Story on local IT companies from employees' perspective

Spider is doing a story on the working conditions of IT professional in the local industry. We'd like insight and comments from people working at different software houses/ IT companies/IT departments in Pakistan. We are not approaching the companies directly as we want to hear the employees' point of view.

Payscale

• What's the Initial Payscale for entry level in your organization?
• Whats the payscale for people with experience?
• Does your company have a formal appriasal(pay increase) system? Is it followed? If its not a formal process, do your employers live up to their promises of pay increase?
• Do you get ad hoc or scheduled bonuses in addition to your base salary?
• Do you get any other perks in addition to your base salary e.g. medical insurance, a car, etc.? If yes then, please specify which ones.
• Salary appraisals are [pick one]: Annual, Half-yearly, Quarterly, Ad Hoc.

Work timings

• Usually at what time do you reach home after work when you are on a deadline and under normal circumstances?
• Do you need to work on weekends to complete your assignments? (At least one weekend per month.)
• Do you need to work during later hours of the day (i.e. after sunset or late in the evening) to accommodate activities with international customers?
• Is your job goal-oriented (i.e. need to complete assignments irrespective of the time taken and working hours are generally flexible) or time-oriented (i.e. you work from Xam to Ypm irrespective of the workload)?
• Does your company have a formal policy for off-time (vacations, sick-leave, paid-leave, etc.)?

Organization Structure & HR Issues

• Is your organization partnered with any industry leaders such as Microsoft, Sun, Cisco, etc.? If so, which one(s)?
• Is your company certified under any standard such as ISO or CMM? If so, which one(s)?
• Does your company have a formal, documented employee hierarchy?
• Approx. at what rate does your company hire or induct new manpower. Pick one: Monthly, Quarterly, Half-yearly, Annually, Ad Hoc.
• Does your company make use of internees i.e. people who are in the process of getting a degree and also working in some capacity while they are studying?
• Organizational Stability -hire, fire, quit rate?
• On an average how long do employees stay with your organization?
• How long has the senior most employee been with the organization?
  

Project Management

• Do you have a dual-role as far as working on projects is concerned? E.g. you are a coder and also a technical writer, or an analyst and also a QA person?
• Is the project well managed?
• Does your company have people with specialized job descriptions? Such
• as analyst, coder, tester etc.
• Do you have formal and experienced project managers on your team(s) or does a senior technical person play a dual role?
• Do you use any formal tools for tracking and working on projects e.g. MS Project, bug tracking tools, project communications tools, etc.?
• Does your company's project management function take into account the input of your whole team before drawing up milestones, deadlines and plans, or commit those based on their own judgement? Are the project deadlines realistic?

Any additional comments? Insight?


Send the answers/comments to zq@spider.tm or you can post your comments here.

Please mention the name of your organization, the name of the institute you studied from, along with the year of graduation.This is important so that we know how many different organizations/institutes we have covered and the demographics of those who have responded. If you dont want to be named in the article then please mention that in your mail. I ensure the confidentiality of your mail. The last date for sending in your answers/comments is January 15th 2005.

[more questions added on Dec 23 2004. Thanks Merlinx]