
Wipro, Infosys, Tech Mahindra, Cognizant Slash Jobs - happy-go-lucky
http://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/pink-slips-galore-wipro-infosys-tech-mahindra-cognizant-cut-india-jobs-117051100156_1.html
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thisisit
I am confused - Is this something new? As far as I can remember the perils of
layoffs and afraid Indian IT professional is the "go to" story each year
during the performance review cycle.

Back in 2015 -
[https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/02/27/indi-f27.html](https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/02/27/indi-f27.html)

2014 - [http://indianexpress.com/article/business/business-
others/la...](http://indianexpress.com/article/business/business-
others/layoff-reports-do-the-rounds-at-global-it-firms-india-units/)

2013 - [http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/companies/less-
than-5000...](http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/companies/less-
than-5000-underperformers-asked-to-leave-infosys/article4272693.ece)

The only reason this is being played up is the perceived notion of
protectionist environment throughout the world (not only US). Then there is
the whole thing about "AI" and automation.

Or if you want to go full tinfoil hat on this - It is a ploy to stop people
from asking better pay or searching for a new job.

~~~
_nedR
Lately, I have been noticing the "increasing automation, use of artificial
intelligence " line being touted by Indian offshoring companies whenever they
talk about laying off or reduced recruitment. What exactly is the automation
or artificial intelligence being used? I never hear any details.

Are they doing something radically new involving machine learning which allows
them to be much more productive?

Or have they refined or streamlined their scripting environments and automated
build\deploy tools? Perhaps they have built a suitably large and mature
framework of components from previous projects which allows greater code re-
use? In these cases, using words like "Automation" and "AI" is just putting a
new sticker on an old product.

Or are companies just using these buzzwords to give a positive spin to an
event whose real reasons are actually more mundane and financial(weak market
conditions, reducing bloat in workforce ). Maybe they are attempting to mask
something more ominous like significant shift in the market away from
offshoring?

~~~
humanrebar
> What exactly is the automation or artificial intelligence being used?

Arguably continuous integration and deployment are forms of automation that
eliminate developer jobs. It's not that there was a "run unit tests" job, but
all developers got more productive so maybe a four person team could do the
work of a five person team.

Or maybe that refactoring to migrate to the new architecture didn't require
help from contractors anymore.

~~~
thewhitetulip
Nope, this is just a hype, as usual. The journalists are getting lazy,
especially Indian journalists, they write anything like this for the sake of
writing. There is no such thing as "due to automation and AI" revenues are
down, on the contrary IF automation and AI is done, revenues and profits will
go up! because of automation 4 people will be able to do work of 10 people.
dumb journalism

------
gopalv
Having worked for one of those names, I have to guess that this is probably
clearing the bench rather than removing employees with billings.

More often than not, the bench exists to promise a customer that they have the
people to "start yesterday" on the project.

The trouble with choking off the supply into the industry is that often the
demand dies out as a result rather than increasing the price of a service -
complete rewrites get shelved, new development gets postponed and sustenance
projects use band-aids to treat bullet holes.

And that causes a trickle-up effect across the product companies selling into
the industry - you don't sell new database licenses if billing systems aren't
getting revamped and if that ripples continues, everyone upstream starts
getting extremely frugal with their expenses.

Which is bad for the enterprise software ecosystem - the only folks who are
likely to not notice that immediately will be small bootstrapped consumer
companies, with real boxes to ship and lots of room to grow (or giant ones
with room to grow, like a self driving car paid for by clicks).

I'm a bit apprehensive of drastic changes ever since I read the CA Budget (see
last page of Economic Outlook[1]).

[1] -
[http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/2016-17/pdf/BudgetSummary/Economic...](http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/2016-17/pdf/BudgetSummary/EconomicOutlook.pdf)

~~~
fadzlan
Oh yeah, I have my shortest stint in one of those company.

It was rumored that the company I was working had taken poison pill last time
by having the ratio of benched workers and assigned workers to 50%:50%.

Their presence in our country was small, but they have multiple office
campuses in India. One campus even have a separate building that if you walk
to that building to work, people know you are benched.

