Job Switch in IT

The last para is the clincher.
ead only when you've time. good article by an MBT employee.
Job hopping. This is one phenomenon you frequently see in IT
Industry. Also this is something I never really understood even after 3
½ years in the software industry....

And it is a far cry from the Government service days of old when one
struggled to get a job when fresh out of college, but once employed
worked on there till retirement.. In those days no one ever thought
Of changing jobs. Perhaps nobody thought of career or work/monetary
satisfaction that much then... job stability was more important.

In IT industry, it is a different ball game altogether...
here people are supposed to switch else they would stagnate.. and it seems
like a rule of thumb that no one sticks around in a single company for too
long... and if he does then people think that is bcoz he is not good enough to get
recruited anywhere..

Somehow when a person X switches from company A to company
B, he gets a 40% hike (atleast)...and also goes one step up in the hierarchy.
Similarly when a person Y switches from company B to company A... he
also gets a similar hike and promotion...

Then why are they switching in the first place.. ? If X is
so good that company B is ready to pay him a higher wage... and company A is also
willing to pay that amount to hire Y from company B.. then
why do the companies not retain their own employees at a better
scale.... At least they can prevent the brain drain and loss of talented people... ( or
perhaps the companies also want some different ppl after
sometime ? This way they too need not fire anyone.. they go their own way.. )

It seems that IT majors now are in a frenzy to recruit the
best talent around that they give incentives to attract and pull in experienced
people from contemporary companies... you see hiring sprees in
Infosys, Wipro, TCS... even Syntel is hiring like crazy with so many
walk-ins in the past few weeks.

Interestingly, caliber and capability no longer matter it
seems... you are just supposed to have the proper names on your resume..
(names of big colleges) and sufficient years of exp to show.. that is it..
you are in. For a little senior position... interviews are a
joke... one is usually asked some general personal stuff and directly
come to salary negotiation... like "We can offer you so much... are you
willing to take the offer" !!

Note that you don't have to be a technical genius to be
recruited into any of these top companies... with the amount of work (and most
importantly *kind of work*) being outsourced to third world countries
like India... mostly testing / support / bug fixing.. anyone with a few
yrs of exp to show... and who can type (and talk) is in.

Good for the employees... one might say.. it is easy to
thrive under such market conditions.. As the saying goes.. "Make hay while the
sun shines"

When I entered my first job in software.. I was advised by
my seniors that frequent switching is not advisable... and you should stick
around in a company and stay loyal if you wished to learn and
progress... but if you
look at the career graphs and salary scale of people who switch
regularly... you see that they have progressed so much over
a very short time that it is impossible to grow so much staying with one
organization...

But what is the main reason why people switch ? Is it career
growth ? Or job satisfaction ? Or money ? Or all of these ?

Maybe perhaps it is just need for a change.. with
frustration levels running high taken the kind of work done in software
industry... ppl need a break occasionally. And a change of environment helps...

On a side note, I wonder how long this phase would last...
there was a time during the software boom.. that anyone who knew just to
type on the computer were being hired in US.. all and sundry were
suddenly in the IT industry and were landing in US earning big bucks... once the bubble
burst... all was gone.. the dream American IT job had vanished...
everything is being outsourced now to cheap labor houses...
> third world countries like India and China.. It would only be a matter
of time before it moved on to other countries in the south east...

Microsoft has now outsourced testing of most of its old OS
versions to India...they are not supporting anything older than XP now
here.. I guess Wipro / Infy have landed the contract for Win SE testing.. a
huge multi million dollar project... for testing / bug fixing legacy OS
components...
I see that many new vendors from Wipro / Infy (maybe about 80 people)
have landed here in the past few weeks for knowledge transfer and
carrying the testing work back to India... no wonder they are hiring like
anything..

Having mentioned this, the job scene in India is booming
right now and is expected to stay that way for the coming few years at
least.. ideal time to make a pile and plan for an early retirement..

But what surprises me in all this is that people usually switch just
companies... they end up doing the same job in another
place... albeit for a bigger sum.. and so the frustration never really goes...
and hence the need for another switch after a year... not everyone switch
to a *proper job* and that's why they keep going in circles switching
from company to
company.. also the money helps.. but imagine doing the same stupid
testing for twice the pay... would it help ? is it really
satisfactory ? maybe like someone said... if you are doing something stupid..
might as well do it for a bigger sum..

This is where I feel a job culture like Microsoft is missing
in India.. here there are ppl who are developers even after 20 yrs
exp... bcoz they enjoy their work.. and they are paid handsomely... here
salary is not based on seniority but on proficiency and experience...
people can choose what they like and want to work as... some want to go into
management while others prefer technical positions... compensation is based on
ratings and work profile created according to the person's
choice.. there are lot of cases here where experienced developers are paid
more than their managers..

Amidst all the outsourcing and body shopping.. we have missed out
building India into a software product development centre..
rather it is now like
a cheap labour shop.. I read in an article that India is
known as the "back
office of the world". I don't know whether to be proud or ashamed of
this tag. When Bill started Microsoft.. they were a few tens
of ppl... we at MBT are around 4000 and all are capable and well qualified
and what sort of work do we mostly do... testing / product support / maintenance...
that is stopping us from building some product and selling
it to the world ?
And why on earth do we sell our work-force as contract workers to
multinationals ?

Rather than switching from company to company in search of the ideal
job... or the best package.. me thinks it is better to go
down south to Kerala and get a nice water-front house... settle down
peacefully with family... purchase some fields and do some farming... now
that would the ideal job switch....