[whitewing]

Originally Posted by condor

From what I understand, Lateral hiring is internal hiring through movement of resources from one function to another. I dont see why TCS even had to mention this, or if they are covering up something. And for internal movements, why should anyone complain ?

The lateral hiring that came up in the news was of the delay in onboarding of people with experience from outside the organization being held up (not just freshers).
https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/bu...-10935121.html

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by Moneycontrol

Over 200 lateral recruits across cities including Bangalore, Pune, Kochi, Bhubaneswar, Delhi NCR, and Indore to name a few are impacted by the delays.

These joinees were hired between January and April and were initially facing onboarding delays by a month. Many of them got two to three subsequent new joining dates. On July 10, however, many received emails stating that their joining dates are getting pushed to October.

They are obviously not talking about internal movement of resources.

These are folks hired in Jan-April, can't join until October. Boy, that is really a stretch.

[Porsche306]

IF Demand == Supply THEN everybody happy ELSE discuss job attrition, layoffs, ..............

[V.Narayan]

Thank you @DigitalOne for your response and for raising some very relevant points. I'll offer my thoughts on some of those points from my perspective of an employer-entrepreneur. Of course we may agree to disagree as each of these is a contentious matter and both of us are viewing it from opposite sides.

Originally Posted by DigitalOne

Perhaps I should qualify who I meant as investors/shareholders and also distinguish them from upper management (CxOs level executives). Apart from the founders who may currently own a minimal % of shares, majority of the shares are held by FIIs/DIIs/Pension companies.

Infosys and TCS are not the IT industry, though they might be the largest. Nor do the institutional shareholders {the tail} wag the dog unless you let them. If Sundar Pichai got so spooked by some tough talk by his institutional shareholders then he needs to answer for that. Let's not assume a CEO or CFO are helpless at the hands of institutional shareholders. After having dealt with institutional shareholders quarter after quarter literally since 1997 on BSE, NYSE and NASDAQ I am very clear of this. These investors, including the ones in USA can bully you only if you permit them to or are not agile enough to spot their incoming missile. In my eyes and based on my experience in the IT industry Pichai gets 0 on 10 for his over rection of sacking thousands and he gets -10 on 10 for then collecting a bonus for himself. He seems to have a couple of vertebrae missing in both his spine and his ethics stack.

These amorphous investors are only concerned with the operating margins and capital gains from share price increases. A CFO who says that they will pay their employees at the cost of a few basis points reduction in operating profit will be out of a job before the press conference ends.

Rather a narrow way of looking at things based on newspaper articles written by journalists who have never run a business let alone fielded an investor call/meeting.

And then there are the Activist Investors. I don't think the scourge of activist investors has hit our shores yet, but it is only a matter of time.

In USA it is a business. We deal with it accordingly and call their bluff. Once they know that we are willing to live with our stock crashing for 6 weeks they go hunt other prey. Troublesome, dishonest {often enough} but manageable. If we panic then like a hyena they go for us. The first time I encountered them in 2007 I panicked. But never after that. After all we deal, in India, with vindictive and corrupt Govt officers don't we? - these guys are similar.

And that's where my concern is. The bottom line (pun intended) is there is a huge class of secondary market investors, either direct or indirect (via MFs/pension plans etc), whose interests are completely antithetical to that of the employees (including middle management). I would like to believe that the top management (CxO levels) have their heart in their right places and do think about employee welfare but they are swimming against the tide.

Depends on what we consider antithetical? If paying ever higher wages to employees attriting at 30% pa and forever negotiating beyond their productive output then yes maybe it is antithetical.

For the misdemeanors (ghosting/job-hopping/moonlighting etc) of some, why do the employees who are working loyally suffer low pay, low hikes and such? Where is the fairness in punishing X for the transgressions done by Y?

