India’s Rising Job Scarcity: At Least 15,000 Apply For The 'Peon' Post, Applicants Include Graduates

[asif1986]

https://www.outlookindia.com/websit...applies-for-the-peon-post-applicants-i/306567

 

[Han Patriot]

India faces an uphill task of employing the growing population over the next 35 years. “Its economy could absorb less than half the new entrants into the labour market between 1991 and 2013, the latest Asia-Pacific Human Development Report said”.

The demographic dividend is coming fast.

 

[AndrewJin]

shining demongraphika

 

[seesonic]

"Tertiary industry" "Service based Industry"

We dont do manufacturing because it "pollute" the environment

 

[Han Patriot]

"Tertiary industry" "Service based Industry"

We dont do manufacturing because it "pollute" the environment

Well, they pollute the environment even without industrialization. China is moving towards cleaner and leaner industrial base.

They also fail to understand China has a way larger services industry, it's just not export oriented due to lingual limitations. Services is much more than outsourcing and call centers, it is also about logistics and distribution. The very reason why Indian grain rots and Chinese grain are stored properly.

 

[seesonic]

Well, they pollute the environment even without industrialization. China is moving towards cleaner and leaner industrial base.

They also fail to understand China has a way larger services industry, it's just not export oriented due to lingual limitations. Services is much more than outsourcing and call centers, it is also about logistics and distribution. The very reason why Indian grain rots and Chinese grain are stored properly.

Service industry requires competent labor like folks in Europe,US and East Asia.

Indians qualification is already dubious to begin with.

For Indian techies, 2017 was the stuff of nightmares.

One of the top employment generators until a few years ago, India’s $160 billion IT industry laid off more than 56,000 employees this year. Some analysts believe this spree was worse than the one during the 2008 financial crisis. Meanwhile, hiring plummeted, with entry-level openings having more than halved in 2017, according to experts.

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Infosys, two of India’s largest IT companies and once leaders in job creation, reduced their headcounts for the first time ever. Even mid-sized players like Tech Mahindra retrenched several employees. (However, TCS’s staff addition recovered after a fall during April-June 2017 and rose 0.8% in the following quarter).

“Digitisation and automation brought about disruption in traditional roles, which means that most of the IT firms found themselves reassessing the capability of the talent pool to stay market relevant,” Arun Paul, vice-president of human resources at Incedo, an IT service management company, told Quartz.

When hell broke loose
Compared to the normal rate of forced attrition (i.e. asking non-performers to leave) of around 1% in earlier years, 2017 saw Indian IT companies letting go of between 2% and 6% of their employees, said Alka Dhingra, general manager of IT staffing at TeamLease Services.

Infosys cut 9,000 jobs in January. “Instead of 10 people, what if we have three people to work on (a project). If we don’t have the software, then some others will take the advantage (away from us),” Vishal Sikka, the former CEO of the Bengaluru-based company, said in February.

Meanwhile, around 6,000 Indian employees at Cognizant reportedly lost their jobs to automation. Mumbai-based Tech Mahindra implemented a cost optimisation plan of increasing automation and reducing manpower. It turned ugly in July when the firm made headlines over a controversial audio clip that featured an HR personnel purportedly coercing an employee into quitting by 10am the next day, or risk being fired.

Moreover, it wasn’t just about those at the bottom of the IT pyramid. Pink slips were doled out to even senior employees with outdated skills.

“There is a change in the trend where automation has taken the driver’s seat to propel cost efficiency and utilisation of human resources for less mundane and routine work,” N Shivakumar, business head of recruitment process outsourcing at TeamLease, said.

Slamming the brakes on hiring
On the hiring front, too, bad news abounded. In 2017, campus hiring by IT companies fell by a massive 50-70%, Santanu Paul, CEO and managing director at skills training firm TalentSprint, told Quartz.

This was mainly because companies changed their hiring practice: While earlier they’d hire freshers in bulk in anticipation of future contracts, the strategy has now shifted to just-in-time contract hiring.

With revenue growth under stress, companies did not want to hold a bench—an employee pool on a company’s payroll, awaiting projects. “The focus shifted to increase in hiring of specialised talent or up-skilling existing (talent),” Incedo’s Paul said.

For several years now, Indian IT firms have anyway been moving away from labour-intensive projects towards more remote and technology-based solutions such as video conferencing, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence (AI). This has resulted in hundreds of entry-level roles like data entry and server maintenance becoming obsolete.

“The IT job market is not as lucrative as it used to be and the dream run is over for the next few years,” DD Mishra, a research director at Gartner, said. “With IT service providers feeling the heat, the job market will remain under pressure for some more time.”

