Infosys going through bad phase, faces talent crunch

New Delhi: India’s largest software exporter firm Infosys is going through a troubled phase. While on one hand Infosys CEO and Managing Director S Gopalakrishnan said the rising rupee issue is a long-term crisis, what’s also a major concern is the talent crunch that the IT industry is going through.

There were 2,50, 000 engineering graduates last year and the IT/ ITeS industry absorbed about 60 per cent of them. But this is clearly not enough for an industry which is looking to employ over 1.6 million people by the end of the year.

IT companies, especially BPOs are now resorting to what could be seen as a lowering of standards. The IT firms are also increasingly hiring locals from foreign countries.

The non-Indian workforce comprised 9.6 per cent of the IT majors’ total workforce in 2006-07,
and the number is set to rise. Wipro Technologies, for instance, hired over 200 college/ business school graduates from the US and Europe in 2006-07. This is a 150 per cent rise in the recruitment of locals in their overseas operations over the previous year 2005-’06.

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), on the other hand, as its long term strategy is looking at having 15-20 per cent of their workforce from foreign countries. Infosys Technologies, during its first quarter results for financial year 2007-08, said: “Outside employment could shoot up by 25 per cent in future.” Infosys already has 3 per cent of its workforce made up of foreign nationals, and has seen their numbers grow 28 per cent from fiscal ‘05-’06 to ‘06-’07.

Original Story

Infosys BPO to lower recruitment standards

In order to keep up with the demand for manpower, the BPO industry is being forced to lower standards.

There were 2,50, 000 engineering graduates last year and the IT/ ITeS industry absorbed about 60 per cent of them.But this is clearly not enough for an industry which is looking to employ over 1.6 million people by the end of the year.

Companies, especially BPOs are now resorting to what could be seen as a lowering of standards, problems the IT industry in India has faced for some time.But now with the demand for manpower escalating way beyond what is available, BPOs have decided to lower recruitment standards.

Typically, only the top six per cent applicants get hired but this may now go up to 15 per cent.This will be compensated by more intensive training.

Genpact for example has decided to increase its training programme by two weeks.''Companies will find ways. I think the fact is that there is enough room within wage inflation and differences between wages of other countries and India. ''This is not going to be a short-term issue. The answer is simple, train and educate a lot more people,'' said Pramod Bhasin, President & CEO, Genpact.

Similar modelInfosys too says it will have to follow a similar model or their profit margins will take a hit.''The people who are excited about the BPO industry, who want to join it and are capable of being hired by it will have to wait as it's not a short term thing. It will take time,'' said Amitabh Chaudhry, CEO, Infosys BPO.

So far most BPOs wanted graduates at the entry-level. Now, companies like Infosys say they can take even those who are not graduates.While this may increase the manpower it is sure to lower standards in an industry that is already facing a shortage of technical know-how and communication skills.

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IT jobs will double to 3.2 m in four years - Nandan Nilekani

Employment generation by IT and ITES sectors will double to 3.2 million within the next four to five years, feels Mr Nandan M. Nilekani, Co-Chairman, Infosys Technologies Ltd.

Delivering the 12th Prof. Y. Nayudamma Memorial Lecture, on ‘Information Technology for Development’, at the R.M.K. Engineering College, Kavaraipettai, on Wednesday, Mr Nilekani observed that it took the industry 30 years to reach the present level of employment of 1.6 million. “What has happened in the last 30 years, will now happen in the next four to five years,” he said.

Mr Nilekani also received Nayudamma Award for the Year 2007 from Dr Anil Kakodkar, Chairman, Atomic Energy Commission and Secretary, Department of Atomic Energy, Government of India.

He said that IT worked well when it came to projects of one entity on a national scale, such as railway reservation or the National Stock Exchange. However, when it came to integrating applications at multiple regions, “it is a different ballgame”.

“Every city and every State is determining its own applications. A large number of projects, but we are not really able to replicate and scale them up across the country. And therefore clearly the challenge is how do we take elsewhere projects that are run in one State or one city and replicate,” Mr Nilekani said. He also stressed the need for introducing a national identification number for all citizens and presented it to the audience as a major project involving the IT industry.

“Unlike in the US, where everybody has a social security number, we do not have one number to identify our citizens,” he said.

In India, there are different numbers to identify a citizen — such as passport number, PAN number, TIN and ration card BPL number.

“So, one of the big challenges of the next decade is how to create a national way of systematically assigning an identification number to everyone. Because once you do that, you can do that for many things. Today, thousands of crores of subsidies are being given to the poor, but they are not reaching the poor people, because there is no way to directly reach benefits to the poor. The national identification number will actually enable the govt to directly target benefits to the poor

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It’s a great time to be an educated middle-class person in India - Mohandas Pai

The amazing transformation in the country’s job sector has only just begun, says Infosys’ Mohandas Pai.

GRN Somashekar

Welcome change: T.V. Mohandas Pai, HR chief of Infosys, says it’s a great time to be an educated middle-class person in today’s India.

Rasheeda Bhagat

He may have started his career in Infosys Technologies in 1994 in finance but, today, as a director on the Board and chief of HR, T.V. Mohandas Pai is all passion and excitement on the HR scene in India, where he sees HR as “the biggest challenge in the next 20 years. We have to invest in people, pay them well and respect them,” he says. Spelling out the amazing transformation on the job front in India in recent years, and the role played by the private sector in this, he says that when he qualified as a CA in 1982, “I had 12 job offers, all from the public sector, except for one. In the private sector, more than talent, jobs went by relationships, as we had a very feudal business culture. But the public sector took the brightest people. Till the last decade it was the one that respected the educated middle-class with no credentials… who didn’t have a chance in hell of getting into a good private company because it worked in very feudal and family oriented ways. But now the balance has shifted and it’s a great time to be an educated middle-class person in India, and the IT industry has created this. It has sent a message to parents: Invest in a child and pay good fees, because he/she will get a good salary.”

Pai was born in Bangalore in a lower middle-class family; his mother was a schoolteacher and his father was raised in an orphanage. The child was sent to a Bangalore school; “in those days you had to be first in class, and get 100 marks in mathematics.”

So did he manage it?

“Oh yes, it was not negotiable,” recalls Pai, seated in his spacious room at the sprawling green Infosys campus in Bangalore. As a child he was fascinated by books and continues to be a voracious reader — “name me a book and chances are I would have read it”. His holidays were spent in the public library where his mother had a membership and he devoured the books there “from Victor Hugo to the Grimm brothers.”

