IT Survivors – Staying Alive In A Software Job
Before I started working for myself, I spent some years in some of the top IT companies in India and still have many friends working in various software companies. I wrote a blog Recruiting like crazy, about the same time last year about how Indian companies are recruiting like there’s no tomorrow and the possible consequences. However I was avoiding writing this particular piece as it seems like an unpatriotic thing to do, to tell the world how bad the working conditions in software companies in India have become. And there’s always the risk of excerpts being used out of context to bash up IT in India.
I am now writing this because I just keep hearing horror tales from the industry and it doesn’t seem like anything is being done in the matter, so I thought I will do my bit and write.
First and foremost, before stereotypes about India kick in, I would like to clarify that I am not saying that Indian software companies are sweat shops where employees aren’t being paid and made to
work in cramped uncomfortable places. The pay in software companies is very good as compared to other industries in India and the work places are generally well furnished and plush offices. India being a strong democracy, freedom of expression is alive and well and Indians are free to express their opinions and voice their concerns. Yet, I say that the software industry is exploiting its employees.
IT work culture in India is totally messed up and has now started harming the work culture of the nation as a whole. Working 12+ hours a day and 6 or even 7 days a week is more the rule than the exception.
Consequences:
- A majority of IT people suffer from health problems.As most of the IT workforce is still very young, the problem isn’t very obvious today but it will hit with unbearable ferocity when these youngsters get to their 40s.
- Stress levels are unbelievable high. Stress management is a cover topic in magazines and newspapers and workshops on the subject are regularly overbooked.
- Most IT people have hardly any social / family life to talk of.
- As IT folk are rich by Indian standards, they try to buy their way out of their troubles and have incurred huge debts by buying expensive houses, gizmos and fancy cars.
Plush offices, fat salaries and latest gizmos can give you happiness only if you have a life in the first place.
The reason I feel this culture has emerged, is the servile attitude of the companies. Here’s a tip for any company in the west planning to outsource to India. If you feel that a project can be completed in 6 weeks by 4 people, always demand that it be completed in 2 weeks by 3 people.
Guess what, most Indian companies will agree. The project will then be hyped up as an “extremely critical” one and the 3 unfortunate souls allocated to it will get very close to meeting the almighty by the time they deliver the project in 2 weeks. Surprisingly, they will deliver in 2-3 weeks, get bashed up for any delays and the company will soon boast about how they deliver good quality in reasonable time and cost. Has anyone in India ever worked on a project that wasn’t “extremely critical”?
I was once at a session where a top boss of one of India’s biggest IT firms was asked a question about what was so special about their company and his answer was that we are the “Yes” people with the “We Can Do It ” attitude.
It is all very well for the top boss to say “We Can Do It “.. what about the project teams who wish to say “Please….We Can’t Do It ” to the unreasonable timelines…I was tempted to ask “What death benefits does your company offer to the teams that get killed in the process?”. I sure was ashamed to see that a fellow Indian was openly boasting about the fact that he and his company had no backbone. The art of saying No or negotiating reasonable time frames for the team is very conspicuous by its absence. Outsourcing customers more often than not simply walk all over Indian software companies. The outsourcer surely cannot be blamed as it is right for him to demand good quality in the least cost and time.
Exhaustion = Zero Innovation
- How many Indians in India are thought leaders in their software segment? – Very few
- How much software innovation happens in India? – Minimal
- Considering that thousands of Indians in India use Open Source software, how many actually contribute? – Very few
Surprisingly, put the same Indian in a company “in” the US and he suddenly becomes innovative and a thought leader in his field.
The reason is simple, the only thing an exhausted body and mind can do well, is sleep. zzzzzz
I can pretty much bet on it that we will never see innovation from any of 10000+ person code factories in India.
If you are someone sitting in the US, UK… and wondering why the employees can’t stand up, that’s the most interesting part of the story. Read on…
The Problem
The software professional Indian is today making more money in a month than what his parents might have made in an year. Very often a 21 year old newbie software developer makes more money than his/her 55 year old father working in an old world business. Most of these youngsters are well aware of this gap and so work under an impression that they are being paid an unreasonable amount of money. They naturally equate unreasonable money with unreasonable amount of work.
