Bharat Rakshak

Actually i had a discussion with a friend of mine. He wanted to start a BCSE School here in Scandinavia. He had the opinion that Indian schooling was way superior as the "standards of math, science was way ahead. So I decided to provoke him a bit.

"Indian schooling is stealing childhood, to make then servants, reproduce things they do not understand, loading them with useless math, harming their physical development"

At the end he actually agreed. The only good thing with Indian schooling is the ability to mug. What you really need are employees who dare to challenge the establishment, come up with new creative solutions, the ability to socialize, the ability to communicate, stay fit. All such skilles are not learned in school. They are leaned and mastered in the playground, doing "khoraphati" stuff.

KJoishy wrote:The problem is there is this get rich quick attitude in India and many people feel that they can reach the top without the hard work and pain. They cannot focus on the task at hand, they are already plotting their next big jump at the next awesome client. I saw this in the "consultants" from TCs who descended en masse at PeechaKaro Co.

why are you constantly picking on indians as though others are any better???

this is a common malaise and not limited to any country or culture..

talk to anybody in 30s in any country and they will say the same about their young.

+ hazar
Gus: To find people like you (and you describe) we have to jump through hoops. Recently I was talking to a friend of mine (with over 30 years in hard core CS with an MTech from one of the IITs - he is in US - for a recommendation for somebody in India with half decent knowledge about parsing, AST, and BNFs. He says all his classmates moved out into management where they are jarnails and karnails and most people with about 5-10 years experience have moved to Internet as they think that this is too hard an area and not too many job prospects if they are typecast into these niche technology areas.

Yeh, iPankers is the way to go. One has to just say "brownian motion" and a long line of iPanker reps from various will form. But then the job would pay about medium salary though - ITvIty munnas on the street do not get all that much money

Gus wrote:

KJoishy wrote:The problem is there is this get rich quick attitude in India and many people feel that they can reach the top without the hard work and pain. They cannot focus on the task at hand, they are already plotting their next big jump at the next awesome client. I saw this in the "consultants" from TCs who descended en masse at PeechaKaro Co.

why are you constantly picking on indians as though others are any better???

this is a common malaise and not limited to any country or culture..

talk to anybody in 30s in any country and they will say the same about their young.

That's because BRF is a forum about Indians and I care only about Indians. When I post on American forums, I don't talk about Indians.

There was a time when I first came to the Amreeka that I believed that Indian culture was superior and that we had "morals". I no longer believe so, these days I feel that humans are all the same, just have different options. When money was put in front of Indians, they went crazy and behaved just like Amreekis did when they had a lot of money. The only difference is when I lived in India, Indians did not have much money.

Do you see anything wrong in my comment or are you complaining that I have not pulled everyone else into this?

Rishirishi wrote:Actually i had a discussion with a friend of mine. He wanted to start a BCSE School here in Scandinavia. He had the opinion that Indian schooling was way superior as the "standards of math, science was way ahead. So I decided to provoke him a bit.

"Indian schooling is stealing childhood, to make then servants, reproduce things they do not understand, loading them with useless math, harming their physical development"

At the end he actually agreed. The only good thing with Indian schooling is the ability to mug. What you really need are employees who dare to challenge the establishment, come up with new creative solutions, the ability to socialize, the ability to communicate, stay fit. All such skilles are not learned in school. They are leaned and mastered in the playground, doing "khoraphati" stuff.

I went through this phase as well. I used to think that the Indian schooling that I went through was very very good and the Amreeki schooling was inferior. I changed my thinking after my kid started school.
Now I feel that while we Indians are good at the hard core math and problem solving, we are training to be comfortable in such back office jobs where you sit at your desk and toil all day. We don't like to communicate and interact. My son's school encourages them and makes them do projects on topics where they have to go and figure things out and present to the class. Yes, they are not as good at math and doing tables till 25 like we were.

American born Indian kids are at an advantage because parents make them do both. American education allows for free thinking, that's why Amreekis invent everything and we invent nothing. But we are good at taking things that Amreekis invent and doing something incremental and cutting costs on it (cheaper labor).

