Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Tech it or leave it

"For most engineering grads first job's a passing phase of less than two years"proclaims a headline in today's Economic Times

A C Nielsen ORG Marg's T Schools '05 Campus Recruiters Index has made the less than startling discovery that 64% of engineering grads who join tech companies intend to leave within the first two years or less. This number is apparently up from 47% in 04 and 59% in 05.

Fact is, few engineering grads seem really enthused about joining Infosys, TCS, Wipro and the like - especially if they happen to be from tier 1 institutes or God forbid, IIT. Company aa rahi hai, to chalo job le lete hain.

And serve the companies right too in a way, if they're willing to snap up any which engineering graduate - civil, mechanical, metallurgical - just because they need to add 10,000 bakras at a time.

Although their HR depts claim that they have systems which ensure a smooth induction, training and deployment onto projects that isn't quite the case for everyone.

A 2004 graduate from a premier institute in Mumbai who was working with Mastek had this to say: "Since IT companies conform to CMM level 5 they have to keep a certain % of the workforce on the bench ie idle. And it can get damn frustating."

There are enough cases of freshers who complete their training and then just cool their heels for a while: come to office everyday, send email forwards to each other (the only timepass available in the absence of internet access) and somehow get through till the end of the day.

Sounds like fun, doing nothing - but try doing it over a period of time. Sucks bigtime!

Another complaint is "I asked to work on X technology but was put onto a project using Z technology." Z is apparently getting 'obsolete' but still a current business requirement. But that argument doesn't cut ice with apna 'I-want-technologies-that-look-good-on-my-resume' engineer.

The Long, Steep Climb
Although the 15,000 bucks you get in hand as a fresher seem decent enough at the time of joining the really long ladder ahead is soon evident.

In most companies it takes 18 months-2 years to get sent on an offshore project and earn that precious dollar allowance (which is the carrot dangling in every techie head). And though that's not really a long time many don't have the patience.

Besides, they soon learn, the job is not really about programming at all... One such dude sums up the average IT career path on a Pagalguy forum:

There is not much of a ladder is S/W industry as such. For most life is quite typical. One or two years in a company. Then a chance to go onsite and see some money. Then back home. Another 2 years and then one becomes an analyst and after 5-6 years, a manager. And your engineering branch is the last thing that would matter here.

The work in S/w company is quite mundane and does not involve too much programming skills. If you have good talking skills and project yourself well to your managers, you would grow.


Given that scenario - and the fact that there is no inherent interest in software as a career - getting into an MBA or MS program is a good escape route. And seems like a faster way "up".

Basically, managing the aspirations of thousands of above average intelligence 20somethings is no joke. Yes they have fantastic campuses, working culture, and future prospects as well but when all that becomes the norm, dil still maange more and that's where the trouble lies.

Above average folks eventually hear voice whispering in their heads: " Is what I am doing meaningful?" Here's one techie's answer, again posted on the PG forum:

"Hmm, so you thought Windows XP was written in India? nops, but the typing of all the HELP doc was done in India. You do not do much programmin. If you are in Mainframe stuff, whereever you work it's going to dig into some code written in 1970 and you'll be wondering half the time "how could ppl write such hopeless code?" and you would need to add one or two lines into that code. Yes not more than 20 lines!

If you are in any of those open system projects, Java, .NET half the time is documentation stuff or changing and test some crap stuff. But few projects have something good.

Remember software industry is not about creating new things. Its all about client giving you work. Work that their IT team is NOT interested in doing.

But you get money $$$$ and of course work exp and a life called "White collar job".


Not very inspiring, especially in light of the fact that those with MBA degree from premier institutes in the same company clearly seem to earn more and rise faster. As well as enjoy greater mobility - they have the option of leaving the software industry altogether if they wish.

So the answer to 'how to stop attrition' is : you can't. Whether you make people sign bonds or chart out detailed career paths - if they join your industry because it's the easiest job available to them and not out of inherent aptitude or interest, they're always going to be difficult to hold onto.

