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

• steve371 9y ago
  What is the percentage attrition? 2%? I wasn't able to get it clearly from the article. I think percentage is what we should focusing on instead of the total numbers considering the total population.
• coding123 9y ago
  Far more companies are replacing India talent with Pakistan talent. The per person cost is what India was about 5 - 10 years ago. However, things will slowly change again, but I'm hoping that these economies start just doing their own projects and competing at the company level not just the outsourcing as there are definitely people we should be paying locally to do the work (at a higher price - remember that extra 1 trillion dollars to the top 500 people?).
• eksemplar 9y ago
  It'll probably get worse for a lot of people. I work in the public sector, in a municipality. Our IT department has been relatively big on the server side, utilizing consultants ever so often to ensure best practices. 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.
  • aNoob7000 9y ago
    When you talk about the cloud, do you mean SAAS, PAAS, or IAAS? I'm asking because we looked into moving our infrastructure to the cloud and the numbers just didn't add up. We've started to move some application to SAAS but most of the stuff just doesn't make sense to move to the cloud.
    • thanksgiving 9y ago
      Can you share some numbers? If you count colocation as cloud, I think there is a wide range of products and services you can use.
      • aNoob7000 9y ago
        Sorry, I really can't share any numbers. I guess for us the biggest stumbling blocks were legacy systems and software licensing.
        • ezekg 9y ago
          You were wanting to move your licensing to the cloud and decided against it? Any particular reason?
    • Spooky23 9y ago
      You do all of the above. First you go to O365. Then you put your AD and ADFS in the cloud as a DR. Then you target other things where DR is useful. 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.
    • eksemplar 9y ago
      SAAS and parts IAAS. We've already moved our operations to a "private" cloud we run on servers we rent, but we're positioning ourselves to go full scale Azure. 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.
• ajaimk 9y ago
  1.3 Billion People and a significant number of that work in this industry.
• abhishek0318 9y ago
  These people are mainly relatively unskilled. These companies are notorious for hiring entire batches of graduating students. Situation in top tier colleges is lot better. This can be seen from increase in placements in IITs this year.
  • adrya407 9y ago
    >These people are mainly relatively unskilled Not only that I agree with that, but I'd like to add the fact that after 2 years of working in a team splitted in Romania and India, the working experience with Indian programmers is relatively difficult. It's not something isolated to an individual, all of my colleagues have been complaining that they would really like to work with someone else, but not from India. I think it comes from their culture, they are not used to work hard or to do something willingly. They are doing it if they must, if someone tells them that they have to do it.
    • axiom92 9y ago
      > I think it comes from their culture, they are not used to work hard or to do something willingly. Cut the crap. India is a country of 1.3 billion people, don't peddle bullshit stereotypes. Not working hard doesn't come from the culture; it's quite the opposite if anything. >They are doing it if they must, if someone tells them that they have to do it. Maybe the firm you are dealing with doesn't pay the employees well enough, which in turn causes demotivation?
      • oh_sigh 9y ago
        Maybe it is something else, like the differing power-distance relationships that Americans and Indians have.
      • JumpCrisscross 9y ago
        I am part Indian (albeit ethnically, not culturally) and work in finance. I always had a great experience working with Indian bankers, investors and VCs. The stereotypes puzzled me. Then I spoke to a few IT outsourcing/consulting companies. It’s horrible. Starting sentences with “no” even when agreeing, jargon-laid bullshitting, lying about simple things, overt sexism (e.g. if my female colleague asks a question, the response is addressed to me), et cetera. I fully blame a small handful of firms for nurturing a toxic culture and then projecting it to the world. (Indian tech start-ups have, in my experience, a wonderful culture.)
• code4tee 9y ago
  There will be many more. The India IT sector’s main play was cheap labor for low value-add IT tasks like basic dev or ops. The play a while back was to move day-to-day ops jobs to this cheap labor. Now the play is to automate this work so the jobs are disappearing. E.g when you move to the cloud with good architecture you don’t need tons of people pushing buttons and tweaking servers all day long. The India firms 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.
