The story so far

(I wrote this a couple of months ago)

Whenever someone says “Vow, you work with XYZ! That’s great! So, all set”, I feel like screaming “you do not have a clue what I’m going through. I hate this job. In fact, I do not want to work already. I want to study. What have I put myself into? :( ” Only I am responsible for my current state. I was not compelled to start off with the job. Don’t know what I am holding onto here.


I do not want to write code for banking applications. I really do not care what the web page looks like to the customer. I’m not interested in writing queries to find out who has salary more/less than a certain amount. I’m sick of hearing the words ‘business requirements’ every day. If someone utters these words once more, I will scream. The company’s numerous policies are grating. I do not understand any of those; whenever I get a mail related to a policy, I just hit ‘delete’ key.


You may find this absurd – I still do not know the last three digits of the salary figure. There is no pull to find out either. I have not even seen a salary slip yet. There is no sense of earning at all in me. I felt no different when I got to know that my bank account was credited with the first salary. Well, I have not really been working. I’m undergoing training and the salary is more like a stipend.


My relatives say “Oh, you have LCD in your room! And huge food courts with so many varieties of food; heard the non-veg food is great… super cool recreational facilities... Must be like heaven!” I wanted to reply saying “yeah, right. I spend most of the time in the GEC (training building). I go back to room only to catch few hours of sleep. Screw the LCD. The AC room is suffocating. Coming to food, the vendors do not even know the difference between bisi-bele bath, vagi-bath and pulav; and I’m a veggie”. Food deserves a separate post.

But then, I just let them assume that things are going great for me. Better to be envied than pitied you see :)


The bank guys are eager to update me with their new schemes in investment. I cannot comprehend their language. They frequently call on to let me know of the different kinds of credit cards I’m entitled to ‘based on my position in the company’. Why don’t they understand that working with an MNC does not mean I get the CEO’s salary?

Looks like the world around me thinks I’m in sync with it, which is incorrect.


Guess, after college I was still not grown up to be decisive. I always knew that I wanted to study further. But, was not certain of the subjects I wanted to study. I needed some time on this matter. In the meantime, I naively joined XYZ because I had an offer; and I landed myself in the place I never liked.


When you are still in the sixth semester of engineering, you just want a job offer because everyone in your class will have one, or two. The placement cell is happy to see the bulletin board that proudly displays the details of offers made by the so-called big organizations. Nobody bothers to find out your aptitude and guide you. Well, it’s your own job to find and do what you like…


Speaking about my workplace, it is a venerated organization. They have the best people in their Education and Research department. The standards set by this firm in the IT industry are exceptional. The quality they maintain is paramount.
They earnestly strive to conserve natural resources. They allocate a good proportion of capital toward ergonomics. All their campuses are beautiful. The Mysore campus is a paradise.

But, I do not belong here.
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Current Status: I’m on ‘quit XYZ movement’ since a while now. And I’m all set to study further; on scholarship! :)
Yippee :)
PostScript: I still do not know the last three digits of the salary figure, neither have I seen a salary slip yet. :P :D

Customer Delight

Yesterday, I went on a long ride on the pretext of fetching vegetables. Riding a bike on the streets of Bangalore Saturday morning is sheer joy. It had been a long time since I was home. I was just enjoying the ride.

On the way, I spotted a coconut vendor and I stopped by to treat myself to tender coconut water, my favorite drink. As I was not keeping well, it would be the ideal victual. I was dissatisfied since the shell had little water. I thought I’d buy another one later. Standing there savoring the coconut meat, I watched the vendor cut away the husk of a coconut and to my surprise, he offered that to me. He didn’t have to do that. It was not his fault that the shell had a small amount of water. By offering a customer an extra fruit, he was losing the price of one coconut.

I paid him for both the coconuts and returned home, amazed at the gesture. This is called Customer Delight.

First Major Heartbreak

February this year, I fell in love. I could not help it. I fell in love with this university and applied to it for a master’s program. Through the entire correspondence with them, I strongly felt I would get into this university. I thought I had good chances of getting a call since my entrance test scores were much higher than what they required.


Unfortunately, it was destined to be a short affair. My application was rejected. It came as a shocker to me. The ground beneath caved in. God, rejection hurts. Hurts real bad. Hurts even more when I’m already wedged in the wrong job and am away from home. I felt as if I had lost the battle of life. An all night’s snivel followed.


