[androdev]

Originally Posted by V.Narayan

All of them with a negative slant! Careers and career building skills don't get built by negativity.

Are you forgetting the long lasting friendships that are built over sustained crib sessions? There is rarely any camaraderie among people who introspect. To paraphrase, "In heaven, all the interesting people are missing." :-)

[Jeroen]

Just to add a slightly different twist to this discussion. Let there be no mistake, many of these companies require a high level of attrition. Because it allows them to higher younger new folks at relative lower wages.

One of the fundamental problems (my view/opinion, no offence meant to anybody) is that many Indian sectors have positioned them as low cost. Which makes it attractive for especially western countries to outsource. The Indian IT industry in particular is build upon that principle. To remain competitive one most create a certain amount of attrition in those job roles that are easily replaced. It is not that difficult to calculate that the attrition rate needs to be above 15% easily and that would be in a period of growth too. Less growth you need higher attrition, or you will need to lay off folks to stay competitive.

Again, not wanting to offend anyone, but if companies can survive and even thrive a 25% attrition rate they are working in the very low cost sector (i.e. relative low experience required and an abundance of young graduates eager to join).

I have never ever understood why anybody would want to work for a low cost company. Obviously, many of us, especially in India, simply don’t have a choice. You need a job, you need to feed your family.

I think this is a very fundamental problem with large parts of Indian industry. There are plenty of very capable and competent people about, but if all you are interested in selling them more cheaply than the next guy, you are going to create a problem long term.

When I started outsourcing the USA Sprint Organisation in 2009 we would still consider China a “low cost company”. Ten years later, China can not be considered low cost. At least not for these sort of jobs. They have moved on. China is actively moving away from copying and being cheap to being extremely industrious and very advanced state of the art technology wise.

Don’t get me wrong, I really don’t like nor approve of the Chinese system. But it is a good example of why you need to move away from cheap!

When I started my career in Telecom we used to develop what we called application systems for our telecom switches. A new release (so added funtionality and new hardware) would be anywhere between 1,5 to 4 million man-hours. And those would be highly, highly qualified R&D folks. We would run those sort of project in 12-18 months. Nobody with less than five years of experience would be on these sort of projects. A lot of development was completely unique to our hardware and our functional requirements. These days I think coding has taken a very different meaning. It comes with very different requirements on training, experience and competence.

Companies really ought to try and add more value to their customers than being the cheapest IT contractor. No matter what, at the end of the day, it is going to be a problem for the employees, the company and the customer. Long term it is simply not sustainable for a developing country. I do believe, (I am no expert, just gut feeling) that it does keep an industry back. Because all of its effort is about cost, managing attrition rates. Not about the customer, their needs, let alone some long term strategic development.

Technology develops constantly. I think India should and can do much, much better than what it is doing today. Plenty of very very clever and well educated people about. Far to many (my opinion) are doing relative simple and repetitive work. The very fact that IT companies get away (even successfully) with such high attrition rates proves my point.

Just to give my comments a bit of a positive spin; if you are working in the IT industry (or are thinking about it) really take a good look at the various IT companies. Which ones are really ahead of the game? Which ones are investing in their employees, not just for the next project, but for the next decade?

Look at what is happening in the AI world. I don’t have statistics at hand, but my impression is that many of the very well paid and hugely interesting jobs are in the west, not in India. As soon as a job can be standardised, as soon as processes can be standardised, the whole shebang will be moved to India, because it will be much cheaper.

It’s high time India IT (and some other sectors too) move away from lowest cost to providing best value for money and provide real tangible benefits. Everybody in sales knows this. If you have something your competitors can’t match, the order/contract is in your pocket. You just don’t want to be competing on price alone.

I worked for a small, but very successful system integrator in the mid eighties. We worked mainly on industrial automation. Huge projects. We were very proud of the fact that we were never the cheapest. Hiring us, took a premium, and companies were willing to pay that premium because they knew we would deliver on time, on budget with the required quality and output with minimum oversight and interference from them. It drove the procurement guys ballistic, but the engineers just kept their foot down. They told procurement, I don’t care what you do, but I want these guys on my project. I have enough headaches as it is. One less thing to worry about when they are on the job!

That’s the sort of company you should be looking for. There needs to be more than just being cheap why they select you. I mean, lets face it, who can live on cheap forever.

