India’s 5 Million Coders Will Reckon With an AI Jobpocalypse
Employees at computers in the library of the Tata Consultancy Services campus in Chennai, India.
Photographer: Dhiraj Singh
By Saritha Rai
17 April 2023 at 19:00 GMT+8
If the sort of technology underpinning ChatGPT displaces software engineers, no single country would be impacted more than India, home to over 5 million coders.
The prospect, however remote, is giving those like Palash Hade sleepless nights. The newly minted engineer from central India anticipates fewer software jobs to compete for in a country of 1.4 billion.
Hade signed up for an online degree in data science and analytics from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras. It’ll help him stand out if job lines grow long, he hopes.
Not long ago, India’s outsourcing firms were so hungry for talent that they didn’t even mind if an engineer’s background was in chemicals or mining. Training people through in-house coding drills was routine. Fresh-faced recruits are still highly valued in the sector, which builds software systems for global customers like Wall Street banks, Silicon Valley tech titans and the world’s largest airlines and retailers.
India’s (and Asia’s) largest outsourcer, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., has made 46,000 campus offers this year, its chief operating officer, N. Ganapathy Subramaniam, said on Bloomberg TV just after the firm missed profit estimates last week. These days, generative artificial intelligence and ChatGPT start and dominate every client conversation, he said.
Change is fast approaching because of advanced AI, said CP Gurnani, chief executive officer at Tech Mahindra and a four-decade veteran of the IT services industry. At a guest lecture at IIT Hyderabad last week, he found students worried. His message to them: Brace yourselves.
The question for Gurnani isn’t whether AI will take over existing jobs, it’s how fast the new technology will catalyze new jobs and opportunities even as it displaces old roles.
Another cautionary perspective is offered by Professor Y Narahari, who teaches programming at the country’s top engineering school, the Indian Institute of Science. His students aren’t nervous about the advent of AI because they’re the ones who will likely design systems to rival OpenAI’s GPT models or be recruited for their skills by OpenAI itself, the scholar said.
But tens of thousands of other engineers who don’t have degrees from such elite schools have reason to worry. A slump in routine coding jobs is around the corner.
Shraddha Kulkarni, a 21-year-old engineering student in Bangalore, has been actively using ChatGPT. Coding without the assistance of AI will cease, said the student. She thinks many entry-level coding jobs could be obliterated in five years.
At this year’s campus recruitment event, Kulkarni was selected by the tech unit of a global corporation she declined to name. What lies in store for next year’s class is another matter, she said.
Anxiety also pervades Reddit and Quora threads, where developers rue the hundreds of hours they invested in studying jumbled documentation and arcane blogs to build their skills. The advent of their AI-based programming usurpers is all too apparent to them now.
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