Indian IT Industry

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S_Madhukar
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by S_Madhukar »

+10 on HP. Total nightmare. Can’t think of any model that was reliable long term. I also have a slightly pricier Epson eco tank and so far so good. Unfortunately in India most IT repairs shops recommended HP and they had more service centres , not sure what the situation is now with other brands. My 70+ Old Dads issues with his HP printer are worth a comedy sketch, will have to force a Epson on him this year
csaurabh
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by csaurabh »

I have an Epson L380 ink tank printer. Running smoothly for the last 3 yrs with no breakdown. Although I do use it a lot (nearly every day) so its in continuous running order. Any time a problem occurs it can be resolved with self diagnostics/ Epson website FAQs. Highly recommend.
nachiket
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by nachiket »

Alright please get back to the thread topic. Discussion on printers is not really germane here.
Vips
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by Vips »

Apna: India's fastest Unicorn.

A 22-month-old startup that is helping millions of blue- and gray-collar workers in India learn new skills and find jobs has become the youngest firm to join the coveted unicorn status in the world’s second-largest internet market.

Apna announced on Thursday that it has raised $100 million in a round led by Tiger Global. The new round — a Series C — valued Apna at $1.1 billion. TechCrunch reported last month that Tiger Global, an existing investor in Apna, was in talks to lead a $100 million financing round in the startup at the unicorn valuation.

Owl Ventures, Insight Partners, Sequoia Capital India, Maverick Ventures and GSV Ventures also participated in the new round, which is the third investment secured by Apna this year. Apna was valued at $570 million in its Series B round in June this year.

The investors’ excitement comes as Apna has demonstrated an impressive growth in recent months. The startup has amassed over 16 million users on its 15-month-old eponymous Android app, up from 10 million in June this year.

Indian cities are home to hundreds of millions of low-skilled workers who hail from villages in search of work. Many of them have lost their jobs amid the coronavirus pandemic that has slowed several economic activities in the South Asian market.

Apna has built a platform that provides a community to these workers. In the community, they engage with each other, exchange notes to perform better at interviews and share tips to negotiate better compensation.

On top of this, Apna connects these workers to potential employers. In an interview with TechCrunch, Apna founder and chief executive Nirmit Parikh said more than 150,000 employers — including Zomato, Bharti AXA, Urban Company, BYJU’S, PhonePe, Burger King, Delhivery, Teamlease and G4S Global — are on the platform, and over 5 million jobs are active.

The startup, whose name is inspired from a cheerful 2019 Bollywood song, has facilitated over 18 million job interviews in the past 30 days, he said. Apna is currently operational in 28 Indian cities.

The idea for Apna came, Parikh has said, after he was puzzled to find that even as there are hundreds of millions of blue- and gray-collar workers in India, locating them when you need assistance with a task often proves very difficult.

Prior to starting Apna, Parikh, who previously worked at Apple, met these workers and went undercover as an electrician and floor manager to understand the problems they were facing. The problem, he found, was the disconnect. Workers had no means to find who needed them for jobs, and they were also not connected with one another. The community aspect of Apna, which now has over 70 such groups, is aimed at addressing this challenge.

The Apna app allows these workers to learn new skills to become eligible for more work opportunities. Apna has emerged as one of the fastest growing upskilling platforms — and that would explain why GSV Ventures and Owl Ventures, two high-profile firms known to back edtech startups, are investing in the Bangalore-based firm.

“Apna’s viral adoption is driven by a novel social and interactive approach to connecting employers with job seekers. We expect job seekers in search of meaningful connections and vetted opportunities to drive Apna’s continued explosive growth across India — and the world,” said Griffin Schroeder, partner at Tiger Global, in a statement.

Now the startup, which has started to monetize the platform, is ready to aggressively expand. Parikh said Apna will continue to expand to more cities in India and by early next year, Apna will begin its global expansion. Parikh said the startup is eyeing expansion in the USA, South East Asia and Middle East and Africa.

“We have already created a dent. Now we want to impact the lives of 2.3 billion,” he said. “We will require crazy amounts of resources and a world-class team to deliver. It’s a herculean task, and is going to take a village. But somebody has to solve it.”
Cyrano
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by Cyrano »

Excellent ! This is something the govt should be doing, to link job seeker's adhaar and link to worker's health insurance, provident fund, skills database, on going skill development etc to progressively transform unorganised labour sector into organised. They can still bring all these on to a common platform and provide APIs to apna and others which will come up in the future. HRD ministry should wake up.

France has a system called "cheque emploi service" that makes working in black into white, and offers tax sops to individuals who hire domestic help, repair workers, artisans etc on per hour basis @ min legal wages or above. Worth looking into and adapting to Indian needs.
Vips
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by Vips »

Bengaluru most sought after hub for GCCs in India: Nasscom report.

Bengaluru is the most sought-after destination for global capability centres (GCCs) across verticals in India, with a presence of over 31% GCCs, followed by the national capital region (NCR), according to a Nasscom report titled ‘GCC India Landscape: 2021 & Beyond.’

Over the last three years, more than 140 GCCs have set up their base in India, taking the total to over 1430. Availability of digital talent, maturity of startups, peer-GCC ecosystem, and a conducive policy environment are among the factors enabling the GCC growth story in India, the report said.

“GCCs in India not only demonstrated greater resilience in tackling the pandemic infused difficulties but also adopted antifragile business continuity plans and operation models, defining the right balance across parameters – people, IT infrastructure, and customer & employee experience for clients across the globe," said Debjani Ghosh, president, Nasscom.

“India provides the most unique ecosystem (academia, startups, service providers, industry bodies, and government) in the world, which the GCCs have collectively leveraged and developed over the years. For India to grow as a global hub, GCCs, industry bodies, and the government will need to bridge the skill demand-supply gap and continue to focus on upskilling/reskilling," Ghosh added.

Engineering and research & development (ER&D) is leading the growth story of GCCs in India with a 55% market share as digital technologies create new sources of revenue for ER&D GCCs to cater to the local customer base and develop engineering capabilities. India’s ER&D GCC talent pool has been growing at over 11% CAGR during FY2015-21 on the back of digital transformation.

As automation and data analytics lead technology penetration across industry verticals, post pandemic, India is quickly becoming a hub for experimentation of various innovations for GCCs due to the sheer scale it offers. With portfolio expansion, GCCs are setting up technical centres of excellence (CoEs) to innovate from India to the world.
Anoop
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by Anoop »

Maria
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Post by Maria »

Some news on the state of Quantum Computing in India:

https://analyticsindiamag.com/india-rel ... -analysis/

https://www.livemint.com/technology/tec ... 51929.html

https://indianexpress.com/article/citie ... s-7429059/

I am kind of disappointed that India hasn't made any strides in an actual near-term QC in India apart from the Eye-Eye-Tees (with due respect) and IISC improving upon Quantum Cryptography technologies. All this, while China is lacing ahead in this field.

Does anyone know what's going with the USD 1 billion released for QCs in India by GOI?
hanumadu
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by hanumadu »

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/bus ... 190432.cms
IIT Mandi is among the few institutions in India working towards indigenisation of a wide spectrum of photoresists. In 2012, the institute took up the challenge of bulk production of indigenous photoresist formulations for Indian semiconductor industries and academic institutes.

...

, which provided $300,000 for developing state-of-art materials for 20 nanometre (nm) node VLSI technologies. This was demonstrated for resolution of 20 nm under EUV (extreme ultraviolet lithography) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA.


Link to IIT Mandi's Photoresist Research Group.
http://www.photoresistgroup.com/index.php

They seem to have now progressed to sub 10 nano meter resolution since the above article. We are near the cutting edge in at least one area of chip manufacturing.

