I had a heated exchange with my boss today leaving me very exhausted mentally and irritated to some extent. The worst part is, no matter how hard I try, I just cannot help but bring this to home - which results in a nasty snowballing effect of adding more stress as everybody else is stressed out at home when they see me grumpy.
I can make a blog and fill it up with 100 posts about how much office work contribute to stress for a working individual in India. Especially in the software industry. The main reason is the disagreement and the way its handled in our so called 'modern offices'. Have an issue with your manager, well the way to sort it out is to sit for hour long lectures on anything from 'Empowerment' to 'Turning around', 'innovation' and more management terms, which you never use in your daily life. Don't agree with your boss/co-worker, the official way is to schedule a skip level meeting, where invariably you are taught lessons on how to get along with your boss/colleagues by your skip level manager. You can run from pillar to post, but the end message is the same - "Just stick to the plan and get on with your work. Your opinions can be shoved up your behind for all we care !"
Sad really ! One of my colleagues was telling me today that "people don't leave companies, they leave managers". And its so true. One of the main reasons I attribute this pathetic state of project/resource management in India is to the vastly unskilled/undeserving pool of managers. These guys were the engineering graduates of the late 90s or the early 2000s, who entered the industry during the 'dot-com boom'. At that time, attrition was so high, a guy with 4 years of experience was the tech lead, a guy with 2 years of experience as tech lead became a manager and so on. Naturally when the tide is slowing down and getting into a state of normalization, we have all these vast pool of people who are stuck at mid-level/upper level management positions, who are so unskilled in technical areas, you've no option but to continue using them. And now we are beyond the previous "maintenance" projects, getting more and more of end to end development and guess who manages these ? The previously unskilled pool !
Most of these so called 'project or resource managers', still work by the age old method of bribe/blackmail/carrot & stick for employee retention / satisfaction. Some of the popular methods of making an employee "contribute" more to the company:
1. On-site opportunity: By far the most popular one. Find a grumpy employee not happy with his salary/work/environment or whatever, forget about spending time at counselling him to find the root cause, just throw in the assurance of sending him onsite and rest assured he'll fall in place. Any place from Singapore to Buenos Aires will do, as long as him/his wife and his kid's tickets are paid for and he is allowed to stay back long enough to change his location in facebook profile and paste pics about his onsite spoils. No matter how stupid his outing was or how bad his new fake accent is.
2. Contractual obligations: Worried about losing your fresh talent jumping onto other companies ? Worried that all you taught to the fresh minds are being stolen away by other companies at your expense ? Don't bother about improving your in house work culture or incentives to make them stay. Throw in a complicated contract which could result in the employee paying a hefty sum of money in case he leaves you. You can even throw in an advocate at the time of making the contract to really strike fear into their hearts. For best results visit the innermost parts of India where students are actually ready to sign their life off for an opportunity to work in a s/w company. Use their poor financial situation complete to your advantage! Now that's how geniuses in HR roll yo !
3. Ridiculous notice periods: I heard that the notice period in US is usually two weeks. Well, welcome to Bangalore ! Here it varies any time between 2 months to 6 months depending on which company you are in. Impossible to retain an employee thanks to your sucky company policies ? Well let us make it such that its not possible for them to find employment anywhere either. 'You can't lose if you don't play!'
4. Unbelievable lateral hikes: Finding trouble poaching talent with your sucky bureaucratic company policies ? Tired of being rejected by anyone who's able to write a program to print "hello world" without compiler warnings or errors ? Well, here's the instant solution - give them a ridiculously high package which is more than twice the amount another poor loyal guy with the exact same skill set and experience is making at your company. Add a signing bonus as an icing on the cake to seal the deal. Rest assured you'll land that guy for your next induction program. Now, to stick to your process of suckiness, ensure that his future hikes are dramatically reduced to fractions lesser than one, and depend on point 1,2 or 3 for his retention. Also, don't bother about normalizing the salary of that honest/loyal engineer stuck with your company. What kind of a loser sticks to a company beyond 2 years eh ?
If you think I'm trying to vent out my frustration or being sarcastic, you are free to walk in and join any software company in Bangalore and see if for yourself. Don't bother checking the logic or the reasoning behind any of these points, unless you are in mood for some real "coaching" on how "you should first ask yourself what you've done for the company before you ask what the company has done for you" !
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