He did his CA and law together; “I wanted to be independent. I didn’t want to work for anybody; I was a rebel.” In 1982 he started practice as a CA in his friend’s office, did consultancy for Prakash Roadlines group from 1986, and later joined them as Executive Director, and remained there till he joined Infosys in 1994.

Even today Pai is visibly excited as he describes how he joined the IT giant. A friend in Enam Securities that handled the Infosys IPO suggested he buy some shares through private placement in 1992 “and I bought 1,500-2,000 shares at Rs 85.” Later he attended the investor conference held by the company before the IPO, along with a friend. “Murthy and Nandan (Nilekani) were making presentations and I told my friend to ask a lot of questions on the prospectus. Those days I had a collection of 3,000 reports; I used to have annual reports for breakfast, would go to AGMs, hound the management and ask a lot of questions. I was a bit of a shareholder activist,” he says.

He had invested in ACC, Kothari Sugars, Tata Steel and Bangalore Leasing, “though I didn’t make much money in equity!” He attended the AGM after the IPO at West End Hotel where all the six founders were there in suits, with three stenographers taking notes. “I asked them ‘why are you paying yourselves so little…?’ they were getting Rs 12,000 or so. I said ‘you should pay yourselves more, you’re making good money and you should respect talent’.” He also asked them why they were paying their auditors less!

After that he was in touch with Nilekani and at subsequent analyst meets too he posed questions on why Infosys was holding so much cash. “Then Nandan met me for lunch in December 1993, and said ‘we have a vacancy; will you join?’ I said ‘I’ll only join if you give me a senior position, but not as an employee, only a consultant’. He said ‘okay, come on board’.”

Murthy, the finance manager

So he joined in February 1994, and worked on several projects such as a private placement, ESOPs, annual report and so on. Pai is effusive in his praise of Murthy’s financial skills. “He was working on a financial model for Infosys, and working with him was a fascinating experience. Here was this man using a software... spreadsheet, et al. Actually he had prepared a financial model — he did 98 per cent of the work, my contribution was only 2 per cent — to forecast Infosys’s growth, and it’s a model that we use even today. He’s an unbelievable man; he’s probably the best finance manager this country has seen. His understanding of finance, the fundamentals, is unbelievable... he’s simply brilliant.”

They worked on this model together and, one day in 1995, “Murthy came to my room and said ‘why don’t you join us?’” G.R. Naik was retiring as head of finance, and “he told me I should take his place. So I joined as Vice President, Finance, and the rest has been a dream run!”

On why he shifted from Finance to HR in 2005, Pai says, “It was a great journey in finance. The most important thing we did in finance was to set standards in financial reporting, corporate governance, transparency, quality of work, engaging government on policy issues, the ADR, etc. While doing all this I worked very hard to create a team of finance people.”

In April 2005 he told Murthy he wanted to step down as CFO, telling him: “I’ve done all this for 12 years and enjoyed every bit. But if I hang on too much, I will not allow my people their day in the sun, and won’t be true to myself or Infosys because a leader is supposed to create new leaders. If I hang on, they’ll get frustrated and that’s not right. So he said ‘why don’t you become Director, Finance and Bala can become CFO’ and I said that means he reports to me again, so what has changed. I should step away.”

Reluctantly, adds Pai, Murthy agreed, and the change was effected in May 2006. When asked what he’d do next “I told Murthy I’ll do some finance stuff, administration, and fade away. And he said: ‘No, handle HR. I know you’ll do it very well.” Around that time Hema (Ravichandran) wanted to go, and Pai stepped in, but as a director for governance, mentorship and policy. “I’m also responsible for HR, education and research, and now the Leadership Institute. When Murthy says something you listen! So that was it.”

Obviously he dotes on Murthy; so what was it like for him when he called it quits from day-to-day work at Infosys?

“It was a big personal loss for me. Murthy is such a brilliant man, I enjoyed going into the room and fighting with him, raising issues. He was my mentor; he mentored and challenged me to realise my potential. I learnt everything from him; how to be a better human being, the virtues of discharging obligations, to be courageous and stand up for what you believe in. I also learnt from him how to build a great company. He was like a foster father to me after I lost my father.”

Corruption

Did he have to deal with corruption and ethical issues?

“Yes, but comparatively less. First of all our need to deal with the government has been less compared to a manufacturing company. Two, we came at the right time when government activities vis-À-vis business came down in the liberalisation era. Three, because we were in technology and the export sector we were treated specially. The government did not understand what we were doing, and kept away! There was a mystery and aura about us.”

Also, he adds, IT had “a wonderful person called Dewang Mehta who created a brand equity for the industry”, and not too many “demands” were made from it.

But when they had to face corruption, “we remained steadfast and said we’ll not succumb and people respected us. For example in a North Indian city known for corruption, the officer said: “Infosys ko de do, donR 17;t waste time!”

Pai adds that integrity is very important in Infosys where background checks are rigorous; “we have low tolerance levels for breaches in integrity; if you breach you have to go.”

Dream for Infosys

“I want to see it become the most respected name in IT services in the world; we’re probably in the top 10 now, within 2-3 years we should be in top 5, but we have to become the most respected and symbolic of the aspirations of educated people the world over, recognised for quality, value system and ability to meet client needs.”

Original Story

Exodus: Top four IT players lose 10K employees in Q1

New Delhi: Indian IT companies, grappling with an appreciating rupee eating into their profits, are also finding it hard to retain employees with the top-four firms - TCS, Infosys, Wipro and Satyam - witnessing an exodus of about 10,000 people in the first quarter.

Although, all the four firms collectively hired more than 25,000 employees in the April-June period, the net addition was just about 16,300 - taking their total headcount to 2,85,357 employees.

Except for Satyam Computers, attrition rate went higher at Infosys, Tata Consultancy Service and Wipro from both the previous quarter as well as the year-ago period.

All the four companies reported an adverse impact of rupee rise on their profitability and margins, and are looking at various hedging measures, which include improving employee utilisation rates.

However, analysts believe the high attrition rates, mostly triggered by employees seeking higher salaries, could adversely impact the companies' plans to improve utilisation rates.

TCS, the biggest in terms of revenue as well as headcount, saw an exodus of about 2,500 employees, while just over 2,000 people quit the country's second largest software exporter, Infosys.

