This is place for some really serious stuff. Keep out unless you are very sure. Might appear to be biased and may not seem to be objective. But believe me I try my best to be unbiased, rational and objective.
That's it.
Every one's heard of the IT boom. And many were and are a part of it. But how far is it successful and useful in the long run. Come to think of it, even I was a part of it.
I was one of the few(namely 30 of 50) who were hand picked (read selected for no cause) by an IT giant(to name it would be politically wrong, pick any firm - they are all the same) to augment its highly skilled and motivated workforce (of 60K+? ).
Do you get the irony? If you don't just read on, if you do, well, read on again.
In the campus interview conducted - the cutoff was a whopping 70% (in Andhra University this was deemed an almost impossible task for most branches except - it wasn't the problem of students - its a problem of the establishment , more on this later). Now in my college with roughly 700 Engg. pass-outs per year, there weren't even 300 who had cleared all papers on the first attempt (prob being the afore-mentioned). Then of the remaining hardly half managed the cutoff, so on the whole 200 students took the test. Of this the top 50 were selected (and we were told they had no upper limit for the intake, then why only 50?).
An then stage two: The training was supposed to be in Trivandrum in a facility built exclusively for training - but the few hand picked numbers were so high that nearly at least 4 more training centers had to be used. But Indians being what we are, no one was much concerned about this inability of an IT Giant. After all if a government can fail what is an IT firm in comparison?
And now the posting: How can anyone in a sane mind believe that a firm with 60K+ employees boast of a highly skilled, motivated and-all-the-good no great adjectives workforce? The firm then would be the country's very best and just think of the country - if really 60K people were so gifted wont the country be very different from what it is? But then this is India and we are Indians in an era of Globalisation, a time when and a place where everyone speaks of themselves in the best possible superlatives - people have been forced to lose their modesty - you have to boast of your "achievements", even if it is only a class-third in a 2 student when you were in your third grade.
Unfortunately the so called IT boom has given a variant of this "boast" and "gorilla style chest thumping" virus to the academic world.
That is the only contribution the IT boom has done to India. Otherwise, it has been pretty lack-lusture performance.Lets try to read between the lines of the IT claims:
1. High salary: Can't be maintained in the face of an appreciating Rupee - are they partly responsible for keeping the Rupee down? Might be.
Ask any IT firm employee - (s)he would vouch for the low pay to work ratio.
2. Skilled workforce: Every Tom, Dick and Harry (or their Indian counterparts) can get into these firms by hook or crook. Definitely skilled they must be in using loopholes of the law.
3. Add to the country's economic baseline: And those who are not of this set are the really skilled ones. But by their so-called high pay and career development these people are lured away from places which really take not just the country but humanity forward (thank the IT firms for not recruiting doctors and surgeons)
And finally what is it that they do - they just maintain some old code and provide support to applications coded by someone else - really a very demanding and mentally challenging task for all their "skilled workforce" (satire intended if you don't get it)
To conclude - some things are better left to imagination.
