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The High-Tech Jobs That Created India's Gilded Generation Are Disappearing (washingtonpost.com)

Posted by msmash on from the shape-of-things-to-come dept.

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.

97 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. Cloud by parallel_prankster · · Score: 2

    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.

    1. Re:Cloud by shaitand · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Cloud by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Support my political activism on Patreon.
    3. Re:Cloud by HornWumpus · · Score: 1

      So you think the reverse makes sense? Have you seen some of the code ops people put together (shudders)?

      IMHO DevOps is where all IT/dev types should spend the first few years of their working lives. So they can appreciate the complexity of the 'other half's' jobs and make an informed decision about what they really want to do. Not so they can do the jobs at senior level.

      --
      John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
    4. Re:Cloud by shaitand · · Score: 1

      "So you think the reverse makes sense? Have you seen some of the code ops people put together (shudders)? "

      But they aren't building applications here, the "code" is just a syntax for configuration of ops systems. It's better to have someone with poor coding style than someone who doesn't know what that code SHOULD be doing on the underlying systems and how to manually validate that result for sound practices. Honestly, the whole concept is terrible. You use home grown scripts to fill holes and any sane ops person minimizes the amount of code you have to maintain in ops, devops makes your entire environment an unstable home grown application. We don't put packages into production that haven't cooked as "stable" releases for half a decade or more but we are going to continuously deploy changes in a system written this week with little more some automated tests and maybe some minimal stage environment testing? *shudders*

    5. Re:Cloud by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 1

      Actually you still need the system administrators as well.

      Sure, but you need a lot fewer of them.

      they aren't up to engineering stable production environments.

      If you have a thousand developers, that may be true. The company I am currently consulting with has Git running on a VPS in "The Cloud" and about a dozen developers with laptops and external monitors. This is how much they spend on sysadmin salaries: $0.

    6. Re:Cloud by MangoCats · · Score: 1

      ...problem with "devops" is that far too many people think developers handling ops is a sane choice...

      Depends on the devs, depends on the ops. Just because someone has skills in one area does not disqualify them from being able to learn them in another. Check your people, check their attitudes, better to spin up a developer in admin skills with continuity in the organization instead of hiring a "certified high reliability sysop" from the outside and pitching out your existing staff.

      Of course, if you run a revolving door shop in the first place, then, yeah, hire what you need and hope for the best. If you can retain talent for 3+ years on average, you'll be better off, even if some of them were hired outside their current job descriptions.

    7. Re:Cloud by HornWumpus · · Score: 1

      If they could code, they would have higher paying jobs as coders.

      --
      John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
    8. Re:Cloud by HornWumpus · · Score: 1

      I'm a dev, have been for decades. Did some DevOps back in the Netmare 2 days, back when being an admin was a fucking bitch...

      Anyhow: The worst thing you can hear from me is 'Anything is possible...' Because the second clause is '...but that's the dumbest thing I've heard in a long time, there has to be a better way!', but that clause is usually silent. People that have worked with me for a long time, know it's there.

      Anything is possible, but you're a fool if sometimes you don't tell management that a bad idea is 'impossible'. We don't know, who is who, in your story. Cookbook admins suck, but devs that don't bother learning how things are done, before inventing their own ways, also suck.

      --
      John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
    9. Re:Cloud by HornWumpus · · Score: 1

      Excel cowboys never build 'applications' either. Until the thing falls over on top of its creator and it ends up on some poor saps 'issue list'.

      --
      John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
    10. Re:Cloud by x_t0ken_407 · · Score: 1

      Sys admin here who sometimes HAS to write code to get my work done in a timely fashion.

      I am very proud of what I have written, but I know its probably all technically wrong. Im proud that my code has eased the workload on myself and my collegues greatly, but I am full well aware that its duck taped together with a wish and a prayer. I am also full well aware that there are probably better ways to do what I want.

      I would be VERY happy for an actual programmer to sit down with me and show me what Ive done wrong, as long as they are willing to show me how to do it right as well. But if you roll up and act superior and snooty about the code I had to put together then youlll get the cold shoulder.

      Agreed with this 100%, (as a sysadmin who also must code on occasion).