Similarly why punish/curse all employers for the mischief of three HR departments? It cuts both ways. Employees come in all shapes and sizes from the competent & productive to the foxy and dishonest. I don't buy this contention that employees, especially in IT, are the hapless victims of cruelty. If I had to sympathize I'd do so with the brick & mortar employee. This thread is replete with laments of low pay from employees of one of the two highest paid industries in this economy. Some might be low paid compared to their expectations. Are they low paid compared to their productive output?

Can't the companies share data with each other on the violating employees and not give this as a lazy excuse to harass all employees (again including middle management)?

This kind of cartelization is not legal in India.

Having said all of the above I agree that the HR departments of the 5 to 8 largest IT companies {Indian & MNCs} do not conduct themselves professionally and behave, often, not always, as if they are buying raw materials and forget they are dealing with people. Also, the top bosses, who BTW are employees, get remuneration which IMHO is a bit rich for India but I guess demand-supply is at work there too. Some of the NRC's {Nomination & Remuneration Committees} of their Boards don't take the stands I believe they ought to.

[adithya.kp]

A couple of my friends are being laid off. (product based company). They have to blame themselves for it. They never bothered to upgrade the skills, and totally disconnected from the reality. I have been trying to help them. But no luck so far.

Out of curiosity, I started glancing at the Indian IT services companies. To my surprise, there are about 50 companies with revenue greater than 500 crore. All of them have healthy cash flows, return ratios etc. In their investor presentation ppts, they already talk about generative ai and stuff, which means they already secured deals here? ( Of course, it could be just calling some llm apis). I have interacted with a lot of people from these companies. I found them very mediocre. ( No offence meant to anyone. Nobody is superior. Nowadays, you see the same in product based companies too). I know India has the cost advantage hence they get the deal. But with such mediocre talent (I am not generalising), how do they get clients?

So my question is, what prevents a lot of people from starting this (I mean IT services)?. Is it that the initial client acquisition is very difficult? Or getting good talent? ( But the salary is very low on a relative basis) . The best part is that you don't need to build plants/factories etc. ( I do understand this is boring compared to product development. But its very hard to be successful in products. Also, by the time you launch it, it could get disrupted.)

[Vishal.R]

I am not into management but some of my observations from my experience in working on the technology side are shared below.

Originally Posted by adithya.kp

what prevents a lot of people from starting this (I mean IT services)?.

There are lots of small IT service shops as well, and .

Originally Posted by adithya.kp

Is it that the initial client acquisition is very difficult?

Getting work may not be very difficult, but reaching "good" clients may be a challenge.

Originally Posted by adithya.kp

Or getting good talent? ( But the salary is very low on a relative basis)

Yes IMHO that is the most difficult part of running a small software unit.

A fresh engineer would join a big company with a relatively less starting salary but would not join a small company unless there is no other option.

Originally Posted by adithya.kp

But with such mediocre talent (I am not generalising), how do they get clients?

1. Existing relationships
2. Presence of sales teams in different geographies.
3. Brand name
4. Clients who are located in North America and Western Europe are also facing problems in finding good talent.

[DigitalOne]

Originally Posted by V.Narayan

...Nor do the institutional shareholders {the tail} wag the dog unless you let them.....

..In USA it is a business. We deal with it accordingly and call their bluff. Once they know that we are willing to live with our stock crashing for 6 weeks they go hunt other prey. Troublesome, dishonest {often enough} but manageable.

Even I don't see it as an Employee vs Employer issue. I see it as an investor/shareholder vs employee (incl middle management) issue. And I hope the top management continue to show some spine. Also that the CxO compensation is not linked to share price performance, in which case the incentive structure again gets distorted. You would have better insights into this.

IT industry also is going the same way as other industries as in employee wages go up very slowly whereas the investor/shareholder goes up fast. This has been discussed in the Understanding Economics thread (most eloquently by Samurai san).

---

Infosys has declared Q1 results and drastically revised its revenue guidance downwards. Yet the company has retained its operating margin guidance at 20-22%.

