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Page 1 of 7 As Indian software companies continue to recruit like there's no tomorrow, salaries are rising (Ref: Satyam hikes salaries), job sites and?job sections in newspapers are flooded with IT job ads. So is all this good news for India and its IT talent or is there a darker side to it??
Most believe that these are good days for IT in India and?almost all companies are recruiting on a massive scale. Recruitments are happening across the board for all kinds of skill sets, including J2EE. Only yesterday, a friend told me that his company is having a Diwali Dhamaka recruitment drive so that those who refer new employees at the time of the Diwali festival get some additional gifts apart from the standard amount one gets when a referral actually joins the company and stays with it for a few months. I then had a look at the current Business World magazine and say these amazing statistics. Infosys, TCS and Wipro together added a whopping 14,530 new employees in just 3 months (July-Sep 04) !!! These three together have 110,960 employees! And these are just three of the many IT companies in India. So if you consider the recruitments happening at IBM, Oracle, HSBC, Cognizant, i-flex.....the figures would be startling to say the least! Source: Business World Sounds good ??? I am not so sure.? What worries me are the conclusions one can draw from these figures: - The idea of "knowledge workers" is a big sham. IT professionals are glorified in India and elsewhere as smart people doing highly intellectual tasks. I think that is very far away from the truth. I refuse to believe that TCS, Infosys and Wipro have intellectual work for 110,960 people.
- So obviously most work happening here is mundane and repetitive. Companies seem to think that the solution for every problem comes when you throw more employees at it. So you are essentially paying smart men and women big salaries to handle stupid tasks. BPO is the best example of this. Have a look at Brain Paralysing Outfits?by Mahesh Murthy.
- The mantra today is "The more the employees, the bigger and better the company" when it actually should be the "The more innovation, the more the creation of intellectual property, the bigger the international presence, the better the company". When was the last time you heard of a ingenious new software coming from any of these giant Indian companies?
- Perhaps the most worrying factor is that, as with all good things, this phase will not last forever. A few years back some companies laid off 50-100 employees and there was a major hue and cry about it. However this time round the layoff would not be in the single or double digits. It would be on a scale that India has never seen before. There are no employee bodies to protect employee interests and so I wonder who can possibly stop this day from coming. Having said that, IT employees don't even seem willing to recognize this possibility.? Consumerism has swept India and most IT professionals are between 20-40 and are carrying loans of a million rupees and more!
- The value of an individual is negligible or zero. You are no more than an EmployeeId. So if you are a fresh graduate with dreams of changing the world, a small 10 person company might be a better option than being just Another Brick in The Wall!
Although I risk being termed a?pessimist, I hope I have at least provided a different point of view and some food for thought. I am looking forward to reading your comments on the subject.?
Related:
>> IT Survivors - Staying Alive In A Software Job
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Comment by Guest on 2004-10-28 17:19:08
I totally agree with the view expressed in the article. I personally believe that indian IT giants are not having any right to say that they are the best and all. They are just a software services companies as other exist. As mentioned in the article none of these IT giants have delivered a product which is a competition to MS-office, winzip etc. I think these companies are just in hurry to get equal with Indian Railways. As per my knowledge Indian Railway's strength is around 10 Lakh people. |
Comment by Guest on 2004-10-28 17:58:29
Check this interview: [URL=http://www.computerworld.com/managementtopics/outsourcing/story/0,10801,83309,00.html]Q&A: Cognizant CEO says, 'We're recruiting like crazy'[/URL] |
Comment by Guest on 2004-10-29 10:34:42
There is only one industry all over the world that recruits with irrelevent background - may it be Civil engineer or a BA and thats the Software Industry. The reason being simple - get a person into the organissation, train him/her and put him to work. The current trend of recruitment is only worried about the number of employees they can hire so as to increase their respective revenues. If all are aware, most of the service based companies are being paid in 3-digit dollards per day per employee irrespective of the designation of the employee. So the aim is to increase the number. I will say that out of the whole recruitment process, only 5 - 10% recruitment is of the "Quality" people. By the term "Quality" I mean - a person who is really into 'Computers', who knows what his future and aim is. But anyway I wont blame the companies for such kind of recruitments. I believe that if someone is leaving a manufacturing industry and joining a S/W just for money, its really a short-term thinking. And due to the 'high' pay factor in the S/W, there are tonnes of such individuals who are willing to do any kind of a job in a S/W organisation. I met a friend of mine who has a well-to-do job in statistics, and to my amazement, he too was desperate getting into a S/W industry. What these people are looking at is a future for say 2-3 years. But waht after that? |
