Indian IT Industry

KJo · Post by **KJo** » 05 Dec 2014 23:41

Singha wrote:imo the indian IT industry is headed for a big shrinkage esp the KPO/BPO/remote infra management part. the number of people (lakhs) I see trooping through just the ORR daily is way more than the total number of ITvity workers in the silicon valley.

problem is this second set is always coming up with ways to automate and reduce manpower costs and hence controlling the situation.

I agree with you. Unless the IT industry changes from "we are low cost onleee" to coming up with some real innovation. Indian IT companies need to come out with their own products like Office or QuickBase or whatever, not just frivolous things. I discussed this with some other desi friends (incl Kunal) and they began fighting with me that INFY has x00000 patents, so we are very innovative. Big deal, getting to market and making a successful product is very very difficult. Patent creation seems to be a gameable business now. I had a desi Prof in Madrassa who was a research paper machine. He knew how to take an idea and generate 100000 papers and patents out of it.

I think the Indian IT scene is very fragile. People don't like hearing this. We had a great free run for 15 years, it will get tough now. I am already working with a team in Belarus.

We need sustainable innovation. Maybe Sikka at INFY will use his products background to make headway. There is a lot of opportunity. Restricting to cheap outsourcing work (also called code cooliegiri) will not work for the long term.

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 06 Dec 2014 02:59

yes definitely the manpower based model is on its last legs, though by sheer inertia and size it might last a while.
even in SV teams are getting ever smaller and as I mentioned even netz directors and spin-in founders are going around leading design reviews, writing docs and blogs, CODING in every new language or tool that comes up...fighting hard to survive and stay relevant....who in india trust me would never have seen the inside of their own groups lab for years (mazdoor union leaderchodi)

Sikkaji is a ray of hope which if he succeeds others might be able to follow and look for survival. after years and years of being north america, hiring north american execs for guangxi , reams and reams of process is infy still able to compete with accenture or ibm?

financially on this trip I actually lost money due to shopping and arranging for my inlaws to cover in blr for a while, but it has been a EYE OPENER TO ME to how the best in world are moving....none are sleeping...all are pumping iron 24x7 and competing desperately.......its like coming from a soft comfortable daycare facility where we are fed warm milk and cookies and put to sleep by caring madams to a SEAL BUDS boot camp where the whistle blasts at 5am, followed by a cold bucket bath and then its 10 hrs of work on the trot..with more learning at night in 'spare time'

it did not use to be this way, my east coast office was and is remains a gentleman's cigar club in comparison but these east coast offices are becoming less and less important as the indic/sinification/desperation work culture starts to predominate

people sitting in india as managers leading cushy 30-50 ppl teams and doing just process are in for a rude shock next few years. both they and their teams might find it hard to survive. and just reading a few whitepapers and throwing words to browbeat people is not going to suffice, managers need to carve out part of their projects and start coding right away.

there is going to bunch of techies, 1 layer of manager(who himself will have to code some) and then directly VP.
directors are going to vanish, as VPs take on more and more work and get hands on.

so the old comfy 4 tier architecture of 1st level manager - 2nd level manager - director - senior director is on way out imo.

Theo_Fidel · Post by **Theo_Fidel** » 06 Dec 2014 03:23

Singha wrote:financially on this trip I actually lost money due to shopping and arranging for my inlaws to cover in blr for a while, but it has been a EYE OPENER TO ME to how the best in world are moving....none are sleeping...all are pumping iron 24x7 and competing desperately.......its like coming from a soft comfortable daycare facility where we are fed warm milk and cookies and put to sleep by caring madams to a SEAL BUDS boot camp where the whistle blasts at 5am, followed by a cold bucket bath and then its 10 hrs of work on the trot..with more learning at night in 'spare time'

Heh! Its been this way, ‘dog eat dog’ in other fields for ever since I can remember. IT for a while was so productive that marginal improvements stopped mattering. But I think every 2% is a slog to achieve now. In my sphere we are glad for 1.5% increase in productivity every year. And that comes from innumerable training sessions. As a function of my license in multiple states I have to spend 60-80 hours every year in board approved training, just to keep my licenses. Welcome to the regular world folks.

