A Job in Paradise - Part 1

Diary Entry - 28

Every now and then, professors from around the country are invited by the people in our college to deliver lectures on topics which nobody gives a damn about. Of course the students are not very excited about it because if there is one thing more boring than a classroom lecture, it is listening to a lecture of how a guy used a home microwave oven to heat metals instead of using it to heat cold pizza. The managements knows how much students hate this, so they threaten us to mark us absent in the attendance and force us to attend it. In the end they give us canteen coupons which we can use to buy badam milk in canteen. It is the thank you present that they give us for listening to the bull shit and for not pelting stones at the speaker. Doing an engineering degree is much like listening to a guy talking about heating metals with a Godrej Microwave. It doesn’t make sense to you at all. In the end you will feel bitter because you wasted 4 years of your life. But there is always a canteen coupon, a canteen coupon which is an anodyne for the pain. A canteen coupon which comes in the form of an IT job.

There are several IT companies that come for recruitment. But according to my friend Poochie (not his real name, it means insect in Tamil), there is no equal to TCS. Poochie thinks that working in TCS is like working in paradise. When I asked him how, he gave me the following arguments:

A new world record:

If you sit for TCS, you automatically become part of a new world record. Sadly that record will be broken, same time next year. Last year, TCS took 1359 students from my college. That is like 70 percent of students who sat for placements. This year they took 1755. That is 87 percent. This time, when the top officials from TCS came to our college to interview students, our college invited them like this:

                                  TCS
                       We welcome you

You welcome our students/future TCSers

            All or how many above 1359?

When I saw this and pointed it out to a friend who was reading a news paper during the pre presentation talk, we couldn’t stop laughing. His reaction was “We are a bunch of cheapos macha”. He was right. The last line did take our college to a whole new level of cheapness. It is true that TCS takes a lot of people. But my college makes it look as if TCS is Microsoft. Dont even think for a minute that only my college is like that. EVERY COLLEGE in Tamil Nadu is like that. If it is not TCS, it is some other IT company.  People have a point when they say 5 % of engineering students get placed in core companies and the remaining gets placed in IT companies. So by getting placed, one automatically becomes part of a world record and that according to my friend is something one has to look forward to.

Male:Female sex ratio:  

Now this is something that really made me think Poochie was right when he called TCS paradise. TCS and IT in general has been a backup job for most people. But for guys, it is a backup job with a lot of women. According to Poochie, the sex ratio is 4:15. That means there are 3 and a quarter women for each guy. Poochie couldn’t understand why people fight so much for core jobs. They pay less and they have no women there (except for the cleaning ladies).  You are better off being a Jewish rabbi than joining a core job, because joining a core company is like accepting sainthood.

Work Environment:

 

Poochie tells me it is the best in the world. A senior told him that except for the initial taxing training period, the TCS work environment had no equal. If you are an engineering student and if you had computer lab in your course, you would have spent most of the time enjoying the ac and talking to your neighbour. Every now and then you do a little work in the computer. Working in TCS is the same thing, except here you get paid to do what you did in your college computer lab. When I told Poochie that they will fire us if we work like that, he laughed. It turns out that people who laze around  get paid too. People are never fired even if they do absolutely nothing. You cant expect the same treatment in other IT companies. That is why my friend found TCS in particular to be a paradise. You are promised job security of more than a hundred percent. You cannot ask more in this world. 

No Farewells:

Ever felt so emotionally bonded with your friends in school and college that you thought during the farewell day you will need counselling for depression? Poochie is like that. He misses the people he studied with in Kinder Garden. Well if you are in TCS, you can save yourself that pain. Everybody who finishes college, go to work for the same company. The people you hate and the people you like will all be there. The people you studied with in school are also going to be there. So if you miss them, you will be able to reunite with them too. But what excites Poochie the most is his reunion with his 6^th standard crush. Who thought a company can make a person happy in so many different levels. 

Apart from this there are things like having a discount on all Tata products. That means the cheapest car can be brought at a cheaper price. You also get to go abroad if you are a hard worker and you will be rewarded in kind.

This is a two part post. Please read the next post A Job in Paradise – Part 2. But before you go, comment on this one and let me know what you thought.

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