20 Months of Life in an IT Industry!!

It’s been a roller coaster of 20 months I have had in here. They have been very good and enjoyable days as well as there have been many bad and forgettable days as well. I was very happy when I had joined Cybage, as I was one the first people to get a joining from my school batch and even the college batch. Something that I was very happy of then because many of my friends who were to join big companies got a much delayed joining. One of the biggest achievements I can boast about is that I survived the unforgiving recession period in here. I was hardly 5 months into the job that I got the first sight of the effects of recession way back in January 09. It was like one of the worst starts of a year.

This is the pic of our complete group. We were celebrating a birthday. This was just before the Recession struck. I am somewhere 4-5 from the right.

I was safe as I was into a project very early, but that month I lost a couple of friends who lost their jobs and became one of the first victims of recession. But by all this I realized that it’s not going to be an easy road ahead, and I should choose the safest path of further studies. I then decided to crack CAT that time. In the meanwhile my work also went of very well, but to my surprise the project got completed I came back on the bench (or the resource pool as we call it). Those were the scariest times, as every day I walked into the office thinking that it could be the last day in office. But on second thoughts I would call them as my best days here in the company, as we a group of friends here enjoyed the days. We literally had no work, so we would come in daily surf the internet, write posts on my blog, play flash games, chat, party, watch live score (IPL season 2 was going on those days) and then discuss about them rest of the time.

Thats Ashish, Shital, Pratibha, Girish, Shalini and Me

One of the Great examples of what we did during the Great Recession Period- "Youtube". Its me and Sachin here.

Then came May 1, the results of our appraisals were announced. We all knew that our salaries will not get increased but to our shock they go decreased (something none of us had expected). I thought that this was the toughest phase here, but there were plenty of hiccups lined up. The HR people started calling people 1 by 1 and gave them their relieving letter (a great way to fire people I must say). Quite a few of my friends were there in the victims list. I was expecting the call any day. I still remember it was 12th May and I got a call from the HR department that I have to meet our HR head. I took a back up of my machine and even sent a good bye mail to all of my remaining friends as I knew what the outcome of that meeting was going to be. But again to my surprise (they have been many of them in this journey of 20 months) I wasn’t fired, in fact I was advised to change my department, and suddenly my life changed (from bad to good, or is it really).

This change suddenly made me look a fresher all over again. I felt that I have just joined a new company. But luckily I still had a group of good friends here to give me support. Well now my life had really changed, I started liking the work, started enjoying what I was doing. So in way I can say that my life had changed from bad to good, but the exception to it was that now I had to work and had no other choice (I wasn’t doing any work for the past few months). In July I moved into a project called MicroStrategy and since then my life has been very smooth. I have had a very good project team, got to learn a lot technically from each one of them. The client has been very happy with the work done, which was finally reflected the appraisals of October 09. The only drawback of the team was that all of the members were women, so I had to be a bit disciplined (something that I am not), but they all were very helpful and I got to learn a lot from each one of them and also this helped me a lot in improving my interpersonal skills.

Me with the team (Anisha, Bharati, Me, Pooja and Sreelekha)

Now coming back to the appraisals topic. It was the month of October, although many people had left Cybage and many were on the verge of leaving it as the situation of the IT industry was improving. So the management decided to give increments to everyone in this appraisal. I was not expecting anything as what had happened six months ago was still fresh in my mind and its effects had just blocked my thinking. I actually did not expect anything in that appraisal. My meeting was fixed with my manager, lead and the head for 5th of October. During my meeting I actually realized that my situation was not bad at all. They all were impressed with my performance in the past 6 months. And all of that reflected in the appraisal report that I received on the 1st of November.

After this the life has been very good so far, except for a few instances when some of my good friends parted ways in search of a better living somewhere else. Also I enjoyed some great moments with my team in the various team meetings, whether they are knowledge sharing sessions (they are actually more of fun sessions than knowledge sharing) or they are monthly birthday celebrations, or they are team lunch outings, or even the Diwali funfair organization committee meetings,  all of them have been very good and exciting.

Me with the team

One of my very good friends Abhay left in the first week of December. I was sad that he was leaving, but was also very happy because he was going for his higher studies. Before he left, we (a small group of friends) sat down late nights in Coffee shops, chatting, discussing about the happy and sad moments we had been through in the last year. After Abhay left, I somewhat continued this trend of meeting up with friends and sitting late night. I along with Nilay and Mihir were regular members of these meetings. Many a times my other friends Raman, Vishal, and Najim would join in. We would sit late till 2 o clock in the morning at Costa Cafe (our regular Coffee joint), chat, drink coffee, eat and yes curse our company (this was one of the major and most common point that would occur on every meeting). Almost all of us were frustrated of our jobs by then, due to some or the other reasons, so we would vent it all out there (luckily I can say I was not, so would just listen to all of them). I really spent some of my great moments during those times. I am putting a few images; these were taken in January and that was nilay’s last day at work. So we all had gathered there to give him a kind of farewell.

Thats Najim, Nilay, Raman, Mihir, Me and Vishal

Thats Najim, Raman, Mihir, Me and Vishal. I guess Nilay is the one who has taken this pic.

Well this time its me and Nilay relaxing in Costa Cafe

After he left I guess the fun and excitement also has left our group. Nowadays we don’t sit that often in night (that time we used to twice or thrice a week, now we hardly sit once a month). Now I have completed 20 months in here. I have mixed feelings about this, neither sad nor happy. This may be because the appraisals are back and I am expecting a good increment again (happy) and also in these 20 months I have had to part ways with very good friends I made here in Cybage(sad).

Now I am looking forward to my completion of 2 years here (if that happens). Well as I had said earlier my CAT results are out and I have secured a 98 percentile. I am hoping that I get into one of the IIM’s, but if I don’t then probably I will stay with Cybage for another one year(I hope that this will also be pretty exciting as the last year, though I don’t want the recession effects to come back).

I will probably update next after my IIM results are out or when I complete my 2 years here at Cybage.

One of our great achievements, featuring on the Cover Page of the Magazine