The Great Indian Software Engineer! There is a very old joke about Bangalore that a friend of mine told me the day I reached Bangalore for the first time after its new found status of India’s IT Capital. It goes like this (told in Hindi first for maximum impact): Bangalore mein kuchh Chaalees Hazaar (40,000) kutte hain; Itne hi kareeb software engineer hain. Sadak par ek patthar utha kar maarogey to ya to kutte ko lagega ya software engineer ko. Aur Kutte ke galey mein patta ho ya nahin, software engineer ke galey mein jaroor hoga! [Bangalore has about 40,000 dogs; about the same number of software engineers. If you throw a stone randomly, chances are, it will hit the dog or the software engineer. While the dog may or may not have a strap (a.k.a. leash) around his neck, the software engineer will definitely have one.] Hmmmm… Alright, the half of you can stop laughing now. Yeah, you – you are included in the half – because the other half IS the software engineers. Yes, that’s the fact – more than half of the current youth does something which suits the title of software engineer (no official figures to support that, just what I see around me everyday). There is a pretty good chance that you the reader are a software engineer; if not, your brother or sister is one; your spouse or your best friend or your neighbor or …you get it, right? Now, I visualized this post initially as a depiction of how the software engineer is bullied by everyone around him to squeeze that extra rupee out of him but it eventually dawned upon me that all professionals of today, be it a stock broker, a management professional, a news journalist, a doctor, all of them must be facing those problems; some of which could be attributed to the rise of the software industry and the general increase in the quality of life of a section of society. So, some of the problems that you see here would be faced by every young professional; a lot of them because the youth often have to leave their home towns for big cities and depend on the maids etc. But what, in my view, has put the software engineer in a unique position is the fact that all his hard work, all his day’s energy and all his knowledge goes into productive work (mostly) for the United States (or some other country). His only contribution to the country is the tax that he pays (which is a significant amount) but no one cares for something that you do once a year and that too just a day before the extended deadline. But there is no satisfaction value to his hard work; he is not like his Airtel or Reliance engineer friend who can boast of working to increase the country’s communication bandwidth; not like his stock broker friend who invests in the local stock markets (even though he might be working for a Franklin Templeton); doctors, of course, have that halo value; journalists can boast of reporting corruption through their sting operations; even a management professional working for the countless multinationals that have made their way into the country learns stuff about the local market because local is how he deals but the software engineer learns everything about the US industry but ZILCH about the corresponding Indian industry. He may know loads about the US insurance industry but how things work in the Indian market are quite different. That’s why no points scored with the local uncle ji. Uncle ji? Who’s that, you ask. Read on… [Location: outside the home of a friend of our friendly neighborhood software engineer] Plush in the success of his newly got job and the charms of his mast multinational office where he talks to people in America on a daily basis, he goes to his friend’s house where Uncle ji (his friend’s father) ask him about his new job.
Posted on: Sun, 16 Mar 2014 07:40:05 +0000