6 and a half years of my professional life - experiences and realizations

I still remember the day when I had fought with my manager while working in TCS in Delhi, and forced him to give me a transfer to Kolkata. When force did not work, I just came back to Kolkata and informed him that I was not returning to Delhi again. That was way back in January 2012. The pictures all move through my mind like a movie. Then I realize, ‘Wow, it is more than 4 years that I had returned to Kolkata!’ My close ones got afraid at my recklessness and callousness, and they were sure that I would be fired from the job. To add to their woo, I went on a long holiday without informing my manager for 3 weeks to a place where there was no mobile phone connection, and my manager became too worried about whether I had absconded from the job. When I finally called him back after those 3 weeks, I sensed that he heaved a sigh of relief! I was a billable ‘resource’ (at least that is what these corporate people refer to us as well as themselves by) and the customer used to pay for me by the hour, and he was very happy to hear my voice again.

After that started my humdrum life. Initially however, it was fun. I was allocated to a different project, and, voila, there was no work to do in that project! I used to go to office in the morning, used to go to the swimming pool, swam for more than an hour, then had food, then killed time with colleagues like me who also had no work, then had lunch, then again talk nonsense, then had snacks, and finally back home in the evening. That seemed too good in an organization like TCS, especially because Indian IT companies are known for making people work like dogs and paying them like beggars. However, that state of bliss did not last long in my mind. It took just 2 months for me to realize that I had started to forget things that I had learnt in the process of working – a thing that no one will ever want to experience. My brain was becoming dull, and TCS was not giving me an opportunity to either learn something new or at least remember things that I had learnt while working in projects in Delhi. I became concerned, and requested my manager to give me some work. After 2 months of requesting him I finally got some work, but that was not the work that required a software engineer. After 1 year of this kind of life, I quit TCS.

From the above experience I learnt a few things:

1.  Do not hurt your manager’s ego ever – he can anytime see to it that you are in trouble.
2. Life without work can never be interesting. It has got rather a very frightening prospect.
3. When you do not have work, read and learn new things. That ensures that you do not become dull.

The story continues. While I was serving my notice period in TCS, my manager and other senior members of the group for which I used to work in TCS used to fix meetings with me almost 2 times a week – they were trying hard to retain me, the reason being, I was a fully billable ‘resource’ and the customer used to pay for me by the hour. Letting me go would mean letting money go. However, after what I had faced there, I decided that it was time to move on.

Then I joined PwC in the Kolkata office with high hopes. I felt very thankful to God that he had helped me get out of a situation where I was struggling and cursing myself every moment for many things together. I also thanked him because he had given me the opportunity to me to work in a reputed firm like PwC. For the next few months it seemed that everything was very good in my new organization. I got a new boss who sat just next to us and who was very easily approachable. I got a new team lead who was pretty friendly, and who used to take care of my personal concerns. I felt this was the place where I wanted to be, these were exactly the kind of people with whom I wanted to work. I started planning about how many years more I would like to stay here, and started dreaming about a good career in this organization. Everything was so ‘transparent’ – at least this is the word that these corporate people like to use about their policies and processes. But times changed very soon, and I found that I was working on a technology that was going to become outdated within another year or two. Also that was not the kind of work that they had promised to give me when they had hired me. I started complaining, and then I started pushing my team lead and my manager for some variation in the kind of work that I was doing, work that would be more interesting and that would have more value in the long run. I gradually started making a bad name for myself in my team because I was complaining; however, I do not think that was the main reason for my going into their bad books. The main reason was they had problem that I had some awareness about the world and about the reality, and I have brains that are efficient enough to think – their main problem was my brains! I did not belong to that group of people who would remain quite oblivious to what was happening in the world, people who would sleep with their eyes wide open, people who were unfazed about what was going to happen next, and who would follow instructions like a robot, never thinking whether those instructions were at all useful and beneficial for them in the long run of life. These people more often than not, used to forget that at that particular stage of our lives we still had a working life of 32 to 33 years left with us. They were quite happy with what they were getting, happy to be in the comfort of their homes with family and children, happy not to learn, and earn either without doing any work or by doing work that was basically useless. They had decided to remain ‘brain-dead’ (I have got good reason to call them that) to the extent that they were not aware that people around them who found out that they were so were using every possible opportunity to exploit them. But they prefer not to explore the world outside and remain in the comfort of their homes and accept the misery that was grinding them every day, and leading them to their doom, primarily because exploring and accepting the truth about the world and about themselves would increase their discomfiture. These people are very afraid to move out of their comfort zones – they love to be exploited for want of some comfort.

Enough of criticism! Now I should get back to my own story. I realized very soon that PwC was worse than TCS.

Beneath the beautiful pond where one can see only beautiful lotus flowers, there is a very deep and dangerous layer of mud. There are snakes hiding in the pond beneath the beautiful lotus flowers, and there is a deep quagmire in the mud, but it does not engulf you all of a sudden, so much so that you never feel that you are being gulped down into it. You realize this only when you are almost chest deep in the mud so that it becomes very difficult for you to pull yourself out.

It was good that I realized the pit that I was in when I was chest deep in the mud, because I made a very desperate effort to pull myself out and succeeded in doing so. I had to face a lot of despair when I was trying to move out of PwC. Companies came with offers and then found that I did not have the required skills to match the experience that they were looking for. Frustration took me over, but the only thing that I relied upon was something that I had learnt at a very early age – patience. I waited patiently for 4 months, and I got a good offer from a good company. In fact I had been trying to get here for the past 4 years, and it was like a dream come true. It was hard for me to believe that I was actually going to be part of the organization that I had wanted to be in. I quit PwC in August 2014.

