The Dark Side of Corporate Software Development Jobs- Part 1

So you got that shiny new corporate job and are on cloud nine.

Perhaps you are a fresh graduate, eager to prove your programming chops to the world and blaze a shining trail for others to follow.

Or perhaps you used to work in a high-stress, high-stakes startup environment where a lot depended on you, and you are now migrating to an MNC (multi-national corporation) where you are just one among many, and you feel that it should mean that you can take it a bit easier.

Or maybe it is the other way around, and you feel unchallenged in your current job, and would like to shoulder more responsibility by applying to a startup.

Whatever the situation might be, if you feel that you are going to be ushered into a new “family” (that’s the term HR people use most frequently, don’t they? As if it’s all hunky dory in there and the bright, merry sun shines down on the green playground of their offices!), you are just deluding yourself.

The disillusionment that comes with experience

Do you know why I mentioned those specific three scenarios in the introduction?

It’s because they are all scenarios I have lived through.

In this series, I will take you through each level and more, of my experiences in this often glamorized industry. Maybe you will find something new here, or maybe you will also relate to some of the experiences. So without further delay, let us begin.

Level 0: Prelude

Back in my high school days, in the ninth standard, Computer Science was introduced as a subject and we got our first experience with the wonder machine. Apart from the staple of Word, Paint, and Excel, we were introduced to our first programming language, BASIC, which was an interpreter-based language unlike most of the current high-level languages which are compiler-based.

I found it extremely fascinating, the way we can command the computer and it would do our bidding, and looked forward to those days on which we had our computer lab classes to get hands-on with the machine.

However, I had to choose another stream for my college degree due to the unavailability of seats, but that is a story for another time.

Level 1: The Early Days

You could say that I started my corporate journey right from college when I got recruited by an MNC. I still had a year left for me to get my engineering degree, so I started devouring all that I could of programming, joining multiple courses from software institutes (online courses were still not a very popular thing back in 2008).

I learned Core Java, Advanced Java, Oracle, ASP.NET, and VB.NET.

And in all the tuition centers, I found that I could solve problems very easily, which my fellow students were finding difficult to crack. I even used to help them debug the programs they wrote, and they used to be astonished by how easily I could spot their errors. More so, because I wasn’t studying Computer Science for my engineering degree.

Needless to say, all this inflated my ego, and I started feeling that when I got inducted into the MNC, I would become a model employee, and even other, more senior employees would gawk at my programming prowess!

This MNC used to have a rigorous six-month training period which would be conducted in-house, with trainees being kept in a sprawling facility for the entire duration. You would not have any worries about fooding or lodging, since innumerable food courts dotted the campus, and the rooms were impeccable. You were only expected to attend the training sessions regularly and score well in the exams.

The training also was right up my alley, and I started scoring brilliantly on all the tests, whereas others around me were struggling, and some even failed. One of the trainees even had a mental breakdown halfway through the training period and they had to be escorted away by their parents, their dream of joining the MNC having been shattered.

When finally the training was over, I had attained a hugely respectable score, and my posting was announced where I would have to relocate to when I became permanent in the organization.

Outro

Tomorrow, I will continue the story where I will share what exactly happened when I was finally allocated to a project and became a “billable resource” in industry terms, and how it was the start of my realization that the outward glitz and glamor of this industry are not all that they are made out to be.