Living nightmare of Indian software industry

[Eric Lemaitre]

Hi all !

Very interesting blog about hardships of Indian software industry, written by someone named Harshad Oak.

http://www.indicthreads.com/blogs/316/software_job_india.html

In particular note such statings as "Working 12+ hours a day and 6 or even 7 days a week is more the rule than the exception", and "How much software innovation happens in India? - Minimal............Surprisingly, put the same Indian in a company 'in' the US and he suddenly becomes innovative and a thought leader in his field. The reason is simple, the only thing an exhausted body and mind can do well, is sleep. zzzzzz".

Comments, Indian ranchers ?

Best regards.

[Pavan Tummala]

Eric,
Yup, more or less, what you read is true. Reason I would say is silly, inefficient managers who think making the developers work overtime yields more results.
But it doesnt apply across all the companies. Some companies are pretty good.
--

[ab parashar]

well I myself had the (mis) fortune to work for one of these sweatshops, I had to slog for 14-15 hours a day.For 6 months I came home at 2 am .....every saturday was working and sunday as well....

But, in those days(2002), had I been in the UK I would probably be without a job...so basically had no choice but to ride it out....

This kind of work culture is not unique to the IT industry....My roomate in college works for a Korean electronis giant in India...believe it or not he works 7 days a week 9 am to 11 pm(officially)....so this kind of culture exists in countries like India and it has just permeated into the software world.....

Cut to UK year 2005....My consulting company bid for a project and gave an estimate of 20 guys working for 6 months, onsite (�500 a day)....the project went to TCS who bid 15 contractors offshore ( �60 a day)....

They actually completed the project in 4 months (including 4 weeks testing) ....after that success, the client has made them their preffered vendor....

[Arjunkumar Shastry]

I would say work culture depends on which shop you work for.If its offshore giant like TCS ,working hours might be hectic.If its foreign shop like HP,Dell working hours are usual 9 to 6 IMO.
Media generally projects these companies who have 5000+ staff with plush offices in different cities.There are many small companies too doing good things with reasonable working hours and good work culture.

[Sameer Jamal]

I work for a small product based company, working hours are excellent, I am glad our company is not into that offshoring business.

[Arun Sharma]

That's not true. I usually work properly for 40 hours a week. But there could be circumstances like final stages of release where I put in long hours for a few days. But that's not just in India but everywhere, I guess.

[sunil chow]

Hi All,

Sorry for contradicting

I know lot of people, especially in service based companies who are with no work for as long as 6 to 8 months.

So the common scene in service based companies is that either you have

LOT of work or NO work

And when you have lot of work you can see people slogging really big

Regards
--------
The anticipation of having something is often
more fun than actually having it

[Pradeep bhatt]

Harshad Oak has authored many books and also done book promotion in javaranch. Is he in Oracle US? :roll:

[Pradeep bhatt]

Someone has made an interesting comment

n my company, if someones leaves office at 5PM, everyone use to make
comments on him/her.

I agree with this one. I have heard people say that - he goes at 6 O'Clock in the evening and hence is not hardworking.

[ab parashar]

Now everyone knows, why Indians lack a sense of humour at work....

[Pradeep bhatt]

Originally posted by ab parashar:
Now everyone knows, why Indians lack a sense of humour at work....

busy

[Vinod Bijlani]

i have worked in similar situations but looking back makes me think thts given me more experience.. doesnt working more (with putting in thoughts/smartness) give you more experience? know more about ur work?
my country is trying to come up to the level where all developed countries are. who said tht was easy??
9-5 is tough in a organization which is expanding at 300% every year & has to compete against cash rich companies ...not everyone is google,ebay
doesn't mean to say we should lose humour or fun out of life ...

[Jayesh Lalwani]

Originally posted by Vinod Bijlani:
i have worked in similar situations but looking back makes me think thts given me more experience.. doesnt working more (with putting in thoughts/smartness) give you more experience? know more about ur work?