And companies are accepting that and just taking in more and more people to begin with (luckily we seem to have a large enough population of B.E.s to draw on!).

Of course one could argue why single out engineering grads - 2 years is the average time most young people spend in their first jobs. Whether in media or BPO or KPO or whatever. And even after an MBA.

The country is awash with jobs - it's easier to leave and more tempting to do so than ever before. Let's see how long the party lasts!

19 comments:

  1. Rashmi,
    Nice post!!
    You just exactly said what happens in this godforsaken business. I have been working in the US on a project for 1.5 years now. This project should have taken just over 3 months to finish. But hey..I am not complaining as I get the precious $$$s...
    No worries as of now kyunki like other s/w guys mujhe bhi car aur flat jo kharidna hai :-))
    -Sandesh

    ReplyDelete
  2. hey rashmi,
    Agree with what you said except for the MBA's part, it loooks like the assumption here is that MBA's land on job that they find meaning.(Reminds me of your Empty Raincoat post,Charles Handy !) This problem is with the MBA's too but the difference it is more pronounced with engineers.

    ReplyDelete
  3. "No worries as of now kyunki like other s/w guys mujhe bhi car aur flat jo kharidna hai :-))"

    I feel sorry for you.
    Indians always go where the money is, not where the fun is. It grieves me,yes.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Vsanthi - that's the point. Things are SO much better in comparison but that is not enough to keep anyone happy.

    Rajan- I did not say MBAs have more meaningful jobs - just that they getpaid more and have more mobility

    ReplyDelete
  5. Its a classic chain. Most guys take up engineering since there is nothing better that assures a decent white collar job. They then join software since there is nothing better to do. After one or two more years they want to do better than just coding for some obscure client and they join a MBA. Almost 70 to 80% of MBA junta in India are such frust engineers. What happens after a MBA? Around 20% shine and become bankers or consults. Around 30% join marketing. The rest come back to software as business analysts and project managers.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I think the primary reason ppl move on after a couple of years is because companies are not able to offer them challenging work which would force them to use all the analytical skills they learn in college. I find a lot of people coming back after working for a year or two and coming back for getting "reco's" for grad studies, or even appearing for CAT.

    I think if companies want to retain engineering grads, they have to provide an environment which challenges the employees, and give them work worth their potential... and not writing of help files, or managing "The 70s Code"!

    ReplyDelete
  7. But why blame only s/w industry.Even in a traditional manufacturing industry one hardly uses his engineering knowlwdge. Infact there are only a handful of guys who might be using their engineering knowledge

    ReplyDelete
  8. IT jobs are being recognized as an extension of college life. this has brought in some kind of comfort factor among the IT professionals.

    The society expects an engg grad to join one of the IT majors and there is very little one can do to go against the norm.

    With the IT biggies having an employee base of 20K - 40K employees, the new hires will find it increasingly difficult to get noticed. hence they start looking for career advancement options and MBA is a natural choice.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Rashmi, I guess the line where you say "Basically, managing the aspirations of thousands of above average intelligence 20somethings is no joke" is the crux of the matter... the dil always maange some more. And the green paper has the last word in every business... so be it. Lets party while this thing lasts

    ReplyDelete
  10. Hail Rashmi;
    I'd been wanting to write on something like this for a long time...I'm so glad you wrote it.....and wrote it so well.
    Lemme tell u your ideas abt tech things are very clear...considering the fact that you're not frm a tech background.

    I became a certified BE only 32days ago.And i was one of those millions of people whom WIPRO picked out from the campuses.I, however, took the placement only on my parents insistance( ya the easy job attitude) and I've not regretted not going to wipro.Most of my friends took up those tech jobs...and they are all either in pune or banglore...and these people work for like 16hrs,isolated from the civilied world...except for that net connection ....

    I thought i had bid a final goodbye to an existance like that....but really MBA is no diffrent....People are here just for placements and i can see my friends who have left their engg placements taking up the same companies during their mngmt placements.

