meeting 8/20

Meeting with Vijay, Murugesh, Hari and Senthil Kumar.

What’s a typical salary for CEG fresh graduate. The range I heard was 2 lakhs-4 lakhs. Hari mentioned that there was a news stating some one in 3rd sem CEG being picked up by Microsoft for 6 lakhs. This has come in news with photos.

Why is the large amount of money earned by s/w professional not going to the poor people - including farmer? What does people do with large ‘discretionary income’ by software professionals. They invest in expensive cars, cinemas, change cell phones often, make travel/vacation.

The top 5 s/w companies in India: TCS, Wipro, InfoSys, Satyam & HCL. These companies employ roughly 80% of the total s/w professionals in India. Assume each at 40K employees – we have less than 250K employees in S/w.

Big names are going for low tech work. Like ensure the cannon printer is printing fine.

When the attrition is far less – say 6%, the company has to pay the annual increments with no extra cost to client. This puts the pressure on companies to get creative and move folks around so that they can still survive. Upper management folks are tracking charts like how many people are in the team, what’s the average salary, average time in the project – and are being constantly challenged to improve these numbers – to meet the profitability needs.

TCS lay off 1000 people and this seems to have triggered issue. They were let go on performance basis. It is too difficult to explain performance in 6 months.

The reliving order is still present in India.

The normal time taken to hire a new person is 4-6 weeks. 12 weeks is not unheard off. It is normal to give 4 weeks notice to current employer in India.

ISO9000 is not too important differentiating factor – as smaller companies don’t demand such restrictions on smaller vendors. Usually the jobs are done through smart people and the process don’t add significant value.

Linux is used heavily in the org. We wish to contribute to open source. However the open source network is highly intimidating. We fear that we might make a mistake in our check in and this could bite us back. The open source code in most cases is very well written – so we got to make equally strict coding to be accepted in the inner circle. Also, the folks in open source are having long memory – so any mistake might be difficult to recover soon. The idea might be to pick up a not so popular software or a narrow market software and make contributions – instead of say, Linux core.

Our parents were more harsh on us than we are with our kids. One potential reason – our parents 40 years back were mostly trying to make the ends meet in basic form. Today the basic needs of food and shelter are all met very easily and the problem/drive are for esteem needs.
How about the idea of releasing a whole bunch of code that’s written and is laying in a corner – not being used. This has to be tested, commented and documented before offering to open source.
BPO translators are paid 2-4K a month. This raises to 10K if you can talk over the phone like an US person.
Now we are 100+.