[hondatoyotafan]

Originally Posted by JediKnight

Have been laid off twice very early on in my career, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise as i took corrective action.

I have been laid off twice but i worked hard but partied harder in my 20s with sanity only coming by my 30s. Great advises for people in the Industry.

[GTO]

Originally Posted by deehunk

It will indeed be good if the retirement age is reverted to 55 years or made it 52 years.

Absolutely NOT! With progress in medical science, technology & more importantly - knowledge (e.g. sugar was good in the 80s, cheese was bad, now it's vice versa) - life expectancy has gone up. I know people in their late 60s who can work just as hard as anyone in their 50s. Heck, the leader of India is 71 years old while the leader of USA is 79. At 45, I am fitter than I was at 35. Knowledge & the resultant lifestyle habits have made all the difference. Retirement @ 55 is a complete waste of resources & experience.

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by GTO

Retirement @ 55 is a complete waste of resources & experience.

Once upon a time, 55 was the retirement age. In 1951, when my grandfather retired from government teacher job at age 55, he was immediately approached by private schools. He took up another teaching job, for which he had to cycle 14Kms one way. So he cycled 28Kms/day for 5 more years before retiring again at 60. After that no one offered him a job, so he started looking after the farm.

I am 53 now, I can't even imagine retiring at 55. I am lot more productive now than I was at 35.

[Stardust]

Originally Posted by sukhbirST

Great inputs and must be followed in principle. However, going through all car purchase experiences in TBHP threads, it appears car loan is the main source of money. There may be very few like me who save and buy. Surprising is the fact that, if someone has requested for a recommendation with fixed budget, many are giving suggestions to increase the budget. Driving and travelling can be done with basic requirements also. Everyone must understand between want and need. Today I am glad that my bike is 13 years old and car is going strong at 19 years. Regarding real estate decide what you want, home or investment.

Completely agree with your point. And taking it one step forward, however ideal it may sound, if people collectively would have followed this save and purchase strategy in real estate too, we wouldn't be seeing this insane pricing in real estate.

Cheaper home loans just made the properties insanely costly. The prices now does not reflect the real worth of real estate.

[apachelongbow]

There shouldn't be any retirement age as such. As long as the person is productive, willing and employable he/she must be allowed to work. As water finds its level so will a non productive employee. This older thinking of making senior people forcibly quit for absorbing new talent is frankly bullshit. If the employer wants a young chap he will employ a young chap.
Ever wondered why is there no retirement age in your own business or politics? It's not like a 80 year old politician is far better than a 20 year old one.

By the time one hits his mid 40s if they are even a bit wise financially, they would have saved for their next 20/30 years. A emi free salary, a good medical insurance, a roof over their head and enough investment to atleast replace their projected 20 years of expenses would mean a base retirement planning has already been done. Then it doesn't make sense to chase the next promotion (atleast financially)

[for_cars1]

Originally Posted by apachelongbow

...to chase the next promotion (atleast financially)

At a fundamental level, everybody chases the next promotion only for financial benefits

Technically there is an individual contributor role (to take care of the real/hands-on work) at various "levels" in the order of increasing pay/span of influence
and a manager role (to take care of the business/administration side) (all the way from 1st line manager to VP - all glorified manager roles but basically a manager).

So its prudent to step back and think whether it is really worth getting caught in the illusionary corporate ladder game at the cost of health/peace of mind.

[chaitanyakrish]

FIRE ( Financial Independence & Retire Early ) is getting popular in many circles, however, with increase in health care amenities, life expectancy is also increasing.

However, as the saying "Empty Mind is Devil's workshop" goes on, we need to develop some skills which we can use to have an income after we retire. That income may not be equal to the salary we earned before retirement, but just to give us a professional satisfaction.

Everyone is good in something, we need to identify skills for which others would be willing to pay for. Example, someone might be good in photography, personal finance, taxation, Art, music, teaching etc; which we can make use of to manage time after retirement.

We spend 30-40 years of working life and assuming, the normal life expectancy of 90 years, we need to spend 30 years in retirement, which would be daunting without these hobbies, which can earn some income as well.

One of my ex-manager, retired 2 years ago, after 34 years in IT ( he's a CA and SAP Finance guy), and runs a Tax filing firm near Malleswaram now. That keeps him happy.

[Samurai]

Sundar Pichai, Mark Zuckerberg believe Big Tech has too many employees who are chilling instead of working

https://www.indiatoday.in/technology...177-2022-08-08

It seems that good times are ending in Silicon Valley. In the last two weeks, two of the most powerful tech CEOs -- Mark Zuckerberg at Meta (formerly Facebook) and Sundar Pichai at Google -- have highlighted that tech companies probably have way too many employees, so many that there are people in these companies who are not working and are just chilling. While Pichai said this in a subtle way, by bringing a point about low productivity per employee at the company, Zuckerberg was direct and blunt. He said recently, there are a "bunch of people at the company who shouldn't be here."

Does this sentiment exist in Indian tech company management? Or this is just an US phenomena?

Mark and Sundar can't blame employees for this. As A.P.J Abdul Kalam once said, success belongs to the whole team and the failure belongs to the leader.

As leaders if you think there are too many unproductive employees, fix it by making them productive. Don't complain about your failure in public and shift the blame to the employees.

[Fx14]

Originally Posted by Samurai

Does this sentiment exist in Indian tech company management? Or this is just an US phenomena?

From a slightly different perspective in India (and not only limited to tech), there are always a few such employees who believe more in "Boss Management" than ensuring their own productivity.

