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Indian 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

Indian 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 ago
Reading 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.
- danpalmer 9y ago
  This is why blind CV screening and remote tests in hiring are crucial. We all have these biases and sometimes the candidates that pass those phases are surprising.
  - saguro 9y ago
    Remote tests put off actually good talent, they are insulted by that kind of waste of time. 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.
    - sideshowb 9y ago
      badly implemented remote tests. Ftfy
      - saguro 9y ago
        https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/4k994j/if_carpenters_were_hired_like_programmers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/4k994j/if_... 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.
        sideshowb 9y ago
        Funny yes, but that's not even parodying a test, it's a checklist of buzz words. Which is below even what I'd call a badly implemented test. Good tests are not tests of any specific knowledge. They test reasoning and communication skills in a programming context.
deepGem 9y ago
http://www.nasscom.in/sites/default/files/NASSCOM_Annual_Guidance_Final_22062017.pdf http://www.nasscom.in/sites/default/files/NASSCOM_Annual_Gui... 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.
danmaz74 9y ago
I read the OP in a different way. In IT - as in pretty much every other field - there are many more low-level jobs than high-level ones. It's also much easier, and much less risky from a strategic point of view, to outsource the low-level ones than the high-level ones, so, most of those which were outsourced were the low-level jobs; we're talking about hundreds of thousands of jobs (millions?) here. 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.

_jgdh 9y ago

Reading 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.

danpalmer 9y ago
This is why blind CV screening and remote tests in hiring are crucial. We all have these biases and sometimes the candidates that pass those phases are surprising.
- saguro 9y ago
  Remote tests put off actually good talent, they are insulted by that kind of waste of time. 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.
  - sideshowb 9y ago
    badly implemented remote tests. Ftfy
    - saguro 9y ago
      https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/4k994j/if_carpenters_were_hired_like_programmers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/4k994j/if_... 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.
      - sideshowb 9y ago
        Funny yes, but that's not even parodying a test, it's a checklist of buzz words. Which is below even what I'd call a badly implemented test. Good tests are not tests of any specific knowledge. They test reasoning and communication skills in a programming context.

deepGem 9y ago

http://www.nasscom.in/sites/default/files/NASSCOM_Annual_Guidance_Final_22062017.pdf http://www.nasscom.in/sites/default/files/NASSCOM_Annual_Gui... 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.

danmaz74 9y ago

I read the OP in a different way. In IT - as in pretty much every other field - there are many more low-level jobs than high-level ones. It's also much easier, and much less risky from a strategic point of view, to outsource the low-level ones than the high-level ones, so, most of those which were outsourced were the low-level jobs; we're talking about hundreds of thousands of jobs (millions?) here. 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.