Of late, the media has been awash with reports of Information Technology (IT) personnel in the United States, many of them South Asian, being given the pink slip in the US. In the years since the boom in Silicon Valley, this is probably the first wave of negative reports on the software industry. As IT stocks crashed early this year on the NASDAQ and other financial markets, triggering a recession in the US economy, the technology hype gave way to more realistic assessments. Internet companies, overvalued on the bourses the previous year, started laying off frantically. Giants like Cisco, reporting the first loss in 11 years, put the brakes on ambitious expansion plans and began downsizing.
But the US trend is no reflection of what is happening elsewhere. In Asia the situation is radically different. East Asian economies recovering from the 1997 economic crisis are now spending on technology again. Businesses in Asia are just gearing up towards a new phase of automation and the demand for skills is growing, although at a slower rate than earlier. People who can design applications to integrate new generation mobile phones with the Internet are still in high demand. But there are no media reports of South Asian workers riding this boom nearer home. This is quite unlike the situation a few years ago, when statistics of the expanding Subcontinental workforce in North American software companies were being paraded as proof of the miracles the so-called New Economy would perform for the Third World in general. No one, then, had bothered to look inside the hood to examine the profile of these workers and the nature of the jobs they were performing.
Today, all accounts suggest an acute scarcity of IT personnel in South Asia. In May, AsiaWeek reported that by 2006, two million IT jobs would remain vacant in India. In Nepal, software companies, despite hiring all available local talent, face a shortage of qualified personnel. In fact the supply situation is so grim that at least one American company was forced to move its entire operations from Kathmandu to Bangalore because Nepal lacks skilled personnel in adequate numbers. The paradox of South Asia hiring when the US is laying off is noteworthy enough. But what is even more striking is the shortage of IT professionals in a region where institutes that claim to impart professional training have mushroomed in the most unlikely nooks. An illusory surplus conceals a real scarcity and this gap between demand and supply can be understood only in terms of the difference between the skill level required by professional companies and the quality of the certified personnel being produced by South Asian countries. In the tech world, the real core of a company is made up of people who know the basics, who design products and write the pseudo-code (i.e. code written in everyday language, which is then used by coders to write real code in the programming language of choice).
System analysts then analyse these designs. Coders simply write the code in a skilled but mechanical routine. It is not difficult to understand why coders can always be dispensed with. In hard times, the analysts and designers can write and verify the code themselves. In a sectoral recession, coders who are sound in the fundamentals can always learn new languages quickly or move on to higher levels with some effort. But those whose knowledge is limited to rudimentary coding are bound to be laid off. A web designer who is proficient only in HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language—the language that drives the web), will not be able to code easily in C++. A coder comfortable only with a Graphical User Interface (CU) to programme for the web in Java, is unlikely to adapt easily to C programming in the more abstract non-GU] environment.