The Indian IT Space
As a fresh college graduate, when I came to Bangalore during the rainy season of July 2015, I had very little idea of how the Indian IT corporate space worked. There were too many moving parts. A new city, a new language, new food & most importantly a new sense of adulting.
I had some understanding of how people behave in an 'office' situation from my previous interactions with people working with our family businesses. The other oracle I had for how people behave in a professional space was sitcoms and movies. From some of those movies came the idea of a 25-Year-old Young Man entering a large office in a three-piece suit, black square glasses, straight face getting in a meeting room (late mostly) with the center of attraction being a rude customer. This young man was mostly an ambitious lone warrior in the middle of other senior men busy criticizing life.
But a lot of the things in the Indian IT space have not been the way I had imagined them to be. For starters, there are no suits and Thank God! for that. Not that I don't like suits, I did Sales for Moolya and I got my fair chance to wear suits and act all corporate. I have a bad hair situation so I mostly wear a cap along with my casuals and a cap never goes with a suit. So for me to not like suits as much is probably because of their bad feasibility with caps. (I am looking for something that can cover my head in a suit, suggestions welcomed) Moolya along with tons of other startups in Bangalore do not have strict formal clothing policies. Whatever that keeps you comfortable is accepted. I also got the chance to experience a bit of London IT space last year & found that theirs and our clothing policies seemed very similar. Theirs was a bit more lenient than ours but again the important factor is no compulsion for suits.
The Indian IT space does not have rude customers (as long as you listen to them), they do have a sense of entitlement, even though the representative of the client company that is supposed to get the deal going is just another manager they have, he may still want to be treated with more respect than all the other people in the room. Is it wrong or right, I am no one to judge, but we all need to acknowledge that this is somehow a reflection of how our society is structured in a hierarchical context. The person in power is the person who is giving work, the person not so much in power is the one asking for work. Is this enough a reason for the client to rub it in the service provider's face?
I had also imagined IT guys to be super tech freaks while I was in college but I have realized in my couple of years in this space that everybody involved in the development of a product that touches the lives of billions of people is at the end of the day a Human. The people behind PayTm, Flipkart, Ola, OYO, etc are all PEOPLE. They are just like us, they see problems and they try to solve them the same way we do. They make mistakes the same way we do. It may look stupid to you to read this but this realization of other people being people is a big deal. A lot of times people in the Indian IT space and just society, in general, shy away from asking a question that they feel is very genuine, the reason they shy away from questioning is because they feel they don't know enough to talk about it, that the other person is too big to be questioned, that the other guy would have already thought of something so trivial and doesn't need to be questioned/reminded.
But this realization that it is okay to ask stupid questions, that it is okay to not agree with what your senior has said, that it is okay to raise doubts, that it is okay to push for things you genuinely believe in is empowering. Once you realize this is not a crime, that this is not illegal, that you are not going to be judged for doing this, there is no looking back, you are bound to raise alarms, you are bound to be recognized, you are bound to add value.
The employees in the Indian IT space need to know that they are not day laborers, that they are not in a space where their tomorrow is unpredictable, where they can't get up and rock the world without the fear of being fired. They can and they should and only then they will be adding real value to whatever they do whichever company they do it for.
One of the problem, why the employees in the Indian IT space do not go against their employers or ask tough questions to their seniors, is because they are not given enough space and freedom to do that. It is the leadership of a company that decides what sort of people they get, what sort of value gets delivered. This is not a one time deal, this is a constant exercise throughout the existence of any company. If you need a certain value, that certain value depends upon certain freedom,
less freedom - less value, more freedom - more value.
A large corporation can afford to give less freedom because of the number of people they have in their workforce. This giant number allows them to delegate a small amount of work to each person, the cumulative delivery reaches to the level of value they needed from the entire team. But Small companies and startups do not have that luxury. They cannot afford less freedom, they cannot ask their team members to look at just one part of work, for them the value they need out of each individual is way too large which is possible only if they are open to giving out more freedom, more autonomy.
If you are an employer in the Indian IT space and you don't see good work happening from your team, it is because you do not deserve that. It is not because your team is inefficient.
If you are an employee in the Indian IT space and you don't see good work happening in your team but you also decide to not raise it to the right stakeholders, You are inefficient, not your leadership.
Reviewed & Co-authored by - Himansha Tyagi