BPO workers are NOT techies!

"Techie murders techie"
"Techie charged with data fraud in BPO"
"Shifts taking toll on mental health of techies in the BPO industry".
These are some of the screaming headlines from Indian newspapers in the recent past.

It is astounding, if not painful, to see the number of times BPO workers are referred to by the most casually used term in this country--"techie". The term is used interchangeably for both IT professionals and the multitudes of Buntys and Bablis who now work in the BPO industry.

It is like calling both a doctor and a nurse "medico".

It has been bothering me personally a great deal since I have been a 'techie' myself for the last 13 years. The IT industry has been in the limelight for the last 20 years and, unfortunately, most people do not know yet (or may be don't care) what exactly an IT professional and a BPO worker do for a living.

A techie, of course, is short for technology worker. While the use of the term might help headline writers of newspapers due to its brevity, it also creates in the minds of their readers an image of a smart, sharp and professional individual who has gone off the rocker due to work pressure in the industry and has turned to murder, fraud and other crimes. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The majority of mainstream IT employees--comprised of those working for companies such as TCS, Infosys, Wipro, etc--are actually smart, sharp, professional people. They are some of the brightest minds in the country, graduating from engineering colleges after tough entrace tests for these institutions and four years of hard work. Once in the industry, they are again into a routine of hard work and intellectual grind while providing software development and maintenance work for some of the world biggest companies who are clients of their employers.

BPOs, on the other hand, are largely staffed with graduates (sometimes even non-graduates) looking for jobs to pay their way through college, or for their mobiles, clothes, watches or even dates at the Cafe Coffee Day or Barista. They generally work in shifts carrying out business processes of these same client companies, typically manning their call-centres or doing their back-office work, which is rarely technical in nature.

The BPO (or IT Enabled Services) workers are really a slice of the general youth population of the country and ills that plague the rest also plague them -- peer pressure, mass consumerism, globalising cultural influences and the need to somehow become upwardly mobile as quickly as they can. All these forces act on their minds, and consequently on their behaviour, manifesting in acts of fraud, violence, etc.

So, next time you want to call someone a techie, please be sure the person is at least an engineer--if not a software engineer. Or spend one night @ the call center. And a day at an IT company.