ITs not glamorous anymore

Its interesting to see IT companies in the bottom shelf of the "Top Tech Companies to work for" list. Infy is at number 7 in the Worst companies to work for category.

Lowest-Rated Tech Companies

Rank	Company	Company Rating	CEO	CEO Approval Rating
1	Xilinx	2.3	Moshe Gavrielov	12%
2	Affiliated Computer Services	2.4	Lynn R. Blodgett	21%
3	Hewlett-Packard	2.4	Mark V. Hurd	22%
4	Avaya	2.5	Kevin Kennedy	24%
5	Real	2.5	Rob Glaser	12%
6	NVIDIA	2.5	Jen-Hsun Huang	52%
7	Infosys	2.6	Kris Gopalakrishnan	35%
8	Nortel Networks	2.7	Mike S. Zafirovski	2%
9	Perot Systems	2.7	Peter A. Altabef	35%
10	Dell	2.8	Michael S. Dell	28%

Source: http://gigaom.com/2009/12/15/which-top-tech-company-to-work-for-not-google/

The problem is not with the IT companies but rather with the people who join them with the wrong expectations. The fact is that IT work is getting commoditized and no longer needs the brain horsepower for which it was once respected.

IT companies these days prefer low risk, low margin maintenance projects to high risk high margin application development which tend to be interesting to engineers who always want to work on cutting edge tech. This automatically makes the manager or management more important the engineering.

As one manager put it "Coding is not the big deal. It is all about managing profitability. Getting work done at the lowest cost.", trying to make it sound interesting to be a 'manager'.

So, IT companies are no longer "engineering" companies but more like body shopping, staff augmentation/hiring companies. The engineers are no longer assets "who walk into the office each morning and walk out in the evening" as it used to be once.

The managers as used as they are to their high paying boring jobs of making excel sheets and reports cannot understand why someone doesn't like their work.

"Not doing something because it is not interesting is not an excuse. We are serving the client and we must ensure customer satisfaction in whatever they ask us to do" as some 'senior' manager said in his town hall meeting to which a friend whispered "Just because I know how to sweep the floor doesn't mean that I am going to sweep the office floors".

As one would expect, employee morale would be low. Its not the companies fault because once you are a public company, you need to chase the money. The problem is with the disgruntled employees themselves who continue to work without trying to find other suitable jobs.

As some great chef said "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen (and the gene pool)" :D