A Touch of Odium

TCS Bashings: Part 1

By virtue of my completing my MBA, I can claim to have acquired knowledge of a few B-School jargons, that have stuck to me ever since and which now and then I keep using in everyday contexts, sometimes even without my knowing. It may seem like a humble brag, I admit. You know what I mean. Think of these – Return on Investment, Disruptive Innovation, Paradigm Shift, Core Competencies etc. etc. etc. You get the refrain. It can be rather disquieting for a non MBA chap to hear such words from the lips of an MBA, but unfortunately these have involuntarily slithered into our daily lingo. One of these buzzwords which became etched onto my vocabulary ever since I sat in the first marketing management class in my first year of MBA is First Mover’s Advantage. 

The life of any writer is quite complicated, especially for the one who has a penchant for stirring up controversial and sensitive themes. Rather than write something which would kick up a storm calculated to bleach his hair, the sensible writer prepares the audience for the ordeal by giving a cue and tendering a disclaimer bordering on the lines of an advanced apology just in case certain sections of the targeted populace start gathering up in hordes outside his door with axes. Once the preliminary spade work has been done he unleashes himself without restraint. Circling back to a few lines above, this is what I meant by First Mover’s advantage. The proactive approach is always the best, instead of the reactive one where apologies, clarifications and all that rot take center stage which subsumes the substance of the literary piece.

The clichéd disclaimer which I propose to dole out in question is as follows:

This piece is not meant to disrespect or demean the IT industry or the nature of its business, any of its employees or coding as a profession. As an ex-employee of the IT industry myself, I know of the pain and frustration certain individuals face when they step into the world of programming. This piece is written purely an attempt to bring out certain real life incidents and experiences to paper with a touch of humour.

It was roundabout Mid-August in the year 2013. The climate was humid and sunny but my social weather was as dark and gloom as ever. I vividly remember, my disposition that entire year was entirely devoid of any cheeriness. I had already experienced my 3^rd consecutive failure in CAT examination further compounded by dismal rejections in IIFT, SNAP and NMAT examinations. I solemnly swear that my performance in all my previous attempts at CAT were nothing short of magnificent. But like many a great cricketer who couldn’t become even greater on account of notching up fewer centuries against his name than he should ideally have, I with unbelievable consistency managed to peak only the early numbers of the nervous nineties in my trio of CAT attempts. What added to my despondence in plentiful measure was the knowledge of the fact that I had been repeatedly screwed by the reservation system. Had I been born in a lower caste, I pondered every instant, I would have got interview calls from the premier IIMs which are considered the Meccas of business management education in India. I remember cursing myself for my various sins I might have committed in my previous births to have been born in a higher caste in a country that thoroughly lacked in meritocracy. With every failure my overall scenario had increasingly begun to assume proportions of Don Quixote tilting at the windmills. Every attempt to scratch at the prized top tiered MBA seat seemed to only throw me back into an abyss of nothingness where I played into an almost meaningless oblivion. Hence it was no surprise that I had lost all sense of hope. Even the most panglossian of souls in my position would have pursed his lips and felt that he had expended the last ounce of optimism left in him. I had virtually resigned to my fate of being labelled as a techie for the rest of my life. 

It was at this time that I was dumped into a Java project in a retail client in TCS, Siruseri – The biggest IT Park in Asia. This building resembles a butterfly when looked from above and houses 25000 of the brightest geek-brained, code crazy chaps of Chennai’s populace.
 

Now coming to the more lurid portion where I expound my abhorrence on being labelled a techie.

I am warning my public I am going to be bloody brutally frank here. To me there are 2 types of people in the world. People who take to programming languages like fish to water and reel out reams after reams of java code and people who simply can’t. Mind you it is not the attitude I am talking about here, nor is it the lack of willingness to learn. It is simply a handicap or a disability. Of this latter category of human species I belong to, I admit quite unashamedly. 

