Monday, April 16, 2012

Overpaid IT employees underskilled?

So the jad(root) of this post is Kiran Mazumdar's statement


I am glad Infosys has set the stage for a salary freeze. Employees are being over paid n are under performing. Skills don't match up.


I have dabbled in IT industry and have tons of friends there, so I know atleast something. Basis which here are some of my view points on the same, which I have already put on FB/twitter and even addressed to Kiran Shaw.


  • the projects are allocated by managers who are guided by company guidelines which are driven by top management and then the mismatch happens!! Intelligent deduction employees are overpaid!! In my limited knowledge i haven't seen an example till date where the Top management has sacked an account director for projecting skills available when infact there aren't. All the care in IT world is about who won which account and prove himself/herself capable of a further senior role.
  • When people beg for months for projects to match their skills- how easy it is for them to get that with policies obstruction
  • another point- infy/wipro in campus time to be clocked-9/9.5 work hours-flops the results. CTS- not a compulsory 9.25 hrs - 100% employee bonus! Selfexplanatory. isnt it?
  • Large IT organisations intake a large chunk of students from colleges and train them on various skills. If there is a skill mismatch across the board then either training or people themselves are wrong. However considering the size of intake per year for freshers itself there can be all kinds of people and not all of them can be alike - not able to gain skills post training as well- or if everyone is like that then the selection criteria has a problem.
  • And Lastly so bcoz #infosys got common people to earn decently better miss @kiranshaw is having a problem. hw abt hvng some rvw of #ceo kids earnings? or for that matter #starsons, #politician scions... any review for them.. match their skills an earnings!
Even a sharp sword can get rusted if not used for long, how can people on bench for months be expected to keep updating their skills for no motivation. But still, a lot of them do try if not all. How unfortunate that a leader who should be visionary and should focus on addressing such issues is making sensitive and irresponsible comments.If there are skill issues at a wide spread level then corporates are fundamentally wrong and need to address this, my thoughts:
  • Update courses for technical and other skills
  • Focus on quality not quantity
  • Employees are humans and not robots, just because they are in campus and in front of desktops their is no guarantee their minds will work. Treat them as such- grown up adults.
  • Don't forget policies and procedures are to create smooth workflows and not to cause hinderances in running business including employee business!
With my limited imagination if I can get three basic things to be placed in order to address the issue to make a change, I am sure there is much more grey matter in the leaders of India Inc.

Lastly, I also have seen the talent crunch and I understand and wonder at it. No, i haven't taken any step to address that because I am not interested but neither i make generalized comments on people's salary.

6 comments:

  1. Awesome blog rt :-). I completely agree with your observations.

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  2. Anonymous8:39 AM

    rightly said

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  3. Very true. Also in terms of basic economics if salaries don't increase at the inflation rate then the middle class gets poorer everyday. Not that the rich care too much about it. She wouldn't know the rents in Bangalore, noida, gurgaon which increases over 10% each year while the world goes through a recessionary phase.

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  4. Nice post. BTW you got the link to Ms Shaw's tweet wrong - this is the correct link.

    http://twitter.com/#!/kiranshaw/statuses/191440447669932033

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  5. good analysis....good longform writing

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