Indian IT Industry

[Sachin]

My point is that I have seen many IT people in India take in jobs from the US to India, but seem shocked when jobs leave India for the very same reason that they came to India in the first place. The reason is simple, cheap labor.

Even with the lay-offs this is what is happening. The jobs are not going out of India, but to a more cheaply available labour force in India. But I do agree with you, that US may not be a hunky-dory place it is believed to be. During the dot com burst in 2000, I know (very vaguely) of a case where an Indian couple (wifey pregnant as well) who was financially helped by his friends, after he lost his job. For some strange reason he also did not want to quit US.

Do the India IT majors have a R&D lab. Esp. for 100,000 person type companies there should be at least 10% in R&D right.

Most of the colonels & brigadiers claim to have an R&D lab. But what has really come out of such labs is a big question mark .

There is a big imbalance in the IT discipline vs the rest. It is time to set that right before we lose a generation of graduates to lower order IT work.

A course correction seems to be happen behind the scenes. News reports were mentioning that in many engineering colleges Computer Science courses have lots of open seats. Many big IT companies now have started looking for mass recruitment from smaller cities and towns. So the young crowd seems to have realised that IT industry in its current avataar may not last long, or would not be a cushy job. I know a couple of cases where folks knew what kind of "projects" were available for them, and decided to move into other government organisations or PSUs.

protest-mounts-against-layoffs

I found a one pager article in the Malayalam daily today. Did not expect this news to get so much traction. The mallu journalist was quick in asking one question to the people who have started a new organisation. CITU (argueably the biggest trade union in India) could not energise the techies to form up a union, so how will this new outfit get kick started. Many TCS employees feel that unionising would jeopardize their chances in getting a job in another IT company. Laws and rules regarding employment in IT companies is a big grey area at the moment. For ages it was believed that a company could hold back degree certificates etc., and it took for some time for people to understand that it is illegal.

[ritesh]

^ Unions in India has got bad name or may i say made a villain of sorts due to the 70s & 80s commies ones.
The new generation need to understand that just like politics and politicians are not bad, same is the case with unions.

[Virendra]

All this said, why is TCS laying people off? Their scam of flooding US companies with useless "techies" been found out?

In which case the firing should have been of useless techies, not of middle level managers.
I know too many people in the office who can't form correct English sentences whether in Emails or status calls. They exist at all levels and designations by the way.
There's too much quantity and too less quality. Any graduate is fine (wow he's cheap too), train him on a tool/sw. and dump in a project. Case closed.
Sasta-Tikau but not at all Sundar.

I've also been noticing the quality of incoming freshers lately and am not at all impressed.
It is either the quantity blast having an effect on me or something is going wrong in our academia, social environment factors which affect the upbringing and final HR outcome.

Regards,
Virendra

[krishnan]

i known guys who haven't finished BE because of arrears joining TCS and ending on onsite project in US

[Virendra]

There is a big imbalance in the IT discipline vs the rest. It is time to set that right before we lose a generation of graduates to lower order IT work.

I've been a witness to that during induction as a fresher in 2007. I saw Mechanical and Civil branch Engineers with me and had the same thought.
Sadly other Industries don't offer jobs in same numbers and ease as IT does. It has been going on like this for more than a decade now.

[Theo_Fidel]

The only imbalance is pay right. There are plenty of civil jobs and even Mech. jobs but they don't pay as much and you may not snag a desk job....

[subhamoy.das]

The lay off is bound to happen as the programming industry matures after 25+ years of existence. New code is getting expensive by the day. Previously every thing used to be hand coded, from logging to exception handling , to application rules. Now code servers are appearing on the horizon where the application rules can be written using user interfaces and English like languages and these coder servers would generate the actual code behind the scene. The skill need is shifting from programming skills to domain skills ( mechanical , civil etc ). The software delivery process is also getting digital with the arrival of agile like delivery process where the process is so simple , it is actually a simple as trouble ticket handling process , that even the techies ( hands on contributors ) can practice the process and software can track the process using data analytics, thus eliminating then need for delivery managers. Manual testing has been become software driven or virtualized thus eliminating the position of testers. Software components are coming up with SAS model and this is also reducing the amount of new code that is getting written. Going forward the demand will be for domain experts with integration skills around high value components so that they can build applications using components and glue code.

