Career

This is Why Indian IT Companies Have Surplus Employees But Lacks Talent

Opinion By Raj on Lack of Talent with College Graduates in India.

India in not exception to diversity in pay packages.

An average Indian fresh IT graduate may not get any SALARY at all for his first 6 month.

They are kept working as trainee or even if they get paid, they get around per month 15,000-20,000 Indian Rupees = $200.

Which is not sufficient to afford rental accommodation in metro cities where these companies operate (leaving food expenses apart).

For Accommodation you need to pay 2 months salary as rental advance and upto 1 year advances in some cities like “Bangalore” to start carrier.

They start their career journey in these Indian IT companies, whose savings directly goes to top managerial people’s pockets. Managers are generally not billable by US clients as opposed to the ground level software employee(worker).

On an average for every Indian Engineer in Indian IT company is billable by US client there are three non billable Managers that feeds on Engineers Salary.

Engineers controlled by managers whose task are generally not related to computer by any means say (attendance, compliance logistics etc).

Theses managers often control regulate the workers appraisal process.

Company policies often not liked/understood by Indian Workforce engineer and they (Engineer) often switches to new companies every 1-2-3 years.

That reason Indian companies heads in cheap and surplus labor task force but lack in talent pool (creamy layer) is because of bad managerial policies/decisions often not rrational and related.

That’s why most MNC like HCL are now Employee centric than Managerial centric than his counter parts Infy and TCS India.

//

I posted the following question in Facebook Fanpage

What do you think about managers in IT companies in India?

Responses weren’t much different from Raj’s views.

IT Managers in India

Over to You

What do you think about bad, incompetent managers being the reason for lack of talent and frequent job changes?

Share your experience and view about your Manager and are they competent enough?

See Also :  Nifty Tricks Job-Seekers Use To Get An Interview

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19 Comments

  1. If they pay you peanuts then definitely you are likely to switch from one company to another and besides of this they even don’t follow any work ethics. They don’t care about your future and your career growth. They just continuously use you and outside India people don’t know the real truth. Only because of availability of these cheap labors they have surplus employee and whole world say the Indian IT companies have extreme amount of man-power and let them do this outsourcing work, they are doing it in least money. But you can’t beat the fact these IT companies have not created any remarkable technologies like Microsoft, Google or other US tech giant created. They don’t believe in investment in research and that’s why research have bad impact on Indian students(because people believe after PhD or any research you can get the job only in college, all IT companies will shut the door for you.). They don’t support the research. Do you believe you can get the job in your dream company like Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo etc. after working for years in these companies? Why don’t these IT companies invest in research and earn through patents like other US companies. Why don’t they create some outstanding IT product which world will likely to use.

    They are earning in dollar and spending in dollars….right….but why don’t you see their life standard and work ethics. Our living in India doesn’t mean we can’t earn more or equal to them. After all, we are not having that social service (luxurious life) and leisure which Americans are having. Shouldn’t they compensate this….engineers life in India is pathetic. In cities like Bangalore, first you have to pay the security of next 12 months only then you can get the room in nearly 12000 rent and most common salary of engineer there is 20000. If you want to live there you have to live in partnership with other colleague or friends. Nowadays, India has just become the island of cheap labors where engineer would do anything without asking any question and are obligated to boss order due to signing of bonds. and don’t forget about the vicious management.

    All these IT companies need is innovation in technology and need to bring some good work ethics and more important of that, strictly following of those work ethics. Make themselves the dream companies of others.

  2. Not necessarily Indian companies. I am an Indian but worked as a US employee, based in India. There were people, both Indians and Americans who stayed with the company for a long time. Ours was extremely employee-centric organization, even listed as one of the best companies in the world to work for, but as an insider, I say that’s not always the case. There were times when people who were vital and worked were let go, due to “cost-cutting” policies while they let junk stay. Happened to both Indians and Americans, top-level to low-level, but more at mid-level. Letting go some of the people was a very bad decision and the consequences weren’t well-thought of, until after facing them. What management does is not always right, some times they too take hasty decisions. Blaming the employees is always easiest way, but a companies skill lies in recognizing people who add value to it and making sure they satisfy their justified needs. After all, no one who’s worth something will keep working for a company that lives in denial.

  3. Raghuram

    Well I can only say that you seem to be hell bend against people working in India. Don’t tell people that you waited for job of your choice after you grad school.
    NO body is born rich and can spend 20-30 lakhs just to go to USA for grad school and then start cribbing that I want a job of my choice..