Haven't been able to find what we are doing in laser light sources and optics areas of semiconductor manufacturing.

Lam Research makes equipments for etching and deposition used in semi conductor manufacturing. It has a India team that seems to be involved in its core R&D.

China is reported to have 40 nm process technology and by this year end will come up with 28 nm machines. If china can make it, we can too though china could be lying about its capabilities.
Vayutuvan
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Re:

Post by Vayutuvan »

Maria wrote:I am kind of disappointed that India hasn't made any strides in an actual near-term QC in India apart from the Eye-Eye-Tees (with due respect) and IISC improving upon Quantum Cryptography technologies. All this, while China is lacing ahead in this field.

Does anyone know what's going with the USD 1 billion released for QCs in India by GOI?
Forget QC, India has no Supercomputer (cluster) to speak of. One was built by Narendra Karmarkar for TRTDC/TCS which was No. 5 in the top 500 list for one year. Then we were overtaken. Since then nothing had happened. Karmarkar left TCS, joined NIC, went from pillar to post during MMS and now Modi govts. He couldn't get much headway due to entrenched folks - mostly babus who have no science background being the powers that be to call shots.
Maria
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Re: Re:

Post by Maria »

Vayutuvan wrote:
Maria wrote:I am kind of disappointed that India hasn't made any strides in an actual near-term QC in India apart from the Eye-Eye-Tees (with due respect) and IISC improving upon Quantum Cryptography technologies. All this, while China is lacing ahead in this field.

Does anyone know what's going with the USD 1 billion released for QCs in India by GOI?
Forget QC, India has no Supercomputer (cluster) to speak of. One was built by Narendra Karmarkar for TRTDC/TCS which was No. 5 in the top 500 list for one year. Then we were overtaken. Since then nothing had happened. Karmarkar left TCS, joined NIC, went from pillar to post during MMS and now Modi govts. He couldn't get much headway due to entrenched folks - mostly babus who have no science background being the powers that be to call shots.
:eek: I didn't know that because I was straight away jolted by QCs when I discovered that emerging tech 2 years back. But OTH, I thought that the Params were cluster based?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARAM
Vayutuvan
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Re: Re:

Post by Vayutuvan »

Maria wrote:...
:eek: I didn't know that because I was straight away jolted by QCs when I discovered that emerging tech 2 years back. But OTH, I thought that the Params were cluster based?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARAM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EKA_(supercomputer)

This was the one built in 2011 Computer Research Labs for Tata Sons. Done in six weeks flat. It was the fourth fastest in the world and fastest in Asia at that time. There is more to this story. I am not at liberty to write more in an open forum.
Vips
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by Vips »

The three acts of entrepreneurship that accelerated India’s start-up ecosystem.

India’s startup ecosystem is radically breaking from its past in company valuations, unicorn numbers, funding round sizes, foreign interest, and growth. What’s going on? Historians suggest caution with origin stories — every theory just points to an earlier beginning. But we believe three acts of entrepreneurship from five years ago — Jio, UPI, and GST — have converged to accelerate our startup ecosystem. We also make the case that this triad of private, nonprofit, and government courage demonstrates the economic upsides of a better balance between the three sectors.

The Harvard economist Ricardo Hausmann suggests economic development is like a game of scrabble. Goods and services are made by stringing together productive capabilities — inputs, technologies, and tasks — just as words are made by putting letters together. Countries with a greater variety of capabilities can make more diverse and complex goods, just as a scrabble player who has more letters can generate more and longer words. If a country lacks a letter, it cannot make the words that use it. Moreover, the more letters a country has, the greater the number of uses it can find for any additional letter acquired. In Hausmann’s framing, the government provides the vowels and the private sector provides the consonants. The 1955 Avadi resolution poisoned India’s economic scrabble by restricting constants and shrinking the state’s resources to provide vowels. Our triad provides new letters and vowels that enable entrepreneurs to create newer and longer words. Let’s look at each in more detail:

JIO: India’s per GB internet data costs are just 3 per cent of those in the US. A bold and risky $35 billion bet made by a private company transformed Indians from being data deprived to data-rich; consumption has jumped 15 times because costs fell by over 90 per cent. The addition of millions of consumers and smartphones since Jio’s delightful five-year disruption of the market has exploded the most important universal metric in startup valuation — addressable market. Most Indians toil in low productivity and self-exploitation. Affordable digital connectivity is transforming 75 crore of them into consumers, entrepreneurs, employees, and suppliers.

UPI: Google’s letter to the US Federal Reserve suggesting America learn from India’s Universal Payments Interface (UPI) run by the remarkable nonprofit — National Payment Corporation of India — acknowledged that our real-time, low-cost, open-architecture payment plumbing is a public good. UPI’s mobile-first architecture is a key pillar of the paperless, presenceless, and cashless framework of the Aadhaar-seeded India Stack. UPI’s current four billion transactions a month — it will soon reach a billion a day — greatly reduces friction and costs for entrepreneurs and consumers in low-value payments. Remember the inefficiency and low reliability of cash-on-delivery?

GST: India’s economic tragedy began with the second five-year plan in 1956, leading entrepreneurs to conclude that the benefits of formality were lower than the costs. This informality bred corruption; transmission losses between how the law was written, interpreted, practiced, and enforced. More painfully, informality bred low-productivity enterprises with low-paying jobs, whose business model of regulatory arbitrage and tax evasion made formal enterprises uncompetitive. GST attacked complexity and incentivised law-abiding supply and distribution chains. It was long in the making but going live needed the risk-taking of starting with a second-best architecture, accepting some unjustifiable rates, and state revenue guarantees. The doubling of indirect tax registered enterprises since GST creates a virtuous economic cycle of higher total factor productivity for enterprises and employees.

India now has the highest ratio of unlisted to listed companies with a $1 billion valuation, suggests Neelkanth Mishra of Credit Suisse (a unicorn was born every 10 days this year). Initial public offering documents filed by early startups like Nykaa, Paytm, Zomato and PolicyBazaar roughly average a 10x valuation rise since the triad went live. Estimates suggest India’s startup ecosystem valuation will explode from $315 billion today to $1 trillion by 2025. An unintended delightful upside of Rs 2 lakh crore startup fundraising in 2021 is the mass diversion of high-quality young human capital from wage employment to job creation.
Cyrano
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by Cyrano »

Sorry for the OT:

Any recommendations for a "made in India" laptop / lap book (light home usage for my parents) ? Processor and many components may be imported but I'm looking for a product at least designed and produced in India.

I've noted 2 which seemed interesting:
- Smartron t.book flex Core m3 - pad top 53K (reviews on amazon are terrible)
- RDP ThinBook 1010 - 19K (reviews on amazon are very variable)

Any feedback on these? Any other suggestions? Thanks in advance.
Naresh_K
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by Naresh_K »

Cyrano wrote:Sorry for the OT:

Any recommendations for a "made in India" laptop / lap book (light home usage for my parents) ? Processor and many components may be imported but I'm looking for a product at least designed and produced in India.

I've noted 2 which seemed interesting:
- Smartron t.book flex Core m3 - pad top 53K (reviews on amazon are terrible)
- RDP ThinBook 1010 - 19K (reviews on amazon are very variable)

Any feedback on these? Any other suggestions? Thanks in advance.
Cyrano garu, You had mentioned a Hyderabad meet in one of the other threads. I had sent an email to you regarding the same. I am not sure if you received the email. I am posting to check if the Hyderabad BRF meet is planned. if yes, could you please send me the details?