If you could combine the good elements of either, it would be the best.

my co is trying desperately to sex up a non-sexy brick n mortar field by having forums of HR and youngsters trying to "engage" them, talks in some "early career network" not just by eminent people internally but achievers from outside......but reality is harsh, moment someone spend $1 mil on buying and filling up a netz chassis , its a 10 yr cycle and there will be constant stream of support and upgrade problems that someone will need to know the overall ideas to manage, constant need to backport features and fixes as well...and the customer pays for it annually via support contract and expects strong support for any problem or question. they earn money through providing uptime and have another layer of customers using the infra. the ball cannot be dropped. most are paranoid about trying new releases, they will wait for one yr for bugfix release on top of major new release, and then test internally for months to pass certification before they start deploying. some have fallen into a comfort zone and cling to releases years old because it works for their config and have to be cajoled out of their shell to timidly atleast test a new release...they demand their feature needs be backported to these ancient releases.....places heavy cycles on dev and testing to again redo this.

google or facebook or flipkart or any cloud based tool can just pull the plug on old version, "go live" with new and lo and behold all past support issues disappear and people are working on latest n greatest. I think this immediacy, sexiness and being able to "see some tangible contribution" immediately is what attracts youngsters. sometimes they are also given relatively free reign at a younger level of exp there. plus the much fatter salary pkg. at one time today's behemoths were just like that , with not much historical tail to support and wide open oceans to expand.

I think its just a cycle, each generation has its aspirational darlings...we had cindy crawford, todays lot have someone else

just wondering. How do cap gemeni consultants fare. Our company is going to outsource and I fear we will become a free training facility. How long time would a SAP consultant stay in India and what is the turnover like? Thanks

IT industry seems like is doing good.
Attrition rate in my group has gone thru the roof. Everyone who is less that 7 years of experience is quitting and I mean everyone. We have stream of goodbye emails hitting us everyday. I have stopped arranging for KT's in my team.
Typically salary jump ranges from 60-100% and not a single soul has been lost to Infy,Wipro or TCS.
One round of Tech interview, another round with someone senior in Practice and then HR interview and bham! Offer letter in the email along with joining bonus. No F2F interview required anymore.
The best part is that once a person leaves, He encourages his other platoon members to jump the ship and join his/her company and in the process makes upto 50-60K as referral bonus.
The only phati shalwar Abdul who can't seem to find a job offer despite many years of late nights in trenches and falling eyesight due to sentry duties on the watch tower is moi

IBNLIVE

Once the preserve of youth, Indian IT staffing enters middle age

Jan 29, 2014 at 12:43pm IST

Mumbai: The executive suite is not the only place that is greying in India's 40-year-old information technology sector.
As the $108-billion industry enters middle age and its growth slows, the three-million-strong workforce is also getting older, making it harder to extract some of the cost advantages of the young, cheap labour for which it is known.

Firms have had to change in order to attract and support employees with a more mature set of priorities, as the bright youngsters they recruited years earlier have become earnest family types. "Middle-aged or married couples prefer to go back home on time, so don't like to stay back at work till late or do weekends," said Megha Jain, 34, a Bangalore-based employee of an IT company. "There is more focus by the company to fine-tune policies around work from home and overtime."

The likes of Bangalore-based Infosys and Wipro Ltd were built on a young, cheap and educated workforce that also drew global giants such as IBM Corp and Accenture to the country.

And the vibrancy of the new industry was epitomised by a corporate culture that was far more influenced by Silicon Valley than traditional Indian attitudes.

In India, many in their first jobs continue to live with parents, whereas working in IT often meant moving to another city, such as Bangalore, Hyderabad or Pune.

Organised weekend outings for staff were a common way of building bonds in the workplace for IT firms whose employees had mostly come straight from college.

Some firms also gave employees free movie tickets and let them expense meals with boyfriends or girlfriends. Flush with money and new-found independence, these IT staffers were known both for working late and partying hard.

"There were not many mothers, or not many parents," Kingshuk Sanyal, a management consultant at Booz and Co, said of those early years in the industry.

Now, many Indian IT firms have tied up with childcare centres to help working couples manage. Some offer flexible working hours or extended time away from work, options that exist with few other Indian employers.

Market leader Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), which once had ad hoc policies around flexible hours and vacations, formalised them about four years ago as the ranks of older staff grew, said HR head Ajoyendra Mukherjee.

IT firms in India are placing increasing emphasis on training and developing existing staff, while slower growth means they no longer recruit college leavers at the same pace.

By March 2013, just over a quarter of nearly 157,000 employees at Infosys, the second largest industry player in India, were older than 30, compared with 15 per cent of its 91,000 staff just four years earlier, according to an analysis by Barclays.

Barclays estimates that employees at TCS with more than three years of experience grew to 61 percent by the end of last March, from 50 per cent five years earlier.

