On the recent ?? spurt in software jobs - India '21
Sunny R Gupta
Sr Director Engg @JioCinema | Building at Scale | Cloud native | ex-Atlassian | Thrives in startup mode
A lot has happened over the past few years in India:
- The recent arrival of various global entities like Twilio, Tesla and others who plan to open world class R&D centres in India. MNCs are increasingly setting up R&D that own entire product lines themselves. Previously, India was seen as a low cost off-shore unit suited to support Headquarters situated elsewhere. Core product development work seldom came to India.
- Atlassian was one of the early entrants that tried to changes this when it arrived in 2018 with a clear goal of having a strong R&D presence in India. As these global giants look to India for their Software Developers - almost every existing entity is facing challenges of retaining great talent.
- As the pandemic has lead to increased adoption of digital practices in doing businesses in the previously traditional corners of corporate India. Companies which were previously fearful of digitising are now embracing it.
- This combined with various government initiatives on digitisation and faceless/contactless governance has led to multiple Startups sprouting, growing and scaling like never before.
As a result, it's a time of renaissance in the IT job market today, as companies like Wipro & Infosys complain of higher than usual voluntary attrition (e.g. Infosys saw the numbers jump from 10% to 15% - a 50% increase in employee attrition over just 1 quarter, Wipro saw ~20% rise in voluntary attrition during the same quarter).
What does this mean for incoming graduates?
First, when voluntary attrition rates are higher, it indicates increased hiring activities across the sector. This is in line with various reports we’re seeing of IT & Software companies hiring more through the pandemic.
It can largely be attributed to the various factors listed above, as the demand for IT professionals grows there are two options companies have:
- First is hiring experienced engineers from within the ecosystem.
- Hiring freshers straight out of campuses and training them to be great engineers.
In my opinion, this is a great time to be graduating out in the industry as a developer aspirant. You have a plethora of opportunities ranging from Services, Product, Homegrown and Multinationals at your disposal.
The industry want's to hire, it is up to you as an individual to become employable. Becoming employable is not limited to being able to solve DS/Algo problems (while it does play an important part in hiring freshers) but also about the following:
- Projects - various things you build while learning new tools
- Internships - past experiences demonstrate our ability to work in corporate environments
- Skills in demand - a detailed blog post on this will follow. But at the crux, do not run behind AI/ML and other skills looking at various marketing tactics. The demand for web/mobile developers, backend developers and infra engineers is much higher than the demand for AI engineers and ML engineers
- Soft skills - ability to articulate thoughts and converse easily, while not a deal breaker is good to have.
Feel free to reach out to me for assistance in understanding any of the above, I run a small community of web & mobile developers where we get down to basics and learn something new every week.
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Ref:
https://www.twilio.com/blog/research-and-development-in-bengaluru
https://hbr.org/2020/10/how-indian-companies-are-using-technology-to-reach-new-consumers
Disclaimer: To be clear, all views expressed above are my own.