No Sleep, No Leisure: My First Year in IT

AIITEU Member, Delhi NCR

I’ve been working in my current job for a year. After floundering for a year after college to decide what I would like to do, where my ‘passions’ lay, I decided that my student loans and a need for mobility meant sticking with IT was my best bet — and this is largely why IT has been the ‘it’ field for a decade now — it ostensibly offers the chance to move up the rungs of the socioeconomic ladder.

The “Hustle”

After spending a year not doing anything to add to my employability, the way I got my current job was through a referral from a friend in the industry. This was possible because I had a good network of professional connections through my prestigious alma-mater. Lacking this, people looking to get into the field often need to resort to less-than-convenient methods. One of these is curating an employable profile on LinkedIn, which often entails following the fetishisation of productivity and knowing the right buzzwords (‘Big Data’, ‘Blockchain’, and the like) that allows certain sections of the upwardly mobile to sell themselves with a veneer of ‘technocracy and merit’. Another is having to put up with unpaid labour in internships. None are ideal, but this is a reality for many — getting a foot into the echelons of the IT industry that allows for socioeconomic mobility requires some amount of caste and class capital.

The Bind

For me, being recruited laterally in a company the usually relies on campus placements through the most prestigious colleges meant being lowballed in terms of salary and getting paid 7LPA for the first year as opposed to the 20LPA base salary that my peers who joined on-campus earned. After months of drudgery and multiple passes through the bureaucracy of HR, I was able to negotiate a higher salary of 12LPA for myself, which is still not the same as that of my peers in the same role as me.

There’s a dearth of transparency in the private sector, and the channels you have to go through will exhaust you if you try to individually haggle for better pay. There’s discrimination in pay based on what college you graduated from, which reflects for years after you start in the industry. There’s Kafkaesque bureaucratic structures, direct coercion, indirect shaming and other tactics that companies will use at every turn to make sure they extract much more value from their workers than they pay them equitably. It can be isolating because there aren’t a lot of spaces to vent or talk about your problems on the job, and neither are there spaces to talk about improving your working conditions, at least if you want to keep your job.

Companies that are comparatively younger like startups or unicorns will, in addition to the above, use the tactic of portraying their employees as a ‘family’, which defangs any real criticism that their workers have and allows them to make their workers feel ashamed for having issues. Simply put, if your bosses are your ‘friends’ or ‘family’, how can you level any criticism against them?

Why The Union Matters

There are many lessons I’ve learned over my first year of working in the industry: that I don’t necessarily need to actually like my work as long as it pays well and allows me to compartmentalise my work and personal interests since work is only a small part of my life. That productivity is not something I (or a lot of people) personally care about. That work in the IT sector can a lot of times be walking the tightrope of doing enough to not stand out but not enough to over-exert yourself. That not talking about these issues, about the stresses of your work life, can be anxiety- inducing and alienating.

Joining the union has given me the space to talk about these things, and I hope we can systematically affect a change in the working conditions of our members as well as IT industry professionals at large as our fledgling Delhi and Gurgaon groups gain more of a foothold.