IT dementia

Before I start this blog let me clear the chaos surrounding 'IT'-it refers to Information Technology rather than Income Tax(Mr Chidambaram's favorite subject to Indian Middle class hatred).For our convenience I have taken the protagonist of the story as someone called Ram Kumar(a simple name) who is someone amongst us.As the story proceeds further we(IT people) should be able to see ourselves in him,if not I am sure you would either be too shy to confess or too bold to reveal such mundane details,either ways I don't give a shit.

'Tring' 'Tring' the damn mobile alarm starts ringing-"Gosh! it's just 7:30 AM"-thought Ram.After switching it off Ram started visualizing a correlation between the mobile alarm and the outlook meeting request alarm,."Holy crap!What the fuck am I thinking?Oh! Shit Monday morning Status meeting-damn I am ruined-another opportunity to screw my yearly appraisal.I should have completed this piece of work on Friday itself.Dude you are screwed".

Another half an hour Ram was seen in a Bus Stand in the middle of a cr owd of say a hundred people waiting for the company bus to appear by any moment to pick them up for prison.The expression on the faces of those incumbents resembles the expressions on Tim Robins face when he is deported to Shawshank Prison in the movie 'The Shawshank redemption'.Anyway Ram is no different and today would prove out to be another disaster day fro him as he missed out on his weekly code delivery again which is good enough for his manager to screw him royally in the annual appraisal meeting.

Ram works for a Software MNC called CAP Software India Pvt Ltd.It is a British Product Development Company which manufactures system softwares like compilers,ERPs,Commercial Search Engines and is a major player in online advertising space.It is a huge company with a global workforce of a million employees.The selection process to CAP is quite stringent.It takes a potential candidate almost eight technical rounds to qualify for any position technical/managerial.Ram had around five years of experience in the IT sector.He started his career in a small company called Technozen which was a startup and had just one client.Ram screwed his days and nights in working for Technozen not because he wanted to excel and be noticed by Top Management who in turn can shower ESOPs on him but he rather worked hard because out of all his friends he was the only one who was working for such a small company.He had friends who were working in Giant organizations like

HP,Oracle,GE,Siemens,Google,Microsoft,Yahoo,Infosys,Wipro,TCS and many a more.He used to feel humiliated whenever he would speak with them as the conversations primarily consisted of some fancy party thrown which his friends attended on the company's expenses or some foreign trip where they went for code deployment.Initially he would not pay heed to that but in matter of days he started feeling the difference in terms of status quo defined by Software Gurus.Ram was working his ass hard on understanding anything and everything in Software Development Life cycle.He was made to gather requirements from clients,create a design based on those requirements,start development,do a comprehensive testing(which includes unit testing,integration testing and finally unit acceptance testing) and finally deployment.Technozen was a small company and hence it thought better to reduce the staff for all these activities to one who could handle almost everything(Cost cutting can maximize profitability).As a result of the aforementioned principle Ram became a scapegoat to the company's capitalistic attitude and in no time he felt he can't take it more and hence shifted to another service based company called Softnet Corporations Pvt Ltd.This company had an appreciable size and had an optimal allocation of resources to different stages of Software development.The work was not great but the environment was congenial.When I say congenial it means there were a lot of cute girls around.Ram did not stand a chance even then as most of them were bound to be married within a year.In India whenever we have girls who have worked for two years we leave no stones unturned to get them married as a little time waste could result in a potential groom loss in the marriage market.

Ram worked in the company for almost two and a half years and found his knowledge curve at the same slope where it was earlier.There was absolutely no work to be done except for enhancements in an investment banking application.The enhancements could be as dumb as changing the value of a variable associated with a bank code or could be as simple as changing the javadoc of the code from time to time.Ram remembered the most complex work which he was assigned in his stay in this company in a span of two years was to add a new parameter to one of the constructors in a class and check out the regressions created due to this.So after working there for almost two and a half years Ram realized he needs to move ahead and try his luck out in the so called Product Development companies which were supposedly doing great work in terms of working on latest technological developments.

Ram worked hard on his Computer Science core subjects(them being Data Structures,Algorithms,Operating Systems,Programming Language Semantics,Theory of Computation,Databases,Distributed Programming).He became a slave to Coreman and started considering Donald e Knuth his surrogate father.He started living inside MSDN Library and dimensions in his life were defined by Grady Booch.It was then he started taking interviews with different companies and realized that he did know an appreciable bit compared to his fellow colleagues.After a brief stint of two months he finally landed up a job with CAP.

