Tech jobs in India are waiting for tech professionals to fill in soon

In the post-pandemic period where the job loss has been increasing in a few sectors, on the other side tech jobs are offering much-needed cushion by opening doors to new positions and opportunities. Many IT companies are looking for talents as the demand for products and services has been gaining momentum with the shift towards digital technology and services. There are hundreds of tech jobs across various tech firms, who are indeed willing to pay a premium to retain and hire talents.

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According to the report of Xpheno, an expert staffing firm revealed that Indian IT services, start-ups, and other product companies are recruiting 70,000 people across almost six positions by offering a hike of over 50-60 percent. The six roles of high demand are full-stack developers, data engineers, react native developers, DevOps, backend engineers, and machine learning experts.

Tech talents

Many new positions have come up along with tech job openings post-covid period with high requirement of tech talents due to the broader trend of enterprises world moving towards digital technology and services.

Rishad Premji, Chairman of Wipro, said in a letter to the shareholders in the company’s financial year 2021 annual report, “Technology is often at the forefront of economic recovery, but especially so now, as the pandemic has precipitated structural changes across industries and challenges established ways of working”.

This shift can result in huge demand for tech jobs and talents that can be a key factor in driving the growth of tech companies. Accenture had 3,000 positions open in 2020 to 18,000 in April 2021 and now increased to 32,000. This is due to the demand for tech professionals and due to this the company is back to pre-pandemic levels. The company is also increasing the salaries according to the skills and geographies to retain the talents.

The CEO of Accenture, Julie Sweet, said during an earnings call,” It is not the highest the company has seen. It is an industry phenomenon and we are comfortable”.

The other condition is that the CEO of Cognizant, Brain Humphries during an earnings call stated that the company has lost projects as it could not hire the talents needed.

Since companies are in need of professionals, they are offering hikes and also building in-house talents to keep their employees on their side. Tech companies such as TCS, Infosys, and Wipro have already disclosed the second round of raises after they have rolled out the first one. And Accenture has promoted a record of 1.17lakh employees of which 1,200 were already to the managing director level.

The HCL Tech’s Chief Human Resources Officer, V.V Apparoa said that the company will now hire nearly 70percent of freshers more than the others in the years to come since it has hired 40percent freshers and 60percent laterals this time. With demand for skilled professionals has increased, finding talent becomes expensive day by day.

Salaries for Top Skills in Demand

Fullstack Engineers: With an experience of about 4 to 7years the package per annum is up to 20lakhs.

Data Engineers/Analytics: With an experience of about 3 to 6years the package per annum is up to 22lakhs.

React/Native: With an experience of about 4 to 7years, the package per annum is up to 22lakhs.

SRE/DevOps: With an experience of about 4 to 7years the package per annum is up to 20lakhs.

Machine Learning: With an experience of about 3 to 6years the package per annum is up to 22lakhs.

Back End Engineers: With an experience of about 4 to 7years, the package per annum is up to 20lakhs.

Tech Jobs in India

Cognizant, a multinational company that provides business consulting, IT, and outsourcing services has the highest openings for tech talents, about 35,000.

Accenture is a tech firm that provides consulting and professional services has about 32,000 openings to fill up tech talents.

IBM is a company that explores trending technologies such as Cloud, Artificial Intelligence and has nearly 6,500 job opportunities.

Wipro is a giant tech company that delivers innovation-led strategy, technologies and business consultation services has 2,405 awaiting positions to fill.

Microsoft is a multinational technology company that produces computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services has 850 job openings.

This is a great opportunity for all the tech people over there to try your luck.

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An Artificial Intelligence (AI) firm with connections to the 2016 Vote Leave campaign has been awarded seven government contracts in the last 18 months.

According to the Guardian, Faculty, which traded under the name Advanced Skills Initiative during the 2016 referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union, has won seven contracts totaling around £280,000 of government work.

Faculty chief executive Marc Warren also attended a Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies (SAGE) meeting; Faculty confirmed that Marc Warren attended the Sage meeting as an observer for NHSX.

Meanwhile his brother, data scientist Ben Warner, was recruited to Downing Street last year for the Conservative Party’s general election campaign, and also attended SAGE meetings to provide advice to ministers on COVID-19.

Faculty is also working at the heart of the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, processing large volumes of confidential UK patient information alongside US firm Palantir, although it has clarified that it only has access to data that has been aggregated or anonymised by the NHS. The NHS has stated that the companies involved do not control the data and are not permitted to use or share it for their own purposes

One tender was a £250,000 cross-government review on the adoption of AI, issued by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and Government Digital Service (GDS), a body which promotes the use of digital technology to improve public services, in 2019. Cabinet Office minister Theodore Agnew also reportedly has a £90,000 shareholding in Faculty.

