Raghuraman Guruswamy wrote:
Top Indian IT service companies have more than 1 lakh employees.
So you can imagine the number of IT professionals which i believe is not the case in the western world.Also, since many IT service companies rely mostly on client's budget and profit factors,there is no other alternative for this. Typically, in a development project here in India, it would be a team of 5 people with 3 being freshers.So, the onus is on the experienced people to train the freshers and also complete the project on time which invariably leads to increased stress levels and long working hours. I also agree that people in US,UK etc would like to be passionate programmers for some 20 years and more. But, its not possible here (atleast in service companies )Also there is the social status factor here. Many people/friends/family members would love us to become team leads/project managers some 6 or 8 years down the lane.Nobody knows the value of being a Technical Architect or Solution Architect. Also there is very little scope for people to grow technically in service companies.But, i believe thats not the case over there.
Ashu Upadhyaya wrote:I suspect you belong to the tribe mentioned above by me or do not have much exposure to the IT industry or design/development! Look around you. Indian IT industry is full of such people.
Ashu Upadhyaya wrote:I hope you are aware that degrees like BE/BTech/MCA/MSc/MIT/BIT/MBA.....you name it..........are for name sake only and do not add any value whatsoever to your job preparedness. This is irrespective of which institution you join or Fulltime/Parttime mode. This is the case with prestigious institutes/universities too. Some pockets here & there in some places are exceptions. I myself did my graduation from an elite institute. As one of my older colleague (a BTech topper from REC now NITs and MTech from IIT) put it - "These are just ornamental". Only advantage is they provide campus recruitment in good times.
All companies are fully aware of this and feeling the pain. Earlier companies were constrained to show up these fancy degrees (16-years of edu etc) to get work or send people to onsite projects. Now outsourcing being the order of the day and all the work coming to India this is no longer a constraint. Here at Bangalore big/good MNCs (both Product & Services) who earlier took only BE/MCA only from reputed institutes are willingly recruiting people who are just graduates! One thing I will say that if one has some support system (read Lobby based on once state/language) then that makes ones life smoother and such people do not feel such dilemmas degree or no degree even BA/BBA are PMs.
You have work exp to back you which is a big plus. I will suggest you to just purchase some degree (full time) & *****for GOD SAKE DO NOT leave job that too on technology you enjoy working for any fancy degree*****.
I have seen scores of people like you who did some MSc (Full time) while doing the full time job from many universities in South India esp from Tamilnadu and working for biggest names in product development companies leave alone services companies. Also many companies looks very favorably to CDAC 6-month course and NCST(now cdac) 1-yr FPGDST. Latter has very good centres at Mumbai for its various diplomas which attract all the big guns of IT (even companies like Thoughtworks take people after this diploma from campus itself). In addition Certifications in Java will do no harm either.
Hope better sense prevails upon you and you leave this degree non-sense and focus on other important things like learning, soft skills and building network while "purchasing" some FT-degree.