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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 can also create oxymorons.
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.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
When Cisco announced their layoff that took affect after the October 2013 government shutdown, the Indians I've worked with were shocked that the layoff applied to them and their middle management. Cisco ran out of Americans to lay off each year.
Actually you still need the system administrators as well. Developers might think they are competent to administer the systems and that is fine for dev but they aren't up to engineering stable production environments. The problem with "devops" is that far too many people think developers handling ops is a sane choice when proper use of these systems is for real ops engineers to employ some dev tools.
"IT" is burger-flipper jobs. IT people rack servers, run cables, configure routers, and handle support tickets. They are your low-end, easily-replaced cogs.
You're looking at computer science and engineering people. Programmers, data analysts, computer engineers, the like. These people are highly-skilled, heavily-educated, and difficult to replace.
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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"IT" is burger-flipper jobs. IT people rack servers, run cables, configure routers, and handle support tickets. They are your low-end, easily-replaced cogs.
You're looking at computer science and engineering people. Programmers, data analysts, computer engineers, the like. These people are highly-skilled, heavily-educated, and difficult to replace.
There's a space in between where people need systems which take actual research and development. And those IT people are not low-end, or easily replaced. They aren't necessarily an engineer (although some of them are) but they are skilled and nontrivial to replace. When people try to replace them with cogs, bad things happen.
You can't replace a developer with an IT person, nor the other way around. Some people are both, that's cool whatever, but most people aren't.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So Trump's idea is working as intended. America for Americans!!!1*
* the last sentence is supposed to be sarcastic.
India works for their own citizens. China works for their own citizens. Germany works for their own citizens. France works for their own citizens.
Why is it such an evil thing for the US to work for their citizens?
Why must the US give all away no matter the circumstance or reason, sell out their own people, while others do the opposite and are applauded for it?
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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