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Infosys, the brand that puts values first and everything else second. True, most other companies would not dare take some steps that Infosys takes to maintain the tradition of 'Drive by values'. It is a proud feeling to be called an Infoscion. Yea, an ex-Infoscion is also pretty kewl. I spent 4 long years there, but when I left, I just had 1 question to ask.
This post is in no means to tell bad things about my ex-work place. Hell NO. I am a proud ex-infoscion. I loved my time there and it has given me unimaginable experience.
The question was:-
"Why is ICICI Direct not banned in office?". For those souls who dont know ICICI Direct, its a site that is used as an interface for share trading. Infosys somewhere in 2006 started getting serious about taking steps to track and correct the productivity of the resources.
This period also happened to see 2 thing, one was the sudden influx of employees (mostly fresh from college) and the two the meteoric rise of orkut, as a social networking site. So, someone in Infosys must have done some research and realised that orkut is dangerous. Dangerous from 2 perspectives, 1 it hurts the productivity of the employees and 2 it is a gateway of viruses. So orkut was banned. But still, smart software engg's that we are, we found proxy sites to access orkut. It meant, more risk involved(by accessing the proxy sites) and more productivity hit, because now we spent time on research too!!! Talk abt the plan backfiring. :)
But overall it must have been a success, or that is what Infosys would like to think. But then recently they even banned gmail. Reason: Productivity loss.
My question is, why is ICICI Direct not banned. Dont the managers see that their senior managers are glued to that site for atleast some time of the day. Isnt that taking a hit at the productivity in some way? Why different yard sticks for a poort software engineer and different for a Senior Manager? We should have an 'All Equal' policy should'nt we?
Secondly, if i understand correctly, money earned through share trading is a source of income. Hence we need to pay taxes on that money isnt it? I would like someone more technically robust in finance to correct/boost me here. But ill take the assumption based on my personal experience. So technically, you are earning money while at work in Infosys. Which is ethically wrong, isnt it? So even if you out aside the productivity question, 'Driven by values' clause should have got ICICI Direct banned? Logical right?
But no, that will never happen in Infosys. Reason: The people who make policies cant really axe their own feet. Can they?
Answers any Infoscions? I would like responses here...
Saturday, June 7, 2008
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8 comments:
Good question.
In my opinion the answer could be as simple as the number of hits to ICICI direct are not huge enough to pop up on the radar. For every senior manager in the company there are at least 20 SEs and not to forget that sites like orkut, gmail etc are more traffic intensive (probably due to 'continuous update' nature of these sites) as compared to ICICI direct.
Second and slightly debatable reason could be that senior managers are expected to be mature enough to understand that any time spent on purposes unproductive to company will have direct and dire consequences on a larger group.
My opinion on second point -
The company doesn't stop any employee from having other sources of income like shares, house rent, interest earned on FDs. In fact, there is provision for declaring all these while filing the tax.
Abhishek, I know the company does not stop that.. but my question is does it have a problem with you doing these activities when you are at office. In other words, what i do outside the campus could be ignored by Infosys. But when i use the Infosys resources to make money, isnt that un-ethical?
@ashley - as long as the employee does his job the company should not have any problem if he makes money using negligible company resources. It is up to the employee how he makes for the lost time - by working extra time, extra productivity or any other means. I don't see anything wrong in mutual benefit - employee is satisfied and company gets the result.
Abhishek, are you not contradicting your own statements. If the employee can anyways do his work and meet the deadlines, why should you block orkut, gmail or any other site for that matter? Also, your defense is based on the word 'negligible'.This is a relative term.
@ashley - that statement was only for managers or more specifically people who use icicidirect.com, the usage of which is very limited compared to orkut. There is no justification for continuous full-day chat or orkuting and there is no way company can rely on the maturity of freshers to compensate for the lost time.
By allowing users to access ICICIDirect, Infosys wants to teach them a lesson how easily they could lose money which they didn't deserve :-)
I do not have an answer to your second question.
But to answer the first question, here is the answer:
It's because people who decide the policies are the ones that are senior managers. They have a lot of stocks to play with and that is their source of income too.
Hence the policu makers conveniently decided to make ICICI direct as exempt from all internet policies. Since none of them (well it's should be 'most of them' to be politically correct) ever use or understand a technical blog/website such as stackoverflow or theserverside or tomcat usergroup email, they think these are websites where junior employees with no/little stocks to play with login and waste company time.
One more aspect is; in general we (Indians) have a tendency to misuse resources. I know it feels sad to say this; but it's true.
It might be a small thing; but it reflects the company attitude. And hence we are suffering the way we are suffering.
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