India, Oct. 10 -- Earlier this week, HCL Tech announced it has finished hiring about 11,000 freshers for the year. It will pay some of them four times what it pays others: Rs.4.5 lakh at one end, Rs.18 lakh at the other. Why the gap? Because there are two kinds of engineers. The ones who get Rs.18 lakh at the beginning belongs to what the company calls the 'Elite Engineer cadre'. These are graduates screened from elite colleges such as the IITs and NITs. They are trained on the cutting edge and understand how to work on semiconductors, AI and robotics among other things. Everyone else enters the company through the AMP Matrix. This is HCL Tech's internal framework for measuring employee skill levels and determining career progression. It includes three bands called Ascend, Momentum and Polaris. Salaries here start at Rs.4.5 lakh. The ones with higher skills move up the matrix to other bands called Momentum and Polaris and can earn up to Rs.10 lakh. Talking to the media, Ram Sundararajan, the chief people officer, described the strategy a "pivot to a skills-based hiring approach." This strategy is not unique to HCL Tech. TCS started the trend and kept salaries in a band between Rs.7 - 11 lakh. Then Infosys went more aggressive and started to offer freshers up to Rs.21 lakh in its bid to get more AI talent and attract digital natives. When looked at from that perspective, HCL Tech is not breaking new ground. The important question for us to ask is, what are higher salaries buying them? On paper, there are three reasons. Of these, it appears, only one stands to scrutiny. 1. Pedigree and the scarce domain skills a freshly minted engineer brings to the table. The fourfold gap is to attract a candidate from the right college who may have some idea on how to go about solving the problems you've been hired for as a company. 2. Then there is the speed of execution a candidate brings to the table. But how you measure that is unclear. 3. And finally, there is judgement. This means, a candidate is given a problem and they have it in them to 'smell' what's the matter with it and get it right. Here again, it is difficult to figure what test you administer to understand how you know if pedigree and the theoretical knowledge to solve a problem confers the ability for a candidate to 'smell' what the matter is. Now, the Bengaluru-based Shrinath V, of The Salient Advisory and a Google Startups Mentor is unwilling to buy the argument that speed alone is what matters. "Those who start early will find phenomenal compounding in their ways of extracting value from these systems." To place that in perspective, he makes the case that as recently as a year ago, when he got down to rebuild a technology-led editorial platform, it took him three months of his time. People such as him now need no longer than three weeks. And is possible without disrupting the work in progress. This is the how forward-deployed engineers work. Metaphorically speaking, think of them as medical doctors or specialised mechanics working with teams on the frontlines while the action is unfolding. "21 forward deployment engineers are now working directly with business on execution," Aarthi Subramanian, TCS' COO told analysts on Thursday. Her point is that as more and more of such forward teams are deployed, fewer engineers will be needed in the longer run because the gap between those who build and those who don't will widen. "What no one will admit is that this means you need fewer people as well in the longer run." It's a fair point. The larger Indian firms already know you have to price for speed. That is why Infosys puts campus hires through 19 to 23 weeks of training in Mysore. The Hechinger Report studied the time it takes, and computed the costs Infosys incurs to convert most fresh graduates into a billable employee at $8,000. Of these, 5 to 8 percent drop out. It is inevitable then that these numbers get factored into the cost of hiring a fresh graduate. This brings us back to the beginning. There's someone who gets paid Rs.4.5 lakh and someone who gets paid Rs.18 lakh. Like Shrinath put it, the speed problem is being addressed. But what about the 'smell' test? The Rs.18 lakh is an attempt to price the judgment a machine cannot supply-at least not yet. As things are, the brand name of the college someone graduated from is the arbitrator of that premium. But there's only so long such a premium will last....