The contract was intended “to identify the most significant opportunities to introduce AI across government with the aim of increasing productivity and improving the quality of public services.”

Another contract was awarded in 2018 for £32,000 to fund fellowships to place data scientists in city governments to help solve local challenges. Faculty was at that time operating under its original name, Advanced Skills Initiative.

Other contracts include a £264,000 contract from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy to monitor the impact of the coronavirus on industry, and a £600,000 contract from the Home Office to track terrorist videos online.

Holly Searle, Faculty’s head of PR and communications, told the Guardian: “Faculty has strong governance procedures in place to guard against conflicts of interest when competing for new work. All of its contracts with the government are won through the proper processes and in line with procurement rules.” Infosecurity has reached out to Faculty for further comment.

A government spokesperson said Agnew had had no role in awarding any contracts to Faculty while he had been a minister, and he had followed the appropriate procedures by declaring his shareholding in House of Lords register of interests and under the ministerial code of conduct.

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The Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (Dewa) has announced the continued success of its Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions that are helping it keep pace with the rapid developments all around the world.

Dewa started its AI journey since 2017 and developed a road map for AI techniques. It has initiated services and initiatives that use AI to enhance and add value to the customer, employee, and stakeholder experiences. Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer, MD and CEO of Dewa, said that using AI at Dewa to provide smart and innovative services aligns with its strategy to achieve the Dubai 10X initiative.

The initiative was launched by His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, to develop Dubai Government services, putting Dubai 10 years ahead of other global cities. It also aligns with the Smart Dubai initiative to make Dubai the smartest and happiest city in the world; the UAE Centennial 2071; the UAE Strategy for the Fourth Industrial Revolution; and Dubai Plan 2021 to make Dubai proactive and creative in meeting the needs of individuals and society.

Al Tayer noted that in 2014, Dewa completed the smart transformation of all its services by 100 per cent, less than a year after the Smart Dubai initiative was launched. Dewa initiated the AI Steering Committee to effectively contribute to its efforts to make Dubai a global hub for disruptive technologies and the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This achieves the National Artificial Intelligence Strategy 2031.

Dewa collaborated with Smart Dubai to apply the AI Ethics and Principles in all its projects and initiatives, and Smart Dubai AI Lab. Dewa launched Digital Dewa as its digital arm, with four pillars, making Dewa the world’s first digital utility to use autonomous systems for renewable energy, storage, expansion in AI adoption, and providing digital services. The First Pillar is Solar Energy and this includes launching advanced solar power technologies in Dubai. One of Dewa’s key projects in this regard is the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park, the world’s largest single-site solar park, with a planned capacity of 5,000MW by 2030. The solar park supports the Dubai Clean Energy Strategy 2050 to produce 75 per cent of Dubai’s total power output from clean energy sources.

The Second Pillar is Energy Storage in which Digital Dewa seeks to operate a renewable energy network using innovative energy storage technologies. The Third Pillar revolves around Artificial Intelligence to make Dubai the first city to provide AI-based electricity and water services. In line with this, Dewa launched Rammas. Through Rammas, Dewa is expanding its use of AI to all its operations. Through this pillar, Dewa will deploy machine learning to augment customer experience, support employee services and productivity enhancement, and optimise core grid operations.

The Fourth Pillar revolves around Digital Services where Digital Dewa will expand its digital services through Data Hub Integrated Solutions (Moro) and its strategic vision to be the most preferred choice for the public and private sectors in the UAE and the region in terms of data storage and cloud-based digital service management. This enhances the integration of institutional operations, monitoring operations, providing the best suggestions for decision making.

This pillar also includes launching Digital X and Infra X companies, owned by Dewa. Rammas, Dewa’s virtual employee, uses AI to assist customers and answer their enquiries in both Arabic and English, through seven channels for customer service. These include Dewa’s smart app (iOS and Android), Dewa’s website and social media account on Facebook, Amazon’s Alexa, and Google Assistant, robots, and WhatsApp Business. Right now, 10 robots have been dedicated to customer service at the Future and Customer Happiness Centres. These provide a wide range of services, such as enquiries, paying bills, moving to a new place, and providing information on Customer Happiness Centres among other FAQs.

