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Vanishing Graduate Tech Jobs Worsen Modi's Headache Before Elections (bloomberg.com) 50

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
For years, India's tech graduates could bank on a job offer from one of the country's IT giants. Now those starting positions are suddenly waning, leaving hundreds of thousands in peril and creating a fresh headache for Prime Minister Narendra Modi. From a report: Infosys and Wipro were among companies that shocked students nationwide last month, saying they were cutting college recruitment as demand for their services cooled across the globe. [...] The unusual pullback from the $245 billion industry risks exacerbating youth unemployment in the world's most populous nation, a potential scar on Modi's ambitious plan to keep India growing at a fast clip and make it the third-biggest economy during his reign. The high-profile problem of youth joblessness also gives the opposition another rallying point ahead of next year's elections, in which Modi is trying to snag a third term that would extend his tenure to 15 years.

The tech-services industry is one of the largest employers in India, and accounts for 7.5% of the South Asian country's more than $3 trillion economy. The biggest tech companies have each traditionally hired tens of thousands of tech graduates every year, then rigorously trained them for tasks such as writing software for some of the world's biggest enterprises ranging from Apple to PepsiCo. The IT companies hired particularly aggressively in the past two years as the pandemic prompted customers to spend on services and technologies enabling remote working. The top two IT companies, Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys, hired more than 284,000 graduates over that period combined. Now the uncertainty caused by Russia's attack on Ukraine as well as high global inflation and interest rates are causing customers around the world to hold off on spending. Meanwhile, technologies such as artificial intelligence are increasingly performing tasks previously handled by entry-level IT workers.
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Vanishing Graduate Tech Jobs Worsen Modi's Headache Before Elections More

Vanishing Graduate Tech Jobs Worsen Modi's Headache Before Elections

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  • Get used to it... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The more work you do with so called "indian tech consultants", you realize how crappy most of them are, even when they have some experience.

    I have a doubt that this was ever going to be a sustainable model offering up cheap but extremely unqualified labor that often struggled to complete projects...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      To be fair, many were not properly trained on the domain. Cheapskate co's subscribe to generic help-desk farms where the operators may be dealing with hundreds of different companies, merely faking being a direct employee.

      Can't blame it all on "those dumb Indians!". American outsourcers are simply getting what they paid for.

      • Frankly, I don't blame the Indians, who I blame is the corporations hiring them. Corporations want cheap uber alles, and that's what they get. Quality doesn't even enter the equation, because when a customer calls customer service, he already is a customer. He already bought the product. So who gives a shit?

        Of course, this will bite you in the rear in the long run, because if I have a bad customer care experience, how likely is it that I'll buy my next iteration of a product from you again? And given that p

        • dropping that much labor into the supply completely changes the dynamic between us and them (and it is very, very much us vs them [goodreads.com].

          The real problem is the CEOs and board of directors have international class solidarity, but we don't. We fight tooth and nail with folks in India and they with us. Meanwhile the c-suite is laughing at us all the way to the bank....

          The solution is for us to demand the same working conditions, access to education and rights to food, shelter and medicine for everyone everyw

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by Anonymous Coward

            what the fuck is this socialist bullshit.... wai.. *checks username* ahhh yup just more worthless drivel

          • Yes go ahead and demand that people in sub-Saharan Africa get $40 an hour and nice two-story houses in quaint little suburbs. Are you going to pay for any of that or have you got a genie capable of granting you some wishes? May as well ask for everyone to get a pony while you're at it.

            • How about you consider how we got here in the first place?

              People love to talk about the poverty in Africa and how people are still fighting each other there without considering why they haven't advanced more, i.e. colonialism.

              Same for the middle east for that matter, people love to talk about camel jockeys or patriot missiles hitting tents but forget about the way we've deliberately contributed to keeping that region in strife for the purposes of profit. Got to keep that oil flowing.

