Shades of Gray

Are Indian IT professionals greedy? Is their lust for higher wages going to end India’s dominance of IT services?

The question that I attempt to answer here is the first one. India’s IT advantage was never going to be permanent. Because of its low wages, India had a comparative advantage over other nations. But this was not a competitive advantage because ‘low cost because of low wages’ is a model that can be imitated easily. And this is precisely why in another ten years, more and more low cost operations that currently come to India will move to locations like Philippines or even China. If India has to remain an outsourcing location, it needs to invest in education and infrastructure so that the demographic advantage that India has, can be used in higher-end operations like R&D that are up the value chain, and not in low expertise jobs like BPO and software testing and maintenance.

Now back to the first question. Stories about employees leaving a job because some other company offered Rs. 2000 more per month are common place. Critics go as far as to say that while loyalty to your employer was a virtue in olden days, today’s youth is driven only by his hunger for more and more money. While it is easy to pass a moral verdict very fast, one needs to see things from the side of the ‘greedy’ employees. Let me present three real-life stories*.

Geetanjali Gupta was working for IT major in India. Though she was working for a telecom giant, her work involved Data Warehousing(DW). A year later, after the work got over, she was asked to move to a different project for the same client. However, the work was exclusively in the telecom domain and she would not be able to build on her Data Warehousing knowledge. Not willing to undo her DW knowledge, she asked her Delivery Centre Head for a release. Even though the DW practice of her parent company was willing to offer her an assignment, Geetanjali was refused a release by DCH who offered to mould her into a telecom professional by erasing her DW experience.

Amit Vats had resigned as he was going for higher education. In his three years at the company, he had received many appreciations from the customer. Before he left the organization, he was told that he would be receiving another certificate for his work in the latest release of the application. As the certificate would take some time, his Module Leader offered to send him the certificate to his new address. Three months later when Aditya called his boss to ask about the certificate he was told that his name was dropped at the last minute as he had left the company. He wondered why he was refused what was his due. Surely, a certificate would not lead to any data security violation!!!

Niharika Singh had received a top rating in her year-end performance appraisal. A year later, when she was abroad for an onsite assignment and got another top rating from her project lead, the account manager reduced her rating arguing that since she was already earning in dollars, this top rating could be given to someone at offshore leading to a more equitable distribution of income. All her protests and follow-ups were ignored. When she returned to India, she was refused an early promotion as she didn’t have two top ratings in the system.

None of these three cases highlight a compensation issue despite the fact that it is well known that Indian IT majors have a below-par salary structure. In many cases, a lateral hire with the same experience is paid much more that someone who has stayed with the company since beginning. What these three cases highlight is the way employers treat their employees. In spite of getting Level 5 ratings on the PCMM standard, HR policies and employee treatment remain pathetic. In such a scenario where the employee gets little respect, little recognition and virtually no career development other than an appraisal requirement to attend a certain number of useless trainings, the employee cannot feel any loyalty towards the organization. Can we blame him if he chases money?

The problem in most of these companies is the middle management. It is because the Project Leads, the Project Managers and the Group Leaders are ineffective that the culture has become so pathetic that sycophancy is the only way to get promoted or go onsite. Rather than fix these issues, the management sits back under the impression that organizing Fun-at-Work games every Friday will keep the employees motivated. I remember a friend with an experience of six years received a low rating because her manager didn’t see her getting involved in birthday celebrations. Many Indian companies are on a hiring spree for the last few years. Some are even hiring science professionals, training them for a few months and then making them fix software programs. Are we naïve to believe that these companies are hiring non-engineers/non-MCAs because they want to improve the employment scenario for these graduates? If you can get these people to do the same job for a salary that is much less than what an engineer or an MCA would ask for, why not save some money off your wage bill? It makes business sense for the companies. But if they are right in taking care of their business and their shareholder’s profits, can we call employees greedy if they take care of their aspirations by looking for better paying jobs?

So, who is greedy? The companies are as they are trying all they could to save money. The employees also seem blinded by greed as they are looking to maximize their payoffs in a booming economy. After all, they also need to save for a rainy day. In the current scenario, jobs for non-MBAs in the IT industry offers a sluggish pace of growth and a poor pay-packet; and as we have seen, little employee satisfaction on top of it. So, if lust for money is all that drives you and me, isn’t greed good?

*Names have been changed