BANGALORE: At a classroom at CMR-IT, an engineering college in Whitefield on the outskirts of Bangalore, a group of around two dozen information technology industry managers in their forties listened intently to what the instructor had to say about tackling their mid-career crisis.Most of them had spent about a decade in coding and managing teams of engineers at some of India’s biggest technology companies such as Wipro, Infosys and Cognizant Technology Solutions.These professionals came from a generation of engineering graduates who joined the sector during its boom years at the start of the new millennium.As revenue from software development and maintenance grew rapidly year after year, companies such as Infosys and Wipro promoted hundreds of them to manage armies of coders chasing project deadlines.“It was a dream run that got over like a sprint,” said Piyush, a senior manager who worked at a Bangalore-based software company until a few weeks ago. He used to manage project allocation for hundreds of engineers at one of the top three Indian software exporters.Earlier this year, his company automated the entire process of deploying staff across different customer projects using a single dashboard. “It’s a rude shock because now I have nowhere to go. My salary is considered too high, and the new employers are looking for different skills,” he said.Piyush, who gave only his first name, is among the hundreds of thousands of managers in IT companies who are stuck in the middle with nowhere to go in an industry that employs about 3 million.Promotions at that level are rare to come by, automation is beginning to replace monitoring roles, and the software services companies are looking for ways to cut the flab by eliminating layers of highly paid managers whose jobs can be automated.The instructor, David Fradin, a Silicon Valley-based technology veteran who had managed products at Apple and Hewlett-Packard years ago, was asking these managers to become software product leaders and move away from commoditised services.“What got you here is not necessarily what will get you there,” Fradin told his students a few days ago.The students were enrolled in a 15-month course offered by the Institute of Product Leadership based in Bangalore.Its founder, Pinkesh Shah, is another Silicon Valley veteran who has worked in the Bay Area for companies including McAfee and IBM. Shah wants to create 10,000 software product leaders from the existing of whom are clueless about what lies ahead.“Many of them are saying, ‘Take me out of Infosys, Wipro, and prepare me for a job at Google and Intuit’,” said Shah. In their current assignments, most of them are facing a dead end.“Mid to senior managers with experience in the range of 5-12 years in the IT services industry are at an evolutionary dead end,” said Swami Manohar, a former professor at the Indian Institute of Science and the founder of PicoPeta Simputers, a tablet maker that was founded when iPads were unheard of.“They were spawned during the heights of the IT services boom, when colleges were spewing out students with BE degree certificates and with no competence in any engineering discipline,” Manohar added.During the boom years of Indian IT, only a handful of these software managers left the industry to join non-software companies offering real engineering opportunities.Those who chose to stay back are the ones facing a mid-life crisis.“In these years, they have become less and less competent in terms of engineering and their only saleable skill set was project management of large and routine low-end services delivery,” said Manohar.Managers such as Piyush are now facing questions about whether they can help build a product or a software platform while exploring new jobs. “That business has vanished and hence these people are unemployable outside the IT services industry in the salary brackets that they are used to,” Manohar said.It’s not that there is any lack of adequate training available at Wipro, Infosys, TCS and others. It’s more about the quality of these training sessions. “Too many firms in India and elsewhere use snake oil that sizzles, but is either inert or even poisonous,” said Matt Barney, a former head of Infosys Leadership Institute, who is now based in San Francisco, Bay Area.He is the founder of LeaderAmp, a startup that helps companies improve leadership success through computer-adaptive and evidencebased learning.That automation is the biggest challenge facing these IT managers is a no-brainer.“Cars replaced horses and buggies, and now Google is replacing the driver. Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platforms-as-a-Service, and now Backends-as-a-Service are disrupting IT as well,” Barney said.The issue, according to Barney, is also about companies wasting too much investment on family members or loyal soldiers “who don't really have the hardware or insatiable passion to grow”.Aakar, one of Piyush’s batchmates from the engineering class of 2000, worked at mid-sized Mind-Tree and faced a similar dilemma. “It’s not in the company’s interest to spend too much time figuring out what to do with resources becoming redundant,” he said. Academicians such as Manohar say “going back to the school” for learning real engineering may not be a bad idea.“The corollary is that these managers need to start from the ground up, being engineers first and forget the fashionable declaration about having a few hundred reportees as their measure of prestige.”