    Problem is only few people know what they want in from early age.Don’t tell people that u know that you wanted to be software engineer and then work in USA.Life is a journey and you can’t plan it like a movie script.
    And what passion are you talking about.If you are so passionate about your software skills that you would have rather made this website much more .
    Talk about passion,if you have guts then just put some project or paper or anything that for sure at least displays yours passion of been software engineer.
    Well we working In Indian IT companies are not ass.There are set of people will to USA like you and there are some who are working on some product development and at the same time working with these companies.

    SO bro it is better to be politically correct that blocking my comments.

    1. Deepak – You seem to not get my point. This article is written by an It person working in India. This is completely his opinion. If you want to share an article with your view about folks working in India, I will be glad to publish with your name.

    2. Sometimes I don’t understand some of readers views. Here is an article published at Indian Express – http://www.indianexpress.com/news/most-engineering-graduates-lack-in-skills-study/1038170

      Does that mean I’m going to hate Indian Express or Aspiring Minds or blast at them? Probably not.

      DO you think I’m going to form an opinion (lie how you did with me) that Indian Express is against Engineering Graduates in India? Absolutely not.

  4. HI,
    i worked in HCL for 2+ yrs and it is not as you see…….they say employee first for name sake…tcs is for better in managerial policies than HCL….what ever u explained happens more in HCL itself

  5. Admin,

    Upon reading the title of this post “This is Why Indian IT Companies Have Surplus Employees But Lacks Talent”, my first reaction was: “hmmm, this must be interesting. Lets see why Indian IT companies have surplus employees but lack talent”.

    This article does not say anything about the reasons for lack of talented employees in Indian IT companies.

    Not only that, the assertion about the monthly paycheques as a trainee may itself be faulty. Rs. 15,000-20,000 per month does not translate to $200. Factoring in the Purchasing Power Index, it translates to more like ~$800 to $1000.

    This post is more like a rant about why Indian IT companies are poor employers than anything else.

    On the other hand, Ashish Arora, in his comment to this post, has laid out very articulately in the 5th point as to why the quality of employees may not be up to the mark in Indian IT companies. Read that, and not the actual post.

    – aman

  6. I do agree that bad managers can be one of the reasons for lack of talent in an organization but think over it again. Do you really think that only bad managers can be reason for lack of talent.

    1. Not essential. There are many organizations where you will find really good managers but employees don’t have either talent or attitude to excel. In one of the organization I worked, they hired fresh batch from IIT khadakpur and trust me there were bunch of people in that group who thought that whole world is in the spree to hire them so they were not professionally competent with other employees in the organization. Perhaps the person who really excelled in the development team was very motivated person who did nothing but think about driver architecture and code all the time. He had a very positive attitude but did his bachelors from some unknown engineering college. It’s attitude and inner motivation that influences how you perform and how much you are talented. Please don’t have this notion that people who cleared one exam can excel everytime and everywhere.

    2. Well, grass always looks greener at the other side. In Western countries like US, UK and Australia, I am pretty sure that people in IT are very aware about situation. There are so called ‘high paying’ jobs in Indian context(I don’t know when people will stop converting dollars to rupees and understand that expenses in those countries are according to currency value), however, these jobs are very unstable and demands every day to be productive. There is a high pressure and I can feel that almost everyday at job. It is not like it use to be when I was working in India. My mistake were pardoned, I under performed and still not kicked off. People were more supportive and helpful and there was an atmosphere of kinda love, humor and connection. Here it is bit artificial or more of a professional culture. Sometimes talent does not comes out of you suddenly, you have to cultivate it, groom yourself to be the best so you have to go through lot of failures and bad people. But I am sure those difficult people make you a better professional.

    3. Many people don’t understand that currently Indian IT market is perhaps generating jobs in a pace more than western job market and that’s why there are so many opportunities for people to hop from one job to another. Also when you hop jobs in India, mostly organizations offer you appraisal of like 30% – 100% whereas, in countries like US you get 5%-10% so people in Indian IT industry are more fortunate in that sense and if you look into this more closely, when you get job in another company, it is solely on the basis of your performance in the interview and what hiring people believe talent you have. I have seen that people in Indian corporate do less of reference checking and trying to know that past performance. So if a person is not performing very good in the organization, he finds it SMART to hop and can blame his manager for downfall of his moral, how can you even know what the truth is??? Can you retrieve his past performance parameters from company’s confidential data?? Hops are happening so fast, people jump from one job to another till they have already worked for like 5 companies in time span of 4 years. What????

