Vignesh Ilavarasan: Working in Indian IT Companies

P. Vigneswara Ilavarasan is presently Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Delhi.

He obtained his PhD (Sociology) from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur. He held a two-year Post-doctoral Fellowship in IT at the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore, before joining IIT Delhi. He has also taught at the Central University, Pondicherry, for a year. His research interests are the Sociology of Work and Industry; and Science, Technology & Society, with a focus on the Indian Information Technology industry. In the last few years Dr. Ilavarasan did extensive research on the culture of the IT industry, India’s booming sector since the mid 1990’s.

Where the image of core programmer in the western world is that of a solitary alienated figure to the world, in the Indian context the building of software is a highly witnessed activity within the formal hierarchy of companies and projects.

Being physically seen at work, even if one is doing other things at the computer or just lingering, is believed to be very important to establish reputation as a trustworthy and good worker. When a programmer has to fix a bug, he will get other team members involved so he does not have to take the responsibility of possibly making a mistake. It becomes a collective responsibility. It is not because people are not individualistic; it is because people do not want to take responsibility for the mistake. The trustworthiness is broad because of the physical presence of the workers and because the work is defined as a group activity. The entire trust is based on this, as became apparent in Ilavarasan’s research.

In the IT industry in India one can distinguish between three kind of companies that work internationally: large domestic export software services firms (WIPRO, INFOSYS), captive centres of multinationals (IBM, SUN) and the R&D centres of multinationals (Microsoft, GE, Google) & small product companies that work for a global market (Ittiam Systems, Sasken).

1. In the outsourcing company time is money. The client brings a project to India, it is done in India and then it is given back to the client. The company will charge the client a rate per hour, and the Indian programmer will be paid the Indian salary rate. The interface with the client is continuous. To be able to work in these companies one does not only need to be a good engineer, one also has to acquire soft skills to be able to contribute satisfactory. Workers are trained in these soft skills: how to write, to greet, to eat, to communicate. One has to be de-indianized. The atmosphere in the office is formal and hierarchal.
2. The multinational company wants its workers to be part of the global workforce of that particular company. They insist on having the same the kind of work culture that they have in the parent office in the US and in India. The person who is training employees in the US is the same as he person who trains employees in India. They teach that all workers are part of the SUN global family and one has to adapt to its concepts. Such a concept is for example flex work. If necessary one works around the clock because the company, and it needs, is integrated into to you.
3. The product company that works for the western market wants its workers to think like the western clients to be able to develop a product for them. So you are in India but you also think like a westerner. For training workers will be exposed to western movies, western types of life, western types of activities, and the atmosphere in the office is informal.

When becoming part of the IT industry one has to adapt to the way the business is designed. Most of the Indian programmers come from middle class in the sense that they have not been in 3 or 5 star hotels.

When they start programming, they start being exposed to this because most of the training sessions are taking place in these kinds of places. And they are told that their life is becoming more and more like the life in these hotels. Within a year after they earn the IT standards of money, the way the Indian engineers dress and communicate changes significantly.

Being part of the IT industry or other professional environments, one is very aware of the image one projects in the professional and virtual world, Ilavarasan argues. Therefore one uses specific languages and highlights certain aspects more than other. The character one projects in the professional realm can be very different from the character one is at home.

One does not criticize the company one is working for publicly, even though one may do so amongst friends. Being a programmer is a dream job for many in India because one can earn a lot of money and travel abroad. However, often the work itself is very boring and not challenging at all. Having been educated to innovate and think creatively, often the jobs ask obedience and do not offer any challenges. The programmer can control the writing of code, but the manager decides on deadlines and deliverables. The computer system does not know whether the programmer is doing serious work or not. It can only know how many lines of code were written, it cannot judge the quality of those lines. The programmer, who is not interested in working on a particular day, can decide to file a bug report, true or not true, it will give him some laid back time even though he will still be present in the office.

As a result of the lack of control and boring work, many programmers shift jobs in search for new challenges. Even more so, when the organization of the business and the systems, which register the workers and their deeds, are designed in a highly technological industrial manner, with chip cards and all, people search for jobs in smaller companies that are capable of identifying the human being in the worker.

At first, when coming out of college where the processes are not automated at all, the automated environments of the IT industry seem very attractive. All is taken care of and one does not have to negotiate with one individual to get the paper work done.

Once one is used to the automatic processing, over a period of time many workers start to miss the human touch in their activities because they are more and more treated like a machine. This contradiction creates conflict. To solve the conflict people make adjustments and focus on the money they earn with it. Many go to the U.S.A. and this creates a new dynamic. People start liking the western context where you do not have to struggle for electricity, you do not have to struggle for access to drinkable water, you do not have to struggle for many things and one gets used to this. When coming back to India people realize that that kind of facilities and infrastructure are not there in India. They start feeling bad, go back to the US, get married and now they have a girl child and find the particular U.S.A. atmosphere not good for the child and so they go back to India and so on.

Another contradiction that workers have to deal with, according to Ilavarasan, is the gap between the rationality of the work environment and the personal religious domain at home. At work one finds a problem and solves it, where at home one may go to the temple and pray.

For example when buying a house, one may consult the astrologer to know when and how to by the house. And even though one knows these calculations are completely irrational, people believe in them. At home people dress differently than in the office and also the way people speak, eat and greet changes at work. The moment the mobile phone from work is on again, people change identity.

The reason why western companies like Indian workers is that there is no concept of time. Especially with a laptop and mobile phone at home, Indian workers will take calls from clients till late at night. When it is necessary to continuously work for 14 or 15 hours to be able to deliver, you need to have that Indian-ness to be able to do so, argues Ilavarasan.

However, there are anecdotal evidences show that people are reaching the breaking point of managing the stress at work. New health problems related to stress have arisen: blood pressure, heart problems and back problems. Also the divorce rate of married couples has gone up and a whole new industry for relaxation and ‘taking time of’ came into existence.

Ilavarasan argues that overall the working balance is very poor. On the one hand, in the human-machine interaction, the technology never stops and does not get tired. On the other hand, the ‘global service model’ in which workers communicate with clients from around the globe who live in other time zones, the particular time difference also creates a lot of problems.

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