Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by kumarvvr 3225 days ago
"insane amounts of money" is an overkill.

I have worked for a year in IBM. We had a two weeks training course on Lotus Notes, sub-contracted out to a training institute. In a dingy place, in an inner part of the city.

Even in companies like Infosys, most training is done in-house. So we are not talking about insane amounts of money. Additionally, if you need to really spend insane amounts of money to train freshers, then either you are hiring wrong, or you are dumping complex work on them. Either way, it's the problem of the company.

> students who come out of college without exposure to real work.

Of course, students out of college will not have any exposure to real work. There is no real internship system in India.

Also, training fresh students, just out of college is a process followed by literally every company on earth, which is hiring freshers.

> Yeah they pay peanuts and yes you would be just a face in the crowd. But they likely give you the biggest break of your life.

They are able to do this because, there is a huge supply of educated engineers, and an acute shortage of jobs. Companies like Infosys mostly outsource mundane work, to hastily trained engineers (to join Infosys, it doesn't matter what your major is, Electrical, Civil, Mechanical, Aero, anything will do.), essentially using them as mules. Fortunately, unlike the coal workers of previous generations, the domain of work allows for natural skill development. So yes, a break in life, but not the biggest.

> People need to show some gratitude.

They do. There is a lot of gratitude. But also simmering anger at the failure of stalwarts like Infosys for failing to develop business to move up the value chain.

2 comments

>>Even in companies like Infosys, most training is done in-house. So we are not talking about insane amounts of money.

Infosys provides free housing AND pays salaries for 4-6 month training period, during which you don't do a dust-peck worth of production work. This is for thousands of freshers. So yes its for all practical purposes insane amount of money.

>>Additionally, if you need to really spend insane amounts of money to train freshers, then either you are hiring wrong, or you are dumping complex work on them.

When given good work complain the work is too complex, when not given complain of lack of opportunities to learn.

>>Either way, it's the problem of the company.

Yeah, In India its always somebody else's problem.

>>Of course, students out of college will not have any exposure to real work. There is no real internship system in India.

There is. It doesn't arrive on a plate though campus placements.

>>Also, training fresh students, just out of college is a process followed by literally every company on earth, which is hiring freshers.

NO. In US you either perform or will be fired.

This level of entitlement among us Indians is sickening.

If people really think there are jobs and companies beneath them, please feel free to go work wherever you like.

World doesn't owe you a job on your terms.

I like the last one. True, Infosys like companies started as a service company and never expanded their business to develop out of the service sector which is bad. My observation is, all these service companies only focus on their profits and never reinvest to expand the business out of it, maybe developing a product to start with.
Why do companies have to move out of service business? There are so many companies which would give complete product development to service companies because it is not in their domain of expertise.

Personally they should have improved upon the service business. All the present good frameworks etc does not need to be rewritten but has to applied in a better way.

Service companies developing products mostly happens for non critical line of business apps, and usually its just an extension to the apps already serviced by the company.

However, BigIT in India could have latched onto that work and move into core product development.

Two reasons they did not.

One, their cash cow is service and moving people into product development would hurt their bottomline.

Two, they failed to see the obvious growing threat of automation. This I think is their biggest failure.

When you see the threat to your core business, its your responsibility to plan for the future.