"One thing that is intriguing in my mind is the lack of a well established technical ladder in Indian companies. Well, I don’t know much about the software services companies in India but I believe most of the VLSI companies or subsidiaries of VLSI MNCs do not have a technical ladder nor do they actively advertise them. Now, let us consider any VLSI company in the US. I know personally that many of them have separate managerial and technical ladders that bifurcate after about two or three levels in the hierarchy. So, an employee after 3-5 years of experience in a company has the choice of taking the technical route. More importantly, you’ll find accomplished and successful people who are at the top of the technical ladders who others can follow as role models.
Perhaps the industry is still nascent in India and is evolving and we will figure it out as we go along. I can see lot of problems coming up due to this in the next few years. I think the bulk of the VLSI engineers in India is about 5-6 years experienced at this point, though I do not have statistics to back me up. Assuming this is true, all or most of these engineers will want to grow. I mean, who doesn’t? What will they grow into? Based on the current scenario, it appears that lot of these want to become managers in some way, “managers-who-don’t-code” to be more precise. This is a dangerous trend because you can only have few managers and more engineers. Otherwise, companies will end up having more managers who manage fewer engineers (though some biggies are already in this situation; let’s not get into that).
Culturally, Indians like to be associated with fancy titles, right? I mean, wouldn’t you like to be called “Chief Advising Consultant” as opposed to say, “Contractor”? If you don’t get a fancy title, you will most likely go to another company that gives you one. I think the bottomline is we will find more people leaving organizations because of frustration of not being able to move up the ladder.
It may be difficult to buck this trend unless companies do two things. Firstly, create a new ladder with primary focus on engineering and technology. This is going to divert traffic from managerial ladder. Secondly, call them by fancy names. For example, I think a “Lead Design Engineer” is more acceptable than say, “Senior Member of Technical Staff”. This will also create heroes and role models in the technology area that will only inspire budding engineers to follow them. To do this, companies must break away from the HR policies of their US counterparts because, honestly, the US HR wouldn’t know a lot about Indian way of working. I remember a popular program on MTV India last decade called “We are like this only”. Everyone else has to understand that."
.....from http://indiavlsi.wordpress.com