  • DevKoala 9y ago
    Thank you for the analysis.
  • JSONwebtoken 9y ago
    Not to mention if your only competitive advantage is price, there always is or will be a source of labor that is cheaper than you. For example, a number of startups I work with are now moving their IT support and basic dev to the Philippines. The quality of work is equally bad or worse, but it's even cheaper than India and the language barrier is comparable.
    • Blueskytech 9y ago
      So the Fortune 500 company I work for hired Verizon as its managed networking provider and their staff is all based in Manila. While others on my team complain about this I have to be honest, their support is top notch because the language barrier is non-existent. Compared to our in-house Indian IT support the language barrier is a stark contrast, I could only hope we move our corp system's support to the Philippines.
    • myth_drannon 9y ago
      I noticed a lot of outsourcing work is going to Ukraine and Belarus. India got a head start because of English language but right now many devolopers in Eastern Europe speak fluent English as well.
• melling 9y ago
  The claim is that India will be the third largest economy in 2032, as China becomes #1. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-26/china-to-overtake-u-s-economy-by-2032-as-asian-might-builds 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.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • naravara 9y ago
    Looks like most of the job loss is due to automation rather than lack of demand. The economy is going to keep growing, the returns will just accrue to a smaller share of people unless the government gets it tax-and-spend on.
  • TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
    Economic instability is a large reason for the push towards protectionism in America. Could those same forces lead to an Indian IT protectionism? Or do they lack enough industry currently?
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
• kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
  Are the legions of "recruiters" constantly spamming my phone and inbox part of IT? I won't shed a tear for them.
  • tqdm 9y ago
    Come on these are real people trying to get by. Have some empathy. It sucks being at the low end.
    • Clubber 9y ago
      Most recruiters get paid more than $100K which is better than most IT folks. https://www.topechelon.com/blog/how-much-do-recruiters-make-charge/ https://www.topechelon.com/blog/how-much-do-recruiters-make-...
• Daishiman 9y ago
  Well, yeah, entry-level IT stuff was always a target for automation because the human component should have been almost completely unnecessary from the start. 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.
  • adrya407 9y ago
    >Well, yeah, entry-level IT stuff was always a target for automation 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.
    • cmurf 9y ago
      At least in this case, 56,000 people in the 1st level lost their jobs. What's the total number of level 1's who matriculated to level 2? And is there a net job loss or are the laid off people finding other jobs that pay as well or better? Without answers for these and related questions, it's uncertain if this is good progress.
      • shagie 9y ago
        From the source article - http://www.livemint.com/Industry/4CXsLIIZXf8uVQLs6uFQvK/Top-7-IT-firms-including-Infosys-Wipro-to-lay-off-at-least.html http://www.livemint.com/Industry/4CXsLIIZXf8uVQLs6uFQvK/Top-... > 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.
• batmansmk 9y ago
  System integration is a proximity job. The last mile of a software delivery. 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.
  • fellellor 9y ago
    Those are entirely different business models - services vs products. Companies aren't always successful in making such transitions.
    • user5994461 9y ago
      Infosys, capgemini and accenture are all service companies, re selling employees by the hour. They don't develop their own products.
      • kamaal 9y ago
        Infosys has a good product offering. And generally spins of its successful products into separate companies. 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.
      • fellellor 9y ago
        If you bothered to read my comment, you'll see that's what I was saying in the first place.
