The recent reports suggest that the firing is close to 10% in a big service company, most of them for low rating and technical irrelevance
Having been in the Indian IT services industry for close to 8 years, I can swear for sure the real under performer % would be less than 2
So what about the others? Weren't they rated low? Oh may be yes but do care to read the reasons below
1. The most critical criteria is the bell curve, invariably every service company exploits this design. irrespective of your performance, only a top 5 to 10% max of the employees are rated good, others are forced fit into the lower ratings. This model proudly adopted by the employer helps him in two ways, 1.) reduces the count of people who should be paid more but gives an illusion to everyone that only performers are paid and pushing them next time. Again, dont miss the point, % of people rated top is forced fit which obviously might include partiality as one factor 2.) Force the employees to fight each other for every year consistently to fit at the top. Though it gives again an illusion of rewarding the meritocracy, understand who is evaluating ? how ? on what parameters? are these industry standards? across technology and complexity? there is no answer to any of the questions for there is a new technology every day
2. An inefficient Manager, his inefficiency could be due to n number of reasons, but finally the result impacts every single person who reports to him unfortunately. It is the managers duty to fight for pushing a good rating of the employee who reports under him if deserved and I have seen, how anyone under an inefficient manager gets rated low irrespective of the performance. People under aggressive and efficient managers are very lucky and obviously they are rare.
3. Bias, partiality ....etc Thats something everyone understands, its a desi instinct. To my knowledge only in Infosys you can do fair fight if you are rated low, but most other companies forget about fights even in day dreams. Fight - i only mean speaking for what you deserve, yes 'fight' is the term for it here.
4. Individual's ability to understand , rate himself, and fight for the deserved rating. I know of people who consider it an ugly job to fight irrespective of the injustice. I have one sentence to these gentlemen, "you just not betraying yourself alone, you betray every person who made you what you are and who is dependent on you deserving the best from you.
5. I read in forums that female employees taking maternity leave are given low rating
May be there are more. you can add it
What about technical irrelevance, ok, so the company will put me under some dying technology for the business reasons irrespective of my potential and interest for as long as they want and finally tell me to get out, because of the reason i did not utilize the every day hrs i had to sleep and spend with family and weekends to update my skills, oh yes dint spend my money on certifying myself and learning future skills which company will reimburse on 100 criterias
I want to make it clear, no company, again no single service company knows the future, they dump people on work whichever they could bargain, have some inefficient manager estimate it, make some direction less employee drain his blood day and night and just move on to next. This worked until the companies had enough time to retrain employees when required and fool around, not any more. The only way to predict future is to create it, obviously thats not what the service companies are specialised in. They dont get it, they will die.
I infact challenge any service company CEO to predict the software or technology that would be hot after 3 years, oh yes 3 years and prove me wrong. If he cant even predict the future of IT themselves for 3 years how could you expect them to standardize. They all go by the wave, it was java yesterday, hadoop today and something else tomorrow. They are busy reading the tech trend on twitter rather than create one.
Hey there is official statement from the service company that layoffs are rumor, oh yeah, i heard that joke myself too!!!
Whatever I have written above fits the majority, there could be special cases, please dont bring them here to generalize, special is special. May be I exaggerated a bit here and there, I think thats ok, do read the disclaimer.
Disclaimer:
Please note that all I have written above are purely fictional and any resemblance to anyone or any company is purely coincidental.
