[Samurai]

Originally Posted by sandeepmdas

I personally assembled and sold at least 80 PC between 1992-97 to shopkeepers and small business owners to run Tally exclusively. It is probably the only software in the world that made computers sell.

Did you also install Nashot in it?

Originally Posted by sandeepmdas

The giant TCS actually launched a rival product of Tally which didn't do well and was discontinued. I think its name was E-X.

My god, I hadn't heard of E-X in 3 decades. There was also another accounting product called Munimji. [I just checked, they are still around]

Originally Posted by sandeepmdas

Nevertheless Tally is one of those rare Indian success stories that can be compared to ISRO, IndiGo, Mahindra & Mahindra, Brahmos and UPI. The one whose success paved the way for other Indians getting a chance for a better living.

The current trailblazer is Zoho, who have the complete portfolio of excellent products. I use their Zoho Books, Zoho Payroll, Zoho People and Zoho CRM. First 3 have enabled me run the company without an in-house accountant or HR.

Edit: Oh, I forgot to address the main topic.

This is a correction that was waiting to happen for decades. Because of the easy money (compared to the effort), too many people without the right aptitude entered the IT field. I don't understand why the Ken article or others are talking about low salaries. Salary is a function of demand and supply.

For decades, WITCH companies hired by the truck load, and then figured out who can work on what. For those who didn't have technical aptitude, there was always plenty of bureaucratic roles. The customers demanded such roles, and WITCH companies complied. I have seen RFPs putting too much on emphasize on Agile compliance, forcing vendors to produce teams of Agile certified people, whether they can do anything else or not. Also, if the role involves verifying and enforcing compliance, then AI can efficiently take those jobs away.

Can AI take away coding jobs? Yeah, but it takes away only those jobs which should not have been done by people in the first place. I never liked the term coding or even developing. I prefer programming or programmer. A good programmer wouldn't bother writing code that be easily generated, that will be a waste of time. CASE tools have been around for many decades. Lex & Yacc [or Flex & Bison] has been around forever. Or even the simple infix to postfix. Those of us who have built custom compilers (I have), always knew how to distill exact intent from a set of instructions and turn it into working programs. The AI just took it to the next level, by converting English instructions into code. However, their accuracy is far from what a compiler can do with computer languages. I have spent enough time with Co-Pilot Pro to realize it is still at baby talk, when compared to a good programmer. It makes lots of mistakes, and the programmer has to be good enough to see it and correct it.

The difference between a good programmer and an average programmer is quite high, let alone great programmers. Consider the following quote:

"A great lathe operator commands several times the wage of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer." - Bill Gates

The WITCH companies indulged in very low-tech software services, a fact even known to their customers. Therefore, customers are demanding that the vendor should achieve headcount reduction using AI to the maximum extent possible. This in effect forces even WITCH companies to keep only such programmers who can stay above the ability of AI, and use the AI to increase their productivity. Those who cannot understand the code generated by AI shouldn't play that role.

Check this comment from the Ken article:

Originally Posted by Ken

Yearly productivity of employees has doubled, said the former TCS executive. If someone wrote 100 lines of code earlier, now with the help of AI, they write 200. This productivity spurt is higher for freshers, since their tasks are easier to automate.

I expect the reverse. With the help of AI, I should be able to write 50 lines instead of 100 lines. Programming is not a volume game. I rather spend more time to write a better and shorter program. Program once written, runs thousands to million times. Saving time in programming can end up being very expensive during runtime, especially in cloud platforms.

[Roy.S]

Originally Posted by Samurai

Did you also install Nashot in it? :

What happened to them? Why did they not become big like the other players in the market like Norton/McAffe etc?

OT: I remember my CS teacher in school desperately calling people for a copy of Nashot when the C-Brain (or was it something else?) scare happened. I think someone bought a legal version and couriered him a floppy.

There was a lot of excitement and crossing of the fingers as we waited to see if the floppy could be read or had been corrupted. Fortunately, it worked.

[sandeepmdas]

Originally Posted by Roy.S

What happened to them? Why did they not become big like the other players in the market like Norton/McAffe etc?

Originally Posted by Samurai

Did you also install Nashot in it?

NAV.

Nashot was "invented" by someone named Naren. IIRC he was a well-reputed coder in those days as per the articles in PCQuest and DataQuest.

There was another antivirus developer based in Chennai, K7. They were very well-known for a short period. Still alive and kicking, I just now find out.