The employee loss is estimated to be much higher at about 3,500 at Wipro, the country's third-biggest IT firm, while Satyam, the smallest of the four, saw the lowest number -- about 1,600 people -- leaving.

Interestingly, April-June quarter is the period when most of the software firms implement annual wage hikes and see a sharp surge in new hirings.

TCS, Infosys, Wipro and Satyam had net additions of 5,512, 3,730, 4,319 and 2,716 employees respectively in the quarter.
TCS reported an attrition rate of 11.5 per cent, up from 10.6 per cent a year ago and 11.3 per cent in the previous quarter, while it stood at 13.7 per cent for Infosys, unchanged from the previous quarter but higher than 11.9 per cent in the April-June period last year.

Satyam saw its attrition rate falling to 14.9 per cent from 15.7 per cent in the January-March period this year and 19.2 per cent in the year-ago period, where as Wipro witnessed a sharp surge to 20 per cent from 17 per cent in the previous quarter and 15 per cent in the year-ago quarter.

Wipro says its high attrition rate was driven by various factors such as seasonality and a spike in the number of employees
going for higher studies during the quarter, as well as the company's practise of implementing annual wage hikes in the third quarter.

The annual hikes are fully reflected in first quarter results of Infosys and TCS, while some of the other front line IT firms do the same either in the second quarter or spread it over a number of quarters.

"This year, in particular, we have seen a spike in the percentage of people who have gone for higher studies, which is not very uncommon to see in quarter one, because all admissions open up around this time," Wipro Corporate Vice President (Human Resource) Pratik Kumar told analysts in a conference call to discuss the company's quarterly results.

However, Wipro is anticipating a decline in attrition going forward as the company has decided to advance annual wage hikes to August, while it does not expect people leaving for higher education to be a factor.

"We have been effecting our offshore salary increases in the beginning of third quarter, unlike some of the industry peers who do it at the start of the financial year. This used to expose us and, to an extent, we used to be vulnerable on that count," Kumar added.

Infosys' Director Human Resources Mohandas Pai said exodus has somewhat stabilised at the company in the past one year, after taking into consideration the 1.5 per cent involuntary attrition at the fresher level.

Pai said this accounted for people who joined at the fresher level but did not complete the training after failing the qualifying test.

"Second quarter of last year we had 2,040 people leave us, third quarter 2,040 and the fourth quarter it came down to 1,640 because of seasonalities. And this quarter it is 2,010," Pai said at a conference call on July 11 after announcing the company's first quarter results.

Wipro also recorded 1.4 per cent of forced attrition rate in the quarter. In the year-ago quarter, almost 2 percentage points of attrition was due to voluntary separation.

The company said this was partly due to a clean-up exercise on the issue of fake resumes, while some people left after being put in lower quartile performance on completion of annual appraisal cycles in the previous quarter.

No cap on private sector salaries: FM

MUMBAI: Setting at rest speculation that the government may put a cap on salaries for India Inc, Union Finance Minister P Chidamabaram has said there cannot be any legislation on pay packets nor was it desirable.

The government does not legislate on salaries and government ought not, he said here, replying to a question raised by a Mumbai university research student on whether low remuneration was acting as a disincentive to attract researchers.

Government salaries were no doubt poor as compared to market salaries. In fact, government salaries no where in the world match private sector except in Singapore, Chidambaram said during an interactive session with students on Friday.

I do not think there is any comparison between government salary and salary of private sector. In fact, to come into the research field it calls for certain attitude. Are you inclined towards academics and research? He asked.

Nobel laureate and renowned physicist sir C V Raman could not have been a great scientist if he had thought he should be paid like it icons Narayana Murthy and Azim Premji. Having said that I agree that compensation for teachers, professors and researchers should be considerably enhanced. When late Rajiv Gandhi was the prime minister, it was recognised through UGC that the salary of a professor should be equal to a government secretary and i believe today the professor's salary is equal to the secretary, he noted.

I also agree that you need better laboratories, libraries and access to internet (for quality research), the Finance Minister observed.

Infosys to hire 26,000 people this fiscal

IANS[ WEDNESDAY, JULY 11, 2007 02:01:36 PM]

BANGALORE: Infosys Technologies Ltd will be on a hiring spree this fiscal (2007-08) too.

In a bid to stem the growing attrition rate due to competition from the booming IT industry, especially the multinationals, the company plans to hire a whopping 26,000 people this fiscal.

"Hiring continues to be strong and attrition is under control. We plan to hire 26,000 people for the year. In the first quarter (April-June), the gross addition was 7,004 employees and net addition 3,730," Infosys head for HRD and education and research TV Mohandas Pai said in a statement here on Wednesday.

As a result, by the end of the quarter under review (Q1), the total number of employees in the company and its subsidiaries worldwide stood at 75,971, compared to 58,409 a year ago and 72,241 a quarter ago.

The attrition rate during the last 12 months has gone up marginally to 13.7 per cent in Q1 from 11.9 per cent in the same quarter a year ago.

"Our investments in training and education are giving us enhanced capabilities to make our clients more competitive and meet our growth objectives," Pai claimed.

Of the total headcount, 71,018 are software professionals, including 63,895 billable and 5,070 trainees. There are 1,859 lateral employees.

In terms of utilisation rate, the percentage has declined to 73.9 per cent from 76.1 per cent a year ago, excluding trainees. Of the total software professionals, 73.7 per cent are deployed offshore and 26.3 per cent onsite.

"Revenues from our onshore-offshore operations continue to remain in the same range (49-50 per cent) as in the last four quarters, with offshore slightly higher," Pai added.

Quitting Infosys - Jayson

After a stint of over 2 and half years, I have decided to quit from Infosys. Today is my last day in office. Unlike the day I left TCS, I feel quite happy today!

There isn’t much to write about Infy experience. I did meet a couple of good guys, but the overall experience can be hardly called “intellectually challenging”.

No, I am still in the rat race. You see, I have a family to feed So I am onto a smaller company, with the hope that I will find some really challenging technical stuff and would be able to make “some difference”.

From Tech, Life and Jayson!

New training policy: Infosys

Bangalore : Infosys Mysore campus has implemented a new training policy based on the cumulative grade point average (CGPA).

Under this CGPA policy, the trainees who are able to get 4 out of 5 points get a third opportunity to clear the training programme even if they have not been able to clear the first two exams. If they clear the third test, they are retained in the company.

The CGPA policy was introduced last year, but this year it has been changed. Now students have to get a minimum CGPA of 4 out of 5 points. Earlier the requirement of minimum CGPA to clear the training programme was not there.