I remember we had this inane conversation on BRF how ‘cloud services’ was no big deal. Bet no one is saying that now. We depend on it for much of our productivity increases these days. This year all our spreadsheets are required to be on the cloud. I don't get the feeling structural engineer types in India are keeping up with the world either. Is it still an Ammonia printing world?

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 06 Dec 2014 03:35

er I think the big building plans are still made that way as the large format printers are costly

RamaY · Post by **RamaY** » 06 Dec 2014 03:49

I hope Indian IT industry stops being a offshore shop and instead works with various other Make in India industries and develop mixed h/sw products. We have a 3 billion+ people in Asia and Africa and have common issues.

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 06 Dec 2014 04:21

the previous 10 yrs have seen several cheen cos become global scale and brand, and 0 from india, courtesy the congi-critters. what you say is how every global brand has been forged by meeting their home needs and markets first and then expanding. our risk averse and timid low scale manufacturing is oriented to licensing proven 2nd tier tech from global majors and making it for home market with steady margins.

the vast explosion of sw driven xyz is like a dinosaur extinction meteor hit for the weighty incumbents who used to build custom hardware at 100s of millions of dollar cost, pkg that with custom sw and make a product - junipers, ciscos, ericssons, alcatel.

now a good part of that market is being stolen like anything by increasingly improving open src mated to cheap hw by the likes of quanta and huawei who are providing sasta tikau stuff in umpteen configs, merchant silicon and happy to accept a 5% margin. they have their own back end guangxi financing in the far east to survive on such thin margins, bad assets whatever..being national champions and such.

some of the dinos will likely be able to shed weight and 'evolve' into agile , fleet footed warm blooded mammals, and feast on the rotting carcasses of the other dying dinos to bootstrap the next phase of evolution.

negi · Post by **negi** » 06 Dec 2014 08:31

Indian ITVTY companies have already ramped down their recruitment numbers in last 1-2 years for quantity based revenue model is not scalable beyond a limit and they all are hovering around that upper limit be it Infy, Wipro, TCS , CTS they all are now in 1.5-2 lakh headcount category . Their model is being disrupted by both technology as well as changing business firstly likes of Bank of America, Wellsfargo, JPMC and now even phrama companies have opened their IT back offices in India so long term 5 year contracts for maintenance and support which used to go to them are drying up, secondly from enterprise license sales perspective most of the companies are now asking traditional SW/appliance vendors like Oracle, SAP and IBM to move to a subscription based model thanks to Salesforce chaps, see until salesforce happened multi million dollar ELAs were a norm and there was no one to challenge the big fish however when salesforce disrupted the market likes of workday, xactly, veeva and openair have entered the enterprise solutions space and are eating into a chunk of pie which was once monopolized by likes of Oracle or IBM. Indian IT shops indirectly depend on huge license sales as they have entire platoons of worker that specialize in maintaining/supporting applications hosted on these products but now with cloud based subscription model there is no need for a system/DB administrator one only needs to worry about a developer guys at Amazon . MSFT or even FOrce dot com take care of all the infra , once you buy the subscription one can install one's SW on the cloud based infra and start development.

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 06 Dec 2014 10:06

I was talking with a friend today...now one does not even need a office or lab to start a co.
Dev and test can be in some cloud based rented tenant space.
Desktop dev can be all free tools. Versioning nd sharing via github.
Ppl across the world are working nd building cool sw in this mode...collaborating via Skype mailers and forums.

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 06 Dec 2014 10:08

I read somewhere ibm India headcount is 1.1 down from 1.7 and headed south

TKiran · Post by **TKiran** » 06 Dec 2014 12:34

The solution to islam is 'more islam' .