    11. Re:Cloud by fluffernutter · · Score: 1

      You point out a big difference between companies in the days of buggy whips and companies of today. Most companies of old would strive to do more X for the same price because their economies were growing rapidly. Fast-forward to today, and most companies choose to do the same amount of X for a cheaper price, which is very bad for the American worker.

      --
      Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
    12. Re:Cloud by jandersen · · Score: 1

      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's worse than that, actually. I have worked in the IT industry for too many decades, and for that entire time, programmers on the one side and system administrators on the the other have complained of the utter incompetence of each other - with a good deal of justification, I might add (I have worked on both sides, so I do have some background). Developers too often don't understand that programs have to be supportable: it must be easy and convenient for the support staff to troubleshoot and configure, because they very often don't have the time needed to dig deep into problems. And sysadmin too often have no clue about what goes on inside a process, how the OS loads and executes code, not to mention how the whole develop and release process works - sysadmins have little knowledge of (and respect for) what developers need, in order to do their job. Devops is suppsed to be a group of people, who understand both sides well, but in reality they are merely 2nd level supporters, who can sort of stumble through a bit a script writing, if they must.

      The fundamental problem is one of proper management - managers in general don't understand what skilled, technical employees do, so they mistake script writing skills for development skills, and because of the promises of the cloud, they imagine you don't need real sysadmins either, since it is all automated and the cloud provider will have the necessary sysadmins - "problem solved". In the all too rare cases where the managers actually understand things and respect their staff, they will work to get developers and sysadmins to communicate at floor level and learn from each other; developers can in fact be allowed to perform some sysadmin under supervision from the real sysadmins, and sysadmins can learn about what developers actually do and why they have their specific needs. And that is when real devops happens.

    13. Re:Cloud by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 1

      Companies don't choose to do anything of the sort. If you're building hard drives, you can sell 4TB drives when they're as cheap to produce as 2TB drives used to be--because people want to buy them. If you put out $100 4TB drives and people buy 2TB drives for $50 instead, well... then you're making 2TB drives.

      This isn't a trickle-down economy. You don't go out, start a business, and push your success out to the masses by creating jobs and shoving products down peoples's throats. We have a demand economy: you start a business and you capture part of the available buying power, and now that's unavailable to any other vendor. If more customers come than to whom you can supply, then you hire more workers and increase your capacity.

      Also, the "very bad for the American worker" thing is begging the question.

      --
      Support my political activism on Patreon.
    14. Re:Cloud by shaitand · · Score: 1

      Coders have a higher potential ceiling but enterprise level ops people make well into six figures and that is on par or better than most coders and within the ballpark of enterprise coders outside the Valley. Devops people around here (not NY or Cali) pretty much universally make six figures.

    15. Re:Cloud by HornWumpus · · Score: 1

      Around here Devops is kind of code for 'cheap clueless management'. Been my experience, but I was a kid and didn't know better.

      Coders haven't really 'arrived' until they work for someone that sells code, one way or another. Until then, they are just overhead, like IT. Exceptions exist, where coders can be rainmakers, financial quants etc.

      --
      John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
    16. Re:Cloud by HornWumpus · · Score: 1

      You'll find very similar issues around sysadmins and installers written by devs. The sysadmins will get pissy because the dev tried do something stupid...automagically setup a database etc. Attitude matters.

      --
      John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
    17. Re:Cloud by shaitand · · Score: 1

      I was referring to enterprise scale, it is not a good plan to "spin up an admin" with any level of seriousness in a large fortune 500 environment. You can move a dev onto the team and have him spend a few years becoming an admin but by the time he is up to enterprise level as an admin he won't be up to date as a dev anymore and you'll have an admin with some dev skills and not a dev. Which isn't to say he couldn't become one again or handle a dev hat at some places.

      You aren't simply going to adopt another hat and build an environment that can deliver 3+ 9's and take 10,000+ thousand requests per second with petabytes of data on the backend and PCI complaint pieces etc. But sure, a dev could probably get the job done taking over as the sole hand somewhere small enough that is feasible like the local library system or a university or something.

  2. Name and shame! by HornWumpus · · Score: 2

    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'
    1. Re:Name and shame! by rholtzjr · · Score: 3, Informative

      E-Solutions Inc. and IDC Technologies spam me at least twice a day under different names for non-existent position all over the US.

  3. H1B Highly Skilled by Njorthbiatr · · Score: 4, Funny

    I can also create oxymorons.

