I just realised that I completed a decade in the tech industry this month. 17th May 2015, was my joining date in my first ever big boy job. I remember the date because I completed my college exams on 15th May and shifted from Chennai to Bangalore within a day to start the new job.
When I was in college, the Software Development field was still in a nascent stage. Mechanical, Electrical and Electronic branches were still in way more demand than any of the computer related disciplines.
CS Jobs were also not available in abundance. Most of us had thought our destiny was to work in one of the WITCH companies (Wipro, Infosys, TCS, CTS, HCL) for less than Rs 3.5 LPA. Companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft only had support verticals in India or were doing menial work for the other US based product companies.
Most companies that came to college had an annual CTC of 4 LPA. Companies paying 6LPA were termed
as Dream companies. For me, my only goal in college was to get a job, because Rs 30,000 per month
sounded pretty sweet to me.
I was pretty stoked to get an internship with a pre-placement offer from a startup for Rs 4.5 LPA in the fourth year of my college. I didn't go on to join the company after the internship ended because I received a better offer from another company.
In those days, not a lot of folks understood the pros and cons of working in a startup. The first startup I worked in, was similar to a 3 bhk apartment on Indiranagar Double Road, Bangalore. I knew people who made fun of people working in startups because we didn't get a lot of the benefits that they had access to, our work life balance was so skewed that we didn't have anything in our lives apart from work.
In those days, it was not a matter of choice but of chance. I was taught to give my all on anything I worked on, and I did give it my all.
The fanciest tech stack you could work on back then was Ruby on Rails and Angular 1.x. That gave you the best kind of jobs.
Over the years, I have had the opportunity of working in multiple companies with different environments, and I am grateful for it all.
Looking back, it has been a pretty fun and exciting ride. I still have the zeal of a fresher, with the added maturity of a senior engineer. And I am still as excited as ever.