[AppyS]

My employer that has so far had a policy of 0 layoffs, leads and managers are being targeted to be rolled off in various departments. If they don't find projects within 2-3 months,naturally they will be shown the door to reduce costs. Not withstanding the fact that many of this group might have been long term loyalists. While the cost structure has gotten impacted due to crazy hiring breaking the pay parity norms over past few years many people who make even below parity, will pay the price of the market not being practical. I seriously also sometimes don't comprehend that how does one really justify their value delivery compared to the crazy packages demanded, especially to themselves?

[kaushikduttajsr]

Originally Posted by AppyS

I seriously also sometimes don't comprehend that how does one really justify their value delivery compared to the crazy packages demanded, especially to themselves?

This one is easy. I save my company 100x of my annual salary in potential losses. I do not mind asking for a pay hike regardless of the market situation. Companies are not here for charity. Neither am I.

But jokes aside, I think this is relatively easier in a product organization where every product launch is a potential new revenue stream. In pure play IT, it might be difficult to justify a high salary demand, esp. when ageism comes into play. Worst kind of discrimination.

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by kaushikduttajsr

This one is easy. I save my company 100x of my annual salary in potential losses. I do not mind asking for a pay hike regardless of the market situation. Companies are not here for charity. Neither am I.

This is a true nightmare situation for the company, if your description is accurate. So much dependency on person means very high risk factor for the company. Have they taken keyman insurance on you?

Even beyond that, they should at least hire 5-10 people of your caliber/skill level to spread the risk. Just paying one guy more doesn't reduce the risk much. You may not quit, but if something happens to you, company is looking at 100x losses. You may be a very important cog in the system, but even the best cog may fail due to various factors. So the company is better off carrying extra cogs as spare than just pay more for the best cog in the world. This is how an employer must think, and they usually do. Reducing risk is the primary goal here.

There is a thread on this.

[ninjatalli]

Originally Posted by kaushikduttajsr

This one is easy. I save my company 100x of my annual salary in potential losses. I do not mind asking for a pay hike regardless of the market situation. Companies are not here for charity. Neither am I.

When I read views like these, I am always reminded of what one of my ex-manager said when back then our firm's entire executive (/CXO) leadership was being replaced / booted out by the new CEO, who was recently hired externally.

Everyone is replaceable. Everyone.

On a side note, after 3+ tumultuous years, he got replaced too.

[kaushikduttajsr]

Originally Posted by Samurai

Even beyond that, they should at least hire 5-10 people of your caliber/skill level to spread the risk.

I agree. Unfortunately, this is not the case and most organizations mostly try to do more with less. As long as that doesn't change, I do not see an issue with demanding more.

Originally Posted by ninjatalli

When I read views like these, I am always reminded of what one of my ex-manager said when back then our firm's entire executive (/CXO) leadership was being replaced / booted out by the new CEO, who was recently hired externally.

I did not say I'm not replaceable. But as long as I'm delivering more than my pay, I am justifying it. As someone said earlier, make hay while the sun shines. I may not always have this opportunity.

Anyway, this is how most product companies work. It's a capitalist market - people with skills are paid. I don't see why anyone should complain.

[androdev]

^
I think you misread his post. Anyone in his role is saving the company a lot of money, not just him alone. He is just saying input cost formula is less applicable to product companies. Even in services companies, you can’t apply input cost formula to sales guys. And if you are such an employee, while you are not indispensable, but it will cost the company a lot to replace and similar results are not assured. It’s not that simple to replace a super star sales guy, for example, even if you have funds to pay. In general, the ceiling for your compensation is determined by the cost (money and uncertainty) to replace you.

[kaushikduttajsr]

I agree to what you're saying. But I do not see being replaceable as a threat to deliver less impactful work or work at non competitive salaries.

Companies do not overpay - they have pay bands for a reason. You can only be paid at top of the band by being rated the highest.

Everybody is replaceable. This line has a very different connotation to me. The only place this line matters is when we choose work over family.

[aargee]

Amidst of all the uncertainties & negativities, how does this sound for a change?
BMW motorcycle as a sign-on bonus': These engineers are in extremely high demand in India

The tech industry in India has long relied on a large and affordable workforce to provide outsourced services to some of the most prominent Western IT companies. However, this labour supply is dwindling in critical areas, particularly in the fields of AI and data science.

According to Nasscom, while over five million people work in tech services in India, there are only about 4,16,000 people employed in AI and data science in the country. The demand for these specialists is only set to grow, with companies establishing R&D hubs in Bangalore and other cities to develop critical technologies such as AI and deep learning.