E-X was a very stupid name (IMHO) for a SW product intended for non-techie Indian consumers, that too in the 1990s.

[Samurai]

Let's also consider the other big boogeyman, Agentic AI. The big consulting companies are minting money advising their clients using the FOMO regarding this. This in turn forces the WITCH companies to somehow show that they are using agentic AI to further reduce headcount on their contracts. How realistic is that?

Just today, Stephen Klein (CEO of CuriouserAI) made a shocking post on Linkedin. Stephen Klein also teaches AI Ethics at UC Berkeley.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/steph...252193792-qTtU

Agentic AI is 100% None Sense Designed To Scare You Into Spending Money on Consulting

At this moment, there is no credible, peer-reviewed evidence that Agentic AI exists in any real-world deployment.
Agentic AI is absolutely a fabricated fiction designed to confuse you and scare you into spending money.

Why the Word “Agent” Is Everywhere

Because it sells.
Because it signals funding potential.

The term is being used recklessly, by marketers, consultants, and startups alike.

This is a dangerous illusion.

To be Agentic, an AI must do more than complete tasks. It must:

Generate and pursue its own goals

Adapt plans over time without human prompts

Operate with coherence and persistence

Exhibit autonomy in dynamic, real-world environments

Today’s best-known systems (GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, open-source agents, etc.) are:

Prompt-reactive, not self-directed

Tool-augmented, not autonomous

Heavily scaffolded by humans to function

They are essentially statistical parrots with plugins.

Stanford & UC Berkeley (2024): Foundation Model Task Performance Study
Found current models fail at sustained reasoning, planning, and adaptive autonomy.

“We observe no evidence of self-persistent goals or proactive behavior.”¹

MIT CSAIL (2023): Limits of Goal Pursuit in LLM Agents
Demonstrated that even with advanced scaffolding, agents cannot manage long-horizon objectives.

“When unassisted, all models collapsed into reactive loops.”²

Anthropic Internal Research Memo (Leaked, 2023)
Privately stated that true agency was “multiple breakthroughs away.”

“No current model displays independent strategic behavior. All require externally imposed structure.”³

Why This Matters
The belief in agentic AI is driving:

Billions in misdirected investment

Misguided product decisions in the enterprise

Misleading safety narratives ("AGI is imminent!")

Overconfidence in unsupervised AI autonomy

If we pretend agentic AI exists, we build infrastructure, policy, and ethical frameworks on fiction.

The bottom line:

There is no “agent” behind the curtain.
Only a stochastic echo of the training data.

Until that changes, let’s stop calling them Agentic.
And start building with clarity, honesty, and humility.

[aby]

As someone who was once employed by the so-called WITCH companies and since then moved on to the other side of things. I can give you some perspective on how exploitative they have become.

Perspective 1: The average billing rate for a typical junior level staff (someone with less than 3/4 years of experience) has barely budged in US dollar terms in last 25 years. In the early 2000s it used to average in the low 20s for offshore staff. Today on an average it is in mid to high 20s. The figure is an average across skills, as some skills like AI/Analytics etc can command a significant premium.
If you compare that with salary of a junior staff in the last 20+ years, it has stagnated. A typical Indian software services company used to offer fresh graduates 2.5 to 3 LPA in the early 2000s. It has barely budged to about 3.5 to 4LPA in nearly 25 years. Hell an average taxi driver in Bangalore makes more money than a low level Infy Engineer. 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.
Here is the kicker - in US Dollar terms the salary of a fresh graduate has DECREASED 30% from around 6k per annum to about 4.2k per annum. Another way of looking at it - in early 2000s, the Junior staff used to make ~22-25% of his billing as salary. Today the ratio is about 12-15%
In short - these companies are maintaining their margins and senior staff salary by screwing over the young ones.

Perspective 2: The collapse of on-site opportunities. Even in the early 00s, typical Indian IT companies paid significantly lower than MNC Firms. The unsaid agreement was that we will send you abroad for a few years and you will make up the difference. With most western countries turning hostile to immigration, this route is closed for most parts. Secondly in countries like US, people are waking up to the fact that not all H1bs are the same. Indian IT companies generally use H1s to Undercut local wages, unlike the US companies. Some highly influential publications like Bloomberg have published articles highlighting the practice. Link Here