Another important factor is this whole bubble that an IT person lives in.. An IT professional walks with a halo around his or her head. They are the Cool, Rich Gen Next .. the Intelligentsia of the New World… they travel all over the world, vacation at exotic locations abroad, talk “american”, are more familiar of the geography of the USA than that of India and yes of course, they are the hottest things in the Wedding Market!!!
This I feel is the core problem because if employees felt they were being exploited, things would change.
I speak about this to some of my friends and the answer is generally “Hey Harshad, what you say is correct and we sure are suffering, but why do you think we are being paid this much money? It’s not for 40 hours but for 80 hours a week. And anyway what choice do we have? It’s the same everywhere.”
So can we make things change? Is there a way to try and stop an entire generation of educated Indians from ending up with “no life”.
Solutions
1) Never complement someone for staying till midnight or working 7 days a week.
Recently, in an awards ceremony at a software company, the manager handing over the “employee of the month” award said something like “It’s unbelievable how hard he works. When I come to office early, I see him working, when I leave office late, I still see him working”.. These sort of comments can kill the morale of every employee trying to do good work in an 8hr day.
Companies need to stop hiding behind the excuse that the time difference between India and the west is the reason why people need to stay in office for 14 hours a day. Staying late should be a negative thing that should work against an employee in his appraisals. Never complement someone for staying till midnight or working 7 days a week .
2) Estimates:
If time estimates go wrong, the company should be willing to take a hit and not force the employee to work crazy hours to bail projects out of trouble. This will ensure that the estimates made for the next project are more real and not just what the customer has asked for.
3) Employee organizations / forums
NASSCOM (National Association for Software and Services Companies) and CSI (Computer Society Of India) are perhaps the only two well known software associations in India and both I feel have failed the software employee. I do not recall any action from these organizations to try and improve the working conditions of software employees. This has to change.
I am not in favor of forming trade unions for software people, as trade unions in India have traditionally been more effective at ruining businesses and making employees inefficient than getting employees their rights and helping business do well. So existing bodies like NASSCOM should create and popularize employee welfare cells at a state / regional level and these cells should work only for employee welfare and not be puppets in the hands of the companies.
If the industry does not itself create proper forums for employee welfare, it’s likely that the government / trade unions will interfere and mess up India’s sunshine industry.
4) Narayan Murthys please stand up
Top bosses of companies like Infosys, TCS, Wipro, etc. need to send the message loud and clear to their company and to other companies listening at national IT events that employee welfare is really their top concern and having good working culture and conditions is a priority. Employee welfare here does not mean giving the employee the salary he/she dreams of.
Last word
I am sure some of my thoughts come from the fact that I too worked in such an environment for a few years and perhaps I haven’t got over the frustrations I experienced back then.
So think about my views with a pinch of salt but do think about them. And if you have an opinion on this issue, don’t forget to add a comment to this article.
There are other issues in our IT labor industry. Had a friend who recently moved back to India. In one interview with Cognizant one of the interviewers asked her why she was talking with american accent. This friend of mine had been living in the US for a number of years and even did her masters here. To pick up some american accent is but normal. But why did it matter to the interviewer. Here in the US that person would have got fired. Since labor laws prohibit anyone asking questions that are not relevant to the job.
I think there are other issues going on. Of course the worst one being long hours. Even this friend who went back to India said she has had to work long hours…including nights and weekends. When she complained she could not stay late till 12midnight since she had little kids to take care of….they said ‘alright in that case u can stay till 9pm’. I was shocked. Her boss thought that 9pm was good. And also this friend of mine is a PM. So its not just the developers who feel the heat.
Also u have 2-4 years of experienced developers as the average. Seems like after that everyone is a tech lead / architect/ pm/ etc. How magical a career advancement. Just when u figured out how to write some decent code u move on to another area to screw up.
There are other issues in our IT labor industry. Had a friend who recently moved back to India. In one interview with Cognizant one of the interviewers asked her why she was talking with american accent. This friend of mine had been living in the US for a number of years and even did her masters here. To pick up some american accent is but normal. But why did it matter to the interviewer. Here in the US that person would have got fired. Since labor laws prohibit anyone asking questions that are not relevant to the job.
I think there are other issues going on. Of course the worst one being long hours. Even this friend who went back to India said she has had to work long hours…including nights and weekends. When she complained she could not stay late till 12midnight since she had little kids to take care of….they said ‘alright in that case u can stay till 9pm’. I was shocked. Her boss thought that 9pm was good. And also this friend of mine is a PM. So its not just the developers who feel the heat.
