India's tech talent pipeline is sputtering Shubh Kumar graduated from IIT Patna, one of India's famed Institutes of Technology – universities that attract millions of applicants but admit only 18,000 undergraduates. Google CEO Sundar Pichai and IBM boss Arvind Krishna are both IIT alumni, and employers seek out IIT students. New grads are generally optimistic that …
""Routine, rules-based roles such as manual testing, basic application support, and low-level coding have been most impacted,"
I would assume that if you're recruiting the best of the brightest then you aren't expecting them to follow a "routine, rules-based" career path. This sounds more like short-term profit chasing; let someone else train them in the basics and then poach them when they've got a few years under their belts. Or maybe they're following the IBM policy; no youngsters cos they might leave, no oldies cos they're bolshie and hard to manage, just the ones in the middle with mortgages and kids who are easiest to push around cos they've got most to lose.
Exaclty: "aren't interested in graduates because they need specialists" - so what'are the skills of those graduates? Just lvery ow one for menial tasks, and not able to get at a decent level with some on-job taining?
Of couse AI is biting into cheap jobs - if those consultancies and company just sold or looked for them to pay peanunts abroad, now managers are fully in their wet dreams of replacing them with cheaper machines.
Why would they want to do "outsourced work" that US companies don't care about enough to hire in the US anyway? These people are going to build the Indian Google and Amazon (or whatever technical thing comes after Google and Amazon).
Microsoft is an Indian company, with a HQ in California.
Many IT/finance veterans in the 45+ age bracket have sufficient financial means, and many are seeking a second phase of their lives, and they are free from day-to-day engagements that weigh them down. They have sufficient investments, have planned for later years, their children are mostly on autopilot, and the wife is pursuing her own business and work—the perfect demographic to connect with young engineers who have lots of enthusiasm, prior work experience to showcase, and brilliant ideas.
As someone who's been in this biz for almost 40 years now, I've been through several places that sold me out to chase cheap-as-chips outsourcing. If India was going to come up with the next tech titan, they'd have done it a decade ago. Instead, those with the captial set up tons of outrsourcing companies to rake in all that Western cash, chasing easy money.
With all due respect to those with genuine talent, India's IT sector is getting what's been coming to it for decades and having been kicked in the teeth more than once by short-sighted UK companies, I won't shed a tear if India's tech sector has to shrink.
This trend extends beyond India. Globally, entry-level tech roles have declined by 35 percent since January 2024, according to Milind Shah, managing director of Randstad Digital India.
I'm sure I read an article† that AI has had no discernible impact whatsoever on the job market, thus far. Who's lying?
† - AI has had zero effect on jobs so far, says Yale study - https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/01/ai_isnt_taking_people_jobs/
q: Who's lying?
The people trying to flog you 'AI' software/courses etc are the ones who are lying.
Trump has torpedoed the global economy and governments are cracking down on the net/access to labour/supply chains. Everyone is cutting back. The tech sector are pretending to shift to AI because it looks good in the PR. Telling everyone that the US is now a dictatorship, AI is a massive con and the global economic future is going to be crappy doesn't suit the narrative.
Economists with Yale's Budget Lab, a non-partisan policy research group, took a look at how US employment has changed since the November 2022 debut of ChatGPT and the sequent release of other generative AI models.
Not affecting US jobs yet, seeing that a lot of work got off shored it is logical that them jobs would be the first to go rather than jobs in USA?
"While India supports Russia, why do we buy from or outsource to India ?
They are destroying our ability to outsmart Russia and China by destroying our IT industries at source."
Because the parasite corporations and their scumbag billionaire owners need even more cash than they already make. By using the cheap labour located there to make more obscene profits all the while making certain to drive their domestically employed workers into serfdom. Oh and why buy or outsource anything to China they actively support a shooting war on/in Europe and the hybrid kind against all of the rest of the world.
Oh and why buy or outsource anything to China they actively support a shooting war on/in Europe and the hybrid kind against all of the rest of the world.
Someone gets the hypocrisy. Russia and China are now officially close allies.
We in Europe are entirely reliant on China to make all our stuff due to the suicidal policies firstly of outsourcing and most recently deindustrialisation. The nutty forced transition to Net Zero means China is now destined to have a complete stranglehold over our energy production, being the largest manufacturer of solar panels and wind turbines.
We then get on our soap box threatening Russia over the war in Ukraine without having a fraction of the necessary military clout to back up our words. All of that cheap Russian natural gas which made Germany an industrial powerhouse is now being re-routed to China via the Power of Siberia pipeline, with a second recently having been approved. Meanwhile, we must pay over the odds for US and Middle Eastern LPG. You couldn't make it up!
The net result of this circus? America gets richer, China gets richer, Russia gets to fund its war, India stays quiet and plays both sides and Western Europe potentially gets destroyed in the process.
Don't worry though, I'm sure all this is just scaremongering and the towering intellects and strong leadership of Starmer, Macron, Merz and Von der Leyen are going to ride to our rescue with the answers!
Far more nuanced than Indian and China bad… however the Orange Shitgibbon also pushing India towards China/Russia.Why was Apple allowed to build a multi/trillion tech manufacturing ecosystem in China that has done more to enable China than 50 years of economic espionage.
