[Samurai]

Originally Posted by texens

If a company is willing to pay 2x compared to what another company is paying, it basically means that the first company is able to generate more value from the same resource, compared to the second company.

No, it doesn't mean that. It means the first company has more desperate need at the given time, compared to the second company at the same time.

IT engineers are not like constructions workers. They can't be productive on day one and stay that way all year around. New hires need few months to become fully productive. Work pressure comes and goes in waves, sometimes the staff is twiddling thumbs for months and sometimes they are pulling 16 hours day.

So staffing departments have to keep people ready for these desperate times, and so they are willing pay higher to a person making a lot less else where. If they don't hire, their losses will be higher. It is like a stock price, the price the company will pay differs month to month and year to year.

So when someone says he got a offer of X at some place, it just means that is the price that company is willing to pay to fill their urgent need.

Salaries have nothing to do with what an employee deserves, which is not measurable at all. Just because an IT engineer makes more than a bank employee of similar age, it doesn't mean the IT engineer has much superior brains.

Here is an old article that talks about the supply of good IT engineers. Note how SKILLS are least important thing an IT engineer must have...

[VaibhavShatna95]

Originally Posted by kpkeerthi

Thanks to Mr. Narayana Moorthy and his friends who projected us as "cheap labourers" and built a business model worth billions of dollars where slaves are forced to perform absolutely non-creative and non-innovative "mundane" jobs.

I'm glad that this image is beginning to change. Recent proliferation of startups, indigenous as well as foreign investments, with truly innovative "product" ideas that change lives have proved that Indian talents are more than "IT slaves". This opened up a lot of opportunities for the talented and the companies are more than willing to pay for the talent. This is a good sign as it encourages innovation in its truest sense. Slowly the talent pool started to move from where they were made to work their a** off to where they are respected. This cycle is perpetual and has raised the bar of a Software Engineer that has in turn set up a raise in his worth (his pay).

Another excellent side-effect of this shift is that the industry is slowly beginning to disregard and eliminate managerial positions. The industry just needs "productive" technical roles and not all-talk-no-productivity kind of roles. Sorry managers.

I see all of these as good sign as it drives us (Indian talent) towards contributing constructively towards innovation and real productivity.

I think you are way too critical and harsh about Indian IT firms. Its not like we do billions of revenue without doing any innovation or don't hire best of the best.

The truth is Indian IT firms have also adapted with times with most of the revenue coming from digital projects nowadays. I have worked with people from Harvard to MIT in my stint with Infosys. They also invest a lot in training and development of talents. I am currently pursuing my masters which is fully sponsored by them and they do pay me a decent stipend as well.

There is a reason big IT firms are all in top 10 market cap within India. Not everyone who works there is equivalent to a slave. Contrary to your views, we have capabilities which Fortune 500 companies are unable to maintain/innovate and hence outsource the work to us.

Sure there are a lot of people in support but now there are an equal number of people working in projects of data science, cybersecurity, mobile app and web dev.... The list is endless.

It is only your view that the big IT resources work for cheap. At client side the billing rates would put local hires to shame. Its just that the business model is such that the company has to generate margin by giving less to its employees but client billing rates are also increasing yearly and this will have a domino effect.

Mr. Moorthy is a great man and all the co founders of Infosys have done this country proud. From Aadhar to Indian IT laws all were introduced by these gentlemen. The kind of era where they started this business from absolutely nothing is a different story altogether. I am sure though you could do better.

[NPV]

Originally Posted by Samurai

No, it doesn't mean that. It means the first company has more desperate need at the given time, compared to the second company at the same time.
...
Salaries have nothing to do with what an employee deserves, which is not measurable at all. Just because an IT engineer makes more than a bank employee of similar age, it doesn't mean the IT engineer has much superior brains.

True that. To jumpstart new projects or mitigate sudden attrition in projects or skiils that are cutting edge/niche, the company may be ready to pay much higher than market.
However, if the person were to work there for a longer duration after that, say 2+ years the hikes may kind of even out and won't be astronomical. Unless one is underpaid, such big hikes may not be sustainable in the longer run.

On the other end of the spectrum, when the job market is normal, most companies will offer a hike relative to last pay. When the person is underpaid, this becomes a disadvantage.

In both scenarios, these companies may also end up creating a pay rationalization issue since these employees may be overpaid or underpaid compared to others with similar roles, skills and experience.

About 15 years ago, there was this market thumbrule for IT engineer roles (average IT business application development roles on Java/.Net platforms) - 1.5 to 2L per year of experience. I don't know if those numbers are still valid.

[rst89]

The 90 days notice period should be done away in India. Hope the HR managers realise the same thing when people don't show up on date of joining.