        • akhatri_aus 9y ago
• Shivetya 9y ago
  Going to be interesting to see what happens to all those in the country as well. since all this goes back to India it won't be long before the state side people run into issues
• forkjoin 9y ago
  Given the number of graduates who join the workforce every year in India, plus the traditional model of companies to maintain a bench for graduate engineer in anticipation of big contracts, the number doesn't look disproportionate. Apart from all the politics and shifting revenue targets (which are the culprit to a great extent), todays technology trends clearly indicates a lot of "high-valued" job are going to be redundant as well, one report from CBRE predicts 50% of occupations today will no longer exist in 2025. whats shall everyone do? skill up . Is that anything new in software development? Nopes, in my 11 years I have already jumped through hoops of yet another modern day tech stack a few times to stay afloat.So I'd imagine its not just the low value IT jobs which are at risk, even the bleeding edge development practices might face the same fate. Any mobile developer thinking about joining the blockchain, ML bandwagon? or wait, carpentry anyone? :sigh
  • visarga 9y ago
    On the one hand you basically say things will change too much too fast: > 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.
    • forkjoin 9y ago
• oarla 9y ago
  Hopefully the indigenous market for these skills develops for those affected to develop a career into.
• NicoJuicy 9y ago
  What I really don't understand is, I'm 1 guy with a very small SMB. I do everything myself and tried in the cloud. 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
  • Clubber 9y ago
    The cost benefit is that if you are small, most of it is free, or near free. It gets expensive when you scale, but if you use fabric instead of VM's, it's nearly effortless compared to hiring two or three top notch net admins and running / renting a datacenter for eternity. The hook is at small scale, the catch is at medium/large scale. For Azure, licensing is included.
  • jmalicki 9y ago
    That's exactly the point... there's less for you to manage (at least at reasonable scale) - you leave management of those people and processes up to Amazon (or whoever your cloud provider is), so you can focus on your core business and not get distracted by managing getting new servers, backups, recovery plans, etc... it "just works".
• mac01021 9y ago
  Honest question: is that a lot for a whole country?
  • Clubber 9y ago
    Certainly not India, and it's not a lot for an industry sector (IT) in India, but it's a possible sign of a reversing trend.
  • shagie 9y ago
    Whole country? No. In the crash of 2008, there was one week in October with 20k jobs lost ( https://techcrunch.com/2008/10/24/19683-tech-layoffs-and-counting/ https://techcrunch.com/2008/10/24/19683-tech-layoffs-and-cou... also mentioned on that page is 24k jobs eliminated when HP and EDS merged ( https://www.computerworld.com/article/2532995/it-management/update--hp-announces-24-600-layoffs-in-wake-of-eds-acquisition.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2532995/it-management/... )). 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-7-IT-firms-including-Infosys-Wipro-to-lay-off-at-least.html 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.
  • pritambarhate 9y ago
    No. Frankly demand for "skilled" IT professional is high as ever. Even in traditional tech like .net and Java(spring). 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.
• ryanthedev 9y ago
  The quality of the work has been subpar from what I have seen at my company. 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.
  • MBCook 9y ago
    The one time I worked with outsourced people from India or Pakistan (I don’t actually know which country the people were hired out of, could be somewhere else) was a disaster, but what do you expect when you get the absolute lowest bid you can? 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.
  • vogt 9y ago
    The UI specs I ship get built out by a team in India and I get to review it once a week. They record a demo on video and send it to me overnight. It's the only thing we can reconcile with the time difference, since I am not able to access the staging environment (for reasons made unclear to me).
• harmlessposter 9y ago
  Tired of winning yet?
• thetruthseeker1 9y ago
  One thing I was hoping to get answered is, what is the revenue growth or dip these companies have seen. I think that may give a better context to this story. Job loss headlines alone sounds like doom and gloom, but that may or may not be the case depending on how the money is flowing...
• kamaal 9y ago
  Those people trying to understand why there is this level of mess in the Indian IT, let me give you some perspective. India was large a socialist economy focussed heavily on self reliance before the 1990's. To be precise 1992. This had both good and bad effects. Unions were rampant, production and engineering were largely focussed on delivering services and schemes administered through the government. Computerization was its bare minimal as unions largely thought of automation as some kind massive job killer. Trust me when I say this the luddite movement back then was so crazy there were national strikes every time the government tried to anything progressive. 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.
