Comment by _nedR | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _nedR | Hacker News Reader

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Lately, I have been noticing the "increasing automation, use of artificial intelligence " line being touted by Indian offshoring companies whenever they talk about laying off or reduced recruitment. What exactly is the automation or artificial intelligence being used? I never hear any details.

Are they doing something radically new involving machine learning which allows them to be much more productive?

Or have they refined or streamlined their scripting environments and automated build\deploy tools? Perhaps they have built a suitably large and mature framework of components from previous projects which allows greater code re-use? In these cases, using words like "Automation" and "AI" is just putting a new sticker on an old product.

Or are companies just using these buzzwords to give a positive spin to an event whose real reasons are actually more mundane and financial(weak market conditions, reducing bloat in workforce ). Maybe they are attempting to mask something more ominous like significant shift in the market away from offshoring?

I suspect there's some truth to it, mixed in with the type of pulp fiction you identify.

For instance, consider the structural changes induced by the whole "cloud" phenomenon. In what is termed "legacy" infrastructure by the "cloud-minded", there is, classically, a whole caste (no pun intended) of operations and sysadmin people with a skill set of "installing servers", "keeping servers running", deploying software packages, applying patches, etc. A large stampede to cloud really does reduce a lot of this mundane but relatively skilled labour, in theory--it's one of the main selling points: lay off 80% of your sysadmin because the infrastructure mostly runs itself! To the extent that it doesn't, focus your operations efforts with a much smaller, leaner team of Cloud Rock Star Ninjas or whatever.

And "mundane but relatively skilled" is, as I understand it, the preferred area for classical Indian offshoring companies' labour arbitrage plays, since it's perceived to be the ideal target range, rightly or wrongly, for outsourcing by developed-world executives.

Then there's all the company that "cloud" has kept, whether conceptually or as a matter of timely coincidence, e.g. the slow fading of the distinction Corporate America makes between Operations and Engineering.

I have dealt quite a bit with these companies. They have great presentations about all the cool stuff they did for other companies and competencies they have. But when they get hired these competencies rarely materialize and you pretty much have a bunch of young engineers who don't know much. The senior architects who did the selling quickly disappear. I have never seen any of the advanced systems, processes and frameworks they are supposed to have actually being used at the customer site.

I've seen a lot of these systems up-front. The reality is that most of them are RPA (Robotic Process Automation) tools. Vendors like BluePrism, Arago, and Automation Anywhere are some examples.

Longer term, they are trying to incorporate some learning algorithms to define a finite number of predetermined outcomes when those systems above spit out errors. A lot of this ultimately leverages error log analysis, known error databases, integrations to ServiceNow, and some scripts to take corrective action.

Configuration management tools? Powershell?

Traditional Windows system administration involves a ton of menial labor clicking through things according to procedures written down in Microsoft Word.

Maybe they are starting to operate more like tech companies with their Linux server fleets than SMEs with their Windows domains?

Dunno what the actual machine learning application would be.

> Are they doing something radically new involving machine learning which allows them to be much more productive?

Well they most likely not. But point here that they are losing lots of business so they would just not need that many people. If one read history it is the same pattern repeating first with textile, then component manufacturing in India. They think cost arbitrage is all it takes to become world leader. It works for some time and then labor saving techniques replace low cost labor.

> What exactly is the automation or artificial intelligence being used?

Arguably continuous integration and deployment are forms of automation that eliminate developer jobs. It's not that there was a "run unit tests" job, but all developers got more productive so maybe a four person team could do the work of a five person team.

Or maybe that refactoring to migrate to the new architecture didn't require help from contractors anymore.

Nope, this is just a hype, as usual. The journalists are getting lazy, especially Indian journalists, they write anything like this for the sake of writing. There is no such thing as "due to automation and AI" revenues are down, on the contrary IF automation and AI is done, revenues and profits will go up! because of automation 4 people will be able to do work of 10 people. dumb journalism

I think this is the other way around: the world is moving towards machine learning and other complex stuff and Indian developers simply cannot keep up, given their average education and experience levels. Offshore development teams has always been of limited use for this exact reason, and now they are of even less use.

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