Making Sense of India's Tech Job Market
India's IT industry employs over 5.4 million people directly, and tens of millions more depend on the tech ecosystem indirectly. When Infosys, TCS, or Wipro announce quarterly results, the headlines affect not just current employees but lakhs of engineering students planning their careers, families who invested in technical education, and an entire services economy built around IT parks in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, and Chennai.
The coverage of tech employment in Indian media has a persistent problem: it oscillates between two extremes. During hiring booms, outlets publish breathless stories about record-breaking fresher salaries and talent wars. During downturns, the coverage shifts to apocalyptic narratives about mass layoffs and the death of IT. Neither extreme captures the reality that India's tech sector is a complex, stratified market where different segments — product companies versus services firms, startups versus MNCs, AI/ML roles versus legacy maintenance — experience very different conditions simultaneously.
The Layoff Reporting Problem
Tech layoff coverage in India is particularly unreliable. When a global company announces a worldwide reduction in force, Indian media often reports the global number in a way that implies all cuts are happening in India. A headline reading "Google fires 12,000" does not mean 12,000 Indians lost their jobs, yet that is how it reads to an anxious IT professional in Bangalore. Conversely, when Indian IT companies conduct quiet "performance-based" separations — a routine practice that affects thousands annually — the coverage is minimal because these firms are major advertisers.
The conflict of interest is structural. India's largest IT companies are also among the biggest advertisers in business media. Publications that depend on Infosys and TCS advertising revenue have limited incentive to investigate uncomfortable questions about bench strength, moonlighting policies, or the gap between reported and actual attrition rates.
What This Feed Covers
- Hiring trends: Fresher recruitment, lateral hiring, campus placement data
- Layoff tracking: Verified reports from multiple sources, not just global headlines
- Salary and compensation: Increment trends, variable pay, ESOP developments
- Industry shifts: AI impact on jobs, GCC expansion, cloud and cybersecurity demand
- Policy and regulation: Labour code changes, work-from-home norms, non-compete clauses
The Balanced News aggregates business dailies, tech-focused publications, company announcements, and employee community reports to give you a realistic picture of where the Indian tech job market actually stands.