Also u have 2-4 years of experienced developers as the average. Seems like after that everyone is a tech lead / architect/ pm/ etc. How magical a career advancement. Just when u figured out how to write some decent code u move on to another area to screw up.
What NASSCOM or government (both spineless the money generating IT industry) needs to do is to force employers to report all employee hours actually worked (regardless of whether employed got paid or not). Companies must be strictly asked to adhere to reporting correct times and not influencing any employee to put more hours of work and report less.
This one change will force most of the problems to go away. Can you see what this will do to the reputation of many culprit companies. They get officially labeled for what they are ‘sweatshop’. And they will have to fix their ways.
And to all those freshers who r out to prove they have no brains and can be used as slaves to do any work…go home…enjoy your salary. If not u r just idiots.
What NASSCOM or government (both spineless the money generating IT industry) needs to do is to force employers to report all employee hours actually worked (regardless of whether employed got paid or not). Companies must be strictly asked to adhere to reporting correct times and not influencing any employee to put more hours of work and report less.
This one change will force most of the problems to go away. Can you see what this will do to the reputation of many culprit companies. They get officially labeled for what they are ‘sweatshop’. And they will have to fix their ways.
And to all those freshers who r out to prove they have no brains and can be used as slaves to do any work…go home…enjoy your salary. If not u r just idiots.
Well I too agree with a lot of things said above. Another reason which is leading to a bad work culture in IT is the selection of managers. It has been mentioned above although but the root cause is missing.
There is a trend in lots of IT companies to pick up managers from a different domain mostly from Manufacturing. These managers can be hired for 1/4 the salary compared to the manager hired from another IT industry. All these kind of managers know is to delegate work and push people to finish it. I mean how would this manager understant the syche of an IT professional. In short its difficult for them to understand that they have professionals not labours working under them.
Well I too agree with a lot of things said above. Another reason which is leading to a bad work culture in IT is the selection of managers. It has been mentioned above although but the root cause is missing.
There is a trend in lots of IT companies to pick up managers from a different domain mostly from Manufacturing. These managers can be hired for 1/4 the salary compared to the manager hired from another IT industry. All these kind of managers know is to delegate work and push people to finish it. I mean how would this manager understant the syche of an IT professional. In short its difficult for them to understand that they have professionals not labours working under them.
This is going to be a long article but please bear with me. I have read some very interesting comments here and wish to add my own. I noticed somebody saying leave the industry if you don’t like it. That is not the issue.
Every industry has it’s ugly problems and issues which you will not like, so will you end up quitting everywhere? I am making an analysis of the state of affairs
of our industry, some of the facts that I have seen, the problems that I have seen etc. Don’t expect to see a solution here since it involves much more than
putting a few lines of suggestion here. If say Toyota is trying to analyze a problem of how then can double their production capacity it is a much easier problem
to solve; but the nature of our industry is very abstract, continuously evolving and the solution lies with the people of the organization & the customer. I have
seen customer suddenly getting a brainwave and dreaming up the impossible less than a month before going live. The sad part is that the technical managers also act like ignorant fools.
First of let’s start with we developers, most of us can definitely better utilize our time, intelligently design better software, build and utilize reusable libraries. Most of all we should stop fooling ourselves with this rant of ‘new cutting edge technology’. There are umpteen number of cases where what could be achieved in one line of SQL is instead put into multiple line of java code that takes hours to code and debug; we are all well aware of the dreaded date comparisons
in Java.
Q-The first and foremost reason for long hours, overbudget and delayed projects. What is it?
Ans-The biggest challenge of the software industry is that unlike most industries it is very abstract. For example, if a customer needs a function that takes 2 numbers and a operator indicator (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division) and returns a result; the estimate of providing the desired function could
range anywhere between 5 minutes to a full day (believe me I am not kidding I have seen senior developers in the financial application world who cannot write software that makes calculations for nuts 🙂 not that I am great or different, given the time and deadline we have we just do the best and scoot ). There could be any one of the following scenarios ->
– 5 to 10 mins : provide a function with very poor error handling, no logging, no documentation; just barely does what is required.
If there was any kind of error the function just reports a generic one.
[done by either novices or burnt out guys on their way to becoming managers and who offload the dirty work of fixing whetever
the customer doen’t like to slaves]
– 2 to 3 hours : improved error handling, checking for more conditions, documenting what the function does. More testing.
