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The one great attraction for folks in India to join the IT industry was the all important “on-site” trip. The trip was hallowed as the right of passage for being a worthwhile IT engineer or manager. This meant earning in dollars and saving a lot of money, purchase of the latest electronics while the rest of India still lived in the Stone Age and visiting numerous tourist spots. For those who were not so fortunate to go on-site, the trip meant getting that latest electronics from friends when they return and that all important mixed bag of chocolates. Something about those mini chocolates that makes CEO and engineer alike lose all decency and sulk like kids if they got one less than everyone else. And in country that has grown in leaps and bounds, it is amazing how we’re still in awe of the foreign bound engineer. But the internet and technology are changing all this.

Thanks to growing bandwidths in India, and guys like Microsoft and Cisco bringing about collaborative tools, it seems the much revered ‘on-site’ trip seems to be falling out of fashion with the top management. It was like all of a sudden someone woke up and realized that investing in bandwidth was the solution to all those travel bills (especially the ones that covered raiding the mini-bar). While technology has wonderfully made life for accountants easier by reducing the number of bills they have had to process during the year, it has left a rather sour taste in the mouth of engineers. And the worst part is that it is almost a case of ‘brother kills brother’ as this was a solution from one of their own (Yes…you folks at San Francisco and Redmond…I’m talking about you)

Companies have been able to justify spending on technologies relevant to unified communication and collaboration making life a lot easier. Productivity is at an all time high. More and more people work out of a remote model where the big puzzle comes together by either integrating pieces of code over a common server, or users can store and develop code directly at the customer’s servers. No longer is there a need to physically go over there and worry about things like time-difference and hotel stay. While it all sounds great, we’re single handedly crushing the life-long dreams of many engineers in India whose sole purpose is to go abroad. Managers like myself find social networking being used to run our marketing campaigns. Things like webex have us make pitches to clients from India itself. So that means I can no longer hope of going to Disney world Orlando. Sniff! And I’m just one of the many whose dreams have been crushed thanks to the internet and the technology that came along with it. I am sure the developers of this sort of technology are in cahoots with accountants, just to ensure more money stays within the company.

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