Reading between the lines (i.e maintaining the operating margin vis-a-vis slowing revenue growth), it seems the company is telling the employees asking for a wage increases to 'go, take a hike' (pun intended).

Asked about pricing, Infosys CFO Nilanjan Roy said it has been stable. The company's net headcount dropped by 6,940 in the quarter to 3.3 lakh employees. Attrition declined to 17.3% from 20.9% in the March quarter. Infosys didn’t disclose a fresher hiring target for the fiscal. And when asked about when it would roll out wage hikes, Roy said, “It’s under consideration as we speak.”

Below image from this Times of India report



Very tough times for the sector and employees .

[v1p3r]

Originally Posted by Acharya

My Niece is joining one of the top investment banks in Bangalore, in the Tech team, fresh out of her college with Salary of 36 LPA.

So this is likely to be Goldman, BofA, Morgan, JPM, or one of those.

These salaries are not uncommon at this level. You would do a 6 month internship here and then get a PPO. This will happen if you are from RV in BLR, or IITx NITx and are in BLR, BOM, GGN, maybe HYD with DE Shaw etc.

Originally Posted by alpha1

I am curious to know a few things:
1) You said freshers, what kind of work are they doing that allows these companies to make so much money from their intelligence, creativity and hard-work to dole out those kinds of monies?

To put it simply, they are executing the strategies that the US quants come up with, by putting them in code. The cost of doing this in India is 1/5th of doing it in the US - starting software salary for similar talent is $150k - so the company saves a ton of cash by having a captive unit here.

Originally Posted by Samurai

All you just told me is that even profitable companies are ignoring economics when it comes to hiring freshers. Strangely enough, this one can be explained. They are competing for talent with funded companies who are ignoring economics. So they are forced to play the game they don't want to play, but they can at least afford it.

No, these guys don't care. These payscales have been in existence with the likes of DE Shaw for the last 20 years. These guys were paying 15 lakhs starting salaries to NIT (then REC) in 2000 in Hyderabad. Their cost of output here is a small fraction of what it would be in the US, so they are willing to pay very well by Indian standards. Their India centres are not revenue-driven, so they just have to present a budget annually that gets approved, and then hire by that.

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by adithya.kp

I have interacted with a lot of people from these companies. I found them very mediocre. ( No offence meant to anyone. Nobody is superior. Nowadays, you see the same in product based companies too). I know India has the cost advantage hence they get the deal. But with such mediocre talent (I am not generalising), how do they get clients?

You have misjudged the Indian IT services giants, by using a wrong measuring criteria. IT services is not about implementing and managing high-end or state of the art technology.

When I worked in TCS, this really bothered me. I joined TCS as my 3rd job in the early 90s. Since I worked in a product startup for a year before that, I had skills in bleeding edge technology of that era. But TCS didn't know what to make of me. After keeping me in internal Tools group for a year, they kicked me out to a client site. During that time I used to argue with some seniors on why TCS mostly worked in COBOL/mainframe and not C++/Windows. Then one day an older PM dropped the truth bomb on me. He said TCS is a services company, and our job is to build and maintain customer's applications like MIS/Billing/Inventory with least disruption and risk. These are large scale applications requiring 10s or sometimes 100s of programmers doing boring work to get the job done. There is no place for risky high-end or bleeding edge technology in such applications. Client won't pay for failures. He said that the stuff I was doing was just window dressing, to impress the customer. Also, training large number of programmers in simple technologies is easier and faster. If the technology is difficult, resource allocation will become a nightmare.

Much later I realised he was telling the truth. TCS would position themselves as hi-tech and innovative company to customers, but strongly oppose anyone trying to use such technologies within the company. Since then TCS has grown 200 times.

TCS employees are not mediocre, just your expectation is wrong. They are in the business of providing software services, that means getting the job done. And they usually do. If they don't know the latest web framework, who cares. They will use a mature technology that works consistently.

