Time To Shift The Paradigm

- Prithwis Mukerjee

RAPID ADVANCES IN machine learning and the spectacular success of artificial intelligence (AI) software in, say, self-driving cars, voice recognition and chatbots for customer service are sending shivers of anxiety through IT professionals. The havoc that robots and automation technology have wrought with the jobs of blue-collar workers on the shopfloor is now travelling upward into white-collar offices and not a day passes without a new report about automation eliminating jobs. In India, the IT sector—that includes actual software developers, application maintenance staff, tech support personnel and BPO call centre operators—seems to be particularly vulnerable and it is no secret that a sense of doom and gloom hangs over the cubicles and around coffee machines in large and small IT companies.

To make matters worse, some companies have started to shed mid-level people managers, who have stopped writing code for years, and even senior managers who give poor returns of billability on their bloated salaries. The last straw on the back of the vanishing optimism is the reduction in campus hiring of busloads of low-quality engineers from the hundreds of engineering colleges that have mushroomed on the promise of the Y2K-inspired IT revolution. How much of this gloomy scenario is true and what can be done to bring the sunshine back? Obviously there is no quick fix, but let us explore the terrain to seek a way out of these difficult times.