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Originally Posted by V.Narayan Given your several posts I presume you are an IT employee and maybe suffering some frustration with your employer to write this statement. India's $227 billion IT industry did not get created in 3 decades by not having a focus on quality at an attractive price. Just the way when we buy cars we want the highest quality and the budget we can afford so does the customer that your employer (and you) deliver to. A young professional in India's IT sector draws a higher wage for the same experience and qualification than he/she would in other sectors. You can say I am upset with my current employer or he isn't giving me a fair deal. But to say that one of India's only global industries is all about quantity and not quality might be a little rich. |
I have had respect for the IT service industry veterans who created these behemoths in a "difficult-to-do-business" environment (relative to current times) and providing employment to millions of Indians and indirectly developing a lot of real-estate in tier-2 cities. In fact, Bangalore became a large Tier-1 city in part because of the IT boom.
However, my respect ends there. Not here to contest but my employer has never been one of these firms. I have dealt with such firms for my work by utilizing their services at times for different projects. My experience is limited to meagre 15+ years or so and the number of projects is also limited compare to 1000x projects that these companies have worked upon. But it isn't different than what I have described. This thread has described multiple times how these companies pay very less and hence see very high attrition. Obviously, I can't reveal the numbers but here is the fact from personal experience:
1) A person working on my project will be paid X lacs per annum by his employer (large scale IT service company) but the billing rate for him/her that my employer pays is at-least 4X and in some cases 6X. I have never seen anything less than 3X in my working life and that was again only once.
2) The reason these companies get such business is simple - If IT is not my core business but is needed for me to operate my business, I do not want to be in the business of running the IT department. Fungibility and rapid ramp up or down facility is what my employer gets in return of paying this 4x-6x rates.
3) Most such companies (clients) understand that they can get the same work done in better quality at same rates that they are paying or may be even get a better deal at times but in their larger strategy plans, these things are at bottom of the presentation.
4) The quality work (or in few cases software products) that you may have seen coming out of large IT companies is coming out of only a small % of their total workforce. Simply because these projects or initiatives are 2nd priority for them and billing is their first priority. Some of those are built by the small % of passionate and highly skilled folks. Some of these are built using
brute-force approach over the last 30+ years using the knowledge and expertise
'inspired' (Bollywood term for copying) from actual product companies but we do acknowledge the effort there. I have seen this personally myself (while working for a Product company) and also read about the same multiple times in newspapers or understood through my interactions with industry folks.
5) When employers (clients) such as mine care about quality of work, see IT as a core department/skill in their strategy, as well as want to take cost arbitrage advantage, they setup a Captive in places such as India, Poland, etc. These captives too employ in 10,000X each but they don't award contracts to such large IT service companies because they have burnt their fingers earlier. You will never see a JP Morgan or Morgan Stanley or large IT Product companies (to name a few) relying on Infy, TCS or Wipro to develop their large and complex systems. They will hire good folks coming out of Infy, TCS or Wipro without a second thought but would choose a captive site of their own in India and have direct employees rather than give remote work to others.
W.r.t to your point that a young professional from the IT industry earns more than an equally qualified person from non-IT sector and gets to work in a better environment (AC office, transport provided by company, WFH facility, etc) - I do agree on it. However, these factors vary from business to business and counter to this argument there are sectors where things are better as well when compared to IT. Other high paying sectors may not hire in such large numbers but there are sectors that pay better than IT Services.