Once India's global claim to fame, the country's information technology (IT) sector is seeing a spate of layoffs by IT majors like Tech Mahindra, Wipro, Infosys and Cognizant.
The churn in the IT sector — which is moving towards increasing automation, use of artificial intelligence and is beset by tightening visa regulations — is likely to affect mid-level employees with 10-15 years of experience the most, as many are averse to learning new skills, industry experts have said.
Further, Indian IT firms are witnessing their slowest growth in a decade, while global firms are shifting their budgets from traditional IT services to newer areas such as digital and cloud, which require engineers to engage with clients instead of working remotely. Even as this shift takes hold of the sector, automation is increasingly taking over low-end maintenance work, forcing companies to shift workers to other projects and reduce hiring from campuses.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by looorg on Saturday May 20 2017, @06:27PM (1 child)
Wasn't that always a thing with outsourcing? Eventually someone cheaper (your expenses increase so someone else might be cheap by comparison) is going to come along and so the jobs move -- from western Europe -> to eastern Europe -> to Asia (China, India) -> next stop is Africa?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 20 2017, @06:30PM
Its not just outsourcing, its the nature of economic development. As automation improves, employment moves from manufacturing to services. The kind of software development work that is outsourcable is essentially assembly-line work.