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Comment by alecco

14 days ago

AI? Ah, India.

"Over $50 billion in under 24 hours: Why Big Tech is doubling down on investing in India" https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/11/big-tech-microsoft-amazon-go...

I can confirm from consulting experience that India is where the jobs went. My office provides professional services to North American and European industrial customers in manufacturing and distribution. Roughly 85% of these customers have fully Indian IT teams. Running a SOQL query in our Salesforce instance for 'Devi', 'Singh', and 'Kumar' yields over two thousand hits across client contacts, even.

Since the workers are hired for cost over quality, they're typically incompetent. Though many have learned to parasitize SME and support staff expertise by asking highly specific questions in an extended sequence. It's a salami-slicing strategy where the majority of the work ends up being performed by those SMEs and support staff while the incompetent workers collect the paychecks and credit. I'm pushing my teams to more aggressively identify and call out this behavior, but it's so systemic that it's an endless battle with every new project coming in the door.

Personal frustrations aside, it's very dangerous from both economic and national security perspectives for India to be building and administering so much of the West's IT infrastructure. Our entire economy depends on it, yet we're voluntarily concentrating that dependency in a single foreign nation. A Pacific conflict alone could sever us from the majority of our IT workforce, regardless of India's intentions.

Currently looking for a new role in biotech and it seems like at many companies it is almost 40:1 india vs united states roles being posted. This is in R&D not even manufacturing.

  • If the US actually cared about retaining jobs for the people they would enforce ratios of onshore / offshore with heavy taxes if companies did not reach that ratio.

    Companies don't want to pay US salaries, cost of living in the US are not going down, costs of engineering talent in India is cheaper, you can hire 2 devs for the cost of 1 US dev. Why would you ever have any US engineering devs?

    It won't change organically unless the costs of India engineers goes up or the costs of US engineers goes down.

    • > If the US actually

      Who has more control over government, the people or the 0.0001%? There is no "US", you are not part of the club.

    • the US could just require indians be paid the same as US workers then companies would be incentivized to hire more from home. You are correct, it is far cheaper to hire indians due to tax incentivize and regulations