All Answers: Re: [pakgrid] Brain Drain - An example and some random thoughts

Hi Zia,

I agree with some of your points regarding government departments tend to offer projects to foreign vendors instead of local.I remember, Netsol was competing for CRM project of PTCL, but in the end it got awarded to ZTE. Their Senior VP told me that it was because Netsol is a Pakistani firm. Maybe some psychological thing with us too.

As per your point about foreign companies hiring local grads and their recruiting process, with all due respect, I disagree with this point. Since, our local IT firms are not providing that environment and respect to software engineers that maybe we also deserve like other sectors in our economy.

Our IT companies are basically seth companies with centralized ownership, and they don't like giving benefits, shareholding etc to their employees. The only thing they tend to negotiate is salary. I am a software engineer, and I also need "proper" medical, and other kind of benefits if I am working somewhere. I want my rights in the light of those labour laws which are provided under the constitution of Pakistan.

I completely agree that our academia is not producing quality graduates, and that is precisely my reason to disagree with all those claims by Dr. Atta since he only developed IT colleges, and not proper universities and that industry-academia collaboration has more of been superficial.

Regards

Usman.

On Fri, Jul 20, 2012 at 9:10 AM, ziaimran <zia.imran@gmail.com> wrote:

Picking up on the brain drain thread, here is an example of brain drain. Some more thoughts follow on practices of foreign software vendors in this country.

Every year multi-national software firms from abroad have started recruiting from Pakistan. They pick up the best candidates and take them to Canada and US or wherever they have a development center and can get a work visa for new recruit.

They will not consider Pakistan for opening a development center - I guess too dangerous a country. They want its talent but don't want to establish meaningful local presence here although they do sell millions of dollars of shrink wrapped software to private companies and government here.

I don't have that big a problem with these guys recruiting young talented professionals from Pakistan (although MOST of them start in the Testing/QA group, positions that native grads don't consider alluring but alluring they are for us Pakistanis - a ticket to Paradise). The bigger problem I have is that companies conduct bulk of their recruiting process and interviews in Dubai. I mean they will do a phone screen and then they will fly in short listed candidates to Dubai for final interviews. Do they consider we are low enough that they wouldn't come to Pakistan for conducting interviews although they have tons of interest in this country and sell millions of dollars of software here every year. They even have offices here which are staffed so what is the danger? By coming here and interviewing locally, If nothing else hour hotels and restaurants will get some business for a few days.

What is insane is that we are enamored of giving these multi-nationals all big ERP and e-government contracts. Time for reflection. We need to look at India and more recently Argentina which protect their interest with an Iron Glove. If you are a multi-national and want to do business with government (or even private sector in Argentina) you better invest in local facilities, local partnerships, source form local vendors, setup shop locally or else you will not be able to get the business. Where are our thought leaders, where is our government? What best practices we have learned from other countries and are we practicing these?

Many international software vendors don't' even have registered offices in Pakistan. Hence when you contract with them you contract with their UK or Middle East office or whatever. They don't want to be taxed locally and don't want to carry any local liability.They make more profit margin in this country than almost any other country (disclosed to me in confidence by the Country Head of one of these firms). They want best of both words - do business here - make profits - but have nothing to do establishing local value add facilities here.

With this post I am sure I will be flamed and taken to task as I have privately been bad mouthed, my reputation questioned and getting censured at the highest levels because, in my previous role, I objected to some of the practices of foreign firms and tried to advise government quarters to put in clauses and negotiate intelligently with these firms, essentially protecting local firms and national interest.

Another big issues is that we are not producing enough of class A graduates in this country. I am not sure about other faculties but as the IT industry has expanded, there are not enough top flight IT graduates being produced by academic institutions. We really need to look at our past and current practices in academia and figure out what is going on here? We have enough IT graduates/ year produced in this country, we don't need more - we just need to impart better skills to what we currently produce. Please don't open any new universities unless we have figured out why the current ones are not working for the uplift of the country even after investing fairly heavy sums (in public and private sector) over the last decade. Ask any mid to small size export oriented software firm here and they complain of not finding enough good software professionals and brain drain.

With a country of 170 million or more population that is a good problem to have. Only if we could produce enough top flight IT professionals to satisfy both domestic and international demand.