Ram had high expectations before joining CAP and his parents were the proudest people alive who did not leave any chance to proclaim the greatness of their son in their so called foolhardy society filled with ignorant shitheads who had nothing better to do other than discuss the alary compensation details of all the inmates of the society rather community.These folks are the most pathetic entities of our society who are constantly looking for an opportunity to find out fault with somebody's genetic successor and create social humiliation for the folks good enough to be ostracized by the community. Ram hated them the most but the irony was whenever he would be back he would be subjected to dinner parties where these entities would be present and they would try their level best to test him on their parameters of success per se.

Anyways after boarding the bus which took around one complete hour to reach the Software Technological Park where CAP was located Ram marched towards his building and finally towards his department and then towards his cubicle.The usual day started with checking out mails which would have either come from the Top Management team located in Britain or from his Euoropean counterparts or from his manager/team mates."Ram can we have a one to one",as Ram turned his head he saw Arun Subramanian his Manager a bald guy with retarded expressions.Arun was a product of a Management institute,did not know a crap about Software Development but proudly spoke about Software Development as his passion.He would give fancy speeches about 80/20 principle and rattle out some stuff which Peter Drucker had supposedly spoken.I am sure Drucker would have got a heart attack if he had speculated his management fundas were being misused by Software shitheads in the Indian subcontinent.Reluctantly Ram entered the conference room with Arun.The door was shut and Ram knew it was another session of Royal Rape where he would be subjected to management principles.

"Ram would you be kind enough to explain why you did not complete the deliverables this Friday as promised earlier?" asked Arun."Sir I am almost done with the code,I just need to do a final testing and submit the change list.I would have done it on Friday itself but I wasn't well and decided to get back home.I will make sure I do it in the next one hour" remarked Ram."Ram I am not going to buy this.Commitment is a commitment.Why did not you inform me on Friday evening,I would have assigned the task to someone else in the team.I am not going to tolerate this shit.Pal you are an experienced guy.I deserve some kind of professionalism from you.Had I been there I would not have bothered about my health but would have finished the work and moreover it is just a piece of code dude.It doesn't even take an hour to wrap up the stuff.I will make sure this affects your yearly appraisal and then you cannot blame me for any mishap. You can leave now" said Arun.Ram left the room dejected.

"what an asshole!Does not know a fuck about software development but works in a Software Company as a Product Manager. Strange are the rules of serendipity" thought Ram and as he came back to his cubicle, he worked hard for a couple of minutes and wrapped up the entire stuff.Ram was used to this crap.As a software professional in a fortune 500 company he knew things like these are just herculean efforts by the managers to project their greatness in front of their respective Product Directors.One more fundamental Ram had realized in a Product Development organization was there was nothing called 'deadlines'.You would be intimated by your management about some deadline when the product release would happen but you can always work at your normal pace as every year the product development deadline would keep on postponing until customers would get pissed off and that was the time product release would happen.I mean look at Microsoft which wanted to release Vista in November 2006 and it was finally released in January next year.Now after almost five years of experience Ram realized that if you talk about Software Development it does not happen in India-it is just a misnomer which exists in our education system,our public who think software engineers in India are revolutionizing the society but come to think of it and I am sure you would have to think hard to maintain that conception.

So like Ram there are innumerable Software Engineers who get trapped in this Software labyrinth and come out of it as losers.If I talk about the kind of work that happens in India in Software I would have to segregate the industry into three basic elements.Service based companies,Product based companies and Research Laboratories.Service based companies are companies that provide software services to organizations in US,Europe,Australia,Middle East and South Africa.These organizations could range from Oil,Insurance,Investment Banks,Mutual Funds,Telecommunication,Health care,Financial Organizations,Military,Aviation and many a more.The revenue model for these companies revolve around the central idea that more the number of engineers who work for a project more would be the profit.They charge their clients on an hourly basis for a resource say fifty dollars per hour.If eight hours is the productive man hours employed per day the amount should be around four hundred dollars and on monthly basis turns our to be around eight thousand dollars.Convert it to INR and it would be around three lakh twenty thousand rupees.Multiply it by almost all the resources working on that project and the amount would be say huge which would include additional people who would be called buffers but who would be billable.If we assume the expenses which these companies pay their employees it would be merely 12.5-14% and say an additional 7 % goes for different costs associated with travel.maintainance,hardware,even then 80% of the revenue share goes to the company's kitty benefiting the founders and the management team.I am not saying the capital intensive approach followed by these companies is atrocious but what I am saying is that in this environment engineers don't get an opportunity to gain much in terms of technology.They gain primarily in terms of the software applications they work on which would not help them much if they plan to migrate to a different company.I remember a friend of mine who was working with a leading software services company which made an effective Financial Software Application a decade back and was still selling or maintaining it for clients.It would employ engineers and put them to the maintain the product which could be termed inferior work(the engineers would gain nothing out of such work except application based information which would not do good).Majority of engineers being churned out by different software companies in India tend to join these software companies and within a year or two leave due to dissatisfaction either in terms of work or remuneration.My observation tells me attrition is not a problem for these companies as they have been able to exploit the Indian Engineers desperation to get a job to the full.They do not give a damn if an engineer leaves as there are three more in the row to bag a job.Software applications designed by these companies are not state of the art and more than often these companies start charging the clients for bug resolutions.

