After my visit to the Bangalore City Market I headed back to Church Street to meet my first Bangalore contact – the first of 16-20 people with whom I had a chance to converse in the next week. This time it was a friend of a friend from California, and we had arranged to meet by email while I was in NY. Let’s call him “Anand.” We met at Koshy’s – a restaurant that many seem to be consider an institution, known for it’s “quaint charm” more than for its stellar food (to quote the link earlier in this sentence). Of course, for a tourist, part of the charm of those kind of places is trying to figure out what exactly makes them so charming to the locals and experimenting in taking that charm on faith.
Koshy’s actually had several restaurants that occupy the whole block, so I just kept my fingers crossed and walked into the middle one. I glanced around the room and someone waved at me. It turned out to be “Anand,” so the hardest part was over. “Yeah,” he said, “it wasn’t hard to recognize you.” (I sent him a link to a photo the day before.) We sat down, exchanged a few words, then started ordering, since the waiter was standing next to us, impatient. Anand ordered a “masala omelette” (not on the menu) and a toast, I did the same. We start talking. First about the bars and pubs in Bangalore – I got some recommendations for eating. Anand then asked me where I was from. I said I was from Russia originally and mentioned that in Brazil this gets me more love than saying that I live in the US. “Ten years ago it would have been the same in India,” said Anand, “People were in love with Russia.” When he was in high school, he continued, their history book dedicated half a year to the Russian Revolution. “I used to be a communist,” he added.
We then talk about what Anand does and how he go there. He is in his mid 20s, and grew up in Madras/Chennai, the capital of the neighbouring state of Tamil Nadu. He says he wanted to do physics at one of Madras' elite colleges, but didn’t manage to get in and decided to study computers elsewhere. He is now working for a “product company” in Bangalore.
As I learned over the next few days, in Bangalore “a product company” typically refers to a large US company that employs Bangalore software developers to work on its own products or internal systems. Those companies are invariable household names in US, and Anand’s company is no exception. “A product company” is one of several types of IT employers that my interviewees often identified, and it’s generally seen as being near the top of the food chain. The complete hierarchy looks rough as follows.
Research
At the very top of the chain is a handful of “research labs.” Needless to say those jobs are very few. The employers are mostly large US companies, though Infosys has a research lab too.
Core Product
“Product companies” comprise the second tier of employers – or the top tier if you ignore the tiny research tier above it. Those are household names that hire developers to work on their own stuff. This tier is sizable, employing thousands or perhaps even tens of thousands of software developers. To get a job here one would need a 4 year engineering degree. No experience past that is required however – in fact, I heard many times that “product” companies prefer to higher people straight out of college, finding it easier to mould fresh minds into their corporate culture then to re-educate engineers with work experience in India. Such companies are always foreign, typically based on the west coast of the US, and as I understand, top management in all such companies is mostly comprised of Indians who have worked in the US and have come back. There is a common opinion that one cannot find managers with appropriate experience in India, and that there is generally shortage of management talent. At the same time, for technical jobs, local developers seem to be preferred to returnees.
Services
“Service companies” hire developers to build software systems for their clients. This tier includes both foreign and Indian companies, but the biggest players are Indian. Wipro, TCS (“Tata Consultancy Services”) and Infosys are probably the largest (those deserve an extra word – see below), though US-based consulting companies seem to be catching up. Working for a service company usually requires a 3 year undergraduate degree (not necessarily a 4 year engineering degree), plus a training course.
BPO
The the lowest tier in IT employment are “BPO” (“business process outsourcing”) jobs. Those mostly involve data entry and call centers. They typically require knowledge of how to use a computer. People usually do a non-degree training course for that. People I talked to in Bangalore were from the first three tiers, so I have limited knowledge of the BPO sector.
Support
Somewhere between services and BPO, there is an another sector: tech support. As I understand, those jobs vary in technical sophistication: some are more like call center jobs, others require more knowledge.
And then there are the exceptions: small Indian start-ups, free software companies, non profits. Those would be hardly noticeable in the employment statistics, though I find that it is often worthwhile looking for people who do “strange” things like that. With some luck, I'll get back to those eventually.
Meanwhile a few words about the Wipros and the Tatas. Wipro started as a vegetable oil company (“Western India Vegetable Products Limited”), and has produced all sorts of stuff over its 60 year history. It still makes soap, light bulbs, baby oil and furniture. TCS is a part of Tata Group, which is India’s largest private sector company and seems to make every imaginable product: fertilizers, tea, cars, wallets, etc. Trucks are the most noticeable of Tata’s products, since you can see them on all Indian roads. While IT services and BPO have become an important source of revenues for both companies, it’s just one of the many many many things that they do. This kind of diversity may seem odd in US context, where the stress is so often on finding one’s core strengths and selling, outsorcing or downsizing the rest. There is a reason for it, however, which is the Indian “License Raj”. Until the economic reforms started 1990s, India had a semi-planned economy. While much of the manufacturing was done by the private sector, any manufacturing required a license. Getting licenses required a combination of political connections and luck. As a result, the companies often found themselves unable to expand production of things that they already knew how to do, but on the other hand found themselves in possession of licenses to manufacture an entirely new product. What does a vegetable oil company do if it suddenly obtains a license to make scooters while unable to get a license to expand its vegetable oil production? It starts making scooters. After 40 years of the License Raj, most successfull Indian companies found themselves making absolutely everything: from soap to IT services. That’s the case of Wipro and Tata. It’s not the case of Infosys, though, which started as an IT services company in early 1980s and has pretty much stuck with IT.
(to be continued)