According to a report by Bloomberg, some IT companies in India are going to the extent of offering new BMW Motorcycles as a sign-on bonus. The report suggests that data scientist specialists in Delhi are witnessing pay hikes of 35 per cent to 50 per cent every time they switch jobs. In India, there is a high demand for data scientists, machine-learning specialists, and skilled engineers.

In order to make the most of the highly skilled population of India, some US-based companies such Flexcar, a car subscription startup, are building teams in Bengaluru for better access to talent. The company is looking for data engineers and computer-vision specialists for their data science hub in the city.

Flexcar's team of 60 engineers helps build AI applications, but they need more talent to keep up with the rising demand. The startup is trying to use ChatGPT to build a chatbot that will be able to help technicians diagnose and fix vehicles by querying chatbots.

According to the report, Freedom Dumlao, the chief technology officer of Flexcar, interviewed an engineer who claimed to already have an offer. The competitor offered him a BMW motorcycle as a sign-on bonus, which Dumlao didn't want to match.

The report cites Rahul Shah, co-founder of WalkWater Talent Advisors who claims that there is an "insatiable need for talent." Nasscom estimates that India needs another 2,13,000 data specialists, while there are only about 4,16,000 people working in AI and data science in the country.

Experts claim that the talent crunch in India will only worsen in the next year or two, making it increasingly difficult for companies to find the specialists they need to build and develop their AI applications. India is ahead of most countries in terms of the IT talent pool. Now, India has a chance to take on behemoths like US and China to build to become the biggest IT hub in the world.

Source: https://www.businesstoday.in/technol...028-2023-05-04

[JediKnight]

Cognizant to lay off 3,500 employees. It will also give up 11 million sq feet in office space, or 80,000 seats, in large cities.

Source

[V.Narayan]

Dear Friends,

A very interesting point I learnt yesterday. An old friend, the MD of a large IT services company came home yesterday to meet me as I am convalescing. Our conversation steered to AI & ML. He mentioned they are shutting down their centre in location X. This centre has about 1000 employees all doing one kind of work. He said they have AI-zed the entire work and now need only 50 to 60 employees to manage what 1000 were doing earlier! This is the first time I have heard of AI replacing people for real with a company/MD I know well. This is a little different from reading about it in the news. I used to be on their Board for a decade till sometime back, so I relate to the organization

So, I asked him why. His reply was, " look V____, I'm under pressure for costs, profits, competition from country Y for this particular product and that particular centre was our most troublesome in returning back to even a hybrid model. Country Y is stealing business at literally one-third the price using AI as their starting game 15 months ago. He continued, "so we decided to simply AI-ize it, shut it down and save ourselves the harassment of recalcitrant employees who in any case change jobs every other year". He continued, "either I catch up with competition that has emerged from almost the thin air or get ready to lose these two clients altogether and with that all the high end work we do too at other centres."

Frankly, I didn't even know country Y was known for IT but it is an upcomng star in an upcoming continent - go figure :-) . From the horse's mouth. And this is someone whom many of our members work for!!! As the old Lufthansa advert went, this is an authentic passenger statement. Each can draw their own inferences.

V.Narayan

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Given that many of our members are young people facing a tough employment scene not of their making I thought I'd share this with one of my kids who works in IT and with our equally young members here. I don't know where AI will lead to. I am quite wary of it for sure given our vast population of youth needing jobs and given that lakhs of our IT folks work at jobs vulnerable to AI depredations. Forewarned is forearmed.

At the most optimistic end AI might turn out like the dread of computerization was in the 1980s and 1990s where we feared jobs will be swallowed up but in reality, they made all of us more efficient and productive and in the end created more jobs both direct and indirect. But in 1985 or even 1995 we didn't know that. At the worst end AI could be a real job destroyer.

[shankar.balan]

What Mr Narayan wrote below resonated with something else I remembered.

In 2017 I was at a client meeting somewhere in the Middle East. One of the large, respected and well known conglomerates there. Amongst the businesses they run are some consumer facing businesses too.

Their then Marketing Chief was saying in that meeting that by the end of that year, they would completely shut down their human resources manned consumer helplines and call centres and email based customer service.
These would be replaced by IVR, Automation, Bots and AI.
The postulate was, those bots wont ever get tired and can work 24 hours a day ad infinitum without even a break. And there is no HR and welfare and benefits and all to worry about with bots.
They are the perfect unquestioning slaves.


But then there is always the other side to worry about if one is so inclined. ‘The Rise of the Machines’ et al.

[am1m]

Originally Posted by V.Narayan

This centre has about 1000 employees all doing one kind of work.

At the worst end AI could be a real job destroyer.

Thank you sir, for that timely wake-up call.