• blindwatchmaker 9y ago
  One of the articles linking from this one (https://qz.com/964843/less-than-5-of-india-engineers-are-cut-out-for-high-skill-programming-jobs/ https://qz.com/964843/less-than-5-of-india-engineers-are-cut...) made me laugh: > 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?
  • grad_ml 9y ago
    This is plain BS. I don't recall any CS department in India (and I know 100's) teaching, MS-word, Logo, Basic, Powerpoint, excel etc. However, I did TA'ed at Rice University, TX, Excel course for freshman.
    • mdani 9y ago
      Here school means elementary, middle school,high school etc. where they teach MS Word etc. In India, CS departments are in “colleges” also called “schools” in US so this may not be bullshit for the reason you stated.
      • grad_ml 9y ago
        Fair observation. I missed that part. My bad!
    • jackmott 9y ago
      they don't teach excel in the comp sci department at Rice.
• Abishek_Muthian 9y ago
  The issue has to do with Institutions & services firms here in India. 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.
  • kamaal 9y ago
    Its strange that you take the names of CEOs and proceed to deduce that as a proof of them being good programmers. Most of them go to Ivy league engineering schools, and then Ivy league management schools. And then from there straight jump into management barely spending any time at all in engineering. And the whole reason why they do engineering is largely because they need a bridge course to get into a masters level management degree. Once you get into a Ivy league management school, going wherever from there is essentially a networking activity not exactly a great indicator of your engineering performance. It helps to have friends in high places. 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.
• X86BSD 9y ago
  56,000? That’s it? That’s literally like one city block in Delhi. I think they will survive.
• tty7 9y ago
  33.6k is still OG
• sandGorgon 9y ago
  These are mostly outsourcing companies. 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.
  • blocked_again 9y ago
    > I'm able to very easily get highly qualified Indians in Silicon Valley to move back and work on something cool in India. We understand your sentimence. But please don't exaggerate too much :)
    • siddharthdeswal 9y ago
      I'm Indian and I agree with you. Parent overdid it a little bit. People gives many shits about the H1B, and it isn't that easy to pull Indians back from the US. Relatively easier than say ten years ago, but not at the level of bravado that parent exhibits.
      • sandGorgon 9y ago
        This is not incorrect. YMMV obviously...but I stand by what I say. 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.
        • kamaal 9y ago
• nautilus12 9y ago
  To be honest, it seems like they have better opportunities with these jobs available, but these people are probably better off in the long run without it, and our companies are probably better off not depending on these services in the first place. Its kind of an unnecessary evil. 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.
• prakashdanish 9y ago
  As a final year undergraduate, this scares me a lot. 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'.
  • RandomCSGeek 9y ago
    As a final year undergraduate, this makes me happy. Finally the trimming that IT industry badly needs is happening. 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.
• nocoder 9y ago
  To me, one of the indications that Indian IT is out of ideas & unlikely to move up the value chain was a string of stock buybacks this year by all major players. I believe a company invests in stock buyback when it feels that it does not have any other better uses of the money. Basically, they dont have/ can't find avenues to invest money where the shareholder growth will be much better than buyback.
  • eru 9y ago
    Just as an aside: economically stock buybacks are equivalent to dividends, but get a better tax treatment in most jurisdiction.
• jorblumesea 9y ago
  I truly believe offshore IT work was mostly a scam in the first place. The work they produced was of very low quality, and often was more expensive because you had to go back in and fix everything. The whole game was to overcharge western firms for cheap crap produced by shoddy programmers overseas. The IT outsourcing firms would pocket the difference. Come in and promise the world, overbill and underdeliver. Then the client is stuck with your crap and needs to pay you to maintain it. 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.
