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I have observed a different phenomenon: in the last 10 years, "startup culture" has swept over India. There is very little innovative or cutting edge being done

I have observed a different phenomenon: in the last 10 years, "startup culture" has swept over India. There is very little innovative or cutting edge being done in the US either outside of the universities (where many of the researchers are Indian) and a few big companies (Google, Facebook, et al -- who all have large engineering offices in India as well). Honestly, I find it easier to hire for skills like AWS, node.js, Kubernetes, React, Scala and TensorFlow in India than it is in the US. You're right about call center work, but that's a different skill set entirely. The biggest problem with the offshore model for development is that it requires a certain level of scale to be profitable. Large projects go great, as do small one-offs at established, large clients; but dealing with small customers/projects creates enough overhead to wipe out be benefits of offshore labor (or at least makes them less of an advantage). You have to have fat margins on your projects to cover the training costs for your people -- if you don't give them training, they won't have time to learn anything new (and the time off of projects costs you far more than any training course would).

hpcjoe 9y ago
Hmmm ... at $dayjob-1, I watched one of the major Indian IT houses take over a large US companies infrastructure in the interests of cost savings. Driven in large part by your standard gaggle of very expensive (and often clueless) big name consulting firms. The net result is that this former customer took a system that worked well, and replaced it with a system that doesn't. Add in frequent outages, "core team" changes on the IT side, and on the customer side (they fired all their internal developers and most of their support) ... ... This would make for a compelling "do not try this at home, kids" type case study. Somewhere in there, the expensive consultants made some other egregiously bad statements to the customer, resulting in a disastrous policy with regard to their core analytics. I give them another 2 years before they reverse course and fire the IT firm and the consultants. From my personal experience, the money you "save" is rarely worth the headaches associated with this. Call it a Pyrrhic victory. It looks like you are saving money. You really aren't. This said, and going back to the OPs point, this change was inevitable. Automation is going to wipe out low level jobs in this space, and the most at risk are those whom have not adapted. The Indian IT firms have not adapted.
pkaye 9y ago
I'm guessing a lot of companies that offshore are going for cost savings and many of those wouldn't spend much on training anyway. India really needs to focus on product development to move up the value chain. Look at South Korea as an example. Practically half the electronic gadgets we buy come from there.
kumarvvr 9y ago
Though it is easier to hire people with skills in XYZ tech, it's important to note that Indian IT companies have bred a culture of knowledge purely on paper. A civil engineer/Electrical Engineer/ Electronics Engineer / Industrial Engineer / etc, just out of college, joins a services company as a "developer" with a pay around 5000 USD a year, works for a few years on, say SQL, goes to the local "IT training institute" run by Mr. ABC with "X+ years of onsite experience", pays them Z amount of rupees, "learns" "T" tech for 3 or 6 months, gets a certificate, applies for a job in another IT company desperately looking for people with knowledge in "T", joins, struggles through and then rinses and repeats. I have seen it personally. Of course, not all of them are like that, but I am sure more than 50% are milled from the same process. That is why you get so many engineers able to do some specific things in some specific technology, but are scarcely able to innovate or think out of the box. There is a whole slew of IT training institutes and hundreds of trainers, staff, photocopy shops, cafeterias, etc, which thrive on training an ever churning flow of "IT" engineers. Add to that, an "IT" engineer expects to be a "Technical Lead" in a matter of 5-6 years, a "Team Lead" in a matter of 8 years and a "Project Manager" in about 12 years of experience. My numbers for the years maybe a bit off though. Contrast this to developers in Europe or elsewhere, you have technically strong developers with decades of experience honing their skills in a myriad of tech and gathering a repertoire of programming techniques, tools, practices, etc.
- kamaal 9y ago
  >>Add to that, an "IT" engineer expects to be a "Technical Lead" in a matter of 5-6 years, a "Team Lead" in a matter of 8 years and a "Project Manager" in about 12 years of experience. My numbers for the years maybe a bit off though. More than anything else, this is the most important reason. Indians for some reason have fancied middle management bureaucratic roles above real work almost forever. This is not just in IT, but the very economic ecosystem of India has this problem. We are talking about a country where even house wives do a distance education MBA course because 'Just in case... I would be a manager someday' kind of attitude. Not one person wants to do any real work. And over long times its impossible to sustain growth without productivity. So there will be a inevitable decline in the overall ecosystem at some point in time. But my guess is those who wish to do work will always have good projects to chase after. The IT ecosystem on the longer run will resemble every other engineering services industry in India. Architecture, Mechanical, Civil, Electrical etc. Niche areas where good talent will be required and there will always be a supply. Noise, garbage and me too attitude people will largely be gone.

