[Mahip]

Originally Posted by siddbera

Now , seemingly , the only way out from here is a MBA degree from a nice B-school. But still can any of the seniors throw some light on the prospects after getting an MBA degree like how can it help us as we are technical guys. Can we pursue a challenging job anytime after our degree?
As, I dont have an outgoing personality , so I thought of taking finance or systems as my specialization. So, how much can it help me in having a good job ?

Read this thread to know more about MBA in Systems:

http://www.pagalguy.com/forum/alumni...-done-mba.html (MBA Systems - Have done MBA in Systems and is rocking today...)

[megha19]

Originally Posted by aashusood

Even though I am not a “software engineer”, let me put in my 2 cents worth of talk.

As amit said earlier, what matters is how much time and at what time you are being seen in the office. I have a 8 to 6 shift. If you come at 8 and leave at 6, ppl start staring at you as if you are committing some crime. However, if you come at 12:30 and leave at 10:30 PM, nobody says anything. I have seen ppl come at 11 and leave at 11 or 12 in the night. “Now that is called a dedicated person”, some say. What ppl fail to recognize is that the guy was off for a tea break for hour at a stretch n number of times, has been chatting etc. .

Yep, i second that. I've often noticed, your in-time doesn't really matter, its only your out-time that's considered as a measure of your dedication. Somehow working after 6 is considered a virtue. And try as hard as I might to ensure my life doesnt start and stop with my work, it gets a bit too difficult to manage any other activities, what with pressing deadlines , a long commute etc. Just going home is a luxury for me sometimes, and when i'm home i dont have the energy to even move a finger. Yes, I have made it clear that I will NOT stay back and work unless its really really required, but still there are days when you just have to. Even if you don't stay back, a normal day would involve me getting up at 6.30 , takin the bus at 730 and getting to office by 830.Leave office at 6.15 in the evening , and with all the evening rush hour traffic get home only by 8. And this is on a day when ppl act like its a favor theyve done by letting me go early. What could i possibly do after getting home at 8, except eat my dinner and hit the sack cuz im just so out of it all, to i ensure i wake up the next morning. If this is an "early " day for me, normal days when theres work dont even let me get enough sleep. And i can say my health's been badly affected ever since I got into this field.

And yes, ive seen mba grads from the top b-schools , including the iim's do all crappy coding work . It takes a while for even them to move away from the technical side. All i can say is it depends on ur luck, if your lucky to get into a not-so-hectic project with a good pm, then u still can try to make something out of ur free time. else its really really difficult to even think of having a life other than work.

[Mahip]

Majority of you must have read one speech on Sitting late at work by Narayana Murthy...

For those who haven't, here it is:

Hope that many of us start leaving early for home after reading this...
I am not relating this to the present scenario. I know people who work 12 hours a day, six days a week, or more. Some people do so because of a work emergency where the long hours are only temporary. Other people I know have put in these hours for years. I don't know if they are working all these hours, but I do know they are in the office this long. Others put in long office hours because they are addicted to the workplace. Whatever the reason for putting in overtime, working long hours over the long term is harmful to the person and to the organization. There are things managers can do to change this for everyone's benefit. Being in the office long hours, over long periods of time, makes way for potential errors. My colleagues who are in the office long hours frequently make mistakes caused by fatigue. Correcting these mistakes requires their time as well as the time and energy of others. I have seen people work Tuesday through Friday to correct mistakes made after 5 PM on Monday. Another problem is that people who are in the office for long hours are not pleasant company. They often complain about other people (who aren't working as hard); they are irritable, or cranky, or even angry. Other people avoid them. Such behaviour poses problems, where work goes much better when people work together instead of avoiding one another. As Managers, there are things we can do to help people leave the office.
First and foremost is to set the example and go home ourselves. I work with a manager who chides people for working long hours. His words quickly lose their meaning when he sends these chiding group e-mails with a time-stamp of 2 AM, Sunday.
Second is to encourage people to put some balance in their lives. For instance, here is a guideline I find helpful:
1) Wake up, eat a good breakfast, and go to work.
2) Work hard and smart for eight or nine hours.
3) Go home.
4) Read the comics, watch a funny movie, dig in the dirt, play with your kids, etc.
5) Eat well and sleep well. This is called recreating.
Doing steps 1, 3, 4, and 5 enable step 2.
Working regular hours and recreating daily are simple concepts. They are hard for some of us because that requires personal change. They are possible since we all have the power to choose to do them. In considering the issue of overtime, I am reminded of my eldest son. When he was a toddler, If people were visiting the apartment, he would not fall asleep no matter how long the visit, and no matter what time of day it was.! He would fight off sleep until the visitors left.. It was as if he was afraid that he would miss something. Once our visitors' left, he would go to sleep. By this time, however, he was over tired and would scream through half the night with nightmares. He, my wife, and I, all paid the price for his fear of missing out. Perhaps some people put in such long hours because they don't want to miss anything when they leave the office. The trouble with this is that events will never stop happening. That is life! Things happen 24 hours a day. Allowing for little rest is not ultimately practical. So, take a nap. Things will happen while you're asleep, but you will have the energy to catch up when you wake.
Hence "LOVE YOUR JOB BUT NEVER FALL IN LOVE WITH YOUR COMPANY (Because you never know when it stops loving you)"

