Enjoying every moment of IT!

A few days back I heard a colleague in office saying, “I am working in general insurance, my cousin is in health insurance, my sister is also in insurance. Only my brother in law is in retail. We are trying to convince him to join insurance too!”. A closer inspection of the conversation revealed that this person was implying that all his family members are working in the insurance domain of various IT companies.

We Indians are living in an era in which the demographics of middle class urban population is increasingly becoming homogenous. Almost every family has someone working in the IT sector. This is even more evident in the southern states. When you hear that a particular IT company hires over a thousand students from Anna University (which is around half of its student strength), you know that something strange is happening. As most of you know, I am talking about TCS which hired 1006 students from Anna University this June. TCS might as well consider setting up a strategic business unit for Anna University students. Incidentally this is not a one off case. Similar figures of campus placements have been emerging from many reputed engineering institutes in Tamil Nadu and other South Indian states. Things have come to such a state that the sole purpose of students enrolling for B.E. courses is now getting into the IT bandwagon.

The students or their parents are not the reason behind this phenomenon. They are simply reacting to the market situation. Who would want to pursue a career in electrical engineering today? Getting a job in the first place is itself difficult. Even if one manages to get into a decent company, the chances of his starting salary being more than that of his friends in Infosys and Wipro are extremely slim. To add to things, our electrical engineer most likely has a 6 day working week and has to spend a substantial part of his day in the workshop in the sweltering heat while his friend in Infosys is comfortable in his A/C cubicle, checking emails and chatting to friends. The Infosys friend also has pretty female colleagues around him to provide him with some entertainment. After two years of struggle and slogging, the electrical engineer proves his capabilities in his workplace. He gets good salary raises and is now proud to be earning almost twice his starting salary. But his ego comes crashing down when he sees that his Infy friend is now with Wipro and is earning thrice his starting salary. To add salt to the would, this guy announces that he is going to the US next month on a H1B visa. The only worry in his life is that he will be leaving behind his latest Wipro girlfriend. The electrical engineer comes home and finds that his parents have been unsuccessfully searching for a marriage alliance for him. The good candidates are either software engineers and prefer marrying another software engineer or they are not software engineers but still would prefer marrying a software engineer. The poor electrical engineer thinks that enough is enough and enrols himself for a Mainframes course.

We Indians are proud of our rich and diverse culture and heritage. But in 3000 A.D., archaeologists will find that urban India- especially southern India in circa 2000 – 2050 A.D. was a boringly bland society and was largely a softwarian (an analogy to agrarian) economy.