[done by guys half way to getting burnt out who have realized the folly of what I have stated next]
– more than half a day : write fancy documentation, complete with UML..object model..blah blah blah. Write fancy unit test plans. spend
useless time trying to learn some crappy opensource testing stuff like JUnit and write some automated testing
stuff that nobody is even going to touch after a couple of days.
[done by the enthusiastic guys who are new or relatively new to the industry, want to yak yak about their skills, build
their resume or have no choice to do this because their boss has told them to do this – the boss who is usually attending
umpteen number of meetings and puts in a guest appearence with a coffe cup in hand just to ask a question- Guy’s howa
are we doing? I want this in production tommorow, let me know if you need any help.].
What I have written above may seem to be a joke but this is the true story of the IT industry today. Ridiculously unrealistic & abstract requirements/expectations/goals
/objectives.
Q-The excuse of..requirements keep changing..it cannot be helped..it that true? I am asking this because this is the usual reply given when there are changes to
be made out of the blue and the dev teams asks for more time and the reason for the changes.
Ans-Definitely not true in most cases. It is mostly becaue of some higly paid managers and executives who go ‘yack yack’ in meetings after meetings and never seem
to decide what they want. Have you ever gone into a car show room and paid for a corolla only to decide after a day that you know what I don’t like the engine
let’s put in a 8 cylinder angine and I need it done fast as per the original delivery schedule. Believe me this is not a joke since I have been on projects
that fit the exact analogy. I have had people make U turns on their decisions or VPs wake up from their long slumber just before the product is to go live
and say that – you know what I don’t like the look of these 2 screens, I need them collapsed into 1 and I need navigation to be changed on the other section. (all this
to be done as per original schedule with 15 days remaining). In the high pressure software world the umpteen project management/software engineering/estimation
etc. theories are literally thrown out of the window and are of little value. Project Managers essentially become highly paid Project ‘Messengers’ conveying to the developers
what the business users need and relaying back messages.
Q-The fix it all and fix it immediately mentality
Ans-With the internet 24×7 and never sleeping the ball game has entirely changed especially after the late 90’s where apps have to be up 24×7 and many problems need
to fixed on the fly ASAP. Many a time this is where the ‘manager’ comes in. There could be problems that can wait to be fixed till the next release cycle and
there are some who do that. But there are quite a few ‘please the boss’ managers who would expect the team to sit through the night fixing those problems.
And of course to be fair to some of the managers there are genuinely some managers whose jobs are on the line if the fixes don’t happen. So ultimately
with the culture of if we don’t do it then there is somebody else who will replace us to do it there is bound to be the perpetual late nights.
And of course there is the mentality where a couple of hour before go live some important stakeholder notices a bug or two and doesn’t like it, like fools the
development team scrambles to hurriedly patch the problem thereby creating more bugs, doing a half hour of testing and going live. I am talking about a major
financial website that I work in. I know the risks involved and the faulty software turned out as a result of this mentality.
Unlike most industries where things could be speeded up by adding more machines or more people software is a very unique industry where it cannot be done because of
the complexity and it being very human labour intensive.
Most desi managers usually ask ‘how long does it take’ and then there will be a ‘no, we don’t have that much time, I need everything completed and fixed by tmmorrow’.
I was personally stuck with such a situation and I openly told my boss, ‘What is the use of asking an estimate then? That is how much time it takes, if you need it
tommorrow then feel free to do it.’
The late hours and overwork are going to stay and not going away. It is a matter of intelligently managing it. Make the right friends, progress in your career
jump projects. Never be around when the project goes live. Am I sounding unethical to you guys? Yes I am. I have tried my hand at being sincere and ethical
only to find myself doing more work being offloaded by others.
This is going to be a long article but please bear with me. I have read some very interesting comments here and wish to add my own. I noticed somebody saying leave the industry if you don’t like it. That is not the issue.
Every industry has it’s ugly problems and issues which you will not like, so will you end up quitting everywhere? I am making an analysis of the state of affairs
of our industry, some of the facts that I have seen, the problems that I have seen etc. Don’t expect to see a solution here since it involves much more than
putting a few lines of suggestion here. If say Toyota is trying to analyze a problem of how then can double their production capacity it is a much easier problem
to solve; but the nature of our industry is very abstract, continuously evolving and the solution lies with the people of the organization & the customer. I have
seen customer suddenly getting a brainwave and dreaming up the impossible less than a month before going live. The sad part is that the technical managers also act like ignorant fools.