Originally Posted by adithya.kp

So my question is, what prevents a lot of people from starting this (I mean IT services)? Is it that the initial client acquisition is very difficult?

Now that you know it is not about technology, think about the other aspects. Running an IT services company is all about sales, marketing, project management, human resource management (recruit,train,allocation) and financial management. Getting all these skills in the right balance under one roof is the key to this game. The WITCH companies are very good at this, and they know how to do this at a very high scale. No one around the world can match them in this.

[voldemort]

Originally Posted by Samurai

Much later I realised he was telling the truth.

I agree with you 100%. Makes perfect sense.

I once read that for most companies whose primary product doesn't have much to do with software (think banks, airlines, fertilizer companies, etc — pretty much most companies out there), the software that they make others build for them are an expense they'd rather not have. They want reliable things that get the job done. In a lot of cases that translates to "boring".

When I worked in TCS, this really bothered me

Out of curiosity, how did you deal with it? Did you start your own thing (I think I read something like that somewhere here, but don't recollect whether that was you or someone else). Or did you paradigm-shift and accept that you would have to do boring work to keep a large mostly-working system continue working, so that the ultimate end-user can achieve whatever it is they're actually trying to achieve?

If I may ask, what would your advice be to highly skilled — as in, say, thousands of lines of code contributions to the Linux kernel during their spare time — early-career software engineers who are stuck in mediocre (to them) positions? Start their own company? What if they don't have what it takes to build a successful business, or are simply not interested in building one? (Assume they're sufficiently well paid (ie., NOT crazy high, yet good enough) despite being in an unfulfilling job).

The obvious thing would be for them to find a better job that more closely aligns with their interests. But that's easier said than done.

I understand this is a bit of an open ended question, but I just wanted to know your perspective on this, considering you seem knowledgeable about these kinds of things.

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by voldemort

Out of curiosity, how did you deal with it?

Actually, I answered this question 10 years ago.

Originally Posted by voldemort

Did you start your own thing (I think I read something like that somewhere here, but don't recollect whether that was you or someone else).

If you read the post I linked above, after that time I never ever worked on a software I didn't design myself. Someone would give a product idea, after that I decide how the whole thing should work. And yeah, I left TCS in 1998 to join a startup in USA as director of R&D. About 6 years returned to India to co-found my first company. Did MBA in my 30s and still continued to design/code software. And 16 years later at age 50, co-founded my second company. All this to make sure I can continue to do design/code software in my 50s. Actually, it is bit more nuanced than that. More about that later.

Originally Posted by voldemort

If I may ask, what would your advice be to highly skilled — as in, say, thousands of lines of code contributions to the Linux kernel during their spare time — early-career software engineers who are stuck in mediocre (to them) positions? Start their own company? What if they don't have what it takes to build a successful business, or are simply not interested in building one? (Assume they're sufficiently well paid (ie., NOT crazy high, yet good enough) despite being in an unfulfilling job).

The obvious thing would be for them to find a better job that more closely aligns with their interests. But that's easier said than done.

How badly do you need to do interesting things? Most people settle for money and stability over self-actualization. I could have been making 2-3 times my current income if had stuck with a corporate career I would have hated. Instead, I decided to do what interests me. My stress levels are pretty low, I don't do more than 2-3 meetings a week, and I don't take daily meds.

Before starting a company, you have to ask couple questions:

1. Do you and your co-founders have the key complementary skills required to build and run a company? Those skills are Sales, Marketing, Engineering, Administrative and Finance. Otherwise the company can easily go sideways. I have seen so many companies just destroy themselves by lacking those skills in the top management/founding team.
2. Can you actually create some product/service, and convince others to buy it at a price above the input cost? The startup scene is full of folks making stuff at ₹200 and selling it at ₹100. That's not creating value, it is charity or stupidity.

If your answer is no to either of the above question, just forget the idea of starting a company. Then you should think about joining such a company, when it is still small.

Originally Posted by voldemort

so that the ultimate end-user can achieve whatever it is they're actually trying to achieve?