Mods: Apologies for the OT. Please remove this post once Cyrano garu responds.
Cyrano
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by Cyrano »

Uvmnk garu,
I replied same day, please check your spam folder. I'm in touch with Hari Seldon garu as well, nothing planned yet, perhaps after Diwali. Will loop you in when things move.
Bart S
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by Bart S »

Cyrano wrote:Sorry for the OT:

Any recommendations for a "made in India" laptop / lap book (light home usage for my parents) ? Processor and many components may be imported but I'm looking for a product at least designed and produced in India.

I've noted 2 which seemed interesting:
- Smartron t.book flex Core m3 - pad top 53K (reviews on amazon are terrible)
- RDP ThinBook 1010 - 19K (reviews on amazon are very variable)

Any feedback on these? Any other suggestions? Thanks in advance.
Many Dell and some Lenovo models are made in India.
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by Amber G. »

Jack resigned as CEO of twitter = Parag Agrawal is the new guy.

Google, Microsoft, Adobe, IBM, Palo Alto Networks, and now Twitter run by CEOs who grew up and educated in India. Many from IIT's.
disha
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by disha »

Amber G. wrote:Jack resigned as CEO of twitter = Parag Agrawal is the new guy.

Google, Microsoft, Adobe, IBM, Palo Alto Networks, and now Twitter run by CEOs who grew up and educated in India. Many from IIT's.*
It appears that IIT has become a IT-Coolie factory for West. Such a waste of public money and talent.

None of these IIT-educated CEOs have a plan to Make in India. Shame on them.

BTW, the Parag Agrawal person has no clue about running Twitter. Coming from IIT, Parag has gone full woke and is best considered a seat warmer and a person who will be answerable to US congress. That is, protect Jack from the fire and brimstone brewing against him. Once his utility is served, he will be discarded like a used condom. The US has done to nations. Parag (and most IIT CEOs) are individuals and not countries, so they will be easily tossed around like nine pins.

You see Twitter's technical problem, business problem and socio-cultural problems are all different. Twitter could not help hacking Modi's account. If a war is started somewhere in the world, Twitter will be liable and it will have a huge price to pay. Both in terms of material and human lives.

Check out Rajaratinam case.

*One of my acquaintances is an alumnus of IIT Kanpur and the first batch handpicked by Dr. Kelkar. In him, Dr. Kelkar** made a huge mistake. I believe several IITians (say 60%?) take the "how to be self-centered and have a remarkable lack of empathy" course.

** Dr. Kelkar in his group discussion asked whether oil should be applied before bath or after a bath? The question was supposedly based on scientific principles. However, Dr. Kelkar did not realize that the practical reasons sometimes outweigh the scientific reasons AND cultural practices could have evolved based on sound scientific principles.
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by vimal »

disha wrote:
Amber G. wrote:Jack resigned as CEO of twitter = Parag Agrawal is the new guy.

Google, Microsoft, Adobe, IBM, Palo Alto Networks, and now Twitter run by CEOs who grew up and educated in India. Many from IIT's.*
It appears that IIT has become a IT-Coolie factory for West. Such a waste of public money and talent.

None of these IIT-educated CEOs have a plan to Make in India. Shame on them.


You see Twitter's technical problem, business problem and socio-cultural problems are all different. Twitter could not help hacking Modi's account. If a war is started somewhere in the world, Twitter will be liable and it will have a huge price to pay. Both in terms of material and human lives.
Twitter has been gamed very well by the western powers to start wars and revolutions in the far off lands. Remember the Arab spring? Nothing will happen to Twitter as long as it keeps the flames far from their lands.

When its close to home they treat people like Assange like dirt, so much for FOE and democracy etc.
Last edited by vimal on 16 Dec 2021 02:04, edited 1 time in total.
disha
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by disha »

I got distracted and came here to post this news:

https://swarajyamag.com/news-brief/rs-7 ... nt-subsidy

The above is a good move. Now Government has to figure out the demand-side equation. The demand is there, significant demand. But none for chips that are Indian designed and manufactured. Since the ecosystem from the ground up does not exist.
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by ArjunPandit »

disha wrote:I got distracted and came here to post this news:

https://swarajyamag.com/news-brief/rs-7 ... nt-subsidy

The above is a good move. Now Government has to figure out the demand-side equation. The demand is there, significant demand. But none for chips that are Indian designed and manufactured. Since the ecosystem from the ground up does not exist.
Had a discussion with some panwallah..who's closely associated with this work. Following points came up during the discussion. He mentioned the following challenges
1. Lack of Inputs/Raw materials
a. Water: High quality water, which for even small scale fabs is equivalent to the requirements of the consumption of household. Even ground
water is not of the same quality
b. Power: less of a concern to goi, but in the minds of participants
c. Gases: India has to import the gases


2. Lack of interest from industry participants: GOI has been involved with discussions with pretty much every one that matters in the industry. There is lack of interest due to
a. lack of materials mentioned above
b. lack of eco system. US, taiwan, Israel & china have huge domestic markets with numerous unicorns in the area
c. Places where new fabs are moving, have a huge demand. US semi demand is roughly 10X of India.
d. Political compulsions
e. past history of red tapism

3. GOI Apprehensions, even though is even willing to put in money,
a. they are wary due to experience in SCL Mohali which is a sinkhole. the wafers output is in single digits. It needs water. Even there are talks
about increasing water tank capacity, but not about increasing of production. BTW the maximum production capacity is in two digits, IIRC no.
was 70. Barely used anywhere. May be some military applications
b. World gradually moving towards fabless
c. future industry changes:
i. Production methodologies may change esp with quantum computing coming down the road.
ii. Industry itself may see glut due to multiple fabs being set up a/c the globe.
d. there are leeches at home that come at the first smell of money. Both in domestic and private sector.
i. Some major global mobile manuf participants taking GOI for a ride by mere assembly but claiming CKD vs/ SKD or something of that sort
ii. Some desi participants trying to pull strings on the basis of color (read saffron) and region to get some fingers in the pie.
e. Even domestic participants manufacturers, whatever they are, are unwilling to put money on desi because
i. reliability, Turn around time and cost of foreign participants is better

4. All said and done GOI-and ministries are trying best to set this thing rolling by keeping emotions aside
a. they have linked in design/production performance and incentive approach rather than direct funds infusion
b. They are fully aware that initially some people will abuse the system but there is a chance some major may come in and otherwise people are
fine with gradual move up the value chain approach as long as not scam
c. while ministries are going piecemeal, there is a realization that people will have to go all out approach. Now with perpetual election mode
and no. of other things, seems challenging to go all out on this.
d. they are going out in factual and no-emotional manner just like other industry participants. My question if they are they missing bigger
picture, no one knows.
d. My thought that top political intervention would be required, given the way things are right now. Perhaps some thing with US
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by Rishirishi »

Had a discussion with some panwallah..who's closely associated with this work. Following points came up during the discussion. He mentioned the following challenges
Panwallah.... Wow India is progressing.
vimal
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by vimal »

@ArjunPandit yawn. We need chaiwalla not panwalla. Everything you posted can be verbatim posted for anything.
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by ArjunPandit »

vimal wrote:@ArjunPandit yawn. We need chaiwalla not panwalla. Everything you posted can be verbatim posted for anything.
thanks for your valuable insights..in case you missed out there is already a chaiwallah sitting at top..next is gaiwallah..so no more chaiwallah needed
as for generic nature, hope you do understand that some part of conversations esp details like the exact no.s offered or the specific companies taking GOI for a ride under the name of manufacturing/assembly in india can't be named in a public forum even though its an open secret in GOI corridors.

