Which biggie to choose?

This is 'kind of' response to the blog post titled 'Infosys, TCS or Wipro?'. I will try to answer the questions raised there and clear any doubts that you may have on choosing an Indian IT company.

If your aspiration is to work only in Silicon Vally, USA, please don't read this. Else, let us move on.

So which one for a fresher? Infosys, TCS, CTS, Wipro, Satyam, HCL or any other biggie? Answer is simpler than you think.

Any one of them.

Choose one which assures you a location that you want or where your friends are joining. There are differentiators between them, but those are not important at the level of a fresher.

About Training in these companies: The claim of "1%" is totally wrong. That is equivalent to saying that 99% of freshers cannot understand English. You just need basic analytical ability and English to understand and learn in those trainings. These companies interview freshers to check their learning ability. If you pass through their interview, be assured that you have the capabilities to learn in their training. Yes, I was thought cobol in a week's time. But I was not expected to deliver something next week to client. After training, I do a mock project. Then I join a project where I do a shadow project work which is reviewed by an experienced person at every stage. So please don't look at these trainings as some machine churning out developers when you give college graduate as input. If you cant pass through these trainings(which is very rare, about 1%), companies try to retrain you on different platform or different service altogether like Support functions/Testing and so on. So you are given enough choices to prove yourself, before kicked out of the company.

About lack of engineering problems in these companies. Are you kidding me? A company of 100 thousand developers lacks engineering problems? Totally not true. I went back and saw my engineering books. I do use all those concepts even today. OK, may be not all, but most of them. Operating systems and RDBMS, Theory of computation and so on. Yes, most of us work on functional software which at the end of the day has to be used by our clients. So functionality of our projects is more important to us than the technical brilliance in that code. We create programs that are used for decades, while product companies go out of the market within few years. So maintainability of our code is important to us. Client IT expects simple solutions from us and not complex technical code. So please stop comparing IT companies and product companies on the complexity of the code written. We work in a different platform altogether. Having said that we do work on complex solutions when demanded by client.

About culture in these companies. First we all will accept that this culture is much better than what is outside in India. I bet IT has better working environment for girls than Automobiles and for that matter, i will say even Banking. Other than that, we all come from this same society. So people wont change themselves between 0900 - 1800 hours daily. There is a Tamil proverb that "If you can't change something at age of 5, that habit won't change at 50". Very true in this case. If we have a bad culture inside these companies, it is to blame the society and not these companies. Even a start up will face the same problem and Indian arms of Microsoft,Nokia and Google will have same problems. Having said that, I feel we(Indian IT) are in a much better culture than what is portrayed outside.

About Onsite discrimination against techies. Onsite in these companies is to be the face of the company and to deliver projects to clients. You don't need technical brilliance for most part(except where you are a technical consultant to the client). But in most cases, if you are technically brilliant, then you will be passionate about what you are doing and hence your communication will also be good. (you are confident on what you are talking). So onsite is not discriminated against techies or in favor of non-so-techies or vice-versa. Some techies who don't care about money might stay in offshore for their liking of work here. (Please note 'liking' - they love what they do, so they stay on that).

Above all, there are few things that no one talks about IT companies. The endless opportunities it presents. Recently these companies have even opened the internal infrastructure for people in bench to create tools that can be used by other projects or can be used within the company for internal purposes.Think 100K people and even if we go by argument that only one in 20 or so does engineering work(which is anyway wrong), we are talking about 5K people doing some good work, correct? If you are capable, you are good technically, why wouldn't the company put you in that 5K group? Now these companies have internal blogs, forums where technical questions are posted. If your daily work is not challenging enough for you, you always have more grounds to explore. The blogs are very attractive medium here. As many people like your writings, they tend to notice you as someone different from rest of the world. I have had my blogs read by C*Os in two of these companies. I don't have that impressive writing skill(you figured that out already, didn't you?) but my content made it possible. So instead of cribbing about lack of opportunities to excel, explore around and you will be amazed by how many challenging problems keeps you awake at the night.

Have an internal goal for yourself and work towards it. I am sure these companies will support you. If you can't sell yourself within a company, how will you sell your own company (If you start one) to rest of the world? All of us are growing at 20-30% a year and so our problems and areas where we explore. Join us for a fun-filled challenging work. :-)

All the best.

P.S: Thoughts expressed above are of mine and not views of my current/previous employers.