The next day (it was Sunday) I woke up late and got ready just in time for lunch. Our campus food courts strictly follow timelines. You don’t get lunch after 2 pm. I had less than fifteen minutes to get myself a decent meal. But, bad luck comes in truckload. Otherwise, how do you explain choosing the wrong one in a huge campus with six food courts? And choosing the wrong vendor there? Usually the food is just fine to blunt my hunger. This day, it was terrible; not a morsel went down my throat. I bitterly cried within myself.


My friend says “If you love somebody (I say ‘something’) set them free. If they return, they were always yours. If they don’t, spank yourself and move on”. I was trying to do that. There was nothing I could have done about the application. I had to face the truth and take it. Over time, I was getting back to normal life.


Two weeks later my brother called to say that the university sent home a mail. I already knew what was written in it. But I have this habit of keeping a frail hope alive in adverse situations even when I know that it is not pragmatic to think that something that’s already gone wrong and beyond my control, can be fixed. Some corner of my heart felt that may be they reconsidered my application. Bro read out the letter for me. The fact remained unchanged. They didn’t really have to send me a mail… It only reminded me of the denial. Another day of ‘rona-dhona’ ... Then, I had to move on.

One life, live it

Photograph : Avik Chakraborty, Infosys Technologies Limited, Bhubaneshwar

I’m writing this in the wake of the tragic incident of a number of trainees ending their lives in our campus after flunking the last test of training. Failing in the last test means they can no longer continue with the company (an IT major). When they have survived till the end of training, they must understand that they are talented enough. Flunking in one test should not be the reason to take such an extreme step.


Our educator shared this incident with us. About two years back, his friend who was a super performer flunked in three consecutive modules in the final phase of training. He was so brilliant that he did not take more than ten seconds to solve a code snippet. Extremely dejected that he failed, he took a drastic step of committing suicide right before our educator.


The assessment here is very stringent and qualifying criteria is a little warped. In fact, some of our educators themselves admit that the trainees are under immense pressure to master concepts in very short time. They say they took years to comprehend these subjects in depth. I jokingly tell my friends “of course, the training is world class. But the torture is Taliban type”.


I do not have any plans to continue either in this firm or the IT field. Still, I feel the pressure. It is not a comfortable environment when you are not doing very well and the people around you are only speaking Java or Oracle even during lunch break and while walking back to hostel. Sometimes I plug in my earphones and play music loud enough to jam the voices around and happily google.


I do not blame the company for the kind of filtering they do during training. Based on their business requirement and strategy they are selecting the kind of people they need. In case you do not fit in here, there is always something else that suits you.


One need not feel that he is worthless just because he could not successfully complete this training. There are a lot of opportunities outside this IT company. And you never know - being thrown out of this firm could be the best thing that ever happened to you. I know that it is easy for me to say this. But I feel being alive is lot bigger than a job at a highly reputed company.


Recently my mom called one early morning just to hear my voice. She had a terrible dream the previous night. She did not say what the dream was about. “If you don’t like the place just came back home”, she said. I could grok why she was scared as I frequently groan about the assessment and I am a very sensitive specimen. I assured her I was fine.


If a bad dream can petrify parents, how will they live through the tragic demise of their kids?

Critique

Being a novice blogger, I get excited about any comment on my posts. Guess I was on cloud nine after so many of my friends said that some posts were good. Comments from a friend woke me up from the dream. This friend’s suggestions were:
1. Improve your writing.
2. Very lengthy posts. Keep it short. May be your friends could read it because they are your friends. Nobody has patience to read through the entire thing.
3. It’s newspaper like.
4. Facts already available elsewhere need not be put up here.
5. Don’t always write in points.
6. Second post was like a biography, it was not necessary to write that.
7. At the first post - Don’t waste time in writing these things.

How I took it:

@1. Yes, definitely.
@2. True. Your friends think you are a good egg even when they know that you are slightly cracked :)
@3. I didn’t know that.
@4. This was about the ‘smoking’ post. My argument was that that many people may not have read about these topics.
@5. May be the engineering style of writing in points has continued here. Even this post is written in points!. I thought it was necessary to demarcate …
@7. I’m a dreamer.

I solicit your suggestions :) . Please write in to help me better myself.

Why not to smoke

Did you know that cigarette smoke contains more than 4000 different chemicals? Some of these chemicals are the ones that are used in toilet cleaners. Imagine what these substances can do to your poor lungs.

Some of the chemicals in cigarette smoke:

Benzene(petrol additive)
- A colourless cyclic hydrocarbon obtained from coal and petroleum, used as a solvent in fuel and in chemical manufacture
- A known carcinogen associated with leukaemia.

