Boom!

If you are a professional, I am sure you will have a LinkedIn account, which is an online network of professionals. I have been part of IT sector for more than a decade now, and thereby have a quite a number of connections hence. After the Covid-19 crisis and lockdown, the IT companies have started to get more business from other sectors, since all companies, having witnessed the pandemic, want to invest more in IT, which is a big enabler of other industries. Every company/industry wants to go over the cloud (for non-technical people – it just means providing all your services & products over the Internet), have artificial intelligence projects running. All in all, the IT sector is booming, yet again! It’s definitely a good time for IT professionals. 

Almost every week I see update such as – “X starting a new position at Y company” on LinkedIn. People are jumping like anything. This morning I saw a post as follows:

X works in A. Y works in B. Both A & B are IT services based companies.

As part of annual appraisal, X got L% increment, while Y got M% increment. (Note that L & M are close, so not much difference).

Both resigned from their companies, and got an increment of L + 30% & M + 30% respectively. So, X went to B & Y went to A, with huge increments. 

This post was followed by stating “rewarding the employees that are staying back by giving them a retention bonus.” There were lot of likes & comments on that post! I could literally hear the applause for the author of that post.

I have been part of recruitment (both freshers and experienced professionals) for quite some years now. In the past one year, I have taken a good number of interviews. Later, I came to know few things about happenings in the industry:

• Many whom I interviewed and passed, they did not join the company.
• They just took the offer from my company & kept on trying for better offers, causing distress to the team, who needed them.
• My other colleagues also reported similar events, wherein people took heavy package offers and kept sitting over them till the last date. Few actually accepted offer, but absconded later on, causing distress to teams and customers.

Just 2-3 days ago, I was discussing this matter with a person. She was explaining the recent offers that her husband received from various companies. He had received good package (~67% increment) from multiple companies. He took offers from 2-3 companies and started working there at one time. This is kind of treachery, specially because in IT sector people are still doing ‘Work from Home’. Later, due to lack of time, he remained with one that committed two increments per year! I was stunned to hear the narrative. 

At this point of time, the companies are stumped, what to do? If they give good increments, people may still use their name and increment, and move to greener pastures. If they don’t give, people are anyways switching (reasons vary for their decision). This is a quagmire, never ending cycle!

Hare Krishna!