Comment by Guest on 2004-10-29 11:20:41
The most important point discussed in this article is absence of some body who will fight for employees rights. I haven?t heard till date that a trade union is formed in any of these IT majors. I agree that there are disadvantages of trade union. But I strongly feel that in each and every organization there should be some governing body. And a bad thing is that this is not happening in software industry. And the most of sad thing that even not a single ?knowledge worker? feels that there is a need of governing body. All these people are living in comfort zone. So all these so called IT majors just recruit really like crazy and when the slowdown starts at the same speed they start the lay offs. From my point of view all these 110,960 people are orphans. The only backing to these people is just of a fat pay packages. |
Comment by Guest on 2004-10-29 14:17:43
Any person doing any run-of-the-mill job is certainly not a knowledge worker. And the institution for which he works for can't claim to be a part of the knowledge-based industry. How can a person with a metallurgy background, with 4 weeks of training in computer science be classified as a knowledge worker? Charles Simonyi , David Kruglinski, Linus Torvald, Charles Petzold, Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie etc. these are knowledge workers. As for these so called programming experts working for the MNC?s, if you asked a person working in VC++ how the windows directories and messages are handled internally, he will most probably start browsing through the BSNL telephone directory. I personally know a few "core" C/VC++ programmers (wonder if there is an synonym for "core" that I still don't know of) who still think that the only difference between Win 98 and 2000 is that Win 2000 has a better GUI. |
Comment by Guest on 2004-11-03 15:02:26
The rate at which offshore companies are recruiting is alarming.The days of arguing on whether to use bubble sort or insertion sort in a code are gone.Partially Software Industry overall too is responsible for this.25 years back,if you can not tell the difference between tree and trie then you can not be in software writing.Now business model has changed.(Things have changed in last 20 years--Bill Gates).From Indian persepctive,things seem to be good now but can change any time once cheaper global destination is found. |
Comment by Guest on 2004-11-04 23:19:40
I think India is getting there. Many US giants such as Oracle, IBM, Microsoft are setting up R & D stations in India and am sure those jobs are not like your average BPO job.
One just has to find the right job for himself/herself. Not everybody is destined to innovate. We don't want million Indian programmers innovating and not writing software
that can be used today for daily business.
Not every US IT job is about innovation either and to discount what an average Indian IT person does for a living as "not so smart" is kinda sweeping.
Should IIT grads be writing the next OS? Thats a tough one. Writing truly ground breaking technology requires skills as well as
intentions.
How many parents would be happy with their IIT grad son not having a job but "innovating" in the house. So it is very much cultural too..
So there...
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Comment by Guest on 2004-11-10 15:30:07
Hey Guys ,
just stop this word 'knowledege workers' Its absloutely pathetic terminology .Information is not knowledge.IT has nothing to do with knowledge per se.This is sick .
The media ,fat salary ,consumerism are trying to just create a myth that we are creating a KNOWLEDGE BASED industry.ITs job is clerical .
and IT professioanls are trying to make clerks more efficient .PERIOD. |
Comment by Guest on 2004-11-15 19:12:07
[URL=http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/922854.cms]Ness Tech to up India staff to 2,700[/URL]
[URL=http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/923106.cms]MS to hire hundreds more in India[/URL][*]null |
Comment by Guest on 2004-11-16 14:12:42
There seems to be some mis-conception or confusion here.
I work for a company that is building J2EE based product. Although not architected in India, the complete work involves a great load of understanding and implementation of best practices. If it had been a clerical stuff, I had been copying and pasting some existing servlet/jsp, ejb and jdbc code into the project. I or my team hardly does that. Not sure of Infy/Wipro etc. but the kind of work our guys in most of the companies do (esp. in J2EE) is surely adding a lot to their knowledge and career. Ask them if they knew what a connection pooling is a year ago. Now they will tell you 10 existing solutions and 1 built by their own intelligence for a custom and proprietary requirement.
Same way, for a senior software engineer or tech lead, the concepts have gone till the level of design patterns and they too are all set to go for architecting some product/solution in the near future.
Lets not discourage the very possibility of India being the tech. destination of the globe. Our guys are surely competitive enough, they just need opportunity and direction.
I have to say one thing. If you are a programmer/developer/software engineer, trust me, nothing can take you away from earning your bread and butter if you make yourself dedicated to a technology and learn to see where it is going. You may lose out the weekend pub parties and Arrow shirts, but you sure would live without them for a while :) |
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