[vishnurp99]

Originally Posted by tc_rides

A good friend of mine working as a director in the IT of a global financial giant got laid off. Had been making close to 1.3 CR with 22 yrs of experience. What do you think, is he underpaid or can ask a bit more? What is the current demand? He is applying for an equivalent job title.

My two cents :
I was earlier part of a software firm product firm which got acquired by a much larger MNC company. The CTC of each associate (even at the lowest levels) was tracked in USD terms and hence a 1.3 CR salary was not really high since your compensation was bench marked to pay packets across global locations like London, NYC, Chicago & Munich. The first option obviously is to look for such firms. The payout will be in INR for Indian employees. It will be difficult to get in without internal referrals in these orgs since the number of people who are trying to get in are quite high.

Another option is to look for opportunities in Europe. Europe is looking for highly-skilled talent. If your friend has niche tech competencies in IT infra management/cloud, machine learning married with his financial experience he is looking at a PR in probably 2-4 years. This experience will no doubt add great value to his resume and set him up for a leadership position later on. I am not really a fan of the US now even though i did my six year H1B tenure there.

Of course there is the option to startup too.

Since he is only in his 40s, the world is his oyster. I am also assuming that he would have got a 6 month - 1 year payout as a part of his retrenchment. So he has the buffer to do whatever he wants to do. This is a great opportunity for him!.

[am1m]

Originally Posted by sandeepmohan

I am out of touch with the Indian Job Market. With the Economy booming, you'd think that finding a job would be the least of your worries. What you describe sounds like the opposite, when it comes to finding work. I guess even the young who are just out of college are struggling as much.

It's not a bad IT job market, but it has always been tougher for older professionals in IT and for freshers. There has always been a much better demand for IT professionals in the 5-7 year experience bracket. And as far as I can tell, that remains unchanged. I think this has been discussed in a couple of threads (https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/shift...their-40s.html (The plight of IT professionals in their 40s))

[UD17]

Originally Posted by sandeepmohan

you'd think that finding a job would be the least of your worries.

IMHO in India:

- Most of the recruitment happens through referrals (atleast in manufacturing). Although there are good numbers of vacancies available in smaller companies yet it is very difficult for the seekers to know about them.

- Most companies had also prepared themselves for the contingency through internal succession planning

Its hard to find people (talking about auto component manufacturing company) even for the traditional roles. I see few reasons - huge geographical spread of talent (people are much more hesitant in changing their location unlike IT), HR related issues (Lack of knowledge/processes or dependency on recruitment agencies) and issues with recruitment consultant (they deliberately don't push many resume or filter resumes based on their perception).

[JediKnight]

Originally Posted by sandeepmohan

I am out of touch with the Indian Job Market. With the Economy booming, you'd think that finding a job would be the least of your worries. What you describe sounds like the opposite, when it comes to finding work. I guess even the young who are just out of college are struggling as much.

Which economy are you talking about? The fortunes of the Indian IT industry are decided by the US economy and to a lesser extent the European economy rather than the Indian economy. There was widespread tech job contraction worldwide starting 2022 and continuing into 2023.

[NiInJa]

Ultimately, it is the money billed to the client that decides how resource's pay fits in the overall calculation of revenue and profit of the organization.

People in the last few years got astronomical hikes with not a considerable increase in returns for the organizations. My organization too has seen an uptick in offshore costs but the revenues (and in turn profits) have not grown on the same lines and now every body's project utilization is getting pumped up. People up to Director level too need to contribute to Projects at 80-85%, which essentially means, they need to sit down and code! because you can only do managerial tasks up to a certain hours in a project, right?

The idea is to know (extract this information secretly if you can ) how much money a company makes by asking you to work. Then, get an idea on how big your team is and how much it is utilized and how much you are collectively returning the company in terms of profit. The moment you feel you are getting paid too much at the cost of their profitability, know that you are under scrutiny.

At higher level in India, it is better to not rely on HR who filter out resources based on total experience. I hope it changes soon. For now, it is better to reach out to contacts.

On another note: I actually once took a hit on my paycheck to get out of a bad organization/situation, twice!! It did affect my overall pay scale over the years compared to my peers, but I am a happy guy with too many friends, experiences and no complaints

[BombayDragon]

Originally Posted by am1m

A friend of mine is going to be laid off next month from a major IT company and is looking for a job. He mentioned that he's interviewing with another major firm and also communicated to the HR folk there that he's ok with a pay reduction...

I am very surprised to read this because my experience when trying to recruit software developers has been the opposite of what you said. A few months back when we required developers who had been laid off or were about to be laid off we were willing to match their prior compensation, however the developers wanted hikes of between 40% to 100% on their last CTC even though they were laid off. If we try to hire people with long notice periods they use the notice period to get counter offers from other companies and back out at the last moment.

If I were your friend I would not worry too much because if he gets laid off he becomes an immediate joiner and all companies are desperate to hire immediate joiners.

I am seriously considering Eastern Europe for hiring people as it's less expensive than India.

My own personal viewpoint is that over the next 20 to 30 years the IT Industry in India will be destroyed as we will price ourselves out of the market. People should read up on what happened to the US steel industry in the mid 19 hundreds and what was repeated with the US automobile industry in the 80s / 90s and draw parallels to what can happen in Indian IT. The USA is a first world country and can absorb such shakedowns, however a poor country like India would lose its competitive edge in IT forever.