The Countries Buying Russian Fossil Fuels Since the Invasion of Ukraine (including Crimea).
The primary buyers of Russian oil and gas include China, India, and Turkey, who have significantly increased their purchases since Western sanctions were imposed after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. While most European Union countries have reduced their reliance on Russian energy, some, like Hungary and Slovakia, still import it. Other key consumers of Russian fossil fuels are Japan, especially for LNG, and to a lesser extent, Brazil for oil products and South Korea for coal.
Top Buyers:
China: China is the largest global buyer of Russian fossil fuels, taking a significant share of crude oil and LNG exports.
India: India has become a major buyer of discounted Russian crude oil, filling the void left by European markets.
Turkey: Turkey is a significant importer of Russian crude oil and oil products.
Other Notable Buyers:
European Union (EU): While the EU has reduced overall imports, it remains a major purchaser of Russian Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) and pipeline gas.
Japan: Japan buys a considerable portion of Russia's LNG exports.
Brazil: Brazil is a key importer of Russian refined oil products.
Hungary and Slovakia: These EU countries have continued to import Russian oil and gas, citing a lack of immediate alternatives.
South Korea: South Korea purchases a portion of Russia's coal exports.
This "we've got AI so we don't need low level jobs), is the equivalent of China's one child policy, it's great at "solving" the problem now, but in a generations time, the.IT industry will be fucked.
No jobs for junior roles, less will take the university courses, as there are no jobs to be filled and then people starting retiring, moving. Who's going to fill those senior roles, if there are no one below them?
Let me guess, the predictive text machine will be so good, those roles will be gone as well, so life on the beach for everyone , just like the powered loom stopped people having to work so hard and how computers would free us from the monotony of office work.
Been saying this for the last 5-8 years, no one is hiring and mentoring the next generation of techies. Considering most highly skilled techies are Gen-X, the industry is going to be well and truly f**ked over the next 15 years. A lot of us made very good money from 1990-2010, invested it into pensions, savings and property and a lot of us are simply going to take any redundancies or just plain quit, all that talent, skills and experience just walking away. Good luck trying to convince anyone fresh out of uni to take on a shiity, under-appreciated IT career with no training and little prospects these days.
In my mid 50s and after 35 years in the biz, I'm just about at breaking point. Too many projects, too many long weekends, too many late nights, got the cash and I'm offski to the land of the OAP. Freedom from the Monday morning dread, stuff the bloody commute and time to do hobbies where the only IT I'll be doing will be on me and my wife's laptops thanks.
I have a lot of sub-contractors in India (and other parts of the world).
I don't really see much difference in employing someone straight out of an Indian University or a 10 year veteran.
Both will need significant training on how we perform our Certification work.
The recent University graduate will ask why they can't use AI for everything. The veteran will ask why they cannot do half a job as they are used to (and will tend to argue more about it).
Our main issue with Indian subcontractors as they will come to team meetings and ambush you with an edge case that they "desperately need an answer to right now". You give them an answer stressing that it is just for that one edge case and then you find out a week later (often longer) that they have changed their complete way of working to cover that edge case, rather than use the correct way that they were trained to use and works for 95+% of the time.
No, the "experienced" devs in India can be little better than the Freshers. At least the new guy might be teachable, the ones who have been turning out the same poor work for the last 7-10 years tend to be a lost cause.
What I have noticed is that the female engineers are often a good bet. They are hungrier and less arrogant, and so are easier to train, picking up the culture.
This is not about AI, that's an excuse. It's the financial collapse of the West. Companies just don't want to speak about what's happening, just say oh the stock price is ok. Well it's actually not when measured in value as opposed to fiat currency. The dollar, pound and nearly every major currency has been losing value measured in purchasing terms. Government's blame it on "inflation" as if that is some external thing caused by Poootin. It's simply from money printing / QE / debt which government's have used to fund all sorts of ridiculous projects for votes not for ROI. It also has the effect of moving money & power from middleclasses to 'elites'. This is why gold & silver prices have been steadily rising to new all time high; banks and sovereign wealth funds have been buying all they can get their hands on because they know what is coming.
But corporates have also realised what is coming and they are retrenching, cutting as much cost as possible to try and survive when it hits. It will probably hit very soon, even this year or early next unless something major is done. Which, unfortunately could be WW3, just hope no nukes. Why war? Because that is often the last resort the elites use to save themselves from being found out. The people expect to lose freedoms, be impoverished and hungry in war and don't look for answers.
Rules-based roles, upskilling-as-a-service, skill-first lens, volume-to-value... my jargon meter kept beeping
Anyway, it's not *just* AI - the quality of the code that has been produced the past 10-20 years is also important. From a client perspective, the results of LLM code slop may be indistinguishable from what was produced before - if something never really worked right and just kept making the code base worse and worse as the years wore on, a "move to AI" may be a face-saving way to change course.
"Global Capability Centers (GCCs) – the term for offshore tech teams multinationals create to serve their global needs – are a major source of IT jobs in India."
GCCs in India handle a range of "functions", including:
Research and Development (R&D)
Information Technology (IT)
Finance
Human Resources (HR)
Analytics
Yes, your people people are now outsourced - the snake is eating itself.
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