Infosys said it does not share the age breakdown of its employees, while TCS declined to comment.

Staffing at IT companies has long been characterised by what human resources professionals call a "classic pyramid", with hordes of junior-level staff at the bottom and a steep narrowing as it goes higher.

"It's taking a different shape, where you have a flattened middle, because the number of people you would need at the level after the entry-level has gone up from where it used to be several years ago," said Srikantan Moorthy, head of human resources development at Infosys.

Firms that started small and grew fast when the industry first took off are now adjusting to a very different environment. Industry revenue growth has slowed to the mid-teens from the 30-per cent levels seen before the 2008 financial crisis hit the sector's two biggest markets in the United States and Europe.

Growth is unlikely to return to those heady levels any time soon as the industry matures.
Long an industry bellwether, Infosys hit a rough patch in 2012 when rivals such as TCS and HCL Technologies Ltd ate into its market share while it was in the midst of a strategy shift to diversify from commoditised services.

In an effort to turn itself around, Infosys last year brought back retired co-founder Narayana Murthy, now 67, to head the company as executive chairman. The company has a mandatory retirement age of 60 for executive directors.
The average employee age at Infosys was 28 by March 2013, two years higher than it was four years earlier, according to the company. The creep higher may seem incremental, but adds up to rising costs.

Barclays reckons that every half-year increase in average employee age leads to a decline of 1 percentage point in EBIT (earnings before interest and taxes) margins for services provided within India at Infosys.

Employee costs as a percentage of revenues increased by about 640 basis points over the 12 quarters through September, according to Barclays, as a result of poor demand forecasting and the rising age of employees.
At nearby rival Wipro, 34.5 per cent of the workforce were aged between 30 and 50 at the end of last March, up from 32.3 per cent two years earlier.

The ageing of the workforce is partly the result of the industry's push to offer higher-value services and break the linear correlation between headcount and revenue growth - an effort that so far has had mixed success.
"We have to add more value to clients, so that the costs you incur result in a difference that the clients can see," Infosys' Moorthy said.

time was when a expenses paid day long outing on a weekday would attract 100% attendance both to enjoy and not have to work. last week we had one, and barely 50% went, helped no doubt by no bus provided (drive to outside the city on own vehicle) and the realisation that taking that day off meant they would need to work on the weekend . all were "working from home" or hiding at various places at work ignoring calls from managers.

as for the food, these out of town resorts charge the earth but generally have crappy food. the usual glum "north india/south india/chinese" buffet we see in 1000 places.

VikasRaina wrote:Everyone who is less that 7 years of experience is quitting and I mean everyone. ....Typically salary jump ranges from 60-100% and not a single soul has been lost to Infy,Wipro or TCS.

For 5- 7 years experience I feel they have a lots of openings. At that exp. level most of the folks are young and also have a decent level of experience. Trouble I feel starts when experience reaches 10+ years. At the management level, there may not be much openings. At technical level (technical architect etc.), I don't know if companies are doing any great technical architecture work at all. Most of the sweat shops are into support & maintenance, so why have a tech. architect at all?

The best part is that once a person leaves, He encourages his other platoon members to jump the ship and join his/her company and in the process makes upto 50-60K as referral bonus

My company has started a practise that a person who quits has to serve his notice period. Even if that means sitting jobless for two months. So last month we had a good case where around 7-9 folks from the same technical skills area put in their papers. It seems they were all in a conference room, happily gossipping and whiling away their time .

Singha wrote:Once the preserve of youth, Indian IT staffing enters middle age

The report is just echoing my sentiments. Pretty much brings out all the concerns I have at the moment.

last week we had one, and barely 50% went, helped no doubt by no bus provided (drive to outside the city on own vehicle) and the realisation that taking that day off meant they would need to work on the weekend . all were "working from home" or hiding at various places at work ignoring calls from managers

True. A trend I noticed was that even youngsters now have their own friends circle etc. So they prefer to spend time in that circles, rather than be forced to come to a team outing. And in 24/7 support engagements most of the folks actually wish to spend their weekly offs relaxing. As for me I have pretty much stopped going for such events from last two years. Have made it clear that such things any way dont motivate me, and it is more of the "work life balance", I would be interested in.

What is the thought behind making a person serve out his notice period even if the person is on bench and is simply wasting time and tempting others..

VikasRaina wrote:What is the thought behind making a person serve out his notice period even if the person is on bench and is simply wasting time and tempting others..