    1. Re:H1B Highly Skilled by david_thornley · · Score: 1

      I liked the proposal (Trump's, I believe) to grant H-1Bs on the basis of who wants to pay most, so each application would come with a salary and we'd go through them in decreasing order and stop when we hit the limit. That would allow companies to bring in the sort of people H-1Bs are nominally for.

      --
      "When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
    2. Re:H1B Highly Skilled by tlhIngan · · Score: 1

      I liked the proposal (Trump's, I believe) to grant H-1Bs on the basis of who wants to pay most, so each application would come with a salary and we'd go through them in decreasing order and stop when we hit the limit. That would allow companies to bring in the sort of people H-1Bs are nominally for.

      So you'd bias the pool towards Silicon Valley participants who naturally have to pay more because it's an expensive place, over places like Seattle where it's not as expensive, so you'd pay less anyways? Or there are plenty of places that have much lower costs of living and thus pay less money, but that doesn't mean they don't have the demand. (Perhaps it's not worth moving?).

      And then you'd likely bias it for financial companies who may be willing to pay way more for a programmer to follow their quant to make a few extra bucks in HFT.

      At this point, you might as well make it an auction for people to bid on the visas, screw salaries. Those who want the employee the most can pay the most to the government.

  4. Victory! by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 2

    Indian outsourcing companies such as Infosys started recruiting Americans, bowing to Trump's calls for "America First."

    So Trump's idea is working as intended. America for Americans!!!1*

    * the last sentence is supposed to be sarcastic.

    --
    #DeleteFacebook
    1. Re:Victory! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Indian outsourcing companies such as Infosys started recruiting Americans, bowing to Trump's calls for "America First."

      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?

    2. Re:Victory! by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 3, Funny

      I said sarcastic, not evil or even bad. It's just that when you see these kinds of posts they're usually driven by lunatics.

      I'm not a lunatic, just a moran.

      --
      #DeleteFacebook
    3. Re:Victory! by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:Victory! by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

      Those of us who oppose Trumpism don't believe he is "working for American citizens".

      Of course he is.

      I don't see the word "all" or even "most" in there.

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    5. Re: Victory! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      The point of visas is to get high skilled workers INTO the country. It isn't to "help" another country. It's too increase your skilled labor pool.

      That's why there is usually a salary requirement way above national mean.

      One problem with that idea is that a person working for 60k in Peoria is going to be a higher skill level than a person working for 60k in Silicon Valley.

      That last part can be easily solved, but bureaucrats have a hard time with mathy things.

    6. Re:Victory! by sound+vision · · Score: 1

      I wouldn't say the governments of China and especially India work for their citizens generally. Those governments work for themselves and for a selection of industries within their borders. So, much the same as the United States. Focusing on industry can, incidentally, provide benefits for the citizenry as well - at least in the stage of development that India is in. (That strategy loses steam as industry becomes decoupled from the citizenry through automation.)

      Of course, cultivating industry also has to be done competently for it to benefit the citizens. In India, the garment factories are so poorly constructed that they sometimes collapse, killing the workers inside. In China, working conditions are so terrible that Foxconn employees commit suicide en masse. Pollution controls are so bad that spending a day in Beijing is the equivalent of smoking a pack of cigarettes.

      Regarding the H-1Bs, I am for reforming it 100%. I know some here would label me a Trumpkin for saying that, but my support for it actually comes from a leftist perspective. The faucet of cheap foreign labor allows corporations here to accrue excess capital at the expense of the citizenry. That is why the H-1B program doesn't constitute competent industry-building.

    7. Re:Victory! by slack_justyb · · Score: 1

      Why must the US give all away no matter the circumstance or reason

      This being a bit anecdotal but US citizens seem to be a lot more adverse to price elevation than a lot of other countries I know of. Talk about raising the minimum wage and people flip out over the idea that their cheese in the grocery store might start costing $0.08 more. So employing an US worker means at some point cost will go up. Yes, there's an overall economic good being done, but for some reason people focus in on that cost going up part the most.

      Or you sometimes get the person who understands all the above but then for spite says, "Well if you're going to MAGA then up the minimum wage, shouldn't kill H1Bs if you aren't also going to help everyone else out."

      Again, grain of slat there. However, I don't expect this to be a long term thing. But that's just because I'm cynical as hell.

