[Mystic]

My 2 cents on why we take things for granted as per the captioned subject of this thread.

Attitude towards life in general and work in particular. Let me start with a small real life story. During the 70s and 80s, we had no international airports in either Bangalore or Hyderabad and hence one has to go to Chennai or Bombay for South Indians. I was travelling by train to Chennai from Visakhapatnam by Mail to catch international flight. At Vijayawada junction, a gentleman came with lot of luggage and chatting to TTE to accommodate him in first class. The TTE said it is difficult but would confirm in sleeper class. The guy’s ego got offended as it seems he has his international flight booked from Chennai in first class and he cannot compromise on getting to sleeper class and he is prepared to compensate somebody to cancel his journey and accommodate him in first class ( This reminds me of flights to USA via Europe when announcements are made that due to overbooking , asking to surrender their ticket to USA which will be accommodated in next flight in few hours and one can get a voucher of 900 euros. Many volunteers stand in line to surrender their seats. May be this gentleman is thinking that such a thing works in trains also). I was overhearing the conversation and curious what would be the end result. When the announcement that the train would be starting in 10 minutes, he quickly got into general compartment and loaded his luggage near the toilet as the TTE could not give the sleeper class confirmation as it was allocated to someone else due to his delay. As his international flight schedule is booked, he cannot afford to miss the train under any circumstances. We tend to take a lot of things for granted in life and realise it in a hard way later that money cannot buy everything.

Now coming back to the thread, let us talk only about campus recruits for now and not lateral hires who are usually enlightened by what life throws at them over time. Why our kids take a lot of things for granted? In India, there is a lot of influence of parents on the education and career options of kids. There is a lot of peer pressure that their children should be either Doctors or Engineers. When the children donot get a rank at entrance exams in merit, the children are pampered and offered a seat in management quota at some professional college. Children are not pushed to make 2nd or even 3rd attempt at cracking the entrance exams. This attitude creates a scenario in the minds of kids as a teenager, they will get through the competition through a back door. This back door opportunity reserved for the very rich is being utilised by the middle class people also now taking loans which they cannot afford. After graduation, the same attitude goes to get a job by bribing the recruiters. This bribing exists in not only for tier 2 and below companies but also for tier 1 companies. I donot want to reveal the tier 1 company name but in our all hands daily standup meeting, the American lady who was VP asked the Recruitment head to handover the car keys and laptop and leave the building immediately for obvious reasons. There is madness in all companies especially in India who wants to prove that they are number 1 in India. The senior leadership gives instructions to recruit from campus in thousands just to tell the world that they are number 1. I myself went for recruitment myself in this regard. After a hard day’s work of written exams, group discussions, interviews on phone with American accent to understand if students can understand, I was asked to make sure that 50% are female students at almost end of day. I had to re look into the final offer list and put some additional female numbers by eliminating the male numbers. On a lighter side, I remember selecting one girl based on her skills in classical dance as she can dance better to the tunes of the clients in projects (Later I realised that she is a gem of a consultant but poor in her English communication skills and failed the telephone test initially).

The career growth is not standard for all and not all the campus recruits go through the same path in their career. Some take their jobs very lightly and some are very hard working and grow at an astonishing pace. I personally seen many campus recruits and can easily identify such successful candidates at interview stage itself.

I think this situation is very unique to India and cannot generalise to western countries as the engineering education at under graduation level is very costly that many drop at secondary grade itself and whoever goes to college has to self finance and they realise the value of time and money at very early stage itself. There are always exceptions of kids from wealthy families.

In India, we need to get our fundamentals corrected in the form of education curriculum and number of lower tier colleges allowed to impart professional education without proper academic faculty. The result we get a lot of graduates who struggle not because that they are not capable but because they are not trained properly by a limited faculty due to insufficient funds.

