The IT Fact

This incident happened a few years ago. My organization (part of Indian IT service industry) as usual was looking at ways to increase margins. The consultant firm which they were working with came up with few charts. One of the chart showed the billing rate vs. employee cost (as per years of experience).  Their conclusion - Bring down the average years of experience in each and every project (irrespective of the size / type / nature of the project). This way the cost will go down, and since the billing rate remains the same it automatically leads to an increased margin. The rumor going around those days was that Senior managers were given margin targets and promised a hefty bonus in return. Mails started floating around. Every project manager was called for a discussion with Senior leaders. Before the discussion, the PM had to collate the designation, years of experience and the salary band of the members in their projects. Here is a sample of how the data was supposed to look like...

The Indian IT service industry has always been about margins. Long long ago, in one of my past organization the senior leaders were pondering over the question "How to further increase the margins?". Probably the discussion might have gone this way: Senior a** no. 1 - Lets move all employees from Mumbai office to Pune or Bangalore where the rentals are less compared to Mumbai. We will save a few pennies. Senior a** no. 2 - Hey if all employees move out, we will have to leave too. Senior a** no. 1 - Ok in that case 50 % of mid-level and junior employees need to move.  All senior a*** - Wow, that's brilliant !!! HR promptly mailed the senior managers to identify as many people as possible and force them to relocate. The word spread like wildfire throughout my organization. People wondered, the maximum cost in IT is the employee cost, saving on a few pennies on rental by forcing people to relocate, how's that going to help? The mood was sombre. Ali baba worried about his...

Sai a sincere software engineer joined my team in Bengaluru. Sai came from a remote village in Andhra Pradesh. He had spent 4 years in Bengaluru and joined our organization in the hope to further up his skills in the ETL domain. This story is much before COVID happened. The organization mandated to be in office for 5 days a week and 9 hours a day. Our operations in Bengaluru had just begun and services such as car drop, canteen facilities were not yet available. I was fortunate to be in the old office in Mumbai having all facilities. Our customer calls used to run till late, at times till 11 PM. We had to work till late hours. The organization provided Desktops to all engineers who had less than 5 years of experience. The challenge Sai faced is "dinner". He could not leave office early as he had a desktop. Poor guy had to go home and have dinner post 11 PM, which had been ordered by his room-mate few hours earlier.  There was a simple solution to this problem. "Allocate ...