[ritesh]

Techies Plan Stir Against TCS Lay-Off

The Chennai-based Forum for IT Employees (FITE), an organisation formed to work for the welfare and rights of IT employees in India, has held discussions with the sacked employees at Infopark to chalk out the protest methods.

To mark our protest we will hold a black gag protest in front of the Infopark next week.

FITE has started an online e-petition collection from the people who got termination letter from the TCS. “We got around 3,000 e-petitions from the techies and all this happened within two days. We hope that the numbers will be more than ten times by the next fiscal,” Bharathi said.

forum also started a Facebook page with the name ‘We are against TCS layoff’ and it is getting a warm response from the people. Within days of opening, the page recorded nearly 6,000 likes and it is getting more than 5 lakh views daily, they claimed.

P Parimala, a co-ordinator of the forum, said that they would consult legal experts and file a case against TCS challenging the ‘lay-offs’. “As of now the company has not revealed the exact figure of terminations and how many they intend to fire.

Meanwhile New Democratic Labour Front (NDLF), a Chennai-based Marxist-Leninist trade union organisation is planning to organise protest against the IT giant’s decision to sack the employees.

“We will organise a protest in Kochi against the TCS move. The TCS is going to sack 25,000 to 30,000 employees in the next few months, mainly senior professionals and hire freshers which is unacceptable,” said Vinod Kumar, a leader of NDLF.

A TCS spokesperson said the firm is a performance-driven company. “Workforce optimisation is a continuous process which happens throughout the year taking into account employee performance, business needs and people’s aspirations.” “We are not into any lay-off here. We are just terminating the people who are ‘non-performers.’ In this fiscal, we have a total hiring target of 55,000 professionals and we are on track to meet it,” spokesperson said.

[dsreedhar]

TCS justification of employee performance for the layoff of experienced staff, and turn around and hire double that number of fresh graduates doesn't make sense. 25K to 30K is a huge number of non-performing professionals at a given time. Either their hiring process is seriously flawed or the training procedures. And it took 3-4 yrs to identify the non-performing resources??
Hiring and training the fresh graduates takes time until they are reasonably productive. TCS risks putting on fresh candidates on projects and its image to the customers.

I think it is all about cost cutting. Is it not possible to do that by trimming the salaries and perks across the board? It should be the same case for other Indian IT majors as well. Somebody has to take lead and rest follows. Hiring and dumping just when they are valuable resource will be a big joke and waste of national resources.

[KJo]

TCS justification of employee performance for the layoff of experienced staff, and turn around and hire double that number of fresh graduates doesn't make sense. 25K to 30K is a huge number of non-performing professionals at a given time. Either their hiring process is seriously flawed or the training procedures. And it took 3-4 yrs to identify the non-performing resources??
Hiring and training the fresh graduates takes time until they are reasonably productive. TCS risks putting on fresh candidates on projects and its image to the customers.

I think it is all about cost cutting. Is it not possible to do that by trimming the salaries and perks across the board? It should be the same case for other Indian IT majors as well. Somebody has to take lead and rest follows. Hiring and dumping just when they are valuable resource will be a big joke and waste of national resources.

These guys are going to protest that the lost jobs? They danced on the streets when they got jobs that most didn't deserve because of free market capitalism and now are going to do a dharna because the same free market took it away?

Hey, we all got jobs and have lost jobs. Deal with it and go find another one. Pampered brats, they want everything handed to them. At PeechaKaroCo, those TCS jokers didn't even care to focus on the job they were hired for. Their eyes were set on the "next assignment" in a different city and "promotion" that they didn't deserve. When they got moved to another assignment, they left their crappy sheety non-scalable code for the rest of us to fix. And we got blamed for it too. That whole model was effed up. In many cases, those clowns took my code, changed some variables but forgot to change the comments that get output to a log file. They were all mine! But all the shabaashis went to TCS.