hpcjoe 9y ago

Hmmm ... at $dayjob-1, I watched one of the major Indian IT houses take over a large US companies infrastructure in the interests of cost savings. Driven in large part by your standard gaggle of very expensive (and often clueless) big name consulting firms. The net result is that this former customer took a system that worked well, and replaced it with a system that doesn't. Add in frequent outages, "core team" changes on the IT side, and on the customer side (they fired all their internal developers and most of their support) ... ... This would make for a compelling "do not try this at home, kids" type case study. Somewhere in there, the expensive consultants made some other egregiously bad statements to the customer, resulting in a disastrous policy with regard to their core analytics. I give them another 2 years before they reverse course and fire the IT firm and the consultants. From my personal experience, the money you "save" is rarely worth the headaches associated with this. Call it a Pyrrhic victory. It looks like you are saving money. You really aren't. This said, and going back to the OPs point, this change was inevitable. Automation is going to wipe out low level jobs in this space, and the most at risk are those whom have not adapted. The Indian IT firms have not adapted.

pkaye 9y ago

I'm guessing a lot of companies that offshore are going for cost savings and many of those wouldn't spend much on training anyway. India really needs to focus on product development to move up the value chain. Look at South Korea as an example. Practically half the electronic gadgets we buy come from there.

kumarvvr 9y ago

Though it is easier to hire people with skills in XYZ tech, it's important to note that Indian IT companies have bred a culture of knowledge purely on paper. A civil engineer/Electrical Engineer/ Electronics Engineer / Industrial Engineer / etc, just out of college, joins a services company as a "developer" with a pay around 5000 USD a year, works for a few years on, say SQL, goes to the local "IT training institute" run by Mr. ABC with "X+ years of onsite experience", pays them Z amount of rupees, "learns" "T" tech for 3 or 6 months, gets a certificate, applies for a job in another IT company desperately looking for people with knowledge in "T", joins, struggles through and then rinses and repeats. I have seen it personally. Of course, not all of them are like that, but I am sure more than 50% are milled from the same process. That is why you get so many engineers able to do some specific things in some specific technology, but are scarcely able to innovate or think out of the box. There is a whole slew of IT training institutes and hundreds of trainers, staff, photocopy shops, cafeterias, etc, which thrive on training an ever churning flow of "IT" engineers. Add to that, an "IT" engineer expects to be a "Technical Lead" in a matter of 5-6 years, a "Team Lead" in a matter of 8 years and a "Project Manager" in about 12 years of experience. My numbers for the years maybe a bit off though. Contrast this to developers in Europe or elsewhere, you have technically strong developers with decades of experience honing their skills in a myriad of tech and gathering a repertoire of programming techniques, tools, practices, etc.

kamaal 9y ago
>>Add to that, an "IT" engineer expects to be a "Technical Lead" in a matter of 5-6 years, a "Team Lead" in a matter of 8 years and a "Project Manager" in about 12 years of experience. My numbers for the years maybe a bit off though. More than anything else, this is the most important reason. Indians for some reason have fancied middle management bureaucratic roles above real work almost forever. This is not just in IT, but the very economic ecosystem of India has this problem. We are talking about a country where even house wives do a distance education MBA course because 'Just in case... I would be a manager someday' kind of attitude. Not one person wants to do any real work. And over long times its impossible to sustain growth without productivity. So there will be a inevitable decline in the overall ecosystem at some point in time. But my guess is those who wish to do work will always have good projects to chase after. The IT ecosystem on the longer run will resemble every other engineering services industry in India. Architecture, Mechanical, Civil, Electrical etc. Niche areas where good talent will be required and there will always be a supply. Noise, garbage and me too attitude people will largely be gone.