[Jackal]

well well (that's how i sigh online )..
pretty good points raised by arun.. the scenario is pretty much like that but he probably has that maturity to see things as they are cuz of his time spend in the industry.. probably because of him being higher up the level than other mere mortals here (read: software engineers)

I myself had a cushy software job n yeah as most of the people here think it sucked.. i would crib about the sad food in the canteen to stupid office rules.. everything
The crux was that i actually hated coding and i was always put in a development project so i ended up doing just n just things which i never wanted to do.. and plus the industry here doesn't work as it does outside india.. i mean what sense does it make when you get a design made by somebody and on the day of the build you get somebody else in the team, give him a month to understand the requirements, the design and complete the CODE ..!! i mean WTF..
it certainly is poor project management and how else can it be better where people sitting on their fat asses for 6 yrs doing close to nothing become managers, go and ask a manager in the manufacturing sector how much he has gone thru (time, experience everything) to become a manager..
also the middle and lower management don't have the vision of the higher management and thus actually lose sight of things like 'vision', 'mission' etc which are important things and not be made fun of, as workers generally do.. and the worst part is that there is no transparency and the end-level-worker doesn't really understand what purpose is he solving..
@arun: SLA walla example is just 1 thing there are billions of things which are being done by people in this industry who have no idea why they are doing it..
On the other side the sufferers have their own fault too..
All these fresh graduates out of colleges have never had it this easy to grab a secure well paying job, so basically they get in with the wrong attitude: that it's all heavenly inside (as was their grabbing this job) but it definitely is not so.. there are a lot of things like work place politics, managers not fulfilling their client-side aspirations, you not getting your kinda of 'development' work etc which render the poor worker dissatisfied and finally he ends up going for an MBA or another job... n these MNCs are always there to lure them away on BIG packages..
but is that really a solution??
Think about the days when there for no such easy jobs available and freshers used to struggle to get a 5k job.. and these people actually struggled to get a job and that's why they value it, they grow up and do whatever bullshit they are asked to do. they never fight their bosses for a raise, come to office sharp at 9'o clock, never have opportunities 2 let their bosses know of their aspirations..
The question is if this is what growing up is.. do you really want to grow up..??
I DON'T

Cheers


PS:I quit my job a coupla month's back after spending 2 yrs in this industry looking for an alternate career n yeah i didn't write CAT.

[Alan Savio]

Gosh ... how did I not stumble on this thread earlier

A topic close to heart .... hahahaha

A simple solution to frustration in the IT sector ...

No one can make you feel inferior [read as frustrated;-)] without your permission
... Eleanor Roosevelt

It takes a little 'looking around' to realize that there is almost no career that presents a very flowery picture ... provided you keep in mind the fact that grass always looks greener on the other side

So it is up to you to make the best of the situation at hand. I am no guru on this subject. And I too have faultered in this regard only to learn that there is no point in getting frustrated.

We must realize that the boom in the IT sector (partitularly companies that are service oriented) is primarily because of low budgeted projects which has led to the drift towards offshorization of projects.

And believe me when I say ... the same guys who crib about their bosses today go on to become onsite coordinators, PLs and PMs who do just the same things as what their PMs did and think that they are doing something really neat! And the cycle continues ...

I am not trying to defend the stand of PMs/AMs and neither am I claiming that the IT industry is an Utopia for every S.E. This industry has certain demands (some that I too feel are unhealthy in the long run) and its own bit of team politics (or atleast my current exposure has restricted the level of politics to just the team/account ). But at the end of the day it is left to you to chose for yourself.

Either you could crib (which is pretty much the in-thing these days and makes you rather popular among peers ... and I myself am victim to the same at times) or you could learn work smart. And i've realized that It's not the hard worker but the smart worker that gets recognized.

So learn to master the art of turning situations to your favour! And yeah ... make sure you party hard on weekends and drown :satisfie: that bit of negativity that sets in over the week.