Formaldehyde(embalming fluid)
- A colourless liquid, highly poisonous, used to preserve dead bodies.
- Known to cause cancer, respiratory, skin and gastrointestinal problems.


Ammonia(toilet cleaner)
- Used as a flavouring, frees nicotine from tobacco turning it into a gas
- Often found in dry cleaning fluids.

Acetone(nail polish remover)
- Fragrant volatile liquid ketone, used as a solvent, for example, nail polish remover

Tar
-Particulate matter drawn into lungs when you inhale on a lighted cigarette. Once inhaled, smoke condenses and about 70 per cent of the tar in the smoke is deposited in the smoker's lungs.

Nicotine(insecticide/addictive drug)
- One of the most addictive substances known to man, a powerful and fast-acting medical and non-medical poison.
- This is the chemical which causes addiction.

Carbon Monoxide (CO)
(car exhaust fumes)
- An odourless, tasteless and poisonous gas, rapidly fatal in large amounts.
- The main gas in cigarette smoke, formed when the cigarette is lit.


Others
- Arsenic (rat poison)
- Hydrogen Cyanide (gas chamber poison)




Source: An article in Deccan Herald (some years ago) and Health Education Authority (UK) – Lifesaver
If you still want to smoke, please do it while non-smokers are not around.

Other avenues, please

Excerpts from an article in Deccan Herald : IT biggies on hiring spree; one lakh people to join workforce
New Delhi, Feb 14 (PTI)
Switching over to robust recruitment mode after a dormant 2009, Indian IT players will hire nearly one lakh people in the coming months amid improving global economic conditions.
Coming after a forgettable year of hiring freeze, layoffs and salary cuts, the recruitment drive in the IT space is led by biggies such as Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys. An analysis of the hiring plans announced by various Indian IT companies shows that headcount in the industry is expected to go up by more than 98,000. Last week, the country's largest software exporter TCS said it would increase headcount by 30,000 in next fiscal year while Infosys announced plans to hire 16,000 people this year. Of the 12 companies which have announced their hiring plans, BPO giant Genpact said it would hire 10,000 people. Besides, IBM is looking at recruiting 5,000 followed by Infosys BPO (2,000), Accenture (8,000) and Mphasis (2,000). Going by Gartner estimates, the domestic IT market is expected to grow by 19-20 per cent in 2010, a sharp rise against a 2.6 per cent growth in 2009. "IT companies usually hire to meet their next 18-month requirement. The actual hiring is always higher than the announced hiring as the companies also do lateral hiring besides fresh recruitments," Chakraborti said. "As economy started improving the IT infrastructure contracts started moving to India. The jobs in IT industry is gaining pace but for us to have a booming 2008 job market will take some (more) time," Info Edge National Head (Marketing and Communications) Sumeet Singh said.

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What I think about it :

EC grads, Computer Science(CS), Information Science(IS), Telecom, Mech, Civil, Instrumentation, Biotech (ok, all the branches of Engineering) guys are all welcome to participate in the recruitment process. After spending four years studying something else, people enter software field. I personally know a mechanical engineer from a premier institute like BITS-Pilani working on S/W projects related to banking, and an MSc-Physics from the same institute developing code. Only about 25pc of the people recruited by the IT(Information Technology) companies are from software background. And let me tell you, most of the NCS (non-Computer Science guys – jargon in the software field) don’t really have a problem working in this field.

Most of the companies train the fresher for about five-six months. In this time you are taught more than a computer science grad studied in four years. And few companies have an extremely rigorous assessment process, which even the CS and IS graduates find difficult to clear. Even if you marginally fall short of the required cut-off mark (say, you have a CGPA of 3.99 and the required grade is 4 on 5), you are given an ‘exit’ (euphemism for being thrown out of the company).

My point here is, if most of the engineering students land up in software field, why study something else for four long years? We have more than a hundred engineering colleges in Karnataka alone offering various branches in engineering, churning out more than 70000 graduates every year. And at present, a lot of people take up courses related to IT at coaching centers, while doing their graduation, to improve job prospects.

I have this concept.

- At present a large amount of resources is diffused over various courses that don’t really produce employable graduates.

- The IT courses do not require as much physical infrastructure as the other branches of engineering do.

- Why can’t we have colleges that teach only IT related subjects instead of all the colleges offering IT courses along with other branches? People interested in jobs in IT industry can straight away join these colleges.

- Consequently, we will have a smaller number of institutes offering NCS courses. The capital thus saved can be directed toward improving the infrastructure and encouraging more research in the NCS institutes. And, a student can focus on his/her field of study alone than studying CS in parallel.

