AI Triggers 70% Collapse in Fresh Graduate Hiring at India's IT Giants That Employ 5.4 Million (indiadispatch.com) 51
India's IT services industry saw entry-level hiring collapse by 70% between fiscal years 2023 and 2024, as the country's four largest IT exporters reduced fresh graduate recruitment from 225,000 to 60,000. Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys shed a combined 38,000 employees in fiscal 2024, marking the sector's first workforce contraction in decades.
Studies indicate generative AI could automate 30-40% of junior developer and tester tasks. The proportion of employees under 30 at Infosys declined from 81% in 2010 to a projected 53% by fiscal 2025. India adds 8-9 million people to its workforce annually while the IT sector projects just 50,000 net new jobs per year from fiscal 2026-28. The graduate unemployment rate exceeds 13%, nearly triple the national average.
Studies indicate generative AI could automate 30-40% of junior developer and tester tasks. The proportion of employees under 30 at Infosys declined from 81% in 2010 to a projected 53% by fiscal 2025. India adds 8-9 million people to its workforce annually while the IT sector projects just 50,000 net new jobs per year from fiscal 2026-28. The graduate unemployment rate exceeds 13%, nearly triple the national average.
Predictable outcomes (Score:5, Interesting)
Cybercrime is going to be wild in a few years.
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Are you saying Cybercrime is not already wild? If this happened in the USA or in Germany (which it IS happening but not at the same extreme percentage), would you think all the recent college grads/entry level programmers suddenly turn to a life of crime?
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No, I don't think I would be. Perhaps I"m just less racist/culturalist/colonialist and have a different view on Indians I've known and worked with and junior programmers both.
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Because they target countries that are not friendly with their own and have a harder time with investigation and extradition? The US Govt doesn't have any agreements with Russian like FACTA and you'll notice that many malware campaigns that originate in the countries you mention specifically and intentionally DO NOT target Russia because their government is complicit, or at least is fine with this activity as long as it increases sovereign wealth or hurts foreign adversaries. The US investigated any cybercr
Forget cybercrime (Score:2, Interesting)
This is going to cause widespread technological unemployment. This isn't like buggy whips. There's no car factory to go work at when the buggy with the factory closes. These are just entire jobs and careers being erased.
I keep saying this but they don't really teach the history of the last two industrial revolutions..
There is a pretty good line you can draw between the technological unemployment caused by the second industrial revolution and the two world wars.
I
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They don't really teach the history of Marxist failures either. "Communism has never been tried" yes it was, they actually really did try to do away with money, the Communists abandoned "real Communism" right away because it was not working.
You are not going to "to each according to his needs" your way out of this latest technical revolution anymore than you could past industrial revolutions. It won't work. People still need actual things like food, shelter, transportation and nobody is going to provide t
Re:Forget cybercrime (Score:5, Informative)
Marx model is that socialism is built on capitalism. Doing away with money is something else, which isn't socialism, nor Marxism. And some countries have tried an actually Marx inspired model of socialism, to great effect. None of those countries have been called "communist", other than as slurs by the uneducated.
Not the needful (Score:4, Insightful)
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But call centers tend to not have that because it looks bad on their reports.
In essence it is the business deal that is the problem and how they get compensated.
I worked for a company helping people install DSL, it was
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Hell, an executive even got in trouble for dictating that it was one issue per call, resolve it and hang up.
I had a similar experience with a doctor's office at a big healthcare center.
I had me an appt with an orthopedist for a problem. When I got there, I mentioned that I had a few other orthopedic problems I wanted to discus, since I was there. I was told I would have to make a separate appointment for each one. WTF?!?
And the reasoning is the same. Doctors being evaluated and compensated, in part, by number of patients seen per day, as measured by appointments, not actual people. Totally fucking ridiculous. In
for profit healthcare needs to go and the doctors (Score:2)
for profit healthcare needs to go and the doctors get less paper work.
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Health care is remarkably cheap in the US (cash pay, negotiated) and I don't have to wait months to see a doctor when I call and say I am cash pay. They bump me up fast.
That was pretty much my experience. My wife and I used insurance for the birth of our first kid. We ended up paying about $3,000 out of pocket. For the second baby we decided to not involve insurance in the process . For everything we paid $900.
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This was at a non-profit place.
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The right way to do that is to say "I have issues X Y and Z that I want to discuss with the doctor during my appointment."
