An innocent concern

So is the market down and lurking. Is another bubble going to burst(is it a bubble at first). Five out of ten articles that i get to read in the e-magazines daily talk about the down slide of the IT industry..what are the big FIVE doing or going to do? How many are offers have they made this year or going to make this year.And few walk some yards to try and get some insider news if any company gave pink slips to there associates.What not, the list is end less.So how far are this stories true. A little experienced IT guy (by industry standards only a 3+ guy commands some respect) like me , if tries to use his keyboard to take a sneak preview...how will it be. Let me try.

The guy who sits in the cubicle right to me ,joined about a year and half ago and the hike he got on his earlier salary is almost 100%,if i have to believe what he said. But by any standards it is a awesome figure. Forgot to add that he joined as a 3+ experienced guy. I do not really care if he expressed his mavens in the interview or was just lucky to get something like that. Now, post 2006-2007 fiscal year, there is a dramatic turn of events. My friend who is 2+ and skilled in Microsoft technologies could not command or demand a salary hike of at least 20% over his current pay check.These two cases may be one off incidents, but still we seldom get to see such things happen now. This simply epitomises the prevailing situation in the market. What and who's behind this hullabaloo. Is that a invisible force or a standing strength that anybody unable to face it. What ever it is...till when is it going to stay.

If I have to be candid, I do not think even a best economist would predict that something like would ever happen.Why i am saying this, just because no best economist could predict such a event could ever happen in the so near future after Y2K.

Some say it is due to the sub-prime crisis that is plunking American market. This actually has a cascading effect rather than any direct effect on our IT sector as a whole. In layman terms, when any bank goes down with its credit, am talking about THE big ones that rule the planets banking markets, the market where it is deeply concentrated would naturally take a deep slide. That means the corporates that spend massively to upgrade or computerize there existing systems would obviously think thrice not even twice before taking any step in that direction.Or whatever that gives a IT company some revenue would not be taken up, upfront. Not just that a company's spending capacity would come down by a huge margin,anybody, even a common man would spend less and as a result, it is becomes a different kind of chicken and the egg problem. Every thing seems dry. So naturally anything that depends so heavily on one market will have to face the music. And that's what is happening. The primary reason for this is our Indian companies major market is America. Few big ones have anticipated this before and tried to depend lesser n lesser on this market for their business. But still, the heat has struck our industry. The pressure was ineluctable. Yes of course, even had we diversified our industry to other emerging markets, it would naturally take a while for that to reflect in the margins.

Sometime around 2003-04, the market was doing so good that people used to command the recruiters for better pay checks. Now, I hear people talking about being asked to leave companies even for the simplest of the reasons. All said and done..is this another warning signal to the sunrise industry on the possible pitfalls if the path taken is not without vision and mission. May be I am too naive to understand all this and thinking too negatively. I do not know. But i would only hope that we get back to those days where we used to see better annual pay hikes rather than pay cuts that we recently got when my company could not reach the quarterly financial targets.

May long live IT.