In case you are willing to know what details are being talked in closed rooms on an open forum, esp after the news was leaked out in advance when GOI planned to release it 1-2 weeks later and people have been given an earful for it..you are welcome to go and knock the power corridors and glean some insights...and of course share it on this forum :-)
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by disha »

Indians were one of the first ones to make semi-conductor. Check out radio oscillators.

Vimal'ji, the BRF network does have people who are chaiwallahs, panwallahs. It is just a matter of math. You must have heard of 6-degrees of separation. Now think 3 or at most 4 degrees.

ArjunPandit'ji, thanks for bringing out various concerns. The list is long, so it will take multiple attempts to address the concerns. We can start with infrastructure first:
. Lack of Inputs/Raw materials
a. Water: High quality water, which for even small scale fabs is equivalent to the requirements of the consumption of household. Even ground
water is not of the same quality
b. Power: less of a concern to goi, but in the minds of participants
c. Gases: India has to import the gases
Chip-making is high energy-consuming industry. And the base of it is sand. Yes, sand. That is SiO2 is processed into very high purity silicon by using high-quality coke (coal) in electric arc furnaces, using chlorine and pure zinc as intermediaries, and then creating perfect silicon crystals out of it.

Other byproducts of this process are PV cells and optical fibers. The waste output is chlorine and is a major pollutant. Hydrochloric acid is probably a more useful byproduct instead of waste chlorine.

Given the above, one can see that to get to the base of a chip, one has to have huge power requirements. And also a steady supply of high-quality quartzite, high-quality coal, zinc etc. This raw material needs to be not just sourced but guaranteed. Since once a manufacturer starts making silicon boules it *cannot* stop. Even an hour of stoppage means the entire silicon boule making lines clog up and to unclog it takes lot of time and energy.

These boules are later sawed into wafers using diamond saws/wires. And one gets the wafer blanks. These are then processed into integrated circuits/semiconductors etc.

Hence if the participants raise questions on high-quality water, input materials, power, and eventually gases (to make the semiconductors) they have a genuine reason. Setting up boule manufacturing itself is a very costly process.

What GOI can do is start at the base of the SC. That is, entice or arm-twist wafer manufacturing companies like Global Wafers (Singapore), Shin-Etsu (Japan) into setting up wafer manufacturing in India. Indian companies like Borosil should be arm-twisted in tie-ups with above companies.

Goal of GOI should be to own at least 20% of the wafer production capacity of the world.. There is nothing as 'Glut' in this area.

Wafer production by itself is a hi-tech industry. It will lead to various research pathways on different semi-conductor. Check out Jagadish chandra bose seminal work on the millimeter band. So it is very much doable in India.

GoI just needs to understand that the 'raw material' to semiconductors itself is extremely high tech in terms of material chemistry and physics.

Further, GOI can assure power requirements and also dedicated setups to manufacture and export boules.
S_Madhukar
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by S_Madhukar »

Ah well Taiwan and Korea etc have resources plenty for fabs and India doesn’t - great for countries which barely had cows to milk and this is water we are talking about … looks like some babus are still so lazy that they can’t see any resources beyond the enormous guts they have grown.

Agree with “glut” - recall someone saying what was the market for PCs? Memory? Demand can create Supply and Supply can create Demand. Still socialist economic models dominating in our babus
Prasad
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by Prasad »

We have LANCO that makes poly for solar cells. So it isn't a stretch to say that we can make bulk poly silicon with the idea that bulk production for
domestic fabs as well as domestic production of solar cells will make it economically feasible. And if we run it using partly-renewable power, we could offer the west a sustainable and dependable portion of the semiconductor supply chain rather than depending on coal-powered, slave-laboured built polysilicon from Xinjiang. Where there is a will..
disha
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by disha »

Madhukar'ji you have a very valid point. Baboos are not paid to take risks. They are paid and their careers are tied to keep the admin going with minimal risk for the political masters. And no politico will be fired by the public for not setting up strategic industries.

This is where the Indian baboo failed. They did not have a strategic foresight other than sending their sons & daughters to US ivy league colleges. And

Taiwan and S. Korea are small states and their political and baboos have a strategic purpose. Further S. Korea needed all the help from US to grow its economy while selling its strategic autonomy. A broken India was in the best strategic interest of the west, particularly after it started leaning towards Soviet socialism.

Things are changing now. The current polity is working hard to give the strategic independence India needs. From Jet engines to Submarines to Missiles to Nuclear to Energy. Now it is the turn of semiconductors and it behooves us to provide constructive feedback.

Yes Baboos are smart and once they are aligned on to a mission they will do wonders. They do have their fear, uncertainty and skepticism. Mostly skepticism. We can only hope to give our perspective and see if it lights a spark. The rest is all Jai Sri Krishna and Mahadev's wishes.

---

Prasad'ji,
We have LANCO that makes poly for solar cells. So it isn't a stretch to say that we can make bulk poly silicon with the idea that bulk production for
domestic fabs as well as domestic production of solar cells will make it economically feasible.
That's an excellent idea of asking companies like LANCO and other major glass manufacturing companies like Borosil (since Silicon crystal boule is 'glass') to partner and start making the wafers.

On the energy, it does not have to be solar, since addition of power for manufacturing will be arithmetic but power consumption for making wafers will be geometric. India can set up clean coal or nuclear power plants as needed for base load. Also coal is required as a process to convert SiO2 to Si. The chemistry is simple: SiO2 + C => Si + CO2 where to avoid formation of SiC, additional SiO2 is added. This is not the pure Si for the wafers, but an intermediate.

---

So ArjunPandit'ji, you can tell your paanwallah that one way to crack this will be start from the bottom of the feed chain. Get partnerships on the wafers to start going and that is part of the semiconductor policy. Somebody from the PMO can get the heads cracked to get the industry leaders on Indian side start negotiating with their counterparts to get the wafers in Make in india.

---
Prasad'ji, coal is *never* going to go away. I did ask in one other forum thread to discuss why Wind Power is more dirty and emits more green house gases than coal based power plants. And yes, coal as a primary fuel for base load may go away at some point in future, but coal usage by itself will *never* go away.
Prasad
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by Prasad »

If things move along and firm up, there are a lot of companies who would love to get a piece of the pie. LANCO is just one example.

We could use a nuke power plant for it and call it sustainable. Coal was just a placeholder for non-polluting source of power. Could be anything to sweeten the deal. And if we do setup a fab, ancillary industries will also need it. So power budgeting will need to take into account nearly an entire cluster + civilian needs around it anyway.
disha
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by disha »

^ +72. There is no icon for two-thumbs up - so :thumbs up: :thumbs up: to your post above Prasad'ji.
Amber G.
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by Amber G. »

IIT has become a IT-Coolie factory for West..
LOL!
Indeed ..Not only for West but for India too..and it seems they are quite happy too..I am familiar with this year from IIT Kanpur placement record for 2021-22, for example according to Director of IITK:
BTW Prime Minister Modi will be the there to congratulate these so called "IT-Coolies'" on December 27, as he is the chief guest for this convocation for the graduating class
Meanwhile among the graduating class have a very good placement record where these IT-coolies are likely to go:
- There were 1300 offers made (about 1100 offers were accepted)
- 47 international offers, a jump of 150% from last year (But hundreds in India's IT.
- USD $287,550 for international highest package & Rs. 1.2 Cr for domestic
- 49 offers above Rs. 1 Cr
- More than 80% students - who used the placement services - placed.

Not bad.