In the long run, automation may increase the number of jobs availablefor workers with niche skill sets. But lower-level workers will continue to suffer. Nearly one-third (700,000) of the low-skilled workers in India’s IT sector stand to lose their jobs by 2022, a recent report(paywall) by market analysis firm HfS Research says. Less than 5% of Indian techies are equipped to handle high-skilled jobs.

This dearth of trained talent is especially worrying as, within the next few years, roughly 40% of the less sophisticated tech jobs will be replaced by high-paying ones like data scientist and data analyst, estimates Kris Lakshmikanth, founder of recruitment firm Head Hunters India.

In the meantime, the layoffs and lack of bankable employment prospects wreaked mental and emotional havoc on employees as they battled a cash-crunch, anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, and lack of motivation. “Most IT sector employees are migrants, with little social support in their adoptive cities,” Dr BN Gangadhar of the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences, Bengaluru, told Time magazine. “Being young, they’re often single and lonely. If married, they have little time for their families. And when things go wrong, whether at work or at home, they have no one to turn to for help.”

Side effects of “America First”
Donald Trump’s arrival at the White House earlier this year hasn’t helped.

Since Trump took office, the fate of the H-1B, a six-year temporary work visa that Indian IT companies heavily depend on, has been hanging fire.

In March 2017, the US government stalled the premium processing of this visa category.

The criteria for computer programmers to apply for the H-1B visa became tougher. In April, Trump signed the “Buy American, Hire American” executive order, promising to bring jobs back to the country, putting migrant workers in jeopardy. In November, the judicial committee of the US House of Representatives gave its nod to the Protect and Grow American Jobs Act (titled HR 170) which classifies any company that has more 15% of its workforce working on-site as “visa-dependent.” With this, the pressure is mounting on Indian outsourcing giants which sometimes have over 50% of their manpower working on-site.

Even the current workers have cause for concern—to clamp down on visa fraud, the United States Customs and Immigration Services (USCIS) plans to double the number of visits to workplaces. “Indian IT companies, thus far champions of IT-based outsourcing, have been forced to go back to the drawing board in order to reposition themselves higher up in the value chain,” Anshul Prakash, a partner at Mumbai-based legal services firm Khaitan & Co, told Quartz.

In the trenches
IT companies have tried to make fixes as doors shut on Indian techies. “…there were concerted efforts on the part of larger IT companies to hire locally, and set up near-shore delivery centres,” said Sandeep Sharma, associate research manager of software and IT services at International Data Corporation (IDC) India. Other have spent on acquisitions. These efforts may help stay afloat but job opportunities for Indians are still shrinking.

The trepidation is unlikely to end anytime soon. By next year, automation will put nearly 70% of the roles in the Indian IT workforce at risk, according to analysts.

“After years of job creation in developing economies, the shoe is now on the other foot. Developed economies will be creating jobs for their own citizens in the foreseeable future,” TalentSprint’s Paul said. “India, on the other hand, will see high-value jobs being created, but not in high volume.”

In the choice between skill versus scale, companies will continue to lean on the former.

“Much of the creative destruction will continue for a while and disruptions are inevitable over the next two to three years,” Mishra of Gartner said. “A positive shift will be visible from 2020 onwards and we expect to see new opportunities getting created out of the current disruptions.”

Note: The post has been updated to reflect that TCS’s headcount rose after the April-June quarter.

https://qz.com/1152683/indian-it-layoffs-in-2017-top-56000-led-by-tcs-infosys-cognizant/

Lets examine posts from western perspective on reddit arguing the No1 discussion site in the west, most western companies outsource its IT services to India because of its cheap labor and most Indians are well verse with english the primary language used by the western world.

I quoted some responds from this particular thread as it has been heavily discussed with a total of 24K upvotes "akin to likes in PDF" and 3366 comments "akin to replies in PDF".



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helper543 769 points 9 days ago

This always becomes an interesting discussion that often devolves into racism. Having been involved on both sides of setting up offshoring centers, some reasons why offshoring to India almost always fails;

• Time zone differences. Working on a project and only having very limited interaction time with onshore staff makes even the most talented tech workers appear incompetent.
  
  
• In India, the ticket out is to be a tech worker. It is the Doctor equivalent of the west. So many with no aptitude for tech jobs graduate in computer science and work in tech.
  
  
• Unfortunately all the average workers with no aptitude in tech crowd out the highly talented Indian tech workers. We have some wonderfully talented Indian H1B's who significantly improve the US tech industry. Unfortunately in most Fortune 500 companies, you may have 10 degree mill body shop H1B's for every talented H1B.
  
  
• In India, saying no is not culturally normal. Neither is disrespecting someone more senior than you. In India, an ambiguous response means NO. Most westerners don't understand this. So when you ask "Can you have it done by next Tuesday", and the response is "I will work on doing my best". That means "No Fcking way it will be done by Tuesday. Are you "F(king kidding me?". A lot gets lost in cultural translation which makes talented Indian workers look less so.
  