    I can't understand where the 'love of learning' has disappeared.Actually i wonder if it was ever there.I think where in the old days there was a worker class in the factories,now it has been replaced with the programmers class.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Although you have depicted the picture of many "techies", let us look into an Indian Manager.(I am excluding all your top B-school grads)

    He/She is typically in his 20s (lol).....

    They dont have *any* skill except "communication skills" which is a euphemism for chattering! You have more number of managers than actually required and they end up doing nothing except banter around with some stupid case-history anecdotes about some Fortune 500 company.

    We have this situation everywhere.

    There are more people talking about "changing a process" as soon as they step into the itself ! Without actually knowing how things work in an organization.

    Most of them are overpaid and yet they are out there to make "cost effectiveness" for companies!

    I do agree that technical people go out of an organization due to reasons mentioned by you. One reason which you have overseen is the "happening occupation"...It was automobiles in th 70s, electronics in the 80s.....And everybody made hay......

    BUT there are people who ARE INTERESTED in technology....NO MATTER HOW OLD IT IS.....Computer Science is a SCIENCE and it wont die...Be it mainframe or nanotechnology or some other thing.....

    Finally I believe that home grown, technically sound managers are much better than these MBA jocks who are eager,enterprising dolts.

    And when the part baloons burts, both "techies" and MBAs will be on the roads.

    ReplyDelete
  12. from my personal experience I can say even a 6 figure monthly salary after BTech/MBA is not worth it if u r not enjoying it.SOoner or later, one goes thru this "mere life ka lakshya kya hai" phase. Again from personal experience i can say that Steve Jobs' funda of 'not settling' as long as one doesnt find one's love is supercool. It There is certain fraction of howard roark in all of us. we just need to awaken it. and it holds true for engineers, MBAs, and dadada

    ReplyDelete
  13. Company aa rahi hai, to chalo job le lete hain.

    Its not that easy. If one is allowed to take only one job, then there won't be such tress passers appearing for these companies.


    just because they need to add 10,000 bakras at a time.

    So much for the dignity of work! I hope you don't treat the pizza delivery boys with equal disdain.


    The work in S/w company is quite mundane and does not involve too much programming skills. If you have good talking skills and project yourself well to your managers, you would grow.

    It is about choices everybody makes. People don't want any negotiations on their salary, relocate to a different city, but still want to work on best technologies (read learn at the cost of company).

    All these cribs may make one think that so much of brainpower is being "wasted". But, trust me, recruiting really good candidates is far more difficult. The freshers from the colleges, who have sky-rocketting aspirations, don't put same efforts in polishing their technical skills.


    Somehow, you tend give me an impression that MBA is nirvana. You get great money, move up the ladder faster, switch jobs with great ease, and do the challenging, earth-shattering work. Lots of assertions without substance.


    Finally, you couldn't make a more keen remark when you say - "The country is awash with jobs - it's easier to leave and more tempting to do so than ever before. Let's see how long the party lasts!" I agree with you, fully. The days of switching your job because you didn't like the food served are numbered.

    Happy Engineers' Day! (15th September)

    ReplyDelete
  14. Hi Rashmi,

    I am an IT engineer (the second biggest mistake of my life) and I worked at Hexaware Technologies for a year (the biggest mistake). At the time the fastest growing IT company, now the fastest sinking.

    Looks like immense research went into writing this one, because most things are spot on. I have been there, done that. And it's sickening. CMMi and their kin are all hogwash, most of it is as someone rightly pointed out, just piles of crap that some dude decided to make up one fine day. On paper, most of it makes sense. But since so little is actually implemented, it makes one hate the system.

    As you rightly point out, millions of capable minds are warming the benches with their copious bottoms, a few hundred are working on MS-Word, doing documentation, and the rest are Project Managers - read capable of doing nothing at all.

    I have three points to make -

    1. I hear, from friends still in the industry, of facing a massive backlash from the client's employees, in addition to doing depressingly unchallenging work. A backlash because they believe that sometime in the future their jobs are going to be sent across to India. A case of half-baked knowledge, for sure. But what transpires is despicable. Dirty politics takes the fun (whatever is left really) out of cleaning up someone else's shit - read support and maintenance projects.

