Distress mail received from a worker of the IT Sector
This is in reference to the views I want to express about the job loss/salary reduction in the IT industry in India. Please keep my identity as confidential as I have contractual obligations with my company not to share information related to salary/activities of the company to outside world. You can edit the content of the article as per your requirements without changing the actual information.
I work in an IT Service industry for a vendor that caters to the IT needs of banking clients. There are record job losses in our sector. Since the beginning of this pandemic, we have been working from home and were provided a company laptop. The earlier assumption of the leadership was that this may not last more than a month or two, so things were very normal but as this lock down got extended in different phases, the management panicked and business uncertainty increased that promoted the management to revere the employee yearly hike seen in more than 90% companies, new hiring got staled except for positions where employees left the company voluntarily and most companies have announced salary reduction under a contingency plan where it may get reimbursed once we return to normal. The salary cut ranges from 15% to 70% depending upon the employee position and the decision of the top management.
The economic situation across the globe is grim, so many of the IT businesses have lost their client base and hence they had to terminate the employees who were hired for the specific project. They were given the choice of either resigning voluntarily or get the termination letter from the HR. In an Indian corporate culture where there is too much paper work to show the work experience, a termination letter from the previous employer gives a bad signal which opens to all sorts of speculation for the future prospective employer to hire the person and hence many of them were forced to resign from the job. Even those who were hired before the start of pandemic and given offer letter were not on boarded in the company. Those sitting in the reserve/bench in the big IT companies have been told to either find a job for themselves or leave the organization.
There are so many people in my linkedin connections that have posted the message in the same pattern and format that they have lost the job due to pandemic and requesting their connection to help them find a new one and many of them are high skilled professionals who are working in latest IT technologies like machine learning, data science and robotics. In my company, the salary cut is getting more every month where there is a speculation that we may open up only after the onset of monsoon season. The main reason for the job loss is because of uncertainty of business, loosing client, less productivity working from home in Indian professional set up where we are used to work under the supervision of a manager.
Once we get back to normal, we may see further retrenchment of employees before we get back to normal that may take some time. The year 2020 has been a death knell for businesses and even for many high skilled employees who could have been absorbed by companies easily in a usual time.