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The High-Tech Jobs That Created India's Gilded Generation Are Disappearing (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Information technology services account for 9.5 percent of the India's gross domestic product, according to the India Brand Equity Foundation (IBEF), but now, after decades of boom, the future of the industry seems precarious. Since May, workers' groups have reported unusually numerous layoffs. The Forum for IT Employees (FITE) estimates that 60,000 workers have lost their jobs in the past few months (syndicated source). "Employees are being rated as poor performers so companies can get rid of them," said FITE's Chennai coordinator, Vinod A.J. IT companies and some government officials say the numbers have been exaggerated, but industry experts say the country's digital wunderkinds have much to fear. "For the first time, companies are touching middle management," said Kris Lakshmikanth, chief of a recruitment firm called Head Hunters India. Bias against Indians abroad is also compounding workers' fears of layoffs and downsizing at home. President Trump has stoked anxiety among Indian techies, who make up the majority of applicants for the H-1B visa program for highly skilled foreign workers. Trump has talked about sharply restricting H-1Bs, and this year the number of applications dropped a staggering 16 percent as companies prepared for Trump's immigration cutbacks. Instead, Indian outsourcing companies such as Infosys started recruiting Americans, bowing to Trump's calls for "America First." On Monday, India's Prime Minister Modi will meet Trump to talk about trade, visas and climate issues.
I see this everywhere - its the Cloud. Companies are not investing so much in maintaining their own IT systems now. They are using a bunch of features provided in the cloud. So mostly, there is no need for so many Indian IT firms. The few ones that are still running are just getting bigger because they are getting more business.
Anybody know any recruiters working for Tata/Infosys etc? Post 'em (Company name, city and recruiter name), so nobody else wastes their time.
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I can also create oxymorons.
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* the last sentence is supposed to be sarcastic.
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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.
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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.
We seem to be in the third phase of Indian tech growth:
- Phase 1: Talented Indian engineers and programmers were recognized with opportunities in the US and other Western countries
- Phase 2: The inevitable over generalization that ALL Indian engineers and programmers are superior to Western engineers and programmers with the added benefit that they work for substantially less than their local counterparts
- Phase 3: Recognition by Western companies that they've been sold a bill of goods, the average Indian engineer and programmer is not superior to Western engineers and programmers and, due to the fact that they've been set up to fail because of incomplete specifications and non-existent training/onboarding, they have been hurt by indiscriminate hiring of Indian tech workers
Rather than reaping the profits through Phase 2 without concern for the future, the Indian government should have been upping its game in terms of the quality of the workers being made available to Western companies as well as establishing more stringent standards for workers along with better education for them. What has happened is that the initial good experiences has been overwhelmed by bad and hurtful experiences leading to companies eschewing Indian tech workers for "the next best thing".
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
The reputation of the quality of service provided has finally saturated to the point that companies looking to save a buck on offshoring now think twice. I've seen too many companies with executive level decisions made by individuals with absolutely no understanding of the technology or quality of service - their decisions were only based on the cheap (up front) cost of the services. Enough companies have learned the hard way that the supposed cost savings don't pan out for several reasons, and that has become common knowledge in non-tech circles. Americans in general have experienced and been unhappy with support provided by individuals that speak very poor English, to the point that it now reflects poorly on whatever company is using such services as being second-rate in their support. The bubble is bursting and things will normalize, and that will definitely result in a sharp reduction in the amount of services demanded of India.
Better known as 318230.
"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.
"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.'"
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.
"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.
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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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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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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