    4. Remember, no matter where you go in the world, Client’s Requirement will always be KING. So, you cannot decide in what project you want to get in. Your manager will decide where you should be placed. But wait, where is this coming from? This only happens when are fresh graduate is hired by a service based organization who deals with project of all sorts and then they place people in different project. That decision is cascaded from top management to your manager. How can he be blamed that you desire something else?? after all he is not running business, he is just doing his job.
    Why don’t you just sharpen your skills in the area you wish to pursue your career like Java, do some projects(free and open source maybe), do some freelancing and try your luck in the market. Remember to apply for jobs which requires you to have desired skills.

    5. This is irrational itself to say that only reason for lack of talent in Indian IT industry is because of bad managerial policies/decisions. Few of the reason why pool is not talented can be as follows:
    1. Not a right hire. What if a company X found out that person hired by the organization is not performing up to expectations. Did I even mention that many of them showed fake experience to get hired in IT industry? Perhaps how many people know that some IT organization even claims their employees to have ridiculous amount of experience to client just to grab onsite projects.
    2. Evolving IT career. How many people can constantly upgrade their skills? What if you were good at Java technologies but never got time to learn new technology like Java 2.0 or 3.0 and performed badly in the next project???
    3. I am pretty sure there are many civil engineers and chemical engineers who are complaining about this and yes, they did a 2 month course on Java and suddenly considered themselves top talent.
    If you are top talent and are performing good in an organization, my piece of advice is go approach your manager’s manager and please have a rational set of proof how you think you are performing good and your manager did not promote you or why you think some manager X did a wrong decision. If that does not resolve matter, some company Y will surely hire you.

  7. In my company Nuclear Power Corporation of India, there are not much opportunity of technical exposure for girls.

  8. one more thing that bothers is that Graduates from Electricals, civil, mechanical and even biotech work in software companies. I am not blaming students for this because jobs in electrical sectors (i dont know about other branches) is not plenty here and for govt jobs they ask minimum 8lacks with an influence.

    And after paying that huge amount even if job is not interesting one should work there forever because of obligation.

    So its not hard to get job, its really hard to get one thats satisfying.

  9. For Government sector, the condition is not much different than IT companies….specially for female employee. For them, opportunities are very much limited.

      1. Central Govt. jobs have stability, good pension and other benefits. Your job is secure till age of 60 and even then you get tonnes of money as PF, Pension. Add health benefits, house in Govt. colony, Central school for children.
        In USA, there is nothing like stability. One day your boss will say that there are layoffs and you are gone. we pay so much in rent, insurance-what pension are we expecting in USA and I dont think we will get opportunity to work also when we are 40-50+.

  10. I truly agree with the above blog and the question that you asked on FB.
    I also work in a same environment . The guys/manager who are above me are just there because they own the company, otherwise no one have hired them ever. They were thrown out of their previous company and in fear of not getting another job they opened their own company. Now they just have to manage us rather Code softwares. They hire freshers mostly and do not even look those guys who have experience because to them they have to pay more. No doubt I got to learn alot in the beginning but that was only because they wanted me to learn and work for them. Even i worked for free for 2 months initially and many other who came after me have worked for free even for 3-5 months and thats the main reason many people have left the company. Such things really kills one’s talent and interest in their work. No doubt how much a person love his work but money matters at some point.

      1. Raghu,

        As far as Programming language is considered.. I feel even its the same case in US right ? For E.g if some X company wants a Java resource and conducts recruiting exclusively for Java, then there arises no question of like or dislike right ?

        Speaking of FTE also will they give the candidate to choose from pool of technologies ? How will it be ?

        1. Companies here hire based on their needs.

          For instance with Microsoft – When they hire Entry Level Engineers for Software Engineer in Test, during the interview they will make sure you know about testing, you can learn to code and strong in at least one language. After you get the job, they don’t put you in training for 3 to 6 months. You learn while doing the job.

          If a company wants Database Developer, they will interview candidates with Database experience. For Entry level FT, they will check for projects in DB. They will ask you to write SQL queries, design a DB Schema. If you never had DB experience before, then chances of getting a DB job is tough.

          Got it?

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