[VeyronSuperSprt]

Originally Posted by reignofchaos

And since when has the number of hours one works got anything to do with productivity .

Who said it did ? We're talking smartness remember ?? Over smart included.

[sdp1975]

Mohandas Pai talks sensibly on fresher salaries and high attrition.

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/...w/57269578.cms

[m8002?]

Originally Posted by sdp1975

Mohandas Pai talks sensibly on fresher salaries and high attrition.

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/...w/57269578.cms

Looks like the ex-Infy bosses are trying to outdo each other in bringing out internal issues.
Wasnt Pai himself the head of HR for 7-8 years that he has been talking about? And did the Infy freshers salary size in accordance with inflation numbers during that time? So he was either part of the cartel or just happy to benfit from it.

[Samurai]

But why do IT services companies need smart people? They mainly deal with coding work that can be done by highschool passouts. The Wired magazine recently declared, and I agree with it, that most coding is blue collar job.

IT is the only industry I think where the equivalent of a super-specialist surgeon and a first aid worker have similar educational qualification and job titles, despite having vastly different skills. This is mainly because the skill depends on the person's continuous learning ability, training obtained, and experienced gained.

Just because H1-B visa required 4 year degree, all the body-shopping IT companies kept hiring low quality freshers with BE degree. If a company job required high quality, such companies did pay high and got their high quality freshers.

I don't agree with the cartel concept being at work here. That only works if the number of employers are limited. Not the case here. Brilliant freshers could always find better paying jobs somewhere.

The average fresher salary remain stagnant only due to too much supply of low quality freshers, which could easily satisfy the IT services job requirement.

[vinit.merchant]

Though not an IT industry, a lot of start up's which took off well, are now facing the heat. Snapdeal laid off 600.
Here's an extract and link to the news

"Over the last 2-3 years, with all the capital coming into the market, the company and the entire industry started making mistakes," said the letter, adding, "We started growing our business much before the right economic model and market fit was figured out."

http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/snapd...ry-cut-1662410

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by DigitalOne

Good examples, especially the first one. Always the 'well-intentioned Socialists' argue for and enhance the minimum wages leading to job losses and unemployment. Their only motivation is to make everybody equally poor.

Well, not sure I agree with you here. There is nothing wrong with raising minimum wage, as long other end is taken care too. The government is forced to raise minimum wage to deal with income inequality. However, they are ignoring the 800Kg elephant in the room. The companies pay way too much to management.

Consider this:

Originally Posted by Jeroen

Take the Netherlands;
Our legal minimum yearly wage for a person over 23 is about Euro 20.000,-- gross. The average income in the Netherlands is roughly Euro 35.000,-- gross

If you earn more then Euro 100.000 gross a year you find yourself in a very exclusive group of less then 1% of the population! So 99% of the working populations finds itself in a bandwith of 20-100K. That's only a factor of 5 between the lowest and the highest.

What is this factor in India? It is as high as 100,000 in some companies. You can easily double the salary of 1000 minimum wage workers, if you decrease the CEO salary by 1%.

[DigitalOne]

Originally Posted by Samurai

Well, not sure I agree with you here. There is nothing wrong with raising minimum wage, as long other end is taken care too. The government is forced to raise minimum wage to deal with income inequality. However, they are ignoring the 800Kg elephant in the room. The companies pay way too much to management.

Consider this:
What is this factor in India? It is as high as 100,000 in some companies. You can easily double the salary of 1000 minimum wage workers, if you decrease the CEO salary by 1%.

Yes, you can. But the day you increase the minimum wage forcibly, the companies would resort to automation. You only quoted the security guards example. I am sure the companies didn't reduce the security requirements; they would have just put in more cameras and sensors and just asked couple of guys to keep monitoring.

I read sometime back Suzuki now employs less than half of workforce in their Gujarat plant as compared to the older Haryana plant. But they are still able to produce more in GJ thanks to high automation. This was in reaction to the long strike in the Haryana plant.

Just increasing minimum wage by decree is not going to help anybody.

[ashokrajagopal]

Originally Posted by DigitalOne

But the day you increase the minimum wage forcibly, the companies would resort to automation.

Just trying to understand; what makes you think automation will come only if minimum wage is increased ? The cost of infrastructure for automation is one time and it invariably features in every company's to do list. Sooner or later, the company would move to automation, (irrespective of high or low pay) for those jobs that can be automated.

[DigitalOne]

Originally Posted by ashokrajagopal

Just trying to understand; what makes you think automation will come only if minimum wage is increased ? The cost of infrastructure for automation is one time and it invariably features in every company's to do list. Sooner or later, the company would move to automation, (irrespective of high or low pay) for those jobs that can be automated.

