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GitHub slashes engineering team in India
- rvz 4y ago'Totally no engineers affected by this and certainly nothing to do with replacing them with Copilot and GPT to save money and cut costs' /s
- theusus 4y agoAre global markets really weakening? I thought they were recovering.
- kfk 4y agoSalaries doubled in 3 years for certain IT professions pushed by the Covid online spike I assume. In my company we were hiring and we kept getting candidates with less and less experience asking for more and more money. IT salaries went up faster than inflation, at least in some European countries. I think now these layoffs are necessary for companies to bring average cost of IT employees back to normal. I did not go along with the demanding salary expectations, I lost business revenue because of it due to lack of people, but now I don't have to do any correction. Basically, we are all adults in the end, employers and employees, I think everybody knew the tech salary situation was not sustainable and some kept pushing up, some stayed more conservative.
- 0xDEF 4y agoBig Tech is purging all teams that don't own user-facing products/features although SRE and AI teams will most likely be spared.
- satysin 4y agoA friend of mine at GitHub in the UK was let go yesterday. Another friend avoided the reductions at Twitch last Friday thankfully but it seems the writing is on the wall. It is hard to make the decision to change job and lose out on a decent chunk of cash though. They've not made their mind up yet on what to do next.
- jacknews 4y ago"... protect the health of our business in the short term and grant us the capacity to invest ..." This seems like standard corporate speak, but any conspiracist could also easily interpret it as the subtly-hinted communications of a mafia victim ... Are they being forced to do this by Wall Street? "Protect the health of our business" ... from vicious stock downgrades and short selling, "Grant us" ... future investment, etc lol.
- chillbill 4y agoFor all their virtue signaling, they start by laying off people in India?
- isanjay 4y agoVirtue signalling is only for show. They don't give a shit in reality
- throwawaylinux 4y agoWhat's one got to do with the other?
- mrguyorama 4y agoYou don't seem to understand what "virtue signalling" means
- prakhar897 4y agoFor the people arguing that Indian Techies are expensive, Here are the pay bands for Amazon in India vs USA. USA India SDE1 160k | 30k SDE2 252k - 325k | 65k - 100k SDE3 400k - 600k | 150k - 200k Also, Labor laws in India are non-existant where you can work your employee to death. Amazon also pays top of the market in India and you can get decent workers for much less. Hence, you can get 10x the output by investing the same capital in India instead of USA. Another point is the labor of India being poor quality. These come because people contract WITCH companies which pay not even pennies to its employees. Expecting people to create top notch work while paying 4k$ per year is just not feasible even in India. (McD worker in US makes 13k$ per year).
- 0xDEF 4y ago>WITCH It's been a while since I heard that term. They are everywhere in Danish government IT (through KMD). InfoSys (the I in WITCH) invested in OpenAI back in 2015. How much is their investment worth now? If it is in the billions they should probably take the OpenAI hype and pivot to something else than being a cheap outsourcing company.
- Ancalagon 4y agoIf they were able to invest billions in a moonshot then obviously their profit model was working...
- crop_rotation 4y agoBecause the US is an outlier. People are comparing to UK and Canada. Compared to UK India is similarly expensive enough. Nobody is claiming India is expensive when compared to the US.
- prakhar897 4y agoUK salaries are 75k$ for SDE1, 165k$ for SDE2. Roughly 2x Indian compensation. EU region also has strong labor laws.
- jatins 4y agoThis is such a lazy move. This shows that they just wanted to get rid of people where 1/ employment laws are weakest 2/ employees are least vocal If they really wanted to save costs they'd be moving some open head count from US _to_ India. But that'd require them actually doing their job. I'd be ashamed of myself if I were part of the team that approved this decision
- 908B64B197 4y agoI have to wonder how much of that is due to the Microsoft acquisition. Now that they are owned by Microsoft they can leverage internal resources (especially from Azure). So there's a lot of functionalities and DevOps roles that are effectively duplicates.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- sebiandev 4y agoGood. US companies should be firing all foreign workforces. Should be illegal to even hire them, IMO.
- steve76 4y ago[dead]
- jostiniane 4y agoI don't know what spoiled your day but corporations are going to do what they need to do to make profits, lower the costs to stay competitive. I thought, before reading your comment, this is basic knowledge. Apple and the rest made big sacrifice to move/hire offshore so you can still buy that iPhone for sub 1000 usd, the story will be completely different otherwise. A 4k iPhone would be something that a few Americans will buy and no non-american will buy, just so they can pay 6 digits salary to engineers and 8 to CEOs of the 100% US workforce.
