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The High-Tech Jobs That Created India's Gilded Generation Are Disappearing (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Information technology services account for 9.5 percent of the India's gross domestic product, according to the India Brand Equity Foundation (IBEF), but now, after decades of boom, the future of the industry seems precarious. Since May, workers' groups have reported unusually numerous layoffs. The Forum for IT Employees (FITE) estimates that 60,000 workers have lost their jobs in the past few months (syndicated source). "Employees are being rated as poor performers so companies can get rid of them," said FITE's Chennai coordinator, Vinod A.J. IT companies and some government officials say the numbers have been exaggerated, but industry experts say the country's digital wunderkinds have much to fear. "For the first time, companies are touching middle management," said Kris Lakshmikanth, chief of a recruitment firm called Head Hunters India. Bias against Indians abroad is also compounding workers' fears of layoffs and downsizing at home. President Trump has stoked anxiety among Indian techies, who make up the majority of applicants for the H-1B visa program for highly skilled foreign workers. Trump has talked about sharply restricting H-1Bs, and this year the number of applications dropped a staggering 16 percent as companies prepared for Trump's immigration cutbacks. Instead, Indian outsourcing companies such as Infosys started recruiting Americans, bowing to Trump's calls for "America First." On Monday, India's Prime Minister Modi will meet Trump to talk about trade, visas and climate issues.
I see this everywhere - its the Cloud. Companies are not investing so much in maintaining their own IT systems now. They are using a bunch of features provided in the cloud. So mostly, there is no need for so many Indian IT firms. The few ones that are still running are just getting bigger because they are getting more business.
Anybody know any recruiters working for Tata/Infosys etc? Post 'em (Company name, city and recruiter name), so nobody else wastes their time.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I can also create oxymorons.
So Trump's idea is working as intended. America for Americans!!!1*
* the last sentence is supposed to be sarcastic.
#DeleteFacebook
Is there any professional industry as unstable as IT? Some don't exist anymore but are there any super unstable ones?
Sig. Sig. Sputnik
Supreme Court allows limited version of Trump's travel ban to take effect and will consider case in fall
It's a great day to be a Trump supporter I say
Bias against Indians abroad is also compounding workers' fears of layoffs and downsizing at home.
Let's not pretend this bias isn't warranted. Outsourced indian tech support has a horrible reputation, and I'm taking into account the language barrier. It is almost universal that the best you can hope for from them is that they follow their scripts. Any deviation from the scripts and you can expect nothing but frustration and pain.
Outsourced Chinese tech support is notably better ( note; I didn't say good, only that it's better than indian tech support ). As a consultant and influencer, I make sure to steer my companies away from any company which outsources their tech support.
Let's not even discuss outsourced sysops. That shit is the stuff of nightmares.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Let's just go ahead and block VOIP from India now before all US telephonic communication are rendered useless.
Between the bad accents, inability to creatively think, and watching far more talented professionals get replaced by offshored idiots (or H1B'd) I don't have much sympathy for their plight. Good riddance and don't let the door hit you on the way out.
From the summary:
Employees are being rated as poor performers so companies can get rid of them.
Here's the thing - as any developer who has worked with offshore teams knows, there are quite a lot of people that probably SHOULD be laid off for poor performance. What if it's not *just* so companies can get rid of them, but an actual ten to having qualified workers on staff instead of just any warm body?
The thing is IT was never going to save India other way - they have more substantial problems in other fields to address,, like a collapsing manufacturing sector.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Unless one has gone to a top school - like Stanford or MIT or a school that has a reputation as creating great CS people - they are going to be part of this cycle.
It's always been that way. That last time it happened was after the dot-bomb crash*. The folks who were able to work on the really intense shit got to stick around, everyone else got purged. And then only some of those folks were able to get jobs in the field again.
The folks that have longevity in this field have esoteric skills, were able to wait it out (like the old guy I know working on an old C-MS DOS system and no one wants to do it), work in some part of the country where the bright kids long to leave for Silicon Valley or somewhere else, or you are so goddamn sharp - there's not many people who can do what you do (MIT, Stanford grads end up there).
If you're an average person in this field, get into management before you turn 35 - that's where the average folks end up. Else, you'll be asking, "Do you want enough room for cream?" on your next job.
*These layoffs may be indicative of something else going on the economy other than Trump's policies.
When Cisco announced their layoff that took affect after the October 2013 government shutdown, the Indians I've worked with were shocked that the layoff applied to them and their middle management. Cisco ran out of Americans to lay off each year.
