During April 2000, when I came out of college with post graduation in Computer Science, IT industry was not so promising with dotcom bubble burst. This had impeding effect on my career start. Not passing out from a premium college had its toll. So it took time to get my initial break. Trust me this is the time I had most of my Java learning. During this time I also tried to do M.Tech in Computer Science from Central University, Hyderabad, but I could not clear final interview hurdle. With these set backs, demanding personal situation and gloomy industry made me almost quit software industry. But somewhere at the bottom of the heart I felt that IT industry would revive as I could see its importance in every industry from scientific research to microfinance. As I believed, time has come during mid of 2001. This is the time when IT industry started regaining confidence. I started my career with Coastal Tech Solutions, Chennai as Software Programmer.
For sometime I worked as vendor in OrbiTech Solutions (Currently Polaris Software) from Coastal Tech solutions to maintain an intranet marketing site before getting a real break with TATA Consultancy Services (TCS). TCS is a real interesting company. Management is ready to take risks because of their vision, experience and mixed workforce. This gives employees ample opportunities to experience their interests at early stage of their careers. TCS also has infrastructure to recruit freshers, train and mentor them for the company needs. This is often not seen in big MNCs and Product companies. Often these companies rely on industry experienced employees rather than grooming them internally. This very environment in TCS provided me opportunities as developer, analyst and lead to work in financial (insurance and credit management) vertical. TCS also gave me opportunity to taste my first international and customer facing experience when I was deputed to Lytham, United Kingdom as developer to stabilize an application that overshoot in time and budget. Interestingly I felt that I knew the place already and assignment was a smooth journey for next two years despite of the stiff challenges.
2005 May is the time when I decided to move back to India to work on some of my personal commitments and change the role and domain. After coming back I joined credit management application development team as analyst to bridge functional gap between client and TCS, and provide technical insights for design activities. I took the functional transition from client at Antwerp, Belgium and moved back to India to help offshore team build the application. Though I did not have banking experience, with little planning and execution I could able to do deliver the goods. May be my logical thought process helped me in the role. I took few credit concepts from a senior SME and applied the basic questioning principle during transition. It worked wonders for me. I gave playback sessions on my understandings to client before signing off for technical activities. Though we faced few problems during offshore development, project was a success and become brand ambassador for TCS on new biddings.
During April, 2006 I decided to move my base from Chennai to Hyderabad. I was also interested in experiencing a different work culture in a medium sized company. All this triggered my move to Kanbay, Hyderabad (Later acquired by Capgemini). Here I worked on developing credit cards disputes management application. This is a very complex application both in functionality and technical activities. Apart from these there are challenges in customer environment with multiple vendors customizing the existing disputes functionality with in Chordiant. Chordiant is a user experience company that has built in functionality for most of the financial and telecom functional requirements. Credit cards disputes management is one of them. This is first time I have come a cross American client. Till now I had interacted European and Asian clients. I have seen an interesting difference between American and European clients. Europeans are conventional and more process oriented. Everything they do think a lot and then take decision. They like step by step approach. But contrary to that, Americans are more optimistic, enthusiastic and little process oriented. But they give importance to end result; however you do is up to you. It took time for me to adjust to second approach. My previous experience with European clients and step by step process oriented approach gave me very good results with American client as well. I could able to build a team at offshore for technical activities. This was never in the scope during the development because of its challenges.
Nearly working for 6 1/2 years in services industry, I started thinking about quality and building products the serve more than one customer. This is where you need to think a head of your competitors and build products for current and future market needs. I joined a product company in December, 2007 to build and maintain a product line that is having importance in every medium to large scale enterprises that use IT to manage their business. Work culture here is quite different from service companies. More emphasis is given to individual than process. I think this is understandable to certain extent as most often products are evolved from self managed teams. But the level of dependencies is more than expected. Also most of the employees in product companies think that people from service companies are not much technically competent and require time to settle in company. This may be one reason companies site to downgrade your designation. But in reality most of the service industry employees are technically competent, skillful and process oriented.
As my goal shifted to build products that market needs, I require business fundamentals to gain insights into product life cycle. Keeping this in mind I have joined Executive Program in Business Management (EPBM) from IIM Calcutta. I am going to complete the program by August 2010. Continuing my technology interest I am waiting for a right moment to make a shit to management position. I believe one no need to leave technology for management. It is just an extension of responsibility.