Try as I might I couldn’t infuse technical stuff such as servers, queries, ODBC and all that crap into my pea-sized brain. My colleagues mostly Tamils and Gults (an epithet for Telugus most often than not taken in the friendly and not the derogatory sense) could talk for hours on these topics while I could simply not fathom why I was unable to get a grasp on these concepts. When it came to discussions on coding, what a great display of fraternity it was! They just loved talking about servlets and codebases. One of the technical jargon which was quite prominent at that point of time was ‘Service Call’ for which I developed a life-long loathing. In case you wondered what on earth was this only an Aamir Khanesque response similar to the one in the 3 Idiots Movie would suffice and it would probably go something like – 

‘A collection of open protocols and standards used in software applications written in various programming languages and running on various platforms using the components SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) and WSDL (Web Services Description Language) which facilitate the exchange of data over computer networks like the Internet in a manner similar to inter-process communication on a single computer thereby also functioning as a request/ response mechanism allowing a client to remotely access/ modify data.’  

Right! So you get it why even as I typed the above gobbledegook, my face broke into a hundred scornful wrinkles. What irked me to no end was the fact that my fellow coding brethren were not only so adept at it but just to rub salt on my wounds spoke incessantly about them like it was the talk of the town. I simply couldn’t comprehend what was the happiness and satisfaction, which was so evident on the faces of these chappies, which they derived out of talking about service calls. It was as simple as this. You could ask a random geek, a couple of salient points on the Finance Budget which was of more significance in life or invite him to a debate on the merits of the GST bill, which was far more impactful on his daily life and in general much more worldly stuff one ought to know and which he would shirk away with horror as if he had been offered a cup of Hemlock. But just mention the word service call and he would start like a horse at the sound of a bugle and initiate a discourse on it!

One more thing I vehemently despised was the patronizing tone with which fellow colleagues corrected and advised me whenever I made some mistake in a godforsaken piece of code. I vividly remember one particular incident, where I was coding a functionality for an android application. A SEV-2 defect had been raised by some bird in the Testing team the previous night, and my project manager, an absolute specimen and a pain in the ass, was behind my back the entire next day, infesting my work station like the dickens and polluting my peace of mind. I tried hard to debug the lines, but couldn’t delve into the root cause of the defect. After multiple fruitless attempts I went to a girl in my team who was working on a different functionality. I don’t know how she pulled a rabbit out of the hat, but within 2 minutes cracked it. It was apparently the placement of a service call that did the trick! The look she gave me though was one of sheer disapproval, as though she was wondering how I ever managed to get this job when I couldn’t understand something as plain and simple as a service call. In chaste Madurai slang, with a tone that biteth like a serpetnt and stingeth like an adder (All copyright credits to PGW for that gag) she said “Service call ah inguttu kudungana neenga anguttu kuduthu vechurukkurengya! Pinna error adikama ennavaam??” (If you place the service call there instead of here where it rightfully should be how the hell do you expect it to not throw an error). 

Off the computer screen, the techies got along with each other with perfect bonhomie and could chew the fat incessantly for hours on just 2 topics of all the universe had to offer – Cricket and Movies. I don’t remember ever other than work any other worthwhile topic to have ever discussed within the four walls of my office.

It was a common sight for a Senthil Kumar from Pollachi to passionately essay the story line of the latest Vijay grosser in which was beating all opening records in Kollywood, with a Ramesh Gaddala of Kurnool approvingly nodding and recollecting how the storyline resembled Chiranjeevi’s super hit which raked in the entire box office moolah in AP in the spring of 2006. And mind you! These above 2 gentlemen wouldn’t be new kids on the block straight out of engineering rather they would typically be pot-bellied project managers who had worked their way up the TCS corporate ladder in the last 15 years, with a single minded ambition of sticking on to the company like a leech irrespective of whether they were viewed as an asset or a liability! 

Over cricket the younger generation bonded with immaculate aplomb, and could remember every single statistic in IPL history, and would often Alt-tab back and forth with lightning speed between their black coding screens and cricinfo.com to keep tab on even the most insipid matches for example lets say the fifth and final ODI, a dead rubber between New Zealand and Zimbabwe at Bulawayo – one of the most lifeless cricket grounds in the world. 

Boredom personified!

More rants to follow....as and when I feel like it :-)