Also Infosys changed the policy later this year, wherein trainees got only two chances to clear the training programme.And trainees who didn’t get through the two exams were not retained in the company.The new training policy would serve as a great relief for the Infosys trainees.

Original story

Infy BPO sees exit at top deck

BANGALORE: Infosys Technologies’ decision to buy out Citigroup’s 23% stake in its BPO arm, the erstwhile Progeon, and consolidate the operations with itself, helped the country’s second largest IT exporter offer a seamless, end-to-end suite of services to its customers. But it left one group of stakeholders, the senior employees in Infosys BPO, clearly dissatisfied, leading to an exodus of several top functionaries.

According to sources, about six people at the vice-president and executive vice-president level, including two functional heads, have quit Infosys BPO in the past three-four months. The senior employees who have left the company include Ramit Sethi, business head of knowledge services unit, and Mahesh K Rao, V-P and SBU head, banking & capital markets. Others to quit at the vice-president level were Shamik Gupta, Satish Shenoy and Christine Bhaskaran. When contacted, a spokesperson for Infosys BPO declined to comment.

Quite a few top guys had bid adieu to the BPO arm last year. The list included chief financial officer Ramesh Kamat, operations head Rajiv Kuchal, who is now with Onmobile, and Ram Akela, head of UK operations. The former CEO of Progeon, Akshaya Bhargava, quit early this year. He, in fact, quit before it was announced that Progeon’s operations would be merged with Infosys.

The allure of joining Progeon for senior and middle-level management professionals when it was started in ’02, was that it would offer ESOPs and subsequently get listed on the bourses - and in the process perhaps repeat Infosys’ iconic IPO success story. However, Infy’s decision to buy out Citigroup’s stake and cease treating the BPO arm as a standalone unit, which would go for an IPO, put paid to these plans.

Also, integration of the BPO business with that of the parent has lead to duplicity of work, resulting in some natural attrition. Moreover, the increased interaction with the Infosys’ sales and marketing teams in the go-to-market function, made the ‘stand alone’ company executives feel that their turf was being invaded.

Infosys had paid Rs 530 crore to buy out the 23% (fully-diluted basis) shareholding of Citigroup in the BPO arm during the first quarter of the current fiscal. And the buyout process saw the technology major reportedly offering two alternatives to the Progeon stock option holders. They were either to accept encashment of their holdings or to get these options converted into Infosys shares. The deadline for this exercise is said to be mid-December this year.
For the second quarter ended September 30, ’06 Progeon (now called Infy BPO) had a topline of Rs 157 crore.

Original story

IT firms hiring big in India

New Delhi, Nov. 21 (PTI): Domestic IT firms are continuing their hiring juggernaut, but it is their bench strength or reserve employees that is growing at a higher rate than the overall pace of recruitments.

The total headcount of the fab-five club of Indian IT space -- TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Satyam Computer and HCL Technologies -- has increased by nearly 38 per cent with addition of more than 75,000 employees in the past one year.

At the same time, the bench strength of the top five players has grown at a higher rate of 48.5 per cent with approximately 28,000 employees being added to their reserves during the same period.

The high levels of attrition and job-poaching prevalent in the technology sector has always forced companies to maintain a strong bench staff team with them -- which enables them to cope up with any sudden outgo of employees as well as in the times of any major contract win that requires a bigger talent pool.

However, the trend has been further shifting toward maintaining a bigger bench strength in the recent past, an analysis of total hiring patterns of the country's top five IT firms over the past one year shows.

Original story

India's outsourcing firms look to hire overseas

S Padmanabhan jokes that of all the roles he has played at Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., including taking India's largest computer services company public, his current job is the most challenging.

As the global human resources manager, Padmanabhan — "Paddy" as he likes to be called — is responsible for juggling the breakneck growth of the workforce, which reached 78,028 in September.

"You're dealing with over 78,000 moving parts," he said. "Last quarter we added 100 people a day."

Further complicating the picture is that today at least 8 of every 100 are foreigners working abroad, a number he expects to rise to 15 in about three years.

India's biggest information technology outsourcing companies are beginning to increase their workforces in other parts of the world. The trend is not being driven by shortages of talent in India but rather by factors such as the need for skills in languages other than English and the wish of clients to have staff to deal with in their own time zones.

For most Indian outsourcing companies, the U.S. is by far the biggest market, followed by Europe.

"As we globalize, we have to become more truly global in every aspect including in the people who work for us. That's what a truly global and multicultural firm is," said Nandan Nilekani, chief executive of Infosys Technologies Ltd., India's second-largest computer services company.

The increase in overseas hiring by Indian firms is in its infancy, with non-Indians making up about 2% to 3% of the industry's workforce, said Sunil Mehta, vice president of the National Assn. of Software and Service Companies, a trade group.

But among market leaders, the number is rising. Tata Consultancy began focusing on diversification in 2002 when U.S. companies were grappling with a downturn at home and began shifting more of their operations to other regions.

Tata began setting up development centers in time zones close to its major markets, with Latin America serving the U.S. and the local market; Eastern Europe serving Western Europe; and China serving its local market, Japan and South Korea.

"In Latin America, we have people with Spanish or Portuguese language skills. When we do work for Western Europe, it's important we have German or French speakers," Padmanabhan said.

S Gopalakrishnan, chief operating officer at Infosys, said one factor driving the trend, dubbed "near-sourcing," was the need to "de-risk": If outsourcing companies concentrate all of their operations in India, there is a risk that services could be disrupted by a crisis there.

Until recently, the outsourcing companies made heavy use of Indian staff members overseas. But as Indian talent becomes more expensive and the cost of visas rises, it is becoming cost-effective to employ local engineers in some regions.

Acquisitions are another driver behind the increased use of foreign nationals. Wipro Technologies, for instance, added 300 international staff members when it acquired Enabler, a European information technology company. HCL Technologies Ltd., a software company, bought a call center in Belfast, Northern Ireland, from Britain's BT Group and now has 2,000 workers there.

But the same factor that stops Indian information technology companies from making giant acquisitions overseas will also stop them from having a large portion of their workforce offshore — margins.

The market judges the companies on their ability to continue to deliver high margins. To do this, their current business model of using plentiful and highly skilled low-cost Indian workers to deliver global services remains unassailable.

Although the industry faces a shortage of engineers domestically, India still produces some 450,000 annually.

