sustenance projects use band-aids to treat bullet holes. And that causes a trickle-up effect across the product companies selling into the industry - you don't sell new database licenses if billing systems aren't getting revamped and if that ripples continues, everyone upstream starts getting extremely frugal with their expenses. Which is bad for the enterprise software ecosystem - the only folks who are likely to not notice that immediately will be small bootstrapped consumer companies, with real boxes to ship and lots of room to grow (or giant ones with room to grow, like a self driving car paid for by clicks). I'm a bit apprehensive of drastic changes ever since I read the CA Budget (see last page of Economic Outlook[1]). [1] - http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/2016-17/pdf/BudgetSummary/EconomicOutlook.pdf http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/2016-17/pdf/BudgetSummary/Economic...
- fadzlan 9y agoOh yeah, I have my shortest stint in one of those company. It was rumored that the company I was working had taken poison pill last time by having the ratio of benched workers and assigned workers to 50%:50%. Their presence in our country was small, but they have multiple office campuses in India. One campus even have a separate building that if you walk to that building to work, people know you are benched. Compared to other company that I worked, one of their value proposition is to have resources readily available if you want to start a project today, apart from having a dirt cheap offer. So yeah, benching a lot doesn't come as a surprise to me about those companies.
- amrx101 9y agoThese companies hire a lot of graduates from all over the country at a merge rate and these newly recruited employees are then benched. They will sometime hire a couple of thousands of new grads from a particular school.
- itomato 9y agoThe bread and butter of many of those shops was already on the trailing edge when they came to the fore. The market has dried up. There are springs of Windows, Oracle, NetSuite, Java and other Turn-of-the-Century technology, but new customers are fewer and fewer. Of those are a fraction who want/need bargain-grade Global IT Support. Combine the declining presence of IT with manual administration interfaces, and it really is no great mystery.
- itomato 9y agoThis sounds bogus to me: >...newer areas such as digital and cloud, which require engineers to engage with clients instead of working remotely Does that mean trends in remote work contribute to a measurable erosion of their collective markets? Or that their workforces cannot function in a face-to-face environment?
- thisisit 9y agoI am confused - Is this something new? As far as I can remember the perils of layoffs and afraid Indian IT professional is the "go to" story each year during the performance review cycle. Back in 2015 - https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/02/27/indi-f27.html https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/02/27/indi-f27.html 2014 - http://indianexpress.com/article/business/business-others/layoff-reports-do-the-rounds-at-global-it-firms-india-units/ http://indianexpress.com/article/business/business-others/la... 2013 - http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/companies/less-than-5000-underperformers-asked-to-leave-infosys/article4272693.ece http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/companies/less-than-5000... The only reason this is being played up is the perceived notion of protectionist environment throughout the world (not only US). Then there is the whole thing about "AI" and automation. Or if you want to go full tinfoil hat on this - It is a ploy to stop people from asking better pay or searching for a new job.
- _nedR 9y agoLately, I have been noticing the "increasing automation, use of artificial intelligence " line being touted by Indian offshoring companies whenever they talk about laying off or reduced recruitment. What exactly is the automation or artificial intelligence being used? I never hear any details. Are they doing something radically new involving machine learning which allows them to be much more productive? Or have they refined or streamlined their scripting environments and automated build\deploy tools? Perhaps they have built a suitably large and mature framework of components from previous projects which allows greater code re-use? In these cases, using words like "Automation" and "AI" is just putting a new sticker on an old product. Or are companies just using these buzzwords to give a positive spin to an event whose real reasons are actually more mundane and financial(weak market conditions, reducing bloat in workforce ). Maybe they are attempting to mask something more ominous like significant shift in the market away from offshoring?
- abalashov 9y agoI suspect there's some truth to it, mixed in with the type of pulp fiction you identify. For instance, consider the structural changes induced by the whole "cloud" phenomenon. In what is termed "legacy" infrastructure by the "cloud-minded", there is, classically, a whole caste (no pun intended) of operations and sysadmin people with a skill set of "installing servers", "keeping servers running", deploying software packages, applying patches, etc. A large stampede to cloud really does reduce a lot of this mundane but relatively skilled labour, in theory--it's one of the main selling points: lay off 80% of your sysadmin because the infrastructure mostly runs itself! To the extent that it doesn't, focus your operations efforts with a much smaller, leaner team of Cloud Rock Star Ninjas or whatever. And "mundane but relatively skilled" is, as I understand it, the preferred area for classical Indian offshoring companies' labour arbitrage plays, since it's perceived to be the ideal target range, rightly or wrongly, for outsourcing by developed-world executives. Then there's all the company that "cloud" has kept, whether conceptually or as a matter of timely coincidence, e.g. the slow fading of the distinction Corporate America makes between Operations and Engineering.
- known 9y agoThey're making $150 billion/year by selling software engineers, not software to US/EU clients;
- holydude 9y agoWhat is your opinion about other offshore locations for IT stuff ? (South East Asia, Eastern Europe) ?
- pcr0 9y agoAside from India and the Philippines, language/cultural barriers are relatively greater in most other parts of SE Asia. Eastern Europe seems to be quite popular.
- douche 9y agoCognizant and Infosys are just the worst. We've been working with them on a number of deals lately where they are effectively middlemen in between us and a real customer who wants a product similar to what we provide. It's been a fucking shambles. Some days I'm just amazed at how much incompetence and incomprehension can be mustered on one team - everything is at least ten times more difficult than it ought to be, and more often than not they appear to be trying to deliberately sabotage the project. Avoid terrible resellers and body-shops.
- kartickv 9y agoSad to see the industry choose abrupt collapse over upskilling themselves and remaining relevant.
- mattfrommars 9y agoCan someone give me some insight which sort of 'IT job' or 'programming' jobs are being replaced by automation? With a background in engineering, makes sense in manufacturing industry but in software development?