[speedmiester]

Originally Posted by sunilch

Aren't both the cases a case of high Risk-Reward gamble? Those who have the ability to withstand the storm, continue to take Risks and some of them do get high Rewards. Those who don't want to take too much risk or don't have the capacity to absorb the shock (say unemployment for 3 months?) don't do so.

Few could be unfortunate to get fired without their fault but then they do pick whatever next is available and move on.

I understand the risk/reward gamble. But the folks most affected are the ones who never thought about the assessing the financial health of the org they are joining or having a forethought of what would they do in case of layoffs.

For the past 4 months, the sob stories that I have to hear are numerous. The ones most affected are the one whose spend increased dramatically with increased comp. They never thought of saving for emergencies.
In spite of all this, some candidates are not ready to take a pay cut or interview at same compensation.

[Turbohead]

Originally Posted by speedmiester

For the past 4 months, the sob stories that I have to hear are numerous. The ones most affected are the one whose spend increased dramatically with increased comp. They never thought of saving for emergencies.

Valuable lesson to the youngsters honestly- take a leap of faith and make it when you can but ensure you're hedged to deal with the inevitable. A balance of both is key to survive and thrive in the present day economy.

I am also surprised with the comments on LinkedIn stating that lay offs are unethical and that Twitter etc should be boycotted. Senseless to say the least. Or I maybe crazy considering since I've been anticipating these kind of lay offs ever since the wages have gone unsustainably high.

These events also make the obvious more obvious -to never compromise on financial education and also to anticipate and prepare for the worst while hoping for the best.

[poloman]

Five years back I was called in to a room where HR and manager was sitting. They coldly told that my services were not required from that moment and explained the severance details. I just told "thank you" left the room and was escorted out of the building.

This is a typical layoff happening in IT. No one is going to sugar coat or cry when you leave. Your ex team or colleagues wont even bother. You can make a sob story out of it, blame the company, blame the world, blame yourself. But the earlier you come out of this blame game and self pity the best you will be able to face the situation.
But this will be really painful since overnight your salary is gonna come down, from 6 digits monthly to a big zero.

No one you think will help you is going to help you. Nothing is going to help other than a never give up attitude. There may be times, you are on verge of losing hope, but round the corner a pleasant surprise may be in waiting.

Looking back I feel this was one of the best things to have happened in my life. This woke me out of my directionless, cocooned life I had settled for in that company for 10 years. The career got a boost after some initial hiccups.

Do I still blame the company or my complacency? May be latter not the former. Because they will do what they have to in a difficult situation.

[finneyp]

Originally Posted by poloman

Five years back I was called in to a room where HR and manager was sitting. They coldly told that my services were not required from that moment and explained the severance details.

Now it is just a matter to be invited for an abrupt Teams/Zoom meeting by HR & Manager and told your services are not required from tomorrow!
A ruthless layoff practice followed by mostly IT service companies.

[poloman]

Originally Posted by finneyp

Now it is just a matter to be invited for an abrupt Teams/Zoom meeting by HR & Manager and told your services are not required from tomorrow!
A ruthless layoff practice followed by mostly IT service companies.

I think this is better than security escorting you out as if you are going to take a gun and shoot down the entire staff ( a US practice simply mimicked here as well) or scoot with confidential files kept in their cupboard somewhere.

[shankar.balan]

Here are a few important things to remember in the whole concept of Employment, Employers and Employees.

1.Employment - the Employee is giving his/ her time and skills to the Employer who needs that time and those skills, in return for a financial consideration.
.
2.The transaction is embellished and beautifully packaged and gift wrapped and everything, by way of the ‘package’ offered. All this is like ‘Window Dressing’ in a shop, to make it seem the most attractive shop in the arcade.

3.In the final scheme of things, when it comes to the crunch, all bets will always be off; the Employer will always do what’s right for them. And the Employee also needs to do what’s right for him/ her.

Keeping all emotion aside, this whole thing is simply to be viewed at the most basic level, as a business transaction, just like the purchase of any commodity or service.

As Employees we should be involved and work honestly and put in the maximum high quality efforts but yet remain ‘detached’ so that we are better able to weather the vagaries of circumstances over which we have little or no control.

