Do the Indian IT companies deliberately create hostile conditions for most of the freshers to leave them?

Okay to answer your question, here is what I think. 1. The Indian IT sector is doing what they call Body Shopping. To elaborate. (this might be a little inaccurate, but I hope it conveys the ideas more realistically) Assume you are a client, who wants to outsource work to an IT company. When this company files the tender to bid for the contract, it has to show how many people it has to take your task to its fruition. Now when it does so, you, the people on the bench come into the fray. You might not be doing squat, and might only be warming the comfortable chairs, and using electricity, and getting paid for doing nothing, but since the nature of the business is such, there is nothing much your managers can do about this. But be rest assured, when a project comes through, you will be among the folks who will be put to work (if you are lucky). 2. I think, you should set your expectations right. The reason why internet explorer is given preference over other browsers is because, for each computer the company buys, it has to get a Microsoft licence, which costs a lot of money. Now if they are paying for something, they can    a. Exercise better control over its usage.    b. If they have paid for it, why not use it. Lastly, I feel that laterals are given more importance and better pay because the companies are blind and oblivious to the talent within the country. A situation similar to this would be the IPL, where I am sure if selectors look within the country, they will find equally good players, but we look outside for players who we don't mind paying and getting performances out of. Hope this answers some of the questions you posed.

I see you have tagged Cognizant first, So i am assuming that you work there. :p Now I also used to work in a company like CTS (:p) for 2 years, so I understand your question (I also faced it :) ). But let me tell you this, the top level management of nearly all Companies are good, and visionary, but the middle level managers(most of them) suck. This is called The Middleman problem. The ones that don't suck(are even somewhat good) get promoted or go onsite. I am also assuming you are an Indian as you want WFH. Dude let me tell you that WFH is a very bad idea. It is fine to stay in office, for a hour more (trust me). Also in India, it is actually illegal to WFH. Some companies allow that because only a few people WFH, so it is negligent. Regarding IE, let me give you an example. I was working on a project that was to be launched in many languages. Now Chinese population have stuck to IE, and you can't ignore China (2nd largest population). So we had to make sure that everything worked in IE(then it mostly works in everything) Now regarding sitting on bench, the thing is every fresher wants to do development, but there is only so much development work. So you have to show that you are capable of doing stuff. Show motivation in whatever work you were given. Help your team mates in finishing their deadlines. Then no matter how sucky your manager is, he has to notice your efforts and skills. The key point is when you are young, try to learn as much as you can. Just because you are on bench, doesn't mean you sit idle. There are a lot of internal development projects going on in every company. Take part in them. This will give you visibility and expertise. Eventually, you will be treated with respect. Let me tell you about my experience. I was the only trainee who was invited to join the SharePoint center of excellence, and I was the one of a few trainees who were given important modules to develop, most of other trainees in my team were enjoying bench. The result of which I learned like hell, made awesome friends with my seniors, and co-founded my company. So have patience. These things take time. Also try to move to product company.