- papichulo2023 4y agoWell now we know who pushed the key
- thallium205 4y agoCopilot and GPT are going after these teams first.
- cornholio 4y agoThey are going for them, but they won't get them in the next 5 years at least, probably more; this move has nothing to do with AI. The level of human interaction required to distill the abstract and implicit requirements of the customers into a machine-implementable format far outstrips the capabilities of current LLM based systems, and I say that as a daily GPT and Copilot user. It will just re-balance the workforce, turning 10x programmers into 50x programmer-project-managers, hence just ever more scarce.
- tarruda 4y ago> turning 10x programmers into 50x programmer-project-managers, hence just ever more scarce I don't understand the math here: Why would it make programmers more scarce?
- dangerwill 4y agoBecause there won't be a 5x increase in the amount of work to do. When companies are given a choice between doing the same amount of work with 5x fewer employees vs doing 5x the amount of work with the same number of employees, they will almost always go with the less risky path (doing what they have always done before just with less).
- hospitalJail 4y agoI'm not sure how this is possible. I'm sure programmers are aware how bad these are for writing code. Is management just caught up in the buzz? The whole 'AI taking programming jobs' reminds me of the '3rd world countries taking programming jobs'. Don't get me wrong, its great for filling in parameters of functions and APIs, it sometimes good at figuring out errors and solutions. Its bad at coding anything other than generic algorithms, and its typically bad at that too.
- KeplerBoy 4y agoIs Copilot/GPT4 replacing the typical cases for off-shoring dev work?
- akmarinov 4y agoNot really I typed in ChatGPT “write a better Windows” and have been copying code for days but it’s not really working out
- bluedino 4y agoWait until it starts writing it's own G(PT)LIBC
- whywhywhywhy 4y agoIs that a task that you’d outsource normally?
- mrguyorama 4y agoHave you tried Windows lately? /s
- radus 4y agoimport windows12 didn’t do the trick?
- t344344 4y agoTry latest version. Now it just sends link to Wine.
- jimsimmons 4y agoUtter delusion in such threads to think this has anything to do with AI. MSFT saw a way to cut costs and the lax regulatory environment and just went with it. GitHub also closed down their SF office, had some layoffs here too and went fully remote
- 29athrowaway 4y agoThat office was cool. It had a replica of the oval office.
- zumu 4y agoNonetheless, very few people went in, even before the pandemic. They should have closed it years ago, tbh.
- hulitu 4y ago> MSFT saw a way to cut costs I thought indians were cheap (and that's why companies hire them in the first place). Is MS not able to pay them ?
- Apes 4y agoAll employees across the globe are cheap compared to even a single C-level, but how many C-levels have you seen let go during this "recession"?
- hulitu 4y agoI'm sorry. I think you don't get it. They fired employees, not managers. /s Those firms are in the long run, condemned. For me the move seems strange because a lot of companies in EU are expanding in India and are hiring a lot of indians. And, in contrast with China, they never said that the reason to open branches in India was to be able to get a foot on the market there. It's like India has cheap developers but no promising market.
- huijzer 4y ago
- LysPJ 4y agoHere's the Twitter thread (by Gergely Orosz) that TechCrunch got the news from: https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1640585325192912898 https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1640585325192912898
- ramraj07 4y agoIndia is not cheap if you want good engineers. Many folks I know (who are good, but not great) make more than what they’d make in UK or Canada. The US is the only other country that pays more. And the flux is just too much (though this likely is not the case in recent months).
- Gareth321 4y agoWhile true, 99% of the time offshoring to India is done to cut costs, not to seek out higher qualified candidates.
- spaceman_2020 4y agoTrue, but there has been a big startup-led divide betwen the "offshorting IT engineer" and the "product engineer" salaries. The gap between the two can be 400-1000%.
- MAGZine 4y agoi think a lot of firms believe they can keep quality (by hiring 'good quality') engineers in india and save money. as anyone who has actually been at a place that tried this knows, it's probably not true. and for the time when it is true, you need very good information on the talent, and experience on how to set up your product/engineering teams. and then it still won't be as cheap as you expect.
- dialogbox 4y agoIndia is cheap. I don't think they do the same job what they'd do in UK or Canada. In my team, there are some folks who returned back to India to build a bigger team with much cheaper engineers. The top level seniors could make more but in average, they are very cheap.