The Indian software services sector is a wonderland. Everyone bullshits everyone. Your job is to make it look like you have enough work for you to be drawing a salary. You are paid to justify that you should be paid. And how do you justify that you should be paid? By preparing elaborate slide shows and spreadsheets. It is one giant work of fiction in Power Point and Excel.
No one talks about efficient code. Even you wouldn't if your effort were to be measured by the Lines of Code. Just imagine. The more Lines of Code, the better. If you spend five minutes working on something, you put two hours in the tracking software, no kidding. If you spend two hours copying code from various pre-existing programs (which had been copied from other programs - you see forty years of Mainframe does give you a sizable chunk of obsolete code) you put your effort as forty. Yes forty hours. Of course, at regular intervals you need to send out mails to various people about various things and demand they give you a solution by EOD (End of Day). If you are at the receiving end of such a mail, do not panic. A solution is usually a mail or any other form of engagement. Never mind if your solution is shoddy, just send it back. Or, better still, say that your solution depends on solutions/feedback from other teams and shoot out threatening mails to them CCing it to your sender demanding that the said team sends you back whatever it is that you hope it is going to send you back by - you guessed it - EOD. No body wants you to wade through the marsh of code and come up with an actual solution. You are discouraged to. You see, the idea is to keep the facade of work going on but never really solving the main problem.
No one but the really desperate should join (and continue in) the IT industry. Because getting out is hard and time consuming. Sometimes it is the only way to go - in the beginning. Small product companies are rarely in the mood to take up or train young engineers. But if you love programming, or life in general, know this from now. You must get out.
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Saptarshi, I love you and so feel compelled to ask this: are you familiar with the term "dooced"? If not, check it out, here: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=dooced
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry you're having such a shitty time at work. Truly, rey. But getting out should be by your own choice, not any other way, so till the day you DO get out voluntarily, please be careful what you write online and watch your words. Sounds cowardly, but esp. in today's world, perhaps a necessary precaution.
much love,
Kaichu, who will get to meet you soooooon :)
I like programming. Though all I know is basic BASIC and basic C++. I am trying to teach myself PHP and MySQL though.
ReplyDeleteThe industry itself is modelled on payment/hour. So nobody actually cares what you are doing as long as you bring in revenue for your company, and then you are branded an efficient worker. An efficient whore now that I look at it. Of course, you are talking about IT services companies, whose main job is to rake in the moolah and show(read pretend to) the people how much work is actually getting done, whereas the main code or the core job has been written in some nondescript back end office by some obscure(but maybe brilliant) programmer. Nobody gives a hoot if you have done some good work if that was for free( read as cost to the company), and nobody actually cares to complain as long as they keep drawing their salary.
ReplyDeleteA revolution is in the docks. What say you!