Then sufficient time can be allotted to deal with your issues and the doctor can be prepared to do whatever is needed when you walk in the door.
"Oh by the way, just one more thing" leads to running over the allotted time and can go beyond what the doctor was prepared to deal with when you walked in the door.
"Oh by the way, here are three more things" just increases the scope of the probl
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Yeah. I tried that approach when I made the appt. I was told to just tell them the most important reason to be seen today, which I did.
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Reminds me of this: https://www.wheresyoured.at/th... [wheresyoured.at]
Customer satisfaction and money, they are a double-edged sword.
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In tonight's news: 70% of India IT graduates are under trained and generally unhelpful.
Pretty much this.
I suspect it's less to do with AI and more to do with the current global economy descending into chaos. So companies aren't hiring as much and the first group to suffer from this are graduates. If your hiring budget gets slashed, you're only going to hire experienced people... then make those people work 80 hour weeks for less pay. Welcome to capitalism Comrades.
Same things happening in the western world too.
As for AI... Even as terribad as it is I suspect it'll be a better script
If you want to look cheap use AI (Score:5, Insightful)
Premium customer service will always be human. That feels like instinct.
Sex bot vs. Attractive human partner? There's a few kinky weirdos, but it feels obvious what the majority would choose.
If you replace tech support entirely with chatbots I expect you'll get the same reaction people have to automated telephone attendants. In the UK we have companies that market on having friendly staff.
Not much for me to celebrate in this story, India has a lot of poor people, now there are more of them so a few can get wealthier.
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Nope. The difference I hear is that a lot of kids trying to start out in life after being sold an IT degree will struggle even more in a country with a lot of poverty. I don't imagine they were being paid much.
I can tolerate an accent, I guess you cant and you have your reasons, that's OK.
The more people that can speak English the better. Whilst we're talking we're learning and not fighting. We lose that opportunity too.
Re:If you want to look cheap use AI (Score:4)
Most normal people can tolerate an accent. But they still want to understand what is being said.
Personally, I find that having to ask someone to repeat themselves 3,4,5 times in an attempt to understand what the fuck they are saying is gets old, and awkward.
I have that issue right now. I'm in the hospital and I swear to god, some of the people I talk to may have brilliant minds, but that doesn't help me when I can't communicate with them.
On that note, I've had to find new doctors (specialists) when I'm referred to someone I just can't understand. It doesn't make for a good doctor/patient relationship, can result in real problems and I've got no issue finding someone else. If that makes me "racist", too fucking bad.
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Most normal people can tolerate an accent. But they still want to understand what is being said.
When I encounter an accent that I'm not used to, even if I can understand the person, I still have to concentrate on every word. An unfamiliar accent is harder for me to understand than nonstandard grammar or diction.
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It doesn't make you racist and it sounds like you maybe in a stressful situation. Harder to process information like that.
You are free to tell anyone they are talking to fast. You are free to say I am struggling to understand your accent as I am not used to it. What you are saying is important and I want to understand it.
If they accuse you of being racist for saying that they don't know what racist means or maybe they are stressed and defensive too.
If you really don't understand, their colleagues that work
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Meanwhile, management is pledging that "AI will only make us more productive, don't worry about your job!"
Re:If you want to look cheap use AI (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is endemic to the management mindset. They get ahead by telling people what they want to hear. Hence there is no incentive to actually understand any one problem to any depth and come up with a solution. Also, they are not rewarded for solutions because solutions cost time and money and personnel.
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Premium customer service will always be human.
A significant portion of the population can't tell an AI from a human, I think the concept of customer service is less certain than you think.
Sex bot vs. Attractive human partner? There's a few kinky weirdos, but it feels obvious what the majority would choose.
The adult toy industry is a $50+ billion industry. "Sex bots" along with "sex dolls" have been a mainstay for a long time and are pretty normalised in the world that lives outside of LOMO (Lights Off Missionary Only). Improving them and bringing down costs will only make this industry more attractive.
If you replace tech support entirely with chatbots I expect you'll get the same reaction people have to automated telephone attendants.
If an automatic telephone attendant is able to do what I need it to
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Sex bot vs. Attractive human partner? There's a few kinky weirdos, but it feels obvious what the majority would choose.
As a divorced man, I would choose the sex bot.