CHEERZ

[srikrishnan]

hmm.. i am not part of the software fraternity of india but have loads of friends(tell me who doesnt)... but i guess one of the quintessential problems that we have is that being in software is no longer special... we've always been having this huge thirst in us to be something out of the ordinary... but a job in a software firms which was looked at with great awe in the 90s is no longer a great deal... maybe thats why it is looked at with discontent.. i guess if there were some 5000 IT professionals in India doing wat they r doing now n getting paid wat they r with the rest as accountants or clerks or that engineer so vividly described by arun(psychodementia), then we would still all be craving for that glorious software post!!! How different were things a generation ago.. there were accountants doing the same set of balance sheet checking n maintaing the standard documents for years together, typist who passed 3 levels with flying colors and doing the good old job for 15 years in a row... heck its always been like this.. Atleast we'r getting paid bigtime... we go through all our troubles and come out stronger.. i had my own set of problems as would 90% of you in engineering and back then i felt i was wasting my time.. but then now i feel that every single trouble that i went thro seems worth it now.. everyone would feel the same... i still feel that inspite of all the IT bashing, a fresher still gets to learn a substantial amount of stuff that might serve to help him and make sound decisions not only technically but in life as a whole... as they would say in SCMHRD(thanks to raghav).."The Journey is the reward..."

[amanapart]

Hi Jackal,
I absolutely agree with you buddie. A software job is just the means not the end in itself. I am right now working in UK for a telecom client of ours and i am just amazed at their levels of stupidity. The whole project seems to be an eyewash. The scope keeps changing by the hour and by the day. The IT and Business are at loggerheads and a handful are working hard to see that at the end the whole project is getting screwed up by the lesser mortals who do not understand the business and who are in a no mans land.

But it's not job sometimes that frustrates one, it's our psyche. I mean, any would agree with me that our reach can always exceed our grasp! It's just that we need to fuel and realise our inner ambition and our passion for anything we can believe, we are capable of doing. For all of the geeks out there, a MBA always gives them a fresh lease of life, helps them rediscover their lost killing spirits, rekindle their fire to proove themselves, ant that is the time they need to have a clear idea of the bigger picture. This is the time they need to make sure that all their efforts are not just wasted into carrying a laptop and working on spreadsheets, instead their management degrees should help them innovate, change, develop and lead.

I know what i am trying to tell is actually an ideallistic scenario, but a glimmer of Hope is what i am trying to give....

amanapart

Originally Posted by Jackal

well well (that's how i sigh online )..
pretty good points raised by arun.. the scenario is pretty much like that but he probably has that maturity to see things as they are cuz of his time spend in the industry.. probably because of him being higher up the level than other mere mortals here (read: software engineers)

I myself had a cushy software job n yeah as most of the people here think it sucked.. i would crib about the sad food in the canteen to stupid office rules.. everything
The crux was that i actually hated coding and i was always put in a development project so i ended up doing just n just things which i never wanted to do.. and plus the industry here doesn't work as it does outside india.. i mean what sense does it make when you get a design made by somebody and on the day of the build you get somebody else in the team, give him a month to understand the requirements, the design and complete the CODE ..!! i mean WTF..
it certainly is poor project management and how else can it be better where people sitting on their fat asses for 6 yrs doing close to nothing become managers, go and ask a manager in the manufacturing sector how much he has gone thru (time, experience everything) to become a manager..
also the middle and lower management don't have the vision of the higher management and thus actually lose sight of things like 'vision', 'mission' etc which are important things and not be made fun of, as workers generally do.. and the worst part is that there is no transparency and the end-level-worker doesn't really understand what purpose is he solving..
@arun: SLA walla example is just 1 thing there are billions of things which are being done by people in this industry who have no idea why they are doing it..
On the other side the sufferers have their own fault too..
All these fresh graduates out of colleges have never had it this easy to grab a secure well paying job, so basically they get in with the wrong attitude: that it's all heavenly inside (as was their grabbing this job) but it definitely is not so.. there are a lot of things like work place politics, managers not fulfilling their client-side aspirations, you not getting your kinda of 'development' work etc which render the poor worker dissatisfied and finally he ends up going for an MBA or another job... n these MNCs are always there to lure them away on BIG packages..
but is that really a solution??
Think about the days when there for no such easy jobs available and freshers used to struggle to get a 5k job.. and these people actually struggled to get a job and that's why they value it, they grow up and do whatever bullshit they are asked to do. they never fight their bosses for a raise, come to office sharp at 9'o clock, never have opportunities 2 let their bosses know of their aspirations..
The question is if this is what growing up is.. do you really want to grow up..??
I DON'T

Cheers


PS:I quit my job a coupla month's back after spending 2 yrs in this industry looking for an alternate career n yeah i didn't write CAT.

[jyotsna07]

thankfully i am at an IT Co. where i like being. but that's prolly coz im straight outta college

[Mahip]

Originally Posted by jyotsna07

thankfully i am at an IT Co. where i like being. but that's prolly coz im straight outta college

Yeah mostly true!

Hope your enthu remains even after spending some years in this field!

[jyotsna07]

Originally Posted by Mahip

Yeah mostly true!

Hope your enthu remains even after spending some years in this field!

hah. no way am i gonna "send some YEARS" here. i know i cant live with "int, char, blah blah" for too long..