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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.
Let's face it....MOST all stereotypes are based somewhat in observable fact....
They didn't just miraculously appear out of thin air...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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.
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.
Actually you still need the system administrators as well. Developers might think they are competent to administer the systems and that is fine for dev but they aren't up to engineering stable production environments. The problem with "devops" is that far too many people think developers handling ops is a sane choice when proper use of these systems is for real ops engineers to employ some dev tools.
Technical progress. We can do X with fewer people now. A few things can happen.
In one case, we can do more X. People buy more services that require X. This means we still need those people, and they output more. Car manufacturers move car features down through their models as they become cheaper, and the various income levels buy a model that fits their desire to spend. We're still using the labor, just for other things. This is a complex example of consumer buying power creating demand for a new product, with the new product being added to a package that consumers are already buying.
We can do the same amount of X. That means we lay off a bunch of now-excess people. We can also do more X, but not quite so much more. This is one of many intermediaries, and it means we lay off fewer people.
We can do the same amount of X per-capita, and expand our population. As we erode the labor required to do X, we increase the population. The percentage of laborers invested in X decreases; at a certain equilibrium between technical progress and population growth, the number of laborers doesn't decrease. We can even increase the number of laborers doing X this way, but more-slowly than population expansion.
Cloud services centralize knowledge. Instead of 20 engineers at 20 companies learning lessons about VM and SAN management, you have 10 engineers servicing 20 companies all working in the same data center doing VM and SAN management. Every lesson learned in the context of one client is now available to apply to all clients. If they find a way to manage with less overhead, they don't need to repeat the whole process of developing a lower-effort management strategy; and they can apply this savings to all clients. At a point, each engineer can service multiple clients, and so the total jobs invested here go down.
People aren't much economists, so they just decide something must be obvious. They examine everything in a bubble, so much so that they assume a business can somehow create jobs and not simply allocate available job-creating demand to itself at the expense of jobs elsewhere. You get weird disconnects from that, like business X outcompeting business Y and creating 2,000 jobs, while business Y needed 3,000 jobs to do the same--and then business Y lays off 3,000 people and folks claim that the economy lost 3,000 jobs, and start attributing it to H1-B work or something.
The best part is when people claim H1-B labor is causing a reduction of employment. Not an increase in unemployment, but a reduction in total employment in the sector. H1-B labor would tend to increase total employment; any actual reduction in total employment means something else is happening.
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"IT" is burger-flipper jobs. IT people rack servers, run cables, configure routers, and handle support tickets. They are your low-end, easily-replaced cogs.
You're looking at computer science and engineering people. Programmers, data analysts, computer engineers, the like. These people are highly-skilled, heavily-educated, and difficult to replace.
There's a space in between where people need systems which take actual research and development. And those IT people are not low-end, or easily replaced. They aren't necessarily an engineer (although some of them are) but they are skilled and nontrivial to replace. When people try to replace them with cogs, bad things happen.
You can't replace a developer with an IT person, nor the other way around. Some people are both, that's cool whatever, but most people aren't.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
So Trump's idea is working as intended. America for Americans!!!1*
* the last sentence is supposed to be sarcastic.
India works for their own citizens. China works for their own citizens. Germany works for their own citizens. France works for their own citizens.
Why is it such an evil thing for the US to work for their citizens?
Why must the US give all away no matter the circumstance or reason, sell out their own people, while others do the opposite and are applauded for it?
Why is it such an evil thing for the US to work for their citizens?
Those of us who oppose Trumpism don't believe he is "working for American citizens". We believe his policies are harming America.