PwC helped me learn a few more new things:

1. Do not go by the name of a company.
2. Never trust a person who has got a direct working relationship with you, and shows that he cares for your personal problems and gives you too much flexibility in work. Rather, beware of such people! They are the ones who are the camouflaged snakes and will bite you over and again from beneath the lotus leaves, and you will not even know who bit.
3. Use your brains – think! Think about what you are doing, do some market research about your job, and try to figure out where you stand now and where you will land in 5 to 8 years if you continue to do what you are doing now.
4. Let people know in professional manner what you think. If you see that people have a problem with your thinking too much, quit that organization. Such a place can never be congenial for work.
5. Do not stagnate. Move out of your comfort zone. ‘Maa er haat er machher jhol aar bhaat’ will not save your job. Be physically and mentally independent completely. Do not expect anybody to be by you when you are in despair. Fight your own fights – they make you strong!

After PwC, I joined EMC Corporation. At present I work here. It is a big brand, and that is what lured me. I had actually been trying to get into this organization for almost 4 years, and finally when I made it here, I was overwhelmed.

It was a different place for me, not just the organization but also the place. Bangalore is a place where I had been once earlier, but that was just for 2 days to visit my cousin in the year 2011. But this time I was going to become a resident of this place; a new culture, new people, new places, a new language – everything seemed so confusing and bad that I felt like running away from here within the first 3 days of coming here. Everybody was so busy that there was hardly anyone to talk to. I started feeling lonely here, and scolded myself for being blinded by my selfishness – “I left the comfort of my home and family, and I left my parents behind all alone there. How will they survive without me? What will my girl friend do there without me? She also must be suffering from the same loneliness. I was the only one in the world with whom she could discuss all her troubles.” I would miss the occasional ride on my small motorcycle to my village to meet my grandparents, the occasional swim with Suvro Sir in the swimming pool, the egg-rolls and momos with my girl friend in the evenings, Kumarmangalam Park, an occasional ride to the Maithon Dam or to Nachan with her. All of this seemed so painful. Moreover, I had read stories of tigers and panthers and elephants and bears in The Kenneth Anderson Omnibus, and I had hoped to see forests and lots of trees and jungles here. When I found that those were long gone, and Bangalore was nothing other than a jungle of concrete now, I felt like running away immediately.

It took me some time to adjust to Bangalore’s culture, but then I started realizing that this was actually a nice place. Gradually I realized that this is actually a much better place in general than Kolkata, at least when one compares the people of Kolkata with Bangalore.

Anyway, I am deviating too much from the main topic. In EMC, I got a taste of a different kind of organizational culture. I started feeling that an organization should be like this. I got the facility of working from home whenever I wanted, nobody bothered me for taking leaves, there are a lot of perquisites and allowances, the office interiors are beautiful, and it seemed like the organization really cares for the employees. This is the first organization where I found that I was actually earning a lot more than what was written on paper in my joining letter. This is the first organization that has religiously contributed money for my pension without deducting a penny from my salary. The managers are easily approachable, and they really take care of one’s problems. Even though I was not in my zone of comfort, I felt much better here.

But all this good did not last long. There was bad news in the way; I am at present not authorized to divulge the details, so I cannot write anything about any news related to my organization. Even though the perks and allowances are still there, certain policies and procedures have gradually crept into the organization which has become a really worrisome factor, and I fear that this organization is also going to become one more Wipro or TCS. I am actually seeing the downfall and decay of an organization that once used to be my dream organization. I somehow do not realize why employers do not understand that employees are the assets of an organization. People who have stayed for many years in an organization should not be fired, and there have been instances of firing that have left me shocked and bewildered. I do not realize how employers fail to understand that firing trusted employees leads to decrease in morale among the existing ones, and causes lack of trust within the organization.

But I am a person who tries to find positivity amidst all adversities. Experiencing such uncertainty at such a young age has already seasoned me to some extent, and has made me acquainted to some extent with the real world, the dog-eat-dog world where nobody cares for anyone else, a world where everybody is trying not to drown in the sea, because this is a very ruthless world and nobody comes to your rescue if you drown. I now realize that anything can happen anytime, and so I try hard to save as much as I can.

I have not been able to find much bad in EMC like I did in PwC and TCS, primarily because I personally did not have very bitter experiences, save the incidents that I have seen happening with other people. The only bad that I have experienced here is a sense of insecurity, that too in recent times; I do not know at the moment of writing this post that I shall not be fired from my job tomorrow morning when I reach office. There is one more bad thing that I have noticed here - work gets very boring. You work on the same product throughout your entire tenure in the organization, and continue to do the same type of work on that product. Learning is there, but as an organization that deals in Information Security, they should exploring other domains rather than just sticking to areas in which they have been working for all these years. That will add to their business portfolio as well as give people like me some relief who want to work in multiple domains rather than sticking to only one domain. Also, promotions are extremely time taking.

Both Bangalore and EMC have done me one good – they have put me in tough situations and helped me truly realize the value of money to the extent that I have started thinking that I should start investing my money to increase it from now onwards.

I do not know how much more I shall be able to sustain this sense of insecurity and stay with EMC. Even though I want to stay here for many more years, sooner or later, I feel there will be an update to this post, because there should be.