15 days is reasonable notice period, if your company has processes set up, a new employee shall be able to scale up pretty quickly if they have necessary technical skills.

Many US MNCs are now scaling up Mexico centres and European tech centres are looking at Romania/Bulgaria/Morocco as offshore development centres.

HRs of service based companies are not good, they don't reply to your mails about concerns. And out of blue, they call you and ask, are you joining next week? Happened with a friend, a service based company directly sent him offer/CTC statement and stopped answering him. And then called him and asked, when are you joining? My friend said, since you didn't negotiate with me regarding salary and didn't answer me when needed, I am not joining.

[recshenoy]

Originally Posted by Samurai

Here is an old article that talks about the supply of good IT engineers. Note how SKILLS are least important thing an IT engineer must have...

Completely agree, people lack skill and expect unreasonable salaries. Talent crunch is real and kind of talent we get for interview is below average with salary expectations close to what the manager of the project earns. They can’t even explain properly what they are doing in their current project. Recruitment team has target to achieve but we reject it because in the end that person ends up in our own team. So, senior managers now a days throw a new unreasonable idea like "if you don’t have resources, let us reskill our react.js developers by asking him to also learn Node.js". This puts project under even more stress because skill of reskilled employee is as good as his/her googling or stackoverflow skills. Only when you integrate those googled codes to single UI or application you will notice all those performance issues. Can you believe in one of my friends project people built a web application which failed on a critical screen when more than one users used that screen? Such is the competency of the people. Of course, end of the day junior developers will not have to worry but manager of project has to face client. Especially with remote working, lot of mediocre resources require constant handholding. Not their fault because senior technical leads who typically mentor juniors to become skilled resource have quit and managers don’t know anything beyond some MS applications , internal budgeting / resourcing systems and client interactions.

I know person who created wrong type of database columns causing failures in interfaces, another person who created completely messy code and now they are quitting this month for lucrative offer while others in the team who are hardworking are left behind. The project deadline will not change but team is working with lesser resource albeit people who quit were pain to manage. Things get interesting when we get a below par replacement resource paying lot more than those low paid loyalist/capable employees in team, they will also get frustrated and leave. Previously onsite, US visa etc used to work but due to constant travel bans, rapidly changing delivery methodology etc there are hardly any takers who really want to wait for US visa. Even if they wait and get visa, they will quit in some months.

As part of my project I am working with US company and resourcing challenges is real in US as well. These are mainly seen in tier 2 cities/states in US where even new H1B holders don’t want to go "Salaries have decreased for those location. We are not going there". Due to resource crunch I ended up doing US manager role and its been horrible working from offshore because I need to manage Indian team of juniors without a lead (resource crunch) in unknown technology and US client / vendor teams which work in their own world full of below average folks. Last week client hired a Cobol contractor developer for per hour billing more than DevOps contractor (considered premium skill). Best (rather worst) part is, by mistake billing rates were sent to me instead of actual client manager . Since I have worked on mainframes and mainframe modernization etc I was like “ WoW! I can do this reporting and Cobol work” and later somebody told me that Cobol has become a rare and hot skill in market now. Now a days nobody wants to learn Cobol, every one wants to become Full Stack developer but lot of critical systems are still running in Mainframes.

Interestingly client are also getting used to this whole cheap model even more now . One of the client manager asks me "I really enjoyed working with you. We are starting a new project (again unknown technology to me) and I will request your company to provide you to that project as manager. It is multi-million dollar multiyear project" . I respectfully said "No, thanks. If you need me, I can do contracting quitting this company but don’t expect me to do this work at such low prices".

Anyways, after reading through this thread and with 16 years of experience doing IT circus in single service company, I am inspired to try my luck especially with below inflation hikes for last several years.

[84.monsoon]

Market forces are slowly driving the maturity of the Indian IT industry. It is simple economics that demand and supply drive prices. Today we are in a position where about 20 to 30% of the population of Indian IT industry, who have niche and globally in-demand skills are experiencing high demand and low supply. On the other end of the spectrum, there is over-supply of talent in the low skill areas. When demand far exceeds supply, basic economics dictates that prices will increase and this is exactly what is happening in the top 20 to 30% of the skill pyramid.

The Indian IT industry needs to start thinking about skill pyramids versus experience pyramids. For a long time (and continuing even now), for a vast majority of the roles, salary has been fixed relative to experience level. Right from the day an engineer graduates from college, he/she is comparing salaries with classmates and expects to be in a similar salary band as their friends for years afterwards. Unfortunately, this industry practice discouraged life-long learning and development of niche skills, since there was no monetary benefit to doing so. When I was at TCS briefly, the staff in my team would tell me that they are expecting a promotion in a certain annual appraisal cycle because they have done 2 years in the current level and it is the norm that upto a mid-senior level there should not be "unfair" differences in how long people stay in a role before they were promoted. I was shocked coming from the US, where promotion is tied to performance, potentially, skills and competencies acquired and job growth.

