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.
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.
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)
Happened to me too - I just said this shit is generated by ChatGPT and I won't be reviewing it. They didn't insist.
India has had an “if you’ve got no better options” for most of my career to be honest.
The volumes (fresh and junior hiring) in India are staggering numbers
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