IBM dismisses 700 freshers in India

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This may literally be a bolt from Big Blue! IBM is learnt to have delivered the pink slip to a sizeable chunk of its entry-level trainee programmers (ELTPs) across major offices in India.

Most of these ELTPs, who were engineering graduates, had put in nearly a year and were working in numerous technology practice groups under IBM India’s global delivery business.

Though IBM is silent on the actual number of ELTPs dismissed, the total is likely to be in excess of 700 across company locations nationally, including 180-odd in Kolkata alone.

ELTPs, who were essentially freshers, were asked to go based on their performance in aptitude tests that were recently conducted in undisclosed IBM India locations. It is learnt that action on the ELTP front in major IBM locations was an ultra hush-hush exercise about which many senior IBM managers were in the dark.

At present, the IBM India management is reluctant to go into the details of its latest HR exercise. But in a written response to ET’s email query, an IBM spokesperson said, “IBM is driven by a high-performance culture, a place where employees are able to contribute at the upper limits of their potential and continually build market-valued skills and capabilities in both formal training and experiential learning. In support of that expectation on the part of our workforce, we are pioneering new ways for our people to certify their skill levels as both a validation of their value to clients and to reinforce the quality of our employees’ personal skill sets.”

IBM has strongly refuted any possible link in the latest action on the ELTP front, with industry speculation about IBM’s global services business suffering a cash loss in India in 2007

TCS shows exit door to 500 employees

New Delhi (PTI): Within days of cutting salaries of its employees, the country's largest software exporter TCS has shown the doors to 500 employees after their performance was found wanting.

Tata Consultancy Services, which employs over 100,000 workers, has said it would cut 1.5 per cent from employees' salaries in the fourth quarter, as it fell short of certain financial targets following a sharp rise in the value of rupee against dollar and the slowdown in the US economy.

"Employees with experience of two years and above across the company who were unable to meet the performance requirements of our company are asked to look for other jobs commensurate with their abilities," TCS spokesperson Pradipta Bagchi told PTI.

He, however, asserted that no employee has been sacked or fired. As a policy the only time when TCS dismisses people is for disciplinary reasons, he added.

The company had said that the salary cut would be in the variable component, which accounts for 30 per cent of the total pay of the employee.

In the third quarter ended December 31, TCS' net profit rose 18.86 per cent to Rs 1,326.67 crore from 1,116.1 crore a year ago, while total income increased 23.04 per cent to Rs 6,041.98 crore from Rs 4,910.53 crore a year ago.

The rupee has risen more than 12 per cent in 2007 against the US dollar, leaving software firms to battle the impact as a majority of their revenues come from America.

TCS' decision comes on the heels of global IT major IBM getting rid of a large number of its entry-level trainee programmers across major offices in the country on the grounds of performance.

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