In a sense, the concept of ‘caveat emptor - buyer beware’ applies equally to both Employer and Employee, for obvious reasons. Hence it is best that both perform their necessary due diligence before making the leap.

But at the end of the day, all these things are cyclical. And when something seems far too good to be true, (like the seemingly unquenchable demand for talent and the excessive emoluments of the last 2 years), then it usually is too good to be true and simply cannot be sustained.

What we are living through now is one of those periodic corrections, which is giving the whole world as we know it, an essential ‘reality check’.

[RGK]

Originally Posted by Samurai

They hire by paying high salary when they want lots of work done. When they don't have any work, they discard the same people.

"make hay when sun shines", so they should be perfectly fine with the flip side of it.

Definitely true. One of the fresher I know obtained a new job for $65k and then increased their offer to $68k (just 3k and no joining bonus, location transfer allowance etc..,). I advised staying there with this employment because the income is not too high and there isn't a real concern about losing your work due to a big salary.

The risk is greater the bigger the money you receive.

[One]

Some views as I think we tend to forget how flexible the IT industry is:

Originally Posted by Jeroen

I mentioned before; I think the Indian industry is selling itself cheaply. Providing IT service at the lowest man hour rate is simply not a sustainable business model.

Selling cheap is a great business model across industries and it will continue to remain forever. Indian industry is a mix of cheapest and cheaper and there's nothing wrong in this as it is one of the easiest metrics to measure operationally.

The other aspect is that I feel the IT industry is very much orientated to selling manhours,

Larger IT companies have been selling value based pricing etc for more than a decade but it defaults to what is easy to measure on majority of occasions. One can't measure the difference between great code and good enough code easily and that can emerge only over a long period of time, a time which corporate leaders don't have. As an exercise, I would suggest defining what kind of company will look at long term value which they can be sold to-:
- Will a listed company take a tender of $100M and then be able to justify on parameters other than major weightage to cost
- Is a 500 person company with a 30 member IT team equipped to deal with systems which capture value beyond man hours?

Am giving general examples, doesn't mean it can't, what it means is there's a path of lesser (not least) resistance most customers take

rather than taking on products and or long term services. Or real turn key projects.

They require a totally different company set up and a different IT organisation obviously. Product Companies such as for instance SAP or take some of the large billing platform providers sell a software product. Very different. Even during downtime those companies will still invest in R&D, because that will ultimately is likely to give them a competitive edge.

Yes but also no. Let me outline a few examples for the "no":
1. Infosys started a Consulting practice by hiring the top consultants from across the world to create a new practice. Didn't fly for reasons which had nothing to do with execution but more to do with big-boys club of entrenched consulting firms.
2. Mastek was started at around the same time as Infosys but they chose a platform driven approach instead of services model. They staffed the companies with same level of high quality talent. You can gauge how that went basis the sizes of the two companies.
3. Mindtree significantly invested in wireless and even created a hardware phone company.

I can give more recent examples but these examples which are decades old should give an idea of the Indian IT industry to function beyond services.

The reasons these didn't go well is because of capitalism - they didn't serve what the market wanted from them. Rest assured, if the market demands something else, the Indian IT industry will attempt to pivot there.

It's not that IT companies can't and don't do products. There are enough SMEs/ large IT firms selling products+services/ services as products/products only. It's more that they try to reduce the mortality rate that comes with product companies. We don't hear about them because news is favoured more towards B2C based products and legacy B2B ERPs can't be replaced easily. So their products fit around the constraints but we won't get to hear about them till we hear about them

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

The industry has done well for 30-40 years now, it comes with the associated risks of disruption and dying suddenly or contracting suddenly. But that's nothing to do with the industry selling itself cheaply or incorrect positioning but more to do with the natural course of things.

I wrote this post not as a personal reply, but more to highlight that the typical issues pointed by folks or general recommendations of "more product" or "higher in value chain" are not really the issues with the industry.