First of let’s start with we developers, most of us can definitely better utilize our time, intelligently design better software, build and utilize reusable libraries. Most of all we should stop fooling ourselves with this rant of ‘new cutting edge technology’. There are umpteen number of cases where what could be achieved in one line of SQL is instead put into multiple line of java code that takes hours to code and debug; we are all well aware of the dreaded date comparisons
in Java.
Q-The first and foremost reason for long hours, overbudget and delayed projects. What is it?
Ans-The biggest challenge of the software industry is that unlike most industries it is very abstract. For example, if a customer needs a function that takes 2 numbers and a operator indicator (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division) and returns a result; the estimate of providing the desired function could
range anywhere between 5 minutes to a full day (believe me I am not kidding I have seen senior developers in the financial application world who cannot write software that makes calculations for nuts 🙂 not that I am great or different, given the time and deadline we have we just do the best and scoot ). There could be any one of the following scenarios ->
– 5 to 10 mins : provide a function with very poor error handling, no logging, no documentation; just barely does what is required.
If there was any kind of error the function just reports a generic one.
[done by either novices or burnt out guys on their way to becoming managers and who offload the dirty work of fixing whetever
the customer doen’t like to slaves]
– 2 to 3 hours : improved error handling, checking for more conditions, documenting what the function does. More testing.
[done by guys half way to getting burnt out who have realized the folly of what I have stated next]
– more than half a day : write fancy documentation, complete with UML..object model..blah blah blah. Write fancy unit test plans. spend
useless time trying to learn some crappy opensource testing stuff like JUnit and write some automated testing
stuff that nobody is even going to touch after a couple of days.
[done by the enthusiastic guys who are new or relatively new to the industry, want to yak yak about their skills, build
their resume or have no choice to do this because their boss has told them to do this – the boss who is usually attending
umpteen number of meetings and puts in a guest appearence with a coffe cup in hand just to ask a question- Guy’s howa
are we doing? I want this in production tommorow, let me know if you need any help.].
What I have written above may seem to be a joke but this is the true story of the IT industry today. Ridiculously unrealistic & abstract requirements/expectations/goals
/objectives.
Q-The excuse of..requirements keep changing..it cannot be helped..it that true? I am asking this because this is the usual reply given when there are changes to
be made out of the blue and the dev teams asks for more time and the reason for the changes.
Ans-Definitely not true in most cases. It is mostly becaue of some higly paid managers and executives who go ‘yack yack’ in meetings after meetings and never seem
to decide what they want. Have you ever gone into a car show room and paid for a corolla only to decide after a day that you know what I don’t like the engine
let’s put in a 8 cylinder angine and I need it done fast as per the original delivery schedule. Believe me this is not a joke since I have been on projects
that fit the exact analogy. I have had people make U turns on their decisions or VPs wake up from their long slumber just before the product is to go live
and say that – you know what I don’t like the look of these 2 screens, I need them collapsed into 1 and I need navigation to be changed on the other section. (all this
to be done as per original schedule with 15 days remaining). In the high pressure software world the umpteen project management/software engineering/estimation
etc. theories are literally thrown out of the window and are of little value. Project Managers essentially become highly paid Project ‘Messengers’ conveying to the developers
what the business users need and relaying back messages.
Q-The fix it all and fix it immediately mentality
Ans-With the internet 24×7 and never sleeping the ball game has entirely changed especially after the late 90’s where apps have to be up 24×7 and many problems need
to fixed on the fly ASAP. Many a time this is where the ‘manager’ comes in. There could be problems that can wait to be fixed till the next release cycle and
there are some who do that. But there are quite a few ‘please the boss’ managers who would expect the team to sit through the night fixing those problems.
And of course to be fair to some of the managers there are genuinely some managers whose jobs are on the line if the fixes don’t happen. So ultimately
with the culture of if we don’t do it then there is somebody else who will replace us to do it there is bound to be the perpetual late nights.
And of course there is the mentality where a couple of hour before go live some important stakeholder notices a bug or two and doesn’t like it, like fools the
development team scrambles to hurriedly patch the problem thereby creating more bugs, doing a half hour of testing and going live. I am talking about a major
financial website that I work in. I know the risks involved and the faulty software turned out as a result of this mentality.