    8. Re:Victory! by manu0601 · · Score: 1

      France works for their own citizens.

      Considering the count of industrial jewels the french government allowed to be sold to foreign companies, this one is not obvious.

    9. Re:Victory! by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 1

      Americans have RIGHTS! Non-citizens DO NOT!

      We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

      There is nothing in this sentence about "Americans". All people have the same rights to life, liberty, and happiness. I am proud to be an American because my country was founded on this principle.

    10. Re:Victory! by gumbi+west · · Score: 1

      It's not a zero-sum game. When super productive people come to the US they can increase job opportunities for those around them. Look at this list of nobel laureates from the US many of them were not born in the US. You can't convince me that most of them they aren't making those around them better off than they otherwise would have been.

      In the other extreme in the Mariel boat lift about 125,000 workers were added to Florida in a very short time. These folks wee not H-1Bs, they were citizens because of the asylum. The change in employment among Americans in Florida was basically zero. Don't get me wrong, a lot of people got really upset about it, but there wasn't a radical change in employment for those already in the US. You can read about it here.

    11. Re:Victory! by unixisc · · Score: 1

      Except that those words do not apply to people outside the jurisdiction of the US government. Try telling fatty Kim that all men are created equal, and that he should give his people enough real food to eat so that they don't have to pretend that grass is a vegetable. Everything about the US constitution applies only to people already in America

    12. Re:Victory! by painandgreed · · Score: 1

      Americans have RIGHTS! Non-citizens DO NOT!

      We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

      There is nothing in this sentence about "Americans". All people have the same rights to life, liberty, and happiness. I am proud to be an American because my country was founded on this principle.

      Please forgive these ACs. Russians probably never had an American civics class in primary school.

    13. Re:Victory! by 0111+1110 · · Score: 1

      Google 'natural rights' and John Locke. Those are the principles this crazy country was based on. The idea that human beings have a thing called 'rights' that no one can give or take away but can only ignore or violate or respect. Read and ponder and realize that the US was a country founded by Libertarian nutjobs. Or at least that is how most Americans would see them. Maybe they'd even be considered terrierists. The country was founded by extremists but they don't run things anymore. If they were here they would almost certainly want to nuke washington dc and revolt all over again.

      --
      Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
    14. Re:Victory! by unixisc · · Score: 1

      Does not matter. Just like Thai laws, for instance, don't apply within the US, US laws do not apply in any country outside the US or its territories. Don't matter what lofty principles they are based on

  5. IT binge and purge by FilmedInNoir · · Score: 1

    Is there any professional industry as unstable as IT? Some don't exist anymore but are there any super unstable ones?

    --
    Sig. Sig. Sputnik
    1. Re:IT binge and purge by gmack · · Score: 1

      Try retail sales, it's far worse.

    2. Re:IT binge and purge by swb · · Score: 1

      It feels like the whole economy is kind of transforming simultaneously faster than most of its participants can adapt to it.

    3. Re:IT binge and purge by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 5, Interesting

      "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.

      --
      Support my political activism on Patreon.
    4. Re:IT binge and purge by HornWumpus · · Score: 1

      Professional...not (starter/dead ender) jobs.

      --
      John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
    5. Re:IT binge and purge by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Support my political activism on Patreon.
    6. Re:IT binge and purge by drinkypoo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "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.'"
    7. Re:IT binge and purge by David_Hart · · Score: 2

      "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.

      IT is not just "burger flippers" as you put it. Yes, some jobs would fall into this category such as patching, basic configuration, handing tickets, etc. But there are higher level jobs such as network/wifi and systems/storage architects which requires quite a bit of knowledge and skill and are hard to replace.

      It's interesting that you put programmers in the category of being hard to replace. A lot of IT stuff requires boots on the ground. Programming doesn't, which makes it much easier to replace with H1B, outsourcing, etc. In other words, it's hard to change a patch cable from India but it's easy to outsource programming.

      That being said, there are newer non-traditional areas of IT and data analysis that are booming, these includes jobs like bio-informatics, etc.

    8. Re:IT binge and purge by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 2

      You're talking about Systems Engineers. People who say, "Your business needs what? A customer relations management system that integrates with your Active Directory domain and your PMIS?" and then sit down and solve out how to do it. They may not be able to put it all into practice; they might be able to describe software architecture, networking architecture, and other stuff that other highly-skilled and less-skilled components of your business can assemble together.