Perspective 3: Quantity over Quality: Over the last many years, as the company sizes have increased they have gone from hiring from top colleges only to hiring from tier-3 and tier-4 colleges mostly. In the lat 90s, when Infy/Wipro/HCL used to recruit a few hundreds of people annually, they used to only go to tier-1 colleges for campus interviews. By late 2000s, due to volume of people being recruited combined with salaries stagnating, they started avoiding tier-1 colleges in general. The problem is that the crop hired in late 00s is now getting into leadership positions, and it is showing up in quality of work

Perspective 4: The rise of Global Capability Centers (GCC). This is probably the most interesting part. Few things have happened in the last 20 odd years. First technology spending as a size of enterprise has ballooned significantly. Secondly in most US organizations, first generation Indian Americans have risen to the top of technology organization. These are the guys who immigrated to US in late 90s/early 00s. These guys generally are well versed with Indian cultural moorings and are using their leadership positions to open up GCCs back in India. The general thinking is why should I pay $35 per hour to Infosys or Wipro or TCS for them to make 50% margin on it. I might as well hire my own staff and pay them higher salaries. With technology organizations generally having a critical mass, it is much easier to make a business case out of creating a GCC. Last I checked more than 1500 companies have already started their GCCs
This means that, they will keep more of the work in house and reduce the role of Indian IT companies to either a contingent staff provider, or use them for one-off projects.


All in all, while I don’t believe it is end of Indian IT story, but I believe action is shifting away from the traditional Bigwigs. The bigwigs unfortunately seem to be in a race to the bottom.

[Ananthang]

Too many parameters here. I work for Big 4 and based on my experience following points are my observations

1) In colleges big companies are forced to take more people than needed to ensure they get first slot next year and creamy layer
2) Colleges requesting big companies to recruit below average or non placed students to be Inducted and given a try. Few companies help and thus comes big assessment failure group
3) Average spectrum within students have reduced, either they are very smart or very lazy
4) Easy money for kids who have bikes in micro delivery distracting their focus at a non scalable revenue
5) Reels and Insta world creating unwanted social pressure and distraction
6) Most of our revenue is driven by US, and the boss in US is not a American mind set guy, but replaced by Indians who know all the tricks that IT companies play and they try to extract every mint.
7) Salaries of 3 plus years experience to 20 years have more than doubled but the billing price is stagnant or reduced
8) The 3 years to 12 year experienced kid only scaled in salary and designation but not by skill. In most Big4, Architect who played short term roles are now the Full time tech lead and Senior Managers are Team lead fire fighting than identifying sales opportunities.
9) The real IT sales team are engaged in operational work and trying to find solutions to non existing problems than addressing the actual known problems.
10) Colleges with 4 core batches with a section each have 10 core batches in different names now and have 10 sections in each with a very high output numbers which cannot be placed and pressuring organizations to select them
11) I am not taking about AI yet because majority of the group we talked above don’t really know how to use AI to improve productivity or engineer new products, but they are only doing Automations using AI, which was previously done by good scripts.

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by aby

Perspective 1: The average billing rate for a typical junior level staff (someone with less than 3/4 years of experience) has barely budged in US dollar terms in last 25 years. In the early 2000s it used to average in the low 20s for offshore staff. Today on an average it is in mid to high 20s.

Doesn't this explain why fresher IT salaries are stagnant in India? The US product company I used to work for in the late 90s used to charge $25K for a connector module, and about a decade later same clients would cry to pay $5K for the same module. What changed? They all hired Indian procurement managers.

Originally Posted by aby

A typical Indian software services company used to offer fresh graduates 2.5 to 3 LPA in the early 2000s. It has barely budged to about 3.5 to 4LPA in nearly 25 years.

Actually, this is not correct. When I started my company in India in 2004, all the WITCH companies were offering around 1.5L on average. That was the threshold we had to beat. Also, I recently came across an old email from my cousin dated around late 2002, stating her take home salary was 11.5K, and she had 2 years experience in TCS at that time. Her gross would have been around 1.8L then. I would say the fresher's salaries have doubled since then.

Originally Posted by aby

Hell an average taxi driver in Bangalore makes more money than a low level Infy Engineer.

And what's wrong with that? Typical fresh engineers are unproductive in the first 6-9 months, and will be mostly undergoing training. Drivers are productive from day one. This is very different than how it was for me 34 years ago, I was productive from day one. My first employer even got my past work for free.

Originally Posted by Samurai

I was self-trained most of my career. I got my first software job by showcasing a TUI library I developed in x86 assembly language. I even had to donate that library to that company as pre-condition to be hired. It became their primary interface for the next few years.