  • pckhoi 9y ago
    This feels like your personal sentiment. You do know that there are good outsourcing firm out there right? I've been working at outsourcing firm for most of my career and I have to disagree. There are a full spectrum of good and bad developers out there even in the outsourcing world, not just bad ones. Do you think outsourcing as a practice can still survive if it doesn't bring value?
    • closeparen 9y ago
      Yes, absolutely - plenty of decision makers face incentives structures that reward short term cost savings and don’t punish increased long term maintenance costs.
  • sumedh 9y ago
    Why has been the scam running for almost 30 years now?
    • Terr_ 9y ago
      The same reason any other scam works: Somebody along the chain has exploitable greed, so that they believe something "too good to be true." The real question is why it would be in temporary decline this year.
      • 9y ago
• senatorobama 9y ago
  Why don't NRI's quit their Bay Area job to come and contribute to the motherland?
  • sumedh 9y ago
    Probably because India cannot match the salaries and quality of life in US.
    • senatorobama 9y ago
      I'd argue about quality of life. But definitely absolute income.
      • sumedh 9y ago
        Then you would be arguing with facts.
• Karupan 9y ago
  Sadly, it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. As an Indian IT guy, I was lucky enough to work in product companies all my life. My many friends in the service industry haven't had that luck. I've heard horror stories and I've sworn not to work for bodyshop firms. 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.
• kumarvvr 9y ago
  This is fundamentally a value-addition adjustment. For many IT engineers, their value addition to the project/client/company is very limited, primarily because most of them are from degree mills and most of them join an IT company for reasons other than to really work on IT stuff. 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.
  • deepaksurti 9y ago
    And really all the blame has to be apportioned to the founding fathers and what not glorious terms used for the Indian IT body shopping industry leaders? (Kohli's, Murthy's blah blah) 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).
    • kumarvvr 9y ago
      Yes. The narrative has to change. And frankly, the culture should move towards more risk taking. Barring a few, most startups take a very conservative approach to expansion and investment.
• known 9y ago
  Indian IT makes money by selling software engineers, not software to US clients.
• fooker 9y ago
  And added about a million. What's the point here?
• Shangrila304 9y ago
  As someone who recently moved from USA To India this is the best thing that is happening to India. 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.
  • alexred 9y ago
    Are you hiring in India at present, then? I'd be glad to be a part of a similarly talented team :)
  • Wohlf 9y ago
    Even with Trump's immigration changes, our immigration standards are equally if not more liberal than India and much better than Chinese immigration. Citizens can't even move around China without government approval. Over 13% of the US population is foreign born, not including the over 11 million illegal aliens we have.
• throwaway7749 9y ago
  I'm sorry, but all "talent" I've worked with in India has all been very lousy and in retrospect makes total sense. You get what you pay for. 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.
  • lawnmover 9y ago
    Checks out with the name.
• xstartup 9y ago
  I briefly worked as a contractor for one of the largest ad networks in the world and we outsourced 20K ad review jobs to South Asia over 3 year period. But then came advancement in machine learning and now you only needed a few people to review ads after the adversary networks flagged them.
• bengrunfeld 9y ago
  What is the chance that this is indicative of a larger trend in IT? i.e. That the "golden age" is coming to an end, and that with the downturn in startup investment, demand for IT professionals - even skilled ones - will rapidly shrink over the next two years, even in the Bay Area. Fuck, I don't want to make only $60k again....
• StreamBright 9y ago
  56K is 0.01% of the overall workforce of India.
• scadge 9y ago
  > For Indian techies, 2017 was the stuff of nightmares. 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.
• scadge 9y ago
  There are approx. 3.1 million employees[1] in India's IT sector. Is 56k (which is lower than 2%) so much? [1] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-approximate-number-of-IT-employees-in-India https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-approximate-number-of-IT-e...