Hard to feel sorry for these arrogant #$^%Q@!s. They made their own beds. That experience turned me into a hard core supporter of Indian cos into a denouncer. I saw how these frauds operate and cannot reconcile with it. I was amazed at the amount of lying and politics they were capable of playing to save their skins though. If only they spent the same time on their work.

A TCS spokesperson said the firm is a performance-driven company. “Workforce optimisation is a continuous process which happens throughout the year taking into account employee performance, business needs and people’s aspirations.” “We are not into any lay-off here. We are just terminating the people who are ‘non-performers.’ In this fiscal, we have a total hiring target of 55,000 professionals and we are on track to meet it,” spokesperson said.

Just 25k non performers? Kick out 90% of the workforce is what they have to do.

[Bade]

It is perhaps a case of shedding the fat in the big cities, as they are upping the head-count in tier-2 cities. Something has to balance. Karma is a .... and comes full circle.

[KJo]

TCS lays off over 1500 employees, stung employees to petition PM Narendra Modi

Now PM ji will get these guys their jobs back?
Instead of blaming other people, improve your skill set, do an honest job at work instead of always being greedy and lazy. No one owes you a job. if you bought a huge house or car that you could not afford instead of saving up, it is YOUR fault. Didn't your parents teach you all this?

We all deal with this situation every day of our lives. Welcome to the real world!

[KJo]

It is perhaps a case of shedding the fat in the big cities, as they are upping the head-count in tier-2 cities. Something has to balance. Karma is a .... and comes full circle.

Badeji, it's the same old story hidden under a lie. They want to get rid of the higher paid people and hire lower paid people to do the same job. In many cases, the CEO forgets that experience bhi koi cheez hai. Hence we were saddled with absolute nincompoops at PeechaKaroCo. I bet Chandra had bribed someone high up at my ex-company to bring in these losers on board to help out. They did more harm than help. Ruined the work atmosphere with their incessant chatter in loud Tamil, and did a horrible job on the software side. But they did manage to spend 12 hours a day in the office. Doing what, I don't know. Maybe surfing for hotties in the Tamil movie scene.

So the cycle continues. More 21 year old "techies" who cannot string a line of coherent code but are supremely confident and think they know everything, more promotions and "foreign assignments", more F-ups, more CYA, and more layoffs.
Life goes on onleee.

[Bade]

It is not like I do not sympathize with the ones who perhaps lost a livelihood. But they knew it was coming being part of this fickle industry.

What I find interesting is people with experience who lost jobs, have difficult time getting back into the workforce. No one wants to hire a 40+ somebody even if he/she is willing to work for less than what they got in their last job. This industry has a work-lifespan of < 10 yrs for the average worker. I am not talking of people with MS/MBA degrees and perhaps in leadership roles.

[ritesh]

Dont ask for proofs, but i got inside info that people earning 10-20 Lacs pa (this is India projects) getting all too nervous.
Very difficult times re baba. Great / not so great churn happening there

[dsreedhar]

Kjo - Sorry about your bad experiences pal. I do understand what you say and I had my share of experience but not as much.
However we cannot totally blame the employees. It is a problem with the system. Some of the blame should be attributed to the companies as well and should be made accountable. We need to make corrections to the system. Otherwise the rot will go on. The companies cannot treat employees as disposables. In India for every employee removed there will be 10 lined up for the job. With the huge population the companies can keep playing this game until they are made accountable too.
My problem is they are wasting national resources which could be put to better use somewhere else. The employees should grow and so the companies.

[kenop]

Dont ask for proofs, but i got inside info that people earning 10-20 Lacs pa (this is India projects) getting all too nervous.
Very difficult times re baba. Great / not so great churn happening there

The corresponds to the general news that people about about 7y experience are being targetted.
I had heard that TCS is looking to hire a number of not-engineering (even non-MCA) background employees. So, that could mean BSc graduates (even BCom could work for finance domain projects ?).
This is truly churning time.
It will be interesting if confirmation is available that Tata Group's growth plans are actually responsible/trigger for this. TCS being the jewel in the crown (highest profit-making) is expected to fund such plans. Anybody in the now about Tata Group plans ?