I am not saying automation will come only if minimum wage is increased. I am just saying it would be sooner. There is an added incentive to automate.

[vishnurp99]

Are there any jobs that cannot be automated at all?

With AI, the different flavours which are out there and RPA, what are the jobs that cannot be automated in the near future?

[civic-sense]

Originally Posted by Samurai

What is this factor in India? It is as high as 100,000 in some companies. You can easily double the salary of 1000 minimum wage workers, if you decrease the CEO salary by 1%.

Minimum wage is nonsense. Salary of an individual is a factor of his utility.

If CEOs are dispensable, why do companies spend millions just for CEO hunting?

[Samurai]

I moved last few posts here because it was getting OT in the recession thread.

Originally Posted by DigitalOne

But the day you increase the minimum wage forcibly, the companies would resort to automation.
.
.
Just increasing minimum wage by decree is not going to help anybody.

Originally Posted by civic-sense

Minimum wage is nonsense.

This kind of thought process is result of decades of corporate propaganda, by the same folks who make 1000 times money than the average employee.

If there is no minimum wage, the people at the lowest strata will be exploited to the hilt. Did you know minimum wage actually started as maximum wage or salary cap? According to wiki, in 1348 the Black Plague reached England and decimated the population. The severe shortage of labor caused wages to soar and encouraged King Edward III to set a wage ceiling. This was to ensure that labourers don't exploit the employers.

Therefore, the first wage related law was about salary cap. Later they realized the need for minimum wage, in the absence of which employers can exploit the labourers. Practically every civilized country has minimum wage law. Do consider that before you deem it nonsense.

What is minimum afterall? It is the living wage. The amount required to survive in a place. So it is directly related to cost of living. As the inflation increases, cost of living increases. Will you work in a company that doesn't give you hike every year? Do you deny that cost of living is increasing every year? If your answer is NO to both these questions, why are you against minimum wage increase every year inline with inflation? Do you want your office janitor or peon struggle to feed their family, while you struggle to decide between Jeep Compass or Hyundai Tucson?

Do look at the minimum wage numbers for KA before you pass judgment. Try imagining living on those wages.

At first I used to get very irritated when government used to revise minimum wage numbers every year. Then I came to know how my lowest paid staff struggle to make ends meet in this high inflation economy. Now I don't grudge it.

Originally Posted by DigitalOne

Salary of an individual is a factor of his utility.

It is much more than that. As an employer, I have studied this for years and wrote an article on it couple years ago.

Originally Posted by DigitalOne

If CEOs are dispensable, why do companies spend millions just for CEO hunting?

It goes back to the original reason why maximum wage law was created in 1348. If there is no salary cap, people with right skills can just wait until their price is met. These guys are not poor, so they won't grab at the first offer. As I have explained in my article, salary has nothing to do with what you deserve. It has everything do with the employer's budget, and their need for right talent.

And the salary cap can be set only by the government. But no industry will lobby for executive salary cap, due to principal agent problem. Why will a CEO lobby for it when he/she is the chief beneficiary? Unless the government is compelled to do it, it will never happen.

[civic-sense]

While the idea sounds noble, minimum wage laws tinker with free markets, by assigning higher value to some jobs than what it deserves. Any job that does not produce value equal to 'minimum' wage deserves to die off. Jobs compete between each other for manpower, so when manpower is reserved for some types of jobs via minimum wages, it creates scarcity of manpower in other job types.

[blorebuddy]

Originally Posted by vishnurp99

Are there any jobs that cannot be automated at all?

With AI, the different flavours which are out there and RPA, what are the jobs that cannot be automated in the near future?

I read somewhere few jobs which are less threatened by automation are sales person, doctor and teacher

[AltoLXI]

Originally Posted by blorebuddy

I read somewhere few jobs which are less threatened by automation are sales person, doctor and teacher

Nothing is spared from being automated.

When everything goes e-Commerce way, when ranking and customer reviews are done by analytics, warehousing is done by robots, why does one need a salesman?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nn-gB6SaV8U

Read about the robotic surgery here:

http://bangaloremirror.indiatimes.co.../61073772.cms?

Read how IBM Watson is helping oncology departments here:

https://watsononcology.manipalhospitals.com/

When there are hundreds of online courses which provide training by the best teachers out there, teacher's job can also be redundant.

Automation has even entered "war business". Soldiers are replaced by drones and wars are fought across the continents using drone technologies.