There are big issues with the industry and they start from individuals in the industry not looking at themselves at the mirror enough rather than companies not looking at the crystal ball. That would be another post though

[Mad Max]

IMO, there are three significant events happening that are kind of causing "a perfect storm"

1. The amount of money sitting in banks is at a significant high but global regulatory norms plus the volatile environment has prevented fast deployment of money to change agents like start-ups, innovation ecosystems and social upliftment causes. In the past, every time these events have happened and the regulatory norms have been diluted, the banking sector ended up in some sort of crisis. This time, the global banking authorities are not budging despite severe pressure from across businesses. This is leading to start-ups, especially ones that are in scale mode, to restrict their growth trajectory due to lesser funding. There is also a need for the funding agencies to display prudence and showcase commitments towards some of the more popular propaganda items. This again leads to some re-balancing of how money gets spent.

2. The technology innovation itself is at a plateau for some time now. Cool beans like AI/ML, Data, Digital etc. have become the norm now. Of course, the use cases opened by the systemic application of these are significant but they are no longer "new age technologies". Also, things like metaverse, block-chain, bitcoin etc. are themselves going through an upheaval and while really smart people are trying to crack these puzzles and make it more socially acceptable and exciting, progress is slow and uncertain.

3. The above two have combined to put extraordinary pressure on an ever-decreasing pool of ready talent to come up with something brilliant, immediately profitable, socially acceptable and sustain longer term. The fatigue experienced by the group is so pronounced that things like the pandemic took a work connotation than a health connotation. It's become a battle of sorts between organizations and their employees - a tom & jerry game of who can outsmart who. Collaboration is definitely reduced, siloed organizations are creeping up at a drastic pace and employees want their personas to reflect who they want to be rather than who they are. Organizations, on the other hand, are struggling with differentiation, product stability and a giant heap of global regulatory pressures to deploy their products in global markets.

We experienced this with Y2K, the change to Web 2.0 and social networked business models. It happened rapidly and it took time for everyone, organizations, employees and customers to scale up to this. It is now hitting a pause before another disruptive wave will come along and off we will go.

What we are experiencing is the amplification of individual stories through social media that makes us feel that we are now in some weird age of wild changes. And with the in-your-face display of overt emotions in a business arena (I am looking at you, LinkedIn), none of us want to be the person who says to the other "suck it up, dust it off and get better at what you do".

[Bhokal]

Some good news: https://m.gsmarena.com/iphone_14_pro...news-56497.php

Apple's partner Foxconn plans to quadruple the workforce in its factories in India, according to sources from the local government that spoke to Reuters. This will grow the number of workers from the current 17,000 to 70,000.

[fhdowntheline]

Originally Posted by shankar.balan

...
Here is a small fun thing from Tintin, which I personally find especially relevant in todays world where everyone and their younger cousin is either a ‘Manager’ or a ‘Director’ or a ‘Lead’ of something or other, however obscure.
:

Herge was way ahead of his time in so many aspects. So many of his episodes still come across as contemporary to modern geopolitics.

[shankar.balan]

Originally Posted by fhdowntheline

Herge was way ahead of his time in so many aspects. So many of his episodes still come across as contemporary to modern geopolitics.

Should catch up offline. Im a major Tintin buff. An amateur Tintinologist if I may.
(Forgive the OT Pics)

[am1m]

Originally Posted by Mad Max

IMO, there are three significant events happening that are kind of causing "a perfect storm

Superb post, thanks for sharing your views. Found this very analytical, better than most of the stuff I'm reading in the media about the current scenario.

[mohansrides]

Originally Posted by Mad Max

… none of us want to be the person who says to the other "suck it up, dust it off and get better at what you do".

Oh, I will say it.

Suck it up, dust it off and get better at what you do. Stop whingeing about your job loss as though you are going through a once-in-a-thousand-years type of misfortune.

FYI, layoffs have been happening very regularly, despite the states of economies and this is nothing new. In fact, going by historical record, these layoffs are arguably mild. So spare us the sob stories already, and get to work on fixing things.

Ask for help, and most of us, including myself, will help you. Position yourself as a victim, and none of us, especially me, will give you even the time of day.

Unless someone hasn’t already broken it down for you, here is the gist. You joined shiny companies and minted money and made hay while the sun shone. Now your choices have to come this. So, have the fortitude to see yourself through this.

Just for perspective, what you are going through isn’t even a shade on the suffering millions of people silently endured (just recently) with regards to their livelihoods and lives during the Covid years.

[Red Liner]

Originally Posted by mohansrides

Oh, I will say it.

It’s like dying. Nobody believes it will happen to them ever.

Until it does.