"In terms of the actual number of people employed," said Gopalakrishnan of Infosys, "India will continue to be the best and the largest."

Original story

You don't need techies to do IT

NEW DELHI: This is the IT industry’s clarion call to all those who have been left behind in the race to become ‘techville' inhabitants. With IT companies such as Infosys, Wipro, Patni and Polaris now eyeing professionals in other sectors to meet their manpower & talent needs, thousands of non-IT professionals are quitting their traditional jobs to jump onto the tech bandwagon.

Take Patni’s case — the company trains non-IT professionals via evening classes. The part-time classes — packed with modules on sofware training and practical shop floor lessons, allow non-IT professionals to test the waters before joining the tech fraternity. Targetting the young workforce, PCS organises these free-of-cost evening classes to attract non-IT professionals from sectors as diverse as insurance, manufacturing, finance and banking.

IT major Infosys, on the other hand, expects to add around 1,000 professionals this year from non-IT sectors for its domain expertise. Others such as Wipro and Polaris too are busy absorbing professionals from varied industries holding glamour, healthy prospects and better compensation as a lure.

“The varied domain expertise that these professionals get to the company is what makes them extremely attractive, unlike the fresh graduates. Our industry needs a lot of non-software expertise as well because of the kind of clients we have on board,” says Patni training GM Sunil Kuwalekar.

The company has 80% conversion rate from these evening classes. The professionals who flock to these classes are engineering graduates having majored in disciplines like mechanical, manufacturing or chemical engineering, but with little software knowledge.

Infosys, meanwhile, is planning to hire from industries such as manufacturing, automotive, banking and financial services. “The hirings are driven by our intent to recruit people with domain expertise of a particular industry. These people are then used as managers in particular practices. We look for learnability amongst such professionals,” says Infosys HR head TV Mohandas Pai.

Endorsing Infosys’ views, Polaris Software chairman Arun Jain — the company hires from banking and insurance sectors — says, “These professionals understand the business requirements of customers and enable a better solutions delivery. They are not software programmers but business analysts who come from nationalised and private banks.”

Polaris gives these professionals training for about four weeks. “The programme imparts the perspective of software so that they understand customer requirements and can interact better with customers who are leading global banks,” he adds.

Wipro too shares the same aggressiveness. But its strategy is primarily driven by the need to get domain experts, says Wipro strategic sourcing vice-president Achuthan Nair.

On the flipside, HR honchos say the implication of this movement of talent will cause a level of disruption in those sectors from where these professionals are coming in.

“This influx of talent from non-IT sectors indicates a definite dearth of talent within IT. And training professionals from other sectors is better than training freshers as they already have instilled in them a corporate culture,” says Hewitt India practice leader Rakesh Malik.

Original story

Infosys Says Trainees not kept in the dark

Infosys says that the trainees were not kept in the dark but were informed at the induction programme at the start of the training that the norms had been changed and a signed declaration taken from the recruits. The company also points out that one swallow doesn’t make for a summer.

Mr Pai told ET, “There is a cut-off mark for the training. Some trainees don’t study or perform to expected levels. We then try the outplacement route for them.” He insisted that the dropout rate from the training programme is still in single digits. Incidentally, Mr Pai had said during the recent Q2 results that involuntary attrition in the company was about 2.7%.

He added, “We test a large number of students across institutions in India for learnability skills. Some students get through learning by rote or other ways. This small percentage gets into our 16-week training as well.” He added, “earlier, people who failed got a lot more chances. But some freshers treat the training like a holiday. Training is serious business and we are paying them salaries as well. They have to be more responsible.”

Trainees feel that the company should make the entrance exam more stringent to ensure better quality. Says one, “there is no technical round during the entrance test. If the company is so concerned about the brand image, why don’t they make the entrance exam more stringent, thereby making recruitment policy stronger.” He added, “What is the difference between an academic environment and a professional one if we are not tested on job after the three months training?”

Infosys’ Mysore training centre has a capacity of 4,500 seats and trains about 4,000 people at any given time. This year, about 20,000 people are expected to undergo training at the facility. The company spends about Rs 2.5 lakh per person for the 14-16 week training.

The issue has come to the fore at a time when Indian IT services industry is hiring in thousands by the quarter as business for the bulge bracket firms continues to gallop at 40-50 % plus levels.

As the companies widen the network of colleges and institutes they pick freshers from, there is bound to be an asymmetry in quality. As the time spent in training is critical, most firms today do not have the luxury of getting the laggards to repeat their training programme. As companies up the training demands, some mismatch is showing up.

Original story

Infosys bags Competitive Workforce Award

On July 31, 2006, Infosys Technologies Ltd. was the first company in Asia—and the third company outside the United States—to ring the opening bell on the Nasdaq stock market. From Mysore, India, Chairman N. R. Narayana Murthy and CEO Nandan Nilekani pushed the electronic button that signaled the commencement of trading.

Watching from Mysore was Joel Almeida, a new hire who arrived in India from Texas just days before. “It was cool to watch a live view of it. There were cameras set up in Times Square. I watched them sign their names in Mysore and then saw their signatures on the electronic billboard in New York,” says Almeida, who graduated this spring from the University of Texas in Austin with an electrical engineering degree.

Almeida is part of a massive training initiative to bring U.S. graduates to Infosys’ Global Education Center (GEC) in Mysore for six months. The training is meant to assimilate the graduates into Infosys’ corporate culture and to gain experience in India. The scale and nature of the initiative, dubbed the Global Talent Program (GTP), earned Infosys the Society for Human Resource Management’s first-ever Competitive Workforce Award, which is given to an HR department that recognizes and successfully responds to key workforce trends and needs in an ever-changing economic climate.

The Training Initiative

Infosys is an international business and information technology consulting firm based in Bangalore, India, with 58,000 employees worldwide. Established in 1981, the company opened its first international office in Fremont, Calif., in 1987 where its U.S. headquarters are still based.

Over the next 19 years, as Infosys created a more global presence, the company foresaw difficulties in locating and placing high-quality employees abroad, specifically in the Americas. Finding high-quality Indian employees was becoming more difficult due to supply and demand constraints. Even when the company could secure talented Indian employees, the cost of deploying them across the world was becoming more expensive. Economically, it was more sensible to find and train local talent to fill geographical needs.

The solution was to create a large-scale plan to recruit and train new graduates from abroad. The GTP began with a pilot program of 10 young Americans who worked in Bangalore. Following the success of the pilot, the company set a goal of hiring 300 college graduates from 82 of the top U.S. universities in 2006.

