Waiting for 2020

India 2020: A nation with a population of 1.265 billion people and more than 30 million software engineers. This will happen but i want more, companies like Microsoft or Google coming out of Hyderabad or Banglore? May be a IBM to show the scale of revenue. And why not more brands which stand for India and not for outsourcing,................

I always thought the right time to join as a software engineer was 1995-98, as all those who joined software industry at that time have grown more because of demand than their talent. It is very unusual to become project managers with 3 or 4 years of experience, but in Indian scenario where software companies have recruited heavily in the last 2 years all those who joined in 95/98 have been made project managers. That does not mean all who have joined in the last 2 to 3 years will become project managers in next 5-6 years. But what will happen to these software engineers if they don't see any growth in their roles, will they turn to entrepreneurship? I hope so as that is what Indian software industry needs today. Now when Indian companies are going the IT way, they should do so with Indian software products and Indian service providers to implement it. But Bharti's outsourcing deals going to IBM and Nortel speak the other way.

Coming back to the role of managers, in service provider companies where it is very difficult to predict the estimated time to complete the project because of the nature of work, which does not involve fixed things, needs more experience on the part of managers to allocate resources properly. A product based company has fixed dates for release which are decided long ago and work of that kind has been done for prior releases to make the estimation easier. But the services company which handle many maintenance projects find it difficult to allocate proper number of resources to the project and the result is some people working more than 14 hours a day to reach the deadline and the rest of junta on bench wonders why the work is not being given to them. Though a mandatory number of bench employees requirement under SEI CMM kind of dilutes the issue it cannot justify the poor management skills of mangers at higher level who look into execution of projects in companies like Infy or TCS . The kind of deal between outsourcing companies and the Indian companies which bill per person per hour or are fixed cost make it more difficult to change the deal at a later stage. The result is dissatisfaction for everyone.

The number of Indian product development companies is too less and the India development centers of US product companies never go for handling independent releases. So how are we going to have the vision 2020 which requires more of experience and skills which come over time.