The IT Professional & the Zone of Comfort
Rapid advances in machine learning and the spectacular success of artificial intelligence software in, say, self-driving cars, voice recognition and chatbots for customer service, is sending shivers of anxiety through IT employees. The havoc that robots and automation technology has played with the jobs of blue collared workers on the shop floor, is now travelling upward into white collar offices and not a day passes without a new report about automation eliminating jobs. In India, the IT sector -- that includes actual software developers, application maintenance staff, tech-support personnel and BPO call centre operators -- seems to be particularly vulnerable and it is no secret that a sense of doom and gloom hangs over the cubicles and around coffee machines in large and small IT companies. To make matters worse, some companies have started to shed mid-level people managers, who have stopped writing code for years, and even senior managers who give poor returns of billability ...