It is wierd. But my understanding is that, it was a way to stop people from moving out quickly. Folks have lots of leaves etc. to use up. So they used to ask HR to take up all that and release them early. Secondly, as per contract a person can pay the company two months of his salary and ask for a release very next day . So other companies (hiring the said person) would provide this money as a joining bonus to the individual. I do agree with you, keeping such people is only going to motivate others to jump the ship as well .

^^

These kind of policies create even more dissatisfaction among employees.
I don't understand what kind of management theories are taught in MBA (which is a fake stream of study anyway) classes, the dirt produced by these courses that man our HR departments have a major share in dismantling fairly good performing companies.

^totally agree. BTW WTF is up with IT HR departments in India filled with MBAs HR actually has to be manned by best and the brightest, technical or not.

indian IT is 30 year old industry not 40. I can see similar effect in my organization. This year we are having a hard time arranging a day long picnic. Previously there was a great participation but now very few are interested....Instead a quite dinner is what being welcomed

in the absense of the thing called 'empathy', when humans each with their own individuality (pros and cons and tastes) are treated as 'resources' it is hard for HR esp when they do not interact day to day with the engineering ranks . in a way the line managers are much better plugged into what the ranks are feeling and can take appropriate steps. in netz atleast HR is invisible behind online case tools for most part and its left to the individual line managers, group directors and their admin assistants to decide how the budget gets spent on outings, lunches, events etc...does not seem like any uniform top down policy. they get some money per employee/qtr and how they spend is upto them.

people will appreciate a quiet dinner or even a good catered lunch in the office but slogging all day for a forcible "bonding" session is no-no...beyond 2-3 people one cannot "order" a large group to be best friends with each other. development / test teams usually do NOT attract the highly social, boisterous, rah rah extroverted folks that proliferate in sales and marketing. the "tone" has to be different. some folks are very uncomfortable with things like delhi style naach gaana esp kids from quiet south/east indian families where there is no dancing procession or function even in marriages. my delhi buddy was telling me in his biraderi, on marriages, rules are relaxed a bit and even his teenage cousins got access to the whisky war chest opened by the adult men

SRoy wrote:These kind of policies create even more dissatisfaction among employees.

Off course. And from what I have seen, none of these people even wanted to come back. Among the crowd of resignees, even till the last day no one repented for resigning or had a change of mind. Off late there were special sessions by HR teams on employee perceptions. I generally make it a point to attend such meetings. A general tone (which even the HR folks admitted) is that people are totally pi$$ed of with a few policies rolled out. More than pay hikes etc., people were wenting their frusturations on other simpler things. Work life Balance, a good career plan with options to take up jobs which a person really likes.

subhamoy.das wrote:This year we are having a hard time arranging a day long picnic. Previously there was a great participation but now very few are interested....Instead a quite dinner is what being welcomed

I feel many of the mass recruiting companies would also face a challenge here. The younger folks (just out of college) may be all the more willing to go for these parties, picnics etc. I work for one such MRC, and folks who cannot step into the office on time, would be 15 minutes before time at the venue if a cricket match (between departments) is going on. Where as the more senior folks at the management levels actually prefer a 8-9 hours of work and then quickly reach home.

Singha wrote:development / test teams usually do NOT attract the highly social, boisterous, rah rah extroverted folks that proliferate in sales and marketing

Well put . A trend I noticed at my work place is that now pretty much all policy makers are more of the MBAs & Salesmen type folks. For them life begins and ends at numbers. Most of them have not managed human beings, and this is now reflecting on policy decisions. And why are such people made the policy makers? Precisely because there should NOT be any human empathy etc., so that the organisation can move on - like say an Army unit charging on, even when people get shot and lie wounded on the way side. At the end the battle is one (business goals achieved), while no one is really worried on the damage happened on the human front.

My obeservations between Indian and Scandinavian work culture.

1
People who only have to work for 8 hours, are more productive during the 8 hours. people who are made to sit 10-12 hours, make greater mistakes and take longer breaks. The actual output is maybe 15-20% more.

2
Scandinavian culture is classless and chamchagiri is look down upon. People are given more freedom and responsibility. the result is less energy wasted on office politics and more on work. Office politics is a huge deadwight in India.

3
Indians do not want to share and firstly protect their position. This is less in scandinavia, hence you get better use of the workforce.

4
Scandinavian managers do not "detail-manage" people. Hence you get less management overheads.

I feel, Indians work more but end result is usually less.