Similarly the solution to IT is 'more IT'

Im in the know that some 4-5 years back there was a study conducted about Indian IT situation and risks. What we are seeing now is not even 20% of what is in store in the next 10years. Indian IT is going to be 5 times bigger than what what it is today in a decade.

To make sure that too big to fail companies shouldn't exist, IT policies have been amended so that big companies were not going to get anymore incentives any IT companies started in the last 2-3 years can't grow more than 2000 to 3000 employees. But number of companies would be in multiples. This has been the GoI's IT policy now to mitigate risks. For another 20 years Indian IT sector would continuously grow. What we are witnessing now is the result of what GoI's policies in the last 5 years. There is a requirement of 1 million fresh IT graduates each year for the next 10years.

Javee · Post by **Javee** » 06 Dec 2014 14:59

Here is what Vineet Nayar Ex-CEO of HCL said a couple days back, very relevant to what we are going through,

The world of “management” is dying as people don’t want to be managed anymore. The world of operations is dying because technology does a far better job at operations and does not even ask for a salary increase. Thus if you are just managing, counting rather than creating, you are already obsolete!

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 06 Dec 2014 15:35

In the Bay Area its not uncommon to see VPs write production code.

hanumadu · Post by **hanumadu** » 06 Dec 2014 21:38

negi wrote:Their model is being disrupted by both technology as well as changing business firstly likes of Bank of America, Wellsfargo, JPMC and now even phrama companies have opened their IT back offices in India so long term 5 year contracts for maintenance and support which used to go to them are drying up,

That's OK as long as its India they are setting up their offshore centres. I think there is a severe lack of qualified professionals in the USA and probably for much of the developed world. The reason for hiring freshers from IIT with such high salaries could be that they want people with a certain capability that are not easily found in the open market anymore. I don't know if this demand is because of a bubble with all the start ups being funded by the billions without making a profit much like the dot com bubble or if there is more substance this time. At least some of the big companies like FB have matured enough to be making significant profits.

negi wrote: secondly from enterprise license sales perspective most of the companies are now asking traditional SW/appliance vendors like Oracle, SAP and IBM to move to a subscription based model thanks to Salesforce chaps, see until salesforce happened multi million dollar ELAs were a norm and there was no one to challenge the big fish however when salesforce disrupted the market likes of workday, xactly, veeva and openair have entered the enterprise solutions space and are eating into a chunk of pie which was once monopolized by likes of Oracle or IBM. Indian IT shops indirectly depend on huge license sales as they have entire platoons of worker that specialize in maintaining/supporting applications hosted on these products but now with cloud based subscription model there is no need for a system/DB administrator one only needs to worry about a developer guys at Amazon . MSFT or even FOrce dot com take care of all the infra , once you buy the subscription one can install one's SW on the cloud based infra and start development.

It might be cheaper to buy SaaS for smaller companies. But for bigger companies, it might still be cheaper to have their own installations. You can buy SaaS if they are not part of your core operations. If you want more control or custom needs then there are PaaS and IaaS. Each of them reduces your IT needs from having everything your own but will not eliminate the need for DBAs or sysads.

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 06 Dec 2014 21:44

https://www.linkedin.com/in/solomonhykes

the educational profile of solomon hykes, the founder of dotcloud(docker.io) is very sdre looking indeed. definitely not a stanford grad

but his co is really disrupting the market with maybe a staff of 20.

reading between the lines he did not get great designations or breaks but kept on learning and playing around until the opportunity came to use that mainstream....

I see lot of sysadmins, sales engineers, IT architects , independent contractors, students with good open src skills they have developed on their own playing in the big pond of open src now, its no longer a walled garden where officially anointed 'software engineers/MTS' are allowed to play in anymore.

the indian model of managergiri even in the offshore arms of product cos has been a disaster with a few exceptions where the managers work like tech leads .... large pieces of work has been mismanaged ... leading to loss of confidence ..... at one time netz had enormously funded the india center with a high point of 10 VPs...instead of driving work, they built their own fiefdoms and carried on with their people models.....now its down to 2 VPs and shrinking.....layers of directors and managers are being removed (our group had 3 managers eased out)
...people who wanted to work and had no interests in politics or brown nosing were not promoted technically....chamchas and status quoists got 2 promotions in 2 yrs. but they have no aukaad in the parent org. bunch of rascals got their promos & fat packages nearly 3-4 yrs ahead of me because i did not brown nose anyone and had no godfather.