Well, there's a good way to do work and there's a bad way to do work. More work doesn't mean that you are learning the correct way to do work. Expecting your employees to work 12-14 hrs a day for 7 days a week is a bad way of doing work. Planning your employee's work around a 9-5 work day is a good way of doing work. If you are working for an employer who is wearing employees out, then you are getting lots of experience, but you are getting lots of experience in the bad way of doing work. Pretty useless if you ask me.

my country is trying to come up to the level where all developed countries are. who said tht was easy??
9-5 is tough in a organization which is expanding at 300% every year & has to compete against cash rich companies ...not everyone is google,ebay
doesn't mean to say we should lose humour or fun out of life ...

Now, the good way of growing 300% every year is to increase your employees by 300%. The bad way of growing 300% every year is to increase the workload on your employees by 300%. Also, I don't see how over-worked software developers working hard will automatically make the country developed

[Devesh H Rao]

My two cents��

�How much software innovation happens in India? - Minimal............�

Innovation depends on the work you get, at the given instant Indian IT industry is not so well entrenched in product development or cutting edge technologies. IT is sort of clerical to a major extent with some �IQ� thrown in wherever required, but you ever expect someone to write a �Hamlet� when the assignment given to him is write a,b,c�z 10 times.

What also gets me worked up is why do we expect things to come to us without hard work, why would some company in the west give an Indian company cutting edge or innovative work unless the company in question proves its caliber first?

Working long hours is the norm, but is it just the case for IT. Any one living in this part of the world needs to just have a look around and see the kind of effort a human being puts in to earn a decent living. Why do we forget that we are a developing country where the government is not rich enough to feed a person if the person is incapable of taking care of himself/herself?

Do the people who are complaining, mean to say present day America or the developed west was built on a platter and no hard work went in it to be what they are at this time.

�Inefficient managers�

Someday people who blame their managers become managers themselves, but does the problem get solved, No it just gets passed on. So why blame others when we ourselves cannot change.


�Staying Alive In A Software Job�

People always have the choice of giving up the job and taking up something which is less stressful, but is that a favored option. Just take a poll on the number of people who complain about the work, who are ready to leave IT for something else and the picture gets clearer.


�my company, if someone leaves office at 5PM, everyone use to make
comments on him/her�


Please people, nobody hangs you if you leave early. Comments never kill and it goes like this �if you got to go, you got to go�. It is a different issue if you get fired for leaving early and I would like examples of that in IT before people start complaining about comments being made about someone leaving early.

PS: We have a guy in our office who sits late regularly, we in the team actually used to take bets on the time he would leave, a innovative way to earn some hard cash don�t you think.



Disclaimers

1.No one forces anyone to sit for more time, everyone has the option of leaving after putting in the mandatory time or if faced with a manager who doesn�t quite understand that everyone has a family unlike him one can always quit. If the person in question is good, it really would surprise me if the person doesn�t land another job soon.
2.The situation is not applicable just for IT Industry and no it is not a bad thing, yes it is bad for me but it is not bad for the future generations [I just hope they do not turn out cry babies]
3.No, I am not a manager and I do not intend to be a manager. I intend to take a break from IT and freelance as an amateur photographer sometime soon and yes the security for me to even think about an alternate career is coz IT gave me that leeway which my dad could have only dreamed off in his times.


All said and done, there is always going to be two sides to a coin.

I remember a saying which goes something on the lines.

It�s always the small bushes or the saplings which get stripped when a herd grazes, but why do we forget that every tree was once a sapling.

[Manish Hatwalne]

Davseh -- I am impressed!!!

I am sort of tired now of writing all those long, verbose posts and fighting various stereotype prejudices ppl have about India. Glad there's somone else who's still young & foolhardy (saying it in good sense) to take it on....

Somehow the questions/comments are loaded/leading in some way...as in, what they say is not entirely incorrect; it is valid -- but that's not the whole truth and that's not the description of Indian software Industry. There are lots of companies where you can work for regular 8-9 hours per day and do well. I am doing it myself!

As for innovation, the perception is valid upto a great extent. Indian software industry is primarily service oriented industry with more stress on consulting, there are companies like mithi, Iopsis who make products and do well. They are not well-known though. And there are internationally known innovators from Sabeer Bhatia to Bose of Bose Hi-fi Audio-- but of course, in such cases their Indian orgin is ignored but US citizenship is flaunted....smart!!!