Originally Posted by aby

In short - these companies are maintaining their margins and senior staff salary by screwing over the young ones.

No, I have busted this myth before. WITCH companies cannot pay higher for freshers while maintaining the current business model. They will have to fire 50%-75% of their staff and dramatically improve the productivity of their staff at the same time in order to double or triple the fresher salary as you propose.

Originally Posted by aby

Perspective 3: Quantity over Quality: Over the last many years, as the company sizes have increased they have gone from hiring from top colleges only to hiring from tier-3 and tier-4 colleges mostly. In the lat 90s, when Infy/Wipro/HCL used to recruit a few hundreds of people annually, they used to only go to tier-1 colleges for campus interviews. By late 2000s, due to volume of people being recruited combined with salaries stagnating, they started avoiding tier-1 colleges in general. The problem is that the crop hired in late 00s is now getting into leadership positions, and it is showing up in quality of work

I don't agree with the relevance of college pedigree. I am from a 4th tier college, my college is not even in the NIRF ranking, and all my employees too are from 4th tier colleges. Yet we are running a product startup, located in a tier-3 city, selling our licenses to top US tech companies. We don't do software services or resource augmentation.

Originally Posted by aby

The general thinking is why should I pay $35 per hour to Infosys or Wipro or TCS for them to make 50% margin on it. I might as well hire my own staff and pay them higher salaries. With technology organizations generally having a critical mass, it is much easier to make a business case out of creating a GCC. Last I checked more than 1500 companies have already started their GCCs This means that, they will keep more of the work in house and reduce the role of Indian IT companies to either a contingent staff provider, or use them for one-off projects.

Yes, I agree that GCCs are paying very high compared to WITCH companies. But are they doing work that is proportional to the pay, I am not convinced of that. Lot of GCCs are doing pretty low-tech work, which was originally done by WITCH companies. Even those jobs can easily vanish thanks to AI. Even they have to move up the value chain to justify their relevance in the AI era.

[Turbohead]

Originally Posted by Samurai

Yes, I agree that GCCs are paying very high compared to WITCH companies. But are they doing work that is proportional to the pay, I am not convinced of that. Lot of GCCs are doing pretty low-tech work, which was originally done by WITCH companies. Even those jobs can easily vanish thanks to AI. Even they have to move up the value chain to justify their relevance in the AI era.

I worked in a GCC in the media space.

I don't think the parent company really cares about extracting more work - they pay employees higher salaries, build a really cool office space and focus on a more relaxed culture enabling lower attrition rates and still saving money over signing contracts with WITCH companies. I worked in one and wouldn't ever dare join a WITCH team after that experience. The difference is night and day.

Was there high quality work being done? There were some teams that produced a few patents.

[m8002?]

Originally Posted by Samurai

Yes, I agree that GCCs are paying very high compared to WITCH companies. But are they doing work that is proportional to the pay, I am not convinced of that. Lot of GCCs are doing pretty low-tech work, which was originally done by WITCH companies. Even those jobs can easily vanish thanks to AI. Even they have to move up the value chain to justify their relevance in the AI era.

It makes a lot of sense for GCCs (especially non software ) to hire in India directly for software maintenance and IT roles. These are support organizations and the work done is the same either in US or India. For example, the software maintenance and IT teams of Unilever/Shell/JP Morgan in US are not doing high end work churning out patents all year along. Even the "required" productivity should be similar in both locations. So they might as well hire in India than pay WITCH companies a huge premium.

I see that as a win-win for both the multinational company and the Indian employees. Its just bad for the intermediary WITCH company.

Now, there could be very small focused teams in these GCCs in West and US who are doing research work on the next gen capabilities. But I would put that ratio to be the same in India and the HQ.

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by m8002?

I see that as a win-win for both the multinational company and the Indian employees. Its just bad for the intermediary WITCH company.

Well, let's hope they are doing that with lot less people (who use AI), especially considering they are paying lot higher per person. Otherwise, their job will be in danger too. It already happened in Microsoft.

https://www.informationweek.com/mach...director-of-ai

[AltoLXI]

Originally Posted by m8002?

I see that as a win-win for both the multinational company and the Indian employees. Its just bad for the intermediary WITCH company.

Some GCCs I know have frozen hiring for "permanent" positions and depending again on the WITCH companies for contract positions

[aby]

Originally Posted by Samurai

Doesn't this explain why fresher IT salaries are stagnant in India? The US product company I used to work for in the late 90s used to charge $25K for a connector module, and about a decade later same clients would cry to pay $5K for the same module. What changed? They all hired Indian procurement managers.