Most jobs advertised in the US or Europe do not actually demand a specific number of years of experience. Selection is based more on the types of roles one has played and the skills and capability one is able to demonstrate. What we are seeing in the Indian industry now is that many multinational companies with their own centres in India are bringing skill and capability-based salary fitment versus being primarily based on number of years of experience. This sudden shift is causing very large hikes to be given out to a few candidates of the right skills and experience in the specific platforms or technologies. From the company's perspective, they consider as the next best alternative is offering the same role in the US and Europe, which will cost two to three times more, even compared to the inflated offer.

Indian IT industry is also catching up on skills based differentiation of pay. TCS now hires freshers in 4 groups - Achiever, Ninja, Digital etc. And the pay can vary from 3.5 lakhs to 8 lakhs. Industry leaders are thus trying to bring a more systematised and predictable pattern to this new world. This is essential for them, since as listed companies they hate unpredictability and want to bring in a method to the madness.

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by m8002?

Our admin Samurai is one who actually walked the talk on this. He can better explain the challenges he faced and how he overcame them. But not all companies will be willing to spare time and resources for such things.

I had answered this question briefly once. For a long time, my attrition was caused mostly by weddings. Girls get married, mostly to someone in Bangalore and leave. There were even cases where they left before marriage, because being in Bangalore improved their chances in the marriage market. People started leaving for money only by 2015 or so when the difference started rising.

People prefer to be in places that have lots of job opportunities. Once a city reaches that threshold, people throng to such places. That allows a couple to buy a home and live in it, while working in different companies and even changing jobs without worrying about moving homes or changing the schools for kids. Cities without that threshold hardly give that flexibility.

[srvm]

Originally Posted by Samurai

.........
Salaries have nothing to do with what an employee deserves, which is not measurable at all. Just because an IT engineer makes more than a bank employee of similar age, it doesn't mean the IT engineer has much superior brains.

Here is an old article that talks about the supply of good IT engineers. Note how SKILLS are least important thing an IT engineer must have...

You don't say. Anybody who tried to file IT returns this year knows it

(Tongue firmly in cheek comment by
Non-IT guy who can't code 2 lines to save own life)

[AltoLXI]

Originally Posted by VaibhavShatna95

Mr. Moorthy is a great man and all the co founders of Infosys have done this country proud. From Aadhar to Indian IT laws all were introduced by these gentlemen.

The company was given the task of developing new IT portal and the result is ...

Originally Posted by srvm

You don't say. Anybody who tried to file IT returns this year knows it

Those who have SB, MIS, RD, PF accounts in post office must be familiar with the frustrating "Server Down" issue. This software was developed by the same company. Not all bad though - TCS have done a good work on passport department software.

[kiranknair]

Wow.. Pretty Scary!! Thanks to the OP for inducing an inferiority complex in a 42-year-old software developer. Man, these salaries are so huge. But at the same time, it is motivating... I have even asked my sister who is a veterinary doctor to stop all she is doing and concentrate on Node.js, Python and React.js (at least functional components)

[Mafia]

Originally Posted by am1m

With all due respect, the 2-3 month notice period idea came from the hiring management side, certainly not from the employees!

The funny thing about the notice period is, you are holding on to an employee who is on the way out. Employee productivity and commitment to the job are probably at the lowest. It is actually bad for firms to have them linger for so long.

The salary hikes I am reading are stunning! The disparity index post-Covid is probably the highest in a really long time. Some industries are wiped off the map and other industries are booming.

This is like war times without violence and physical destruction of the planet.

I managed to find an opening with a 30% pay cut after 6 months of downtime due to COVID-created problems.

[download2live]

Originally Posted by 84.monsoon

The Indian IT industry needs to start thinking about skill pyramids versus experience pyramids.

Indian IT industry is also catching up on skills based differentiation of pay.

This is step in right direction.

Next step which is thankfully happening is the increase in the startups. For a very very long time (And I dare say today also) sub-par mundane work was shipped to India. That supply is bound to dry up as automation takes over and more countries with cheaper labor come to market.

We need to do the hard miles. It is not an easy thing. And for a journey like this we really need dedicated learners. They need to be rewarded well for their skill sets.

PS: I do not consider replication of something successful in western world as a startup !!

[ronford]

Originally Posted by AltoLXI

The company was given the task of developing new IT portal and the result is ...