      You can replace most lower-level IT with someone who's been trained for a few weeks. In smaller shops (and yes, I've seen $2Bn businesses with smaller shops), you don't even have lower-level IT; you have your highly-skilled network engineers, and they have so little to do that you make them run cable and rack servers. In big shops, you have infrastructure engineers and network engineers designing the data center and making up all the routing and VLAN and firewall rules, and you have a bunch of IT monkeys running around pulling cables and sticking servers into racks because real engineers have no time for that.

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      Support my political activism on Patreon.
    9. Re:IT binge and purge by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 4, Informative

      there are higher level jobs such as network/wifi

      Network engineers.

      systems/storage architects

      Infrastructure engineers.

      Here's the thing: when you get an IT degree, you don't get this knowledge. You get a 4 year Bachelor's of Applied Science in Information Technology from a $140,000 university, and you've learned something about routers, cables, servers, and some data center management. Those IT degrees are super-fluffed-up, and they don't include a whole hell of a lot of useful information. Most of it is "intro to...". For example, the local university here supplies a Bachelor's of Applied Science that includes intro to database design, intro to data communications and networks, software and hardware concepts, some math, some statistics (math), economics, and structured systems design. So you're looking at two database courses, two networking courses, a basic explanation of what a computer does, one course about complex system architecture, and then math and economics and technical writing. Or, in short, "I know what a computer is."

      You can go to college for Network Engineering, and learn about how networks operate at every level, with a deep exploration of routing protocols, of switching technology, of networking architecture, the whole lot. You can get a four-year BAS in Database Design and Administration. You can get an IT or IS degree that makes sure you've taken a long look at the glossary of terms.

      You can't pick up a Network Engineer, DBA, or Programmer by grabbing some high school kid who "liked computers" and training him for a couple months. For what's described as just "IT" and not an engineering-level job, you can pick a guy off the street and teach him how to plug the little wires in correctly.

      We're constantly working toward that, more and more. You want comprehensive network security? Plan out your programmable switches, your IDS sensors, malware trackers and detonators, and so forth. Then, send your boots-on-the-ground to go plug all that shit in and give it the right IP address. One of these is a massive exercise in understanding complex architecture, identifying major trunks in your network, capacity planning for how you're getting all this information together and how much your new IDS can handle, and simple risk trade-offs on what you can and can't see within the limits of your budgets. The other is plugging things in.

      Sure, you can outsource programming, or network design, or what have you; and you can outsource it to a highly-trained and experienced professional. You can hire a frigging Wendy's cashier to handle a temporary data entry clerk position, or to help rack some of these servers. More and more, we're seeing the ability to plug-and-play certain devices without heavy engineering, too; and some devices let the engineers design it once and then send it out to groups of devices, so you don't need 8 people configuring your 400 firewalls anymore because you have CISCO's management center or FortiManager or whatnot. Soon, the intermediary "I designed complex architecture and this Networking dude is configuring the switch" jobs are going to be cut down to "I designed complex architecture and configurations, and that intern racked the server; it's in my management center now, and I hit Apply."

      "Soon" being "half a decade ago".

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    10. Re:IT binge and purge by Maxo-Texas · · Score: 1

      seriously-- retail jobs used to be stable as a career tho not as a job at a particular place for over three decades.

      But lately, they are being killed by online sales. We have 5 to 6 million people and three of our malls have died. The only two doing really well have luxury high rise condos built in to them and sell upscale goods.

      The big box stores are increasingly empty.

      That's a lot of jobs which no longer exist and those average folks don't have money to buy products as a result.

      And that means the corporate headquarters for those chains are laying off professionals. I know of one retail chain which is about to have 50% corporate hq layoffs at every layer even the exec vp's.

      So a lot of retail locations are closing and whoever services those locations are losing work as well.

      The loss of stability is almost as bad.

      But if you want less stability in a professional field -- anything to do with oil fields right now. Massive layoffs in that field and those jobs won't be coming back.

      Glad I'm retired and just do a little massage work on ex colleagues these days.

