Job Hopping

With IT and airline industry booming in India and people seem to be really misusing the freedom

Every day for the last four months I have been hiring. I come to office each day, hassle my recruitment team, agencies and consultancies for resumes, perform interviews, negotiate salaries and make offers. It’s amazing to see how people negotiate for salaries and perks, no one asks anything anymore about what the job entails, what they can contribute, or how they can grow and realize their dreams here. It’s about pay, and people are eagerly willing to display unbridled stupidity in managing their careers by focusing incessantly on money.
Heck, the time it takes to finalize an offer nowadays, I could send out an offer letter, go have several children, watch them grow, put them through school and then head back to office, the candidate is likely to have finished negotiating his pay and ready to join.
We need to wake up and smell the stink of the decay we are creating all around us in the IT job market.Year-on-year end people here expect nothing less than 30 to 45% salary increases, where as the average salary hike in the US per year is 3% and Eastern Europe is 4%. I could go on and on about the quality of the flotsam and jetsam that washes on to my desk in response to job ads, but we all know it. Sometimes it takes as many as 40+ interviews to close one position.[A very interesting note!]

That was the IT industry. Air Sahara is now offering a 40% salary hike to its employees to retain them. Lo oks like it is a great time to be an “employee” and a bad time to be running a company. For those of you in the software field, I have a question. How do you deliver a project on time?

7 thoughts on “Job Hopping

  1. Niraj, I think India has lot of talent, but the trouble is in retaining them. When we had only Doordarshan, watching TV was simple. Now with so many channels, people flip channels like crazy. The same stuff is happening in IT and airline industry.
    One way to retain people would be to give them stock options which would vest over a period of 5 years or so.

  2. JK,
    About stock options, it’s interesting to note that the noted investor Warren Buffet is *against* giving stock options to employees. Among other things, he feels that it is an injustice to investors …
    –Das

  3. Das, If Warren Buffet were running a software company in India or here in the Bay Area, he would know why sometimes injustice has to be done.

  4. What ever is happening is good. This is compitition. This is demand supply business. Comparing 30% hike in india with 3% in US doesn’t make any point. as 1 $ = @ Rs.50
    To keep same annual hike in India it should be above 40%.

  5. This kind of horse trading was first started by this big MNC’s who are ready to offer such big hike in salary’s when they try to set up initially in India and now when they are settled they hassle about salaries and now complain about it.
    Only when all these companies come together and stop such horse trading the candidates will also not ask for such hikes.
    The prospective candidated know that there are somebody who are ready to pay such hike in salaries so are their expectations too.
    There is also peer pressure of the prospects who see that his buddy pal has got such a jump why not me try for the same what is there to loose in this when so much of job is available around.
    It is hign time that we try to mitigate this issue or as the gentleman in ge mentioned there won’t be any jobs available to advertise for or to look for.
    thanks
    babu.

  6. I am a lay man and my apprehension is the more companies are paying those fat packets to their employees,the more will be the cost of the software and obviously it will burden the common people.

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