Infosys began rolling out that initiative by hiring 126 new U.S. recruits and taking them to the company’s training facility in Mysore. “The reason we hire new grads is we believe in growing them with the company,” says Somnath Baishya, head of global entry-level hiring and campus relations. “We have invested heavily in training. We not only wanted to hire them from the local market, we wanted to bring the new hires to India to give them the experience of Infosys in India.”

U.S. campus relations manager Patrick Payne says: “We wanted to hire a local workforce, but we also wanted them to have a global experience. We have a truly amazing facility in the heart of Southern India. We wanted to get them to Mysore, to understand the culture and how Infosys operates.”

The training in India lasts a full six months—or longer, depending on the graduates’ technical skills. That may seem like a long time—and it is—but HR professionals at the company felt it was necessary to give trainees a real exposure to Indian culture, to teach them the way of doing business at Infosys and to train them in technical skills.

For the first week, trainees are briefed on Infosys and the Mysore facilities in general. Then, the trainees are grouped based on their education. Although a large number of the trainees come from an engineering background, some don’t. “We have one group that has a CS [computer science] background and one that doesn’t. Those who don’t have [a CS background] spend an extra month in training,” says HR support manager Peter Norlander in Fremont, Calif. “We believe we can hire smart and motivated people, even if they aren’t from technical backgrounds, and train them how to succeed [in IT],” says Baishya.

The trainees spend four months in Mysore, training on various technologies, such as Java. “A typical day is 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., during which the trainees have labs, classroom training and soft-skill training, such as communications, problem-solving and cultural assimilation,” says Arun Naya, HR manager of the GEC in Mysore. “Many nights, the HR department organizes cultural programs to teach them about the diversity in India.”

Throughout the program, the trainees take examinations to assess their learning. For the remaining two months, the trainees are deployed to development centers throughout India to gain hands-on experience with real projects.

The Hurdles

No company can undertake an initiative as massive and global in scope as this project is without facing some hurdles. A few that Infosys faced, and cleared, include:

Convincing the recruits: Despite Infosys’ stellar reputation as one of the fastest-growing technology companies, it was challenging to convince new graduates to go to India for six months. Payne says: “The pitch to the students was to talk to them about the experience, a ‘semester abroad of work-study. We realize six months is a long time in your eyes, but what other time in your experience will you be able to go to India with a growing name like Infosys who is willing to provide you a technical skill and come back to the United States with a full-time job?’ ” Alexis Heintz, a new hire who graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, couldn’t pass up the opportunity. “I was an international studies major, so I don’t have a background in computer software,” says Heintz, who arrived in July. “Infosys was willing to train me from the bottom up. I like to travel, and I was curious to see some of India.”

Demystifying India: Some of the new recruits are unsure about living in India. “There were a lot of initial apprehensions about what to expect when they reached India,” says Baishya. To assuage new hires’ fears, Norlander, a U.S. national who recently spent a year in India, spoke to the trainees one-on-one. “We get lots of funny questions,” he says. “Some of the new hires weren’t drinking the milk because they didn’t know if it was safe or not. There’s nothing wrong with the milk. They were nervous. ‘How do I talk to people?’ They learn through doing.”

Naya concurs “A few of the U.S. trainees talked to me about how apprehensive they were [before arriving in India] and how pleasantly surprised they were when they saw the facility.”

“Some of the people from our [group] brought their not-so-good clothes because they were afraid they would be walking on dusty roads,” says Heintz.

Managing global logistics: A training program with global components and key players in worldwide locations requires a lot of early morning and late evening phone calls, as well as a reliance on e-mail. The time difference between Pacific Coast time at headquarters and Indian time is 12.5 hours during U.S. daylight-saving time.

Just deciding how to get the new recruits to India was a challenge. “I [thought] we should fly them on their own from their home cities to Mysore,” says Payne. “The people in India wanted them to get to know each other and fly them out from one location together. We ended up doing kick-off events in San Francisco and Newark, N.J., and flying them out from those cities on six different flights.”

It turned out to be the right decision. “After 23 hours on a plane with each other, the trainees got to know each other better,” says Payne. “They were forming bonds by the time they got to Mysore.”

Expatriates working in India for more than six months must register with the Indian government, a process that typically takes days. Norlander worked with his colleagues and government officials to streamline the foreigner registration process down to two hours.

“I know other expats who work for big-name companies who spend days standing in line. We gave the government a lot of advance notice, and it was a large group” to process quickly, says Norlander. The new hires were the largest group of foreign nationals recruited to work in India ever.

Accommodating multicultural needs: Richard Lobo, head of employee relations, describes another challenge: “It’s difficult to create an environment where a person from almost any country will feel reasonably at home.”

But Infosys has built a world-class facility for trainees. The $120 million GEC spans 300 acres and accommodates up to 4,500 trainees. It is one of the largest training facilities in the world, staffed with 150 technical trainers. Moreover, the facility’s amenities appear to have received as much forethought and effort as the training. The GEC has multiple food courts; a swimming pool; gymnasium; soccer field; several amphitheatres; a 1,200-capacity multiplex showing the latest movies from Hollywood and Bollywood; basketball and volleyball courts; billiards, pingpong and bowling facilities; a Laundromat; barbershops; and grocery stores.

The HR professionals at Infosys spend a great deal of time discerning and accommodating the culinary preferences of their trainees. “Food is one of the most worrying aspects because it can cause stomach upset,” says Lobo. “Even among people from the same country, if you are not used to the cuisine, it can cause a problem. We cater to a wide variety of cuisine in our food courts.”

“When we first got here and weren’t used to eating Indian food, they brought in a chef,” says Almeida. “The chef included more mild Indian food, getting our stomachs used to it over three or four weeks. As you feel more comfortable, you move out into the food court, and now I’ll go in restaurants in the city and eat spicy Indian food. If we hadn’t slowly worked into it, we might have had trouble.”

The Outcome

The HR professionals at Infosys are pleased with the success of the initiative so far and plan to expand it. The company plans to hire more U.S. graduates in 2007 and to begin hiring graduates from the United Kingdom, says Baishya. “[This program] gives us the confidence to [implement] more such programs from across geographies and talent pools,” she says. “The intent in bringing them to India is not only to train them on the software side, but to expose the new hires to the Indian way of working and to give them the opportunity to interact with our Indian employees—to see Infosys as it is in India.”