Yayavar · Post by **Yayavar** » 06 Dec 2014 22:29

Javee wrote: Thus if you are just managing, counting rather than creating, you are already obsolete!

Yes, but people may not want or wount do dual role. A technical guy may not want to do evaluations, handle personnel issues of vacation/sickness/morale, other bookkeeping etc. So would rather there be a manager to deal with certain things. Having same person do all might compromise on many things and add stress.

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 07 Dec 2014 08:24

May not want is not material....one vp maybe do 100 evals than 10 managers doing 10 each.

Yayavar · Post by **Yayavar** » 07 Dec 2014 08:37

^^that is a high load....but basically wanted to say that tech plus mgmt is a tough proposition. some people do it but their workload is high.

negi · Post by **negi** » 07 Dec 2014 15:12

Singha wrote: ...people who wanted to work and had no interests in politics or brown nosing were not promoted technically....chamchas and status quoists got 2 promotions in 2 yrs. but they have no aukaad in the parent org.

This is a sad reality with ITVTY in India and it cuts across all kinds of players be it Product or services . Problem is exacerbated by the fact that moment a company opens it's India development center a rigid pyramid of designations is used to arrive at pay bands and the way hierarchy is setup somewhere up in the middle of the pyramid technical chaps reach at a dead end , that is where lead engg. starts moving into Product management and this is where all ugly gymnastics happen. Until one is technical it becomes very easy to assess performance of two engineers in a team once you move into a role where you mostly coordinate/talk , delegate work then an opportunity opens up for the big boss to give his favourite a gentle career push .

KJo · Post by **KJo** » 07 Dec 2014 21:26

Raja Bose wrote:In the Bay Area its not uncommon to see VPs write production code.

Large companies like Cisco, eBay or chota mota companies? If it is the former, I am surprised.
I personally love writing code, and still do so for personal projects, but in PeechaKaroCo where I worked, they treated people badly for that.

{deleted}

KJo · Post by **KJo** » 07 Dec 2014 21:28

I am trying to learn R programming and learn more about Data Science and Analytics. What's a good book for beginners? I have taken some online courses, but a book will be good.
Any recos?

Theo_Fidel · Post by **Theo_Fidel** » 07 Dec 2014 23:14

yayavar wrote:A technical guy may not want to do evaluations, handle personnel issues of vacation/sickness/morale, other bookkeeping etc.

My own experience is that none of this is necessary in a high skilled environment. Which is what the IT folks are discovering. In my entire career I have never had an evaluation done, well maybe once-twice but it was a pointless exercise as everyone realized quickly. Everyone is expected to manage their project hours individually and their vacation time. And mostly folks do a better job than any team of KB types. Needless overhead IMHO, and complete drain of cash. Of course in 100,000 type companies things get complicated very quickly but then I would never work for such a company no matter the pay. ...

Yayavar · Post by **Yayavar** » 08 Dec 2014 12:12

.. but not all are Theo..lots of people work for companies with > 200K employees ...,that is how it adds to 200K or more

TKiran · Post by **TKiran** » 08 Dec 2014 19:48

The only problem I see is for those people who are still to pay off house EMI's even when they reached 50 years age. They will not get jobs outside of their coocoons in big IT firms such as Infy Wipro TCS HCL etc. they are more likely to get fired and more or less left to fend for themselves. In other words the retirement age would be 50 and those who have already crossed the bridge will survive. Those didn't cross will perish. There will be lot of social unrest among ITVity peoplewhile adjusting to 50 years as defacto retirement age.

