AI Is Coming for India's Famous Tech Hub (msn.com) 28
AI is upending India's technology outsourcing business. The industry is pivoting to adapt, but the changes could cost a large number of coveted jobs. From a report: The country's big outsourcing companies are already using AI and have plans to integrate it throughout their businesses. That might not save the low-end operations that run call centers or do other basic tasks within the so-called business process outsourcing sector.Â
AI is threatening to disrupt most businesses around the world, not just India's $250 billion outsourcing industry. The outsourcing boom in India over the past few decades created the "getting Bangalore-d" phenomenon in the U.S., often used for Americans who lost their jobs to more affordable Indian talent. AI's impact could have big repercussions as the industry employs 5.4 million people, according to tech-industry body Nasscom, and contributes about 8% of the country's economy. More than 80% of companies in the S&P 500 outsource some operations to India, according to HSBC.
AI is threatening to disrupt most businesses around the world, not just India's $250 billion outsourcing industry. The outsourcing boom in India over the past few decades created the "getting Bangalore-d" phenomenon in the U.S., often used for Americans who lost their jobs to more affordable Indian talent. AI's impact could have big repercussions as the industry employs 5.4 million people, according to tech-industry body Nasscom, and contributes about 8% of the country's economy. More than 80% of companies in the S&P 500 outsource some operations to India, according to HSBC.
"Better crap" may work here (Score:4, Insightful)
Indian outsourcing in the coding area produces, from the samples I have seen, at best crap code. Usually fit to be thrown away, but for nothing else. As AI can only produce crappy code, this may indeed be a valid application.
Re: "Better crap" may work here (Score:2)
So what was your sample size?
Re:"Better crap" may work here (Score:5, Insightful)
Indian outsourcing in the coding area produces, from the samples I have seen, at best crap code.
You get the quality you pay for, you want it fast and cheap you get fast and cheap.
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It is incorrect to assume that cheaper labor means bad labor.
cheap labor usually means bad labor (outcome) when combined with poor leadership
Re:"Better crap" may work here (Score:5, Insightful)
It is incorrect to assume that cheaper labor means bad labor.
A different culture, does, however.
Being cheaper is ancillary.
In my experience, India, being a very populous country, does indeed have a larger pool of talented coders (in absolute numbers). With that being said, getting those talented coders to understand the requirements, not cut corners, properly apply good security practices, follow instructions is a Sisyphic job on its own.
I blame cultural differences.
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It is incorrect to assume that cheaper labor means bad labor.
A different culture, does, however.
Being cheaper is ancillary.
In my experience, India, being a very populous country, does indeed have a larger pool of talented coders (in absolute numbers). With that being said, getting those talented coders to understand the requirements, not cut corners, properly apply good security practices, follow instructions is a Sisyphic job on its own.
I blame cultural differences.
I agree largely on cultural differences, one thing that constantly pops up is that culturally they cannot make decisions on their own. Everything must be agreed upon in committee, they're often like a very inefficient version of the Borg.
However you're right that they can produce people as good as good people from western nations, they're often over here in the US, UK and Australia working for the wages we get. Indians are often willing to leave India to get good money, that's kind of rare, especially ou
Re:"Better crap" may work here (Score:5, Insightful)
Very often it does though. Some of these offshore workers are clearly working more than one job, so they're really not focusing on the one job you want done. The second factor is that many are trained in "IT" rather than a more general purpose computer science. With an outsourcing company you don't get to see the resumes of who will work on your project, you get a one page power point overview; and during an actual interview those overviews are clearly full of exagerations or outright falsehoods. Interviewing a single person to be the "lead", I could hear after relatively simple questions a discussion ensued that I wasn't supposed to be hearing. Finally, the workers you get are short term; very often each time you meet with the team there are new people who joined and the people you want to talk to have left. If your product is not mainstream using mainstream cookie-cutter coding styles, you need team members to spend time coming up to speed, which means they should be there at least a year or two before they start earning their keep.