Unlike most industries where things could be speeded up by adding more machines or more people software is a very unique industry where it cannot be done because of
the complexity and it being very human labour intensive.
Most desi managers usually ask ‘how long does it take’ and then there will be a ‘no, we don’t have that much time, I need everything completed and fixed by tmmorrow’.
I was personally stuck with such a situation and I openly told my boss, ‘What is the use of asking an estimate then? That is how much time it takes, if you need it
tommorrow then feel free to do it.’
The late hours and overwork are going to stay and not going away. It is a matter of intelligently managing it. Make the right friends, progress in your career
jump projects. Never be around when the project goes live. Am I sounding unethical to you guys? Yes I am. I have tried my hand at being sincere and ethical
only to find myself doing more work being offloaded by others.
even i am working in a PSU *top one.. made meagre but no work pressure..no job satisfaction.. but only 9 to 5 …
even i am working in a PSU *top one.. made meagre but no work pressure..no job satisfaction.. but only 9 to 5 …
I agree with what you’ve written. The average indian software developer is paying the price for the strategy of ‘low cost labor and shorter delivery time’ adopted by Indian companies to win businesses from the west, The very reason companies in the west are offshoring work is due to the cost advantage offered by cheap labor in India. If this advantage goes away, there’s no value add for western companies offshoring work to India and indian companies will not be profitable as they’re right now and neither there will be the huge demand for IT professionals as there is today. Indian companies have no other means but to rely on this ‘cheap labor’ service oriented mantra to remain competitive in the Industy, as they don’t have any competitive advantage in terms of R&D and in developing world class software products which US companies like Microsoft, Oracle to name a few have. As long as Indian companies don’t innovate and develop world class products, this plight of the Indian software developer will continue. The brightest innovative indian minds move to the US and contribute to the success of the US companies, as it’s obviously prouder to be working in the US earning in $$ than slogging in India while the average developer is stuck in the grind. Also the management/work culture in india is plagued by work politics which acts as a deterrent to career development compelling the ‘smart minds’ to move to the US where a manager doesn’t treat his staff as cows tilling land, but as a Human being who has the same rights as himself to lead and enjoy a happy content life for himself and for his family. Unless this sort of change occurs in the outlook of bosses who run Indian companies, the brain drain will continue and no Microsofts or Oracles will emerge from India but rather it’ll contine to languish as the dumping ground for low skilled work.
I agree with what you’ve written. The average indian software developer is paying the price for the strategy of ‘low cost labor and shorter delivery time’ adopted by Indian companies to win businesses from the west, The very reason companies in the west are offshoring work is due to the cost advantage offered by cheap labor in India. If this advantage goes away, there’s no value add for western companies offshoring work to India and indian companies will not be profitable as they’re right now and neither there will be the huge demand for IT professionals as there is today. Indian companies have no other means but to rely on this ‘cheap labor’ service oriented mantra to remain competitive in the Industy, as they don’t have any competitive advantage in terms of R&D and in developing world class software products which US companies like Microsoft, Oracle to name a few have. As long as Indian companies don’t innovate and develop world class products, this plight of the Indian software developer will continue. The brightest innovative indian minds move to the US and contribute to the success of the US companies, as it’s obviously prouder to be working in the US earning in $$ than slogging in India while the average developer is stuck in the grind. Also the management/work culture in india is plagued by work politics which acts as a deterrent to career development compelling the ‘smart minds’ to move to the US where a manager doesn’t treat his staff as cows tilling land, but as a Human being who has the same rights as himself to lead and enjoy a happy content life for himself and for his family. Unless this sort of change occurs in the outlook of bosses who run Indian companies, the brain drain will continue and no Microsofts or Oracles will emerge from India but rather it’ll contine to languish as the dumping ground for low skilled work.
I strongly think that the so called PROJECT LEADER position should be ABOLISHED!!!!!!!!!!!
HELLO !!! This tradition does not exist in US. The P.L.’s IN iNDIA have power like working on time sheets,
sanctionING leave, approvE training etc. and these guys are not equipped to handle them.
The power they have is unwarranted and breeds favoritism. They should just remain TECHNICAL!!!!!!!
I strongly think that the so called PROJECT LEADER position should be ABOLISHED!!!!!!!!!!!