My take on faculty and kids at top schools like IIT Bombay (top 50 ranks in JEE get CS seat here) and MIT in USA ( at UG level, only a handful are selected from India and usually they are gold medalists at international educational olympiads etc). The kids who go to these schools which have some of the best faculty are mostly self motivating and can pickup concepts with minimal guidance from faculty. Ironically we need good faculty at Tier 2 and below colleges to bring the kids upto speed and not at Tier 1 colleges.

[am1m]

Haven't worked for a big services company, so am curious about the 'took for granted' bit. Did it become easy to get a job with Infy at some point in time/some decade?

Back in college (late 90s) I remember Infy being an employer of choice. Well, any employer would do back then, I guess, but Infy was clearly considered a top company. Just above-average students like me didn't even qualify to apply for the first round of interviews, because we didn't have the required average across semesters. The top 15-20 students got offers from Infy after multiple rounds of interviews, and the college certainly did their bit wining and dining the recruitment team. It's a different thing that after that Infy kept postponing their joining date and these toppers (those who waited) finally ended up starting their careers a year after they graduated! But the point is that the ball (balance of power) was always with the employer.

Did that change drastically? Even then if Infy has managed to keep fresher salaries low over these decades, I'm guessing they still don't have any dearth of applicants?

The low-cost, cost arbitrage 'body shopping' model had to fade sometime. It's surprising it took this long.

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by am1m

Back in college (late 90s) I remember Infy being an employer of choice. Well, any employer would do back then, I guess, but Infy was clearly considered a top company. Just above-average students like me didn't even qualify to apply for the first round of interviews, because we didn't have the required average across semesters. The top 15-20 students got offers from Infy after multiple rounds of interviews, and the college certainly did their bit wining and dining the recruitment team.

Then Infosys was the master of PR. They would spend crores of rupees on PR across all major newspapers, ensuring no negative news is ever published about them. That is a thing with all newspapers, if you spend a lot on ADs, they will ignore negative news about the advertisers.

Infosys had never exceeded TCS in revenue, profit or size, yet everyone believed Infosys was the top IT company of India. Only after TCS went public, the public realised who was the real top dog of Indian IT.

Remember how many newspapers used to innocently suggest NRN as the rightful replacement for Abdul Kalam as the next President? That would have been the ultimate coup for Infosys PR machine.

[ninjatalli]

Originally Posted by am1m

Haven't worked for a big services company, so am curious about the 'took for granted' bit. Did it become easy to get a job with Infy at some point in time/some decade?

One of the easiest to get through across any peer (WITCH/IT/non-IT) comparison. And I’m talking from back in early 2000s. Maybe the situation has changed after 2 decades for freshers; but I guess the competition would have become tougher too.

[DigitalOne]

Originally Posted by aby

In the same period, the salaries of the senior level staff has sky rocketed. I can imagine being paid for performance, but sky rocketing salaries at the time of stagnating performance seems a bit hard to digest.

What is the median salary of someone who has worked for 20-25 years in one of the WITCH companies? I am not talking about sales (revenue generation roles) but typical revenue enabling roles (software dev roles) like project managers, delivery managers etc.

I don't think the salaries in these roles have skyrocketed. Also, the variable pay components are deliberatedly very complicated, with different KPIs and payout dates. News like this has unfortunately become fairly routine across all WITCH companies:

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India’s largest IT services company, has slashed the variable pay of its senior employees for the third quarter in a row, Moneycontrol has reported.

Infosys has given employees an average performance bonus of 65 per cent in the fourth quarter of FY25, citing macroeconomic uncertainty.

Originally Posted by Samurai

Then Infosys was the master of PR.

The decision to list Infy ADRs on Nasdaq in 1999, at the height of the dotcom boom, was a marketing and PR masterstroke. And of course, the story of how Infosys was founded is repeated ad nauseam even today .

[download2live]

Originally Posted by am1m

Did it become easy to get a job with Infy at some point in time/some decade?

In 2003 I know that anyone who had worked the whole of Shakuntla Devi's puzzles cleared Infy. It used to be like a recruitment fair.

