Management, Indian Style

I'm a little late commenting on this thread, but I finally had a chance last night to read the article linked in the post. It's interesting on several levels.

One thing I notice is how the Indian software employers appear to be in the same situation U.S. (and no doubt other countries') employers were in 5-7 years ago. Good software people were hard to find, and hard to keep, so companies went to extra effort to come up with way to attract and retain good software people. This became something of a joke over time as companies tried to one-up each other with employee perks.

That said, it's clear from the article that employee attraction/retention is not all they have in mind, but rather it appears to be part of a larger strategy to encourage innovation in service to customers. It sounds like this company has figured out that happy employees usually take good care of not only customers but also the company bottom line, and that "Shut up and do it my way" is not usually the best approach to take with "knowledge workers" like software developers and engineers.

I also found very interesting this reference to the "effort-based" model of offshore outsourcing:

There is a method to what some might consider madness. Nayar has concluded that what he calls the "effort-based" model of Indian IT up to now will not win long term. That's because IBM and other global IT companies now have their own local employees and can match many longtime Indian cost advantages.

There appears to be a shift in focus as people are learning that throwing the most "effort" behind something is not a good way to achieve cost advantages on software projects. This can only be good for Indian and other offshore IT economies, and for the offshore development model in general.

Also interesting, of course, is the "360 degree" employee-boss review system, and the "trouble ticket" system with which employees can make suggestions for improvement in the company or their jobs. It will be interesting to see if other companies outside India try this. I know in the U.S. it's pretty clear that typical employee review processes are hated by everyone involved, except perhaps the people at the top who use them to control dispersion of bonuses and salary increases. In 12 years working for a variety of U.S. and transnational companies, I've never encountered a "rate your boss" program, much less one that posted results publicly.

Dan

We're in the process of developing 360 reviews here in local government..expect it to be done before June 30. However, I seriously doubt they will be public. Just the person involved would see the results. We also have many suggestions for improvement programs, some offering tangible remuneration.

Capitalism is a dynamic system, therefore one would expect that on a dynamic and cyclical basis, it would revisit "Fordism" every so often.

In "Fordism", the company appears to be structured around the needs of its employees. Henry Ford, despite his anti-Bolshevist statements, was considered himself almost a Communist when he started paying employees at his River Rouge plant five dollars an hour in 1920.

This was a lot of money in that day, and many other factory owners said that the employees would waste this money on strong drink and pianos, not being used to having money like the rich.

Earlier, in Chicago of the 1880s, George Pullman, the inventor of the sleeping car, gave his employees sports facilities and apartments.

However, at both places, the apparent employee orientation was strictly in the interests of the bottom line. Ford needed to attract, not the "best" assemblers of autos, but those most willing to work to rule on his assembly line.

Prima donnas, and guys who knew how to build a car from scratch, were not needed at River Rouge. At Ford's and Pullman's plants, the employees were forbidden to talk about labor unions and collective bargaining, and at Pullman's plant, employees were evicted when laid off in the downturn of the 1890s.

At HCL Technologies today, employees get to rate their boss. I'd hazard that other apparently employee-centric innovations are on tap at HCL including free M and Ms and sports facilities.

Likewise, in my experience, Bell-Northern Research provided in 1980 a complete changing room with shower and spa, and a running track, and sponsored a beer blast every Friday, being a Christian, rather than Hindu/Moslem, operation.

The problem was that this lasted for a very short time. Furthermore, the destruction of the employee-centered humanism came not at first top down but from the bottom, interestingly enough.

In 1982, some clown stole all the towels in the fitness center to use while he changed the oil in his car in the parking lot.

In 1984, a beer blast ended in several fights and destruction of property.

That is: the employees being given the "perks" knew at some level that they were being treated well for a reason, and a funny thing about people is that they would rather be treated as ends in themselves.

There's a real contradiction here. In school and in church we are taught to treat people as ends in themselves. But when we enter the job market our strategy has to be to treat ourselves operationally, as a resource to be made marketable, and to use and manipulate others...or fall by the wayside.

Consider for example the tone of books that give advice about the technical interview. Only a true naif would say "study your business until they beat a path to your door". No, instead we are coached in how to essentially lie about ourselves and to memorize the answer to the most popular interview questions, anhedonically, without taking the sort of pleasure in the question that might generate fanciful, wrong answers.

This works well enough. I've played the game. But note that the response to Fordism usually disappoints the Fordist manager.

Only the Bell-Northern employees predisposed to work hard by their passion for technology worked hard, and they did so independent of fitness facilities and beer blasts. The employees who were there to smash and grab on the other hand only pretended to make their weekly quota of "accomplishments and results", while ensuring their position usually by backstabbing and gossip.