BTW - I knew - Dr. Kelkar, IIT K was small enough then that he knew most of us students by their first name and was extremely involved with faculty and students - A humble Men with big vision but I can safely say he would be very proud of the quality of students his institute produced. ..
Apart from CEO's of companies like IBM, world renowned professors, scientists, administrators ..
But some discussion in BRF reminds me of lines from national poet Mathilisharan Gupt - who wrote about the attitude of people who were against any kind of education saying -- education is only good for those who want to do manual work and thus rakshak's of foolishness will always condemn education.
श्रीमान शिक्षा दे उन्हें तो श्रीमती कहती यही..
गेरो न लल्ला को हमारे नौकरी करनी नहीं.
सिक्षे तुम्हारा नाश हो, तू नौकरी के हित बानी
ले मूर्खता जीवित रहे - रक्षक तुम्हारे है धनी
Amber G.
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by Amber G. »

ArjunPandit wrote:
thanks for your valuable insights..in case you missed out there is already a chaiwallah sitting at top..next is gaiwallah..so no more chaiwallah needed
as for generic nature, hope you do understand that some part of conversations esp details like the exact no.s offered or the specific companies taking GOI for a ride under the name of manufacturing/assembly in india can't be named in a public forum even though its an open secret in GOI corridors.

In case you are willing to know what details are being talked in closed rooms on an open forum, esp after the news was leaked out in advance when GOI planned to release it 1-2 weeks later and people have been given an earful for it..you are welcome to go and knock the power corridors and glean some insights...and of course share it on this forum :-)
And here is an opportunity to approach those assorted chaiwallahs to advice them on things like waste of public money and talent on IIT types IT coolies..:) too...


PM Narendra Modi Invites Suggestions From Students To Address IIT Kanpur Convocation On Dec 28
Atmavik
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by Atmavik »

^^^ people are free to to choose their own paths and calling them names is not right. it could be IT, politics, manufacturing tech , etc.. i just hope their choices are driven out of their interests and not because our economy cannot support them.

one my my cousins after graduating from IIT tried his had in different things but settled in IT. on the other hand here is a person who chose not to go to IIT

csaurabh
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by csaurabh »

IITs were always an IT/MNC coolies factory. There is not really any doubt about that. I spent 6 years of my life in two different IITs and I could not find anything remotely connected to benefiting the country or even just generally interesting.

Having said that I think the vilification of IIT students is unfair. These are after all people who have next to no say in how the institute is run and the placements they get is just reflective of Indian industry/society in general. All said and done they are no more a coolie factory than any other engineering college in India and perhaps a lot less given the higher percentage of exceptional/high IQ students.

No, this focus on students is a distraction from the real villains of the IIT system which is professors.
These so called professors/academics live in a make believe fantasy world of theoretical research papers which have no practical utility other than getting academic job/promotions. They brainwash students with their silly 'theories' and impart almost no practical engineering knowledge or skills whatsoever ( resulting in the industry needing to set up a parallel education system which does that ), and they spend huge quantities of funds in buying expensive equipment from the west to generate their so called papers. They have even conned some govt organizations and pvt sector into giving them funding for such activities, without having any obligation to produce anything useful. One very senior ISRO scientist told me once that they had spent around 100 cr on funding to IIT projects with no results and thats why they stopped funding them nowadays.

Before you can say 'exceptions', there will always be some exceptions in any system. If there are 2 good/useful professors in a department of 25, that does not excuse the other 23 being garbage. The worst part is that these are not bad or stupid people in general. They are just brainwashed into academic ways and don't understand what real output or contributions look like. Situation is improving a bit nowadays but not by much.
Ambar
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by Ambar »

VOX media known for its anti-India propaganda does a hit job on Infy. I am not a fan of Infosys or its founders but i really could not understand what the big deal is if an employee has to wait for a project as long as they getting paid for their time.
BY EMMA RINDLISBACHER | DEC 7, 2021, 10:00AM EST
ILLUSTRATIONS BY THOMAS HEDGER
OUTSOURCED TECH JOBS ARE RETURNING TO THE US. SO WHY ARE STAFFING FIRMS HIRING SO MANY YOUNG AMERICANS TO SIT AROUND AND DO NOTHING?

When Infosys announced construction on its planned headquarters in Indianapolis in 2018, it was a coup for the Trump administration. Although few have heard of the company today, Infosys is an IT firm best known for outsourcing jobs from the US to India in the ’80s and ’90s, the same sort of company Trump targeted during his campaign and through executive orders as president. Good American jobs were being moved overseas by firms like Infosys, according to Trump. Now, they would be bringing 3,000 jobs to Indiana and 10,000 jobs nationwide — well-paying tech jobs at that.

For Infosys’ president, Ravi Kumar, the new headquarters was just one part of a larger project to revitalize the American dream. “The American dream is all about, ‘I could start anywhere, but I could be a CEO of a company or I could literally reach the top of the ladder as long as I have the capability and potential,’” Kumar told The Verge. He outlined an ambitious plan to not just hire entry-level workers but train them, too, in partnership with Indiana’s Purdue University, as well as colleges across the country.

One of Infosys’ many recruits was Josh, who joined the company at the height of the pandemic after graduating college. (The names of the Infosys employees quoted in this article have been changed to protect their anonymity, out of fear of retaliation.) But although Infosys hired Josh and paid for his salary, it’s difficult to say that Josh worked for the company. Instead, he spent much of his time at Infosys on what the company referred to as the Bench.

Infosys is a consulting firm and assigns employees to specific clients. When Infosys has more employees than it needs for its clients, those spare employees end up on the Bench, where they are, in effect, paid to do nothing. And as Infosys has ramped up its hiring of American workers, many of those workers found themselves getting paid to not work.

“IT FEELS LIKE I AM BEING WASTED, I COULD BE DOING MORE, AND I’M NOT”

At first, being on the Bench had its perks, particularly for Josh, who worked remotely due to the pandemic. “I ended up playing a lot of video games,” he said. But his time on the Bench began to wear on him for reasons he found difficult to describe to his family and friends. “It was really hard to explain to them why I felt like it was a bad thing,” Josh said. “They were just like… ‘Well, you’re getting paid to do nothing, how could that be bad? That sounds like a dream job.’”

Far from a dream job, Josh found his time on the Bench to be quite stressful. Infosys said that the company would place him on a client project, but Josh didn’t know when that would happen or whether the project would involve the software engineering skills he learned in college. “They don’t keep you up to date on a daily basis,” Josh said. “Sometimes, you can go for a week without hearing them, so you have no sense if any progress is being made toward getting you on a project.”

Josh spent a total of six months on the Bench, during which he constantly checked his computer to see if he had been assigned a project. “While you’re on the Bench, your one job is to respond when people try and contact you,” Josh said. “Days can go by where there’s nothing coming from the laptop or the phone that you need to respond to, and yet you feel kind of chained to it. There’s a good chance that you could be called or sent an email that says you have an interview in four hours. That was what happened to me.”

Josh was relatively lucky. He was eventually placed on a project, and although the work was what he described as “bottom-rung type of labor,” it was at least a software development project, meaning he got to stick with what he studied in college. Not everyone who worked at Infosys could say the same. The Verge interviewed 15 current and former Infosys workers, who all asked to remain anonymous due to fear of retaliation from their employers. The experiences they described were varied, in part due to opaque Infosys policies that were applied inconsistently for different employees. Some described moving across the country in search of assignments, while others were put on projects that were completely unrelated to the skillsets they had been hired for.

But one common experience for many Infosys employees is the Bench. And while the Bench might have benefits in the short term, the Infoscions, as the company’s employees are called, are keenly aware that spending too long on the Bench might damage their career prospects.