TCS on the other hand used to do interviews and ask questions based on the engineering stream of the fresher.

It is 22 years now (I am old) and my memory might be failing me a bit.
What I remember clearly is that I failed both.

[ninjatalli]

Originally Posted by download2live

In 2003 I know that anyone who had worked the whole of Shakuntla Devi's puzzles cleared Infy. It used to be like a recruitment fair.

TCS on the other hand used to do interviews and ask questions based on the engineering stream of the fresher.

It is 22 years now (I am old) and my memory might be failing me a bit.
What I remember clearly is that I failed both.

Haha - you and I had very different perspective of those puzzles. It's been 21 years but I still hazily remember the events. Have breakfast in the mess. Listen to the HR speech in an auditorium. Go to the test room and do the puzzles for 30 / 60 (?) mins. Go back to the hostel for lunch. Get told in the afternoon who cleared the cutoff and hence have a job from Infosys. Till we got the official letters a few months later, we were kind-of half expecting to be told it was all a joke.

I didn't qualify for TCS as they went for the top lot; but I remember the process was similar as you have explained

[aby]

Originally Posted by Samurai

Are you assuming all the money comes to India? All the WITCH companies have to maintain offices around the world, hire local employees, spend on marketing, while paying in local currency. And the Indian expenses have gone up too, rent, equipment, services.

Well the most of the money DOES come to India. After all they are India listed and have to pay their employees and shareholders in India.
As regards other expenses, in fact as a proportion of sales they have gone down significantly. Take a look at Infosys or HCL results from early 00s to today. SG&A expenses are down by almost 400 basis points

Originally Posted by Samurai

Wow, I am impressed. Are you from a tier 1 college? I know TCS used to pay much higher to IIT/REC/BITS candidates. It was a caste system based on college, and had nothing to do with ability.

Yes I did graduate from one of the non-IIT tier 1 colleges. Even in my batch TCS was the least paying among WITCH with less than 10k gross. IIRC HCL maxed out at about 1,58,000 odd and the rest in between. Till early 00s, you saw entry level salaries rising steadily, plateauing sometime after mid 00s. My guess is that the supply started exceeding the demand after this time.

Students from my college wouldn’t look at WITCH some 15 years after I graduated. Product MNCs were paying salary in 12-20L range, while the WITCH companies still were offering ~3L. So the only people showing interest in WITCH were students with terribly low CGPA and then WITCH companies stopped visiting for a while. It is another story that they have restarted recently with employment prospects for new graduates declining as a whole.

Originally Posted by Samurai

I am sorry. It doesn't work like this. Salaries are a function of demand and supply. If the client requirement is met with candidates willing to work 3L, no CFO will be allowed to pay more just to look good. Even Infosys, the doyen of "morals and values" could not do it, because the shareholders will question it. The link I quoted earlier was refuting a claim that every fresher should be paid 15L minimum. That is impossible for WITCH companies. Even doubling to 6L would not be possible because they can get freshers at 3L. At the volume they used to hire, the quality of candidates will not improve if they simply pay double.

It is true that the first responsibility of executives is to maximise shareholder returns. Towards that if they can get away with paying their employees as less as possible they will continue to do so. But at the same time it is NOT accurate to say they cannot increase the fresher salaries. Also shareholders don’t really care how much you pay your employees as long as returns are in line with expectations.

Here are some data points from last 20 odd years.

Firstly the average revenue per employee has gone up significantly in INR terms from ~17L annually to about 45-50L annually. This has been realised through a combination of rupee depreciation (mostly) but also by reducing the proportion of unbilled staff and also minor increase in USD billing rates.

The percentage of SG&A has gone down from about 13-15% of revenue to about 9-11% of revenue. This is related to unbilled staff ratio going down.

Finally the infrastructure costs have gone down proportionately. Today most of the WITCH staff are in tier-2 cities, unlike in early 00s when they were mostly had Bangalore/Chennai based operations. From what I am aware, average cost of real-estate in terms of cost per seat in USD terms is lower today than it was in late 00s. Even Capex as a percentage of revenue has gone down from about 8% to less than 2% today. They are not building huge campuses any more.

