Last day with my first company

Today is my last day with the first company for whom I started working full-time in my life: W Technologies (referred to henceforth as W). Being in the young Indian IT industry, when I started with them on 12th August 1997, I never thought I would stay with them for eight-and-half years! Makes me nostalgic.

• We were studying at home for the final exams of my bachelor's degree course when one of my friends came home and mentioned the newspaper ad for a training program through which W accepted B.Sc. degree holders as 3-year trainees, after which they became employees. If my friend did not happen to mention that ad, I might not have joined W! Interestingly, three years previously, when I was joining my college for the B.Sc. degree course, a lecturer in the Electronics department told me that if I joined the Electronics or Computer Science courses and scored well, W had a program through which they would take me as a trainee. I did not heed the lecturer's words and joined the Physics, Chemistry, Math (PCM) course, simply because the Electronics or Computer Science courses were relatively more expensive. I thought I would do an MCA (Master of Computer Applications) after my B.Sc. Thankfully, during those days, W took non-Electronics and non-Computer Science graduates for its training program, as long as Math was one of the subjects. It no longer does that.



• When I joined W, there were less than 5000 people in the company. Now, there are over 40,000 people. It has been an exponential growth.



• During those days, W was so small that everybody in the company and their families could get together in one place (Bangalore Palace Grounds) for a celebration.



• During those days, everytime someone completed 5 years in the company, an email about them would go out to the entire company. The email would congratulate them and briefly describe their career. Invariably, almost all of them would be at project management or higher level! One of my colleagues used to say that after 5 years in W, even a dog would become the project manager! These days, 5-years-in-W emails are sent only to the vertical/horizontal to which an employee belongs. One rarely comes across a project manager among them. Most such people are at the team lead level, usually onsite.



• I came to the US in Oct 2001. After that, I never worked for W at the offshore center in India. At that time, Electronics City office of W was not as big as it is today. I have never worked in that office. When I visited there in recent years, I felt quite lost with so many strange faces. I have been away in the US for so long and so much has changed in those years that, I am quite alien to the current workplace culture of W.



• I am relatively happy with my career in W. Every assignment I have had has always been better than the previous one.



• Strangely, I have had a good or great relationship with almost none of the supervisors to whom I directly reported in W! The relationships could at best be described as neutral. The only exception to this is Mala, with whom I had a good relationship.



• It is quite true that employees are loyal or not loyal more towards their managers than towards their companies. This is the main reason for me to quit W. Of course, there are some policies and processes in the company which allowed me to be treated unfairly, but I think a fair and mature manager would have easily neutralized those policy- and process-gaps. In my case, the manager did not do it despite my explicit feedback. In fact, he actively piled onto the unfairness.



• In contrast to my W managers, I have had great success with managers in the client companies, for whom I worked through W. I have always been able to quickly establish a great working (and at times personal) relationship with them. My W managers have recognized this as my special forte. (They even offered an onsite account manager position to me last year in Canada. I turned it down because I felt that the compensation they offered for the position was not fair!)



• From mid-2000 until now, I have almost never directly worked for a W manager from the functional perspective. I have worked in roles which were always independently reporting to the clients. My W managers only received feedback from the clients and filled my appraisals. I have greatly enjoyed this independence and that is one of the reasons I have been able to establish good rapport with the clients. The downside to this is that, most of my W supervisors have never had a complete picture of the good and bad things I have done at work nor about my strengths and weaknesses. They have mostly received second-hand information, at best.



• Despite spending eight-and-half years with the company, I have been in love with only one girl in W! That is something of a rarity for me because I am a sucker for romance and prone to falling in love quite quickly. With so many girls in W, most people would think I would have a longer romantic history in the company. But I don't. And, I still resent losing that one person. (This has zero reflection on how I feel about the others I fell for after that one W girl).

I am moving to a new company from Monday, Feb 13th, 2006. From a core-IT company with more than 40000 employees, I am going to a company which has only around 6500 employees! My new company is not even in the IT business. So, the number of IT people in the company is probably around 400-500 only! It will be interesting trying to be a bigger fish in a smaller pond. We shall see how it goes.

I have mixed feelings about leaving an India-based company and working for a US-based one. I hope it all works out in the long run. It is definitely starting to work out in the short term because I am starting at a pay-level which is 50% greater than my W pay. And no, I am not getting a spectacularly high salary. It is just that my W pay has been lousy, to put it mildly.