NEFT charges

Great news. ICICI Bank will now charge Rs.5 per transaction for electronic funds transfer. Time to shift money and salary accounts from ICICI Bank?

5 bucks may not be much on both absolute and relative terms for most of us. But I fail to understand why I would pay anything at all to transfer my own money from the bank. I do it online because it is convenient and I can schedule automatic transfers on certain days of the month. I can, at a pinch, simply issue cheques for the few transfers I  make.

I can understand that some people may be transferring a rupee a day to hundreds of accounts and this costs the bank money. And the bank is well within its rights to levy a charge; after all the RBI allows banks to charge upto 5 bucks per transaction. But it could very well have levied this charge on those who have too many transactions. Leaving the first, say, 10 transactions in a month would probably have kept several people like me happy.

I've seen this happen with other banks too. Levying charges for drafts, money transfers, cheques... I have a simple solution - just use the services which don't cost money and use another bank for the rest. A certain amount of cheques per month are free, that's sufficient to distribute funds to accounts in other banks.

Wonder if the interest lost due to my shifting funds to other banks because of these stupid policies is really less than what they would have earned by their service charges...

As an aside, the NEFT service charge also includes service tax. I am certainly not going to pay money to the guv'mint for moving my funds to another of my own accounts!

Vidooshak says...

My good friend Vidooshak blogs here ,as a guest blogger - no less, about how freshers are in a hurry to reach manager-level positions. In a nutshell, people want to get out of the "team member" kind of role and move to a "team-leader" role as quickly as possible. Without having paid their dues, so to speak.

A different perspective from someone from product development as against the services sector - what Vidooshak writes is not completely accurate, for some companies at least.

I've met several people with superlative technical skills, working as so-called individual contributers all their lives. They don't want to manage people and, more importantly, they get sufficient respect in the companies they work in. I've known corporate vice presidents who wrote code in addition to doing whatever it is that VPs do.

Let's be quite upfront about it - what do people mean when they say they want to advance in their careers? More money? Check. A better lifestyle? Comes with the money usually, so check. Less work? Ahem... check? Better work? Check! Enhanced social status? Check.

All of these actually translate to climbing the designation ladder. In all the companies I have worked for (and also others in the same domain/industry) there are two such ladders: technical and management. Possibly other companies have them too, but the difference is that in the ones I know the tech ladder is given equal importance, same perks, same respect as the management ladder. Look at it this way, a Senior Software Engineer vs. a Project Lead - which one would you consider more successful in his career? In the work places I refer to, they may actually have more or less equal respect.

From what I have heard about the software services companies, it looks like the culture of promoting people to "manager" is ingrained. I heard of someone who had 40 people reporting to him after he had worked for about 3 years. In my previous companies, a person would be an engineering director if he had 40 reports! This difference is due to the large size of the services companies, perhaps; but that still doesn't explain how a person with 3 years experience out of college is thought competent enough to handle such a large team.

Am I laying the blame at the door of the IT industry? Absolutely! If freshers see a clear career path as a technical specialist they may not be so eager to get promoted as leads and managers. If they see their peers getting promoted as managers and getting perks and respect, why wouldn't one aspire to the same path?

The other problem is the non-standard designations. Everyone knows what a manager does and that it is a "high-up post". How many understand what these titles mean - Lead Member Technical Staff, Member Consulting Staff, Senior Software Engineer, Software Engineer II? In many companies you would be promoted to Senior Software Engineer after a year, in some it is a designation you earn after ten.

Priests and money

Recently read news about a priest in a temple hocking the temple jewels to marry off his daughters. Then read a piece about how priests are underpaid even though the temple "corporation" is the richest in the world.

I'm stunned at how many questions this raises in my mind.

Temple jewels?! What in the name of... er... God is a temple doing with jewels? I was always told that a temple is a place where people go to pray. Donations to the temple were for sustenance of the priests; even though they really seem to be bribes to the almighty.

Let's not even touch upon the topic of whether temples are necessary, my views on that should be well known to my two readers.

What causes people to think that donating in the millions to one specific temple is going to help their lives? Aren't all temples the "abode of God"? Why should the Lord choose one certain location to be holier than the rest of the planet?

I also wondered at the temple "corporation". Don't people - devotees - realize how commercial the venture has become? Don't they see the huge queues of people waiting for "darshan" and the VIPs breezing in and out? Does their Lord discriminate on the basis of status in society?

Why do I find people becoming more and more superstitious? Why do I find that building a temple in the middle of the road may actually be more lucrative than getting a job?

There And Back Again...

Two years without anything to say? Wow!