While taxes has gone up in last 20 odd years due to sunsetting of STP rules, the reality is that WITCH companies are far more leaner today, when it comes to their operations.

That the junior staff now get a much lower share of average revenue per employee today than what they were getting 20 years ago - is mainly due to two reasons. First you have massively expanded supply by increasing colleges 10x. Secondly and IMO more importantly, the leadership of all the WITCH companies have moved away from the original founders. Since the new leadership did not have similar equity as their predecessors, they demanded and got significantly higher remuneration - which was given to them by squeezing the people at the lowest end of the hierarchy.

In a way it says about our economy as a whole, that almost a generation since the IT boom started in late 90s, we still haven’t managed to create another industry which can accommodate our vast number of college graduates. So now it seems to be a race to the bottom when it comes to salaries.

Originally Posted by Samurai

What they have to do is hire lot less, 30 instead of 100, and then pay them 2 times. Then the candidate quality will be much higher, and wouldn't require 6-9 months of training. That is a very different business model, and they have to convince the customers to go by results, rather than headcount. It also means most jobs will simply vanish, that is the very title of this thread.

I am more convinced that GCCs will ultimately eat the WITCH lunch, more than anything else. Almost all of WITCH services have mostly been commoditized, which means unless they change their business model, they are going no where.
Changing the business model is not something that the risk averse WITCH leadership has appetite for. So for a while it will be more of less. Keep flogging a dying horse till one day they realize horse is no more.

[Utsav_199]

Originally Posted by aby

In a way it says about our economy as a whole, that almost a generation since the IT boom started in late 90s, we still haven’t managed to create another industry which can accommodate our vast number of college graduates. So now it seems to be a race to the bottom when it comes to salaries.


I am more convinced that GCCs will ultimately eat the WITCH lunch, more than anything else. Almost all of WITCH services have mostly been commoditized, which means unless they change their business model, they are going no where.
Changing the business model is not something that the risk averse WITCH leadership has appetite for. So for a while it will be more of less. Keep flogging a dying horse till one day they realize horse is no more.

Agree 100%, you reap what you sow, while the OG founding fathers gave us roti kapda makan contributing greatly, our gen next is an aspirational one. But where is the economic foundation to support that aspiration?

Or for that matter even the old basic foundation is under threat now, unless the current leadership figures out a way (I am hopeful that they will, what do they say about necessity being the mother) or new crop of companies come up.

[srvm]

I'm not from IT domain. It is very interesting to read the posts in this thread.

As a person from Mechanical / Aerospace domain, whose job also requires recruiting/selecting Engineers for my organization, I have been waiting for >15 years for bright, fresh graduates to even consider coming to the interview (today, our pay for freshers is typically 4 lakhs per annum).

I've lost count of the number of times when selected candidates (moderately bright ones) have either not joined us, or left us within 2-3 months. All because they prefer an IT job with similar or better pay.

The recent posts in this thread seems to indicate that my luck will finally turn for the better.

[G20Rider]

Current business model of WITCH is going extinct soonish. It doesn't mean the WITCH companies itself will go extinct, but the model where they deploy hundreds of thousands of low or average paid dev and testers to get stuff done is obsolete. Its the era of small pool of highly paid tech engineers armed with coding assistants!

For context, I work as an engineering manager in Europe working for a company thats worlds largest in their domain. I spent 50% of my time coding and rest doing "management" which translates to meetings, planning, hiring etc.

From my experience, where WITCH shines is in the quantity game. Need 10 devs to start working within a month on the weird stack that nobody has heard about? WITCH has 20 ready to start within 2 weeks.
Trying to hire them locally onshore? Good luck finding even 3 in next 6 months. Keep in mind this is a company that pays above the market average and the market is in a layoff cycle.