[Bade]

Be thankful that it is internal to India churn only for now. People are still getting hired elsewhere in India. PMO petition will get nowhere. There is still widespread unemployment at lower ranks and for people with non-engg degrees. I welcome the move of run-of-the mill IT work to newer development centers in tier-2 towns and spreading of the wealth. Why should just people in Chennai and Bengaluru only benefit always. The current heart-burn and commie behavior seen among IT workers is due to the writing on the wall. They can move to where the jobs will be in the future.

[Sridhar K]

KJo Bro,
Understand that you had bad experience with people from TCS but you are painting everyone in both TCS and in the Indian services industry with a big broad brush.

Don't want to make it a pi$$ing contest but have to tell you the other side of the stories. I have worked with peecha karo folks myself as a consultant (though not from TCS but have got friends there who do that) and have choicest of words to describe the skill set and attitude of people working there especially the ones in the UK and in their captive in India. One great VP/Program manager in the UK runs comes up with a great strategy to measure the progress of business requirement gathering. Step 1. User Interviews 2. Requirement documentation 3. Target Operating model 4. Review 5. Rework. The BA team had finished almost 90 % of step 3, but our great man reports to the mgmt that the progress is only 50% as we are in step 3 of a 5 step process (2.5/5 hence 50% progress). The same guy does this after asking the business analyst to create process maps of operations SOP (desktop procedures of business operations team) when you are supposed to focus on gathering business requirement to be fed into a functional spec of a new technology platform in which the entire current process will be scrapped. His US counterpart was no better as she was asking the BAs in the team to collect batch job names, steps in the batch jobs through which different market feeds coming in the current system and was in daily fight with the UK guy on what is the right way to create a BRD. Two teams from my company, one each in UK and the other in US was writing two BRD in two different ways (one creating a documentation of the current SOP and the other creating a complete tech arch document) when they were supposed to write the exact business requirement. They wasted almost 75% of their estimated efforts in this direction before I had to meet their program head in London 1-1 to explain the exact issues and brought the entire project back on track. So much so for great peecha karo and crappy Indian service providers.

However, my point is not that peecha karo is bad and TCS/Indian companies are great. I equally know quite a lot of great people in peechakaro including many friends and a distant uncle of mine who worked in TCS before joining peecha karo. Have learnt a lot in Peecha Karo as well as from from working with Indian service provider.

I don't discount your experience but I can definitely tell you that your experience is only a very small portion of the spectrum of the relationship b/w Indian services providers and their western clientele. There are many sides to the stories which people like Javee and others have partly alluded to in their post

The issue facing the Indian service industry is as follows. Cost arbitrage is no longer a USP for these Indian service providers as captive set up, proliferation of other Indian service providers have pushed the prices down. Extraordinary growth over other industries, huge demand for people and deluge of everyone outsourcing to India, increasing opportunities have resulted in higher salaries for people and thereby increasing cost. For companies that have reported Q-o-Q growth, the situation is tough as the demand for conventional outsourcing based on people cost arbitrage is saturating with decreasing prices, increasing operating cost. With the current set up, it is very difficult to show growth in profits Q-o-Q unless you commoditize your services big time. Since the prices are low anyway, you recruit people with lower salaries (hence fresh trainees) , maintain good pyramid and there is not much room for senior people with tech/domain skills to be kept as they is no great revenue realization. So people were becoming pure service delivery managers leaving the programming to the foot soldiers.

However, agree with KJo that this pure commoditization approach is short sighted and bound to hit both customers first and the services company badly. He may have experienced it first hand as a customer but this may increase now. Don't think the Indian services companies have yet found a balance between commoditization and complete competency/people based model.

Guess TCS has grown too big now with very limited or nil attrition at middle/senior levels plus people getting promoted and skewing the pyramid big time. The skewed pyramid may no longer affordable and possibly the restructuring. There may be two kinds of people that may come out i.e. people who cannot find managerial roles with good span of control or Sr. Technical/ functional people who have higher designation but not revenue realization.

The restructuring is making news because it is TCS where people always considered it to be a safe place as they never fired people. The laid off employees may be complaining because they may never thought that it will happen in TCS and there is no real social security in India like proper rules on severance pay and there is not much opportunities for a non hands on service managers as every company have enough of them.