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 09 Dec 2014 07:08

onlee chance of survival is being hands on, contributing some code, physically fitter than people 20 yrs younger with less responsibilities .... people managers and multiple layers of them pushing around ppts and ms project files are clearly on the way out. i heard today qualcomm has no pure managers and instead has mgrs-cum-techlead dual roles. thats clearly where a lot of cos will move under cost pressure and smaller/agile teams.

Yayavar · Post by **Yayavar** » 09 Dec 2014 09:27

and that is the workload I'm referring to.... already people have lot of technical design/code/roadmap/get_funding/planning etc. and then add people mgmt ..wah! no nahin mangta, though it might happen more often as you say

Paul · Post by **Paul** » 09 Dec 2014 09:58

While it is true that QCOM prides itself on being a company of engineers not MBAs, QCOM India does have its share of nepotism. There are Intel and TI mafias ruling different BUs in Bangalore and they prefer to hire from their pool while the AMD faction is not far behind in San Diego. Preference is also given if u are in the right gene pool. Cannot reveal specific instances but this trait of Indics has manifested itself here as well.

However the BGL unit is giving tough competition to the San Diego office last I heard.

prahaar · Post by **prahaar** » 09 Dec 2014 10:10

I have observed significant hidden ageism in North Europe. It is not uncommon for 50+ techies to not find a good job since they have reached a significantly higher pay compared to their own job level. Technology industry which are not tightly connected with domain expertise seem to have a higher problem of ageism.

Sachin · Post by **Sachin** » 09 Dec 2014 14:40

yayavar wrote: A technical guy may not want to do evaluations, handle personnel issues of vacation/sickness/morale, other bookkeeping etc.

In many of the so called IT Majors (Service companies like Most Reputed Co, Vegetable Oil.Co etc.) after a point of time there is no real great work for a hard-core technical champ. That is why in these companies you may not find that very common sight in other countries. That of a 45 or 50 years old man, typing away reels of code. Vegetable Oil.Co earlier used to have a different track - Technical and Project Management. Now that line is thinning. Even the "technical architects" are forced to manage teams, do appraisals etc. Infact many of the people who opted the Technical stream chose it precisely get away from all this

. But in such companies, I don't think there is a way out.

Singha wrote:onlee chance of survival is being hands on, contributing some code, physically fitter than people 20 yrs younger with less responsibilities ....

Well said, and I say that because I can see the writing on the wall

. Any idea on which are the upcoming areas which I can focus? Through trainings etc?

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 10 Dec 2014 00:39

Sachin, a lot of work has/is moving out of traditional pgming languages like c/java/c++ into things like python and Go. thats probably an area to get started on(for me too!) . and using these to talk to cloud/web systems using stuff like xml, rest api and json seems pretty common now. the CLI based model of arcane 1000 commands to learn is dead...nobody wants it now...and with it stuff like CCIE which relies a lot on such stuff will either die or undergo radical changes to use object knowledge based GUIs that will shape and guide user into the right workflows than be expected to sit down and write 10,000 line CLI config scripts like the big enterprises and service providers have done in the past !!

there are also scores of interesting projects open srced into github but you need to find a domain thats relevant to you and follow it deep...into what is going on in that domain in open src projs. typically they are 2-3 yrs ahead of commerical projects and state of art in concepts and ideas though not hardened for commercial use. they are functioning as (a) incubators for interesting ideas (b) common forums for cos to work on and collaborate (c) an outlet for talented people outside the formal ecosystem to showcase their vast skills (d) an influencer of technical decisions which way to go

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 10 Dec 2014 02:29

prahaar wrote:I have observed significant hidden ageism in North Europe.

What I read that here in the US too it is there and out in the open too.

member_28722 · Post by **member_28722** » 10 Dec 2014 04:15

ChandraV wrote:I think we are doing a little too much dhoti-shivering regarding IT industry's future.

