There are certain firsts in your life that you always remember. Your first job is one of them. My first job was with Satyam Computers. Now Satyam is a four letter word these days but back then it was the company everyone wanted to join because of its reputation of providing a very conducive learning environment. As it turned out, my three years in Satyam were marked with three things learning, more learning and even more learning.

The first shock came very early, in the form of cultural diversity of our training batch. As I would learn later corporate world is melting pot of culture and your success depends largely on your adaptability to different cultures. The second shock came three months later when we finished our training and were all geared up to start working. It was in the form of dreaded five letter word bench. We felt like finished goods lying in the inventory.

Finally after cooling my heels on bench for more than three months I got into a project. I was now billable. The word billable is a bit rude for a human being but people in IT industry take pride in being billable as it reflects that you are contributing to the company(even when you are spending half of your day around coffee vending machine).

I went on to do three more projects for Satyam and I can paint pages about the experience I had, and learnings I took away. Memories of working continuously for 24 hours and still enjoying every bit of it, memories of fiercely arguing with functional counterparts and still remaining friends at the end of the day, memories of some poor appraisals, some unexpectedly good ones. These memories and thousands more form the part of the experience that I had in Satyam.

I have advertently tried to stay away from the technology because my first job taught me that it’s not the technology but it’s the people that make the organization. And it’s your colleagues that you will remember when you move to your next job and not the piece of code that you wrote for some random project.