These is a crucial phase for Indian services providers and the pace of events over the last few years have meant that employees of Indian IT companies have to brace up for any eventualities.

[KJo]

Kjo - Sorry about your bad experiences pal. I do understand what you say and I had my share of experience but not as much.
However we cannot totally blame the employees. It is a problem with the system. Some of the blame should be attributed to the companies as well and should be made accountable. We need to make corrections to the system. Otherwise the rot will go on. The companies cannot treat employees as disposables. In India for every employee removed there will be 10 lined up for the job. With the huge population the companies can keep playing this game until they are made accountable too.
My problem is they are wasting national resources which could be put to better use somewhere else. The employees should grow and so the companies.

sreedhar,
I agree with you... it's a shared blame. These companies have a gold rush in their minds and think that it is just about staffing and quantity. No thought is given to quality. And they seem to have bribed top level guys (mostly goras) with money and women to make them order that these companies be hired. At PeechaKaro, the order was to take TCS and not Cognizant even though Cognizant had better people. We had to interview them for show. For these companies it is quick money and now.

But that does not absolve the employees who are lacking in all respects. Like I have said earlier, out of 40, only 1 was outstanding, and 2 were very good. Everyone else was #%$@!^. They were very good at cheating and lying though which makes one wonder how innocent and naive they really are? If someone doesn't know, you can teach them. If someone wants to cheat, nothing works. I have been stuck with one TCS mofo at midnight during an install where it is just him and me on the call and he confesses that he is looking at a WebSphere Application Server admin console for the first time. And he is in charge of installs and he expects me to walk him through the process over the phone with click this and click that level of guidance. I should have been paid his salary also. If I had not made things happen, the PeechaKaro management would have come down on my head. Since I was doing MBA after work hours, there was a lot of jealousy from the white management to begin with and they were looking for an excuse to get me.

Sridhar K, Yes, I know I may be painting TCS in a broad brush, but I am just telling everyone my personal experience. I probably got the worst of TCS and I was in the worst personal situation as well. It is not their incompetence that riles me, it is their supreme arrogance and overconfidence. They just didn't give a sheet about anything knowing that they could get themselves out of any situation. Collateral damage be damned. There was a Tamil Christian guy who had about 5 years of experience, but was just so rude to everyone over the phone in calls "Who told you to do this I saaayyyyy??? No you tell me who told you???". They felt untouchable, no one could harm them. Interestingly 3-4 years later, he messaged me on FB begging me for some money saying he came up with some product (video attached) but needed money to sell it. Sure kanna...

Another TCS fellow (a Dilliwaala) who was actually a very good friend insisted to the manager that he needed someone "to support us" during Christmas time 2009 when I had taken time off and relatives visiting from abroad. That ***** manager of mine was probably ordered by a higher up to listen to whatever these guys say and made me come in every day. I had a hard time apologizing to my relatives. I had to come into the office and do nothing, just hang around. The kicker was he managed to work from home himself. When I asked him why he did this, he just giggles. I cut off all connections with this guy after that.

So, TCS is a bad word for me. And I agree with you that PeechaKaro is bad. No, absolutely awful. I won't defend the company, I probably have more stories about that place than TCS. Good post from you above.

[dsreedhar]

Luckily I didn't have to deal with arrogant people, though had to deal with beginners with false claim of experience. However they were receptive and willing to learn and work.

"Guess TCS has grown too big now with very limited or nil attrition at middle/senior levels plus people getting promoted and skewing the pyramid big time."
That is a problem especially when these experienced folks become pure service delivery managers doing just administrative work and all the real work shoved to foot soldiers who are mostly freshers. It should not be just body count anymore. Have to increase the skill base. Coding should not be just writing a few lines of simple computer instructions. The middle level experienced folks should be doing more and lend their experience and learning and contribute to the real work. All the white managers (technical) I worked with have been work alcholics. They had years (15+) of experience under their belt but still have the passion in doing the real work.

PS: Reference to specific sect of people may not be appropriate in the forum. May invite the moderators wrath.

[Theo_Fidel]

My problem is they are wasting national resources which could be put to better use somewhere else. The employees should grow and so the companies.