They are more bothered in providing the boss with what ammunition / inputs they want on other team members etc., rather than performing their job role.

Often they are the ones who will start their work only around the end of the normal working hours and stretch a bit to try and complete their little pending work for the day (which was not touched at all during normal working hours). This also earns them brownie points in the eyes of a boss who is not clued in to the reality.

The best part is when the boss highlights such employees as examples to be followed to the rest of the team that actually does all the heavy lifting.

[hondatoyotafan]

Originally Posted by Samurai

Does this sentiment exist in Indian tech company management? Or this is just an US phenomena?

Mark and Sundar can't blame employees for this. As A.P.J Abdul Kalam once said, success belongs to the whole team and the failure belongs to the leader.

This happens in every major big company if you look at the big companies which were startups once like Oracle or Cisco they are less productive than when they were small to medium startups. Difficult too for leaders to make productivity at scale. Only Amazon and Netflix IMO have been able to scale productivity across teams through ruthless processes like. 'Up or Out' type appraisals.

[ninjatalli]

Originally Posted by Samurai

Does this sentiment exist in Indian tech company management? Or this is just an US phenomena?

A mass push / hire & fire happened in Cognizant back in 2019 (and onwards) when the CEO Francisco D'Souza was replaced by Brian Humphries - it caused a mass exodus of middle and top tiers of leadership/management across the firm. A good percentage of them were folks who had "nestled" into roles/responsibilities that weren't client facing but still relevant for the organization/divisions they were working for. There were multiple forces at play, but the common theme thrown around was productivity and billability.

[hrman]

Lots of great learnings on this thread. I have experienced this first hand on two occasions.
During completion of my MBA it was the dot com bubble and jobs were scarce. And once later in life. What has made my resolve stronger is the following:
1. While you spend most of your time in your jobs, join other networking forums in your field. Nothing helps like networking. At one time, I was in dire need of a role change and my network helped me.
2. Maintain good relationships with all, especially the seniors in your organization, especially your boss. Don't burn bridges when changing organizations.
3. If you don't have a supportive and appreciative boss, consider a change. Dont hang around longer since this lack of support will not help you when you require it the most.
4. Job loyalty will take you only so far as getting your monthly pay check in time for what you deliver. There is no other relationship between you and your organization. Do not expect the company to bail you out in times of need. If there is a more lucrative opportunity don't let loyalty hold you back.
5. Take a separate life insurance cover and a separate medical hospitalization cover for you and family from outside. Your company provided insurance benefit will be only as long as you are on their rolls.
6. Be frugal in your lifestyle and invest invest invest. There are many avenues for getting good returns. Choose wisely and be disciplined. It helps to also keep a Target % of take home as investment every month.
7. I maintain a tracker of my monthly expenses and annual forecast. It is useful for me to plan ahead when I will eventually decide to retire early or not pursue a full time job anymore. Link your investment appetite to this.
8. Your objective should be to be loan free at least after 42 years of age. With rising age your employability in the market becomes lesser hence your target should be to avoid debt in all forms after a certain age.

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by hondatoyotafan

This happens in every major big company if you look at the big companies which were startups once like Oracle or Cisco they are less productive than when they were small to medium startups. Difficult too for leaders to make productivity at scale.

I know it happens in companies of all sizes. It happens seasonally even in highly efficient companies, when a product/service becomes stable, and new ideas are still being discussed. Often efficient folks leave, while inefficient ones stick around, bringing the overall productivity down. However, the management has to plan for it and reorganize/reallocate/hire/fire appropriately. What companies don't do is go public and blame the employees for being unproductive.

We all know TCS/Infy keep 10s of thousands of employees on bench for months together. Do we hear them blaming the employees?

Lack of productivity is a management problem to solve. Don't blame the employees for your failure.

[warrioraks]

Originally Posted by Samurai

Does this sentiment exist in Indian tech company management? Or this is just an US phenomena?

They are publicly saying what is already being discussed for quiet some now in hushed tones. This has come up in my casual conversations with friends at Google and few other big tech organisations multiple times over the last two years.

Few reasons I can think of:
1. Strong product companies have a recurring and constantly increasingly source of revenue with practically no direct relationship to what a large set of employees is doing today. Think of Google. Even if they don’t develop anything new for next 12 months, the revenues from existing products is more than enough to pay for everyone in the company without majority of the people even logging in. That creates a significant time lag to understand who is being productive and who is not since these organisations realise benefits too far in the future for work that is done today.
2. Tech companies in India have been hiring big for the last 5 years. Pandemic accelerated this and now the head count has increased significantly. With an imminent US recession, they want to run a tighter ship and the excessive head count now is like a splinter in the eye. These statements are most probably a pre-cursor to layoffs that could happen soon.
3. The general sentiment in India about work life balance has never been stronger in my opinion. This has an indirect impact on productivity from an organisations perspective.

Most of the big tech companies have majority of their staff in India. So these are definitely not US specific comments. This is a real problem at hand for product/tech based companies, especially because it is harder to track efficiency and productivity in an objective way.

Consulting (professional services) type companies on the other hand where one hires for projects and bills to the clients are not seeing this problem as it is easy to identify metrics like utilisation based on the billed hours. This leads to re-alignments and rationalisations from time to time.

[sunilch]

Originally Posted by Fx14

The best part is when the boss highlights such employees as examples to be followed to the rest of the team that actually does all the heavy lifting.

You have provided the real reason behind the issue. If the boss wants this, nothing stopping it right?

Many times what you see happening in the team is the result of what the leader is asking for.