Our media gives us more news related to recruitment in the IT industry; gives a fancy name ‘techie’ to coders; talks big about their lifestyle.( All of this is true) This influences readers/viewers to assume that IT is their/their ward’s ultimate destination. Most of the work in the IT field is service based, and is predominantly dependent on the core subjects. It is high time we concentrate on research and development than take pride in having huge number of programmers in the country and their fat (or, should I say obese?) pay-package.

PostScript: IT guys, no offence intended all right? I’m only trying to say that there are a lot of other avenues to be explored.

At the peak of incongruity!

There have been many instances when I've been off-key. Sometimes this has put me in embarrassing situations . I recollect a few of those here.

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1. Sixth semester - someday: I was at the Internet café filling up an application form which was taking a lot of time. After about three hours' time I felt for my Honda Activa’s keys. I did not find it. Then I rushed to my bike which was parked outside. The key was sitting pretty on the bike’s belly. Heaved a sigh of relief. Anybody could have easily stolen my bike that day!

2. 2008 - I was purchasing some articles for Sankranti(South Indian festival) celebration. As I was selecting the mango and neem leaves I realised that the my Activa's key was still on the bike(yeah, again!). I rushed toward my bike which was parked a few feet away. Fortunately, the bike and the keys were safe. But, I still had the leaves in my hand and I had not paid the vendor yet! I returned to the shop to pay him the money. Fortunately(again), he was busy with other customers and had not noticed me walking away with the leaves. Otherwise he would have thought I was some kleptomaniac on prowl!

3. Final year of Engineering - someday: I was supposed to pick up my friend en route to college. I had totally forgotten about that. She must have stood there in disbelief when I rode past her without even checking if she was waiting there! This meant she had to walk back to the bus stop which was a little more than half a kilometre away. Consequently, she was late to class.

4. Eighth semester final exams: I think it was Embedded Systems paper. The invigilator handed out the attendance sheets to me. As I was signing I felt I was signing on more pages than I did for other subjects. ECE students were supposed to sign only on the first three sheets. I had signed across some Computer Science student’s USN on the fourth page! The invigilator later resolved the issue.

5. Best friend’s birthday last year: That evening, I was chatting with her on phone just as on any other day. After the chat ended, another friend asked me for her contact number to wish her. It never occurred to me till then that it was her birthday! Then I called my friend; except a sheepish ‘happy birthday’ I did not know what else to say.

6. A couple of months back: While riding my bike I asked my brother if the new footwear shop in our locality sold good goods. There was no answer. I repeated the question. Still there was no answer. Then I pulled up and looked back. Bro was not there. Where was my little brother? I was scared to death. My eyes were moist. Since I had forgotten to carry my cell phone, I could not even call home to find out if he was there. I rode back as fast as I could. There I saw him laughing at me.

He had got off the bike before I started to ride and I hadn’t realized that. You can’t blame me for this. He practices stealth techniques of martial arts. I could not have known when he got off.

7. Last month: After a twenty minute walk from my hostel room to training centre at the workplace it struck me that I had forgotten to carry my I-card. Since I did not have enough time to go back to my room and get the I-card, I proceeded to attend the lecture and swiped in late at lunch break.We are given attendance based on the number of hours clocked between swipe-in and swipe-out. Since I had not clocked in the required minimum number of hours that day I lost a day’s leave.

Nowadays I spend a few seconds to check and re-check to make sure I have not missed out on things :)

Quality Service

How often has it been easy for you to find a plumber, electrician or a carpenter who did a fine job? Most of us are not really happy with their work. We either get the job redone spending lot of money, but seldom satisfied, or just put up with mediocre service.

When you construct your house, how sure can you be that the mason has mixed the cement, sand, water and gravel in the right proportion? That the mixture has not timed out? If it did, its strength would reduce by a considerable degree. How sure can you be that the walls are accurately vertical and strong enough?

We have often seen fire outbreak due to slipshod electrical work; buildings have collapsed because of second-rate construction. A premier space organization like ISRO is not spared of such problems either. Its compound wall collapsed, just one year after construction!

We should have a national institute which offers quality courses in various fields like masonry, painting, gardening, and all the vocations mentioned above(you could add more to the list). The institute should certify that the concerned person is qualified in a particular field.

The advantages I see from such a system:

-safety

-we can be sure of not being swindled

-job well done

-less expenditure

-saves time

-organized labour

This means you are happy