1820-1920The steam engine arrives and the jobs multiply. Saxena puts the world's job count at roughly a hundred times higher at the end of that century than at the start. Some of those engines were broken by the unions that feared them.
1985TCS hires its first batch. A veteran from that batch, now chief executive of Wan, tells Saxena the entire Indian IT industry held at most 500 people.
2005Twenty years of the IT revolution. The Indian job count against the 1985 base has multiplied massively, which is the pattern he keeps returning to.
2011Ratan Tata puts a number on it. Meeting Vishal, he says India has to employ 150 million people by 2030. The episode is recorded about three weeks after his death.
2014Saxena and Anshuman quit. He is in Berlin, his co-founder has spent a year or two setting up Facebook's London office, and they pick India over Europe on analysis rather than sentiment. InterviewBit and Scaler Topics come out of that decision.
2025Five hundred has become about five million. Thirty years of the job changing shape repeatedly, which he reads as thirty years of forced upskilling rather than thirty years of luck.
TodayScaler runs the argument on its own floor. An engine checks every admissions call against a hundred rules and flags a breach to the manager inside two minutes, replacing a ten percent sample done by twenty people. Those twenty now do escalation and career counselling.
2030The deadline on Tata's number. Saxena sells the bridge to CHROs as arithmetic: two months of severance plus one to two months of salary in recruiting fees, when a quarter to a half of that would retrain someone already four or five years deep in the system.
