A fresher's diary

9.00 am:
Hi, I am Shambu. Today is my first day of work in a multinational company! I am so thrilled! Its my first job. I am excited by the fact that I will be attending my first corporate event and our charismatic CEO will be addressing us.

My close friend Aggro is with me. He is of the opinion that the orientation program is just a waste of time.He says its like political speeches, consistently apocryphal but sometimes entertaining .My friend is a bit cynical about most of the things. So I let it pass.

Seems like there is a small hitch in our program.Some last minute changes. Instead of our CEO, some other guy will be addressing us. If the jury had voted right, this guy would have definitely picked up the razzie for the worst dressed.

After tripping over a couple of wires on the stage, almost spilling coffee on the first row , clearing his throat in front of the microphone, he finally settled down.He informed us that he had returned from the U.S a month back discussing business with the customers.To us it seemed as if he hadn't taken a bath since then.

He started with the history of the company, then moved on to what kind of exciting and mind boggling work we do,so on and so forth. His incantations had a soporific effect on the audience.

By the time he came to the part regarding the company's expectation from the new recruits, some people in the audience had started snoring audibly.But he bravely went on for another half an hour or so.Finally he wished us good luck.

He was followed by a procession of equally inept speakers who had nothing better to add, but to our misfortune, a lot of time on their hands.

11.30 am:
The HR lady took us on a tour of the campus. I am not sure whether the newbies were interested in the campus, but they were definitely interested in her.Nobody took their eyes off her.She was a bomb!.She would have given Gisele Bundchen a run for her money. After the tour, she too wished us good luck and hoped that we would give the company our best. I don't know about the company but going by Aggro's besotted looks , he was definitely ready to give her his best.

12.30 pm:
The lunch is good, but a bit expensive.I ran into a guy in the canteen. He was my senior. He looked a bit dejected and forlorn. One of the brightest guys in our college. I asked him what he was working on . He said it was some R&D stuff and was very vague about the details. Nevertheless I was impressed. Aggro had a different take on R & D. He says whenever somebody says R&D, chances are that the poor sod has no clue about what he is doing.

2.00 pm:
I just met the guy who recruited me. I and Aggro will be part of his team. I was also introduced to my project mates. One of them was watching an interesting video on You Tube and as soon as he saw us coming he quickly switched on to the development environment and pretended to be busy. The other guy I met was busy taking a call. I assumed it was an official call.Aggro disagreed.He swears that he heard the words honey, sweety and restaurant. I am not so sure. It must be Aggro's wild imagination.

6.00 pm:
Wow! I just completed my first day in the office. Aggro says it was boring, except for the interaction with the HR. He spent most of his afternoon chatting with her on some internal chat tool. I am sure Aggro has already started zeroing in on his honey moon destination. Mentally at least.

Day2:
11.00 am:
I had my first team meeting. One of the developers told our manager that it was not possible to ship the product on the committed date. It was buggy and way below standards, the geek said. He had logical arguments to back it up.This fueled a heated discussion among the participants, that lasted for little over an hour.Even with my limited experience, I could see that the geek was right and was being sensible.At the end of the meeting, the geek was out voted and it was decided that product would be delivered on the committed date. I felt sorry for him.
12.30 pm:
Over lunch I discussed about the meeting with Aggro. He had some inside information that the geek would be moved out of our project. The You Tube guy would instead take over the responsibilities from the geek. I am surprised at the decision. Aggro says it comes with the territory. His advice to me is to never argue with the boss. This is how his weird sense of humor put it...

One fine day if your Manager says that the team needs to sacrifice a goat for the betterment of the product, you shouldn't argue with him. Common sense should not cloud your judgment. Instead of trying to comprehend the relationship between the quality of the product and the sacrifice of a goat, you should instead throw in a suggestion like sacrificing a goat is an excellent idea. In fact the whole team should light a bonfire and dance around it semi naked,arguing that it will foster team spirit. Such brain waves will get you brownie points during appraisal.

4.00 pm:
We had another marathon team meeting. This time some quality guys were also involved in it. A quick mathematics from Aggro indicates that the word "Team spirit", "Innovation" and "Proactive" has been used 256 times. Aggro is not completely sure since the standard rhetoric was sometimes punctuated by burping and belching sounds.Spicy lunch I guess.

Day 3
10:00 am:
Today I attended a technical presentation. The guy who spoke had a paunch belly like most other participants. In between taking calls on his mobile and drinking endless cups of coffee, he mentioned about frameworks, libraries, code re use and platforms. It was all overhead transmission for me. Aggro says none of the souls who attended it gave a whit about what was being presented. He was right. People were busy drawing meaningless doodles on their notebooks, dozing off, smsing jokes(I presume) and basically doing everything except listening to the presentation.

