New-age companies are over-estimating their tech-hiring requirements and engineers are getting complacent as they are raking in the moolah amid a hiring war, said BharatPe co-founder and MD Ashneer Grover.
Grover was speaking at the Wharton India Economic Forum on January 8 on a panel with Uber’s Asia-Pacific president of mobility Pradeep Parameswaran and BillDesk co-founder Srinivasu MN.
“The challenge is, the amount of salary the tech guys are getting paid is making them lazy. They're not thinking of evolving themselves into product managers or becoming more relevant, or upping their game,” Grover said.
He added that, until this war of talent continues, techies will not have any incentive as there is a big pot of gold they currently have. BharatPe, according to Grover, has 100 engineers as part of its team which is seen by many industry players as understaffed.
“Personally, I feel I am overstaffed. A lot of companies are not asking their tech teams what they are doing,” he added.
In his view, companies are just adding more engineers as a way of "throwing people at the problem" while planning scale-based growth, which is not the right solution. Tech employee hiring has to be a saner number and not in 1000s, he said.
“I fail to understand how as a founder of a company you can be comfortable having 1000 tech people. Something is really amiss there. That problem is just getting brushed under the carpet because there's so much capital available. No one is asking you for profits. No one is asking you what's your cost of production of a product,” he said referring to the boom in startup funding seen over the past year.
Until this war of talent continues, Grover said that companies like BharatPe will continue to lure techies with BMW bikes and free trips to Dubai to avoid them being poached by other companies.
However, when it comes to banking, Grover sees a huge opportunity if tech and not financial services is at the core of what is being built.
“All core banking systems are legacy systems. They were built 20 years ago when the banks computerised from a ledger system. None of them can even handle a fraction of the UPI volumes that are happening today,” he said.
BharatPe, in a joint venture with Centrum Financial Services, had secured a small finance bank licence from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in October 2021 to acquire the beleaguered Punjab and Maharashtra Cooperative (PMC) Bank. Grover said that the aim behind securing a licence and entering into core banking was to serve more customers on low transaction credit and payments.
Over the past week, Grover has been embroiled in a controversy after an audio clip surfaced which allegedly was a conversation between him and a Kotak Group employee. The leaked audio has Grover allegedly abusing and threatening the said Kotak employee for failing to secure financing and allocation for shares worth Rs 500 crore in an IPO launched by beauty firm Nykaa.
Moneycontrol was the first to report on January 9 that the matter had escalated further and Grover along with his wife Madhuri Grover had sent a legal notice on October 30, 2021 to Kotak Mahindra Bank's managing director and chief executive officer Uday Kotak and other senior management on the issue.
The notice accused the bank of failing to secure financing and allocation in the IPO and sought damages for the gains Grover, his wife and their clients would have made after subscribing to shares worth Rs 500 crore in the company besides Rs 1 lakh towards the cost of the legal notice.
Kotak Group confirmed receipt of the notice in a statement late evening on January 9 saying, "This notice was received by us and was replied to appropriately at the time, including placing on record our objections to inappropriate language used by Mr. Grover.”
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