India's culture may well be more communal with less backstabbing and gossip and less misuse of company facilities. I would ask whether the Hindu/Moslem divide is a workplace problem, but it appears not to be.

But, these Fordist adventures always will fail because they are self-contradictory. They treat the employee as if he were an end in himself only to make money, which means at the end of the day that the employee is not an end in himself.

The corporation cannot replace the community.

Mr. Nilges, would you not agree to some extent that there is reciprocal use going on? Yes, the corporation uses the employee and cares more about money than the individual. But yes, the employee uses the corporation to collect a check, build a resume, and become more marketable oftentimes at the expense of the corporation (if it pays educational reimbursement or sends the employee to technical classes). A programmer analyst starts work straight out of school, the manager and coworkers teach him everything they know and have learned painfully, and then 2 years later he can demand a significantly higher salary at his next job interview while Corporation A takes the loss and starts over interviewing and training. Granted, as Andy has posted here, sometimes the arrangement can be one-sided, with the employee giving and the employer playing the role of the blood-sucking leach. However, I wouldn't support the argument that it's always that way. Likewise, corporations often put up with low performing developers who do just enough to get by and beat the system, making them difficult to fire.

Any "low performing" developer has the right to do "just enough to get by". I know this is an alarming statement. Let me explain.

Suppose she has a second shift caring for her family and a sick parent: if she in good faith does "just enough", and the company agrees that it is "just enough", then I think it's fair she "gets by".

More alarmingly, suppose she is a snow or surf bunny whose first loyalty is to ski-ing or surfing. Suppose she works from 9 to five and again does "just enough to get by" and then heads for the beach or the slopes nearby.

She's met the terms of her employment contract. Her fellow developers have in my book no right to bad-mouth her behind her back, or to feel in anyway superior because they put in hours and effort over and above. That's their choice.

Now, the above is almost unsayable in American business. But I find that even in the workaholic culture of Hong Kong, the British expats, and even many Chinese, do NOT feel that effort over and above the expectations of the firm is worthwhile. In fact, at my company, the network admin comes to my office every night at quitting time because the office CLOSES DOWN and the employees CANNOT STAY.

An Economist reporter, in 2004, visited a company near the company where I used to work in Shenzen in mainland China. He saw Chinese developers sleeping at noon as did my mates. He concluded that the developers were working 24/7, which I'd hasard, they weren't, because I would typically start a bit late (ten) and often work late, and my only co-worker was the janitor, who lived in the back.

My experience worldwide is that the data processing mythos, that there is a reserve of "hard work" that can replace science and insight "out there" which we can access, is false, and that people all over the world need, in the words of the American labor movement of the 19th century, "8 hours of work, 8 hours of sleep, and 8 hours for what we will".

Recent articles in the International Herald Tribune bemoan the discovery that Chinese employees demand time off and higher pay: I could have told them that my mates in Shenzen were PEOPLE who can put out a lot of effort, but who also would like reward for their effort. They aren't about to feel guilty for collecting a paycheck.

In the 1970s, many software developers, among them Larry Ellison, did "just enough"; Larry went to California to have fun in 1968, and took software jobs to afford hiking gear.

I first encountered the culture of work, for work's sake, in IT in a rather strange Chicago company at the end of the 1970s, at an historical juncture when the American middle class began to realize that it was getting the shaft, and an effort started to show outward evidence of inward grace by various means.

My choice was to work very long hours and to continually invent new approaches, such as a Cobol program that simulated a telecom switch to do accurate billing. But then I discovered that one of the most prestigious techies in the firm was UNDER-reporting his hours, working 12 but billing 8, and this made him look like a whiz...whereas I was only acquiring a reputation as someone who billed too much, even though the client of the telecom solution was happy to pay the bills, having got what he wanted.

I was also angering people because my "inventive" solutions were a criticism implicit of their work.

I'm afraid, Donna, that the entire MIS culture, in which we grow through our work and gain benefits of expertise, while genuine on the ground, is without recognition by the executive suite because it has no legal standing independent of business.

Like Gilda Radner as Roseanne Roseannadanna used to say, in the old Saturday Night Live, it's always something in our world. You learn VB, turns out that C# is needed. You learn Oracle, they want SQL Server. You know everything technically, they want the business skills. This is not a complaint: I am past complaining. It is instead a straightforward narrative of a world in which WHO YOU ARE, your real, rubber meets the road worth as a person, is always up for grabs.

In my experience, women data processors, like you, deal with this better, but I did not deal well at all (I'll be the first to admit) because it always seemed to me that there was some point at which I would be accepted, and accept myself, as a professional...a point which seemed in my experience to recede. A great therapist helped me to take personal inventory, but in any such inventory, you have to realize that there are objective social facts over which you are "powerless" and which are intrinsically unfair.

