Serendipity and Learning

Those who wanted the service industry to create a Microsoft or an Adobe in India miss the point that it is an ecosystem that creates, not exhortations. Along the way that Indias services industry was floundering or stumbling and bumbling along, a company named Flipkart was formed. It seemed innocuous enough - after it was an Amazon clone - started by selling books, went onto sell many other things. The market that was India was lucrative enough for Amazon itself to come onboard. Flipkart itself spawned a host of me-too brands. And it gobbled up Myntra.com - which remains a premier fashion destination online in India. The Paypal mafia had a similar clone in India - the Flipkart mafia. Demonetization led to a surge in digital payments. GST led to more digital transactions. And an entire tech ecosystem emerged to meet the demands of new India. Slowly but surely, the tide turned. Engineers did not want services jobs anymore and instead wanted meatier tech jobs,  wanted to solve re...

The late 90s to early 2000s were all part of Indias service economy boom. Everybody who was anybody became an engineer. Every engineer from mining to petrochemical became interested in IT services. If not anything, it offered a steady income for an aspirational country. But this interest in services also came at a cost. In my own experience, I found people thinking purely of work as a service, devoid of too much initiative or risk and spending their lives as it were on a spec sheet and clients orders. It also de-skilled people - unless they were careful about building a skill - it was an instant road of managerial anonymity and a career devoid of any skills. Along the way, for those who are familiar, were lamentations from people that all these services are not enabling India is not producing the next Microsoft or even a web browser. There were IT services giants, but they were not producing any products. And such it went that people argued that services was an industry while others...

The title is a play on Go East, Young Man - as applied to people in the Indian IT industry. As Karthink observes in his very perspicacious post, it is the End of Experience . As someone who has been in this industry doing various roles including Leading Java modules without knowing to code to searching nonexistent flex fields in Oracle applications so that I could satisfy business needs (this role, was indeed quite satisfying) to Implementing a useless ERP for a firm that couldn't care less on the supply side to a firm which was not interested in the system anyway to Leading a testing team to charge down whatever the developers coded (how I loved this role) to  Chief Form filling administrative officer in a multitude of useless sytems that measure useless metrics to be viewed by no-one in particular. And then I was the chief form filling officer for an entire business unit where I got a hapless team to fill out complex excel sheets without using a single formula but using all th...