Pretty much. He doesn't seem to grasp the reality that solving the problem is political and like gun laws in the US there are those that will oppose every change no matter how small every step of the way for money regardless of the human or planetary cost.
She never said she was very good at what she did. Yes, she was working like crazy but that is a different thing. Being overly invested in career mostly makes you very good at what you do.
It has less to do with China but more to do with the Author being so far from the home. Tomorrow her Mom might need her more and the government can only help that much. These are all the choices people make in life..
I find it weird when people curse Indian IT companies which were once their employers. Is it not true that once upon a time you were only fit to join them because no one else would have employed you.
I worked for TCS for about 3 months. This was not my only job prospect but I didn't know any better. I negotiated a pretty good salary and it was remote work with no travel. I thought it was going to be a dream job. Then, I started to realize how inefficient certain parts of the company was. It took about 1 month for them to provision a laptop. They screwed up my payroll setup and I couldn't get them to fix it. I had several other issues that just took forever to resolve. Once I did finally get a laptop and got to work, I realized that none of my team had the skills that they should have had to be on the project that we were on and that I been brought in to train them all (Unbeknownst to me). I left after a few months. My manager was shocked that they I was trying to leave and he tried to pressure me into staying. I did not stay. I might have just hit a streak of bad luck, but I will never go back to a large "IT body shop" again.
Gratitude shouldn't come in the way of evaluating the company fairly. After all, companies evaluate our performance coldly and ask if they can get better work for the same salary from someone else. Nothing wrong in doing the same to them.
I find it really strange that people are down voting this comment.
Not only do these Big IT companies hire in mass, they also spend insane amounts of money and time training students who come out of college without exposure to real work.
Yeah they pay peanuts and yes you would be just a face in the crowd. But they likely give you the biggest break of your life.
Not everyone gets training. I spent a good amount for education and training with a 3rd party company after my bachelors. The company (1 of top 5 among Indian IT cos back then) came for recruitment and talked about hifi projects in their presentation. Then they put me in language testing. I have to check an excel sheet and make sure that the text is displayed correctly in some 30 languages.
1. The training is useful only if you are allocated to the project in the same domain.
2. You are trained in some relevant tech so that you can look for jobs else where.
Both of this is not the case. Mostly everyone is trained in mysql, language(Java, C# etc) or maybe mainframe systems. What extra are you getting over a self taught programmer. (You would get very less in real because the later has some experience working with some project where as you have none). You are then allocated to some support project where you don't get a chance to write a single line of code.
Did not understand what you are complaining against. There is no university education or any kind of training for life. My entire experience in tech is learning a new piece of technology every few years.
Any company that is likely to hire can only give you base set of skills, beyond this its on you take it forward from there. Also in my experience these companies have routine training for most bleeding edge tech. Not many people sign up for it. During my time there, very few people had the inclination or appetite to take on technically intensive work and bulk of the crowd was in only because they needed a job and it was easy to get one here.
Plus the motivation of many people was getting easy abroad travel opportunities and ability to get by life doing low intensity tech work at a good monthly pay.
I have worked for a year in IBM. We had a two weeks training course on Lotus Notes, sub-contracted out to a training institute. In a dingy place, in an inner part of the city.
Even in companies like Infosys, most training is done in-house. So we are not talking about insane amounts of money. Additionally, if you need to really spend insane amounts of money to train freshers, then either you are hiring wrong, or you are dumping complex work on them. Either way, it's the problem of the company.
> students who come out of college without exposure to real work.
Of course, students out of college will not have any exposure to real work. There is no real internship system in India.
Also, training fresh students, just out of college is a process followed by literally every company on earth, which is hiring freshers.
> Yeah they pay peanuts and yes you would be just a face in the crowd. But they likely give you the biggest break of your life.
They are able to do this because, there is a huge supply of educated engineers, and an acute shortage of jobs. Companies like Infosys mostly outsource mundane work, to hastily trained engineers (to join Infosys, it doesn't matter what your major is, Electrical, Civil, Mechanical, Aero, anything will do.), essentially using them as mules. Fortunately, unlike the coal workers of previous generations, the domain of work allows for natural skill development. So yes, a break in life, but not the biggest.
> People need to show some gratitude.
They do. There is a lot of gratitude. But also simmering anger at the failure of stalwarts like Infosys for failing to develop business to move up the value chain.
>>Even in companies like Infosys, most training is done in-house. So we are not talking about insane amounts of money.
Infosys provides free housing AND pays salaries for 4-6 month training period, during which you don't do a dust-peck worth of production work. This is for thousands of freshers. So yes its for all practical purposes insane amount of money.
>>Additionally, if you need to really spend insane amounts of money to train freshers, then either you are hiring wrong, or you are dumping complex work on them.
When given good work complain the work is too complex, when not given complain of lack of opportunities to learn.
>>Either way, it's the problem of the company.
Yeah, In India its always somebody else's problem.
>>Of course, students out of college will not have any exposure to real work. There is no real internship system in India.
There is. It doesn't arrive on a plate though campus placements.
>>Also, training fresh students, just out of college is a process followed by literally every company on earth, which is hiring freshers.
NO. In US you either perform or will be fired.
This level of entitlement among us Indians is sickening.
If people really think there are jobs and companies beneath them, please feel free to go work wherever you like.
I like the last one. True, Infosys like companies started as a service company and never expanded their business to develop out of the service sector which is bad. My observation is, all these service companies only focus on their profits and never reinvest to expand the business out of it, maybe developing a product to start with.
Why do companies have to move out of service business? There are so many companies which would give complete product development to service companies because it is not in their domain of expertise.
Personally they should have improved upon the service business. All the present good frameworks etc does not need to be rewritten but has to applied in a better way.
Service companies developing products mostly happens for non critical line of business apps, and usually its just an extension to the apps already serviced by the company.
However, BigIT in India could have latched onto that work and move into core product development.
Two reasons they did not.
One, their cash cow is service and moving people into product development would hurt their bottomline.
Two, they failed to see the obvious growing threat of automation. This I think is their biggest failure.
When you see the threat to your core business, its your responsibility to plan for the future.
I feel that this is a over simplified version of a much deeper problem and cannot be concluded based on the experience of the Author alone. There are many things that cause burnout and many different reasons that cause depression. In the case of author the Work did it but there are people in this world who get burnt out because of sickness of their loved ones or even because of ambition & their vision. Interestingly the word depression is not even mentioned in the article.
It's not all rainbows and sunshine - my brain likes to be _interested_, so as soon as I feel a challenge is "figured out" (even if it's incomplete) I tend to move on to the next thing.
So it's easy for me to be engaged, hard for me to complete anything.