Sreedhar,

This is a dodgy premise. One could at the same time question the need of wasting the cream of India youth in call center and IT services for American companies to make Americans richer/better services/etc.

The thing about capitalism is that it is impossible to direct it from above. One must suspend value judgements from on high. Which is the point that most people here are making. Capitalism is a horrible systems, but it is the best we have. And the boom and bust, jobs /layoffs are part of the cycle. What capitalism allows over time is for resources to become so abundant that we don't really worry about waste such as a 100,000 people losing their jobs or their experience of 15 years thrown into the garbage. They just have to retrain and move on. 90% of what we use today will be obsolete by 2035. In fact 90% of the companies today will likely not be here in 2035! This is the reality of capitalism....

[RamaY]

TCS justification of employee performance for the layoff of experienced staff, and turn around and hire double that number of fresh graduates doesn't make sense. 25K to 30K is a huge number of non-performing professionals at a given time. Either their hiring process is seriously flawed or the training procedures. And it took 3-4 yrs to identify the non-performing resources??
Hiring and training the fresh graduates takes time until they are reasonably productive. TCS risks putting on fresh candidates on projects and its image to the customers.

I think it is all about cost cutting. Is it not possible to do that by trimming the salaries and perks across the board? It should be the same case for other Indian IT majors as well. Somebody has to take lead and rest follows. Hiring and dumping just when they are valuable resource will be a big joke and waste of national resources.

When Jack Welsh fired 10% of employees every year, it was a "Leadership Revolution". When TCS does it, it is a scam! Jack Welsh also hired thousands of (fresh) people into GE as he fired 10% of his staff.

Reason? He was hiring 20% of top performers & 70% followers (from the fresher group), while firing the bottom 10% from overall employee pool every year.

Jack Welch's vitality model has been described as a "20-70-10" system. The "top 20" percent of the workforce is most productive, and 70% (the "vital 70") work adequately. The other 10% ("bottom 10") are nonproducers and should be fired.[5][6] Rank-and-yank advocates credit Welch's rank-and-yank system with a 28-fold increase in earnings (and a 5-fold increase in revenue) at GE between 1981 and 2001.[citation needed]

[Rishirishi]

Why Indians do not innovate???

1 Because Intelectual rights are very poor.
2 The Indian home market is not a suitable customer for the large international customers.

Imagine if everyone in India was forced to pay for the office pack
You bet many alternatives would pop up. But even large enterprises get away with pirate copies. So why bother creating software for them.

[Rishirishi]

For those of you that think this peecha karao thing is good.

Look at top notch companies, who create and deliver world class services/products. Not one of them will have a Peecha karao culture. Becase with this technique you only get stressed employee who desperately try to get out of challenges rather than facing them. It leads to depressions, politics, blame games and finally poor output.

[dsreedhar]

RamaY - I would not have a problem if the layoff is of the genuine bottom non-performers. Do not want to see sacrifice of work quality and overworked new entrants for the sake of cost cutting in the short term.
Sorry for my ignorance. But what is Peecha Karo being referred to in multiple posts here?

[Yayavar]

Rishirishi - there was wipro's 1-2-3, word, and other office products in late 80's and early 90's. People preferred to get the pirated versions of lotus 1-2-3 and MS. iirc, Infosys had the rights to sell MS office but same story. Wipro could have chosen more innovative names rather than copy-cat names but I doubt that would have made a difference.

[ArmenT]

Sorry for my ignorance. But what is Peecha Karo being referred to in multiple posts here?

Let me introduce you to the BRF dictionary.

In this case, you might want to check the entry under Peecha Karo Company

[ritesh]

I think, it's time for unions to be formed in all the listed non listed private sector organisations.

Is it time to unionise the IT sector?

Almost always, it’s only the success story that we hear - Infosys planning to hire 16,000, TCS setting a much higher target of 55,000 new recruits, and job portals predicting robust recruiting for the next 2-3 years. What go unnoticed are occasional blips - the layoffs - that are not statistically not as significant, but are imbued with sad stories of people.