Jeroen

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by Jeroen

We were very proud of the fact that we were never the cheapest. Hiring us, took a premium, and companies were willing to pay that premium because they knew we would deliver on time, on budget with the required quality and output with minimum oversight and interference from them. It drove the procurement guys ballistic, but the engineers just kept their foot down. They told procurement, I don’t care what you do, but I want these guys on my project. I have enough headaches as it is. One less thing to worry about when they are on the job!

The power has shifted from engineering to procurement these days. In very few companies techies can override the finance or procurement people. If the vendor is ready to walk away, and the customer has no other choice, then they will concede. Sometimes not even that, if the egos are too big. I have seen some cases where the procurement chap's ego cost the company big losses.

Since we refuse to undersell ourselves, we now approach it differently. We go directly to people responsible for P&L, who are above the procurement people. Show the value we bring, to the guy who wants the project to succeed, and let him decide if he wants to pay the price for it. Whenever someone from procurement/finance wants to negotiate, we don't engage at all. When someone who doesn't understand the value of the item wants you to reduce the price, how does one argue? In fact, it is a deliberate tactic to feign ignorance about the value we deliver. (i) Oh, you are asking for 100k, but our budget is only 50k. (ii) Our policy doesn't let us pay more than $30/hour (iii) You know, your competitor is only quoting 60K. We can't pay more than 10% of the lowest competitor, even if you are much better. It is policy.

Note how none of these reasons have anything do with the value delivered? So, we refuse to negotiate with them. We politely ask them to discuss with the decision maker if he wants us out. There are companies where procurement guys have the last say. Such companies are rife with principal-agent problem. The procurement picks vendors based on what gives them the best incentive and not what is best for their company. That leads to really ugly situations.

[JediKnight]

Originally Posted by greyhound82

Can you give some insight to the domain. 2 years ! , that too with proper math and computer science foundation. I thought a person well versed with optimisation, algebra, real analysis, topology, combinatorics , probability and statistics along with data structures and algorithms can solve most of the real world computational problems.

Well it is not in public domain. I can just mention it is critical part of cloud infrastructure which is used by hyperscalers: AWS/MS azzure/Google cloud etc. You need to understand both the firmware and the hardware in great depth to do something. We have super complex algorithms and proprietary custom SOCs containing hardware blocks that transfer several gigbytes of data per second. You need to understand all the hardware blocs/ the cores memory hierarchies before you can really debug an issue. Just writing some code and compiling won't cut it. You need to know exactly what the compiler will spit out. Where your variables will sit, how the CPUs will access the data etc. One extra CPU cycle or a bus contention can shave of several 100 IOPS throughput. Not to mention strict QOS requirements which can only be met by careful software/hardware co-design.

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by Jeroen

That’s the sort of company you should be looking for. There needs to be more than just being cheap why they select you. I mean, lets face it, who can live on cheap forever.

We need both. Look at the two extreme examples provided in this thread itself.

Originally Posted by anti21

Honestly, if it is taking months for an engineer to become fully productive, there needs to be a serious relook into the on-boarding and hiring process (Unless a company is using in-house developed language which does not follow coding conventions and a running it on your own in house developed OS in a data center and have zero or old documentation). Most of the good engineers should be able to start working on day 1, and be uptodate within 2 weeks while working with some help on bugs/small tasks and 4 weeks where they don't need any help anymore and can easily pick up big tasks/improvements/epics. For this to happen, you need to have an up to date documentation on each of your services, your updated architecture and code flow, a defined coding convention, proper CI checks, proper local environment for devs to tinker on, and one click dev setup on a new laptop. They should get a laptop and all the rights they need on first day itself (ideally shipped to them before they join), have a reference to see what is where (which cloud, where are pipelines, how deployment happens, how to spin up local environment, how to setup your laptop to begin developing, how to commit, how to test, CI checks criteria, how to document etc). A buddy should be assigned who can clear their doubts that they will have. A good engineering manager should establish these as base practices in the company. Trust me, it has great benefits over long term.

Originally Posted by JediKnight

Well it is not in public domain. I can just mention it is critical part of cloud infrastructure which is used by hyperscalers: AWS/MS azzure/Google cloud etc. You need to understand both the firmware and the hardware in great depth to do something. We have super complex algorithms and proprietary custom SOCs containing hardware blocks that transfer several gigbytes of data per second. You need to understand all the hardware blocs/ the cores memory hierarchies before you can really debug an issue. Just writing some code and compiling won't cut it. You need to know exactly what the compiler will spit out. Where your variables will sit, how the CPUs will access the data etc. One extra CPU cycle or a bus contention can shave of several 100 IOPS throughput. Not to mention strict QOS requirements which can only be met by careful software/hardware co-design.

