Thoughts From India

IT as Career 4 - First Company

The next in my series on IT as Career - 1, 2, 3

So you made the choice and now having studied hard, looking to get your first job.

A big question at this stage is,  Whether it is good to join a big IT company (Infy, Wipro etc) or a small 10 people IT shop? It is always debatable. In the big IT shops you get to learn a lot on how big projects work, about quality and processes, how to do work in a methodical fashion etc. But in the small shop is where your contribution will stand out. Your code could make or break the whole company. This of course means, more pressure, longer work hours and mostly lesser pay. But then it is an experience that is very difficult to come by in the bigger firms. So my recommendation is to work in a small-medium sized company for starters and then move on to the bigger ones later in your career.

So learn the to handle stress and see the hard life in the smaller company, so that when you do move to a bigger company you are a mature person and then you can learn all about processes and how a mature business works.

But seeing the tremendous growth in IT outsourcing and the way most of the deals are stuck based on the size of the vendor, I doubt if those small IT companies (that depend on pure cost advantage, without any specific niche area) will survive very long. But take advantage of those when they are still there.

Bandhs, Strikes and the Common Man

I have been reading and listening to the news of all the problems surrounding the three days traders strke in Delhi.

From what I can make out of it, they are actually striking against a move to close down illegal businesses running out of residential areas.  So now you know, if you do something illegal and get caught just call for a strike of your group. So if you are programmer and you get caught over-speeding, you just go ahead and call for a strike of all programmers!!! (I suspect this would one day happen in West Bengal, now that they have a IT workers Union coming up there)

The person who is most affected by this is of course the normal man on the street and of course every tax-payer too, as buses got burnt and other public properties are destroyed. But the problem is that there is no common man union yet and no way to create a common respose to things that you don't like.

Wouldnt be cool, if we call for a three day strike against traders in Delhi? Everyone refuses to visit shops/buy anything for three days, then what happens to the trader's business? This sounds like a way to show disapproval and can be effective if enough people take part.

If we can take advantage of the power of Internet, I guess this should be possible. Maybe not now, but surely within a years time to create an infrastructure for common man to express his feelings of what is happneing out there.

If you think this will work, then spread the word, comment on this post, write to me, blog about this, write in your local newspaper and let us try to see if this idea will really work.