Hey.. Senior Tech Lead, What are you doing today?

Back in 2004, when i joined IBM as a fresher, i was put in a migration team. The main objective of the team was to migrate a project from US to Bangalore. The US team had four people.  At the end of migration, our team had successfully migrated the project from New Jersey. We ended up replacing four Americans. Out of the four Americans we replaced, one got an internal transfer but the other three had to leave the company.Two people who went out got some job but one of them did not get a job for a long long time.

We are all Clones

Now in 2015, the Indian IT industry seems to be at that same juncture. The senior crowd which is drawing a lot of salary is definitely becoming a burden on the balance sheets. So, the next logical step on this profit driven system will be to replace the Senior Crowd with a less expensive Junior crowd from colleges. This is almost like the movie Moon, where there is an Engineer monitoring mines in the Moon. He soon finds out that he has an expiry date on which he will be terminated and replaced by his clone. But then he then realizes that he himself was a clone to begin with. I think, it is time for the Indian IT crowd to realize that we are all clones  and our expiry dates are nearing.

But to come to that realization we need to see a few things. First, lets take a look at the guys we replaced in the US and Europe. Were they replaced because they were less competent? I don't think so. At-least, the guys i replaced were good and some of them were really really good. In fact, they were way more competent that us. We anyway replaced them. After that we have slowly learned the trade and we also have become reasonably good, if not exceptional. We have become more experienced and we are probably making better quality software than the ones we made in 2004. But along with our competency,  our salaries have also increased multiple folds. But history tells us that, in this profit driven setup, if you are costly, it does not matter even if you are good. Because at end of day, for the guy who present the balance sheet to the investors there is only one objective in mind.
                             "I need to show an increase in profits than last year"
To achieve this, he will start adjusting so many costs by cutting down perks and expenses. But once all the obvious expenses are trimmed, he has to start cutting down on people too. Many a times, this will also include some really really good people. But he does it anyway fully aware of the fact that it will compromise the quality.

Quality Matters?     

But wait a minute. Weren't we all told that quality is uncompromisable? Didn't we celebrate quality weeks and acquire six sigma, ISO 9001 certifications. But if that is the case, and quality really really mattered,how did a fresher from Bangalore replaced a 20 year experienced DBA veteran in Atlanta? What that means is quality matters but only to some extent. It only matters to the extent where it is visible.If it takes 100 dollars to make a really good quality product, it will only take 50 dollars to  make that same product with an "user acceptable" quality.In other words, the engineering scale for quality is very different from the customer scale of quality.

 
Let me give an example here. The other day i was looking for dining tables. I went to a furniture shop nearby. They had two tables. First a teak one that costs Rs30,000. and then a stylish looking one made of MDF Board which costs Rs.20,000. The 20k one looked really attractive. But i decided to dig a little deeper and did some asking some questions. I found that the teak one comes with 5 year warranty and the other one comes with a 1 year warranty. This according to me says a lot about quality.  They also said that they will take the teak table back for the bill amount even after 5 years. So, I asked them what price they will give for the other table after five years. One of the snugged and said, "Saar, it wont be standing for five years..". But he said a lot of people who like the contemporary looks do buy the 20k type. So, what they have bought is a dining table that looks "good enough" but might not stand for more than 3-4 years. The same logic applies to software also. It is very very difficult for a customer to distinguish a "good software" and a "good enough software". Also sometimes, a customer only needs a "good enough" software at a low cost because not every customer is landing robots on a comet you see.

Are we irreplaceable?

According to me at-least 70 percentage of us are easily replaceable with a cheaper talent. It does not matter how "critical resource" you are to the project, you are replaceable if you are costly. And if you are costly, the outside opportunities also dry up..For people who have shifted to full time "management" jobs, this is already a reality.

So, what is looks like to me is that,  Indian IT industry has come to a point where a lot of senior "resources" might become jobless in coming years. How do we know this?  There is an inherent worth every person brings to the company. The more the salary you draw, the lesser the worth you give back to the company unless you are going to keep yourself updated. But there are a lot of dead end projects in which there is no scope for improvement. For example, there is not much worth a person can bring to a project which is running stable for 15 years. All it needs is a good baby sitter. There is also another problem of keeping yourself on par with the pace of the industry. That problem is your age. As your age increases, your personal responsibilities increase and your analytical ability decreases. So, it becomes tougher and tougher to keep yourself updated. With age, you will start getting a lot of health issues which will also eat up your time.

What next?

In an ideal world, corporations will be people driven but not profit driven.But we are not living in a ideal world. But that does not mean, that people driven companies does not exist. For example, take a look at government jobs, they are people driven. The reason why it takes a lot of time to get things done in a government office is that, an average government employee works slower than a private sector employee. But the government is not profit driven. So, it does send these people home because they are working slower. It works differently by compensating with their pay system. It pays average. The increments, bonuses, promotions are all normalized. It does take a hit on customer satisfaction but hey at the end of day, a lot of people are going home happy because their life is secured.I think it is high time, we need to do realize that in Indian IT setup, our exuberant salaries and the performance driven pay system have started to work against us.

Am i saying corporations are evil? Lets play a little devils advocate and find that out.Consider the following scenario. You hold 100 Infosys stocks each worth Rs.2000. Things are going fine but on April 2015, Infy announces that it is taking a hit on profits to retain some of its employees. Within an hour, their stock falls down to Rs.1800. Now, in this scenario will you sell the 100 stocks you have or will you support Infy by keeping the stocks? You will sell the stocks and most sane people will. What this means is that, we are very much the part of this profit driven system. So, we cannot blame this on the corporates or the system before an introspection.

I don't know what is solution for this. May be, we need to strive a little more harder to increase our productivity. May be, we need to become irreplaceable by doing a lot of innovations. May be, we need to take salary cuts. May be, the government should enforce Employee Unions in IT Sector. May be, we should start thinking of alternate career paths like going back to farming. May be, we should start spending more cautiously. But some thing has to change here. I don't know what it is. But nevertheless, the first step for this change is to understand the system and realizing that there is something wrong in it.