Tried to ride the wave
My first job was not as a surfer. No, by wave, I mean riding the trend.
My first job, towards a possible career, was as a content writer in a start up in India in the year 2000. I was fresh out of the bachelor college and had enrolled for masters, but was not really keen on it. What I wanted was a job as a software programmer. But the fact that I was a political science graduate and not a computer graduate posed a problem. I had a diploma in computers, but knew I couldn’t compete with others who had computer science degrees. So I decided to be sneaky.
1999-2000 were the dotcom boom years, where websites were being launched to crazy valuations by investors. This craze was visible in India as well, and a career in web designing or software programming were sought after. In a small city like Ahmedabad, however, there were very few software development houses, so there was a tough competition for the meager jobs there. What jobs were available, however, were for content writers. Having written a few articles for a local newspaper, I had the the advantage over my fellow applicants.
So I got a job at a start up. The company was planning to launch an e-commerce site that would feature every known hot business idead then, namely, a place to trade goods, a section for customized email, a section for e-greetings as well. I was happy with the job, and reasoned that after joining as a content writer, I could switch over to programming, kind of a back-door entry.
If every there was a soul crushing entry into a possible career, this was it. I realized that I was the only content writer in the entire office, which was manned by inexperienced programmers, think they had it made, just by getting a job at an IT firm. Being the only non-techie, I was look at like a caveman, while the other guys strutted like they were Bill Gates and Lunis Torvalds rolled into one.
My boss, the Project Manager, was a great salesman, who had fooled the owner of the business and the investor that he was a techie, when all he could do was throw around jargons like a client-server architecture, Java beans, JSP, DBMS etc. When it cam to guiding us greenhorns, I could tell he was totally clueless. In the month that I worked there, he didn’t hold even one team meeting, only pointed at pages to show how he wanted the site to look, and generally shot down any ideas that the team gave.
The owner of the business, the person who had put the money on the line, was a revelation as well. He was a speculator who had recently struck rich in some land deals, and was looking to make another quick strike. The insane valuations of six month-old dotcoms had convinced him that he would be a millionaire soon.
My work usually involved writing content for our website, which involved as many synonyms for words like great, leverage, connect, as well as the maximum usage of words like online and information superhighway. When not writing content for the webpages, I was asked to write limericks for the e-cards. Now, I am reasonably good with prose, but anything resembling poetry is my turn off button.
One week into the job, and I realized it was a blunder. I was not even being paid well - it was an entry-level position after all. After two weeks, I resigned. I expected the Project Manager to let me go, since he had caught me napping a few times. But the efforts to retain me by the PM as well as the CEO, to loosely use the word, amazed me. I decided to stick around. During the third week, I got a similar offer from another IT firm, which was more established and immediately took up the offer.
In my last week, I simply informed my boos that I would not be coming the next onwards, and he probably saw the logic in that, since he let me go immediately.
I later learnt that the company folded up without the website launching, but not before the change of three Project Managers.
I now look back at the experience with nostalgia, but then, it was my first brush with professional frustration.