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“Whether or not you like sitting around and doing nothing and collecting a paycheck, at some point, it’s going to end, and when that ends, somebody is going to ask you what you did during that period of employment,” Josh said.

By most accounts, Infosys’ pivot to hiring American workers has been a success. In 2020, Infosys announced that it had exceeded its initial goal and had hired 13,000 employees nationwide. Then, in the midst of a pandemic at the time, Infosys made a commitment to hiring an additional 12,000 employees to bring the total to 25,000. Unlike other tech companies, the hires weren’t experienced programmers but were typically recent college graduates or workers for whom Infosys would be their first tech job. “We strongly believed that we could train anybody who has the potential, aptitude, and the attitude,” Kumar said.

But for the new hires, many of whom had recently graduated from an education system that teaches young people to tie their self-worth to their job, it was hard to see Infosys as a reincarnation of the American dream. Entering the workplace but not working felt infantilizing.

To Josh, working at Infosys felt “almost like I never really graduated.” Like the practice assignments he had done in school, his time on the Bench felt devoid of the responsibility he thought would come with a full-time job. “It does really mess with your sense of being an adult,” Josh said. “The money isn’t really the main part of it that felt weird to me. It’s just the lack of responsibility.”

The Bench was taking an emotional, almost existential toll on him.

“It feels like I am being wasted, I could be doing more, and I’m not,” Josh said. “That’s the part that feels bad. I want to do things, but I can’t.”


Founded in 1981 and headquartered in Bangalore, India, Infosys has become synonymous with globalization. The company allowed corporations in the US to employ lower-cost workers remotely, pioneering a business model known as the “global delivery model” or, more informally, “your mess for less.” The model split the tech industry in two: the more complex jobs would be done in the US by highly skilled and highly paid engineers, while the jobs companies didn’t care about went overseas.

The key to Infosys’ success in India was its ability to hire entry-level workers and train them for software engineering jobs. “Even today, no company has training like we have at Infosys,” said company founder Narayana Murthy in a history of innovation in India. “We have the world’s largest training facility; nobody else in the world has anything like this.” (Infosys’ record has since been taken by TCS, a different Indian outsourcing company.)

The emphasis on training made sense because many of the jobs companies were outsourcing were jobs that previously would have been given to entry-level employees. “One of the funny things is that we, as a country, essentially fueled the technology rise of India, of China, of Eastern Europe,” said Jacob Hsu, the CEO of the US-based staffing firm Catalyte who previously was the CEO of the international staffing firm Symbio. “A lot of that was driven because we sent a lot of the entry-level work overseas.”

Another key to the model: salaries in India were much lower than they were in the United States. But wages in countries like India have been gradually increasing, and the math of the “labor arbitrage” that previously made moving to India a no-brainer is slowly making less and less sense.

But even if labor costs no longer give offshoring the same advantages it had decades ago, the model of “your mess for less,” or of giving undesirable tasks to other companies, still holds sway in corporate America. It’s just that today, that mess for less can be done with American labor.

Previously, Infosys preferred not to hire Americans at all. The company was a frequent sponsor of the H-1B visa, which allowed the company to bring its Indian employees to the US. The visa came with a number of conditions: companies needed to pay their employees a prevailing wage, and employees needed to meet minimum educational requirements. In 2020, Infosys’ 3,528 H-1B visas placed it second on the list of the companies that had the most H-1B visas approved. The company in first place, Amazon, is an American tech company, but “more than half” of the top 30 H-1B sponsors were outsourcing firms that competed with Infosys, according to one report.

“WE ARE CONTINUING TO DO WHAT WE ARE DOING IN SPITE OF THE FACT THAT THERE IS A NEW ADMINISTRATION IN THE US”

It’s unclear whether staffing firms like Infosys are using the H-1B visa for the reasons it was originally intended for. The H-1B visa was created in 1990 to “bring in high-skilled workers who could complement the skills of US workers,” said Julia Gelatt, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. “The sense at the time was that there were growing industries in the United States in areas that the US wanted to develop to be globally competitive, but there weren’t necessarily enough US workers who [were] qualified and ready to fill those jobs.” Whether the work that companies outsource to firms like Infosys is aligned with the original intention of the H-1B visa program is somewhat up for debate.

On one hand, the jobs often require college degrees and some technical knowledge; on the other, many of the Infosys employees interviewed by The Verge saw the positions as menial and certainly entry-level.

Infosys has run into trouble with visa rules. In 2013, the company settled a lawsuit with the US Department of Justice, which alleged that Infosys had obtained visas for its foreign workers through “systematic fraud,” specifically by bringing workers to the US under a B-1 visa instead of an H-1B visa. The distinction matters because while B-1 visa holders are allowed to enter the country and attend meetings, they aren’t actually allowed to perform work in the United States.

But Infosys’ three-decade reliance on the H-1B visas came under siege during the Trump administration, which instituted new rules in 2020 targeting the visa program. And while those rules were struck down by the courts, the Trump administration did drag their feet when it came to approving new visas for Infosys and other competitors, a trend that only reversed when Biden took office. “There certainly was a lot more scrutiny being applied to H-1B applications, and that was particularly true of some of the outsourcing firms,” said Gelatt.

According to Infosys, the Trump era visa restrictions were tangential to the company’s expansion in the US. “We are continuing to do what we are doing in spite of the fact that there is a new administration in the US,” Kumar told The Verge. Instead, Kumar said, the change was driven by Infosys’ clients, who wanted their contractors to be closer to home.

To meet their aggressive hiring goals, rather than hiring expensive experienced engineers, Infosys returned to their roots and invested in training. “Since 2017, we’ve been very aggressively growing as a company, so we need talent,” Kumar said. “The only way you can get talent is to build it if there is not enough available in the market.” The training isn’t cheap; Infosys spends $25,830 on every employee they hire from college, Kumar told The Verge, which funds a formal two-month training program, as well as project-based training for an additional three months.

Once employees join the company, they then enter a corporate environment where moving up the ladder is not only allowed but encouraged. As an example, Kumar cited more lucrative consulting positions, which he said were often filled internally.

This flexibility, according to Kumar, is part of what allows the outsourcing firm to embody the American dream. “If we want to create social upward mobility in jobs, we will have to create these reskilling bridges, so people can start at the bottom, but they can transition to high potential jobs,” Kumar said.

The very same flexibility, Infosys employees say, is part of what makes the company a challenging and, in some cases, disappointing place to work for. One employee, Stuart, was hired by the company to be a business analyst, and Infosys even paid him to attend a short-term training program to learn how to be one. “It was very hands-on. It was enjoyable,” Stuart said of the training. “I learned a lot. I felt excited to become a business analyst.”

But that enthusiasm faded when Stuart finished his training and was promptly put on the Bench. “Eventually, you see people bringing in a deck of cards to work,” Stuart said. “There’s no supervision; there’s nothing to do; there’s no projects to get on, but we’re required to be there.” So when a position finally opened up, Stuart took it, even though it wasn’t the business analyst role he had trained for. It was an IT support desk project, a position he described as “being a call center employee.”

The project gave him steady work, but paradoxically, Stuart found that the new project made it harder to look for a job other than at Infosys. “I now have nominally two years of experience in IT, but I definitely don’t have two years of business analyst experience,” Stuart said. “People don’t view me as having enough experience.”

Ultimately, Stuart and other Infosys employees questioned whether the flexibility Infosys offered was actually a good thing. “People sometimes talk about a job versus a career, and right now, I have a job,” Stuart said. “A career is: ‘I have a vision of this leads to that leads to that, and it’s something that I want to do for the next 40 years.’”