Towards the end of the presentation, there was some excitement. One portly gentleman suddenly woke up from his slumber and intended to make his presence felt. He went on some totally irrelevant tangent , which I guess nobody (including himself) understood. The presenter having nothing better do, welcomed this intervention and started arguing passionately with him. After half an hour of futile discussion, both of them felt pleased at themselves and decided to take the discussion off line. The others heaved a sigh of relief.

1.00 pm:
We are having lunch with somebody Aggro introduced to me. The guy has 2 years of experience and this is his fifth company. He says he wants to pursue his MBA and he is waiting for his MBA results.If that does not work, he will make his all important third jump in the last nine months. He doesn't want to settle for anything less than 50% hike. My remark of "Isn't it a better option to remain in a company for a few years, learn something and then make a decision", was met with a "WHERE-DID-THEY-RECRUIT-THIS-HALF-WIT" look from Mr MBA. Aggro quickly came to my rescue and changed the topic.

Day 4:
Our product was released today. Everyone was giving high fives, except for the geek. He had a distraught expression on his face.

Day 5:
11.00 am:
Today we are out on a team lunch.This is a continuation of yesterday's celebration.The lunch was in some fancy restaurant on Church Street. The right side of the menu, looked very prohibitive.I was told that I could order anything I wanted. Obviously the company was sponsoring the lunch. Most of the dishes were half eaten or just sampled , when the waiter presented us with the bill. I felt sad at the enormous waste.

Frustration and cribbing seems to be the natural state of most software engineers.Somehow they seem to find solace in constant whining. As if following some unwritten protocol, the guys started complaining as soon as they were out of the restaurant. The ambiance was not good, the food wasn't authentic Chinese. The company no longer cares about employees, its time to look for greener pastures, blah blah blah.

Week 2:
Today I was asked to fix a bug. I was excited at the prospect of laying my hands on the source code. I wanted to debug the code and understand the flow. My project mate(who sometimes reminds me of Wally in Dilbert) told me that it was not necessary. He asked me to straightaway change Line 300 of GetSingletonObjectUsingFactoryPattern() method . I was supposed to change the For Loop to While loop. When I saw the source safe history, I saw that there were five previous check outs and check Ins .Each time the For Loop was changed to While Loop and vice versa. When I asked him about this, he mumbled something about Refactoring.

This reminds me of Alan Kay's quote " Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves"

Week 3:
The customer has come back with what is being warily called as a lower-than-expected rating.As usual Aggro through his devious means has got hold of the right information. Supposedly the customer was so disgusted with the product that he has vowed never to outsource any work to our company. Mr You Tube,Wally2 and the manager are traveling for the damage control.

Month 5:
Its been 4 months since I have joined the company. Nobody seems to be interested in doing their best. Visibility, building castles on the air and internal politics seems to be the way of life. The geek has quit and today is his last day.

Having nothing better to do, Aggro with some of his friends have come up with the some interesting facts:

• Supposedly out of the 1000 odd employees, around 20% are freshers(Out of which 75% are male, 24% females and the genders of a few employees is still under debate).
  
• Among freshers five couples have started dating each other, two are on the verge of break up.
  
• Almost all of the new inductees have added a few pounds in the past few months, thanks to the sedentary life styles.
  
• The new receptionist is being touted as the Bipasha Basu of our company. Not surprisingly all of them barring Aggro want to be her John. (Aggro still has high hopes that somehow he will patafy Gisele one day).

Month 6:
I have put my papers today. Nothing about this company makes sense to me anymore.

The managers are power hungry and incompetent to the core. They are driving business to the ground. With the precision of Luftwaffe, they are bombing down every promising project.

The best guys have long left the company. The desperate one's are trying to fill in their shoes.

The HR is still serenading new joiners with their creative fantasies. Short listed interview candidates are being promised nothing short of Utopia.

The fact that six months of my career has gone the drain is still haunting me. One good news is that Aggro has finally impressed Miss Gisele and they are going steady. He is going on a long term on site visit. In terms of quality , he says that the work he will be doing there is comparable to data entry operators.

I have a couple of offers from multi nationals. I am not sure that I want to join them. I have set my eyes on a small start up. Nothing fancy, but far more satisfying I hope.

Somebody said "True innovation often comes from the small startup who is lean enough to launch a market but lacks the heft to own it". It sounds like music to my ears.