The occasional light expression

Yesterday night I attended a Landmark Forum session at St Joseph’s school. The usual forces were at play - buzzing Landmark graduates, no coffee/food, disoriented and generally happy or confused guests, more buzzing Advanced Course graduates, and Gopal Rao, the charismatic Landmark Forum patriarch, who has been doing this work in India for 19 years now. Gopal is a bit less physically charismatic than Praveen Puri, but both are quite powerful individuals.
One line by Gopal stayed in my head - “Life is a series of conversations….”. For some reason, i was reminded of reading J. Krishnamurthy, who i’ve always considered some sort of a Nietzschean shaman.

I cover two points - A recent article highlighting Indian salary hikes and the issue of whether India’s cost advantage in technology is eroding.

Regarding the first, ECA international recently published the results of a survey from 2006 where they found that India, Indonesia, and Russia had the highest salary hikes in the world. Specifically, India had the highest pay hikes of around 12%.

The article notes- “As highlighted recently by ECA’s discussion forums in Hong Kong and Singapore, companies in Asia are becoming increasingly focused on recruiting and retaining welleducated, highly skilled employees in order to maintain the rapid economic growth the region is currently experiencing…”

My observation of the IT industry in Bangalore since 2003 is that this is only partially true. The Indian IT ecosystem covers the entire gamut - from companies that charge about a thousand dollars to GIVE you a job that pays $100 per month, to companies that splendidly compromise and give employees un-ergonomic chairs, terrible lunches, cheap pens and paper pads, to companies that allow you to work from home and cover your transport. There are clearly two kinds of high tech companies in India. One kind has the motto “Throw money at us and we will code just about anything for you with our backs bent and our noses on the ground”. The second kind has the motto “We honor our work and integrity, so please honor yours”.

Moving on to the second past: Is the Indian market overheating because of rising wages?

One recent piece by a global HR firm (reference quoted in a recent Economic Times Brand Equity article) suggests that the Indian cost advantage in global outsourcing of software development will remaiin for about 45 years. The argument is that while at senior and executive levels, wage differences have gone down to 1:3 or even 1:2, the wage differentials at the entry levels remain at about 1:6 and cause the overall Indian IT industry to remain competitive in matters of salary and compensation, even with a 15% salary hike every year. This while a top notch salaried Indian CEO may make about 1 million USD a year, an entry level programmer/designer/analyst still makes only about $10000-$15000. This compares favorably even with salaries in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea and other Asian economies.

My two cents: Global product and services outsourcing will continue on its trajectory for atleast the next several years. Outsourcing has taken on a life on its own, and wage inflation notwithstanding, companies outsourcing software to Bangalore, manufacturing to Beijing, and architecture to Bucharest have no option but to continue building armies of staffers outside of the developed world markets. They also have no option but to continue selling to what a famous politician once called the “great unwashed masses”…

The Usability Professionals Association (UPA)’s Hyderabad chapter recently did a good survey on the demographics, experience levels, and salaries of User Experience (UX) professionals in India, primarily across the metro cities. The results of this survey are available for download here.

While the number of respondents was limited to a few hundred, the survey is interesting for several reasons. First, it is one of the only recent surveys on UX professional compensation in India. Second, the numbers indicate that technology companies and UX consulting houses are getting competitive and offering UX professionals much higher salaries than even a few years back. While it arguable whether this is because Indian or international technology companies see the business value of UX more clearly, or because the Indian market is fairly heated at this point (Average 15% raises, average 20% attrition in the IT industry), the availability of these numbers is a step in the right direction. Third, this salary also indicates that the UX industry in India is showing signs of maturing and the availability of world class UX technical and management talent continues to increase.
I wonder if a similar survey has been done for China. I should probably check with my friend Jason Huang, who heads UPA China, on how similar these numbers are to Chinese UX salaries in pure dollar figures.

Jan Chipcase of Nokia Design has a fascinating job - to conduct exploratory behavioral field research, run user studies and develop applications and products that find their way into the mobile marketplace.
Jan has a direct disclaimer on his publications page: “A lot of rich qualitative user research loses it’s soul by the time it’s been squeezed into conference and journal submission formats and in addition, work involving concept generation tends to remain confidential. So what you see here scratches the surface, nothing more.” I wish more of the user researchers and usability professionals in the world were like this!

Jan’s Publications page is a goldmine of knowledge for anyone interested in the space of mobile phones and mobile design research, especially for emerging markets. Here are links to two very interesting Powerpoint presentations. One is on creative compensatory mechanisms for mobile phone charging in Africa which describes some of the creative kiosk based operations in Africa that enable mobile phone users to charge their phones through intermittent power supply. The second is a very visually powerful Powerpoint on Nokia’s user research practices and methods.

If this has piqued your interest, here’s another interesting spin by Jan titled “Ten things you didn’t know about Mobile TV”, which documents his user research in South Korea on Mobile TV usage scenarios and his musings through his field research in New Delhi.