Software Industry Trainee Layoffs

 A few weeks ago, there were about 400 trainees in Infosys who were separated from the company. This led to two narratives.

Infosys narrative was essentially this: We recruit a large number of graduates without them being ready for the job because the Indian academia is poor quality (obviously, not their words). We look for students who are eager to learn. We make them go through a very high quality training. We invest a lot in them including paying them salary during the training period. Most of these trainees convert into our regular employees. But some have difficulty. We hand hold them, allow them three chances to prove the minimal learning. But every year, a few are not able to learn sufficiently well, and we have to let them go. This is the process we have consistently followed for the last 20 years, and the same process was followed this year too.

The narrative of the trainees was this: This wasn't a simple case of a few trainees not able to learn what they were taught. This was mass layoffs. About 400 trainees were laid off. The company suddenly increased the syllabus, reduced the training time, made the question paper tougher, and increased the pass percentage substantially. All this was designed to deliberately show this as trainees' inability to learn but it is essentially layoffs.

There is also an additional issue of how the activity was conducted with bouncers, and not allowing them to stay on even for just overnight, and all that. If true, I think Infosys could have been a bit more sensitive around the process but frankly, the main issue is separation from the company. So let us focus on that.

The trainees were asked to learn what they should have learnt in their four years. Every Computer Science program in the country would have a curriculum that has a significant overlap with what Infosys wanted trainees to learn. If they knew what they were supposed to have learnt in the college, the training and the testing would be a breeze. But it was difficult only because they didn't learn sufficiently well in the 4 years of college. No one has claimed so far that the syllabus of training was not related to a computer science degree program.

Students not learning much in 4 years of the college is not just a problem, it is an epidemic. But if you are enjoying your college life to the extent of ignoring academics completely, you are taking a risk. The risk is that you may not get a job at all. And if you get a job, you may not be able to learn new things quickly and get fired. And if you took this risk as an adult, you have to now face the consequences. You can't now point to others who also took the same risk, and were luckier, and demand that you be treated same as them. Remember, there were lakhs of students who took the same risk, and were even less lucky than you were, and they didn't even get a job.

Many trainees claimed that they were given a joining date 2.5 years after the job offer. This is certainly not helping your cause. Did you not apply for other jobs? If so, you weren't good enough for any other job. If not, did you use this time to improve your learning, or did you continue to enjoy this as an extension of college life.

Unfortunately, what happened in Infosys will keep repeating in near future.Thanks to AI, number of jobs in the low level IT services will go down and companies in this segment will reduce their hiring and increase their firing. So if you don't learn fast enough, you will be in trouble sooner or later.

If you are still in college, the lesson in this episode is that you must learn your basics well in your college years. Otherwise, AI will eat your job and you will be left to criticize the software industry.