Team-BHP (https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/)

-   Shifting gears (https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/shifting-gears/)

-   -   IT Industry and Employability of Technical Graduates (https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/shifting-gears/69434-industry-employability-technical-graduates-55.html)

Guess you misinterpreted my statement. What I meant was even with technical skill-set post 40-42 it will be tough to cope as the industry requirements are changing rapidly & I doubt our learning capabilities will be as sharp post 40s as it used to be in the initial years(20s or early 30s).

Ofcourse hope is not a strategy. And hence I have totally switched to Individual Contributor(pure technical) role since last couple of years, which is kinda helping me now to some extent in staying relevant.

P.S : Am not talking about people managers as I am not into that stream at all. I find dealing with technology easier than dealing with people lol:

Yes, it is a good career path. But if you look at it shrewdly, three jobs have been shrunk into one :D, and one guy has to do all the three jobs.

With QA automation, a QA can be shared across multiple projects since a lot of effort for manual testing is saved.

I might disagree with this! You only have to be curious and have some passion for new things in technology and the rest will automatically follow.

Maybe your are correct.

My context was in early days our sole focus is mostly on job/career as we don't have too many responsibilities that need our attention. But around 40+ one usually has a lot more responsibilities catering to which tends to reduce the adapting ability comparatively. But then I am not yet there, so was just inquisitive :)

End of OT from my side :D

Yup, for d@mn sure. There is no better way to REALLY learn to code, create, than by spending hours a day coding and creating. Assembler helped me understand early on, mainframe mostly. But higher languages, too. And hours, and hours, and hours on the keyboard trying stuff.....and hours and hours more...did I mention? Hours! Then, you get a job. And you find that the complexity of actual coding and I.T. is almost unfathomable...but you ramp yourself up and deal with it. And one day, much to your amazement, you find out that you can flat out cut the mustard! The brown goo hits the electrical cooling device and YOU are the one they run to, to make things right.

If you are lucky, you come away from it with some hefty personal gains. Yes, a little money in your pocket but just maybe, you find you now have an orderly mind suited to solve more than just I.T. algorithms.

Some interesting observations by Steve Wozniak published in TOI today:

I read it yesterday and I was very happy that someone highly esteemed like him pointed it out to all the biggies of the Indian IT world. I have mentioned similar sentiments on this thread all along. See the last two paragraphs of this post written in 2009.

This is a great thread, by the way. Spent 2 hours reading comments on this thread. In year 2000, the process followed by IT companies for hiring was -

- Aptitude Test
- Ground Discussion (Topic: Brain Train.. or Drain. Or something like that)
- HR interview

I rarely got to the 3rd round. Although I was never able to become a software engineer, I respect Indian IT companies and their employees because all the work they do sounds very smart. Media talking about India being an IT superpower probably influenced me too. But this thread has been very insightful for somebody like me.

What does Steve mean by "MBA and creativity"? That Indian MBAs don't start a business after they get their degree? It's probably because of lack of capital. But I have seen many MBA graduates (especially those with IIT/IIM combinations) quit their jobs after 10 years and start a business.

This part is a bit unfair because India has a large number of creative industries. OK, we don't have athletes - but we do have writers, movie industry, TV entertainment industry, classical dance/singers etc.

So IT services is a lowly job, according to some, and only companies like Apple, Google etc are real tech companies. Why? Do everybody have to do high-end tech jobs to earn respect? I have heard many call us - IT workers - IT coolies. What does that imply? Coolies are low lives who do not deserve respect? Out of all the jobs available in this world only a handful of them are creative. The rest are routine jobs which is meant to get things done. And people get paid for it. For they all need to eat and cloth and have a roof above their heads.

IT service companies belong to a certain type of industry. Which does not include Google, Apple etc. Why does Infosys, Wipro, TCS have be like Apple and Google?

True. For most, this would be just a paying job for their living and they would spend rest of their time on something else. Nothing humiliating about these work.
The question is not on what Infy, Wipro or TCS does or doesn't not. Question is why India does not have Google, Apple etc.

Not qualified enough to talk of the wider topics discussed in this thread, but from what I have seen (in my part of the world) these names are mostly mentioned by the folks who are employed in the IT sector, to refer themselves – more in a lighter vein.

Sounds very smart but the work done by majority is rather mundane. I say majority because there are tiny companies who have carved out their own niches, but then the number of such companies are far too few for the country which has a population of 1+ billion. After two decades or so, the industry should have matured to leap to the next level but unfortunately it has not.

The less the said about the people in the media pretending to know the IT industry, the better. More of PR exercise by companies having good marketing budget.

Nothing disrespectful. It is good that people earn their livelihood working for these companies. The issue is there is no real value add to the intellectual capital of the country. Service companies are more of outposts doing back office work outsourced by companies in the West which is more of cost saving measure. Even the work done in the "product/captive" companies is routine affair with the majority of the specifications/design coming from the counterparts outside the country. This is the type of work which can be automated.

This means jobs cater only to the lowest level in Maslow's hierarchy of needs

That sums it up.

The real issue is that the people who worked/continue to work in the industry, and the onlookers from the boundaries all generally measured the value of the work from the amount of financial impact it created.
The "air" around IT job in India is not justified when you look at the value output to the industry and the impact in the s/w world. Just think about it -- people who have no clue about technology still earn quite a lot from it, are arrogant within and outside the organizations from the entitlement they seem to receive from their salary history. This single point I guess is what Woz was talking about.

Ubers and Olas paid the drivers too much in the beginning. That was a function of the times, their business model, and the investment to capture the markets, ie. a lot of things totally different from the value of a "driver". IT industry (largely) in India is only in the same lines. The money it produced was just a function of time and had nothing to do with the quality of the people we produced.

No offence to "drivers" for the metaphor or to people currently working IT. I am one too.

Having been part of arguably the foremost Labs in modern communication in research and relocated and working as part of the biggest networking company, I will have to disagree. Please dont generalize. We also outsource to Indian companies and talent from those companies are very good too. Good engineers are a mix of IIT and lesser known colleges too.

R&D service Industry is increasing and maybe will become bigger than what it is today. The same Wipro, Infosys also work in such areas although in smaller numbers.

There might be a cultural issue for risk taking or un-availability of market. But with tools/resources available across the world today, hopefully things will change.

I am not part of a service company as such and I might not know everything about the type of jobs being done there. But then even abroad, majority of the people work in the taking ideas, designs and implementing kind of things. I feel this thread is a little de-meaning to people who work in IT just because they meet the requirements of whats in demand. I know too many people who lost jobs in US and were not able to find suitable ones due to lack of exposure to new demands.

Strange contradictory articles on Economic Times. On one hand, it says IT companies are cutting India jobs because of automation and need to create job overseas.

Cognizant’s headcount in India drops by 8000 in 2017, US and Europe headcount grows
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com...w/63109489.cms

But then, there is another article that says HCL Tech is struggling with attrition rates and hence looking at setting up facilities in small towns.

HCL Tech looks to small towns to curb attrition, bring stability
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com...campaign=cppst