IT jobs ~ Over the years #DWBI

2006 - The year of IT that saw great spending and investment in the sector enabling creation of thousands of jobs in India. Particularly US did great investment with Banking and Finance and Healthcare being the driving domains where Business flourished globally. Me being in the Data warehousing and Business Intelligence horizontal was a true gift considering the velocity with which the sector was growing. Huge demand was there for Business Intelligence, Developers and Testers alike were hired in batches. Doing an Engg. In Electronics and Communication and IT were truly favorable at those times. India was growing with great pace especially in the IT sector. The INR too was weak and the Dollar up enabling massive profits for IT giants.

2008 – The Lehman Brothers collapse leading to the entire reshuffle and reorganization of the leading Banks in the world. Almost all the sectors drove southwards due to this big fall of the Banks. Thousands lost their jobs but considering this as a one time fall, the stock markets fell about 20% globally and the Banks looked promising to re-structure themselves and be back in the race again. The Indian companies tried cost cutting and started focusing on the productivity of individual employees. Lots of emphasis were given for process improvements in the code and offering value additions to the client. Employees were deliberately asked to provide at least 2 value additions per month to be in the race. Lots of analysis were done on the existing projects and ideas of coming up with limited/short term Fixed-Bid projects came into picture.

2010 – Re-grouping and boom started again in case of jobs creation. Although the jobs created in the US were still down, India performed well due to the principle of cost cutting and outsourcing by the US companies. India was the driver in these turbulent market conditions and we started moving upward. Those who lost their jobs came back again and felt relief. But the Global and US markets were under the radar consistently. Lots of competition was there between various DWBI tools in the market and the race was healthy. Lots of new technologies came fresh and acquired considerable amount of market space.

2012 – INR got weaker and weaker and the Dollar was the single trusted entity in the world although Gold too was seen as a safe asset with their prices and demand going upward. The talks of Greece, Spain exit from the EURO was a cause of concern and the entire Europe was under performing. The exit would have led to the weakening of the EURO currency and Germany was offering lots of help financially to those loss led nations.

2014  - Outlook looked still gloomy with the case of potential BREXIT from Europe. UK’s job data was very poor and inflation was high. IT investments from Europe and Britain to India were at record lows. US was however performing just about fine. The Dollar still ruled the world.

2016 – Global and Indian stock markets were at record highs and the Dollar was still strong. Gold came down a bit. The cycle of losing jobs had just started. Big Data tools ruled the markets. DWBI came down drastically.

2018 – The jobs data in India has gotten worse. The IT companies showed good profits but the actual job data in the country has been unfair. DWBI jobs were hit and the rise of Data Science really offloaded the jobs from the Developers and requirements were more inclined towards people with both business and limited technical knowledge. Data Scientists are in high demand right now and BI professionals are highly hit. It has thus become a mandate to move to other programming languages and gear towards AI and machine learning than relying on the old DWBI fundamentals. With the rise of Big data, things have gotten worse for those relying on the traditional OLAP systems and architecture. The future is Data science and the DWBI professionals need to be aware of the statistics, Mathematics and machine learning if they are to stay working. Someone moved the cheese and the IT jobs data in the country are at new lows. The market is too dull and there are no openings for DWBI professionals outside. Hope the latter part of 2018 might bring some hope to the despair lost folks. Gear up for Data Science.