For some, rather than revitalizing the American dream, Infosys might instead be strangling it. Kumar acknowledged that Infosys’ model of a career might look different from a career where workers could expect job stability but said that this shift was an inevitable consequence of technological innovation.

“We are out of this era where for the first 20-plus years, we went to school, and the next 50 years or so, we went to a corporate job, and we recycle everything we did in the first 20 years for the next 50 years,” Kumar told The Verge. “In the digital age, when skills are so short-lived, you should be on a lifelong learning continuum all your life.”



Infosys’ career flexibility assumes that Infosys’ employees can find work to do in the first place. But as Infosys has ramped up its hiring in the US, some of its employees have found themselves on the Bench for an extended period of time. They are, in effect, paid to do nothing while Infosys attempts to put them on a project.

Adding to the uncertainty around the Bench was a perceived lack of communication about how the Bench even worked. “It felt like none of us really had a good grasp on what was going on,” said Josh. “There wasn’t a whole lot of communication about it, and if we asked about it, then we didn’t really get very many details.”

For those familiar with how consulting firms work, the Bench is not a new concept, and companies like Infosys report their efficiency metrics in their quarterly reports. “Our utilization rates are one of the highest in the industry,” Kumar said. He explained reasons why a worker might be on the Bench for an extended period of time but ultimately conceded: “In some ways, it’s our responsibility to get them on to projects.”

One employee described the Bench as a convenient way to get off projects. George, who joined the company after graduating college, saw getting put on the Bench as “kind of awesome.” Unlike many other Infosys employees, George was quickly assigned to a project, but he found the work unpleasant. “They assign you completely menial, completely trivial stuff for you to do,” he said, describing assignments where he translated code from one programming language to another. “There’s not really much to learn.” One day, George decided not to show up to work.

“No one noticed for almost an entire month,” he said. “I was just at home literally doing nothing.”

Eventually, the Infosys managers caught on and called George into the office to explain himself. After a contentious discussion about the importance of George’s job — “I was gone for an entire month, and nobody noticed at all, so you can’t really tell me what I was doing mattered,” he recalled saying — George asked them to put him on the Bench.

“I heard stories of the Bench, and it was just a limbo place you could be in between assigned roles at Infosys where they paid you, and you didn’t have to do anything,” he said. “Honestly, it sounded wonderful. It sounded like what I was already doing for the past month.” The managers agreed and put him on the Bench, asking him not to show up to the office. George rode out his Bench time from home, which he did, for months.

George used his free time to prepare for job interviews. He was eventually terminated by Infosys, but within a few months, he landed a position at “great company,” one where he could do meaningful work and that paid him enough for him to “achieve the lifestyle that I wanted, that I was told a software engineer was supposed to have.” But finding the time to prepare for these positions meant standing strong when Infosys asked him to relocate to client projects in different states.

“I was in a unique position in that I was willing to put my foot down despite the threat of termination,” George said. “For others that I had met that were not willing to go that far, they were basically forced to go wherever.”

One of the unusual elements of a job at Infosys is that employees were sometimes encouraged to relocate to a different state if they are unable to be assigned to a project. In some cases, this encouragement can involve the threat of termination. According to an email obtained by The Verge, employees on the Bench were told that “[l]ocation preference requests cannot be guaranteed as described in your Employment letter” and that “[r]efusal to take assignments during Bench will be reviewed for appropriate disciplinary action up to and including termination.”

Although Infosys did not appear to have a consistent policy around terminating people for being on the Bench for too long, it is a real threat. In the same email, employees were told that “[y]our time on Bench will be tracked (also referred to as ‘Bench aging’) and therefore it is essential that you make efforts to find a billable position and come off Bench as soon as possible.” While not every employee interviewed by The Verge seemed to have been affected by Bench aging, two workers were fired for that very reason.

For some, Infosys’ flexibility around which office employees could work from was a positive. Infosys has various offices, or Hubs, all across the country. “I know of cases where we have hired, trained, moved them to Indianapolis, and then they come back and say, ‘OK, our parents live in Chicago, we want to go back and work out of Chicago,’” Kumar said. “So we are actually being very flexible.”

Video
But for others, that flexibility is just another aspect of the uncertainty and stress of trying to start a career at Infosys. David is one of the employees who switched locations during his tenure at Infosys, having relocated twice while working for the company.

When David joined the company for what he thought was a software development position, he was first asked to relocate to a large city. At the time, he was enthusiastic about getting his start in software development, having “always liked technology.” But the first project he was assigned to had nothing to do with software development. It was a customer support job. Later that year, he was removed from the project, and David, like George, spent his time on the Bench at home.

After a few months, David interviewed for a new project, this time in a more suburban location. David got the job, but it came with a catch: Infosys only gave him a week to move, a request David was “not happy with.” But despite the short timeframe, the opportunity to leave a city that “was definitely a bigger city than what I was used to” was enticing, he said. The suburbs offered a quieter lifestyle. (“I liked being able to go on hikes.”)

David made the move, which involved renting a U-Haul and breaking his lease. But when he got to the new location and arrived for his first day of work, no one was ready for him — or for the other new employees. “We just sat in the office during the day,” David said, describing how it took a week before he and the other new employees received the company-issued laptops they needed to start work.

He did eventually get put on a project at the second location, which this time involved development work. “I was so excited after a year of waiting for it to finally happen,” David said of the prospect of finally getting to gain experience in his chosen career. But that project was again short-lived, and he was dropped after a few months. “I was a little bummed out,” said David. “I was worried that maybe I wouldn’t get any real opportunity to work on development stuff at all.”

After a second time on the Bench, David was brought back on to the same client, but his experience was a bit different. Although he spent about a month developing a testing framework for the client, during the rest of the time, David didn’t have any other work to do. Sometimes, the more experienced Infosys employees would give him practice assignments designed to give him experience with a new technology. But mostly, he spent the rest of his time in the office trying to “look busy.”

“They saw me sitting at my desk, reading something — sometimes it was code-related, sometimes it wasn’t. But unless they actually stopped for a few seconds to read over my shoulder, they wouldn’t know the difference,” David said. “I actually spent a lot of time researching hobbies that I wanted to get into.”

David’s third and final stint on the Bench began unceremoniously: he tried to get to the client’s office only to find that his badge didn’t work. “We were on our way in to do more busy work as usual, and the badges wouldn’t let us swipe in anymore,” David said. But even then, he didn’t get fired. His time at Infosys ended when he finally landed a new job at a different firm that, unlike Infosys, gave him consistent software development work and allowed him to finally progress in his career as a developer.

Now, David looks back at his time at Infosys with a mixture of bemusement and frustration. “I don’t think most people are going to complain about getting paid to do pretty much nothing,” he said. But at the same time, working at Infosys did delay his career for two years and, worse, gave him a nominal two years of experience that made it difficult for him to be considered entry-level. “It’s basically like Infosys was paying me less than I could have made to do next to nothing while also crippling my ability to get better jobs or better work.”

Then there was the guilt.

“Even though knowing that it was outside of my control, at the same time, I’m sitting there getting paid more than someone who is a housemaid... or who is a plumber, or who is a construction worker,” he said. “Thinking about it that way, it’s like, ‘Wow, I know this isn’t really in my control, but it still does feel a little bad to know that I’m living what some people would call the dream, getting paid for doing nothing.’”



As Infosys has expanded across the US, politicians have showered the company with tax breaks. In Indiana, Infosys’ planned headquarters granted it $101.8 million in subsidies, one of the largest incentive packages in the state’s history. And in Connecticut, a proposed smaller 1,000-person headquarters gained the company up to $14 million in subsidies, with the final amount conditional on hiring all 1,000 workers.