I write the below post on behalf of a friend of mine who has been in 1nfy for 7+ years now. Am penning down my friend's thoughts against each statement in your question. Disclaimer - I am not being defensive here, just presenting my reasoning. 1. Being a fresher, I can see that the life of the senior folks, especially the ones who have joined laterally is very comfortable. Mid Senior and Senior members of the organization have learned the ropes and know the 'system' and people well enough to be comfortable - or to handle issues or manage expectations when they are put outside their comfort zone. Laterals are usually hired due to planned growth in units and demand for their acquired skills, while considering their learnability. If the skills are valuable enough, then the pay at which the lateral is hired is usually higher when compared to a person who has never jumped ship. Believe me when I say that almost no one can sit on their laurels and hang around for too long without adding value to the team / organization / client - and it only gets harder when moving up the ladder. 2. Freshers have to sit on the bench for too much of time. This is due to the dynamic nature of project requirements, and skills gap as almost all customers want experienced resources to work for them. Around 9 to 10 years ago, there were situations when trainees (mostly CS / IT engineering graduates) were taken out of training and asked to work in production projects immediately due to high demand. These 'sunshine' days are now over as IT budgets are being controlled and managed more effectively. If an issue like the Y2K bug appeared again, then perhaps such a demand spike could appear in the future. My friend was on bench for 5 months after completion of training, but utilized time very effectively by working on internal projects and attending training sessions in soft skills, etc. There are several avenues to productively spend time during bench, and organizations are now focusing more on how to improve bench utilization by having enterprise applications for staffing and internal projects. For example, if you speak with a manager and get an opportunity to contribute to the unit/group newsletter, you will end up learning both about the work going on in the unit/group, and also improve your writing skills, while also getting a chance to build relationships with the management team of various projects. 3. Managers, Senior managers, Group Managers never take your questions seriously stating you are young blood and advise you to cool down. My friend's advise to freshers is to channel your energy into learning and internal projects and organizational contributions, and showcasing the results to get visibility. Smart and enterprising people who skill up and/or participate get things done are noticed and picked for production projects earlier than the ones who laze around and achieve nothing. 4.There are too many restrictions, to start with, Internet Explorer is considered as the standard browser, and you are not allowed to protest against this. Unfortunately, this is one of my friend's gripes too. He raised a request to get Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox installed, but this was rejected due to 'security reasons'. The only reason he could think of is that the extensibility of Chrome and Firefox and the potential chance of exploits in beta / newly released versions could increase the risk of security incidents. An organization typically has to certify each version of software before allowing it to be used on their infrastructure - and the high frequency of updates in Chrome and Firefox is an overhead which would increase costs. 5. Client is given utmost importance while nothing is done for employee satisfaction. And when you communicate with people from client side, you understand that they never laid down any strict restrictions on you, it is rather the Indian upper management that is working hard to prove its loyalty to the client neglecting employee convenience. When working for a business in a dog-eat-dog world with extreme competition and thinning margins, this is expected. Indian IT company employees have much better working conditions when compared to industries where margin is thinner and production pressure even higher - read the news about what is going on in companies like Foxconn. The comparison with Foxconn is likely to lead to a lot of comments and brickbats, but this is the likely harsh vision of the future for entry level employees in Indian IT companies when work being done becomes less complex and commoditized and if replaceability is higher.  6. People are made to work on weekends and/or night shifts in the office where this could have been accomplished by giving 'work from home'(the client has no problem if employees of the IT companies work from  home). Weekend work People who work on weekends in production support projects are typically given compensatory leaves on weekdays. But for people in development projects, the story is different. If the reason for having to work on weekends is due to poor quality of output or gaps in estimation, then compensatory leaves are usually not given. If however the reason for having to work on weekends is due to client pressures (perhaps due to regulatory compliance or contractual reasons), then the development team members usually have the right to speak with the management team and ask for compensatory leave. Night shift work Production support night shift work usually has higher pay compared to the normal day shift. And people who have worked in night shift for a certain number of days usually are then rotated onto the day shift after a few days of compensatory leave so that they can get adjusted to the change in work timings. Understand that the real question is why these can't be done from home - and I'll explain the answer below. 7. And all these restrictions are only meant for the freshers. Short answer - if a client is OK with vendor employees working from home, then the team members should have speak with the management team and see if something can be worked out - considering the NDA and contract signed between the client and the vendor. Long answer - Restrictions around working from home depend on the contract between the client and the vendor, and the most important factor here is data security and IP protection. Almost ALL banking client work is done from inside dedicated secure areas on PCs which are on the client network, and the possibility of working from home is almost zero - at any hierarchy in the project. The key thing to keep in mind here is that any work involving access to client data or code is likely to be executed only at office, unless both the client, and the vendor has signed a strict NDA (non-disclosure agreement) and the client trusts the vendor to stick to the NDA, and the vendor trusts the employees to stick to the NDA. Based on historic data, freshers are at a disadvantage, as there have been several incidents due to password sharing and mishandling of confidential information - whether it be client or company specific information. Mid-senior / senior team members would have gained the trust of the management team, or would have company laptops issued to them which would enable them to work from home. In terms of company issued laptops, this is a cost/overhead for larger organizations. Freshers joining startups or smaller companies have a better chance of being issued a laptop or getting a chance to use their own laptop for project work. If using one's own laptop for project work, then a Pandora's Box of issues arise - especially around client / company IP, data security and software package licensing - unless open source tools are being used to do the work. 8. Home grown talent is treated inferior as compared to lateral joinees with similar amount of experience. (This gives you a 'Ghar ki murgi daal barabar' feeling to you) See the answer to point 1. If experience in a specific skill is in demand and supply is short, then pay is usually higher for laterals entering an organization. Non-laterals (using a more dignified term than 'old timers' :-) ) who skill up, showcase ability, add value and compete successfully with laterals are more likely to be treated with respect, and perhaps get rewarded for loyalty to the organization. To put it bluntly in other words, love your job, but not the company, because you never know when the company will stop loving you. :-)

