Typical life of an Indian Software Engineer
India is currently flooding with the software engineers. The job is getting so much common that if you were to ask, what does your son/daughter do? to a random person, the 90% of the answer would be Software Engineer. Currently the world has 19 million developers, which has been estimated to grow up to 25 million by the year 2020. I hope someday Software engineers gonna dominate the world population by themselves.
So, How does the life of a Software Engineer start? In India, the career is decided just before you decide your degree.You have successfully joined a high end college. Now your life seems so sweet. Friends, parties, assignments, pubs, projects, bunking, cultural, Industrial visits, exams and many more things you have never experienced before. You just eat up four years of your life at the speed of light. Everything seems like a dream. You are at the edge of finding what you really love and what is your passion really about . But you will start waking up just before the placements. Suddenly, everything turns gloomy. No one is willing to accept you as you were. So you start acting. You start lying how you are going to love the company if they would take you in. And your colleges tries to push you to any possible company to make a clean record of 100% placement. Whatever the degree can be, even if you are specialized or not, it doesn’t matter. Unless you get the core companies(other than Computer Science) you are stuck as an invincible Software Engineer ;) .
The Genesis
First day at your office, you totally doesn’t feel comfortable with those formals. You are going to sweat like a pig with all those traveling and nervousness. Probably will get intro with everyone in the team, and they gonna give you a demo of what your are going to work with all of your life. And you will start starring at the screen and just gonna fake like you are so much interested about what they are doing. And the sad thing is, the day never gets better after this. You have struggled learning algorithms, theories, and so many shit in your college life, just to write few lines of database CRUD operation codes.
You would have known few people from your office by then end of the month and decides to have a change. So you make different type of groups, like Lunch group, Pantry group, Dinner group. Wow, that is really a big change in your life :p , but that is the most you are gonna get. You will start making so many emotional attachments with the people in your office cause, you would lost contact with most of your college friends by now. If you are lucky, you might even get a girl friend. There goes your remaining free time to think about your life. Now you start to plan things so neat and clean, so that it always matches up with your girlfriend’s life. Other than office work, now you have got better jobs to do, like picking up your girl friend, dropping her back and those weekend shoppings which makes wonderful memories.
A year passed, now you stare back at your life finding nothing. You try to find your passion again. But your Managers has some magical powers which let them know your are off with your work(May be, they have spy wares installed in your browsers, I have no idea exactly.) and they start pressuring you with more work. And you get so frustrated that you start sucking at both at your work and life, and you fail totally. Now your life becomes something like this.
Two years passed, you lost your way of finding your passion and you suck at your work too. You have no idea where your life is going. So you start looking for a better job(Actually you are trying to abandon it, cause you are so bored at looking at the same faces again and again.). And the better company needs you to be a big shot, and they never get that, a guy with just two years experience had never got a chance to do big things and he was just trying to do something different and desperately needs a chance. Very few gets lucky, but they don’t understand that it makes no difference than the few % of hike in their salary.
Five years passed, you still have no idea about what you are passionate about and you definitely know that your life is going nowhere. Probably, you might have money stuffed up in your bank accounts, a car and an apartment. So, you are the perfect Indian bridegroom. And you will start thinking that marriage is not a bad option. You get married, have kids and gonna lead a typical software engineer life, which just lacks everything. The Happy Endings are only for movies.
“Life doesn’t have a ctrl-z. Type wisely.” ― Imtiaz Iqbal
P.S: This post is not for those who work in Product companies or the ones who got dream job offers from their college placements. Btw, your life is no different too. It is just wrapped up with more booze, money and a better life style.
Thanks to Sangeetha Kannan for reading drafts of this.