Over the last few days, there has been considerable noise about alleged mass layoffs by TCS. Social networks are abuzz with unsubstantiated news that the company plans to send home about 25, 000 “non-performers” by the end of February 2015. Although TCS has maintained that there is nothing extraordinary and it’s only part of “workforce optimisation”, many discussants in social networking and media forums have alleged unfair treatment and a surreptitious plan to downsize the workforce.

According to some analysts, one of the reasons for the retrenchment could be to avoid employees with a few years of experience, who are proving to be costly to the company, and use the same resources to hire more people at the entry level. The seniors, who cannot be inducted into leadership or project management roles - probably due to lack of vacancies and competencies - add no better value than a new entrant. This “workforce optimisation” is seemingly about “cost optimisation”.

What about obscene salaries paid to top mgmt?? What about compensation to directors of the company?

This is a problem with most of the IT companies. Most of the industrial scale recruitments are for for “coding” (writing software) which require relatively but basic, skills. If the employees keep doing it without constantly upgrading their skills, they become no better than the new wave of recruits that enter the companies every year. After a while, the earlier ones make no sense cost-wise because the same job can be done by cheaper hands. The company, then talks of poor performance. On the other hands, even if many of them do well, there are not enough senior positions to absorb them.

In their testimonies and comments online, some of the laid off employees, say that they had been performing well, but still faced the axe. They also say that it’s difficult now to find other jobs because fresh recruits are available at cheaper cost.

Reportedly, a group of TCS employees have met the labour commissioner in Bengaluru and complained to him about the alleged lay offs across various centres in India. According to one of them, “first they remove you from the project, and later will ask you to leave the company.” “Employees are asked to sign voluntary resignation letters. We are given a one-month notice period, and are not being given eligible compensation,” is the version of another employee. Employees who lost jobs in Kochi also echoed similar sentiments.

This is happening across the private sector. Hence extremely important that GoI / State govt come out with new labour laws, which will atleast guarantee proper compensation, say 3-4 months.

Obviously, the scale of retrenchment is higher because it has encouraged people to get together. A big question that will come up in the coming days is the legal validity of the lay-offs. Are they legally tenable? Shouldn’t the employees and the labour department be notified in advance?

Before more and more IT-professionals join the ranks of unorganised labourers in the country, perhaps it’s time to look at ways to protect the rights of employees in the industry. The IT industry, including the employees, have so far stonewalled the overtures of labour unions. Last year, labour union activists in Karnataka had opposed the five year exemption to the IT sector from the Industrial Employment Act . The Left organisations such as CITU also has raised the need to extend the protection of labour laws and unions to IT employees.

It’s not just the present uproar over retrenchment that calls for legal protection for the IT-employees. There are also workplace issues such as long hours of work, lack of redress mechanisms and severe stagnation.

Time for introspection by the industry and more scrutiny by governments.

We do need to debate more rigorously on this subject.

[ritesh]

My inside info was that the purge is happening for D band employees, but this guy claims that even C band is being targeted.


from the above firstpost article.

[ritesh]

As per below report are:

http://www.domain-b.com/companies/compa ... dasan.html

Protests started in the last one week in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Pune and Kochi. The recently formed FITE in response to the developments within TCS is spearheading the campaign with a mass petition to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to stop this "indiscriminate termination."

According to FITE founding member Bharatidasan, TCS has asked 700 employees in Hyderabad, 470 in Bangalore, 480 in Chennai, 70 in Pune and 20 in Kochi to leave, while several hundreds were told by their managers that they would be called by HR.

But, below is interesting....

TCS last month said revenue growth in the current financial year would be lower than that of the previous year, backtracking from far more optimistic projections it had made earlier.

You give rosy outlook and pay unprecedented compensation to your CEO, now when push comes to shove, you target middle -lower tiers employees

[Vayutuvan]

I do not believe that TCS senior employees are paid above average. If one quantifies "slightly higher side" to mean ~75 percentile then that would fly in the face of reality that it is a widely known fact that TCS is not a good pay master. The fact of the matter is that they pay their employees below average due to TCS brand equity which translates to higher salaries if and when the employees leave TCS. They almost always get better packages.

