Highly-paid techies at risk of pink slips

Hyderabad: Despite being armed with the latest skill set and having years of experience, techies who are drawing high salaries are also at the risk of losing jobs. Often, salaries are such a large expense, that many companies look at giving the pink slip to highly-paid techies to cut costs.

A techie, who was asked to leave, said, “I had good package and have experience in machine learning. The expectation is always beyond technical roles and a lot of project management skills were expected.”

Retrenched techies have always said that they were performing well before being asked to leave. Retrenched techie Apuri Satya said, “Indian IT folks are always ready to learn and upskill. But because you have more experience and your package is high, companies prefer techies with somewhat lower experience and with a similar skill set. One of my friends was asked to leave and the next day there was a job posting for his same role with a much less salary range.”

He added that the resume filtering process had been automated, so techies with more experience and salaries and updated skill sets are not even called for an interview.

Another techie who was recently laid-off said, “I somehow felt experienced techies are being targeted, especially with 20 years experience or above 50 years of age. It becomes difficult for us to manage as our children are in colleges and the fees are high.”

The techie added that for many years, the companies give them top rating and suddenly downgraded them to the lowest rung.

Mr Sandeep Kumar Makthala of the Telangana IT Association said, “Experienced folks with higher salaries are being laid off. Eight per cent people who are being laid off have 10-15 years of experience. IT companies follow the bell structure.

There are more people at the bottom and the numbers reduce as you go higher. As they enter the next level in terms of salary and position, it is important to have add on skills.”