The drawback with WITCH engineers is that even those being billed to us as senior engineers are essentially junior level where the relationship is very transactional. ie you throw them a specific problem with instructions on how it should be fixed, they will throw back a merge request with a fix. Now guess who can produce code if given specific instructions? thats right, the coding assistants.

WITCH engineers are unable to figure out areas of improvement, clearly articulate and present a solution, then get it delivered with their peers. And they lack confidence to speak up - something thats very important with western client. Whatever the onsite says, its agreed. I dont think its a problem of the people itself, most are quite competent technically. its the education and training system that overly concentrate on problem solving but not in soft skills such a communication, presentation and relationship building etc. This was not a bad system since in the past world needed an army of engineers to sit and code, but that requirement is greatly reduced now.

We no longer needs a set of pure coders, but needs system designers and integrators who can come up with an solution spanning multiple systems, stitch them together in a way that meets the cost and security requirement of the company. Todays AI assistants cannot do that and there is no sign that they can do this anytime soon. These will still needs to be done by senior / lead engineers and architects who can code as well. So a project that used be staffed by few senior / lead engineers onshore + 10s of junior devs offshore is now being staffed with few senior / lead engineers onshore + couple of junior devs offshore plug coding assitants. This means those few senior / lead can be paid higher at the expense of multiple junior engineers.

In summary, days of average paid developers/testes/managers are over, but its a great time to get into tech if you are at the top of the game. In future an average IT student will struggle to land a job that pays decently while a super motivated, talented IT student will have multiple options that pays 10+ lakhs per annum.

And thats just the natural way of tech industry as well as India as a market maturing. Coding (and testing) is being commoditised and kicked down the value chain. As a result number of body shop jobs will reduce but number of high quality jobs from homegrown startups and tech companies will increase. But those new jobs from startups simply cant match the sheer scale of WITCH jobs thats at risk. Its up to India as a nation to find a new industry that can employ those hundreds of thousands of youngsters who otherwise would have gone into WITCH. As of today other than manufacturing (even with all the automation), there is simply no other industry that can absorb people in such large numbers and thats why we as a country should work harder to make India a manufacturing hub.

[srini1785]

Originally Posted by srvm

The recent posts in this thread seems to indicate that my luck will finally turn for the better.

I hope so, but that does not mean that those you get would be knowledgeable in Aerospace or even basic Mechanical engineering concepts. I read recently that Mechanical engineering courses are now a thing in KCET counselling.

[Newtown]

A few thoughts based on my experiences, as I draw close to a Silver Jubilee in the industry

• GCCs have already started experiencing the same situation as the WITCHes. Suck in people enmasse and then repent in leisure when 60% or more turn out to be not as thoughtful and productive as expected. What's different is just the extent - WITCHes are stuck with a higher percentage of such individuals.
  
  
• There is barely anything left that is not commoditized. But think about how the WITCH people could have worked across a multitude of customers over a number of years. That breadth of experience is welcomed and many a time needed - Especially in the case of Greenfield projects.
  
  
• Many of the WITCHes refuse to accept reality. The days of doing work returning crazy margins, are long gone. What they are squeezing out now it what is impacting their quality and ability to deliver.
  
  
• As correctly mentioned above, who joins the WITCHes these days? No one from the top tier anyway as historical evidence is aplenty to indicate to them their fate.
  
  
• The quality of education being imparted - Over the years, I have seen shocking situations when it comes to the quality of the teacher/professor/lecturer. A lot of them don't belong to the noble profession of teaching. The terrific ones are now few and far between. That was not the case 3 decades back when 75% of them were really good.
  
  
• Double edged sword - WITCHes still need people so their recruitment teams do anything to hit their number, and two things happen out of that: One, it dilutes the quality of the hire. Two, it brings in even more disparity in compensation across the organization. It is very common to see a long tenured associate with excellent performance being compensated at a fraction of what some very low-quality lateral recruits bring in. And with that comes the silent resignation. The performer will continue to be a top performer but at a lower level.