Apple shuts down office in India

I was reading this article in ET, which talked about the chickening-out act of Apple from India. Now why IBM and most other IT majors were able to see software talent at lot cheaper cost in India and not Apple is something worth finding out....But what I see in Apple's case is a new trend that's starting to catchup in India..Fire employees at will.

According to TOI, these were some of the statements from employees who were sacked;

On May 15, Apple officials addressed us and were highly appreciative of the workforce and the task it would execute in India. I wonder why they never said anything even then

- Employee who was sacked from Apple's software division in India.

It started off with building dreams. We were not given any warning. They just told us the operations would now head back to the US

- Employee who was sacked from Apple's software division in India.


"I wonder why they never said anything even then"
and
"They just told us the operations would now head back to the US"

hmm..I said to myself,this never used to happen in India, this is not USA! So are the golden days when you can retire in a job with out worrying about being fired coming to an end? Are the days when even if the company had to fire people(when its not performace related) they used to give them some time or even help then get a new job, over? Is Apple's case premonition for trend that we will be seen, lot more often?

Well...in my opinion, the answer is YES, the golden days when the only thing you had to worry about was getting into the company, if not over are seeing the dusk. But does that justify what Apple did? Ask me and I would say no. I am not buying into there argument of engineers here being "pricey". That's probably the most ridiculous argument. Is Apple management so short-sighted that they entered a market with out analysing the cost it would incur to hire people to run the unit or was the estimation so bad that the cost overshot the projected values by such an extent in just two months of operations that they had fire everyone and shut down the unit? Their logic really does not make sense to me..

Layoffs are bad, both for the company morale and its image, especially if its not ingrained in its policy framework. I agree that Apple has set foot at the wrong time when the software market in India is at its peak and acquiring a full time, good engineer at this point can burn deep in the wallet(its height of foolishness), but I will be surprised if Apple did not realise that before it set up its office, If Apple was not sure if revenue stream generated from its India operation could sustain these cost...it should have probably gone for other models like partnership instead of hiring full time employees or else HR could have done lot of things better, they could have signed a "differential labor contract" with employees, where its made clear to the employee that there is risk of layoff in case there revenues don't pickup or they could have gone for no layoff policy with possible pay cut if things don't improve. So by making layoff part of the company culture they could have made things lot less painful. Its not reported that Apple did any of these. That's really sad.

anyway many of the 30 sacked employees have joined there former employers, that's good, hopefully rest of them should do as good, MARKET IS HOT :)