MNC Jobs == Cheap Labour Jobs ?
August 11th, 2008Before starting I would like to state that its a flame post, read it only if you can digest properly.
All my fellow readers might be knowing about the much hyped Microsoft internship which was offered to me last semester.I screwed up my academics (to some extent) to get this prestigious opportunity. What was the final outcome of it? Read on…..
When I arrived at the office, I was nearly taken away by the impressive building, the superb lifts, cokes and coffee machines. We had night cab drop and food allowance. Everything looked so impressive! Slowly I came to know that this India Dev Center is just a place where M$ dumps all its useless and crappy work which they think “The Redmond guys” should not handle at all. Its nothing but cheap labour !! We are paid CTC of say 9 lakhs, but look back a little. We are being underpaid badly and that too without an overtime pay. Isnt this cheap labour? (I repeat again) What work is being handled here? Visual Studio Tools, SMS UI, Wordpad UI and product experience groups. This may be daring work to some extent, but not at all core job from any angle. The whole Visual Studio is being build somewhere else, Wordpad is built somewhere else, just the UI testing is over here. IE is built at Redmond, but testing work is sent here. WTF!
I always had thought that India was one of the top countries when it comes to IT sector. Is it really true? Narayanmurthy had clearly said that until we improve out hardware proficiency, we cant advance at all, and I firmly stand by his statement. NASSCOM and all these Indian organization rely too much on foreign companies rather than starting their own business without external help. They don’t dare make M$ angry and this was the reason why they backed OOXML for Indian stand at ISO.
Again once I wondered why all big MNC’s choose India as their destination? They cite “Good Brains, Nice Workforce, Good English Speaking Professionals”. I agree with first and third but not with second. It should be remodelled “Nice Cheap Workforce”. We have lax labour laws in our own country and people are made to work hours and hours after office timings for completing their work. Can this happen in the US and European countries? I can only say that whatever the big MNC’s say, India and developing countries are nothing but a place to cut costs, cheap abundant labour makes it simpler. They would never go out of their slavish mentality and keep all their core development in top-secret centers which cannot be a developing country at any cost!
My last line is “Work for an MNC if you want, you would be lucky if you had freedom and got a prestigous work in real sense (not in sense of salary)”
August 12th, 2008 at 2:57 am
I do not agree that your interview round was tough ..
You are right about the MNC’s providing the kinda work in India … EYES OPENED ..
Have u ever compared Indian Services based companies work with these MNC’s …???
Atleast in placements ask the guyz who come to interview you as to which team they belong .. your profile shall be mostly there …
Were you with the IDC or GDCI[MSIT]??
August 12th, 2008 at 10:23 pm
I agree that my interview round was tough. I was a bit weird and unexpected! No grievances about it.
There are many companies in India who work for these MNC’s. I just hope their work culture is not that slavish.
BTW I was in IDC.
November 2nd, 2008 at 11:37 am
Hi manish
I was wondering what kind of work were you made to do in MS. Was it worth spending the two months there?
November 2nd, 2008 at 1:37 pm
Hi Ashish,
Actually MS has lots of work to do, just that its India center does some cheap kinda work. Again , I agree that testing should not be called cheap job since its also an integral part of software development cycle.
MSIDC is the second largest Dev Center of MS outside Redmond, so we naturally expect to have core development teams in bulks.
The team in which I was working was a dev team (thank God), but I was really pissed off to see that they develop VS tools using .NET which runs as slow as sloth.
The intern guy who worked next to me had a horrible experience since he was in test team, guess what testing? Functionality testing? No! He was in UI testing, the most irritating testing job ever made. I was a bit lucky than him.
Each one has its own likeness, but I still think that whatever happens, happens for good! Maybe I wouldnt have resisted MS too ling if I would have got a PPO. Am not saying this since I was not offered the job. There is no jealously feeling at all.
November 3rd, 2008 at 12:19 pm
Good for you you got into a dev team:) I had a chat with the person in charge of recruitments. I asked if interns got a choice in working in the field of their interest. I wanted to work on DirectX/Xbox360.
What he told me was interesting. According to their internal policies, if their team works on any product, they work on it end to end. So they either completely develop it or have no role at all. Sadly there is no DirectX/Xbox360 work in India.
One thing that was surprising was that the interviewers were really friendly. I was hoping a kind of stress interview, but the interviewers were guiding at every step:)
November 4th, 2008 at 12:07 am
Yeah, for interviews being friendly, I agree 100%. One interviewer took me to the interview room with hands on my shoulder asking my place of residence etc etc.
There are only 12 teams in MSIDC, Where most important are Visual Studio, Silverlight, Data Protection and a few more. There are no hardware teams in IDC as far as I know. If you are lucky enough, you may get into dev team, but you can still change after a year or so.