Monopolies (Score:4)
You might have the illusion of two or three products but if you look at who actually owns the companies through the combination of stock and personal ownership you're going to find it the same 1000 billionaires that own everything.
Capitalism is a machine and we stopped performing necessary maintenance on that machine back in 1980 when we elected Ronald Reagan. It's a miracle we haven't blown a rod. We do have one group of people in a political party who keep putting oil in that leaky engine but I think they have reached their limit.
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Democrats confirmed RFK Jr as a cabinet member. There is no clearer sign that they are just as bought as the Republicans. They also universally voted for PATRIOT, DMCA, etc etc. The Democrats are wearing the same clothes as the Republicans. I am unsure why you are so loyal to them. They are NOT loyal to you. You are being manipulated. Both parties are bought out, even if they "feel" different to you.
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This is automation of the lowest tier of support. The people who are expected to follow a script, and not deviate from it. That also happens to be the entry level into the profession for a lot of graduates, but that will shift now.
As you note, the higher tiers will at best get support from LLM's, as there is no way to make an LLM flexible enough, and also because that's where a friendly voice is important.
I expect that the same thing will happen that has happened every time we've had automation enter a fiel
Misleading (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Misleading (Score:5, Insightful)
Specifically, they cherry picked 2022/2023 and pretended those numbers were good examples of "normal" hiring. Looking at the chart, it's clear they had a huge hiring boom, enough to overcome the prior 5 years of demographic shift. This is consistent with the general hiring boom in tech that came about then, just before LLM hype launched into the stratosphere.
They talked as though 2024 was a precipitous drop, but as you say, it was just a return to 2021 levels.
Without AI, we probably would see similar employment trends in tech and note it as a "correction". With LLM in the mix, it becomes hard to say how much is genuine shift to LLM to take care of things or LLM as a rationalization to get rid of the tech workforce the companies probably didn't need to hire up so much in the first place. Can certainly say which option generates more clicks though...
Buried interesting point (Score:2)
The proportion of employees under 30 at Infosys declined from 81% in 2010 to a projected 53% by fiscal 2025.
I found this interesting. Sure, that is a natural outcome of dropping junior positions.
But it makes me wonder, if here in the U.S., if some lawyers will latch on to this effect and investigate the plausibility/viability of lawsuits against U.S. companies deploying AI.
When it is shown that such deployments result in an effective discrimination policy against hiring younger people, outrage will ensue. I realize that age discrimination lawsuits are currently generally targeted at the 40+ crowd, but could the "
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You won't see any of that. There's way too much enthusiasm for AI from businesses. And the current admin seems to love AI too. AI has lots of tracking features associated with it.
What we probably will see is a rebound in hiring after all these companies figure out how useless AI is at interactive processes.
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No, because experience isn't a protected category. Age is, but only in certain cases mostly dealing with existing employees. Youth isn't protected at all:
https://www.eeoc.gov/age-discr... [eeoc.gov]
"The Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) forbids age discrimination against people who are age 40 or older. It does not protect workers under the age of 40, although some states have laws that protect younger workers from age discrimination. It is not illegal for an employer or other covered entity to favor an old
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As I mentioned, the outrage may induce a change to the existing law.
AI maybe. Effect of US economy definitely. (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe AI is somewhat contributing to this Indian consulting services contraction, but the more direct obvious cause is the dramatically worsened US economic situation. Companies have less money to spend. They've cut back on domestic hiring, and they're cutting back on these consulting services.
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That's exactly it. In the US, a lot of job losses are attributed to the rise of LLM's, but that's correlation, and not necessarily causation. And given the number of factors currently hammering the US economy, highly unlikely to be causation.
Why Assume AI is to Blame? (Score:1)
Why assume AI is to blame, and not global macroeconomic factors (eg. Trump)?
We've seen no evidence at all that AI has even come close to increasing productivity by 70%, which means AI can't be responsible for this entire decline.
There's a phrase: "Eating your seed corn" (Score:2)
This phrase from the summary caught my eye: "Studies indicate generative AI could automate 30-40% of junior developer and tester tasks." This society better start developing young people and the lower skill tiers if they want that cream that it yields, the cream that drives technology and society. Cream does not automatically appear without regular milk.
If a society decides to prey on its young people instead of developing them, it is setting itself up for decline. The education bubble is a big deal. I reme
Race to the bottom finds a finish line (Score:1, Insightful)