But some warning flags need to be raised. Bulk recruiters have been the employment & money generators in India IT in last couple of decades during the ERP wave. With ERP now getting substituted by Cloud, and almost all companies focusing on reducing IT costs, this trend needs to change in next few years else we will be in a downward spiral.
Technology industry as a whole (not just IT) needs to improve on quality and accessibility. The focus should change from quantity and cost cutting to quality solutions
Focus should be on
1. Making 4G accessible everywhere
2. Free Wifi networks in all malls
3. Improving penetration of IT in India by coming up with solutions to cater to the unique Indian environment
All these go hand in hand with IT growth. There is plenty of growth available intrinsically if one chooses to look.

Also the manager-dominated culture of IT needs to reduce and evolve into a tech-dominated one.

member_28722 · Post by **member_28722** » 10 Dec 2014 04:18

matrimc wrote:What I read that here in the US too it is there and out in the open too.

Not really, a very good amount of US population is migrant workers/students converting into legal citizens. All of these are in 20s/30s.

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 10 Dec 2014 08:46

saurabh.mhapsekar: My point is limited to IT specifically programming jobs. You are expanding beyond what I had in mind. Not much more to say from me at this point.

negi · Post by **negi** » 10 Dec 2014 09:16

^ Programming as in R&D ? Even there if you visit offices of any big co in Bay area you would see significant number of Indians in the team. They could be MS types or those who get transferred from BU in India to Massa . At least likes of Oracle, VMware, Netz , EMC , Amazon, MSFT, QCOM , IBM research have huge number of Indians on their rolls.

It is the higher management in these companies where native Americans still dominate in number the 1-15 year experience band in terms of numbers will be dominated by Indians and Chinese.

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 10 Dec 2014 10:01

Negi: Yes. I work with a lot of them Si Valley (in addition to east coast, central, Tx, Oz) programmers on a daily basis. It is a mix - people of origin (and educated at least partly in) India, China, Middle East (lots of them in Engineering), Europeans (now a days a lor of east europeans too) - no single group dominates. But in services, there are lot of Indian origin programmers, especially in Business process/domain expertise and Java/web. Not too many in open source though

Sachin · Post by **Sachin** » 10 Dec 2014 10:57

Singha wrote:Sachin, a lot of work has/is moving out of traditional pgming languages like c/java/c++ into things like python and Go. thats probably an area to get started on(for me too!) .

Thanks a lot. This gives some pointers. How is Big Data Analysis coming up? Or is it a boat which I missed again? Would it be possible to drop me an e-mail on sierra alpha charlie hotel india november papa kilo @google mail?

negi · Post by **negi** » 10 Dec 2014 12:28

^ To be brutally honest Big Data by itself does not have too many jobs as such for not all enterprises have a real world business use case which involves churning through volume of Data beyond the capability of traditional Database systems. Analytics is nothing but application of statistics to business problems, likes of SAS have been targeting a subset of that market in financial and banking domain . R is a nice open source package for doing the same without splurging on huge license costs of SAS.

Imho beyond a certain point there is not much value in just chasing technology side of things i.e. the scene in Indian IT today unfortunately is everyone wants to learn SAP HANA, crash course on Hadoop and jump onto the Big Data bandwagon which is ok in the short term however in the long term if someone wants to venture into Analytics or what today is now being sold as Data Science then it makes much more sense to brush up on Statistics and learn R because they actually keep one closer to the real world side of the problem being attacked rather than just screwdriver giri and knowing a product/package.

Comer · Post by **Comer** » 10 Dec 2014 12:46

Folks, what do you think is the logical next step for someone who has worked on high availability systems and coding in C?

Rishirishi · Post by **Rishirishi** » 11 Dec 2014 03:05

The next big thing is cloud. a programmer who understands which applications humans like to use.

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 11 Dec 2014 04:23

saravana wrote:Folks, what do you think is the logical next step for someone who has worked on high availability systems and coding in C?

if you want to continue specializing in that take a look at reddis and etcd. very niche area though. its viewed more as a feature than a domain that one can live within.