Let's try to answer your questions one by one. Creating a hostile work environment What is the benefit any company has by doing so? It takes an enormous effort to hire a person - time spent on shortlisting resumes, , preparing for interviews, conducting interviews, post interview discussions, negotiations, getting him on board, training etc. which one makes more sense - Retaining the talent and growing him for company's good or creating an environment which forces a fresher to leave? If all they wanted was to let freshers go, I am sure they can come up with infinite reasons and in the first place, they wouldn't have hired them at all (unless they had a personal grudge against you and are paying back this way. Not very likely! ;) ) Restrictions Hmmm. Internet explorer! I am with you on that. Even IE developers probably hate to use IE6. But on the other hand, lets think of the users. Let's take an example of the railway ticket booking system. It is used by millions of users; many of them not very computer aware (trust me, they type www before the site name! ). These people tend to use the default browser which unfortunately happens to be IE. Hence, its natural for the clients to press upon IE. Personally I feel work from home should be encouraged as it has many benefits - no travel which means more time to work, less traffic, better composed mind, and less pollution and less time spent on coffee breaks. Now if you go and tell your manager the benefits of WFH, he will ask you - 'Yes dude! But how do I know you ll really work?". As you can see it requires some trust to be built before giving these benefits. Its like your dad allowing you to drive alone. He knows you will drive but he will sit behind you till he trusts you to drive safely. So stop worrying about these petty things, work on your future, possibly have a coffee with your manager, build confidence and a good relationship. Good luck!

not sure about other companies and the IT industry in other countries. Evn im in bench and I heard from my seniors that its the end of the finacial year and so its kinda tough for them to reallocate resources. And our rmg said by april end many ppl will get release from projects so we freshers can get into projects.

Indian IT industry is mainly service based in nature. Each year thousands of engineers graduate and get placed in these companies. There is large number of people competing to get a job and once they get a job, they have a tough time surviving there. The nature of industry is like this that the fresher engineers are considered just as educated workers. But lets not be too pessimistic about the nature of IT jobs. Just keep learning and focus on yourself and you will be good to go ahead in this field.

I am saddened to say this but most of the things that you said are true for most on the big IT companies in India. I have been a software developer for 8 years and started my career with TCS (stayed there for 2.8 years) so i consider myself fit to answer this question.The technology related restrictions are mostly there in big indian IT firms because the people managing the assignments (tech leads) are highly incompetent/ignorant. Quoting your example, a team lead would think that changing the default testing browser for their web application to be IE because they think that adapting a new browser would put a hell lot of work for them/wud require some drastic technology changes. which means that they dont know how a web browser works.But there are greener pastures in india :). Lots of organizations do really good software dev/data analytics work and have people who really know what they are doing.There is still a lot to write about this topic, but i wud like to say that if someone wants to switch to good work, it is possible. With some research, you will find a lot of Organizations that are creating awesome products/ delivering top notch services.Let me mention a few good organizations… okay maybe later ;)