Indian companies must start to to focus on the way they work and organise them selfs. The ammont of politics, conflitcs, adultry is really sad. People will simply colapse under presure.

but the avg quality of manpower in India would be way below the small pool in scandinavia. lots of people cannot do anything without being micromanaged and followed closely here. if managers get hands-off, nothing will get done , or something will get done but not to spec.

thats the whole frustration of manager class here. the industry is too big and "do anything" for people to specialize for years in something. and teams are unstable. how many people are willing to stay in same team for 10 years? even if he/she wants to stay some reorg or business decision will drop them somewhere.

Did you know, ISO's had a pretty good few years in Scandinavia. Most of the biggest companies in Scandinavia has off-shored work to one of the top 4's and the trend is rising. There are small Indian enclaves in some of the obscure cities in these countries, a river of brown in the sea of paleness

Re RishiRishi and Singha's posts - Indian firms basically follow a "leveraged" model. The breakup of employees by work-ex or capability would result in a pyramid with a few good ones at the top and a bunch of fresh recruits at the base of the pyramid. Most Western firms would not have this pyramid....this fact in itself would account for much of the difference in work cultures noted.

Rishirishi wrote: I feel, Indians work more but end result is usually less.
Indian companies must start to to focus on the way they work and organise them selfs. The ammont of politics, conflitcs, adultry is really sad. People will simply colapse under presure.

I agree with your observations about Scandinavian work culture. But my experience is more with Europe, and I see things are pretty much the same there as well. In a previous project we were to replace some employees of the customer who were with the customer for 18-20 years!!! The functional knowledge they had was awesome, and our folks (with 2 years of industry experience) was literally shivering. I feel there is also a very good social security network in Europe. The country takes care of many needs so much so that they dont have to work themselves to death, hoping for a secure future.

People are given more freedom and responsibility.

As a corrollary. Perhaps the European folks have more freedom to experiment . And when they experiment they also know that there could be failures. The system also is okay with such failures. Where as I feel Indians are much more risk averse and generally do not want any faults to happen. If such things happen blame game starts or cover up happens. My own experience with two of my bosses in last two years, they are constant whiners for things done wrong. Never do they bother about things done right.

Indians do not want to share and firstly protect their position. This is less in scandinavia, hence you get better use of the workforce.

At least in IT industry there are some genuine concerns . This industry does not offer any job protection or retirement benefits. The people know that if their knowledge is obsolete or some one also knows it equally; then chances of them getting fired are high. And for many IT folks there are no other career options left. My organisation had introduced a tool where knowledge on how issues were fixed have to be recorded. The senior folks (7-10 years exp) pretty much revolted. They very well knew that the next plan would be to hire freshers from college, give them this database and ask them to fix the issues.

Singha wrote:but the avg quality of manpower in India would be way below the small pool in scandinavia. lots of people cannot do anything without being micromanaged and followed closely here.

Is this is a pan-IT industry problem? I am asking about the few companies working on niche skills and generally dont take freshers. For sure this problem is there in Mass Recruiting Companies who still dont understand "you pay peanuts, you get monkeys". From what I understood from a few courses I attended; IT Managers in India are like Expeditors in manufacturing units of 1970s. They really don't manage any thing but would be running around to see if the system is working and people are in their seats etc.

Arjun wrote:The breakup of employees by work-ex or capability would result in a pyramid with a few good ones at the top and a bunch of fresh recruits at the base of the pyramid

At least in the org I work at the moment the good ones at the top is becoming a pain area. Large number of people in the Team lead, Project manager level cadres have moved on. So much so that managing the fresh recruits etc. is becoming a challenge, there is no good leadership immediately above that level. These folks (ideally in the 3-7 years exp. bracket) have all jumped ships. So no we have work force of below 24s years being managed by managers above 35 years !!! .

Sachin wrote:work force of below 24s years being managed by managers above 35 years !!! .

Same problem here.
Entire legions of team leads, senior developers and architects have disappeared.
The gap...skills, generational too wide to be bridged.

In USA, it will be other way round. 24 year olds managing work force of 35years. This "respect for grey hairs" is in Indic culure only. Can u imagine a fellow co-worker touching your feet because his feet accidentally touched yours and you are a very senior person in the organization! This kind of culture is worst in bengal where u have to call your seniors by x da or y di and kills professionalism and competition. When i did a RTI 10y ago, i user to complete my work and leave 6 sharp and later found out that i was being labelled "lazy or loosy" by co-workers. When i used to leave my team - who user to work late nights - beacuse i was into a culture where u can take care of yourself and u nee to ask for help when needed - i was branded not a lead material. There is so much diff between the indian and west work culture. It is basically a reflection of the socierty. In US, u would pick your won lugage and head for your car and drive it hom. Here, u will have another person pick it up for u and have another person drive u home! The Macs are a dead give way. Here ur left over will be picked up by another person, where in US u will pick it yourself.

