A Road to Perdition

Bharat has been a primary IT service provider now for four decades. Over the period, she has played a pivotal role in helping American and other multinational companies in launching large number of products in all domains of market. Initially Bharatian software engineers were in high demand for their higher IQ in computational sciences. Every project that we worked on had balance in the type of the work offered. Bharatian engineers were involved in every aspect of the project right from the R & D and for that matter given domain trainings for months if required. Product owners in that era did not worry about sharing the core IP knowledge because they had no choice. I remember how I used to be the part of the Physics and Chemistry of the laboratory devices for which we were developing the Data Acquisition software.

As the industry flourished in Bharat and in some other countries number of projects getting launched soon outnumbered the computer engineers. Type of work that was at offer also had variety. Like software testing was eating up significant amount of developer's time and was becoming the bottleneck for the project progress. So the industry had to open its door for non-computer background workforce by providing them on job computer education which went on up to six months to an year depending on the subjects and domain. Gradually training institutes which offered such orientation courses flourished in metros and the handsome salary figures had attracted the graduates from all STEM streams to subscribe for these courses.

Once the workforce problem was solved, IT companies saw potential opportunities of growth by accepting any type of work that was on offer. Pure software testing projects were signed and companies were even ready to bear the domain training expenses for their workforce. We saw certain companies expanding like crazy within a short span. Development to testing project ratio in some of them dipped as low as 30:70. This in turn triggered the development of software testing tools and technologies which bifurcated the industry into two tracks - Development and Testing. Brain drain from all STEM streams into IT created a whirlwind in other industries, They had to rollout the jobs to the candidates who were substandard in the skills and eventually resulted into losses. Projects and jobs in other industries dwindled. Computer related colleges and courses mushroomed while seats in other streams were remaining vacant. For example, a mechanical engineer scholar with an extraordinary talent and potential for research was wasted doing the ordinary work which any ordinary brain could have done. This was a recipe for disaster but was conveniently ignored for the end result of it - gross domestic growth.

As every decision in a person's life has a consequence in future, so it does for the industry. In past couple of decades, the overall nature of the projects and the required skills in IT industry went on diminishing. More and more mundane work like BPO, maintenance, configuration, assembling, technical writing etc. got pushed/dumped on us and the core competency work was conserved, preserved and reserved for the selected workforce. Its obvious that our masters, both in Bharat and abroad can heap the huge profits only by maintaining the status quo. And we all will keep playing in their hands if we keep suppressing our versatile potential by compromising on superficial and abstract skill at the expense of mastering the core subjects of various STEM streams.

If we forget it, history repeats itself. Given the fact that individually everyone seems to be flourishing, the statement may sound farfetched and arrogant in present, but we are for sure walking on a path that eventually will lead us into total white collared slavery, at most in a couple of decades as the average age of Bharatian population will approach 40. Learning from the experience, we cannot rely much on our leadership in both business and politics to accept the reality and guide us out of it. We ourselves, individually, will need to come to terms with the situation, demonstrate farsightedness, awake, arise and walk out of the self-administered somber and hypoxic state by revamping the fabric of IT industry as well as promoting the entrepreneurial competencies in entire STEM powered industry.