    2. It really is high time we started moving up the value chain. For a country that churns out software professional by the hordes every few months, it is no less than shameful that we have but a few software companies which are into product development as a core activity. The country is awash with jobs, yes, but it will remain so only till the Chinese learn English. Once that happens, all these service jobs are going to move across the border, because they'll be cheaper to execute there. That will spell the wipe-out of an entire generation of call centre dudes and dudettes.

    3. Well, its all eyewash anyway. So unless someone stands up and cleans the entire system from the inside (shocking stories abound, mind you), nothing much can be done. Behind that glorious facade of shimmering glass and aluminium, there is an entire industry that is hurtling to its doom on the optimistic cushion of inflated projections and impractical business forecasts. The future, I believe, is somewhere else.

    Did I escape? You bet I did. Into the comfortable confines of a prestigious B-school that would assure me an 8-lakh rupee job at the end of two years?? Far from it!

    I broke the bond (yes, yes, yes!!). I am a blacklisted employee (hahaha). I am marked 'absconding' in spite of leaving behind my address, telephone numbers and lawyer's second cousin's wife's brother's contact details.

    I write for a living now. About cars, bikes and everything else on wheels. I generate editorial content (ooh!) for two magazines - CAR and BIKE. I play Need For Speed in office (testing games), drive the fantabulous-est cars (road tests), read foreign magazines (capability enhancement) and the works.

    Days fly past and months zoom away. No saturation, no frustration, just plain unadulterated joy.

    There's a God up there. And there's something beyond an MBA to escape the mess!

    ReplyDelete
  15. Ma'am:

    Bang on the point, as always!

    I have my own story to tell like a zillion others in our forsaken IT doomed, err boomed country. And I have to introduce it as a SCAM [no acronym, my naive way to emphasize].

    I am a Computer Science graduate from our so called "Tier-I" institutes. I was good at programming. I won the medal for the best undergraduate project (Bachelor's one year project). My project (http://speech.iiit.net/~deepti/)was featured on the BBC World and several local publications, a la rediff.com.

    Unfortunate, as I was to graduate in 2002, I had offers from Hughes Software Systems (a flimsy, "we'll confirm around June, when you graduate" types) and from the darling of media, Infosys Technologies Ltd. Unfortunate as we were, by the end of the year, about the time we were to graduate, almost all recruiters were "not in a position" to honor their offers.

    Anyway I went to IIIT Hyderabad to continue my research on Speech technologies, and am proud that the work that I did, was finally (after much work over it) ported to Simputer (which is an Indian endevor, much hyped, but a less than expected a success).

    After the BBC mention we got enquiry mails from like all over the world. Harvard Medical School, epatra.com CEO, and Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala (IIT Chennai, of the cor-dect fame, the company got orders worth 300 or so crores from brazil for their technology) backed n-logue come to my mind rightaway. But unsure as I was of what the world had in store for me, we did nothing much about the enquiries. We did not launch a startup to productize our project, and I regret this everyday.

    But the media queen that Infosys is, the day they gave me a date of joining, I abandoned all the research, and gladly went to their Chennai campus to become a corporate whore aka cyber coolie. I was quickly transferred to Mysore to undergo a quickfire training (Infy's first attempt at a 6 week training course). The training was on basic CS concepts and mainframes, most of which were the in-thing 20 years before I was born. I topped the training batch of 150 people, and an inspiration was the rumor that one who tops gets to do "good work". But good work there is none.

    I worked at Infosys Pune, and Mohali over a period of 15 months, always doing my best and developing several systems apart from project work, many of which are deployed across Infosys now.

    And why did I want to keep myself busy with the out-of-project work? Because, my project work sucked. Seriously, I used to wake up everyday and ask myself if this is what I worked hard in a CS degree and left research thereafter?

