Monday, July 2, 2001		Article

IT is 10 am on Monday. The cubes have started to bustle with keystroke sounds and ‘what did you do over the weekend’ talks. I start my day by picking a couple of water bottles from the office kitchen and filling a cup full of caffeine. Scrolling through my e-mail inbox, I set my reminders for Monday meetings. After only an hour of real work, its lunch time at around 12 noon. Coming back from lunch at around 1:30 pm, I have a meeting at 2 pm that takes 2 hours without any valuable conclusion about how we are going to address some of the technical issues in the product we are developing. At this time I am tired but still try to put my best during the last three hours of my day.

This was a routine of a software engineer working in Silicon Valley, the software capital of the world, two months back. And then there were newspaper headlines that hi-tech industry was in recession. There were layoffs all around and so-called hi-tech engineers were no more than a normal bloke who knows a bit of HTML and Web-designing. Let me add Java too. For me, this didn’t come as a surprise. When I first landed in the USA, I often asked this question to myself — ‘How can an industry, which spends so much on its work force without worrying or able to work out at the end of the day the amount of income that work force was able to generate, can be so healthy?’

Well, the illusion of being healthy was broken sooner than later. The hi-tech investors pulled back their investments from dotcoms that were not generating any income even after 3 to 4 years in service. But the real facts lied somewhere else. Software engineers became takers rather than givers. Sky rocketing salaries, start-up bonuses, stock options made us too relaxed. The productivity (as shown by latest research in USA) of the US work force was bound to diminish and it did.

But the market forces are bringing the equilibrium back. Many hi-tech companies have decreased employee salaries. You can almost forget about yearly pay-reviews that were so frequent almost a year back. Software engineers have started to realise that being an engineers is a lot more than being able to right HTML and poor JAVA code. It’s the ‘Survival of the Fittest’ world now. And may be, it’s best for all of us in the most talked-about and most challenging engineering-field in this world.