Chapter 21: Trade Hound…

Around 2002 the job scenarios were not all that good, with the dotcom bubble bursting in late 2000 early 2001 software companies were unsure if they would have sufficient work to last the year and layoffs were an exercise conducted on a weekly basis. Many Indian companies that thrived for more than a year on the dotcom revolution shut shops and the number of unemployed Software engineers rose.

I had a degree in Instrumentation and the only knowledge that I had about software was limited to writing simple C-programs, a little bit of assembly, reverse engineering and working with multiple OS installations. Of the 4 traits mentioned above the last two were self learned when I was stuck at home doing nothing for about 6 months between graduation and getting a job. Since I had no desirable knowledge that the software companies looked out for, I never applied to one.

I got my first job as a sales cum installation engineer in a firm based out of Delhi that used to sell biomedical instruments, the salary was not all that rosy, I was being given 3480 INR per month and additional travel and stay expenses, and a commission of .5 percent on the deals that I close (now some may think that 0.5 % would be too low a percentage but the biomedical instruments don’t come cheap, in fact a gas chromatograph, my first assignment cost around half a crore). I never took the job, reason being my dad was against me having any relationship whatsoever with the capital and he was against me settling for a job that does not pay in 5 figures (to the left of the decimal).

I continued my job hunting in all of core instrumentation companies, faxing out resumes by the dozen, I did get a fair response but none fitting my dads bill.

You might feel why it was so difficult to get into an instrumentation company with such good grades? The problem was that most core engineering companies have a compensation strategy, what they do is recruit engineers from allied branches and train them in the core field and pay them less. An example: Say company A wants an instrumentation engineer, and the industry pay scale for an entry level instrumentation engineer is say 8000 INR/month, they go and hire a production engineer (who knows instrumentation but his degree doesn’t say so) train him in instrumentation processes and pay him around 4000 INR/month, so they get two for the price of one. Also to note is that these rules don’t apply if you have a strong letter of recommendation, where you end up getting the better of the industry average. These are some of the politics that companies follow and deny at the same time.

I was formally introduced to the idea of working with a software company by my friend Mohammed, (Patni) who had come down to my place to borrow the material for GATE preparation, he got into a conversation where he revealed his five figure salary to my dad, that was it, I was made to apply for 10 software companies during the week.

I started looking out for a software job in newspapers and was delighted to know that a company by the name Nucleus Software was conducting walkins in 3 batches at Andheri. So I gathered all my credentials and walked in. to my surprise there were thousands of software engineers who had come in for the same, the attention that the 2.5 inch by 2.5 inch ad had commanded could well highlight the height of unemployment that was prevalent then. The Nucsoft (as the company called itself), divided everyone into manageable batches and those who could not be accommodated were called in the coming weekend, and the others the weekend after the next.

Mine was scheduled for the same day. So I waited patiently to give the aptitude test, my test was to begin at 4:00 pm, I was busy checking out the girls who had come in for the test and it was then that my eyes fell on a Lone guy seated at the corner and revising his arse off. My Brother was here, it was war.

He was in a batch before mine, so when I entered the hall, he was leaving it. My brother had a degree in Electronics, but since he had always wished to get into computer science, he had done some certificate courses from NIIT and the likes, so his software knowledge was well beyond mine.

I cleared the aptitude test; as a matter of fact there were only two more from my batch who managed to clear the aptitude. The written test had five questions of which we were supposed to attempt any 3 with question number 1 being compulsory. The catch was Question 1 was purely UNIX about which I did not have a clue, I ended up attempting the 4 other questions (1 on algorithm, 1 flowchart and 2 c-program snippets). When the results were declared, no one had made it to the interview, but I was called in for a discussion, where I was made aware that my answers though impressive was not sufficient enough to get me the job as they were on the lookout for UNIX expertise, I was offered the next C-vacancy that opens up.

I was later informed that my cousin had got into nucleus software, with a pay package of 7500 INR/month and a 2 year bond. For once it seemed that he was winning again…