Layman's guide to surviving in the software industry

Disclaimer:

All the characters, places and supposedly copyright stuff I scribble about only exist in my subconscious. Passing resemblances to real life is sheer coincidence. Any offence regretted.

Part 1: the brave new world

It takes real guts to be an engineer. I stumbled upon this truth after a series of long experiences rather, most of them with mixed flavors. At the fag end of third year, when one walked past the canteen halls or the long corridors of any building, all you could hear was professional mumbo jumbo. Guess what, we had become professionals! Wow, what panache that word attached with it. You were no longer an oversleeping, careless, economically dependent half-baked engineer anymore. That didn’t mean a lot to me anyways. But to many it did. The first step towards becoming a full baked engineer from one of the scores of engineering colleges scattered around Tamil Nadu was to get a job, and get it before you graduated. This task was reasonably easy. The average guy was faced with a lot of options by behemoth software firms and the not so famous ones. He had grown in the midst of a heritage which was fostered by his parents and the rest of the society. This trend is kept up right from first year. And that brings us to square one, getting in a college. I mean becoming a part of one of the 250 odd engineering colleges from the oddity of a mediocre school student. This traced the following easy steps:

Firstly, join a school where they train you like a secret agent or something to write examinations. You write them until you are squeezed dry of ink and imagination, the end point is you become exam-o-phobic and you get withdrawal symptoms if you don’t give exams for more than one week.

Secondly, write all the entrance tests conducted by institutions across the length and breadth of the Indian subcontinent (that way your hit to miss ratio of joining a college substantially increases). One fine day when you are blissfully enjoying your almost never ending summer vacations, if you get a letter or two from a college whose name you can’t even pronounce in the first attempt, congratulations, my boy, you are well on your way to become a “successful” engineer. Now back to square two.

They day is not far off where they will make “quantitative aptitude” by R S Agarwal as a part of the official first year curricula. I see one out of every three people carrying that book, no matter wherever they go(statistics may vary from place to place). Some odd places I saw people reading these books include railway stations, loos, fast food joints…to name a few. Second in the list comes Barron’s guide to GRE. The average engineer is innovative and open to many alternatives. If India doesn’t embrace him and recognize his abilities, he leaves the burden to uncle Sam to figure it out. And yes, he’s successful in that facet of life also. Very few morons actually go for weird things after their graduation, these include the under privileged strata who don’t fall under any category. The are deemed geeks by the rest of the “lucky” ones.

Its eventually one week before placement time, and you have crossed all barriers and have been keeping fingers crossed for this moment. Some people are highly confident of landing in a three letter software company in spite of all odds, and they manage to do it. Placement season comes and goes like hurricane Katrina. There have been a lot of trials, tribulations, realizations and ego wars over the week. Some won it, some unfortunate think they won it. Its celebration time for the placed ones. They never have to worry about work or education or problems plaguing mankind for the next thirty years of their life, or that’s what they think. Id like to steal a line from the movie con air, where Garland Green(Steve Buscemi) mutters

"What if I told you 'insane' was working fifty hours a week in some office for fifty years at the end of which they tell you to piss off; ending up in some retirement village hoping to die before suffering the indignity of trying to make it to the toilet on time? Wouldn't you consider that to be insane?"

That was quite befitting in the present context. Whether we study about computers, aero planes, IC engines or oil rigs, we land up as software engineers. I am so snobbish about being one. It gives raise to cultural shocks. You have the notion that you are suddenly pricked by a pin at you bottoms to run a rat race, no matter what, and you run it, nevertheless you know about it or not. This has been an unwritten custom, the normal life cycle a guy goes through, especially when he is under the umbrella of some big brother university( I needn’t translate it in tamil though), without knowing why.

I honesty don’t know answers to some questions darted at me, like why does software industry need so many people, how do I find the guy next door to be my cold cubicle mate down the line next Monday, to what extent is the normal state of affairs is affected in the country when I pour in some serious work by burning the mid night oil over several months, why am I paid so much for just sitting in front of a monitor all day long etc….

I will try to answer them, again honestly(and candidly), through the insight I have garnered over time.