Much of the Information mentioned in this article has been plagiarized from the magazine competition 360degrees, just to keep people more aware!!
Faking in IT perhaps more dangerous than the fake pilot scam because even the genuine pilots rely a lot on tons of lines of code and software to fly the plane safely. If the software was developed by those who faked their experience, our lives are at risk. As a matter of fact, we are at risk. We can still have some hope because there are quite a few in every IT company who are genuine, passionate and hard working preventing bad code to go on production.
If you notice, the fake experience scam amongst pilots started around the time when India witnessed a lot of new airline companies starting operations. The need for pilots surged as compared to the supply. This was an opportunity for institutes to cash in and they appear to have used this opportunity to make money for themselves. The IT boom has always been there and even now a lot of IT companies find it hard to get experienced. Every IT company would love to have is get their employees trained on ethics.
Some people might have fallen victims to social pressure of having a job and earning well. They might have felt the fastest and easiest way to get rid of the pressure is to fake. However, once they mature and learn that they shouldn't have faked they feel about it. Once the mistake is realized there are two choices people usually make - to correct it or bury the past and move on.
If it is so risky, why do people do it?
There are several reasons why they do it but if you ask those who faked they would always have a sentimental story to tell. "I have to take care of my parents and i was not getting job for the last 2 years" or "I moved to US and was not getting a job there for long time". What they actually mean is, "I lack skills and I found that improving my skills is too hard and faking was an easier alternative".
As there are large number of people who don't get placed from the campus or make into IT in their first attempt, there is a huge market space they create for training institutes to get them learn skills in demand and improve their chances to get an IT job. Some training institutes to boost their placement percentage and to cash in on the opportunity, woo their students to fake their experience after their training. Those institutes who facilitate faking, support their act by backing them up with stories of how they have helped such people in the past and the success such people have had in getting employment and retaining them. They appear to hide the truth that faking experience could land someone in jail or they can be blacklisted by all the IT companies.
The IT industry interviews aren't skill based but knowledge based. The education system in India is great in producing people who can memorize a 1500 page book, word to word inch to inch. Any faker with decent memorization skill could crack any IT interview which is based on knowledge, in just a couple of years you could see lot of software failures from software being produced.
The National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) in India appear to have a blacklist that allows organizations to report fakers into the blacklist so that other organizations could be saved from hiring one from the blacklist. However, personally, I am not sure of its effectiveness. However, I know a lot of fakers who work for companies even registered with NASSCOM