Other companies have taken notice. Tata Consultancy Services, an Infosys competitor also based in India, announced that it would hire 10,000 workers by 2022, having previously hired 21,500 workers between 2015 and 2020. But Infosys’ fiercest competition might come from American staffing firms, which see Infosys’ lifelong learning model as a way to adapt to the future of work. Some of those competitors are funded by Achieve Partners, which raised $80 million in 2018 for a “putting America back to work fund” to invest in staffing firms in industries with labor shortages.

Achieve Partners was founded by Ryan Craig, a venture capitalist who typically invests in education companies. But Craig had become increasingly skeptical of models where students pay education companies directly, particularly in light of the rising costs of college tuition. “For at least the past decade it’s been clear that apprenticeships – earning while learning – are more powerful and lower risk pathways for socioeconomic mobility than the tuition-based colleges and universities,” Craig told The Verge in a written statement.

Achieve Partners was a way to bypass the higher education system entirely. According to investment documents reviewed by The Verge, Achieve Partners’ business model involves acquiring staffing firms and then adding a “last-mile training” component to the business, wherein the firm hires recent university graduates and trains them to specification.

“WAS INFOSYS TERRIBLE? YES. WOULD I EVER GO BACK? ABSOLUTELY NOT.”

The documents also show that their investments are expected to be profitable. Achieve Partners expects to make an average of $100,000 per worker, according to the documents, with a gross margin of 40 percent. The documents don’t say how long each worker will be employed by the staffing firms, but theoretically, with Achieve Partners taking a 40 percent cut, workers would be left with a salary of $60,000, less expenses (such as the cost of training) paid by the employer.

Dave DeSario, a director at Temp Worker Justice who reviewed the investment documents, described Achieve Partner’s 40 percent markup as “pretty typical in the industry.” DeSario added that companies typically keep their markup data private from their employees. “Workers have no right to know or to see what the markup is on their wages,” DeSario said.

As companies like Infosys have expanded across the US, they’ve been quick to portray themselves as job creators, in large part because of their willingness to hire and train entry-level talent. But critics caution there is little evidence that staffing firms actually create new jobs that wouldn’t exist otherwise because, by design, they make money by winning contracts to supply companies with workers. Presumably, if a company doesn’t sign a contract with a staffing firm, they would hire the employees themselves in-house, and the employees would have higher wages because there wouldn’t be a staffing firm to take a markup.

“There’s no evidence to suggest that giving state or federal money to temp agencies creates actual long-term, good jobs,” DeSario said, citing a 2006 study on the topic. “All the evidence is actually to the contrary that when states or the federal government gives money to develop jobs through temp agencies, it only produces short-term jobs, which don’t have a positive impact for those workers, or it produces the very limited hiring of the top tier candidates who would have gotten hired anyway through other means.”

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(For his part, Kumar said that comparisons between Infosys and other staffing firms were misguided. “We don’t do staffing or staff augmentation at all,” Kumar said. “We run projects and programs for large enterprises. A lot of our business is fixed price.”)

At first glance, Infosys seems like an exception. For the Trump administration, Infosys’ hiring spree is a vindication of its protectionist policies targeting H-1B visas. And for local politicians, Infosys’ job numbers help justify the tax breaks foisted upon the company. The carrot and stick approach seems to have worked — no small thing for a country still recovering from a pandemic-driven recession.

But for the Infosys employees, whether or not they were actually employed was a complicated question. For some, while the job was not ideal, it was a job nonetheless. “I would say a paying position is better than no pay, no position,” George said. “Was Infosys terrible? Yes. Would I ever go back? Absolutely not. But if I could do it all over again, and I was in the same situation, and I had absolutely nothing else going for me, it was better than nothing.”

And yet, although models like Infosys are supposed to help new workers get a foot in the door, it’s unclear if these sorts of contracting jobs are good environments to start a career. These models continue to proliferate because of the profitability of their markups, but if the companies can’t get their employees real-world experience, there’s a risk that employees may become stuck in less stable positions that don’t pay as well as permanent roles.

Ultimately, other Infosys employees found it difficult to see their position as a real job at all. “I have other friends who got actual jobs at Allstate or Caterpillar or stuff like that,” Josh said. “They’re actually doing things, and I’m just sitting here.”

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https://www.theverge.com/c/22820291/tec ... do-nothing
Yayavar
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Posts: 4832
Joined: 06 Jun 2008 10:55

Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by Yayavar »

Agree on your sentiment wrt Infosys.
At that same time that guy Josh should just use his time to do something else that he thinks is useful rather than blaming the client or Infosys. If that is not possible leave and join elsewhere.
Ambar
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Joined: 12 Jun 2010 09:56
Location: Weak meek unkil Sam!

Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by Ambar »

Precisely. To have staff on "bench" is an age old practice in IT Consulting industry, infact Indian IT companies learnt the practice of placing staff on "wait list" from established old consulting companies like IBM and Arthur Anderson. If i was fresh out of college 20 something like Josh, i'd be happy to collect my paycheck from Infy, use the downtime to hone my skills and prepare for interviews.

That said there will be challenges to the business model of Indian IT consulting companies in future. It is not just the inevitable automation of many repeatable tasks which will reduce outsourcing/offshoring but also captives. In the last 8 to 10 yrs i have noticed an increased willingness of even small companies (both in EU and US) who want to start captive units in India, Philippines, Ukraine etc. Infy, Wipro, TCS, HCL etc have been incredibly profitable for more than 3 decades now, it is time they really loosen their purse strings and go on a shopping spree buying product companies especially in the AI and healthcare space.
vcsekhar
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Posts: 146
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Location: Hyderabad, India

Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by vcsekhar »

Ambar wrote:VOX media known for its anti-India propaganda does a hit job on Infy. I am not a fan of Infosys or its founders but i really could not understand what the big deal is if an employee has to wait for a project as long as they getting paid for their time.

https://www.theverge.com/c/22820291/tec ... do-nothing
This is a total and complete BS hit job on infy, the concept of being on the bench is common in the US consulting companies too, but, what most of them do is to put benched people on internal projects to improve their own systems and keep people occupied. The fact that "Josh" is getting paid even though he is not on a project is glossed over to talk about the type of work, they all admitted that they were searching for other jobs in company time and doing personal stuff during work times, so not very ethical at all.
I used to work in a small consulting company in TX and when we were not on a customer project, we used to work on our own intranet software and eventually developed our own products that helped our consulting business. It was generally upto us to go to our manager and say, here is a side project that I want to do since I am not on a customer project right now and 99% the manager would say go ahead and give us the resources we needed.
The article sounds like a bitch fest of disgruntled employees who want the pay but want to crib about their job. :roll:

Its not like Infy is the best software company but it certainly is not the worst. I had heard of stories from my friends in other consulting companies in the US where if you were out of a project for a month or more you were pretty much sure that it was the end.
RajaRudra
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by RajaRudra »

Some of the CTCs i am hearing about in the last couple of months are mind boggling

Person 1 - Scrum Master - Total 14 (5 years as Scrum Master) - 35 LPA (125 % increase in new job)
Person 2 - Third Year College - Campus - 18 LPA
Person 3 - React Developer - 4 years experience - 24 LPA (from 6 LPA)
Person 4 - Testing - 8 years Exp - 27 LPA (From 7 LPA)
Person 5 - 2 Years exp - Support - 8 LPA (from 3.5 LPA)

Indian IT Industry Salary Structure is getting normalized in higher trajectory.
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