- Manish
[ November 11, 2005: Message edited by: Manish Hatwalne ]

[Stuart Ash]

So what does monsieur Eric LEMAITRE think of all this now??

[Devesh H Rao]

One of my ex-PM/boss/mentor used to tell me that an "Image" is nothing but a reflection of the self that you project.

So if a person has an image that he can take anything thrown at him, I will go to the extent to say that it is his fault that he gets trod on.

The person will come across as a weak person who is not able to protect his rights and he has no business complaining about the so called �taken for granted� attitude of his superiors.

I personally, in my limited experience of 4 years in IT have worked on 5 different projects under 6 different PM, both Indian and Non-Indian both in India and out of India and have not once been forced to work under duress.

I have definitely put in more than 12 hours on more than one occasion, but I have also put in 4 hours in a day without being questioned.

We actually cannot use specific instances to generalize a situation prevalent anywhere,
Just as a swallow doesn�t make a spring, a blog doesn�t make a sweatshop


PS: What has got me even more worked up is

�"How much software innovation happens in India? - Minimal............Surprisingly, put the same Indian in a company 'in' the US and he suddenly becomes innovative and a thought leader in his field.�

The next time I get asked to work on a design, I am going to point out the blog and say �Sorry I am currently working in a firm located in India, and hence I cannot do that kind of work here, please get me a job in a firm in US and I will do the needful�

[ November 11, 2005: Message edited by: Devesh H Rao ]
[ November 11, 2005: Message edited by: Devesh H Rao ]

[Preeti Jain]

No Harshad Oak is not in Oracle!
He has got his own company Rightrix SOlutions in Pune!! In fact he was my J2EE professor 2 years back while I was doing my Msc(comp Sc) in Pune!

[Hu Jiabao]

J2EE professor? . Does your University has Swing professor,AJAX professor?

[Eric Lemaitre]

Hi Stuart !

So what does monsieur Eric LEMAITRE think of all this now??

Is there anything personnal in this question ? This post was not intended to offend anyone, just to bring info, and discussions remained fair all along.

I personnally understand better why many Indians want to go in US, as India still is globally right now an ancillary partner, doing the "not noble" parts of offshore projects (coding) while "noble" parts (design, integration) remain abroad, but this is changing fast.

Another very interesting element to consider is Chad Fowler's book "my job went to India" on western side, so as to design a job keeping strategy on both sides, western & Indian (for as Indians get richer they are becoming too expensive, themselves being offshored to China, so everyone has to wonder about this).

Best regards.

[Stuart Ash]

No Eric, there is nothing personal in that question. And no offense taken, it is obvious that your posting was not in bad taste.

My reason in asking mainly was because in this forum, as I have seen, India-centric topics are typically discussed only by Indians, while you, evidently non-Indian, came up with this topic. Hence, my curiosity in trying to understand you curiosity in this area.

[Eric Lemaitre]

Hi Stuart !

No Eric, there is nothing personal in that question. And no offense taken, it is obvious that your posting was not in bad taste.

I hope so, for I am already spotted on Java Ranch as the "always whining french" who complains not to be able to get US sponsorship despite good credentials, so I hope discussions will remain fair. We are a team of 3 highly skilled IT pros at work, but all of my other colleages worked some years in US on H1B and left voluntary, so all got easily sponsored except me, which doesn't help.

My reason in asking mainly was because in this forum, as I have seen, India-centric topics are typically discussed only by Indians, while you, evidently non-Indian, came up with this topic. Hence, my curiosity in trying to understand you curiosity in this area.

Honestly I am greatly considering Chad Fowler's book "my job went to India", and drew my own conclusions quite similar to his own ones. So I am gathering info so as to build a strategy out of remaining an IT professionnal whatever happens, for I like this job too much to change. As millions of western IT pros in Europe and US will lose their job for outsourcing countries, among which India which is the most outstanding of such countries right now, it is my favourite target for evaluating job survival counter strategies. Outsourcing is and will remain a very strong business strategy which will cost US hundreds of thousands jobs anyway and will stay for long if not forever, for all jobs which can be outsourced for cheaper will be, so it becomes vital for western people like me to cope.

Best regards.