Career Decisions

I do agree with Komisar here – A career is after all what you make of it. If you are drawing a fat paycheck and have a lot of perks and amenities, it does not imply that you are satisfied with the nature of your work. Working on what you like surely has its own benefits, you put in real efforts as you like your work and the money is bound to follow.

One might take up jobs in various kinds of disciplines and yet excel in all, though people might call that person ‘Jack of all trades and King of none’ but that’s his/her way of working. Komisar is such a person. These kind of people love to broaden their horizon of friends/acquaintances and also to learn things from people of all walks of life. The best part of his way of work is he has the option of doing what he likes. He can fail at times but that would be his own decision. Although there are deadlines to meet and goods to be delivered, he is not restricted with his scope of work nor does he have to have a boss who rules his every decision. Given a chance, I myself would like to try working on a myriad of platforms.

In the case of Kartikey, he is a person who is over-burdened with work and does not have the time to stop and smell the roses. Kartikey has arrived at his decision by thinking over for quite sometime and if he were my friend I think I would not advise him on anything. He is the best judge of his decision as he is the only one who knows why he has taken this decision. On the other hand there are people who are workaholics and perfectionists – those who love to spend 14-18 hours of their day working and they are satisfied doing that.

Both, Komisar and Kartikey are right in their own way – each individual is different – one man’s food is another man’s poison! What may suit one might not suit the other. Kartikey derives satisfaction from helping others whereas Komisar loves to gamble, as he has explained it – but his gambling is of another kind – he likes to gamble with ideas, as many at a time as is humanly possible. He likes to pour energy into them and see if they'll ignite.

The statement - “If you tend to stay with one company for more than two to three years, you are seen as incompetent” does not hold true for all. In the IT industry where I work, the attrition rate is very high and people at the lower rung change jobs almost twice a year. They are very successful in their jobs and tend to learn not only the technicalities of the job but also the processes of the various companies that they work at. But at the same time, there have been cases where we have Senior Managers, who have worked for around 10-12 years in the same company, have got thorough knowledge of the various cycles and processes involved and are terrific in understanding any application/business unit despite of not having worked on any of them. They are a major asset to the company and these people drive the projects very well.

The best part of working in an IT industry is that we are allowed to change our projects after every 2 years. This way we can move from one domain to another with ease. Some companies also offer to train their employees in different platform if the employees are keen on learning new things. This way there are less cases of burn-out as I myself feel that after working for 2-3 years in the same project – one cannot contribute anything more to the project. The work becomes monotonous and people tend to leave the company in search of a new job. Learning new technologies help the employee in getting over the boredom as well as achieve job satisfaction. We have had such a case in my previous organization – people who had completed 2 years in our project were given the option of moving to an altogether different technology and it was in a different domain. The technology was a hot skill and experienced people for that skill were very less. So the company decided to take candidates from its own workforce and train them and bring them on-par for the project requirement. This way people are able to change their domain and the company too need not hire highly paid resources.

Moving from one job to another – across different domains is good for people who get bored very easily and dread doing the same thing again and again. These kinds of people enjoy the thrills of learning new stuff, meeting new people. In a short stint they might multiply the profitability of the organization and once their job is done, they move to fresher pastures. Such people are good in projects which have stringent deadlines and high visibility. They work very well under tremendous pressure and are risk taking in nature. But the same thing holds true here too – some people might not like such kind of jobs.

Working across different domains helps one understand the functioning of various domains as a whole and how one domain’s functioning affects the functioning of the other. This makes an individual aware of the business processes underlying that domain and also the others.

Not only does Subrato Bagchi, the Gardener (???) and COO of MindTree Consulting say that “People don’t leave organizations, they leave only Managers”, this statement has also been made by Azim Premji – the Chairman of Wipro Limited. Managers do play a very pivotal role in shaping the career of an employee. If the Manager is a good person – takes active part in the betterment of the career of the individual – then his subordinates look up to him. They do not think twice on staying late to finish an important assignment, people even stay late without any overtime. The manager fights for the benefit of his subordinates and maintains the unity in the team. Such a person plays a crucial part in moulding the professional life of his subordinates. If the manager is not good enough, then his subordinates will not respect him and if persistently harassed, they will seek new jobs. We had an associate manager who was very friendly and approachable. He used to actively seek opinions from us regarding our work, chalk out guidelines, stay back with us if we had some unfinished deadlines to meet. He was the one who fought with our Project manager to give us home drop as we used to work till late hours. We never thought twice for working late to finish our work and used to work on weekends too. The day he left the project, we stopped working late as the new manager was in no way close to what our old manager was!