AI will take jobs for sure, the kind of jobs described in the first quoted line of the post, above. At a smaller scale, I'm already seeing the kind of output it took a team of 4-5 people more than a week to do at my first job, now routinely being done by 1 person in a day. At least smaller companies like mine have have figured that out and never hired more than 1 in the first place, the scary part is there are several companies (like one of my former employers) where 4 people with 10+ years experience are still doing that same job. It's just a matter of time.

Your analogy of computerization in the 90s is spot-on. I had my first bank account with one of the nationalized banks back then and saw first hand how hard it was for the staff to transition to using computers. A lot of them simply refused to use the new machine sitting on their desks! Now, I'm seeing similar reluctance in my present company to embrace these AI tools and the kinds of excuses for keeping "the human touch". The output speaks for itself and the cost and effort savings are impossible to ignore.

I'd say this is a good time for all of us in IT to honestly evaluate the kind of work we do daily. If the majority of our work is repetitive, mechanical (copy-pasting code snippets for example), simply waiting for input from someone else and then passing that on slightly modified to some other person, then watch out. Or better yet, get ahead of the curve and figure out ways to automate that yourself and become a consultant!

[androdev]

Originally Posted by V.Narayan

At the most optimistic end AI might turn out like the dread of computerization was in the 1980s and 1990s where we feared jobs will be swallowed up but in reality, they made all of us more efficient and productive and in the end created more jobs both direct and indirect. But in 1985 or even 1995 we didn't know that. At the worst end AI could be a real job destroyer.

Capitalism detests human employees, especially the foot soldier category. Computerisation created more human jobs (of a different kind) as an unintended by-product of achieving the main goal of creating immense wealth to business owners by replacing the inefficient human work force.

Computerisation and Industrial automation has eliminated manual labour in factories and offices. A manufacturing or office job that needed 50 workers, now only needs a couple of workers. Those jobs are permanently gone - especially in developed economies. The only jobs remaining at large scale are: creative jobs (doctors, engineers, lawyers, teachers and other professionals who need to use their brain) and manual jobs that require commute and non-repetitive manoeuvres (plumbers, electricians, drivers, mechanics, police, soldiers, etc.).

AI will have no such by-products. Compared to the days of computerisation and industrial automation where disruptions used to take place in cycles of 10s of years, the world of AI will evolve and disrupt in matter of weeks. Unlike 1960s where governments and public leaders had some pretence of public service, we live in a world where policy makers are unabashed proxies of business owners. The combination of speed of evolution and lack of resistance from policy makers would be extremely lethal.

Creative desk job holders, stuff that can be modelled as a brain sitting at one place and producing some output without any need to commute or interact with customers, would be at serious risk. Content creators without commute/customer-interface requirements such as low-end programmers, commodity artists, VFX/CGI professionals, BPO/KPO people (backend accounting, proof reading, medical/financial analytics, etc.), part of military, etc would be at serious and immediate risk. The role of education in the current format is all geared towards getting a creative desk job - I suspect this will prove to be a disaster for a generation of students during the period of transition.

Additional innovations and social changes beyond AI are needed to impact field workers (plumbers, mechanics, drivers, etc.) and jobs that require customer interaction where people are not comfortable dealing with bots (in-person sales, doctors, teachers, etc.).

Capitalism has few key ingredients: labour, man made equipments, natural resources, capital - in the order of ease of replacement. While it's possible to thrive and do well in each of these categories, and hence I'm not against career planning and growth, it's better to move towards the top of the food chain if opportunities permit. A majority of the posts in this thread show considerable lack of understanding of how capitalism works. Capitalism is algorithmically designed to eliminate or replace the least efficient input cost - without prejudice.

[am1m]

Originally Posted by V.Narayan

Frankly, I didn't even know country Y was known for IT but it is an upcomng star in an upcoming continent - go figure

Another superb point. I think we all knew this was coming, (perhaps not from the specific country VN sir is referring to), but that some country would replicate our low-cost model and start grabbing the lower-end IT services. We did it to the US with our mass-produced engineering grads willing to work at lower wages, looks like this country is using AI.

I'm not an industry veteran by any means, but old enough in my career to remember when the shift from US engineers to our teams in Bangalore happened at a couple of jobs. It was mismanaged in several companies. The US teams were (very understandably) bitter about having to work with and even train their eventual replacements! Have even experienced open racism during those 'transition' days. We'd often muse how we'd react when we reached the point where we'd be in a similar position (though, back then we always imagined it would be Sri Lanka or the Philippines who would take the market.) And quite frankly, I thought it would have happened a lot earlier.

[DigitalOne]

Originally Posted by am1m

We did it to the US with our mass-produced engineering grads willing to work at lower wages, looks like this country is using AI.

We cannot boast our English language advantage also now.