It's political and I have begun to strongly believe that the best leave or are schemed against by the mediocre cabal. You cannot continue in a large firm in India if you are anywhere near good.
It's political and I have begun to strongly believe that the best leave or are schemed against by the mediocre cabal. You cannot continue in a large firm in India if you are anywhere near good.
I’m not doubting your story (I’ve never worked in India) I just don’t understand the incentive to fire a good worker in this scenario.
CEO
VP (usually a family member or a "chamcha" literally spoon, but means sycophant.)
Directors (all yes-men chamchas)
Worker bees
Not very different from most companies, in my experience.
Many times novices to this game, work mad hours, only to realise a year or two down the lane, some guy who practically did no work but comes from the same state your manager does, is now promoted above you.
I took over a unit where 80% of the engineers were from one state, and mostly from the same college as the previous hiring manager.
There was one particular misfit - competent engineer but didn't have any skills for my BU.
I tried to transfer him to the hiring manager's new unit, and he refused. So I told him I would have to fire the misfit. Guess what, the next day he found a req and took the misfit.
This was a pattern everywhere I worked. So when I was able to dictate hiring policies, one rule was that we would never visit the same college twice in row. This of course made me very unpopular with HR. Now they had to work harder to maintain connections with placement departments.
In all seriousness they mentioned India not mango fango. That said, my xp has been the same as you. Only time top performers get nixed is if a whole arm gets nixed and they get caught in the crossfire.
Most people struggle just to keep their head above water nonetheless come up with elaborate conspiracies of sabotaging other peoples careers. No one is thinking about you that much.
Now I'm on the flip side, in a place where I may have to put someone on a PIP. What can be done has been done. There is only so much support and positive guidance that can be offered before you have to provide them with a plan backed with consequences for not following through. It is an employee that I don't want to lose because of their contributions, but it is also an employee that I can't afford to keep because (without changes) they are a liability. Unfortunately, previous interactions suggest that I will have to cut my losses. Yet the ball lies entirely in their court at this point because they are the one who has to take ownership for the issues they create.
Case 1: You're a high performer, one year into the role. A colleague, who's been around longer but struggled, gets promoted not necessarily on merit, but on their ability to manage up. Your early contributions are quietly absorbed into their promotion case. Once they step into a managerial role, the dynamics shift. Unless you stay quiet and compliant, you’re suddenly less welcome in the team.
Case 2: High Performers: Some managers (even partners) feel threatened when team members build credibility with clients. I’ve seen situations where a client repeatedly requesting a specific consultant backfired on that consultant. At year-end reviews, client recognition turned into a liability, not an asset.
Credit Allocation:In some Big 4 setups, CRM credit allocation is less about contribution and more about visibility and tagging. Accounts are assigned to partners who may not actively engage, yet receive full credit. Technical sales teams, who drive actual deals but don't "own" accounts, often find their impact diluted. In some cases, partners even tag themselves as "owners" of said accounts mid-pursuit to claim credit post-close. At the year end, the actual deal closers are usually running around begging partners for credit. You might end up getting 30% of what you actually closed. This works well for partners as incentives outflow is reduced leaving money on the table.
Event Marketing Shell Game: Large-format partner-led events in places like Goa or Dubai are positioned as knowledge exchange and brainstorming events. Behind the scene Sales teams are pushed hard to invite prospects where the engagement has been going on for months. When those deals close weeks/months later, the event organizers often claim the outcome; regardless of who did the heavy lifting.
Its honestly mostly like a queue, you can't see why people who came before should get a early exit. But those people had people before them too, and thought the same. Now that you arrived, you think your specific case be prioritised above them for merits you think count above theirs and not necessarily their place in the queue.
As much as we all think we are special, we mostly aren't, time and queue position plays a huge role in most things in the society.
Its pointless to fight the queue system, most events in life happen in an order, and its pointless to fight cause-effect sequences. Some exceptions to this absolutely exist, but this is the general rule.
>>At year-end reviews, client recognition turned into a liability, not an asset.
Do not outshine the master - 48 laws of power
Remember the system is a part of the game, if you threaten someone you will take their job, its in their interest now to see through the end of you.Jack who just arrived and pushed ONE sack up slightly faster than Dave, in the first week, thinks he must be promoted above Dave right then and there. Or its oppression.
To start with accept this thing first. Its human fallacy to confuse making rapid changes to a process as making fast progress. In reality sticking to one thing for long is what brings the big progress.
You might want to talk to martial arts people, stock investors/traders, musicians, surgeons, or anyone for that matter.
Someone who shows up on the 10001th morning, is not the same as some one who showed up on the 100th morning, even if the latter is some performing better creating a his own personal local maxima.
I've too often seen Dave praised for carrying sacks day in day out instead of placing them on the goddamn conveyor belt. Some have come to doubt the conveyor belts utility when we could all just be carrying the sacks. In fact if we got rid of the conveyor belt we could hire our cousin and brother-in-law to be cool like Dave.
And keeping the conveyor belt running seamlessly for years, requires showing up for years too.
There are no replacements for sticking to one thing for long.
This is not a description of how talented, or smart, or “good at something” someone is. You are describing how risk-averse someone is, as well as how able to survive failure. The latter is slightly different from the former, although related. Someone not able to survive failure at all (due to having no savings, for example, or perhaps someone who has high monthly fixed costs) ought to have a low tolerance for risk, but they might still have a lower threshold for what they consider risky relative to someone else.