              Those who profited the m

        • If all of your competitors are using the same crappy call centers then it doesn't matter much, because customers don't have many alternatives. But let's face it, everyone says they want good customer service, but few are willing to actually pay for it. The Indian call center workers will probably get replaced by a talking LLM in a few years. A lot of support I've dealt with in the past few years has already started using chat programs as a front line and for some things, an LLM is going to do well enough be

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Isarian ( 929683 )

        I worked for a firm that opened an entire office in southwestern India. Many years after this office opened, our one senior QA Engineer's job had turned into reviewing the work of our overseas QA analysts every day and explaining all of the ways their test plans were insufficient or identifying bugs they had missed. In order to improve domain expertise we brought over two QA analysts to our state-side office for hands-on training. This work was in the mortgage industry, a domain that doesn't exist in India

    • The problem is the price. You can get good quality Indian techs - for the same price as Western techs. If you want bargain basement prices, you get bargain basement quality. Seeing as that's the reason that most companies outsource, well...

      It seems to be maybe a cultural problem? There are a lot of Indian techs who seem to have only ever learned stuff by rote. I recently had a student where we were talking about Git. He was a pretty smart guy, but where he used to work, he had a button to make a "pull requ

      • It seems to be maybe a cultural problem? There are a lot of Indian techs who seem to have only ever learned stuff by rote. I recently had a student where we were talking about Git. He was a pretty smart guy, but where he used to work, he had a button to make a "pull request", so he thought he knew Git already. Turned outs he no idea what a commit really was, what .gitignore did, what push and pull actually meant. He just knew to click a button, and i didn't provide him with one. It really put him at a disad

    • I have worked with a number of them over the years and it's very much a cultural problem. The good ones are those that can take their own initiative as well as admitting being wrong.
      There are also things that people living in northern Europe takes for granted like snow and ice in the winter that's an unknown experience to them that can totally trow them off track.

  • Use all the skills gained from tech to design high quality housing to replace India's slums and make India a first world country already. They already have some of the best internet in the world, just use all your technology for good.
  • Paying someone in India a very low wage to create low quality cookie-cutter code for you is all well and good, but if you can get it for free, even better for the bottom line!

  • I was literally just fired (Score:3)

    by NobleNobbler ( 9626406 ) on Friday December 01, 2023 @02:21PM (#64047041)

    Because I was too expensive and was replaced with 4 h1bs who have totally fraudulent creds. They're destroying the codebase right now and I have the privilege of being forced to have to act like I'm still employed here and not care.

    Like instant PR approval for "caching" that caches secrets by the same hash key no matter which client. Instantly bringing the service down and no one has a clue why.

    • I don't get it. You were just fired, but you have to pretend you are still employed at the company? How is that a thing?

      • Because I'm a consultant and my employer has no plans to give me a new client.

        • Well that makes sense. Consultants are always the first to go. They are hired specifically because they are easy to hire and easy to let go. It shouldn't be a surprise that they chose this approach.

  • Is there such a thing? I don't know if it's even possible seems like it would be extremely unreliable to build an app with AI. I'd definitely like to see a video of someone building a useful and plausible app with an API backend and all entirely with AI .. and then make UI or backend changes.

  • I've worked with a lot of the major players, including TCS and Infosys, and you get less than what you pay for. Here's my experience with such consultancy companies:
    1. These places love to do that shit where they charge you for senior resources while in reality they have a bunch of low level people working on your project as part of their training.
    2. They never hit milestones
    3. There are always issues with onboarding because half the time they don't even know how to access the C drive on their own computer.
    4. They w

  • It's affecting us all and it won't avoid India either. Tough transitions for us IT folk are upon us.

  • No one saves money with outsourcing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Somervillain ( 4719341 ) on Friday December 01, 2023 @09:14PM (#64048065)
    20 years ago, offshore outsourcing was the future and Slashdot was running articles telling all of us developers to learn new skills, like managing offshore resources or more business analyst roles. For people like me, who dealt with them on a daily basis, we could see it was a massive con. Around 2005, EVERYONE was offshore outsourcing. By 2010, anyone with brains was pulling out. By 2015, it was common knowledge among the tech industry that Tata, Infosys, Wipro are garbage. They were nowhere to be seen by any of the major players, certainly they weren't touching anything that mattered.

