[delphico]

While a vast majority of comments here seem to indicate a lot of jobs being moved offshore, there are massive layoffs (even entities shutting shop in India. Github closed its office here, Twitter reduced its presence dramatically etc. Where I work, there are no back-fills for voluntary attrition or restructuring). Layoffs are a taboo of some kind here too, affected are treated as "non-performers" and recruiters will look down upon you.

A lot of hiring here is for low end work or at very junior levels (If you are a 10+ years experienced guy, good luck getting a job. I know a close friend of mine struggling to get one - ready for even a 40pc pay cut)

If you apply for a Principal or Staff position (few), be ready to grind out 1 easy, 1 medium and 1 hard Leetcode problem and doing a System design interview where you do FB with Instagram design reels all at once in 1 hour). Surprisingly when you attend meetups and talk with "Senior" managers who used to hire dozens with shambolic interviews, seem to be opting for getting "good" "resources" with DSA skills from this market (Imagine working in core engineering and then going on to do body shop consulting at an IT provider migrating from Java 4 to Java 17)

While the general sense on lot of jobs are going offshore is true, it is possibly very low paying entry level jobs.

You can now possibly correlate these to a lot of comments you see, junior folks who (no offense intended) :

* Given a spec hack something up and never think of how a customer will use this * Exceptions (sorry, we code Hail Mary scenarios) * Monitoring (sorry, that is ProdOps issue not mine) * Alert Management (this is non critical anyway & maintenance is someone else's job) * Testing (shambles)

Add to this targets such as "automate" with "Gen AI", We paid your co-pilot license where is the productivity increase number (you are an under performer and did not "customer delight" experience)

Sure is frustrating (onshore or offshore) & sad to see this where this is. One just thinks we'd have to live with this at-least for now. Hoping that things get better (overall in the world), sanity prevails and we can all have better lives ahead of us

[piskov]

I would say the article is about Pax Americana. Anywhere else — like Russia, Asia, Africa — IT is booming with stronger demand than ever.

Probably, one of the main reasons for layoffs in “US and what have you” is new wave of deglobalization and having your own google, visa, etc. “just in case”. This way possible markets shrink and big “IT troops” become less economically feasible.

We may even see in the not so distant future some IT migration from US to the countries outside of Pax Americana.

[kyawzazaw]

could it also be part of "section 174 US tax code"

[osigurdson]

Russia?

[benterix]

This would make sense - most of top talent left when they realized what can happen to them and those who decided to stay did it mostly for family reasons. So someone needs to fill in this hole.

[piskov]

The notion of most top talent leaving is very much opposite of true.

Some reasons for better than ever demand in IT are the creation of alternatives to some gone paid western products like SAP or migration of the existing solutions to open-source stack: e.g. from Sql server/Oracle to PostgreSQL and/or adding Linux support instead of just Windows.

[osigurdson]

I thought offshoring happened 20 years ago. I think today, it is more about aishoring, or the dream that it will be possible to do a lot with very few people.

[delphico]

Oh absolutely. The term is new (aishoring). There is chaos though (initial days of aishoring ?) The challenge I see is the following (or the management thought I see is the following)

a) Hire some Junior devs, track them through spyware on the laptops b) Enterprise ChatGPT, Bard, <Insert my own> c) CoPilot d) Spin features out

Some senior folk reviews the code (we pay him top dollar, so 18 hours is reality he/she has to wake up to) As someone to whom this happened (I did not sign up, it was normal till management changed), I can tell you it made me go crazy. 85 hour work weeks (weekends included) took a toll and I quit and took a lower paying position (1 year ago).

Sadly its not getting better, Was conversing with a colleague recently and he told me his new task was to use GenAI to migrate IMS to Java microservices. Kind of chuckled to myself (console by saying: it gets worse, before it gets better)

[osigurdson]

I'm not sure the new model will be senior dev + junior devs + LLMs. Rather it is more likely that it will just be senior dev / person with ideas + LLM. At least that is how it seems that it should work. However, my own empirical evidence runs somewhat counter to that: ChatGPT has a tough time getting the details right. Perhaps in time we will get true amplification.

[benterix]

> As someone to whom this happened

Happened to me too - I just said this shit is generated by ChatGPT and I won't be reviewing it. They didn't insist.

[wizerdrobe]

The trend I’ve seen, and one that actually seems to have decent results, is “near-shoring” to Romania, Ukraine, Brazil or similar.

India has had an “if you’ve got no better options” for most of my career to be honest.

[delphico]

Point taken, but there are no black and white options as you'd have seen. I have worked with folks from East European Geo's who are very good and you will find that everywhere.

The volumes (fresh and junior hiring) in India are staggering numbers

[coldtrait]

I was part of a somewhat well known US based product company that set up shop here in 2022 and laid off their entire India team in 2023 too. I am still looking for a job and I am terrible at Leetcode interviews in general. Things are looking grim.