These two posts show the spectrum of engineering work currently done in India. One feels engineers can be productive on day one (case 1), and other knows it can take even 2 years (case 2). Most others will fall in between these two extremes. It all depends on the technology domain.

Treating all engineers as same takes us into making wrong inferences. This is what I was alluding in my post in the startup thread.

Anyone who is hiring by the buckets and shovels is not using them for critical engineering high up the value chain. It doesn't matter if they are WITCHes or MANGAMs, they all have maximum work for engineers doing simpler work. The engineer who writes the EC2 core and the engineer who writes the web page to configure the EC2, both work for AWS. But the skill levels are very different, and the latter will outnumber the former by a factor of even 100, both in supply and demand.

[locusjag]

Well, I know that there is a clarion call to be positive here, but here's my thought on AI and where IT employees should position themselves in the light of AI and automation.

The low-skilled, repetitive jobs that were outsourced yesterday for cost reasons, have been automated by Robotic Process Automation today.

As narrow AI scales up in its capabilities and claws its way up the value chain, yet more relatively low-skilled offshored jobs are bound to get automated by those algorithms. (E.g., I remember hearing about a production support AI algorithm that senses broken code and "heals" it).

The rather pessimistic bottomline from me here is - what can be offshored today can be automated tomorrow.

And of course, once many things get automated, what are we to do? Not everyone can be elite coders.

[poloman]

Meanwhile the industry is headed for a major blood bath along with Q3 results. Huge layoffs are predicted in PC and semiconductor space. Revenue is down as high as 50% in some verticals due to inventory build up. Expect the same with social media companies and banks.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...of-pc-slowdown

So the claim of productivity increase due to so called WFH were simple smoke screens. The reality of the boom was increase of IT related activities due to lockdown and huge money pumped in as stimulus. Now with inflation and interest rate hike, employees will be treated like loose change.

[libranof1987]

During the third term of my MBA in the US; a few companies paid out the joining bonus to those that had accepted their full time joining offer, the day they signed it. With more than six months to go for joining!

A cheeky way of ensuring they got the candidate to join. Because the cheques were encashed the day they were received in the mail.

[Turbohead]

Originally Posted by poloman

So the claim of productivity increase due to so called WFH were simple smoke screens. The reality of the boom was increase of IT related activities due to lockdown and huge money pumped in as stimulus. Now with inflation and interest rate hike, employees will be treated like loose change.

Woah! Hold it right there!

Productivity from WFH and the record profits seen last year are completely independent of each other. There's no guarantee that hard work automatically guarantees record profits.

I agree with the rest of the statement. The internet became the only means of communication and commerce during COVID and consequently became a heavily invested sector.


With the upcoming recession, are you guys expecting the new heavily paid employees to be sacked for renogotiating their offers? Were employees paid like crazy even in 1999 before the dot com crash? If so what was the aftermath? Anyone here has personal experience and insights?

[locusjag]

Originally Posted by Turbohead

With the upcoming recession, are you guys expecting the new heavily paid employees to be sacked for renogotiating their offers? Were employees paid like crazy even in 1999 before the dot com crash? If so what was the aftermath? Anyone here has personal experience and insights?

I was around when the 2008 recession hit.

I know a few employers that took the "last in, first out" approach in firing employees. One whole project team from my company had shifted en mass to a competitor as the client had shifted there. This entire team, 3 months into their new company, were out of a job in no time once the Lehman Brothers crash happened.

I am not sure if all industry leaders will take such a dim view of people who do job hopping. The existence of a last in, first out firing approach tells me that at least some leaders do view such job hoppers as mercenaries and even though they've rewarded the hoppers with hikes, maybe they've done so grudgingly, waiting for the first opportunity when the economy gives them reason enough to mete out punitive justice?

It is procedural justice in a way to reward loyal employees with job security during uncertain times.

[sri_tesla]

Originally Posted by poloman

So the claim of productivity increase due to so called WFH were simple smoke screens. The reality of the boom was increase of IT related activities due to lockdown and huge money pumped in as stimulus. Now with inflation and interest rate hike, employees will be treated like loose change.

So, you are saying the productivity with WFH is low and that's why PC sales are low? Sorry to say this but that is wrong on so many levels. I work in the same industry and the PC market (CPUs, GPUs, memory chips, etc...) have some of the best products in the market right now. Performance increase in CPUs and GPUs in the latest products is much higher than it has been in the last decade.

