A couple of weeks ago, I was speaking to Rituparna Chakraborty, partner at True Search India and co-founder of recruitment firm Teamlease. We were recording a short segment for an earlier episode of The Ken’s 90,000 Hours podcast, which by the way is four episodes in and officially two months old!

Once we wrapped up our 30-minute interview, I hit pause on the platform we record on, and promptly did what most reporters do: I used the last few moments of a conversation to see if there was a germ of an idea for another story.

“So, Rituparna, the TCS layoffs,” I said, admittedly with zero chill. “Cutting 12,000 jobs seems like a pretty drastic step. What’s going on there?”

She told me India’s $280 billion IT services industry is at an inflection point, and that there was a bigger story unfolding. Between artificial intelligence, geopolitical shifts, and client budgets being redirected, the sector is caught in what Nitish Mittal, a partner at global research firm Everest Group, described to me separately as a “perfect storm”.

Rituparna said that the layoffs were an early indicator of a massive reset for the industry. Then, she added a comment that stuck with me:

That line sent me down a rabbit hole. Rituparna’s comment was about the industry’s decades-old pyramid model, where IT companies would hire many, many, many software engineers. As you moved up in the organisation, each layer had fewer people; eventually, some of those employees became managers, and they continued to work their way up the corporate ladder.

India’s IT sector was once the country’s most reliable employer, one that people aspired to join and where they built their careers over decades. But that last part is becoming less true.

I wanted to understand how those changes were being felt on the ground, so I released a survey. More than 100 of you—across roles, functions, and levels of experience—sent in answers, providing a gamut of perspectives. Over 44% of those who wrote in had more than 11 years of experience in the industry, and around 40% had less than five. Aside from software engineers, I also heard from business analysts, consultants, project managers, and a handful of CXOs.