Those who have SB, MIS, RD, PF accounts in post office must be familiar with the frustrating "Server Down" issue. This software was developed by the same company. Not all bad though - TCS have done a good work on passport department software.

Exactly, compare the IndiaPost website with the passport website and you'll see stark differences. Also, applying for a passport is relatively easy compared to opening a new deposit in the postal department or even filing your IT returns.

[texens]

Originally Posted by Samurai

No, it doesn't mean that. It means the first company has more desperate need at the given time, compared to the second company at the same time.

IT engineers are not like constructions workers. They can't be productive on day one and stay that way all year around. New hires need few months to become fully productive. Work pressure comes and goes in waves, sometimes the staff is twiddling thumbs for months and sometimes they are pulling 16 hours day.

Originally Posted by Samurai

So when someone says he got a offer of X at some place, it just means that is the price that company is willing to pay to fill their urgent need.

IMHO, this can be solved by better planning. The standard attrition rate is pretty well known for an organization. While taking up assignments, and doing bi-annual/annual planning, leadership must take all of these factors into account before making a commitment to avoid such a desperate situation. Hiring by paying a very high amount just because of desperate needs is not a sustainable model.

Originally Posted by Samurai

Salaries have nothing to do with what an employee deserves, which is not measurable at all. Just because an IT engineer makes more than a bank employee of similar age, it doesn't mean the IT engineer has much superior brains.

Completely agree with you. You'll see that not just Software Engineers, but even other roles in software industry are making more than the industry average - and the reason is tech multipliers. For the same investment of human resource, software companies can scale a lot more than hardware/services companies. If ford needs 1 resource (humans, plant) for building 1000 cars, it needs about 10 resources for building 10,000 cars. Compare that to Facebook - it can go from 1000 end-users to 10,000 end-users by investing just 2 resources (software engineer, server) instead of 1 resource. It's far easier to scale in Software (compared to hardware). This is precisely the reason you'll see the valuation of tech companies are far higher. It's not without a reason, that even non-tech companies like WeWork tried real hard to portray themselves as tech companies, and not real-estate companies. Note: This applies only to IT Product companies, and not IT Services companies.

Originally Posted by NPV

True that. To jumpstart new projects or mitigate sudden attrition in projects or skiils that are cutting edge/niche, the company may be ready to pay much higher than market.
However, if the person were to work there for a longer duration after that, say 2+ years the hikes may kind of even out and won't be astronomical. Unless one is underpaid, such big hikes may not be sustainable in the longer run.

Off late, the primary increment in an individual's salary comes from the gain in the RSUs (and not the 10% hike in base salary). This is also augmented with the annual performance based equity refreshers thrown in by the company. The companies that don't do this end up losing the engineer to competition. They then spend another 6 months and lacs of rupees to find a replacement - and then spend another 6 months to ramp up the resource. And the funny thing is - most probably they're anyways having to pay the higher salary to this new resource

Originally Posted by NPV

About 15 years ago, there was this market thumbrule for IT engineer roles (average IT business application development roles on Java/.Net platforms) - 1.5 to 2L per year of experience. I don't know if those numbers are still valid.

Years don't really matter all that much now. A lot of interviewers never look at an engineer's resume before the technical interview. This helps remove any unconscious bias due to the candidate's years of experience.

Originally Posted by recshenoy

Completely agree, people lack skill and expect unreasonable salaries. Talent crunch is real and kind of talent we get for interview is below average with salary expectations close to what the manager of the project earns. They can’t even explain properly what they are doing in their current project. Recruitment team has target to achieve but we reject it because in the end that person ends up in our own team.

The recruitment team needs to shortlist the right candidates and set the right expectations. Bringing mediocre talent for on-site interview is nothing short of a crime - it eats up everybody's bandwidth and results in burnout. Asking the candidate to take an online assessment test before brining them on-site is one of the cheaper solutions for this problem as good rockstar SWE recruiters also come at a premium these days (but they're worth the money).

[VaibhavShatna95]

Originally Posted by AltoLXI

The company was given the task of developing new IT portal and the result is ...



Those who have SB, MIS, RD, PF accounts in post office must be familiar with the frustrating "Server Down" issue. This software was developed by the same company. Not all bad though - TCS have done a good work on passport department software.

It is difficult to know the volume of transactions on any portal in the initial days. I don't think a private cloud going down is such a big issue. Same has been the case for Flipkart/Amazon during their initial sale days.

The second software you are talking about is Finacle. It is being used by all the top companies world-wide now including Indian companies such as ICICI and Paytm. I am not privy to what version the post office is running or the nitty gritty of their systems.