      --
      She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
    11. Re:IT binge and purge by Darinbob · · Score: 1

      Except that those jobs aren't in the IT departments. Those are R&D jobs, just with an IT focus. When India talks about IT jobs, they mean the fungible workers 99.9% of the time.

    12. Re:IT binge and purge by BigDukeSix · · Score: 1

      Nitpick: you have the mechanism wrong. Physical impact to the chest does not typically induce ventricular fibrillation; quite the opposite in fact: it induces a pause in the cardiac rhythm that in the past was actually a treatment for fibrillation (google 'precordial thump'). This is, incidentally, the basis for drunk Dr. McCoy beating on the dead Klingon's chest in the last of the original Star Trek movies. Sudden cardiac death in athletes is thought to be related to electrolyte abnormalities in people who have undiagnosed rhythm disorders, all of which are rare (I believe the most common one is Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome).

    13. Re:IT binge and purge by Maxo-Texas · · Score: 1

      It is an interesting point but our city is over 100 miles across. So now large areas of the city are not served by any mall which I think contradicts that theory (here at least).

      --
      She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
    14. Re:IT binge and purge by David_Hart · · Score: 1

      Sure, you can outsource programming, or network design, or what have you; and you can outsource it to a highly-trained and experienced professional. You can hire a frigging Wendy's cashier to handle a temporary data entry clerk position, or to help rack some of these servers. More and more, we're seeing the ability to plug-and-play certain devices without heavy engineering, too; and some devices let the engineers design it once and then send it out to groups of devices, so you don't need 8 people configuring your 400 firewalls anymore because you have CISCO's management center or FortiManager or whatnot. Soon, the intermediary "I designed complex architecture and this Networking dude is configuring the switch" jobs are going to be cut down to "I designed complex architecture and configurations, and that intern racked the server; it's in my management center now, and I hit Apply."

      "Soon" being "half a decade ago".

      The state of firewall management is not the same as other network devices. Firewall configuration and deployment has been centralized for well over 10 years. I used to manage Juniper firewalls using NSM and you could preconfigure a firewall and have it automatically push the configuration once the IP address was applied and the device was pingable. It's definitely where everything is heading, but it's just not there yet for all network and Wifi devices from all vendors.

      Cisco Prime Infrastructure, for example, is just getting to the point where this is usable for Switches. And these tools are just getting up to speed for WiFi devices.

    15. Re:IT binge and purge by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      Except that those jobs aren't in the IT departments.

      If you hire competent IT personnel, then yes, those jobs are in the IT departments. Infrastructure is IT's job.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  6. Quality of service by grasshoppa · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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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    1. Re:Quality of service by cayenne8 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Bias against Indians abroad is also compounding workers' fears of layoffs and downsizing at home.

      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.........
    2. Re:Quality of service by gmack · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I keep hearing this, but to be fair, most of the problem is with the way companies outsource. If someone in India is good at their job (and I have known some highly skilled Indians), they can move to wherever country they want meaning that if you want to hire someone skilled in India than you must pay them enough that they do not want to move.

      If you you are opening shop in India for good reasons such as keeping 24 hour coverage, you end up paying more on wages but you get better people.

      On the other hand, if you are opening shop in India to save money, you are getting all of the people who aren't skilled enough to move and aren't qualified to take the better jobs. That leaves the worst of the bunch to do your tasks and worse yet, if they are being used for call center type work, then you are getting them late at night their time when they won't be at their best.

    3. Re:Quality of service by diesalesmandie · · Score: 1

      MOST all stereotypes are based somewhat in observable fact....

      Correction, stereotypes are/were based somewhat on observable fact AT SOME POINT IN TIME

      --
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    4. Re:Quality of service by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      In my experience, outsourced work involving knowledge or customer service interaction rates as follows...

      #1 Philippines.
      Speak Americanized English. Similar culture. Most able to improvise and most companies are willing to trust them with it. No attitude. Some issues with word choice, like "please wait a while" instead of a "moment" that can be frustrating, but nothing major. Do have typical Asian attitude towards bending the rules and can be frustrating about financial transactions.

      #2 Hong Kong
      Speak British English. Some cultural issues for Americans, better for Brit or continental audience. No attitude. Frustrating about payment terms. Asian attitude towards breaking the rules, but not Chinese level. Often allowed to improvise, but less effectively than Filipinos.