I’ve met plenty of talented/smart/etc people in each of these groups, and also plenty of the opposite. To be fair, my experience is anecdotal and biased, although I would reasonably expect such a pattern to continue.
The real cause of our dysfunctional system is the debris of nehruvian socialism (he was a covert communist masking himself as a Fabian socialist).
He didn't reform the British divide and control mechanisms but continued them and in fact made them worse. If you think your bureaucracy is bad, wait till you see ours.
These are "one exam wonders." They clear one exam, and with zero life experience at the age of 25 can sabotage almost any enterprise with their clerical behaviour.
Our own deep state.
It's much better in the private sector but this mindset is pervasive.
Apparently this Nehru chap has been dead for 60 years. In fact, India has only been a country for 80 years so he's been dead for most of the time India has been around.
Likewise with Ronald Reagan. Supposedly he's responsible for all the woes of California since.
I've got to be honest. It's not that convincing.
It reminds me of those engineers who you hire and one month in they don't have anything to show because of "tech debt" and shit like that. It's always the fault of some guy who has long left. Then you hire other engineers and they just nail it. Such is life. There's blamers and doers and the two are not usually the same.
The fact is that for every policy the government introduces, the entrenched clerks find ways to sabotage it.
If you think you can handle it I invite you to come and apply for any government scheme of your choice.
True story: we once sent an NDA to a government ministry for review and it came back with one objection after 11 months. The objection was that the year was wrong in the document.
After that we no longer bid for any government work.
They just have to outlast each elected government of five years and they have a similar judiciary which protects them.
There was a (feeble) attempt by the current government in their previous term to reform the judiciary (NJAC Act) and the entrenched judges ruled it unconstitutional. Unlike the US, judges aren't political appointees, they appoint each other.
Unlike all those engineers who will say there's too much 'tech debt'. Everything is always "entrenched" and 'too hard to change' and shit like that. Then someone who is both interested in changing things and has sufficient will to change things shows up and it turns out it wasn't that hard after all. Seen it in eng orgs numerous times.
It wouldn't be surprising that India has no one like that. These people are rare. The US got one and it turns out you also need competence or the changes will just be totally bogus.
[0] https://www.thehindu.com/society/nehrus-socialism-was-evolut...
They were once caught red handed cropping images of documents to push their narrative.
https://www.opindia.com/2019/02/the-hindu-not-only-cropped-t...
It has been 50 years since his time. And most of what he did now has largely faded out to nothingness. OTOH, his time wasn't all that bad either. Even till 2000s cities in South India were very liveable, with decent quality of life.
Most of Indias problem come from a brutal zero sum game society, where population is too large, and there isn't enough affluence going around.
Everyone, every community and sub group, down the individual has to do anything in takes to snatch, hoard and then deny as many resources they can. Even if it means wrecking everything that exists to get there.
Nothing good comes out of these things.
To begin with fixing India, you must work towards having affluence of a few decades atleast. A generation or two need to live through this to wash away behaviours of a scarcity game.
Its a brutal zero/negative sum game, at a country level, but plays out in every individual's life, and at a punishing pace, intensity and frequency.
Anybody who doesn't prioritise their self interests at any and all costs, suffers.
Just stubbornly refuse to do a thing that isn't beneficial to you. You will come out fine.
Source: current concluding my stint at Deloitte.
You have clearly not worked in any major company in India, Or even other nations (since PIP is a common process worldwide in most companies).
Any employee can escalate to the company Ombudsman if they feel they are being subjected to unfair treatment or inappropriate processes. It is the job of the Ombudsman to be neutral and do an thorough impartial investigation.
PIP (Performance Improvement Plan) is a formal process, it even HR and senior management (skip level 1 manager at the very least) are involved in it. There is specific time duration and set of expectations given formally (under review process with HR, so there is full transparency) to the employee to improve the performance.
A top performer cannot be nixed via PIP, because the onus of performance proofs is on the employee and those evidences are visible to HR and upper management.
PIP is used to nix bad performers, not top performers.
Typically, even if an employee clears PIP, they need to get an "Exceed Expectations" (or equivalent) appraisal rating in the next appraisal cycle in order to continue in the organisation, but if they get lower rating instead, they are in hit list to be nixed during next round of job cuts whenever it happens.
Top performers may quit due to office politics and lack of growth, but PIP is not their way out.
PIP is a permanent black mark on an employee's record (which is maintained historically), so it disallows the company from hiring that person again if that person exited due to PIP.
Top companies in India and elsewhere have very formal processes, including Ombudsman and PIP, which get audited.
I was too pissed off to go to an ombudsman. It honestly didn’t occur to me. It just felt like “this guy hates me and wants me out.”
He called me two years after I was fired to inquire about missing equipment that I never had.
If you were innocent of that dangerous charge, you should have fought hard against it, and ensured the top management, HR head and Ombudsman became involved in the investigation.
Being fired for theft or such serious crimes, can and will leave a permanent black mark on your employment record with the HR, and it may get pulled up during BGV (Background Verification) invoked by a prospective employer evaluating your candidacy for hire, thus seriously affecting your career and life.
I think you should now reach out to that company HR and clear the conspiracy and black mark against you. Perhaps, you can hire a lawyer who deals with employment matters, so he or she can legally get the matter resolved in your favour.