The main reason for the sudden slowdown in the PC market is the pull-in of demand due to the pandemic in the last 2 years. The same companies posted record growth in profits in the last 2 years due to a huge increase in demand suddenly because of WFH. New products (AMD Ryzen 7000 series, Intel 13th Gen series, Nvidia 4000 series, etc...) that are now being released have record levels gen to gen performance increases. All these products are completely developed when the teams are under WFH. Despite such better products, we may see the PC slowdown continue for a few more months due to the aforementioned pull-in demand and very high inflation in the west (the US and Europe).

[poloman]

Originally Posted by sri_tesla

So, you are saying the productivity with WFH is low and that's why PC sales are low?

There was no increase in productivity due to WFH. This is my point of view. You can differ with that. There is no matrix to measure the productivity other than how the company is doing in terms of revenue and product execution. Revenue per employee is a good KPI.

I am also from same industry. So I also say this with conviction. There are fresh blood who have not set foot in the lab for last few years and had to struggle to get them in to labs and learn some key debug skills. So let us not paint a very rosy picture of WFH in every discussions.

[am1m]

Originally Posted by poloman

There are fresh blood who have not set foot in the lab for last few years and had to struggle to get them in to labs and learn some key debug skills.

That certainly will affect performance, no doubt about that. So while it certainly applies in your field, there are other IT jobs (perhaps not as high-tech as yours) where all we need are laptops and an internet connection and remote work works just fine.

Originally Posted by poloman

There was no increase in productivity due to WFH.

Maybe, but your original post attempted to draw a conclusion about remote work based on an article that listed Intel's problems and layoffs. Intel has had issues maintaining it's leadership position long before covid and remote work. (BTW, the article you have quoted doesn't mention anything about remote work having anything to do with Intel's woes either.) So perhaps you can understand why people are confused about the conclusion/connection about remote work.

(And given that we're all employees at some level (however high up) and susceptible to industry downturns and layoffs, wondering if we should really be smug or happy about mass layoffs just because we think they prove/disprove a pet theory of ours!)

[poloman]

Originally Posted by am1m

Maybe, but your original post attempted to draw a conclusion about remote work based on an article that listed Intel's problems and layoffs. Intel has had issues maintaining it's leadership position long before covid and remote work. (BTW, the article you have quoted doesn't mention anything about remote work having anything to do with Intel's woes either.) So perhaps you can understand why people are confused about the conclusion/connection about remote work.

(And given that we're all employees at some level (however high up) and susceptible to industry downturns and layoffs, wondering if we should really be smug or happy about mass layoffs just because we think they prove/disprove a pet theory of ours!)

Sorry if I was not clear. My comments on WFH are limited to experience in working in semiconductor industry. I agree there may be other pure IT companies where this is workable. But WFH leads to productivity increase is not proved with supporting data. It may be beneficial for employees. As simple as that.

My post was also about general down trend in FAANG companies and wider IT industry. When these companies were making record profit, there was an attempt to paint this as a result of increased productivity due to WFH or vice versa. This downturn is debunking that.

I have been part of a layoff 5 years ago and spent 8 months with out job. So no one is being smug about it. Also I have no hard feelings about that company either. I am not overtly worried that it can happen again. All these are part and parcel of the industry.

TCS makes medical certificate mandatory for WFH. If companies are benefiting why they are resorting to such drastic steps?
https://newsupdate.uk/tcs-show-medic...imes-of-india/

[tsk1979]

Originally Posted by poloman

Sorry if I was not clear. My comments on WFH are limited to experience in working in semiconductor industry. I agree there may be other pure IT companies where this is workable. But WFH leads to productivity increase is not proved with supporting data. It may be beneficial for employees. As simple as that.

My post was also about general down trend in FAANG companies and wider IT industry. When these companies were making record profit, there was an attempt to paint this as a result of increased productivity due to WFH or vice versa. This downturn is debunking that.

I have been part of a layoff 5 years ago and spent 8 months with out job. So no one is being smug about it. Also I have no hard feelings about that company either. I am not overtly worried that it can happen again. All these are part and parcel of the industry.

TCS makes medical certificate mandatory for WFH. If companies are benefiting why they are resorting to such drastic steps?
https://newsupdate.uk/tcs-show-medic...imes-of-india/

Hmmm

WFH -> Revenue went up
Companies stop WFH - Revenue went down

So your argument is actually saying that WFH was good and return to office ruined companies