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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.
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.
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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
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".
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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.
Someone on here once told me I should look into an online college instead of traditional Computer Science, because he has this really nice online college that was started by some governor. I took a look. They had Business Management and Information Technology, but no Computer Science. The guy couldn't understand the difference between CS and IT, and tried to explain that CS doesn't require math and that math is just fluff.
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It's not, not yet. It can, and it has--the Great Depression and the Industrial Revolution had pretty bad immediate effects--but for now, it's just economy.
Technical progress always means reducing labor required to accomplish an output. That means lay-offs, transitional unemployment, and so forth. People can get quite vocal about little things.
Think about it this way: 2-3 sports players die every year from a minor flaw in the human cardiovascular system. A college hockey player or a high school baseball player will take a puck or ball to the chest, and his heart will stop--permanently. Every heartbeat requires an ion channel reset; it takes 30mS, and a low-energy impact to the heart during this window puts the heart into permanent fibrillation. A heart rate of 120 means you're vulnerable to this for 60mS of every second.
Imagine if that made CNN and Fox News.
There would be a 10-year holy war about how we need to abolish all high school sports involving any sort of possible impact. Every few months, we'd re-kindle it by bringing a new face into the death-by-hockey-puck dialogue.
We do this with businesses. We lay off people constantly. The economy is growing, the number of jobs is increasing, and we point at the constant stream of thousands of lay-offs in the midst of millions of new jobs and loudly proclaim that our economy is dying. A lack of apoptosis is called cancer.
Mind you, we've got another recession coming up in a few months. We really will get a new unemployment spike then; that's going to happen. Different problem.
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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.