      #3 China
      Heavily accented English but tend to be cognizant about it and work hard to communicate despite it. Cultural differences abound, but familiar enough with western culture to function. Less frequently allowed to improvise. Not good at it. Stick to the script or the manual. Tend to ignore rules. Hygiene issues. Security risk both due to tendency of IP theft and also due to government structure.

      #4 SE/E Asian areas not mentioned
      Similar issues to China. Language a toss up. Culture a toss up. Biggest issue is usually shit infrastructure. Not worth working in unless it is labor only.

      #5 India
      Acceptable English but no willingness to accept they don't speak intelligible English to Americans or Brits. Rude when customers don't understand them. Attitude issues when corrected. Inflated sense of importance. Tend to have tone issues with customers. Very willing to break rules. Hygiene is an issue.

      If I had any choice, I would never do business with India. I wouldn't use mainland China for anything mission critical. Pick the Philippines or HK.

    5. Re:Quality of service by TheRaven64 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      It's worse than that. A bunch of companies open offices in India and employ competent people. They're not getting the ones that can't move elsewhere, they're getting the ones that realise that, relative to cost of living, moving to the US and earning 2-3 times as much would not make financial sense. These companies do reasonably well. The problem is the people who think that they can contract an Indian outsourcing company and get some reasonable level of competence. The outsourcing companies get the people that the companies paying a (locale-relative) decent wage and with on-site management who can sift the cruft won't hire. If you've been working at an outsourcing company for a few weeks and doing a good job, it's easy to bounce to a better job.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    6. Re:Quality of service by HornWumpus · · Score: 1

      Eastern Europe, particularly S Eastern Europe. No so much for phone banks, but for IT/dev roles. Of course they aren't near as cheap as India and YMMV.

      --
      John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
    7. Re:Quality of service by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Ukraine has very good coders. Time zone isn't as hard compared to SE Asia. Willing to tell you when the requirements has issues instead of implementing the whole thing and letting it fail. Not nearly as cheap as India.

    8. Re:Quality of service by unixisc · · Score: 1

      You forgot Singapore. I've heard they're pretty good

    9. Re:Quality of service by cayenne8 · · Score: 1

      Correction, stereotypes are/were based somewhat on observable fact AT SOME POINT IN TIME

      From what I see...most of them can be pretty readily observed. People, as a whole don't change very readily over time.

      Of course, that's not the "PC" thing to say (or think) , but you can see it every day in many groups of people.

      --
      Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
    10. Re:Quality of service by grasshoppa · · Score: 2

      If someone in India is good at their job (and I have known some highly skilled Indians), they can move to wherever country they want meaning that if you want to hire someone skilled in India than you must pay them enough that they do not want to move.

      I agree with this statement. I would only add that folks of this quality won't work for outsourcing firms, typically, or if they do it's transitory.

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    11. Re:Quality of service by swb · · Score: 1

      Rude when customers don't understand them. Attitude issues when corrected. Inflated sense of importance. Tend to have tone issues with customers. Very willing to break rules. Hygiene is an issue.

      Arrogant and filthy.

  7. No Sympathy by DatbeDank · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:No Sympathy by Tablizer · · Score: 1

      It's not about race: when you hire somebody locally, you can evaluate them better. When you pay a firm 2 thousand miles a way to select staff, you have less control over quality, and they are tempted to cut corners to save a buck because that's human nature: less scrutiny, more corner cutting.

      --
      Table-ized A.I.
  8. This is inevitable pullback, and a good sign by SuperKendall · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
  9. Saw this coming.... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  10. No surprise; India hasn't raised it's game by mykepredko · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:No surprise; India hasn't raised it's game by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 1

      Most Indians in India too bought the same bull shit that ALL Indian techies are superior to Western grads. They were so bad they did not even know how bad they were. This hubris is making India not realize the phase 3 as fast as American companies realize it.

      --
      sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
  11. Reputation by Dan+East · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  12. Good news? by shaitand · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  13. I smell bullshit... by drew_92123 · · Score: 1

    "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.

  14. Everybody loves a doomsday scenario by asliarun · · Score: 1, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Everybody loves a doomsday scenario by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

      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.

      Nobody cares about that. They care about which type they get on their project.

      On the actual work phase, not the proposal.