FTFA (emphasis mine):
Its booming IT industry has taken care of Silicon Valley’s menial jobs.
Nice.
We seem to be in the third phase of Indian tech growth:
- Phase 1: Talented Indian engineers and programmers were recognized with opportunities in the US and other Western countries
- Phase 2: The inevitable over generalization that ALL Indian engineers and programmers are superior to Western engineers and programmers with the added benefit that they work for substantially less than their local counterparts
- Phase 3: Recognition by Western companies that they've been sold a bill of goods, the average Indian engineer and programmer is not superior to Western engineers and programmers and, due to the fact that they've been set up to fail because of incomplete specifications and non-existent training/onboarding, they have been hurt by indiscriminate hiring of Indian tech workers
Rather than reaping the profits through Phase 2 without concern for the future, the Indian government should have been upping its game in terms of the quality of the workers being made available to Western companies as well as establishing more stringent standards for workers along with better education for them. What has happened is that the initial good experiences has been overwhelmed by bad and hurtful experiences leading to companies eschewing Indian tech workers for "the next best thing".
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
The reputation of the quality of service provided has finally saturated to the point that companies looking to save a buck on offshoring now think twice. I've seen too many companies with executive level decisions made by individuals with absolutely no understanding of the technology or quality of service - their decisions were only based on the cheap (up front) cost of the services. Enough companies have learned the hard way that the supposed cost savings don't pan out for several reasons, and that has become common knowledge in non-tech circles. Americans in general have experienced and been unhappy with support provided by individuals that speak very poor English, to the point that it now reflects poorly on whatever company is using such services as being second-rate in their support. The bubble is bursting and things will normalize, and that will definitely result in a sharp reduction in the amount of services demanded of India.
Better known as 318230.
As an American I fail to see how any of this is a bad thing. There was never a shortage of US talent who could fill jobs just a shortage of companies who liked the fact talented workers were scarce enough to command high salaries and had leverage at the table. They also don't want to admit that learning on the job is the job in technology, any large environment takes a year or so to become versed with the tech details as implemented in that environment and in that time a skilled tech worker can fill any gaps or blanks in their experience vs what is used at that company. You don't actually need someone skilled with all your devops tools in a devops roll for instance, anyone with a solid ops record can learn the additional tools alongside unwinding the mess that is your corporate environment and the person who can "hit the ground running" without that year simply doesn't exist though some are more effective at faking it during the transition than others.
"Employees are being rated as poor performers so companies can get rid of them"
How about the high demand for workers in the tech industry created an environment in which demand outstripped supply so just about anybody could get a job with little to no training... which of course led to an industry full of idiots with extremely poor customer service skills who lacked even the most basic skills needed to perform most IT related functions... so much so that without written step by step instructions they were incapable of doing anything...
They're simply trimming the fat or separating the chaff, or whichever analogy you prefer... and this is only in response to the companies that pay these indian tech firms telling them to hire qualified workers "or else"... so of course the workers groups are going to try and turn this around by saying that the ratings the employees are being given are inaccurate or unfair... but they're full of shit and they know it.
Everybody loves a doomsday scenario and articles that are apocalyptic. Heck, politicians routinely use this strategy to win elections.
The reality is unsexy and mundane middle-ground. The Indian IT industry is not going to disappear overnight, nor is the US industry is not going collapse overnight because of China and India. Also, everyone loves the stereotype stories of Indian offshoring horror stories but again, the answer is a lot more complicated.
The unfortunate reality is that a lot of the headcount that was offshored and outsourced has to do with work that is relatively lower skilled, and involved repetitive activites and "following processes". It therefore mattered little if the work was done in one country or another, except offshoring the work to some countries also meant significant cost savings and headcount reduction.
However, that is not all to it. Work that is off-shored is often a complex package of business processes, software tools, infrastructure, support etc. While a lot of the work is indeed process based, a critical part of it also requires very high levels of solution and software architecture skills, deep business process knowledge, deep domain knowledge etc. Indian companies did not merely win projects because they could tout "low cost" competitive advantages, but also because they could staff enough people with the deep levels of expertise and experience required to make these projects a success. It is a numbers game. If there are hundreds of thousands of mediocre or even sub-standard workers, there are also tens of thousands of employees who are top notch and highly skilled.
And these are exactly the nuances that get lost when the pitchforks come out about the poor quality of offshoring. Projects and contracts of a certain scale require certain headcount numbers and contracting companies to prove that they can handle work at this scale. This kind of capability and reputation is very hard earned and often takes decades. It doesn't just disappear overnight. For large consulting companies, this reputation and scale capability is their identity, their "moat".
