Big Blue Hands 700 ‘Fresher’ Indian Engineers Pink Slips

Research Triangle Park, N.C. — IBM’s full-throttle drive to hire thousands of tech workers across India has hit a major speed bump.

Some 700 first-year engineers, or “freshers,” have received pink slips after they apparently failed to measure up to Big Blue’s standards, The Economic Times of India reported Saturday.

Although IBM declined to comment on the specifics of the firings – just how many and for what reasons – the newspaper reported that the freshers “were asked to go based on their performance in aptitude tests.”

The firings could prove to be a setback for IBM’s aggressive recruitment of Indian technology talent. Big Blue even has a specific Web site set up for “fresher” recruits in India, where the company employs more than 47,000 people. Many of those have been hired over the past couple of years as IBM publicly boasted about its plans to make India a major hub of its international operations.

India also has been the destination for thousands of jobs in offshoring positions from the United States and Europe. Reasons include lower salaries and cheaper costs of doing business. Offshoring is an especially touchy subject around the Triangle where IBM employs more than 11,000 people - so far its largest employee campus.

Calling the decisions a collective “bolt from Big Blue,” the newspaper said Saturday that most of the entry-level trainee programmers, or ELTPs in IBM speak, were let go. Many were engineering school graduates.

These freshers, as the Times called them, are not freshmen per se but newbies. Engineering schools use the term freshers for graduates with one or two years of experience. The fresher term can also refer to the fact that this new talent can bring fresh ideas to a company.

Many IBM managers were kept in the dark about the process, according to the Times.

IBM did issue a statement to the newspaper:

“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.”

The Times also noted that IBM did not make the dismissal decisions for economic reasons. Rather, the company said the global services group which includes many of the workers based in India is performing well financially.

“We continue to hire people with skills that meet our client needs and business demands,” an IBM spokesperson told the paper.

Reaction to the firings has been harsh.

One reader told The Times that the ELTPs would be “ruined” because of the IBM dismissal and the black mark it would put on resumes.

Another poster, who said he was an ELTP, complained that he “had not been trained in a single skill properly.” He also noted that the training had been outsourced.

The worker complained that after eight months “I’m still on the bench.”

“Firing is a common thing in the corporate world; but unethical behavior such as informing the media that it is our poor performance standards, not giving us projects/platforms to perform, delayed joining dates after graduation, etc is not doing good to any,” he added.

Another writer pointed out that IBM is not alone. Other tech firms are laying off people due to the economic slowdown in the U.S., the poster said, leading him to say: “Looks like our country is heading towards catastrophe.”