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  15. Not to worry by OneHundredAndTen · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Not to worry by TheSync · · Score: 3, Insightful

      India needs economic growth for its poor people. Building infrastructure is not a bad idea, but the economy for the common people is still largely hampered by over-regulation. IT has been a source of growth because it only needs some people showing up to an office. If you have to actually get land for a factory, get a loan for it, get the permits to make something, make something, and sell it for a profit despite the weird taxes between state borders, it is much harder.

      India ranks #143 on the Index of Economic Freedom, way behind China at 111. Moreover, India's direction is down in the Index, as opposed to China which is moving up.

      [India's] Growth is not deeply rooted in policies that preserve economic freedom. Progress on market-oriented reforms has been uneven. The state maintains an extensive presence in many areas through public-sector enterprises. A restrictive and burdensome regulatory environment discourages the entrepreneurship that could provide broader private-sector growth.

  16. Maybe the pendulum is swinging back? by ErichTheRed · · Score: 1

    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.

  17. Perhaps it's the 80/20 rule in play by Maxo-Texas · · Score: 1

    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.
  18. Instead of just accepting 2-3 deaths a year by rsilvergun · · Score: 2

    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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    1. Re:Instead of just accepting 2-3 deaths a year by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      why not ask what could be done to prevent them?

      Ok. Here's why: "It would cost more lives to do it than not."

      Let's compare it to a cup. The kind anybody who has taken a puck to the nuts is happy to buy and wear. Let's also assume the heart problem is just as simple and cheap to prevent. (More likely not even possible.)

      Here's my estimation:

      Annual Cost per Player = $10 (get a new "heart cup" each season?)
      Active Players per Year = 1,500,000 (globally, that would rather pay $10 than accept tiny risk of sudden death)
      Annual Total Cost = $15M
      Median Lifetime Income = $1.2M ($30k x 40yrs)
      Annual Death Loss = $3.6M (3 deaths per year)
      Net Benefit of Prevention = $-11.4M annually
      "Cost" of Prevention = 9.5 (lives, annually)

      Spend 12.5 lives to save 3. Feel free to correct my estimates as you see fit. To me this clearly shows how bad humans collectively are at risk assessment.

  19. They're losing out by rsilvergun · · Score: 1

    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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  20. keep the goddamned blue bastards at home! by Thud457 · · Score: 1

    Syria for Sirians!

    --

    the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

  21. Live by lopsided trade, die by lopsided trade by Tablizer · · Score: 1

    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.
  22. just to be a devi's advocate by superwiz · · Score: 1

    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.
  23. Normal by nospam007 · · Score: 1

    'Gilded' ain't 'golden'.

  24. Wow, that's horrifying by rsilvergun · · Score: 1

    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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  25. I'm looking at code monkeys by rsilvergun · · Score: 1

    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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  26. That's not actually a nitpick by rsilvergun · · Score: 1

    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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    1. Re:That's not actually a nitpick by BigDukeSix · · Score: 1

      That is, more or less, why Gatorade was invented. And you are right- I should have been more forceful. This poser is trying to sound like they know something about physiology, which they most certainly do not. I'm just calling out the bullshit. That's you, bluefoxlucid. Put up or shut up.

  27. That's not really going to help by rsilvergun · · Score: 1

    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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  28. Re:Something good is happening here by fluffernutter · · Score: 1

    If there were true global competition happening then I would be all for it. If an Indian CEO could make $100K a year and do the same job as an American CEO making $10M a year then let's go for it. The entire economy balances out with cheaper products, a more level playing field for everyone, and possibly more buying power per person. The problem is, it never seems to be equal, does it?

    --
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  29. Re: Philippians by user+no.+590291 · · Score: 1

    Beat me to it. Picturing those New Testament era coders in Phillipi slaving away.

  30. It's not only the cloud by Mosquito+Bites · · Score: 1

    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

  31. Re:And What About Modi? by TheSync · · Score: 1

    The Economist said it best...

    FEW countries would see a tax requiring some businesses to file over 1,000 returns a year as an improvement. But India might. A nationwide Goods and Services Tax (GST) is set to come into force on July 1st. It will replace such a tangle of national and local levies and duties that even the prospect of 37 annual filings (three a month plus an annual return) for each of India's 29 states in which a business operates is a relief by comparison.

    So hey, Modi got something done!