I was therefore past saying "someone moved my cheese" when I read, in 2000, that 80 percent of Americans have done worse under Reagan, Bush, and Clinton, including most data processors that I know. I was more like my old SDS self, pre-feminism, saying, hey, fuck that shit.

I conclude that the company, by making the tools of production available to me, is not doing me a favor for which I need be grateful. What I DO need to do is find real solutions for them that work, can be done in reasonable time, and that other people understand, and today, the only way I know to do this is extreme programming.

Whenever I seal myself, today, in a workaholic bubble, I produce software artifacts that although documented cannot be understood by people without my experience and knowledge.

I don't agree that the employee "collects a check", instead he is paid for time that is irrecoverable. Marx was a bit of a work-shy monster, but what he said was true: the employee gives a gift of irrecoverable time to the corporation, and is paid with replaceable dollars.

Sure, this is reality, but that doesn't mean it's unfair. I produced a solution in May 1981 that enabled a company to enable its clients to bill accurately, but at a terrible cost, because I was only given the time to "tweak" the existing Cobol code, and I took the time away from my family at a critical moment when my wife was in a serious, if undiagnosed post-partum depression.

Although the client thought I was a genius, my solution worked so well (the rules were changeable by the user as I describe in my book) that the solution created no opportunity for follow-on "technical support", which also, I believe, angered my company.

By being "the very model of a modern major programmer" I managed to screw my family, and shortly after the project my performance reviews began to include nasty, if unattributed, comments about what a snobbish dick I was.

For these personal reasons, Donna, I can no longer buy in to a narrative of programmer growth, or to the idea that a company is doing me any favors, here by throwing my carcase into a suck project. Like Alice at the end of Lewis Carroll's book, I had outgrown a house of cards.

I conclude that in programming, Capital says to Labor, look, you do my work for me: so encode the business rules that I can use a minimal "executive dashboard" on a PDA while I tee off.

The request contains a real contradiction. To actually implement the solution I have described I had to hurt and to offend the programmer of the original solution, and his friends in management: I had to be his condemnatory Parent and his Manager.

This while I felt uniquely isolated by the problems of the marriage and while I would go out on various outings with my cultured and off the job, very civilised co-workers. I recall going out to a do it yourself Messiah and dinner afterward with them, wondering at the contradiction between the savage ways management would set us against each other on the job, the gossip and the continual backbiting masqerading as value-neutral technology, and how friendly we were off the job.

Even in the Seventies, that dreamtime when we weren't "productive", quite a lot of work got done in software. In the Seventies, serious and reliable systems like Tandem for online banking were constructed by people who knew about levels of complexity and stacks: while in the 1990s, at least from my ant's eye viewpoint, programmers in countless startups repeatedly discovered the amazing fact that HTML is *not Turing complete* and "you can't get there from here"...in hideously long workdays, only to be laid off when funding dried up.

Quite apart from being an old fart, quite apart from details of my personal biography, I believe that in software, an insufficient analysis of what it is what we do when we code has produced a striking lot of misery in people's lives, and a number of systems which merely disempower.

I need to make it simple.

The employee is, Donna, a person, and as such worthwhile as an end in himself.

Whereas the company is a thing and as a thing I have to conclude has no inalienable rights. A company is an economic convenience, only one of many for job and wealth creation.

The employee has MORE and less alienable rights than the company.

I am well aware based on my experience in the 1970s that there are a lot of dickhead employees out there who will use this asymmetry to slack off and exploit the company. Indeed, many of those dicks used the software resources so acquired, by slacking off on their paying job and copying code, to found companies which they now defend as having inalienable rights as against a new generation of like-minded slackers and dicks.

Some people, in other words, are no damned good. The trouble is that when people know nothing apart from a devil's bargain, I exploit you and you exploit me, the world sucks.

But in the words of my homeys in Neighbors for Peace back in Evanston, Illinois, "another world is possible".

....and overwhelming the thread as usual, I would ask if India has a better idea? Any Indian chaps have ways to avoid some of the problems of which we speak?

At HCL Technologies today, employees get to rate their boss. I'd hazard that other apparently employee-centric innovations are on tap at HCL including free M and Ms and sports facilities.

I think that there is a world of difference between this rating system and perks. The perks are essentially a company giving you a salary partially in M and Ms and sports facilites. The advantage being that those are taxed less I believe.

Whereas in this case these tickets can fundamentally improve the company and make it better. This is not to say that they will, but they can. "Perks" on the other hand just annoy everyone that does not take advantage of them.

In any organisation,there should be active participation from both management side and employee side. Then, it will automatically shift from being one sided affair. A lot of companies thrives on this rule. And,they are succeding too.

HCL Technologies in india is an upcoming firm in the IT industry all over the world. This concern had grown within a short period. Because the importance given to the employee and customers. Follow this to become an developed firm.