I always achieved their goals without doing boring stuff. We just get 1-2 tech support tickets a month.

[airguitar]

What are your thoughts on hiring-lobbies and favouritism in IT firms ? XYZ is a powerful person, moves to a different company, they have a huge budget and new projects, which means new (good, impactful and well-paid) roles at the new firm. XYZ doesn't advertise the roles at all, XYZ hires from his professional network completely or worse from his social network because they happen to go running or drinking together ( bypassing/circumventing poaching clauses or by hiring from his network but not his directs etc). Note that XYZ doesn't favour duds though, hires decent people even if they are from his professional or social network.

While it's understandable that XYZ prefers to take no chances and his chances of working with "known devils" provides a safety net for him and reduces his risk, is it fair on similar other people that are equally talented and not in XYZ's circles and either do not know about the roles at all or have to prove their worth in 3-5 hours while XYZ's minions will always have the benefit of the doubt even if they screw up a round or two.

XYZ would ensure best compensation etc for the people he brings but the same may not be true of someone joining from outside of XYZ's network. Almost sounds like a page from the theater or film industry.

What are your thoughts around this? Do you think that IT industry is 100% meritocratic or just as equally fallible due to fallible human beings and the compulsions of convenience similar to many unorganized or less organized industries? DO you think such behavior goes against equality of opportunities that many IT firms profess?

[RJK]

Originally Posted by airguitar

What are your thoughts on hiring-lobbies and favouritism in IT firms ? XYZ is a powerful person, moves to a different company, they have a huge budget and new projects, which means new (good, impactful and well-paid) roles at the new firm. XYZ doesn't advertise the roles at all, XYZ hires from his professional network completely or worse from his social network because they happen to go running or drinking together ( bypassing/circumventing poaching clauses or by hiring from his network but not his directs etc). Note that XYZ doesn't favour duds though, hires decent people even if they are from his professional or social network.

While it's understandable that XYZ prefers to take no chances and his chances of working with "known devils" provides a safety net for him and reduces his risk, is it fair on similar other people that are equally talented and not in XYZ's circles and either do not know about the roles at all or have to prove their worth in 3-5 hours while XYZ's minions will always have the benefit of the doubt even if they screw up a round or two.

XYZ would ensure best compensation etc for the people he brings but the same may not be true of someone joining from outside of XYZ's network. Almost sounds like a page from the theater or film industry.

What are your thoughts around this? Do you think that IT industry is 100% meritocratic or just as equally fallible due to fallible human beings and the compulsions of convenience similar to many unorganized or less organized industries? DO you think such behavior goes against equality of opportunities that many IT firms profess?

Not sure about the meritocracy of the industry hence will refrain. However the situation described here is applicable to all industries & am sure happens everywhere. To answer the question, it is NOT fair but well, that's just life. We learn to live with it & move on & the faster we do it, better for us. These are some really hard lessons I've learnt from my own experience over the past few years; I also was idealist earlier but have now come to see things for what they really are.

Cheers

[SoumenD]

Just came across this video on YT. Byjus seem to be in news for all the wrong reasons lately. The said person apparently was laid off post which this happened.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3vQ0SPpqYY

News channels also are playing it but not sure of the authenticity.

Link

[xcentrk]

Originally Posted by Samurai

Actually, I answered this question 10 years ago.

......

I always achieved their goals without doing boring stuff. We just get 1-2 tech support tickets a month.

I read your article and you just mentioned exactly what I had in my mind. IN fact the scenario explains your point clearly.

I only have 16 years of total IT experience and I still prefer to write programs and make impact rather than do mundane tasks or support projects. And I strongly believe that is why I am still relevant and working in this field. Although I started my business couple of years ago and on the way to making profit now, I still prefer to know things and create tools or new product that I have complete control of.

I advise the same to any new developers that I get to nurture. Just my way of helping freshers and I hope one of them benefit from this.