This was a part satirical, part honest look at the experience of being a software engineer.
Too cynical perhaps, but thats the way it blows sometimes.
This is Bangalore, the city of virtual dreams. Namma Bangaluru. What Bombay is to the movie industry, Bangalore is to software. An ethereal place where nothing is too much to dream for, nothing is too difficult to achieve. A place where people randomly gravitate towards, merely onlookers on the site of a gory accident of fate. There is blood and tears here as well, fear and terror. But,what must it be to be a tiny cog in this entire enterprise? Even a cog is allowed his feelings - no matter how inimical to feeling software might seem.
In this city, a software job is passe, yet as a `dotcom'er, I belong to that elusive brand that is discriminated against. The dotcom boom and bust have scarcely made any impact on what you as an individual are perceived as. This city has always lived by conventional stereotypes of what is a good place to work in and what is not. Needless to say, dotcoms are not the flavour of the month. From the landlord to your local chai wallah, everyone here knows what your company is going to be five years from now - everyone save you that is!
Bangalore was always cosmopolitan, but more so now than ever before. Everyone from everywhere who needs a part of this pie is here. Language is hardly a barrier, with English as the prime implicant in the matrix of our regional languages. Every festival is celebrated as there will be someone from somewhere who needs to celebrate it. A microscopic India you might say, fraught with tensions at every level, filled with a sense of disquiet. There a subliminal feeling that we all are together part of something larger than our petty selves, but its too hazy to describe in any clear way. In the meanwhile, we live, we work, and we earn. Life goes on.
Where you work is now potentially where you find your life partner. With deadlines that must be met and schedules that invariably slip, people are thrown together for longer and more intense periods of time. Relationships blossom. Flowers in the desert to bloom for a fleeting glance. Marriage, however is only slowly gaining currency. Most individuals are happy in their freedom to want to settle into anything.
This sector has unbelievable supply-demand dynamics. There simply aren't enough people for this industry just as yet. The recruitment targets keeps rising as well as the starting salaries of freshers, bright and newly scrubbed behind the ears. So much so that it is rumored that often software companies have boards on their premises that read "Trespassers will be recruited". This is the `young-person' market, where your talent is scarcely as important as your age. These are also the new rich, the yuppies with disposable income beyond the imagination of their parents. Most parents belong to a generation gone by, which cannot imagine such luxury as a job a year before you finish your education.
The lack of people leads to indiscriminate poaching. Head hunters sneak in to woo employees during working hours. There is no sense of morality, no sense of honor. At your work desk, when you are working on your next deadline is when the latest offer will come to you. No company is above these sneaky underhand attacks. You could be drinking a cup of coffee in a coffee shop when someone walks up, checks your name, smiles and offers you a job. And if you are interested, then the serious business of interviews must be faced with. Every form of interview is well known here. From group discussions to technical talks, the right phrase to use here is "been there, done that!". And at the end of the proverbial rainbow lies that next pot of gold and that next salary hike. There are of course, the hidden perks of the job. A new dog tag to flaunt, a chain that encircles your neck with your photo at one end, in case you got lost.
Buzzword compliance is critical for surviving today.It makes no difference if you feel that the latest and greatest is not worth it. If you need to be up with the Joe Ramaswamy's, then you need to know what's hot and what not. Toss words around with no meaning, bodies with substance but with no soul. Hardly will anyone interrogate you, most people seek affirmation of themselves, rather than the true meaning of anything. Bangalore is also the land where the geek is cool. The geek is happening. Being a geek is in this city is something of an honor, an elevation of status. Saturdays are when the geeks go to town and paint the town in the colors of their choice. So much so that Friday now is for the poor students - much like the mice trying to play when the cats are away. Pubs, discotheques, hang out joints - the conversation is on Buzzword(TM) and the group(s) are recognizable by their own dog tags.
Communication is completely electronic, from plain old email to instant messaging, everything is exploited. Email is a most useful medium for communication. I fear that people crying hoarse for letter writing must now collectively be suffering from some odd type of neurosis. Typically handwriting and spelling aren’t something that too much can be said about, so I prefer a medium when what I’m trying to say get across with minimum fuss and least distortion. The pleasures of writing by hand can be reserved for things that are a joy, for creative work that dispenses with the need for speed. For raw speed of course, chatting via the Internet of via a Messenger client is ideal. Companies now routinely ban chatting as it can be too addictive and too time consuming, but if we can’t find a way out of that, what use is it of being a software engineer?
I no longer long for the Bangalore of my childhood. On an average an old-timer must mention longingly of the Bangalore gone by, of the epithet of the garden city of India and all that jazz. Not me. I’m happy as can be here in the new face of Bangalore. If life is a race, then currently I’m the long distance runner, and the loneliness of the long distance runner is all that I have to savor. I enjoy the emptiness enough to realize that these are the moments I have to myself, to understand the chaos and the beauty around me. These are the moments when my existence is of my own choosing. To paraphrase a lot of Kant, “I feel therefore I am”. These are the moments of a software engineer in Bangalore. This is my virtual reality.