Dear NR Narayana Murthy Sir,
You are an alumnus of my prestigious institute, IIT Kanpur. And I feel proud about stating that upfront. Your organization Infosys has been doing exceptionally well as long as I can remember and it doesn’t need my acknowledgement to prove the same.
I would like to straightaway come to the point sir. On the one hand, the firm has been able to increase its profits manifold in the past few years and also show a double-digit growth in a single quarter. While on the other hand, the entry-level salary for a fresher at Infosys has been stagnant for the last five years despite the industry having scaled up the value chain in the global market.
You are all-knowledgeable and aware of the soaring inflation rates in India, the manifold increase in the fees of engineering colleges and the rising rates of education loans above all. The colleges offering the degrees, the banks offering the loans and the paying-guest accommodations offering us the rooms have somehow all been able to adjust for inflation by increasing their prices. What surprises me is that your esteemed organization (and many other IT giants of the same stature) have miserably failed to do so. The result being stagnant salary packages being offered to engineers across the nation for so many years now.
I found the following extremely intriguing fact that would like to share at this point. In 1996-97, a TCS fresher was offered an entry-level salary of Rs 1.45 lakh. This year the entry-level salary rose to Rs. 3.16 lakh, but adjusted for inflation, that amount is equivalent to a mere Rs 1.15 lakh, says a report by Credit Suisse (from 2013). I verified that the compensation statistics are almost similar at Infosys and many other companies in this matter. I know your company doesn’t get affected by this fact, but an engineer from a middle class family does. It might sound funny, but a laborer who earns daily wages has witnessed better percentage hikes than a typical Indian software engineer.
It would be a sin to ask IT companies for charity, but is it wrong to ask for fair compensation which at least factors in inflation? I see all kinds of “employee caring” policies being reiterated time and again for Infosys’ engineers. But sometimes I do ask myself, are these policies really employee-caring? What more could I expect from my firm if it doesn’t even take into account the very basic reality of price rise and inflation while deciding the base salary for its employees? With every government pay commission for its permanent employees, I feel devastated inside because I know that our dear IT industry is not going to follow it.
I hear all kind of justifications for this brutal reality: such as the demand-supply imbalance, the cost of training an employee; the list goes on and on. Sir, isn’t it true that from the abundant supply of lakhs of engineers, you try to select the best ones? Do they not deserve to be paid fairly? I would hate to admit this but I do feel that our Indian IT giants are not recruiting engineers, but cheap laborers whose price is decided by the labor markets of IT industry. But is it that the markets decide the price, or the few organizations who own the market decide this price, is the question that needs addressing.
By no means have I intended to defame the image of a company or a person; I want to make a point which is commonly observed across the entire industry and one which I don’t see being resolved in the near future. A few years ago, I thought that being an engineer was good enough. But today this thought is just petty mockery of my millions of friends, whom you know as software engineers.