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by defectbydesign 2254 days ago
How many jobs will go to India?
1 comments

As third party observer, why this gets downvoted?

I’m genuinely asking.

Probably because it is perceived to be a fairly uninformed question. It's sort of like talking about the USPS potential insolvency and someone asking how many postmen will be replaced with gig economy workers. As far as I'm aware, major leading American tech companies have never really exported jobs to India, it has been almost entirely companies that need mediocre quality work contracting out to companies that fill those contracts with workers from India or elsewhere. Without carefully developing an office, culture, and employee pipelines over 3-5+ years you carry extremely large risk outsourcing important work.
Is it a joke?

In many industries it's not uncommon to subcontract a service by a subcontractor which himself subcontract the same service to another subcontractor (usually cheaper).

In the end it is only a question of money!

Actually top american tech companies don't have to go directly to India to get cheaper workers but instead they call american subcontractor to get cheaper workers anywhere in the world. Even more with restricted green cards thanks to Donald TRUMP. :-)

i don't know why you were downvoted -- you're exactly right.
It was right 10-15 years ago, but less so now. There's been a huge pushback on off-shore development in the past decade for a variety of reasons, mainly poor results, issues with time zone differences, and the negligible cost savings. Most of the big consulting firms we associate with off-shore contracting (like TATA) are supplying mostly on-shore (engineering) consultants to domestic companies (but maintaining services like help desk offshore).

Middle management got tired of having daily meetings at midnight or 6 AM, and it got too expensive to bring people over who were fine with doing so. The India job market got pretty tight around '14 or so, to the point where engineers were leaving jobs every 4-6 months for greener pastures. And even though the consulting companies are supposed to be in charge of KT, so that transitions don't impact the clients, the rate of change was just too high to maintain good quality.

May be you should consider posting some data-driven citation.

AFAIK, jobs have stopped going to India for sometime now. Indian IT companies which relied heavily on offshoring had significant contraction as a result. A lot of modern IT jobs in India are in fact for new startups/companies meant for Indian population itself. Before COVID, India was seeing China like internal uprising with equivalent of many US tech companies poping up all over with jobs that were starting to match US salaries outside of tech hubs. Also, visa process had became unsustainably hard for most companies there so on-shore workforce augmentation sector has been quickly drying up as well.

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/ites/how-indian-it...

The Indian ITO firms have been seeing pressure for a while, but that doesn't also mean US tech companies have stopped hiring in India (or that they've stopped hiring contractors through those Indian firms).
Because it's silly and ignorant and possibly xenophobic.

It probably doesn't help that elsewhere in the thread they're making comments that make them sound kind of crazy:

> [open source orgs are] communist organizations living on private money from anticompetitive tech giants.

It's a bit of a non sequitur, and as others have said, it wasn't elaborated on.
https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ycombinator.com#section_traff...

Probably some of the less than 20 % of indian readers who prefer to hide the destruction of american jobs by India but actually by overpaid american tech leaders in the silicon valley. ;-)