HELLO !!! This tradition does not exist in US. The P.L.’s IN iNDIA have power like working on time sheets,
sanctionING leave, approvE training etc. and these guys are not equipped to handle them.
The power they have is unwarranted and breeds favoritism. They should just remain TECHNICAL!!!!!!!
Very well written article. It also applies for us developers in Singapore too….
Very well written article. It also applies for us developers in Singapore too….
Whatever you have written is really true in software industries. I have been in this industry from last 3 years and I have never seen even a single project, which is not in ‘very critical, tight deadlines’ situation.
But I would like to add one more point that this virus ‘very critical, late working’ is spreading in out India’s top institutes like IIT, IIM and many more also. The teacher expects that the student will complete his/her project single-handedly in one week, which cannot be even completed by a team of 15 people. They expect that if they will pressurize the students they will give excellent outputs. But the fact is it is just reverse of that.
The same thing is happening in our software industries. I think India is going to be a ‘tired-nation’. Here everybody is working just for sake of working but with no quality output.
😕
Whatever you have written is really true in software industries. I have been in this industry from last 3 years and I have never seen even a single project, which is not in ‘very critical, tight deadlines’ situation.
But I would like to add one more point that this virus ‘very critical, late working’ is spreading in out India’s top institutes like IIT, IIM and many more also. The teacher expects that the student will complete his/her project single-handedly in one week, which cannot be even completed by a team of 15 people. They expect that if they will pressurize the students they will give excellent outputs. But the fact is it is just reverse of that.
The same thing is happening in our software industries. I think India is going to be a ‘tired-nation’. Here everybody is working just for sake of working but with no quality output.
😕
It’s not a problem of india, its a general problem of the emerging countries, In my country morocco, where we outsource with french speaker companies, software developpers live in the same situation: well paid (comparing to the country average) but no social life, as there is no time for that…
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It’s not a problem of india, its a general problem of the emerging countries, In my country morocco, where we outsource with french speaker companies, software developpers live in the same situation: well paid (comparing to the country average) but no social life, as there is no time for that…
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Really well written piece Harshad.
Though I have never worked in the IT industry but would be working very soon, I found your piece quite revealing.
I was reading the comments to your article and someone has written that we need to put in that much hard work if we are to compete with the west. Well i would like to clarify on that point that the software community of India is a part of system of unequal exchange which primarily favours the west.
The reason why work is being outsourced to us is that we provide cheap labour and in turn help to fatten the pockets of the west based entreprenuers.
I think the indian software community is being exploited by the system of global capitalism and there needs to be some organised effort against it.
Anur R Puniyani
Really well written piece Harshad.
Though I have never worked in the IT industry but would be working very soon, I found your piece quite revealing.
I was reading the comments to your article and someone has written that we need to put in that much hard work if we are to compete with the west. Well i would like to clarify on that point that the software community of India is a part of system of unequal exchange which primarily favours the west.
The reason why work is being outsourced to us is that we provide cheap labour and in turn help to fatten the pockets of the west based entreprenuers.
I think the indian software community is being exploited by the system of global capitalism and there needs to be some organised effort against it.
Anur R Puniyani
The virus in the IT industry has spread to others as well causing overall misery to workers in Corporate India. But, somehow government servants seem genetically immune to this virus
The virus in the IT industry has spread to others as well causing overall misery to workers in Corporate India. But, somehow government servants seem genetically immune to this virus
Hi Harshal,
If there’s work, you could sit & do it. Give reasonable estimates. Obviously any Manager would have gone thru the same situation before takin the task of ‘Manager’. He/She shouldn’t be a ‘Damager’ to his employees. Staying Late in office does not mean an employee is very productive. One has to give a reasonable time-frame to finish the job. Staying long hours, spending 12hrs in office does not ensure Quality of Work. Your are doing your job, but taking your own sweet time!!.
My Damager says ‘Oh, your leaving so early’ when its 2 hours past the time, & its 9 hours of work. If he was a Manager, he should have asked ‘ what made you stay extra for 2 hours?’ This sums what he expects from me?? Must work, like a thumb rule on Saturdays’ etc etc….
These things can’t change unless people in Upper-Management realize & know what productivity is & what Esitmation is….. and when your lower the order, all you havta do it go on with the flow or stand out. When you stand-out… you get laid-off. Period. That’s the end of the story.
This is how you fall in line too……