Even with a "full time" corporate division in India, I find that spend a lot of time hand holding programmers who are out of their depth and don't understand basic concepts, and who seem to keep themselves afloat by cut-and-paste coding (which is a major problem if they're replicating technical debt and assuming it's good code). Maybe they were trained on web programming, or IT help desk issues, but now the're working on a system with limited memory and speed and have to actually think for once.
The ONLY reason this works is that there's generally 1 or 2 people who do the actual effort out of a team of 20. These few might burn out at any moment though because their workload is massive as they shoulder everyone else's workload. The stereotype of an Indian manager is to overpromise their team's capabilities. and the stereotype exists because this situation happens a lot. After all, if we offer you a ton of money if only you can do a certain job, and there will be zero penalties for failure, then the answer will usually be that, yes, they can do the job.
And yes, there are bright Indian workers, well trained Indian workers, amazing Indian workers, but the majority of them can be found outside of India because that's where the good salaries are. That's why it's called a brain drain. Why would the best workers decide to stick with a low quality offshoring site? Once they've got better experience and the visa applications are approved, they're going to be gone!
AI won't help this, because AI generated code requires a fully competent and trained team to review all the code. You cannot be naive and say "do not hallucinate" to prevent bad results.
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There is another factor: The good engineers in India have better jobs and don't have to work in these outsourcing centers.
As always, you can pay for quality, or not.
Re:"Better crap" may work here (Score:4, Insightful)
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Reminds me of some code we had written from who knows who or where via Pricewaterhouse-Coopers.
Instead of using a code versioning system, every time they'd change something, they'd put entire snippets of code, sometimes in the hundreds of lines long, into a single cell of an excel spreadsheet, documenting the line and why the change was made. While I did appreciate that they at least made an effort to document it...srsly? And instead of using code that clearly called for enums, switch, etc, they frequently
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I have to believe that if they've got something to be afraid of, so do I.
That really depends. The bulk of the abysmally bad code from outsourcing to India that have seen is from 10-15 years ago. If they still operate in that level, they have something to be afraid of because AI can produce trash on that level.
Script reading is what current AI can do. (Score:2)
At least with an obvious AI on the other end we won't be expecting someone that keeps claiming they can help to actually be able to help. The AI will just politely admit defeat and transfer you up the chain to the next, er, um, AI. Uh Oh.
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Eminently Replaceable and Good Riddance (Score:4, Insightful)
The whole idea of shifting work to India was that they all spoke English already (damn colonizers saw to that) and they had a modicum of technical skill in some areas. In the end, most of the skilled workers came over and got H1B's but the H1B is a kind of slave-contract. You don't get to compete as a citizen. They are virtually indentured servants because soon after their sponsors pull out, they are forced to return to India unless they can quickly find another sponsor (not easy). I don't like the H1B because it creates an underclass of workers that benefits the big businesses hiring them (not the H1B or American they displace).
It was probably a bad idea to try and capture the "low end" of IT because it was always ripe for an AI replacement as soon as the technology got good enough and it's more than good enough now to match the quality of most call centers and low level tech support gigs. The AI won't have the telltale accent and might last longer before your customer starts screaming and cursing for a real American.
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Do the needful (Score:3)
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It's replacement turtles all the way down (Score:2)
https://www.theonion.com/ameri... [theonion.com]
I would think so (Score:2)
LLMs are way more versatile, not to mention better at understanding* requirements, than Indian Java drones.
* choose whatever word you want - they produce better code from requirements, and listen better to feedback.
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"We" had an office in Bangalore (Score:2)
One big issue I saw was that when interviewing or working with developers from most other places, they tend to be people who got into it because they like to code and have a talent for it. In Bangalore coding was incredibly lucrative by local standards and a larger portion of applicants (and hires) seemed to be just in it for the big money.
The really good ones, we H1B'd to the USA, so that was another factor.
That might not seem like it would matter but in practice it seemed to matter. Maybe this has changed