IT - 2017

Ever since Donald Trump got elected as US president, there has been sudden downtrend seen in the IT sector as far as India is concerned. The IT recruitment for laterals has seen a huge drop. New opportunities are not seen and new projects are not coming up. New investments are not happening. Existing projects are getting decommissioned. Ever since we saw the 2008 recession, 2017 has been a much more impacted one but not publicized. Clients are expecting to cut down costs and are requiring lots of value added services for the costs incurred. Non performers are getting ousted. Freshers are expected to replace laterals and even lateral hires are paid less. The hike that the industry expects while lateral hiring is not happening. Even for those who have been continuing with the same organization is seeing less hike per year. The industry's future looks gloomy as most of the college students are skipping Engg. and seeking other studies. Onsite opportunities are getting less and people are sent back to India.

Although the Indian PM had visited US, nothing has happened financially to improve investments. The IT companies are still posting good numbers, but it is at the cost of new opportunities. Companies have started to be conservative in hiring as they have begun to focus on hiring contractors for short term than inviting long term employees. In an Indian perspective it is like a Use-and-Throw policy but it has been the case and functioning style in the US. 2017 has been one of the worst markets in the last decade. This is likely to continue next year as well. With Europe not in a good shape over the last few years, we are largely dependent on the US. However US's harsh curb on the economic policies have affected our business outlook. Huge competition is seen within the IT giants of India to get hold of new businesses from the US. The future definitely looks unstable. The employees are expected to be at their best and deliver good results to retain their place. Due to this downtrend the companies are expected to extract work from employees like machines by asking them to work for over 9 hours per day. These organization will now be result oriented and the employee policies are expected to be buried. Managers will have an eye on their employees throughout the day expecting everyday results. Automation will be the new trend which will replace manual effort thereby resulting in few workers delivering results. Automation testing is likely to make huge impact to save time and money. 

Development time allocated will be limited. Charge/hour of employees will be reduced. DEV folks might be encouraged to take up testing/PROD support activities. DEV folks are likely to be put into reporting and testing after DEV is complete. No more the luxury of the workers to choose projects and technology will exist. People should be able to shift technologies or learn new tools. Employees should be on their heels. The condition being like this, we only hope the situation to turn around favoring US to be in good terms with India. We believe things will be change if not in the near term, helping us to be a good business partner for the US. We expect to return to the likes of 2009-10 where the business flourished. We hope for the best.