Our career is often shaped by the mentors we have. The first manager I had, my first mentor, once told us a story. He once, from his company, went into a very famous American card company. He observed that almost all of the employees in a particular section, were working for more than 10 hours a day. He later came to know that the entire work culture of team changed after an Indian became their head.
The world inside and outside India are just different. The cultural differentiation is palpable, but the differences generated from the cultural, historic and most importantly economic gradients are unimaginable and often disgusting.
I started my career at an Indian software product company. The company is a single owner, self-made company – it flourished as a rare home grown success story from, my rather bizarre state, known for it’s labour unions and hartals – Kerala. In spite of my love for the state for the support for many things labour friendly, it is often seen as it’s worst weakness. The company has a very capable business product, but profiled and customised for individual clients.
Even though I started my career as tester in one team, I roamed into different teams at different junctures of the teams’ evolution. Most of the teams were running, with it’s own fair share of issues regularly concerning client escalation and tiring delivery schedule. The only thing common to all – poor quality of deliverables and extremely poor documentation. The documentation for all teams that I worked, except for certain teams who had visionary managers and experienced people at its root, had such poor documentation that their entire documentation can be abridged into 2-3 pages of hollow verbal descriptions.
Since we were freshers, we are allowed to have audacity to ask questions rarely asked. So we, the new breeds, asked the difficult questions – Why don’t we document properly? Why don’t we deliver quality deliverables? A flurry of irritated, aberrations of justified answers would follow. In short, the answer always has been, it’s too damn difficult to document when we are trying to make it just work. The responsible group finds it really difficult to test, document and deploy the changes due to relatively small workforce when compared to the quantity of tasks – in short, not enough man power.
The second reasonable question – well that’s automation is for right. We went right into it and after the efforts we put in, for automation, we found out that the UI for testing had so many complex elements and so little discipline in managing the elements, that the selenium suite (automation suite) would go out of memory performing it’s actions. The company was exceedingly against buying software, rather they are interested in creating the product in-house with almost a single developer to manage all the efforts. The UI developers, who had the ability to correct the element names and hierarchy, had similar concerns of over-working. In some projects, the man power concerns were so bad, people had to work for 16-20 hours every day of the week. The situation was so bad, one generation of producy had about 2000 odd open issues in our bug tracker. The main problem comes down to two main items – lack of morality and integrity, poor institutional ethics. The problems we have discussed above are known to management, but they had their own reasons not to act on it. I even had a meeting with a gentleman who asked myself to see the entire problem in a different perspective.
Recently, I read a book called ‘Bottle of lies’ by Katherine Eban. I went into my slumber of web research to look out for generic medicine scandals that usually revolve around corrupt and appalling business practices, that can be seen only as travesties of corporate especially since the consequent es are predictable from the beginning of such practices.
The general trend of sheer neglect towards the good practices and processes that the industry has accumulated over the period of its evolution might be an interesting perspective to start. But as soon as I reached a particular node of understanding, I began to see a common thread, a thread that was clearly mentioned in ‘Bottle of lies’ without much subtlety. The head of most of corrupt companies is either an Indian or a South Asian man who had completely altered it’s existing behaviour to make it more profitable and appeasing to the speed of modern world.
The world is moving at an unprecedented and unexpected pace, but the primary question for an individual is, whether the modern economy and polity, allows his choice to be as well informed as they were envisaged to be. Do we need such pace for our life? Can’t we wait a little longer for a waiter to serve our dishes? A little longer for our cars to be refilled?
The Indian women are often ridiculed for their idiocy and naivety in work, they are often excluded if there is any signal of pregnancy, they are objectified, they are laughed at, they are considered secondary in spite of the empirical evidence. The work culture spearheaded by India Inc. is masochistic, intense, poor and just plain fragile. The reason for such micromanaged, intense management system can be attributed to many factors – overpopulation, poverty, larger families, prolonged support for dependent generations, poor skills. The reasons however long and strong they are, are enough to justify the sheer lack of humanity. The author himself was often responsible for many such atrocities especially imbibing the company culture that I worked.
The question India Inc. has to ask is whether such a behaviour creates a sustainable work culture where the employee and employer can work together with least compromises on their integrity. Without integrity and ethics, what value we add to the world? What are we then?