Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
"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.'"
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?