[prahaar]

I do not believe that TCS senior employees are paid above average. If one quantifies "slightly higher side" to mean ~75 percentile then that would fly in the face of reality that it is a widely known fact that TCS is not a good pay master. The fact of the matter is that they pay their employees below average due to TCS brand equity which translates to higher salaries if and when the employees leave TCS. They almost always get better packages.

My anecdotal evidence suggests, mid-level management is significantly empowered as well as paid accordingly. This was reported to the extent where these "Groups" were a company by itself (sometimes submitting competing bids to the same project). In terms of salaries, combination of stocks + cash is very competitive for mid-high levels.

The competing bids were because each would keep the info "secret". Consequently sometimes it would blow up via the sales/marketing guy who would receive this information from the customer.

[Virendra]

Why Indians do not innovate???

1 Because Intelectual rights are very poor.
2 The Indian home market is not a suitable customer for the large international customers.

Imagine if everyone in India was forced to pay for the office pack
You bet many alternatives would pop up. But even large enterprises get away with pirate copies. So why bother creating software for them.

Oh that reminds me, we here in TCS work with Open Office.
MS Office license can't be afforded I guess ..
Installations are on case/need basis. Around me only 10-20 % people have it.

My colleagues would sometimes joke that they feel shy sharing screen with other vendors of same project (like iGate etc.), coz the other person might embarrass them with a scream "What, you don't have MS Office !!".

[Comer]

^^ OpenOffice is a pretty good tool by itself and a good substitute for MS office (which is not a standard anyway).

[pgbhat]

We have folks in our office who go on calls with enterprise customers all the time for sales/service/support and we use google docs (email is paid version of gmail) for many things including customer presentations. Don't know why it would be a H&D issue.
Of course everyone in the company gets a Mac book pro. Almost nothing is spent on client side laptop/desktop software.

[Anand K]

The inflexion point for Indian IT industry is here

Interesting comments too... like this one:

This Time & Materials business carried the seed of its own destruction. But it has taken a while to happen. An ex-boss of mine pointed out 5-6 yrs back that for testing projects done by GE partner companies in India, the rate was same as for folks who flip burgers in high wages states in the US like MA, CA etc. The service cos in India have literally destroyed a good white collar profession. If they had at least ended this IT boom on a high note – being known for something it would have been OK. But everyone outside of the stupid and clueless trade press knows how horrible Indian IT service cos are in general with few notable exceptions.

The big myth that got busted along the way was “We will first do services, then transition to products” – We are still waiting. The most successful Indian product companies have been for the most part startups from the beginning though they might have done some consulting on the side to sustain themselves. The industry leaves behind a horrible legacy – greedy landlords who are still unaware that the boom is over, spoilt middle class brats suffering from a severe sense of entitlement but with no matching skills, tasteless builders and their mega projects, myths about programming and mathematical skills, myths about Indians beating the Americans at their own game – the list is endless. Perhaps the worst legacy is the same service industry guys now pretending to be startuppers – some are even VCs.

Since you say that coolies are obliterated by technology consider construction workers in India – they are working like their predecessors did decades back. It is still a labour intensive industry. Whereas in the US you sometimes see a walmart under construction in the morning and by evening it is either complete or nearly so. But with software competition and true globalization seem to be much more true than with say the construction industry. It is very difficult to escape the effects of technology in the software industry.

[Comer]

Any sign of changes in the campus recruitment and training of these service companies, do they still do mass recruitment across disciplines?

[KJo]

You give rosy outlook and pay unprecedented compensation to your CEO, now when push comes to shove, you target middle -lower tiers employees

US companies are masters at this. Now Indian companies are learning this fraud from their American gurus.
At my previous company which was publicly traded, they would give us a rosy picture all year and in Dec they would pull it down and say that "only 75%" of the bonus pool was full. In other words, don't expect a whole lot as bonus. Then they gave us 1-5%. Of course the bigwigs got a lot.

We have seen this for years. For folks in India this is new.

[KJo]

Sorry for my ignorance. But what is Peecha Karo being referred to in multiple posts here?

Let me introduce you to the BRF dictionary.

In this case, you might want to check the entry under Peecha Karo Company

I take credit for inventing this.
I kind of co-invented Bawarchi... but then looks like RB independently beat me to it by a day..