Heintz, who is taking voluntary Hindi classes at the Mysore campus while she trains, understands the importance of the cross-cultural exchange in creating a global workforce. One evening she stumbled upon some young Indian women playing with a basketball. “I asked them if I could join them,” she recalls. “They asked me to teach them the rules of basketball because none of them had actually played. I taught them the basics. It was a lot of fun.” Heintz learned as much about the women’s culture as they learned about basketball.

The Indian experience makes a significant impact on the trainees, adds Norlander. “There’s a huge shift. People come in apprehensive and leave very confident. They’ve done something challenging and overcame uncertainties. Speaking from my own experience, it wouldn’t be remotely the same experience working for Infosys having no experience at all in India. Infosys reaps a local workforce that understands the [global] company.”

Original story

Campus placements not an entry ticket to Infy anymore

All is not well at Infosys Technologies’ Mysore Campus — touted as the world’s largest training services facility — where the company puts thousands of freshers through their paces before moving them to the workplace.

Infy freshers at Mysore are learning the hard way that campus placements do not necessarily guarantee a job after the IT major changed its training policy. Until recently, recruits had six options, including two vivas, to clear the training programme. Those who failed had to undergo training again.

But sources said Infosys changed the policy this year — now trainees get only two chances to clear the training programme. And if they are unable to get through the two exams, then, unlike last year, they are not retained in the company.

One employee recently wrote an email to all Infoscians (about 66,150 people) including the management and board members via the intranet, crying foul over the training policy and complaining that they weren’t informed about the change in the policy until they arrived at the Mysore campus. The policy change has created job insecurity among trainees, who feel they might have to go through the tedious process of job hunting all over again if they don't make the grade.

The employee — ET is in possession of a copy of the e-mail — a member of the July 2006 batch at the Mysore training centre, says in his mail, ``In some colleges, the HR told trainees that the attrition rate is very low and that only 1 or 2 trainees will lose their job. In the same year after recruitment, the company changed the policy...And trainees had no option but to sign the new policy document because they were not allowed to sit for another company recruitment test on campus. Trusting that the company will be truthful to us, many of our trainees sacrificed other jobs offered.’’

According to sources, 40 trainees from the June 2006 batch were asked to leave as they failed to clear the two exams. It is learnt that around 200 out of 600 trainees who were part of the July 2006 batch have not cleared their first exam, which means if they fail in the second test as well they are out of the company, sources add. Mr Mohandas Pai, Director - HR, Infosys Mr Pai declined to comment on the numbers though he added that 40 out of 4,000 trainees amount to about 1% attrition.

Infosys says the trainees were not kept in the dark but were informed at the induction programme at the start of the training that the norms had been changed and a signed declaration taken from the recruits. The company also points out that one swallow doesn’t make for a summer.

Mr Pai told ET, ``There is a cut-off mark for the training. Some trainees don’t study or perform to expected levels. We then try the outplacement route for them.’’ He insisted that the dropout rate from the training programme is still in single digits. Incidentally, Mr Pai had said during the recent Q2 results that involuntary attrition in the company was about 2.7%.

He added, ``We test a large number of students across institutions in India for learnability skills. Some students get through learning by rote or other ways. This small percentage gets into our 16-week training as well.’’ He added, ``Earlier, people who failed got a lot more chances. But some freshers treat the training like a holiday. Training is serious business and we are paying them salaries as well. They have to be more responsible.’’

Trainees say the company should make the entrance exam more stringent to ensure better quality. Says one,``There is no technical round during the entrance test. If the company is so concerned about the brand image, why don’t they make the entrance exam more stringent, thereby making recruitment policy stronger.’’

He added, “What is the difference between an academic environment and a professional one if we are not tested on job after the three months training?” Infosys’ Mysore training centre has a capacity of 4,500 seats and trains about 4,000 people at any given time. This year, about 20,000 people are expected to undergo their training in the facility. The company spends about Rs 2.5 lakh per person for the 14-16 week training.

The issue has come to the fore at a time when Indian IT services industry is hiring in thousands by the quarter as business for the bulge bracket firms continues to gallop at 40/50% plus levels. As the companies widen the network of colleges and institutes they pick the freshers from, there is bound to be an asymmetry in quality.

Original story

US college grads keen to join Indian firms

Nicole Dun made her way through customs at Bangalore International Airport, then onto a bus bound for Mysore, India, 86 miles away. She was understandably nervous. A freshly minted 22-year-old computer-science graduate of the University of California at Davis, she was leaving the United States for the first time and on her way to her first serious job.

It wasn't at Google, or Cisco, or eBay. Along with about 300 other American college grads over the next year, Dun has signed on as a software engineer with Infosys Technologies, the red-hot Indian engineering firm that plans to add 25,000 employees to its 58,000 over the next year.

She'll train in Mysore for six months before joining Infosys's Fremont, California, office.

Only a few years ago, so-called outsourcers like Infosys were the villains of the high-tech world, accused of farming out work to dirt-cheap programmers in Indian office parks -- and putting Americans out of jobs. Now those same companies are setting up shop in the United States. More striking, there are plenty of young American engineers eager to sign up.

Infosys says more than 1,000 American college students applied for the first 126 spots in its new Global Talent Program. Why? At about $55,000 a year, Infosys's entry-level pay is comparable to that of other engineering employers. But its new hires recognize the benefits of global exposure for their careers.

"The training itself is looked upon highly by other companies," says Brandon Pletcher, a 23-year-old computer-engineering grad from the University of Arizona. "It gives us the edge to do our jobs better."

The new trainees will attend lectures and hone their programming chops, then test those skills in development centers throughout India, working on actual software projects with experienced colleagues.

Dun and Pletcher also emphasize the valuable 'cultural training' they're getting by working with other trainees from India, which is Infosys's intent.

"Creating a multicultural outlook is part of our effort to truly leverage the power of globalization," says Bikramjit Maitra, the company's head of human resources. In the multiculti spirit, it also brought a piece of America to India. "Once we got to campus, there was a bowling alley," says Dun. "I felt like I was home."


Original story

IT majors on hiring spree

There has been no let-up in the domestic software majors' hiring spree, with more than 27,500 IT professionals joining the country's five biggest firms during the past three months, while the momentum is only likely to gain further.

The country's top-five club of IT players - TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Satyam Computer and HCL Technologies added a total of 27,583 employees to their pay rolls in the July-September quarter.

