Why is there such a high incidence of attrition and burn-out in the Indian IT industry?
There are superficial reasons and there are deep reasons.
Most Indian programmers are generalists, knowing the basics of a programming language but without much domain or business expertise or research orientation. Hence, it is easy for them to hop a job without any major change or disruption in their work.
Hopping a job always gives a better raise in salary than if you stay on and wait for the annual 15% increment
Most Indian cities are devoid of any avenues of creative expenditure of one's energies. Most entertainments available in big Indian cities are consumptive in nature. Hence, people invariably get bored quickly.
Most Indian IT companies are serving offshore businesses. There is little emotional engagement with the business of the organization due to this geographical and cultural distance.
Almost all large IT companies in India have such a high and desperate demand for new workers that they will significantly overlook short tenures in a candidate's resume and will be willing to offer them a significant raise from their previous job. Good engineers are hard to find.
In the frenzy of hiring, background checks and elaboration of one's experience are perfunctory, at best. Hence, lying on the resumes is rampant and it is easy to tailor one's resume to a job opening. Employment "consultants" are almost predatory in their hounding of the candidates and in assisting them to get through an interview process.
IT salaries in India are disproportionately higher than in any other business in India (except Finance and advertising, which take special skills, post graduate degrees and training). Therefore, any person who has studied mathematics at the senior secondary level sees IT as the predominant career choice, and aptitude for analysis, optimization, process-orientation and understanding of formal specifications are of usually little import.
As almost all engineers and technically oriented people are going in for IT jobs, the general environment is that of mediocrity and generalism. The generalism extends to corporations as well; most IT organizations in India proclaim themselves to be (euphemistically) "end to end solution providers", which translates into: "You tell us what to do, we will try to do it as best as we can, irregardless of whether or not we have any prior expertise or experience in it."
As IT organizations bend over backwards to grow their business, the casualty is the generalist work-force which has to deliver on impossible deadlines based on specifications from equally clueless customers.
The corporate culture of cubicles, meetings, 1-on-1's, objectives, appraisals, follow-ups, dotted-line reports, etc. is still relatively new in India and while initially people enjoy the novelty of it, soon they see that in India, we have merely introduced processes based on a western work-ethic over a primarily unaccountable and slavish (by temperament as well as by the nature of the work) workforce.
Of course, the fact that most of the customers are at least 5-6 timezones away means frequent early morning and late night meetings and calls. And since the relationship is that of service provider rather than a partner, the communications are fraught with undertones of authority, subservience and "keeping one's mouth shut if one disagrees."
In a programming project, unless there is a huge amount of process and documentation involved, usually only one or two people knows about a particular piece of code. And since it is notoriously hard to pin-point problems in a large software program (especially with the newer, distributed, enterprise application stacks such as J2EE and .NET), all the people involved in the project are constantly on their toes trying to defend their code, to ward-off code-red calls in the middle of the weekend, to avoid taking responsibility for the whole project (which is but natural).
Needless to say, in a call center setup, where most people work in shifts throughout the day, there is no personal space, there is constant mind-numbing work without any creativity, most people work at night, most people pretend to be westerners and take all kinds of abuse and complaints (as customer service representatives).
Are we really digital "coolies"? Doing just the back breaking lifting whereas the destination and the journey and sometimes even the mode of transport is charted out for us by others?
...
Friendships at work suffer a dose of reality when one of the friends leaves. It becomes clear that this is not home, that this is not the neighbourhood, that this is but a stop on the way. One progresses in the modern world into ever shortening cycles of familiarity. The permanency of home and one's parents, the changes in teachers at school, the changes of educational institutions, the changes of jobs, of cities and houses and apartments. If the world around is in flux, I become almost frenetic in my search for a place where I will finally feel at peace.
It is a strange phenomenon. On one hand, the Indian middle class is seeing a prosperity it has never had. On the other hand, there is a greater malaise, depression, restlessness, self-centredness and apathy than ever before.
The prosperity has come to many in India unexpectedly. And the strange feeling of having arrived without really undergoing a journey of self-discovery leads to a shallowness which is easy to observe in the technocrats around us. Emotional and intellectual infants are suddenly the privileged. And such privilege breeds a self-centredness and arrogance which makes us not only unwilling to evolve, to learn, and to look beyond ourselves but also which makes us value only our ambition and the hedonistic and no-holds-barred journey towards more privilege.
Many people secretly or openly loath their managers in Indian IT organizations. Because of the wide-spread arrogance and general attitude of generalism, there is little respect for skill ("oh i can also do that, he just has had more experience"), for maturity ("what maturity, the bugger got lucky"), and there is a disdain towards the manager's subservience to the customer. The manager tries hard to diplomatically balance between the customer's pressure and the employee's well-being, but as most managers have little confidence in either their work-force or in themselves, and most have little understanding of the fundamentals of the technology, they end up displeasing both, earning the wrath of the customer and the ridicule and hate of the work-force and therefore increasing the pressure both on themselves and on the people they manage.
People, in their twenties, are being asked (by the economic forces and peer-pressure) to market themselves. The kind of spiritual bankruptcy that this is leading to is all around us. They are being exposed to the stark chasm between what they actually do, are capable of doing, and what they claim they can do, and what others expect them to do, and what their organization tells others they do or are capable of doing.
...
Humankind is passing through a momentous transition at the workplace. The level of efficiency and "six-sigma" or "CMM Level 5" metrics of error-free operation are being demanded of humans who are inherently organic, not totally rational and failure-prone biological organisms. Our work is being reflected in the discrete and unforgiving logic of the digital computer. All software engineering is aimed at making humans tackle this divide better. Humans are developing products, which no single human understands, which have to adhere to an inhuman SLA of no-fault operation and performance.
Yes, humans are performing, we are building such products everyday, but, ..., we are also burning out in the heat and stress of all this.
It is a natural human trait to believe in the unknown. We believe that by going to another country, by falling in love with another person, by reading a new book, by seeing a new movie, by changing our job, we will get a temporary or lasting happiness. That our suffering is the result of our environment, that by changing the environment, by getting a higher pay, getting a better manager, more "challenging" work, we will defeat our depression, boredom and sorrow.
There is a certain artificiality to everything in a corporate workplace which doesn't escape the soul of man. People know the truth behind company events, corporate values, behind team-building exercises, behind the slogans, behind what is said and what is not said, ...
It is almost tragic to see people having fun in a company outing. The natural, spontaneous joy and the childlike curiosity of a human being is being channeled into becoming a better worker, who is happy with his work.
...
One must ponder, not at the symptom that is attrition, but at the fate of humanity.
Management, I have always maintained, is the art of subverting the nausea and hopelessness of Sisyphus.
"an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone
cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio"
(Howl, by Allen Ginsberg)
(Eli Eli Lamma Lamma Sabacthani: "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me") (the cry of Jesus on the cross)
