IT companies killing India’s future

Abhishek Kala (21 Points)

19 September 2008  

This thought suddenly popped out of some corner of my brain last night ..

“IT companies are responsible for the kind of growth India is witnessing today, and will also be responsible

for the kind of growth India will not see in the near future”.

How is that possible is a question which lot of you must be wondering.

How is that possible?? We all know what companies like Infosys,TCS etc etc has turned India into a place to be. But all this has already happened, its something of the past, lets try looking some years down the line of our career say 10 years.

How many projects,technologies,products,companies we all would have changed by then. How much time we would have spent working on different things when all you us know today its all about specialization not generalization.

Lets do some mathematics here on the amount of time spent:

( 8 hours x 20 days x 12 months x 10 years ) = 19200 hours.

Just imagine what could have been achieved if we spent that much amount of time on one thing. Forget about spending the entire 19200 hours on it, even if we spent half of it, we could create wonders. My question is, does any of the IT companies give their employees some time to think something new. They don’t and why would they, they pay you not to think but to work. IT companies in India with its huge bench strength don’t encourage employees to play around with latest technologies.They just want you to do whatever you have been asked to. Basically what it means is .. be dumb programmers (sorry, if it sounds rude) not smart programmers, not create something new but most of the times whatever already exists.

One of the employees in an IT company recently told me: “In an IT company in a year you work for around 3-4 months ( in terms of man hours) and for rest of the time you actually do nothing”. In the process we enter such a comfort zone that our brain doesn’t allow us to come out of it. We become complacent and don’t even try to break out of this comfort zone. But am afraid this attitude forget about India, its not going to take us as individuals anywhere. Every year Software engineers, tens of thousands of them graduate from engineering colleges across India. How many of them do we know as successful entrepreneurs or even just entrepreneurs, am afraid there are actually not many. I don’t want to answer the question why this is happening, why don’t you answer it. Frankly speaking i would like to hear answers to this question ( Submit a response to this article ).

Trust me we don’t need a revolutionary idea to start with. Even companies like Yahoo or Google didn’t start with a very revolutionary or big bang idea, it evolved with time. And it did because the founders believed in what they were doing and spent hours,days and months to take it forward. They worked just on one thing something which they believed, built it from scratch to a giant.

Yahoo was just a directory of Web pages classified under categories and sub categories and guess what the founders were not Computer engineers they were Electrical Engineers.

When Google came into existence there were many other companies like Yahoo, Excite and many more search engines already in existence. The logic which the founders of Google had come up when they started Google was again not something revolutionary. PAGE RANK is what made them different from other search engines.

Below is the Algorithm in its crudest form :-)

Pages B, C, and D all link to A, and they already have their PageRanks calculated. B
also links to three other pages and C links to four other pages. D only links to A. To
get A’s PageRank, take the PageRank (PR) of each of the pages that links to A divided
by the total number of links on that page, then multiply this by a damping factor of
0.85, and add a minimum value of 0.15. The calculation for PR(A) is:

PR(A) = 0.15 + 0.85 * ( PR(B)/links(B) + PR(C)/links(C) + PR(D)/links(D) )
= 0.15 + 0.85 * ( 0.5/4 + 0.7/5 + 0.2/1 )
= 0.15 + 0.85 * ( 0.125 + 0.14 + 0.2)
= 0.15 + 0.85 * 0.465
= 0.54525

When they approached VCs or search companies in silicon valley they were shown the way out within minutes. But Larry Page and Sergey Brin believed in what they had created even though at that point of time they had no idea how to make money out of it and it took them years to figure out how to. At one point of time Google was shelling out millions in salary with no idea how to earn revenue.

Today all of us know where their belief has taken them. Google today is a company worth more than        $200 billion ( 800000 crore INR .. how many zeroes does it have .. whatever be the number its huge money ) that too in just 10 years.

Bill Gates recently said : Dream big and money will follow on it own

The basic point which i am trying to make here is just imagine what we can create if we start working on one particular thing instead of playing around with different projects, technologies and products. That one thing is something which each one of us has to identify and it sure will involve lot of thought process. The return of time invested might not be very quick but if believe what you are doing is something and you are willing to spend time on it, its sure going to be the next BIG thing.

 

Regards

Team - https://www.PangaADay.com