In my organization, we have started a process called KYC where aquired knowledge needs to be documented in a wiki. There is very little progress even after 2 year. I have seniors tell me that it will make them redundant! There is so much zeal to protect and so less to share because in IT knowledge -which is basically the skill - can be quickly learnt unlike other engineering disciplines like core engineering. Heck, my father , who is a civil engineer, can get work even at the age of 75 and i think that i will be blessed if i can reach 50 and still have a job!

Sachin, when you say jumped ship, where did they go? Left IT industry or moved to other jobs?

Arjun wrote:Re RishiRishi and Singha's posts - Indian firms basically follow a "leveraged" model. The breakup of employees by work-ex or capability would result in a pyramid with a few good ones at the top and a bunch of fresh recruits at the base of the pyramid. Most Western firms would not have this pyramid....this fact in itself would account for much of the difference in work cultures noted.

Lower margins is what it is. But a weak rupiah vs $ or Euro makes it reasonable. As inflation - both consumable and durable including RE rises - the pressure on the margins will increase (I think it is already started and we are seeing it in rising labor costs but delayed a little in time which common sense back of the envelope modeling would support).

Whoa too many I did "XYZ" in US type posts followed by usual gali galoch of Indics.

If we Indians apply honorifics to acquaintances and strangers alike, what's the problem with applying the same in office situations? Why we should be ashamed of our culture?

Calling by first name according to me is a sign of boorish behavior and I don't recommended anyone aping that.

Since these discussion becomes a shooting range for usual India bashers, let me relate my experience about typical Indian vs Western skill set /productivity etc.

Our top notch match theirs, metric by metric in terms of being innovative and productive. Lets leave out the worst lots of either side and consider the average programmers.

Here the Western ones are much ahead in productivity by light years.

But here is a caveat.

Take away their favorite toys...OS/IDE/RDBMS etc. and see what happens. An American or European team will come to a grinding halt. An Indian team will still deliver. The average Western lot is productive within their own comfort zones, but the average Indian lot when put in difficult situation starts to improvise.

While I detest the Indian MNC management for lack of their attention to product development, but given a choice of average programmers, I'll always pick desi birathers...excluding "foreign experienced" brown sahibs.

SRoy wrote:Take away their favorite toys...OS/IDE/RDBMS etc. and see what happens. An American or European team will come to a grinding halt. An Indian team will still deliver.

In that hypothetical situation it will be the exact opposite, especially regarding the Europeans given the comfort they have with and the contributions they made to some of these technologies (in the FLOSS).

One sees very few in the FLOSS community from India. There are more from Russia or even smaller east European countries than India.

Lots of US universities originated and contributed heavily to these technologies. M$ tools is not be all and end all as most Indian freshers people seem to think. That comes across on the Internet when no other browser but IE would work. Same situation with desktop applications.

matrimc wrote:M$ tools is not be all and end all as most Indian freshers people seem to think. That comes across on the Internet when no other browser but IE would work. Same situation with desktop applications.

Just the opposite. I've been trying hard to have some of the newbies getting used to a real IDE, as they still fight with vi, jumping between terminals.
Similarly with IE. That's only for Intranet/Corporate applications. Web browsing is done using browsers that are strictly prohibited by corporate IT, using the copy and use mode of course (no installation).
Maybe our experiences differ.
What's with M$?
We are UNIX based product team, but I think MS creates some of the most efficient development tools.
Whenever I'm in the trenches I always have a C/C++ IDE, a FTP client and a SSH terminal open on my laptop. Best of both the worlds.

matrimc wrote: One sees very few in the FLOSS community from India. There are more from Russia or even smaller east European countries than India.

Please take a look at the commit logs of any useful and successful FOSS project.
90%+ commits comes from programmers that are already working somewhere gainfully and their employers pay for this type of work. All FOSS success stories have corporate backing.
If we want to see Indian contribution to FOSS, our MNCs need to move to product development first.

A lot depends on type product being developed as well and the corporate policy. In my own org the stuff I look after does not require tinkering with FOSS products, we use them as they are available. At the same time some of my colleagues in other units are into high tech stuff that goes in satellites and trains. They use a heavily customized open source UNIX and they regularly contribute patches. So it depends.