Rammas is able to learn and process customers’ needs, analyse and evaluate as per given data, and respond accurately to facilitate transactions. Since its inception in Q1 of 2017, Rammas has responded to over three million customer queries on 284 topics. This saved more than Dh36 million.

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WHEN the first printed books with illustrations started to appear in the 1470s in the German city of Augsburg, wood engravers rose up in protest. Worried about their jobs, they literally stopped the presses. In fact, their skills turned out to be in higher demand than before: somebody had to illustrate the growing number of books.

Fears about the impact of technology on jobs have resurfaced periodically ever since. The latest bout of anxiety concerns the arrival of artificial intelligence (AI). Once again, however, technology is creating demand for work. To take one example, more and more people are supplying digital services online via what is sometimes dubbed the “human cloud”. Counter-intuitively, many are doing so in response to AI.

According to the World Bank, more than 5m people already offer to work remotely on online marketplaces such as Freelancer.com and UpWork. Jobs range from designing websites to writing legal briefs, and typically bring in at least a few dollars an hour. In 2016 such firms earned about $6bn in revenue, according to Staffing Industry Analysts, a market researcher. Those who prefer work in smaller bites can use “micro-work” sites such as Mechanical Turk, a service operated by Amazon. About 500,000 “Turkers” perform tasks such as transcribing bits of audio, often earning no more than a few cents for each “human-intelligence task”.

Many big tech companies employ, mostly through outsourcing firms, thousands of people who police the firms’ own services and control quality. Google is said to have an army of 10,000 “raters” who, among other things, look at YouTube videos or test new services. Microsoft operates something called a Universal Human Relevance System, which handles millions of micro-tasks each month, such as checking the results of its search algorithms.

These numbers are likely to rise. One reason is increasing demand for “content moderation”. A new law in Germany will require social media to remove any content that is illegal in the country, such as Holocaust denial, within 24 hours or face hefty fines. Facebook has announced that it will increase the number of its moderators globally, from 4,500 to 7,500.

AI will eliminate some forms of this digital labour—software, for instance, has got better at transcribing audio. Yet AI will also create demand for other types of digital work. The technology may use a lot of computing power and fancy mathematics, but it also relies on data distilled by humans. For autonomous cars to recognise road signs and pedestrians, algorithms must be trained by feeding them lots of video showing both. That footage needs to be manually “tagged”, meaning that road signs and pedestrians have to be marked as such. This labelling already keeps thousands busy. Once an algorithm is put to work, humans must check whether it does a good job and give feedback to improve it.

A service offered by CrowdFlower, a micro-task startup, is an example of what is called “human in the loop”. Digital workers classify e-mail queries from consumers, for instance, by content, sentiment and other criteria. These data are fed through an algorithm, which can handle most of the queries. But questions with no simple answer are again routed through humans.

You might expect humans to be taken out of the loop as algorithms improve. But this is unlikely to happen soon, if ever, says Mary Gray, who works for Microsoft’s research arm. Algorithms may eventually become clever enough to handle some tasks on their own and to learn by themselves. But consumers and companies will also expect ever-smarter AI services: digital assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana will have to answer more complex questions. Humans will still be needed to train algorithms and handle exceptions.

Accordingly, Ms Gray and Siddharth Suri, her collaborator at Microsoft Research, see services such as UpWork and Mechanical Turk as early signs of things to come. They expect much human labour to be split up into distinct tasks which can be delivered online and combined with AI offerings. A travel agency, for instance, might use AI to deal with routine tasks (such as booking a flight), but direct the more complicated ones (a request to create a customised city tour, say) to humans.

Michael Bernstein of Stanford University sees things going even further. He anticipates the rise of temporary “firms” whose staff are hired online and configured with the help of AI. To test the idea, Mr Bernstein and his team developed a program to assemble such virtual companies for specific projects—for instance, recruiting workers and assigning them tasks in order to design a smartphone app to report injuries from an ambulance racing to a hospital.

Working in such “flash organisations” could well be fun. But many fear that the human cloud will create a global digital proletariat. Sarah Roberts of the University of California, Los Angeles, found that content moderators often suffer from burnout after checking dodgy social-media content for extended periods. Mark Graham of the University of Oxford concludes that platforms for online work do indeed offer new sources of income for many, particularly in poor countries, but that these services also drive down wages. So governments need to be careful when designing big digital-labour programmes—as Kenya has done, hoping to train more than 1m people for online jobs.

Technology is rarely an unalloyed bane or blessing. The printing press created new work for the wood engravers in Augsburg, but they quickly discovered that it had become much more repetitive. Similar trade-offs are likely in future.

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