Sunday Posts

Last week, voice recording of an HR executive firing an employee at Tech Mahindra, a big Indian IT company, went viral (as above). The employee was told that he is being fired not because of any performance issues, but because of 'cost optimisation'. He was told to resign by the end of the day, failing which he would be terminated the next day, and lose all his exit benefits and wouldn't even get a reference. When the employee pleaded it was too short a notice, he was told that the company can fire him summarily. When he sought an option to appeal, he told there was none. After this went viral, many weighed in, converging on the consensus that while the company might have the rights to fire the employee, it was all too harsh. As for me, I thought it was coercive, and therefore, illegal: I can't see how a company can fire an employee on disciplinary grounds because he failed to resign as told. In America, this, aggregating the claims of all employees fired in th...

I wrote a post yesterday on the 'crisis' of the Indian IT industry . My essential point in this was that while the Indian media sees a sudden crisis in the Indian IT sector and summarily blaming it on Trump, the problems were simmering for a long time and blaming it on Trump Administration's current or intended policies would be mistaken. And, besides, while a number of observers - Rajat Gupta, formerly of McKinsey fame (and Galleon infamy), being the latest - blame the leadership of Indian IT companies for lack of vision and inaction, I thought this was unfair, it was hard to change business models for mammoth publicly listed companies: In fact, this is exactly what these companies are trying to do, triggering all the crisis talk. However, all this don't point to a solution, which some reading the post pointed out. To this, I do not think there is any silver bullet. Many, Rajat Gupta included, have spoken about educational change, but that is neither short term n...

Indian IT is in a crisis, or so the newsmen claim.  A string of layoffs, some at very senior level, and the new and proposed visa measures in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and Singapore have contributed to a sense of seize.  But, while this headline story has its merits, but the sense of crisis and the connections with US Visa changes are certainly overblown. The problem with this crisis-mongering is that this diverts attention from the structural challenges that the sector faces. The Indian IT has had mixed fortunes for some years, and the salaries, at the entry and mid level, were stagnant for some time now.  There are a number of reasons for this.  First is the 'productisation' of IT - this whole phenomena captured in the expression 'there is an app for that!' - that challenged the custom development model that the big Indian IT companies are usually accustomed with. The trend, which started in the Consumer sector, is ra...

Vivek Wadhwa is pessimistic about the future of Indian IT because of its inability to change (See here ). He makes the point that the CEOs see that the ground realities are changing but are unwilling to do anything about it, with the daily imperative of closing Outsourcing orders dominating their agenda. In short, the sector has become a prisoner of its own success and there is a lack of strategic thinking. While I share Professor Wadhwa's sense of foreboding (that Indian IT industry isn't changing with time) and his prognosis (the lack of strategic culture), I would think that it is more of a case of an industry that can't change itself rather than industry leaders not wanting to change. Indeed, this makes things worse: Global IT services is an extremely competitive industry, and one thing that works for Indian companies here is the ability to scale, to line up thousands of workers which companies from other competitive countries can't easily do (with the excepti...