SRoy: I do know about FLOSS and the model. Yes, our experiences differ. You are in user facing and/or in-house applications, I suppose.

Quantity has a quality of it's own that is the moola mantra of Indian IT industry even the Product cos based out of India are going down that path. They run their customer support and QA divisions out of India some even do extensive development here but the fact is we employ a lot more number of people to do the same work which lesser people will do in the US or west. We have this habit of not running a lean ship and that is going to be a huge problem when rising wages in India kind of make the entire offshore/outsourcing model counter productive.

This is a chicken and egg problem , you see after 7-8 years in industry a lot of guys in India end up at this deadend which reads 'MANAGER' some of us don't want to do that so what options does one have ? Continue to work in the trenches ? Fact is firstly there is not much scope there and even if there is some in product cos, the managers rule the roost in our desi setup . Basically there is no career path for people who wish to stick to just technology and keep away from people management. If you persist you will have to compromise on your package.That is why you will see a lot of 7+ experience types in Product co in India doing a quick MBA and rejoining as a Product manager or moving to WEST. RTI is difficult too , the days when you had 15-20 years of experience in US and could come back and become a Director here are gone. In the Product industry the packages are usually like 2.5*n (avg figure) where n is the number of years of experience once you touch 10 years of experience you have to move into management in India, I don't see nerd professor types here who get a cube of theirs and work alone , you have to manage people and at the same time be responsible for their deliverable, clean their mess and report to home duties and after all that your effort might not get same recognition as some 25 year old who wrote a module for that same product sitting in Redwood city.

All in all we need to shed fat and yes that means offload non-productive or non-revenue generating positions . We do not need regional managers, resource managers, technical liasons or whatever fancy name one could come up with. The hierarchy has to be steep and yes HR , Finance departments need to be facilitators not the ones who come up with penny pinching schemes to add that miserable figure to year end revenue and show it as some kind of profit.

Fact is for peanuts you will get monkeys , folks in Indian product industry who do good work are still there just because of the fire in their belly not because they don't have any other option , good people can fly to US/WEST today and land up a fat paycheck.

Oracle, Netz, MSFT, IBM sell well not becaue they have a good sales team or they implement some gold belt six sigma $hit , they are doing well because they have good solid products which work and these are built by people who can crunch code .

oh btw my rant aside at the end of the day we all are a part of the system and cannot fight it, when time comes I shall too move to the dark side .

Good post negi

I handle some Indian Employees (subcontractors). In the begining it is always the same "Sir" and AAP attitude. I call them by the first name and tell them my name is Rishi. Treat them as my equal and make them comfortable enough to confront me, if I am wrong. I tell them just mind the scope, I do not want to know when you come and go. If there is less work, stay at home and enjoy life. heck sleep to 10 AM if you feel like it. But I am very strict when it comes to the end result. One of them was not sharing his knowledge and doing all the work him self. I explained that if he did not teach the dudes in India, I will not let him have any holiday. I do not care if you get sick, it is your duty to make sure it works. How you do it is up to you.

Result is:
Dude here offload maximum workload in India, lives a nice life, work from home, if he feels like it. His performance is good, he does not have to ask me for everything and takes pride in the work he does. I am happy, as I know he will get the work done, without me having the detail manage. There is less management overhead and most important, he is not leaving even if he is offered a better salary.

negi wrote:Quantity has a quality of it's own that is the moola mantra of Indian IT industry even the Product cos based out of India are going down that path. They run their customer support and QA divisions out of India some even do extensive development here but the fact is we employ a lot more number of people to do the same work which lesser people will do in the US or west. We have this habit of not running a lean ship and that is going to be a huge problem when rising wages in India kind of make the entire offshore/outsourcing model counter productive.

This is a chicken and egg problem , you see after 7-8 years in industry a lot of guys in India end up at this deadend which reads 'MANAGER' some of us don't want to do that so what options does one have ? Continue to work in the trenches ? Fact is firstly there is not much scope there and even if there is some in product cos, the managers rule the roost in our desi setup . Basically there is no career path for people who wish to stick to just technology and keep away from people management. If you persist you will have to compromise on your package.That is why you will see a lot of 7+ experience types in Product co in India doing a quick MBA and rejoining as a Product manager or moving to WEST. RTI is difficult too , the days when you had 15-20 years of experience in US and could come back and become a Director here are gone. In the Product industry the packages are usually like 2.5*n (avg figure) where n is the number of years of experience once you touch 10 years of experience you have to move into management in India, I don't see nerd professor types here who get a cube of theirs and work alone , you have to manage people and at the same time be responsible for their deliverable, clean their mess and report to home duties and after all that your effort might not get same recognition as some 25 year old who wrote a module for that same product sitting in Redwood city.