The robust hiring momentum has virtually shrugged off the concerns related to soaring wages eating into the company's profitability as all the five companies have reported impressive financial results for the quarter ended September 30, the experts feel.

The collective employee strength of top four IT companies - TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Satyam Computer at the end of the period was 2,37,016.

The country's second largest software exporter Infosys added 7741 employees during the June quarter, while industry leader TCS announced net addition of 6663 employees in the same period.

Earlier, Infosys had announced it plans to hire 25,000 employees this year while TCS announced it would increase the headcount by 30,500 people.

Another software major Wipro recruited 5328 employees during the July- September period this year, taking its total staff count to 61,179 employees.

During the June quarter, about 2,000 employees joined Infosys on a single day, which underlines the company's continued focus on investment in creating training and recruitment engine to meet its growth objectives.

Infosys plans to add 10,000 employees in the last two quarters of the current fiscal. During the first quarter, it had added 4,200 freshers, while the later additions stood at 2,140 employees, which excluded the job additions at the company's BPO subsidiary Progeon.

Industry experts said the robust recruitment plans of the IT companies were also aimed at offsetting the impact of high attrition rates plaguing the market.

TCS has continued to maintain the lowest attrition rate in the industry at 10.6 per cent, including BPO (10.6 per cent in Q1).

Out of the total job additions of 5328 people in IT Services business in September quarter at Wipro, which has expressed its willingness for a more aggressive stance on acquisitions, 605 employees were from their completed acquisitions during the quarter.

HCL Technologies had 3826 employees for the September quarter and reported a 11.7 per cent increase in headcount in a single quarter.

Satyam added 4025 associates in the quarter, taking the total employee strength to 31659. Total resources, including those of subsidiaries and joint ventures, increased to 34908.

According to IT industry body NASSCOM, the technology services segment would hike the employee count to 3,90,000 in 2006 and has a demand for 8,50,000 professionals and 1.4 million back office professionals by year 2010.

In 2005, Infosys, Wipro, Satyam and TCS increased their headcount by 56,000 people and have continued with robust hiring momentum since then.

Original story

Infosys presses panic button on talent, Wipro says take it easy

Information technology heavy-weights Infosys and Wipro seem to have contrasting takes on the question of a crunch in human resources in Indian IT industry.

The Infosys management has constantly highlighted a looming danger of a crunch in engineering talent in the country whereas the Wipro management has chosen to underplay fears of a human resource crunch arguing that there isn’t a dearth of qualified people if “engineering talent is supplemented with non-engineering talent, wherever possible’’.

With the IT sector set to see a recruitment overdrive in the coming years, to maintain growth rates, the supply of talent has emerged as a key question mark over the industry. As many as 10 lakh people are likely to be hired over the next two to three years in the IT sector.

The IT majors have seen their employee strengths rise from around 4,000 in 1999 to over 60,000 at present. “The limiting factor for India’s growth will be availability of trained people. It is the biggest challenge for the sector as IT companies increasingly battle for talent pool in the country,’’ says Infosys human resources head T.V. Mohandas Pai. “While the number of engineering colleges in the country have increased in the last six years from 523 to 1,352, the quality of students is a cause of concern,” says Pai.

Wipro chairman Azim Premji, however, says, “There is adequate talent available in the country and no need for panic’’. Reports of a human resource crunch in India was creating more panic for customers than companies, he said. Several functions can be performed by trained B.Sc graduates and there is no need for depending on engineers alone, he added.

Both Infosys and Wipro have incidentally begun their own schemes for creating talent supplies. Infosys has started a programme called Campus Connect at over 100 engineering colleges in the country under which teachers are trained to teach the latest technologies in use in the industry. Wipro has started the Wipro Academy of Software Excellence (WASE) programme, in collaboration with the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS-Pilani), to hire BSc graduates and train them in software engineering over a four-year period.

During the financial quarter that ended on September 30, Infosys added 7,741 employees, the country’s largest IT exporter TCS added 6,663 employees, and Wipro hired 5,328 employees during the period. While Infosys had projected a total of 25,000 employee hirings for the current year its latest hiring figures show that the company is set to hire 28,300 employees for the year. TCS has projected a headcount increase of 30,500 people for the year.

Original post

Infosys works hard to keep staff

In the Indian outsourcing industry, attracting and retaining staff is critical to keeping the business growing. To keep its staff, Infosys Technologies pays them the same or, at times, better than the rest of the outsourcing industry in India, and has set up large state-of-the-art facilities that pamper the staff with on-campus beauty salons, shopping arcades, subsidized restaurants, jogging tracks, and large gyms. The job also gives staff an opportunity to be posted abroad, which is a key attraction for a lot of Indian staff.

Infosys, like other Indian outsourcing companies, does not have a trade union. The company does not encourage unions, nor have the employees shown any inclination to unionize. Part of the reason is that salaries in the Indian outsourcing industry are already far higher than in other sectors of the Indian economy.

Trade unions have instead complained about the large number of hours staff work at outsourcing companies. IT services staff often work late in the evening, as they need to deal with customers in the U.S. and Europe, in different time zones than India.

"I am usually late at the office, either completing work or to get a call through to a customer or a colleague in the U.S.," said an employee at Infosys' Bangalore facility.

Business process outsourcing (BPO) staff have to work night shifts to service customers in the U.S.

"Work in all offshore operations is hard, and I am usually in the office for 11 hours a day, apart from about two hours of commute time," said a software engineer at the Indian software development subsidiary of a U.K. company. "The salary at Infosys at my level is lower than what I currently get, but every software engineer wants to work there for the brand image Infosys has," he added.

Work at Infosys tends to be in fits and starts. "You could be working up to 13 hours a day when you are on a project, but for months on end you could be without anything to do," said an employee at Infosys' facility in Hyderabad, India. The employee joined Infosys in May but was without work till August this year, though on full salary. "When you join a services company, you have to prepared for this," he said.

On the bright side, there are fewer layers of management at Infosys than at many other offshore operations, and opportunities for career growth are high, said the Infosys employee in Hyderabad. Software engineers can even look forward to careers in consulting, even though they have not gone through business school, he added.

However, software engineers working in product development would rarely consider employment with outsourcing companies like Infosys.

"In the services industry you are working on a small portion of a project for which the specifications have been laid out by the customer, so you don't get a feeling of ownership," said an engineer at the Bangalore product development subsidiary of a multinational technology company.

Original story