India Dev Center (IDC) is a pure empire building exercise. It is all about creating more partners as the VP mentioned in his Redmond recruitment visits. It is a good tour for a few Redmond folks who find a "sugar daddy", go to India for 2-3 years, get two promotions and come back to a different job in Redmond.
Meanwhile, a few exceptions aside, the quality of the work is abysmal. Components that came back to Redmond had to be completely rewritten.
But who cares, L65 and up are busy building empires following the cue from Redmond. Perhaps they are just the extreme case of the disease in Redmond where everyone is busy building a fiefdom.
It is time to break the fiefdoms down and focus on core products/services here and in satellite offices. Hold VPs accountable too!
woah ! You can read the rest of the comments on the blog here.
I think Microsoft India management is worse than you think, They have put all microsoft philosophies out the door. A very simple example of that is that there are cublicles in micrsoft india unless of course you are a manager or an Admin, because those two do the real work for Microsoft. Can you imagine that? Microsoft started with offices in redmond for a reason... to remind our management because it is believed that those are more efficient. Now who cares about efficiency in india? Software engineers are most neglected people here by managers. There is one more interesting thing, if you are a software engineer ie level <63 then you are gonna get very less salary because all the money should be given to management isnt it? The software engineers really dont do anything for microsoft.. thats why we have so many managers doing nothing in IDC and thats why everyone wants to be manager...
ReplyDeleteYeah, i know about the cubes in IDC. In fact, I hear that the 2nd building which came up in Gachibowli has 1/2 cubes - further taking the concepts away from Redmond.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I think that this is prevalent in all Indian companies. Tech is given the backburner, and the only focus is towards management. And that is a really bad trend. After 6-10 years of picking up technical skills, people move to management leaving all their tech skills behind. Also, most of the people who were good in tech, when they move to management are quite bad at it - since they are not able to let go of their tecnical knowhow. A kind of lose-lose.
I dont know how long this kind of work will sustain. Already I am noticing, nothing worthwile comes out of india, and in all companies, the good work is still being done in the USA or EU. As someone said "Indians outsource our thinking".
I've worked in Microsoft India and Microsoft Redmond also. The biggest shock of my life was the E-mail send by HR last Diwali stating the MSFT will not celebrate Diwali as it hurts sentiments of other religions blah blah.
ReplyDeleteThis was the I decided to move back to Redmond.
MSFT India is all about corrupt CVP who is not answerable for anything happening. Only thing he is interested is sorrounding himself with idiots so that he can have feeling of being smart. I feel like he is working for HP and paid by Microsoft for helping HP for cleaning all the shit from HP India.
With kind of leadership we have in EPG and DPE, day is not far when Java and other paltforms will be most commonly used Dev tools in India. Mr. Venkatesan and his top leadership team are very very good media managers. They manipulate media so well that everybody gets feeling all is well inside MS.
God save MS India.