All in all we need to shed fat and yes that means offload non-productive or non-revenue generating positions . We do not need regional managers, resource managers, technical liasons or whatever fancy name one could come up with. The hierarchy has to be steep and yes HR , Finance departments need to be facilitators not the ones who come up with penny pinching schemes to add that miserable figure to year end revenue and show it as some kind of profit.

Fact is for peanuts you will get monkeys , folks in Indian product industry who do good work are still there just because of the fire in their belly not because they don't have any other option , good people can fly to US/WEST today and land up a fat paycheck.

Oracle, Netz, MSFT, IBM sell well not becaue they have a good sales team or they implement some gold belt six sigma $hit , they are doing well because they have good solid products which work and these are built by people who can crunch code .

oh btw my rant aside at the end of the day we all are a part of the system and cannot fight it, when time comes I shall too move to the dark side .

The Indian It industry is based on reducing costs for customers. India must start to move up the ladder and start to create value that they can charge premium buck for. Create softwares or provide services that people are willing to pay top dollars for. only then will the industry be fun to work in.

subhamoy.das wrote:In my organization, we have started a process called KYC where aquired knowledge needs to be documented in a wiki. There is very little progress even after 2 year. I have seniors tell me that it will make them redundant! There is so much zeal to protect and so less to share because in IT knowledge -which is basically the skill - can be quickly learnt unlike other engineering disciplines like core engineering. Heck, my father , who is a civil engineer, can get work even at the age of 75 and i think that i will be blessed if i can reach 50 and still have a job!

That is why I never advise anyone to join this industry. You do not get much return for your exp. You are only worth what you have worked with the last 5 years.

Rishi India already has moved up in that space, some of ye über expensive enterprise product stacks are made ground up in India and this is not just software however the problem is there is hidden unemployment at play here I.e. The actual work is done by a small size of say 5-10 people but because the official team size is 40-50 a lot of normalization and bandar-baant happens and meritocracy is the first victim . The reason for innovation not happening in IT is essentially the one which causes brain drain in DrDo or Academia it is very simple no one is here for charity , a good programmer knows his/her worth they depart for greener pastures when tey don't get their due , old guard is still manning some key posts and they are keeping the core energised but I am not sure if the same can be said about my generation

SRoy wrote:Entire legions of team leads, senior developers and architects have disappeared.
The gap...skills, generational too wide to be bridged.

In my current organisation lack of monetory benefits and a few policies related to career progression did the damage. Folks who did the actual work in the trenches all moved out to other companies, where there were better policies. And in many cases folks were actively poached by rival companies, and within a short while projects also soon went to those poachers .

And this generational gap also seems to be a big problem. Managers are now complaining that their work life balance is very bad, and junior folks have to be micromanaged by literally baby sitting. So when managers put in the papers their reasons are more on work-life balance.

KJoishy wrote:when you say jumped ship, where did they go? Left IT industry or moved to other jobs?

Folks in the 5-8 years experience mostly jumped to other IT companies only. Most of them got a better pay packet and change in designation. I know a couple of folks who moved to PSUs or Govt. Sector jobs, and a few more who are actively trying. At the more senior level; managers moved to smaller firms, or work places where the work culture is more US styled or European. A few of them went back to their core technical skills to work as contractors and some moved to manage their own businesses (non-IT).

negi wrote:Continue to work in the trenches ? Fact is firstly there is not much scope there and even if there is some in product cos, the managers rule the roost in our desi setup . Basically there is no career path for people who wish to stick to just technology and keep away from people management

This is becoming a problem in Service companies as well (not just product companies). With the type of work done in the sweat-shop India based MNCs, 7-8 years experience is a very risk area to be in . You would have been getting a decent pay packet, would be settling in with life etc. But the company is finding a way to make much junior folks do the same work, because that is what is going get the more profits. What would the individual do, see if he can move to the next level which is either a manager or an architect. On that basis they can surive a few more years. But after that for an architect projects which requires major architecture (using his expertise) would not be available. For a manager again it would be more of managing bigger projects (with large number of people), and focus on Excel-giri and see how to squeeze the maximum profits out. The sad part is that at this level there are not many options to change over.