Cognizant does a Lara

Newspapers in Chennai do not report about the placement in colleges. The Hindu, for example, comfortably chooses to ignore even the $150,000 a year job offers dished out to IIM graduates. But yesterday's (May 31, 2005) issue carried an article on the first page which screamed "Tamil Nadu wins hands down in terms of quantity and quality of manpower."

For a change, Anna University was in the news for the right reasons! The start of the placement season has seen Cognizant Technology Solutions (CTS) recruit 504 of the most promising final year students from Anna University alone. 504?? When I graduated a couple of years back, 504 should have been about the total number of students picked up by all companies!!!

I wonder what an American whose job has been outsourced would feel about this. But that's economics, right? That is the way the world works. And no one in India is complaining. In the past few years, tech jobs have become all too easy to get into. The popular joke is that you only need to pass high school to get into an IT job, the four years in between are to enjoy life. A popular cartoon shows an IT company sporting a huge board which reads "Trespassers will be recruited."

The best part about CTS picking 500+ is this. After getting recruited by CTS, a junior called me up to inform his good fortune. I inquired how the other companies would react to this. Obviously, companies next in line would cut down on their numbers if they knew that another company had created such a void. The reply from him was, "Ah. Those companies wouldn't care one bit. I bet Tata Consultancy Services (the next in line) will recruit 350!" God save America!