I am sorry you are not seeing the other side of math - which is rupee depreciation during the same period. Rupee has depreciated from ~45 to a dollar in early 00s to ~85 to a dollar today. If converted to INR, junior staff were billed at ~990 INR an hour in early 00s to close to ~2300 INR an hour in 2025. That’s a whopping 130% increase. Salaries during this period for WITCH Companies for Junior staff has gone up by 35% at the most.

Originally Posted by Samurai

Actually, this is not correct. When I started my company in India in 2004, all the WITCH companies were offering around 1.5L on average. That was the threshold we had to beat. Also, I recently came across an old email from my cousin dated around late 2002, stating her take home salary was 11.5K, and she had 2 years experience in TCS at that time. Her gross would have been around 1.8L then. I would say the fresher's salaries have doubled since then.

Again I would say, your data is inaccurate. I have my own offer letter with me from 97 when I got selected in campus placements from one of the WITCH. The offer was 1,43,710 annually. I did not join them next year, having got a much better offer from a German MNC.

4 Years later, when I saw my classmates having enjoyed a longish stint abroad while all I could muster was a month long training stint in Germany , it led me to jump to another WITCH for a minimal hike. A year later in 2003, I was one of the so-called College ambassadors - part of the team which conducted campus placements in my own college. In 2003, which really was the initial phases of boom time, the starting salaries offered by this WITCH was in between 2.4L to 2.9L - depending on bachelor’s/masters and Computer Science vs. Non Computer-Science. Again these were Bangalore salaries, which typically were higher than tier-2 cities

Originally Posted by Samurai

And what's wrong with that? Typical fresh engineers are unproductive in the first 6-9 months, and will be mostly undergoing training. Drivers are productive from day one. This is very different than how it was for me 34 years ago, I was productive from day one. My first employer even got my past work for free.

True that. But has the model changed in last 25 years? In early 00s, WITCH would hire BE Civil or BTech Chemical - then put them thru a 6-12 month intense training before deploying them into billable roles. How is it different today? An initially unproductive engineer in early 00s were being paid almost 6k USD per year. Today it 4k USD per year.
In the same period the average cabbie has seen his earnings increase from INR 4-6k per month to ~30k per month and average cost of living has gone up 400%.

Originally Posted by Samurai

No, I have busted this myth before. WITCH companies cannot pay higher for freshers while maintaining the current business model. They will have to fire 50%-75% of their staff and dramatically improve the productivity of their staff at the same time in order to double or triple the fresher salary as you propose.

Again that is not accurate. In the last 25 years, the average CPI in US has gone up by a cumulative ~50%. The average billing of Indian Companies has gone up by only ~20%. It is a race to the bottom.
Now in the same period, if the WITCH Companies had increased the salary of their freshers by just 10% in dollar terms, which is less than what their billing has gone up by - they would be paying INR 5.5 to 6L per year annually. The CFOs of the companies have used rupee depreciation to maintain their bottom lines.

If you really want to see where the money the WITCH is spending - please refer to Infosys Annual report from 2004 link here for 2004 and one from 2024Link here for 2024

The average salary of a VP+ level person has jumped by 5x to 6x during the same period in INR terms. In short during the period the fresher got minimal hikes, the senior staff gave themselves dollops of hikes. All in all they have moved from benevolent model of capitalism to brutal American style of leadership takes all model.

Originally Posted by Samurai

I don't agree with the relevance of college pedigree. I am from a 4th tier college, my college is not even in the NIRF ranking, and all my employees too are from 4th tier colleges. Yet we are running a product startup, located in a tier-3 city, selling our licenses to top US tech companies. We don't do software services or resource augmentation.

Full power to you and your company - wish it many luck in the future.
However you cannot use this argument with HR leadership of companies. Try convincing the Indian heads of Microsoft or Adobe to visit a tier-3 college for campus placements. I fully agree that lower tier colleges do have hidden gems, but when hiring for entry level positions none of the leaders want to really spend time finding those gems among stones.
Again personal perspective - 15 years later, my cousin graduated from the very college I went to. By then in 2010s when we have several large US MNCs operating in a big way in India. She didn’t even look at the WITCHs as an option. She had an offer from Adobe at around 17L per year, when the WITCH were offering around 3.3L. The WITCH HR also knew that and they just stopped visiting tier-1 colleges

Originally Posted by Samurai

Yes, I agree that GCCs are paying very high compared to WITCH companies. But are they doing work that is proportional to the pay, I am not convinced of that. Lot of GCCs are doing pretty low-tech work, which was originally done by WITCH companies. Even those jobs can easily vanish thanks to AI. Even they have to move up the value chain to justify their relevance in the AI era.