Compared to other company that I worked, one of their value proposition is to
have resources readily available if you want to start a project today, apart
from having a dirt cheap offer. So yeah, benching a lot doesn't come as a
surprise to me about those companies.

~~~
amrx101
These companies hire a lot of graduates from all over the country at a merge
rate and these newly recruited employees are then benched. They will sometime
hire a couple of thousands of new grads from a particular school.

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thewhitetulip
> which is moving towards increasing automation, use of artificial
> intelligence

It is such baseless stuff which irks me every time, I have read from MANY
papers that automation is doing this that without explicitly saying X
automation firm screwed up the revenues.

I would like to see visible proof that "automation" is eating into the
revenues, no report says that, they just say "automation and AI"

The journalists don't know difference between AI vs ML and everyone is acting
as if "AI and automation" will destroy X firm, no, they won't. Anyone who
works in the sw field would know that there are many manual things done in the
project so much so that there wouldn't be an "automation firm" which would
sell blah blah robots to do human work. It is way off into the future, if
it'll ever happen. This madness has to stop.

edit: clarification about who they meant

~~~
gilfoyle
I think the role of AI in eliminating these jobs is overstated compared to the
role of Cloud, Dev Ops automation and faster iteration cycles afforded by
relatively better abstractions and tools for building software compared to
10-15 years ago.

A lot of these large IT companies relied on long term maintenance contracts
for infrastructure and legacy software with unnecessarily large teams on self
serving time and material (T&M) models. But these days, even large enterprises
have to innovate to stay in the game and their experience with top end Agile
consulting firms made them realize that you can do with much fewer people with
automation and hiring better. On the other hand, the large IT companies got
stuck with their old model and without training and experience on challenging
projects, the talent atrophied even while having to eek higher salaries every
year due to inflation and talent loss to startups and others.

However, the numbers being reported so far aren't huge compared to the
employee sizes of these companies. For e.g. 5% layoff would actually be a
reasonable trim on an annual basis. In that sense, the carnage hasn't started
yet.

~~~
thewhitetulip
This is what should be in the newspapers rather than "AI and automation"

~~~
humanrebar
It's not really AI, but it is a kind of automation, right?

~~~
thewhitetulip
Yes, but automation alone isn't causing layoffs! Bad management is. They are
just hiding their own failures on the pretext of "risk of automation and AI",
it is nonsense!

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osrec
I suppose it was a long time coming. Why send your work half way across the
world, for it to be done/corrected 3 times over with often poor results, when
you can do it once and do it right onshore. In my experience, offshoring is
the absolute epitome of a false economy!

~~~
flukus
The type of company that hires these companies don't have the corporate
structures necessary to build decent software either. They'll build crap 3
times over with poor results and cost more doing it.

I'm sure you've heard about those people with 10 years of experience that are
unable to code fizzbuzz? They hide out in those large corporate environments.

~~~
osrec
Yes, I've come to the realisation that large corporations are where the
spirits of good developers go to die...

~~~
muro
Microsoft, Apple, Google, FB and other places with awesome devs are also large
corporations :)

~~~
abalashov
I'm pretty sure the parent posters were referring to large corporations whose
core product is not technology as such, although even there, you'd be
surprised (or maybe you wouldn't). You don't have to get far from
MS/Apple/Google/FB/etc. to walk into an alternate universe of complete
mediocrity, where engineering and development are viewed as cost centres
and/or fancy forms of typing...

~~~
flukus
Even within those companies lurk a lot of mediocrity, either acquired or
homegrown. MS and Google have had some stinkers over the years, apple seems
better, but the probably keep the worst of it internal.

------
sumanthvepa
Most of us in the Indian IT industry, have probably seen the writing on the
wall for about close to 6-8 years now. One way Indians can handle this
adversity is to switch from working for service companies to working for firms
that build product.The silver lining, although a very tenuous one, is that
venture capital and private equity inflows into India in the areas of
e-commerce, digital marketing, fintech and software automation have been
steadily increasing over the last decade (although not in 2015-2016.) That
provides opportunities for experienced professionals -- the cohort that seems
most affected. Those with the experience of managing people, technology and
operations may find the downturn easier to navigate.

~~~
pjmlp
As far as I understand even Indian companies are now offshoring to other
countries in the Indian Ocean, with IT salaries lower than in India.

Is it visible there?

