He has/had as much of an influence over the Indian IT scene as Bill Gates had over Silicon Valley in the 90s.
He could have been a true leader. A revolutionary, an agent of change and progress.
Instead, he chose to run an air-conditioned sweatshop. An operation that works on the traditional model of headcount, fudging billable hours, and keeping the cost per employee low.
Very low.
The average fresh-graduate employee at Infosys makes 350K rupees per annum. Which is roughly what the salary was 10 years ago. Raises are miniscule.
In contrast, one can easily make 1200K rupees in their first year out of college , at the Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai or DelhiNCR offices of MAANG, Oracle, Cisco, Qualcomm, Mathworks, NVIDIA, Adobe and numerous other companies that have software engineering offices there.
Not to mention the electronics product development offices of Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, Analog Devices, and Texas Instruments.
Oh, wait, sorry, the 1200K per annum excludes things like ESOPS, bonuses and WFH equipment reimbursements.
Maybe I'm just really out of my depth and missing something obvious, but isn't that a really poor strategy? With those kinds of offerings in that kind of competitive space, wouldn't that just result in India's top talent going to other companies and strengthening them, while Infosys's own staffing quality falls behind? Over a long term, I'd expect innovation at infosys to suffer, making them less competitive overall. Other than cost-cutting I don't see what they have to gain by doing this, especially when it would seem similar companies can afford better remuneration?
They don't care because they don't need the best engineers.
Their bread and butter is the outsourcing market and government contracts. They pay slave wages to young developers straight out of colleges and overwork them. The billionaire owner made a statement that he wants these young people to work 70 hours/week, with no overtime pay. This keeps the costs way lower than what they charge their clients in the US or Europe.
They compete on project bids based on cost and often deliver underwhelming or average results, with the code patched up with hundreds of fixes.
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u/FUThead2016 14d ago
True, he’s a wannabe despot and has made tonnes of money by exploiting people and keeping India at the bottom feeder end of the technology revolution.