    Finally, my time arrived, my H-1B visa got approved at the INS, and I was being sent to California for 2 years. But I withdrew from the process, quit Infosys. I refused to be a part of the clan whose sole aim in life was to exist/lurk in the office irrespective of the nature of work, wait in the ration line to go abroad, live like mice there, come back, buy a longish car, get married, time wife's pregnancy such that the expected delivery takes place while on the second phoren trip. I refused to become a whore who has lost her values (read engineering education).

    I've been working in so called KPOs since then (infact the term KPO was also coined by my ex employer) and yes, I am your poster boy for 3 jobs in 3 years. But no, its not my fault and I'm not even ashamed. The first job switch happened because the first job should not have happened. The second one happened because the industry (Legal Process Outsourcing) needs to grow and people have to move out to setup/help setup new firms. So here I am working on patents, in effect working at the cutting edge of research (patents are as cutting edge as it gets). Research it is, albeit not mine, but then how many paying jobs in India are doing research anyway.

    And yes, having modified 20 lines of code in 6 months is not an urban legend. This is the life of every Infoscian, and I would guess a Wiproite and a TCasS.

    It's a SCAM because those who do not get frustrated of working on the mindless projects, are the ones who become more successful, at least in the way society defines success. Ladke ke paas paisa hai, achi naukri hai, foren country mein aata jaata rehta hai. kuch to computer ka karta hai, bittu tu bhi kuch seekh infosys waale bhaiya se.

    I know many people who refused to be a part of the corporate whoredom at Infosys and the like, and went back to research. My own friend went back to IIT Kanpur to pursue his research related to materials engineering. But the unexciting thing is this: he earns 9000 rupees as stipend. This is a SCAM.

    Here is a guy who was stud enuff to clear the JEE, do an undergrad at an IIT (no I'm not being snobbish), and is now pursuing research, which may well make foldable computers a reality tomorrow, but he is earning like 10 TIMES less than people who chose to be in the likes of Infosys, go onsite, and time their wife's pregnancy.

    Its a SCAM because Civil engineers who could join National Highway Authority and build great roads and bridges are wasting their lives with code written at the time when their parents were dating each other.

    Its a SCAM because a mechanical engineer who designed buses in his bachelor's project is now waiting in the ration line to go "onsite".

    Its a SCAM because an electronics engineer who designed systems for alarming in case of landslides in college is now installing Windows XP in Texan country and goes to strip clubs on weekends.

    No going to strip clubs is not a SCAM.

    ReplyDelete
  16. Great post..right on the hearts of all so called "programmers" & IT professionals who jump into the field bcos of money and end up doing menial 'software' tasks which actual 'computer engineers' do not do and are infact over-educated to do so.

    Komal, you said right ! worker class is same as programming class.

    ReplyDelete
  17. Wow...
    What a Blog...!!!
    My life is Blog, My career is Blog...bcz there is nothing much to do in this field...
    I am also part of s/w industry....
    but luckly I am doing crap....
    i am usually passing time with blogs..and news..
    let c ..where life will take...
    surely i am not frustated..and not even planning to do MBA..!!!!

    I am working in Singapore..and planning to visit ..so many Asian countries near by.. life is having fun in Software...
    I know as everywhere ....its same stuff going on...
    I cannot search for best wrk...as there is no best..work anywhere...

    More we (IT engg) shd not complain about support projects ...
    as its the only way to earn long term revenue in IT..
    thats wht the big companies like TCS, infy, wipro are doing.....

    anyway.... buying good car..and roaming in diff places become my goal for coming few years...

    Rashmi keep writing...
    R u also on the bench..????
    (sorry kidding)

    ReplyDelete
  18. Anonymous9:24 AM

    there are people who want to stick to IT..but they happen to get screwed up managers..managers are one more reason people shift companies

    ReplyDelete
  19. This is a very interesting topic indeed. As a shareholder of a small Indian based software concern I find the current attrition levels to be one of the biggest challenges for the Indian software industry and India as a whole as well. Attrition makes India a less attractive destination for outsourcing - something that won't benefit India as a whole.

    /David - www.litebreeze.com

    ReplyDelete

Disqus for Youth Curry - Insight on Indian Youth