[Turbohead]

Originally Posted by BombayDragon

People should read up on what happened to the US steel industry in the mid 19 hundreds and what was repeated with the US automobile industry in the 80s / 90s and draw parallels to what can happen in Indian IT.

Can you post relevant links to these events? Very curious to know the reasons in depth.

20-30 years is quite a long time IMO. If the local Indian market matures and starts investing in quality IT services and products, Indian IT will survive provided Indian customers don't outsource their work to cheaper countries

[BombayDragon]

Originally Posted by Turbohead

Can you post relevant links to these events? Very curious to know the reasons in depth.

20-30 years is quite a long time IMO. If the local Indian market matures and starts investing in quality IT services and products, Indian IT will survive provided Indian customers don't outsource their work to cheaper countries

I don't have any links but a brief overview of what happened is:
Initially the USA was the world leader in steel production but then the workers got unionised and asked for massive pay hikes and benefits to the extent that it became unsustainable for the steel industry to survive and it moved out of the USA to other countries especially in Asia. A similar scenario destroyed the US Auto industry (along with quality issues) and Detroit which was once a thriving industrial city became a run down city.

[Janus]

Before we price ourselves out, I think Machine Learning will take away our IT jobs in the next 10-15 years. All it requires is someone with a high level knowledge of their architecture/infrastructure, the coding can be done by an Machine learning app, which to be honest can be managed by the folks in their respective countries.

Or the Indian IT folks who will gain citizenship in the coming years in the western world.

It takes a small spark to ignite revolution in that product category.

Similar to how Apple Vision Pro ignited the spark in the VR world or as they call it Spatial computing and OpenAI has done it in the Machine learning side.

Now rest of the orgs have to just copy (Apple/OpenAI) and improve/iterate upon the first good viable mass product (ChatGPT/Vision Pro)

[Mystic]

Agree that the future is AI but we are not there yet and the hype is creating a chaos now and disrupting the industry. We are aware of ChatGpt very recently but my son was working on this almost a decade back. I challenge that I can still sell my self at a very high billing rate in IT even after 60 years of age with no AI background. We still need human mind with domain knowledge to make ERPs to work.

In our house people joke that we speak ABAP instead of Telugu ( ABAP is a high-level programming language created by the German software company SAP) as there are at least a dozen SAP consultants within my close family.

I think AI industry is slowly becoming like pharma industry being controlled by a few at the top influencing, controlling and lobbying at very high level. We have to see on how this unfolds. It is very interesting to see my son’s tweets posted using his academic account on almost every day and I fail to understand the jokes which can be understood by his clan of very daring millennials who can question openly in the world of AI.

I feel sad that even SAP is going through layoffs due to AI.

https://www.indiatoday.in/technology...470-2024-01-25

Food for thought article on AI:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/beyon..._campaign=copy

[xcentrk]

Originally Posted by Janus

the coding can be done by an Machine learning app,

Hard to believe and even if it happens, at least not in the next few decades.

Please note that I've been working in IT for last 17 years and most of my life I involved in development.

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by Janus

Before we price ourselves out, I think Machine Learning will take away our IT jobs in the next 10-15 years.

I don't think it will be that simple. I shared my thoughts on this last year.

[xcentrk]

Originally Posted by Samurai

I don't think it will be that simple. I shared my thoughts on this last year.

That was a nice read. Excellently put. I can see these kind of articles and post everywhere saying due to AI there will be layoffs. And even some developers believe this

In the end, as many have already put, as of now AI is nothing but nested if else loops and we are nowhere closer to bring the kind of chaos that these medias are predicting.

[DigitalOne]

Originally Posted by Samurai

IT jobs are at most competing with Cognitive/Enterprise AI.

Originally Posted by xcentrk

Hard to believe and even if it happens, at least not in the next few decades.

IMHO, there would be a significant impact on IT company jobs. There are DevOps, User Assistance/tech writers, Customer support, program/project managers, HR and such who will be impacted because of AI and Gen AI in particular.

Now coming to developer jobs, the productivity jump from using Gen AI will lead to lesser number of developers required to produce the same output. If a developer using Microsoft copilot is 50% more productive, then the project needs 50% less number of developers. This is simple math which people are in denial of. Unless globally there is more software produced, these 'excess' developers will have job impact. Same goes for Quality engineers. They can produce more test cases thus reducing the need for more quality engineers.

Secondly, companies will start making cost benefit analysis of senior developers against junior developers + Copilot. Even if the current analysis is in favour of senior developers, as junior developers learn more how to get the best out of the AI tools and the AI tools themselves continue to learn, soon there will be a time when the benefit skews towards junior developers + AI. My guess is this will be in next 2-3 years.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman put it very succinctly "For me, AGI…is the equivalent of a median human that you could hire as a co-worker."

Finally, Gen AI is being seen as a new way of humans interacting with systems. A voice enabled digital assistant can potentially replace traditional user interfaces. I know that this was what was promised with Siri, Alexa and the likes which never came into fruition, but today's LLM models are much more powerful. If that happens, would you still need so many UI developers?

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by DigitalOne

If a developer using Microsoft copilot is 50% more productive, then the project needs 50% less number of developers. This is simple math which people are in denial of.

Can 9 women create a baby in one month? I know this is not a perfect analogy, but IT has rarely worked on simple math.

I am sorry, I don't deny that productive will improve, but that has never resulted in reducing the number of IT workers. Every time when a major productivity was seen in IT, it resulted in increase of IT jobs. It just changed the way we did things.