And if you're going to get into racial or ethnic stereotypes, then it is to be noted that the same Indians who are frustratingly incompetent in offshored contracts are also the ones that are thought leaders and actual leaders in a lot of the flagship high-tech companies and software companies. So like i said, it is a numbers game.
India can (and should) now develop an industry to provide with electricity, running water and sanitation to the more than 600 million Indian citizens who lack such basic facilities - there is more than enough work for everybody when it comes to implementing such a program. Of course, the Indian government will do nothing of the sort, preferring instead to devote resources to me-too international pissing contests, as it has historically done.
But you have to move to Syria, Iraq, Libya, or Ukraine and learn how to shoot a rifle and make bomb vests and pretend to pray to a different (but not too dissimilar) dog. By Indian standards the pay is pretty good despite the cuts made last year.
The problem is overpopulation. The government wants you to use less carbon, while bringing in millions of immigrants seeking SUV's and monster houses. On the one hand, they're calling themselves saviors, on the other, they're a suicide cult.
I think this may be due in part to a few things:
- Companies being less susceptible to the sales pitches (i.e. "Our Indian developers are superior in every way to your native ones...and we work for 20% of the salary!") after either being burned once or twice, or playing golf with enough CIOs who've been burned
- Saturation -- as in, even if they're cheap, the body shops can't hire people indefinitely if the amount of work is going down
- Cloud -- less remote management of infrastructure that isn't automated to some degree
Actually, I know the pendulum has been swinging back for a while -- but we're still seeing huge, high profile deals being signed with TCS, Infosys and all the other body shop consultancies.
Long term employment-wise, I definitely see room domestically for generalists who can be flexible in their skill sets. Companies will hire specialists as they need, but they will need native people who can deal with diverse groups, understand a little bit about everything and can adapt quickly. Unless you want to be a total nomad and hop from job to job every 3 months, being a generalist and investing enough time into being the person your company wants to keep in-house is going to be the key. Not to say that being a specialist is all bad - I know plenty of consultants who make way more than I do. But, the trade-off is living out of a suitcase, bouncing from one short-term job to the next, and having no home life unless your wife is completely happy with you never being there. Most of the nomad consultants I know are unmarried for divorced (some several times) for that reason.
So they've burned through the 80% of their possible market and now won't be able to sustain further growth.
There are only so many u.s. companies with large IT staff. Smaller companies are going to a hosted model.
And there are a lot of huge failures (Sysco) by indian IT companies which are well known so the remaining companies are less willing to bite. When some "bright young executive" proposes using indian resources the Board and upper management know it's not as good as it sounds.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Lets be really honest for a moment. Why do companies outsource to India? They will give you a myriad of lies such as working hours, talent and everything else under the sun. The real answer that is the turd in the punch bowl is the cost savings. Indian workers undercut western salaries by a significant enough margin that employers are willing to hire them and deal with deflecting the concerns that people raise about quality and western jobs. Period.
Someone in the government finally has the balls to stand up to this crap and is significantly altering the H1B system. GOOD!
I'm sorry but all you libtard pie in the sky "the world is a great place" IDIOTS don't realize the amount of your quality of living that you will be FORCED to give up if we have to compete with the rest of the world. Many Indians don't have telephones, air conditioning, toilets and many things that western people consider the bare minimums in life.
We have a good thing here in America that we have worked hard for. Why give it away to the rest of the world just because some greedy CEO see's a way of exploiting 3rd world countries?
The first thing one of these sociopath evil CEO's will tell you when they lay you off is "nobody's guaranteed a job in this world'. You know what? It works both ways asshole. Nobody is guaranteed a valid business model either.
I think honestly they should do a LOT more such as punishing these greedy companies by taking back tax cuts. It's about time we stood up for our own country and stop letting greedy fuckholes sell it out from under us bit by bit.
why not ask what could be done to prevent them?
Also, if instead of 2-3 deaths out of 6 billion it was 2-3 deaths on a 20 man team I think we'd do something. That's the kind of numbers the industrial revolution brought to the table, and the A.I Revolution looks to be doing the same.
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to the Philippians. The Philippians finally got it's act together with regards to telecom, so outsourcing there is now possible. Plus they speak native English. Expect a lot of work to flow there now.
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Employers finally figured it out and woke up..
There was an article on here some time ago, where it depicted various Indian individuals stating/claiming that because they have been so downtrodden over the years, that Fresh Graduates from various Prestigious Indian Institutions have been claiming "they have the right to: Cheat, steal, and Lie" to further perpetuate the culture..
