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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
by 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 agoThank you for the analysis.
- JSONwebtoken 9y agoNot 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 agoSo 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 agoI 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.
- rosege 9y agoI've worked with some Ukrainian devs and they were very smart guys
- Clubber 9y agoI've worked with Belarusian developers and they were top notch. Belarus is very close with Russia and is considered the last dictatorship in Europe, so weigh that with a decision. 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.
- maxxxxx 9y agoI don't know if this is still the case but the Eastern Bloc developers I have met years ago were all super strong in math and other science fundamentals. Very impressive.
- xstartup 9y agoI've had opposite experience. In my case, they were sharp but they were also toxic to be working in a team. So, we had to move our R&D centre to Poland.
- sumedh 9y ago> but they were also toxic to be working in a team What do you mean?
- Clubber 9y agoI'm not the person you replied to, but I suspect they tend to be very headstrong and don't have a problem telling you that you are wrong with vigor. Then are willing to argue the point for an hour or two. If you are not accustomed to it, it can be a shock, but it certainly can lead to finding the best solution.
- tigershark 9y agoActually in Philippines pretty much everyone speaks a quite understandable English compared to the average Indian that thinks to be speaking a perfect English while the reality is quite different.
- kartickv 9y ago"Understandable" to you, based on where you live and what dialect of English you speak :)
- bobsman123 9y agoAny Spanish accents or word muddling will be much more understandable to anyone living in the United States than an Indian accent or word confusion. This isn’t helped by the fact that Indians in tech in America rarely speak English with each other.
- Spooky23 9y agoFor most folks in the US, understanding a Spanish accent is easier than most Indian accents. This is especially true for lower paid support roles.
- kartickv 9y agoMaybe so, and many Americans aren't understandable to me as an Indian. I just wanted to point out that not being understandable is a statement about the person making it as much as it is about the people it's ostensibly about. Indians, in this case,
- Spooky23 9y agoTotally get it. 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.
- navinsylvester 9y agoMight be the case with many IT services firms but assuming that so called home countries brains only can do serious engineering is quite short sighted. 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.
- shagie 9y agoEngineering can certainly be done outside. However, there is a real risk in having the core business competency and value be outsourced rather than something built up with employees at the company with an interest in the company's success rather than looking at it as just the next project.
- abakker 9y agoThe distinction here is between captive development centers vs outsourced IT services. The latter has previously had more jobs and is experienced more layoffs now. The former is likely still a growth industry.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- halbritt 9y agoI doubt anyone in the silicon valley believes that. 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.
- ryen 9y ago
- victor106 9y agoThis was true about 10 years ago. But these days I find indian teams are equally as talented as Silicon Valley. 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.
- kamaal 9y agoI simply see this as fruits of cheaply and easily accessible internet and affordable Laptops. Bulk of the tech there is, is open source and you can learn anything from any corner of the world. If you are in a competitive economic space, you will even have sufficient motivation to learn.
- jitl 9y ago> Indian teams are as talented as Silicon Valley 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.
- unclebucknasty 9y ago>In the US, the top 15% of the market is in Silicon Valley 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.
- pavanred 9y agoIndian IT Outsourcing Industry ⊆ Indian IT Industry 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.
- _jgdh 9y agoReading HN comments about the Indian IT industry triggers the Gell-Mann effect for me. Few people know what they're talking about and those that do are usually at the bottom of the thread. Of course then I open all the other comment threads and consider the comments in those threads correct and well informed.
- saguro 9y ago> Indian IT Outsourcing Industry ⊆ Indian IT Industry 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.
- flexie 9y agoThis is wrong in so many ways. Indian engineering is many things just like in the US or Europe and you can get world class IT specialists in India. If anything, the existense of the IT outsourcing industry in India has helped establishing a growing educated middle class which is the prerequisite for one day being able to churn out even more world class engineers.
- jimmywanger 9y agoYeah. Automation makes many webdev jobs redundant. 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.
- walshemj 9y agoand will those sites rank properly in search engines
- jimmywanger 9y agoWho cares? There's a difference between "really good" (spendy) and "good enough" (free). If you're a small business, you don't really need SEO. You just need to provide information to your customers. 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.
- viridian 9y agoI think for all three, the basic SEO stuff is actually taken care of for you as well. I had zero interest in the services until I read that it meant I wouldn't have to consult yet another seo guide written within the last six months because I wanted to stand up something new.
- walshemj 9y agoYes but for local businesses you also have to manage your product listings and your local listings with those $50 sites actually use the correct markup for local seo and is your browse structure optimised or even crawlable?
- 9y ago
- baybal2 9y agoYou can partially thank failing Russian economy and depreciating rouble. 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.
- knowThySelfx 9y agoWhatever it is, there's still a shortage of skills everywhere in IT sector.