The second category of companies are Product Development companies which are merely Indian Development centres of some Product Development Companies from Europe,US,China,Australia and Middle East.These companies run solely on a singular product or a product suite and sell them to clients globally.These are big gargantuan companies which indulge in core product development using a mix of different technologies.These companies offer growth in terms of knowledge as well as remuneration but again talk about the Indian Development centres and you would again find crap work.Most of the crap work comprising of running test scripts,bug fixing and feature enhancements are done
by engineers in India.From a knowledge perspective how much can you actually gain if you tend to work on the aforementioned things-I'd say Null.Like Ram most people enter these companies in search of good work and realize a year down the line that the work they are made to do is relatively inferior to what their American or European counterparts are doing.I mean core product development happens from a product development perspective.The reason is simple-our foreign counterparts know how limited knowledge our Indian engineers possess in terms of Computation Sciences,most of whom are not even aware of the basics of Computer Science.These companies spend some revenue in Training and Development for our engineers and then put them to do their crap work for them which we do accepting it as our fate.Th ese European or American companies are
clever enough to appoint what they call as 'People Managers' who would manage these people and make them work.As a result of this they can concentrate on doing better work,take more ownerships and always be ahead of the Indian Development centers.So in nutshell these companies are no different or better than service based companies which we were targeting earlier.

The third type of organizations would be primarily Research and Development centers for either Product based or Service based organizations which tend to absorb only M-Tech or PhDs from IIT/IISc the number being as low as 100 per year.These research bodies are purely market driven and fund projects only if they see a potential revenue inflow.These organizations seldom take engineers unless of course we have someone who has excellent credentials and has made appreciable amount of publications in Computer Science.The normal engineering crowd in India tries to stay away from them and whatever opportunities these bodies present to knowledge growth of an individual are diminished due to our fickle attitude.

Now after discussing about these three type of companies I would like to say that the Indian Software Industry is just a nightmare as people are ignorant enough to understand how we are being exploited.We don't specialize in skillsets and technologies and as long as the attitude of engineers does not change we would be subjected to moronic work .Talk about the Indian scenario and how many product development companies we find inside India-none.Talk about all the major technology majors like HP,Microsoft,Apple,Google were all started by engineers in a small way and within a span of time these companies changed history rather created history.We as the intellectual workforce of the world are left to eat shit.The tendency in India is so pathetic that ask an engineer what he wants in a span of five years and he would tell you about the fact that he would want to be a manager and settle up in a posh city like Bangalore or Pune and lead a comfortable life.How many of them actually step into entrepreneurial ventures like Vinod Khosla ,Bill gates or Larry page and Sergei Brin.

Talk about our very own Service based companies and come to the point of how much research is actually happening at these organizations and you would find nothing.Companies like Google grew upto 280 Billion Dollars in 12 years but our very own Service based companies could become just a mere 4 billion dollar organization in 20 years.Sad but true but check out the statistics and you would see how much research and Development is promoted in IITs or for that instance our very own DRDO.The research initiative is missing.the urge to research and create new technological products is not present in Indians.

I see a very sad picture as of now and unless anything substantial is done to curb the negativities I observe I do not see Indians making a very outstanding picture in the global scenario in the long run.Are we born only to submit to the whims and fancies of Foreign nationals or do we actually have the balls to show the world we are a nation of intellectuals and would leave no leaf unturned to achive our intellectual glory thereby assassinating this age old image of a laborer.