  • sytelus 9y ago
    US tech companies actually had much larger layoffs however this were again in very low ends. The high and middle ends are booming as if we are back in 2000 bubble. Due to such disparity one should always clarify what kind of tech jobs one is talking about. From https://www.bizjournals.com/bizjournals/news/2017/02/17/tech-layoffs-surged-in-2016-and-2017-doesnt-look.html 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.
  • piva00 9y ago
    I'd say that 2% of a whole industry being laid off is quite considerable, if 2% of the German car industry is laid off in a single year it'd be considerable, for example.
  • nmstoker 9y ago
    You're right it's a fairly small proportion, but when the workforce overall is growing by around ~1 million per month, growth within each sector is essential just to cope (figure source is 2 years old and not IT specific, but still likely to be broadly accurate: https://blogs.wsj.com/briefly/2015/07/22/indias-labor-force/ https://blogs.wsj.com/briefly/2015/07/22/indias-labor-force/ )
• juanmirocks 9y ago
  If I read the article correctly, mostly or only the low-level jobs in the industry are laid off. Does this even consider all other low-level personnel like cleaners? That would make the whole story quite different.
• sytelus 9y ago
  I see a large number of bright Indian developers now staying back in country because its almost impossible to get H1B visas (that was actually the case even without Trump and now its getting much worse). This has started interesting trends in India. All of the sudden, now there is VC culture shaping up and I'm seeing lots of Indian developers doing their own startups. Indian newspapers frequently are putting spotlights on these young trailblazers and writing stories of their struggle and triumphs. There are startup events, meet ups and conferences going on virtually every week somewhere. And in fairly short amount of time, India has racked up some huge successes like Ola, Gaana, Oyo, Flipkart with stories to match with their SV counterparts. This scene is very different from what I had known 5-10 years ago where India held massive number of IT professionals but top 10% of talent pool kept getting drained out of the country. Despite having largest number of IT professionals, country was without its top talents and consequently without any products and startup vision. The scarcity of H1B visa had been magical for Indian startup scene and if this trend continues, US software dominance should have contender in future.
  • RandomCSGeek 9y ago
    As an Indian CSE student, I agree with this. But there's more. The downfall of IT industry, and general decrease in need of IT engineers, is finally decreasing the amount of students joining engineering. 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.
    • calvinbhai 9y ago
      This is great to know! I hope this ends up cleaning up the bad colleges, and improving the quality of engineers!
  • sbmthakur 9y ago
    I concur. I feel that these H1B restrictions will help India in the long run. Instead of doing some mediocre coding job in the U.S., the same people can stay in India and change the face of the country.
• mike_hock 9y ago
  > 56k employees They're laying people off at modem speed!
• alexasmyths 9y ago
  I wish there was more info on the drivers of this. Is it less demand from US firms due to slowdown? Market saturation? Shifting needs?
• spo81rty 9y ago
  There is also a lot of competition around the world for IT out sourcing besides India. I have had really good luck using some remote developers in Uruguay for example. A couple friends out source all of their work to Vietnam and the Philippines.
• qxf2 9y ago
  This article has a random sprinkling of numbers that really do not give you the big picture. Here is some context about the outsourcing industry in India. Good stats to know (assuming the media is right): 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.
• hi41 9y ago
  The article refers to digitisation and automation as one of the reasons for the layoffs. 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.
• minusSeven 9y ago
  Pleasantly surprised by comments here which were lot more specific and relevant than the hive mind attitude of Reddit for the same thread.
• lawnmover 9y ago
  Ah the same old argument that everything that can be outsourced is cheap and repetitive. But again we hate the outsourcing industry for taking away our jobs. Seriously why should someone retain you and pay you top $ in the first place, if your job was repetitive and lack specialized skills? 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.
• yakitori 9y ago
  As someone here has already mentioned, it's more likely due more tech and indian tech especially moving towards clouds for the derivative cost savings ( less manpower ). 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.
• andy-x 9y ago
  56k is soooo old, we have broadband already.