  
• Most bodyshop firms have no talent retention policies. They view a body as a body without any regard to talent. So talented resources move around to get payrises. The most talented resources work at large non bodyshop tech companies Indian offices at almost western salaries. At a body shops you are getting the workers who couldn't get those better jobs.

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disposable-name 127 points 9 days ago

Seriously, the face-saving culture of the East makes it very hard to do business.

It may seem great if you're a dipshit exec - "UNLIKE LOCAL STAFF THEY DON'T FUCKING TALK BACK OR TELL YOU SHIT CAN'T BE DONE!!!" - but for the guys on the ground, it's a nightmare.

My dad's full of stories like this:

"Has that microwave transmitter been installed?"

"Oh, yes, yes, we worked on it day and night, and it has!"

It had not.

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OEMMufflerBearings 1110 points 9 days ago

As a young software engineering student, I used to worry about the same. I figured many other industries got outsourced, it's only a matter of time until we're next.

Then I spent an internship, managing the offshore team.

Hoo boy do I have some stories to tell, long story short, I am no longer even remotely worried about being outsourced.

If I am ever outsourced, I'll leave politely and on good terms, and leave them my info if they ever need me back as a consultant. I figure it'll be a few months to a year or two until I'm hired back on as a consultant, to unfuck whatever the outsourcing guys did, at 4x my old hourly rate.

Some examples of the shit these guys did:

• Copy and paste the same large block of code, over 30 times (I guess they skipped the class on functions).
  
  
• Assign me a pull request code review ...that didn't compile. (and we used consistent environments in the cloud, so it's not a "it works on my computer" issue, it just literally didn't work).
  
  
• Have the team of 8 guys struggle with something for a week, produce 800 lines of code that did not produce the expected output, before asking our team for help. I replaced it in an afternoon with 30 lines of code that didwork. Remember, the offshore team are full time guys, I was an intern.

Seriously though, these people couldn't program their way out of a goddamn for-loop.

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majaka1234 444 points 9 days ago

Client: "your quote is too high. We went with someone else"

two weeks later after the Indian dev fucked it all up and now it's affecting core business activity

Client' "we have need of your services. Name your price."
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TradyMcTradeface 831 points 9 days ago

You guys ever had it happen where an Indian tech worker will pay another person to conduct an interview for them?

Happened in my current work. One guy was interviewed over Skype and nailed the interview. Brought him on site and the guy looked totally different from the guy in Skype. He said he cut his hair so he looked different, but as soon as we started asking questions we confirmed the guy was not the same guy we had interviewed over Skype because he didn't know jack shit.

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fkreddit00 6184 points 9 days ago*

By far the worst group of developers, analysts, and testers I ever had to manage were the Indian employees. The majority (but obviously not all) of them came out of degree mills, hated each other due to regional issues (so they wouldn't speak to one another), would NEVER tell the truth, would creep out my female employees, and could only perform repetitive tasks.

A story for you (I have more):

I interviewed a guy over the phone who had a very slight accent, knew the answers to almost every technical question, and seemed like a great candidate. I contacted HR and we hired him.

Fast forward to the guy's first day:

He arrives and is totally unkempt, I greet him and realize that this guy can barely speak any English. I can not understand a word that he is saying and he obviously does not understand any of the technical terms being used for the next week.

He admitted two weeks later to a coworker (also Indian) that within the Indian community in the DC Metro area and elsewhere around the country, there are Indians that they pay to fill out resumes, do phone screens, and get paid for development when there are non repetitive tasks.

Lets not even talk about the pmp, cissp, ccna mills and the 'pay for someone to take your certification test' for you bs.

It sucks because there are actually some very smart Indians in this industry as well. My fellow program and project manager's and my overall experience has been very negative.

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https://www.reddit.com/r/path%3D%252Fr%252Ftechnology%252Fcomments%252F7mgcrv%252F

@TaiShang @Dungeness @Martian2 @Kaptaan @cirr @terranMarine @Bussard Ramjet
@sinait @faithfulguy

 

[Dungeness]

Indians are paying a heavy price for the disastrous economic policy set by their "democratically elected" government over the years, and Modi is not doing any better. Now they can only envy the success of countries like Vietnam and Indonesia in job creation, as China is already out of their reach.

A slowing economy risks turning India’s demographic dividend into a disaster
https://qz.com/1173792/as-gdp-growth-slows-indias-demographic-dividend-could-turn-into-disaster/

 

[AndrewJin]

demonglafic dividend?

 

[GodToons]

shining demongraphika

This is not joke, all govt job are chased by huge population.
Government job in India allows you to:

• work at your own pace/ practically no work
• assured pay rise
• take bribe for all your mundane job
• no one throw you out from job even if you caught red-handed or proved inefficient due to leftist unions