I believe that is a very misguided statement, that perpetuates a perm. stain on the Indian culture and destroys reputations. While NO culture is Perfect, a call to ar
Now that Seed is bearing fruit, as employers figure out they have been lied to, and/or cheated and thus changes the Landscape for not a select few, but more broader strokes.
I find it difficult to be sympathetic to this situation based on the ingredients..
Thanks and have a good day
Syria for Sirians!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Thank Paul for writing all those letters to the Philippians back in the day. It bet that really helped develop their English skills.
If your job heavily depends on international politics and trade, expect instability.
Then again, most jobs do to various degrees. Career stability is so last century.
Table-ized A.I.
What if this is simply the same development that you see in this industry in the US? What if it's just rampant age discrimination taking place in India in the same way it takes place in the US? The industry had experienced a long period of expansion in India, but it the expansion had to plateau at some point. And the number of younger workers willing to do simpler work for lower wages only increases. In India it could simply be the beginning of a bursting bubble. Do remember that all the tech executives were warning that if don't let these tech workers in, then they'll just go to other countries around the globe. Because there is a presumed shortage of them. And that's one thing I never believe -- complains of shortages of trained workers made at the same time as there are massive lay offs.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
'Gilded' ain't 'golden'.
do you actually think that way? e.g. Money == Life? I really don't even know where to begin. I'll just leave this little though: under your system the value of a billionaire's life is necessarily more valuable than that of a pauper. After all, the billionaire makes so much more. You could gut the pauper for organs to keep the billionaire alive and it's perfectly OK. Because economically it's a sound proposition.
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which used to be a nice gig with lots of Americans doing it in the 70s through the early 90s. You don't need a CS degree (read: a specialized Math degree) to do that. Or you didn't until we stopped protecting our workforce in favor of that sweet, sweet cheap labor. Fuck people, Unionize already.
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it invalidates his entire argument. We could easily test for those electrolyte imbalances and prevent them. Hell, just drink more Gatorade.
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make anybody rich. Which is the main point. Sure, you'll have made the lives of 600 million people better, but what about that 1 person who wants profits now? They need outside capital flowing in rapidly and a product to sell at middle class labor rates for slave labor prices.
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Beat me to it. Picturing those New Testament era coders in Phillipi slaving away.
Real reason behind the decline in Indian IT jobs is because of the way they are operating - leeching away good paying jobs from other countries
Leeching is never a good way to survive, as the leeches have to find a host to attach to and leech
Instead of developing that own IT fields, like USA did, like Europe followed afterwards, like what happened in Singapore or Korea or Japan or even in China - those countries did all kinds of incubators helping creative youngsters to further develop their ideas into fruition - India simply sit there expecting to leech from the Western nations, year after year
Another thing some Indian companies do, is surreptitious colonisation: An Indian company builds a nest in country X, and then only hires Indian workers that it brings over from overseas. Completely legally, mind you. If that's not easy to do, it might complain through a trade association about needing more experts that are supposedly not available in that country X from within an already extensive federation of states.
Countries with large populations, such as the U.S., are able to absorb this, but European countries with small populations are not able or willing to put up with a scheme that might put their own population, culture, and identity under pressure.
In order to get jobs to India, they soft-ban a certain product made anywhere (and in China) by levying substantial import tariffs. (I also see India and China perceiving one another as competitors on the world stage.) Case in point is the iPhone, which is more expensive in India because of these import tariffs, and so Apple is considering building a factory there.
This protectionism applies to a very large assortment of products; ostensibly, then, to protect their own manufacturing.
What keeps manufacturing away from India are extensive issues with deep corruption and poor infrastructure. These things seem to go hand in hand.
I have no bias againt workers from India, I do have a bias against people who have been poorly trained & who can't apply simple logic, that it seems a lot of them come from India probably isn't a coincidence. I can blame both an educational system that seems designed only to teach words to make it sound like they know what they are doing AND the individuals who don't seem to want to learn what this stuff is REALLY about.
I've wasted ALOT of time 'teaching' people from India what their job is. They need to learn far more BEFORE they get hired. I don't mind teaching them how to apply their learning to my company's specific needs I do mind having to train on whole concepts.
Modi was supposed to be the "deregulation, get the economy going and reduce corruption" guy.
And while politicians regularly disappoint their followers, it is still appropriate to expect at least some of their political platform to be implemented, and at least some of the promised changes to be made. Even in India, which is quite proud of their democracy, and maybe a little less proud of their bureaucracy.