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The Butterfly Diaries 07 - The Ersatz Elevator

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There were elevators and then there were ersatz elevators. One never knew which was which till the door opened. So it was with our attempts to get into projects. One might think I wasted the entire time since the completion of my training in the grip of the vices of the vile village. But in between these bouts of hedonism, I did make earnest attempts to find that elusive elevator to take me on the ride of corporate success. Every third day, I would be at the desk of our business unit human resources lead and every tenth day at the door of the business unit head’s cabin. So much so they fled at the very sight of me. My schoolmate was the first one in our home to get into a project. It was a mainframe one, like that of most of our other Open Systems colleagues in the America business units. It looked as if the training stream mattered little more than one’s initial or birth month in staffing. So much for me being sad about missing the Internet stream. As it happened, the first project op...
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The Butterfly Diaries 06 - The Vile Village

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They say it takes a village to raise a child. And if the village happens to be a vile one, what would be the fate of such children? Or of us – the naïve children entering the corporate world. But first things first: if we did not clear the training, such questions would be immaterial. And if the project failed, I would not be the only one facing the consequences. My schoolmate who had stood by me through it all, the Saint I looked up to, the nice Miss Graceful, a couple of other innocent bystanders and last but not least ‘ she ’ herself – they all would fall with me. No! I couldn’t let that happen. That thought served as a combo dose of Wikoryl and steroids. For the last three days of the project, I worked like I was possessed, not caring for food or sleep, stitching together the modules into a working application. The others toiled valiantly too. Yet we could not finish on time. We finished a day late with a few bugs still unresolved. But we had met the minimum standards required to ...
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The Butterfly Diaries 05 - The Austere Academy

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As we headed towards the training completion, it started feeling like we were at an academy going through a rigorous educational program. Classes, attendance, exams, projects – we had it all. I hoped this was more a transition and real work was going to be nothing of this sort. All my efforts to rally support turned out to be unnecessary when it became clear this lady had no intention whatsoever of exacting revenge upon me. I was so relieved that I did not even care about her contribution on the next one. And we managed to pip the other team at the post yet again. Next came the final course – Visual Basic. And with it a new kind of trouble. Again, the project team was shuffled and this time we lost that petite girl who had been with us through the two earlier courses. She had been quietly competent and a total team player. Her presence had been so gentle and calming that I had not noticed it until it was gone. And man! It hit me hard. Especially when I saw her hanging around with her ...
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The Butterfly Diaries 04 - The Miserable Mill

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I have read about how factories in Europe were the miserable mills that powered the industrial revolution. I often wonder if tech parks in India were their equivalent, powering the digital revolution. Of course, watching someone sitting in front of a computer altering thousands of images to fit different browsers does not evoke the same sympathy as watching someone standing in front of an assembly line and attaching thousands of parts. The stream-specific courses came with group projects, our first taste of the mill. As if to ensure that we did not escape the misery, they allotted only one computer for every two persons. This halved each group’s speed while subjecting everyone to the joy of watching someone else blunder their way through the module assigned to them. My Malayali friend and I circumvented the situation by unofficially signing up for the night shift that came with the additional perk of a free dinner. The first course was Unix. For the project, I was paired with a guy fr...
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The Butterfly Diaries 03- The Wide Window

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While the IT industry represents a wide window of opportunities for a diverse set of candidates, the IT buildings do not have even a narrow window. It was the first time in my life when I was spending a considerable amount of time in an air-conditioned environment. And a considerable time it was, for the training was rigorous. It had to be, for the objective was to bring together a bunch of young kids from diverse educational backgrounds and stamp them into a similar mold. After all, the diversity was not intentional but a by-product of an attempt to make up for the lack of a captive student base by skimming the cream off the student bases in other fields. The first month focused on introduction to computers, Windows basics and soft skills. At the end of the month, a sorting hat would declare not just our technology stream but our business unit as well. No one knew the basis for this selection. The financially lucrative American market and the cutting-edge Internet technologies were th...
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The Butterfly Diaries 02- The Reptile House

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What is the difference between a reptile house and a software development block? In a reptile house, the outside walls are opaque, and the individual enclosures are transparent. In a software block on the other hand, the outside walls are made of glass and the partitions between software engineer cubicles are opaque. That was the first impression I got of what was going to be my first ever office. And yes. There was one more difference. The reptile houses were the only houses the reptiles had. We software engineers however had to have other houses as well to keep our belongings and to sleep in. And the important business during the weekend was to find these other houses. For right at the stroke of midday on Sunday, our 5-star hotel dream stay would come to an end. If we didn’t find a house before then, we would be on the streets. With the snakes and the crocodiles. And of course, the ubiquitous stray dogs. But to the company’s credit, they did not leave us out in the cold. At their ow...
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The Butterfly Diaries 01 - The Bad Beginning

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This was back in the days when even the good old dumb phones were still novelties. The second gold rush was just starting. This time it was the turn of the Indians to rush West with their wagons and pick axes. The mines though were not physical but corporate. Any enterprising fellow who could string together two dozen lines of code that did not crash the system, had his fortune made. Was I to be left behind? More so since I was one of the few who actually loved stuff such as if…then conditions, for…next loops, variables etc. that produced the magic to make the idiot machines dance. But then it looked like the great Indian IT dream was going to end even before it began. They were talking of something called the ‘dot-com burst’. I did not know what it was except that it had caused my June Bangalore joining date to change into a July Bhubaneswar joining date and then to an August Chennai joining date. My dad had seen numerous transfers in his twenty-five-year career. And here I was seeing...
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