~~~
sumanthvepa
Could be. There is nothing sacrosanct about Indian workers. (Or any others for
that matter) The reason I was advocating that folks with experience and talent
seek out product companies, is that as a group, they are less sensitive to
worker wages. A talented programmer, product manager, marketing executive or
ops person will have at least an order of magnitude greater impact on the
company's bottom (or top line) than they would in say a pure body shopping IT
outsourcing company. So as an entrepreneur, for the right candidate, I have no
problem paying 2x the market rate. A good employee will more than make up for
the extra cost. In the outsourcing business though, the business model is very
sensitive to labor costs. Not so with product firms.

~~~
pjmlp
I got that idea, talking with some Indians while travelling in Mauritius a few
months ago.

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jalayir
Not sure about the quality of this piece. One company, Cognizant, is obviously
in some form of trouble. The others are laying off a few hundreds/thousands
jobs, on a base of 100K+ employees, as part of the performance review process.
There's also no mention of hiring being reduced for any of these companies.

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douche
Cognizant and Infosys are just the worst. We've been working with them on a
number of deals lately where they are effectively middlemen in between us and
a real customer who wants a product similar to what we provide. It's been a
fucking shambles. Some days I'm just amazed at how much incompetence and
incomprehension can be mustered on one team - everything is at least ten times
more difficult than it ought to be, and more often than not they appear to be
trying to deliberately sabotage the project.

Avoid terrible resellers and body-shops.

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einrealist
Sadly the article does not specify whats automated and slashing these jobs. I
suppose the majority of these terminated positions are service roles, like
help desks / call center?

~~~
flukus
A bash script? Wouldn't be the first time it's beat out a team of software
developers, especially systems that high level execs decide they need.

~~~
raverbashing
Why write a bash script when you can employ 5 java developers and take 10
times longer?

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mattfrommars
Can someone give me some insight which sort of 'IT job' or 'programming' jobs
are being replaced by automation? With a background in engineering, makes
sense in manufacturing industry but in software development?

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itomato
The bread and butter of many of those shops was already on the trailing edge
when they came to the fore.

The market has dried up. There are springs of Windows, Oracle, NetSuite, Java
and other Turn-of-the-Century technology, but new customers are fewer and
fewer. Of those are a fraction who want/need bargain-grade Global IT Support.

Combine the declining presence of IT with manual administration interfaces,
and it really is no great mystery.

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whitefish
This will lower salaries in India for IT professionals. As a result
outsourcing to India will become more attractive.

~~~
taylodl
That ship has done sailed. American firms have learned what makes sense to
offshore and what doesn't. Hence the carnage.

~~~
nradov
American firms learned that once they have thousands of resources in India
it's more cost effective to just hire them as direct employees instead of
going through an outsourcing company. In the long run this probably works out
better for everyone, except the owners of the outsourcing companies.

~~~
trhway
>it's more cost effective to just hire them as direct employees

it also makes it easier to bring them later (after 1 year) into US on L1
without all these limitation of H1 like prevailing wage, yearly cap, spouse of
L1 can work, GC seems to be easier (at least that seemed to be the case 10
years ago when I last paid attention to immigration)

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itomato
This sounds bogus to me:

>...newer areas such as digital and cloud, which require engineers to engage
with clients instead of working remotely

Does that mean trends in remote work contribute to a measurable erosion of
their collective markets? Or that their workforces cannot function in a face-
to-face environment?

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known
They're making $150 billion/year by selling software engineers, not software
to US/EU clients;

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holydude
What is your opinion about other offshore locations for IT stuff ? (South East
Asia, Eastern Europe) ?

~~~
pcr0
Aside from India and the Philippines, language/cultural barriers are
relatively greater in most other parts of SE Asia.

Eastern Europe seems to be quite popular.

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kartickv
Sad to see the industry choose abrupt collapse over upskilling themselves and
remaining relevant.

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rohan1024
[http://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/pink-
slip...](http://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/pink-slips-galore-
wipro-infosys-tech-mahindra-cognizant-cut-india-jobs-117051100156_1.html)

Link to desktop site.

~~~
dang
Thanks. Changed to that.