    I think the broader business community is learning what the tech industry learned 10 years ago. You don't save money by offshore outsourcing. Why?

    1. There's a global talent shortage. Anyone with talent in India can earn much more money at Google, Apple, MS, etc...either by moving or simply going to one of their Indian offices. You'd have to be an idiot not to work directly for a tech company where they treat you with respect and give you nice amenities vs a body shop that mistreats you and subjects you to disrespect.

    2. Fraud is rampant. Yeah...that engineer with a Master's Degree and 5 years Oracle experience they just sourced for your project? Hmm...why does he look 22 and know nothing about SQL? Why?...because they know you won't check. My former employer paid to have several of these offshore consultants flown in to our office for us to train them. We were told they each had 5 years of relevant experience in Java and Oracle. I had to train them how to do Java 101 and write SELECTs and INSERT statements. The shitty part? Once I reported it to our manager, she told me to keep quiet and train them...also gave me a raise. She should have fired them on the spot, but that would require admitting she was wrong to her boss. She also was getting flown out to India regularly...wined and dined and being treated like royalty.

    3. Turnover. OK, so your best engineers trained up their talent. What happens next? They leave the shitty body shop for a local employer who pays twice as much. Now you repeat the process.

    4. The work is shitty. The workers are mistreated, underpaid, stressed out and disrespected. They'd be a fool not to jump ship to the many other employers willing to pay them more and treat them like a human being instead of a commodity.

    I've seen many shops hire offshore outsourcing firms: the big names, smaller players, specialty niche players. The result was always the same...the results were late, over budget, and had lots of drama. Money was never saved. The firms would actually demand more money to save the project. Now you're in the classic sunken cost fallacy. Your boss bet his job on joining the future and moving all development to India (or somewhere else in Asia). Now he's demanding to put more effort and hire more offshore engineers to make our deadlines...now you're spending 3x as much...the offshore outsourcing company is costing twice as much as local talent...and you still haven't been able to lay off the locals because they're the only ones keeping the shop running.

    I am sure there are legitimate reasons for hiring these folks...if you need bodies and you don't care about quality or cost?...I guess they're fine. However, you won't save money and your quality WILL go down. If they had the talent to write your app, every software company in the world has an office in Bangalore and is willing to pay them much more for the same work.

    I guess now all the banks, retailers, and regular businesses are learning and hiring locally...probably saving tons of money in the process.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bungo ( 50628 )

      Anyone with talent in India can earn much more money

      This is so true, I saw this happen a lot.

      Back around 2010, Tata sent over a young guy from India to be the team lead to learn from me and take over. He lacked experience, he had just above zero knowledge, but he was smart and a fast learner. At the end of the transition time, months later, he knew enough to be able to take over.

      He also found out that I was getting paid 5 times what he was getting, was already contacting local contracting companies that would hire him and get him a work visa.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Argon ( 6783 )

      This is so true. Indian tech industry is bimodal, the best talent ends up working for what we call "product" companies, i.e directly employed by offshore centers of the Amazons, Googles, Cisco's of the world. The other end is the mass of engineers who have the bare minimum "talent" and end up at outsourcers like TCS, Wipro or Infosys. It's not that everyone at these companies are bad, there are many decent and some really smart engineers in these companies. They end up working on products (for example TCS a

  • By the time you explicitly state what you want coded, you've pretty much already coded it yourself. ChatGPT can do that kind of coding pretty well.

    The *good* offshore developers quickly find better jobs being actually employed by software companies, rather than working for outsource companies.

  • When working at major networking services company, I'd often joke that our wireless sucked because every network engineer worth a damn was pimped out for billable hours.

    India has this problem. One could joke that any person worth employing (and even more who aren't) are contracted out in other countries and probably intend to stay there. As a result, there are far too few highly skilled people in India.

    I've been told by at least a few Indian people that no sane person who has the option to leave, even to li
  • These problems need to be solved. I also can’t find a job for a long time. Although I was an excellent student at the university, I found a dissertation writing service and used https://essays.edubirdie.com/dissertation-writing-service [edubirdie.com] for this. India's population is growing. Many people go abroad after studying.

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