The reality is that every single one of us needs to constantly be on the top of our game, else we risk being disrupted out by AI.
Having said that GCCs do a variety of work - from simple help desks to things like developing new products for regional markets. I have been operationally involved in more than one GCC, I can tell that in the near term - WITCH do face some serious challenge to their model from GCC - more so than AI. They are proving Jeff Bezos’ famous adage - Your margin is my opportunity.

[Fuldagap]

Originally Posted by aby

If you compare that with salary of a junior staff in the last 20+ years, it has stagnated. A typical Indian software services company used to offer fresh graduates 2.5 to 3 LPA in the early 2000s. It has barely budged to about 3.5 to 4LPA in nearly 25 years. Hell an average taxi driver in Bangalore makes more money than a low level Infy Engineer. 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.

This so very true. 3.5 LPA has been the number since atleast 2005.

If a cab driver earns more than an entry level Infy candidate, there is something wrong somewhere. This is the precise reason many students turn to preparing for govt exams after a stint at IT jobs. They are intelligent, hard working and adaptable. Already proven by cracking those placement exercises. Govt jobs pay far better than IT jobs at the start at least. Students/candidates falter.

Some of them keep continuing preparing for civil services after landing at a suitably fit govt job. This is a harsh reality. Many things wrong with this setup but it is what it is.

Almost everyone I know in my circle, who is a govt servant, was in IT. A very few number of friends landed in army or civil services because they wanted to since childhood. Most were lucky, some were not. But the friends who tried hands at IT first and then entered govt jobs, they are not only content but push a lot when it comes to delivering. Some have changed according to the system. As shown in movies.

I see people with considerable less comoetitiveness in them yet in great jobs abroad compared to India.

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by aby

I am sorry you are not seeing the other side of math - which is rupee depreciation during the same period. Rupee has depreciated from ~45 to a dollar in early 00s to ~85 to a dollar today. If converted to INR, junior staff were billed at ~990 INR an hour in early 00s to close to ~2300 INR an hour in 2025. That’s a whopping 130% increase. Salaries during this period for WITCH Companies for Junior staff has gone up by 35% at the most.

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.

Originally Posted by aby

Again I would say, your data is inaccurate. I have my own offer letter with me from 97 when I got selected in campus placements from one of the WITCH. The offer was 1,43,710 annually. I did not join them next year, having got a much better offer from a German MNC.

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.

BTW, here is my experience letter from TCS. Note how much I was making, my CTC was around 3.5L after 7.5 years of experience. I was no underperformer either, I had become Assistant Consultant with only 6.5 years of experience, while the average was 8 years. I had joined TCS with 1.5 years of experience.

Originally Posted by aby

Again that is not accurate. In the last 25 years, the average CPI in US has gone up by a cumulative ~50%. The average billing of Indian Companies has gone up by only ~20%. It is a race to the bottom.
Now in the same period, if the WITCH Companies had increased the salary of their freshers by just 10% in dollar terms, which is less than what their billing has gone up by - they would be paying INR 5.5 to 6L per year annually. The CFOs of the companies have used rupee depreciation to maintain their bottom lines.

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.

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.

Originally Posted by aby

The average salary of a VP+ level person has jumped by 5x to 6x during the same period in INR terms. In short during the period the fresher got minimal hikes, the senior staff gave themselves dollops of hikes. All in all they have moved from benevolent model of capitalism to brutal American style of leadership takes all model.

I am not a fan of that either. But it doesn't change the economics of demand and supply for freshers.

Originally Posted by aby

However you cannot use this argument with HR leadership of companies. Try convincing the Indian heads of Microsoft or Adobe to visit a tier-3 college for campus placements.

And I thank them for that. Otherwise I can never hire good people.

[Guna]

Originally Posted by Jeroen

If you are in services you need to find a model that is not based on hourly rates and or rate cards.

Jeroen

Service companies have 2 models: 1. Staff Argumentation or Time & Material (providing human resources) based on hourly rates. 2. Fixed Bid/Cost.

When I worked with IT companies, most of their projects were fixed bids and not providing bodies.