am1m BHPian

Join Date: May 2010 Location: Bangalore Posts: 980 Thanked: 2,816 Times

Re: The plight of IT professionals in their 40s Some observations from personal experience after 15 years (and counting) in the IT industry.



Kind of work. As much as the Indian media and our egos would like to have us believe, there is very little innovation in the Indian IT industry overall. Even today. Over the past 5-10 years there have been a few startups that are doing some great work, but these are few and far in between. The majority of Indian IT companies, product and service, basically follow the 'Infosys model' - hire cheap labor and sell their work for several times more to clients in the US or the EU who still make a saving on costs. This is true even for the so called 'product companies'. They may be innovative product companies in the US, but the India office basically works for the US office as a vendor doing back-office work. This will continue till more Indian IT companies start creating products for Indian customers. So naturally once a person's cost rises and the profit margin on his work reduces, the people doing the overall numbers will replace him with someone cheaper, especially when there is not going to be any significant reduction in the quality of work. Because frankly, given the quality of work that still gets 'outsourced' to the India office, none of this is rocket science and a person with fewer years of experience can easily replace someone senior to do the kind of work they are doing in most cases and job roles.



The 'manager' syndrome. Sadly, even after all these years and being exposed to the American and European work culture, we're very designation-crazy here. Willingly continuing as a technical or a domain person, honing your craft is not a majority choice still. The desire is still 'x years of experience means I should be a manager by now'. And people jump or threaten to jump till one desperate company finally offers them that hallowed designation, irrespective of whether that person has the required people management skills or not. The fact is, no really important decision gets taken in the India office, simply because no really important client or major source of revenue is in the India region for most IT companies. So most Indian IT managers are really only an interface/middleman between the senior manager in the US and the India team. How long can a company keep paying so many of these sorts of people 'xy lakhs per year' just to forward e-mails from his higher ups and ask for status reports from his team?



Non-existent HR development or training. Very few companies invest in their employees long-term. Sure the pay package will include an inflated 'CTC' figure. But there is no interest in developing an employee or training him to do his job better. Which is understandable since most people will jump for a 10-15% increase after less than a year, so why bother.



Entitlement. For all the fun we make of government employees and public servants, I've seen that we IT guys behave a lot like them. Most of us believe that it is our birthright to get double-digit hikes every year and a promotion every x years, irrespective of how the company is doing overall or how much we've delivered over the past year. Most appraisals, instead of being those - a honest appraisal of the measurable work done against a predefined target, are basically haggling sessions over the 'increment'. Again, adds to the rising cost of an employee without any increase in the value delivered. Of course we tie ourselves to these hikes because our 'basic needs' go up with every hike - a bigger car every 5 years (EMI 1), a new smartphone every 2 years, an overpriced flat closer to work (big EMI 2)...



IMHO, the music is not stopping soon, but it sure is getting softer. Till then, let's make hay while the sun shines. And for goodness' sake, be smart and try and live debt-free!