PlaceMeant

PlaceMent!!! A Place you are  Meant to be in???

Dress professionally, be pleasant, speak a few polished words and there; you will get yourself a placement in an IT firm. The IT industry generates the bulk of the employment opportunities in the country and it looks as though it is carrying the burden of improving the economy, but, one must be a tad naive to accept it. For the testing and developing process of programm-ing, one need not be a rocket scientist. Anyone with basic programming knowledge can be trained for the job. The ambitious and intellectual lot of the student folk are in the top tier institutions namely, the IITs and other reputed government institutions. A little remnant of that group finds itself in self- financing institutions. These graduates either continue their pursuit of the elusive all-pervasive (?) knowledge or get themselves premium jobs with their current knowledge.

What becomes of the second tier students? They form the group of vulnerable apprentices. Exploring if it is wrong on their part for being in the second tier or if it was wrong on the part of those who influenced them into engineering can lead to an entirely different case and let’s keep the chargesheet focussed on software companies alone for now. The second tier people have dug deep into their pockets and are looking for a reasonable return and this provides the perfect opportunity for the software companies to lay the trap. With core jobs providing only half the salary, the software jobs are a serious lure. The college placement officer’s statement, ‘’Get a job offer from the first two companies and repay the faith your parents have shown in you’’ doesn’t help either. He will add to the non IT students that they can always go finding core jobs after securing a first placement. That sounds safe and sensible initially but  deeper thought reveals the opposite. The intensity and effort expended towards finding a job by a person with an existing offer and one with no offer is not the same. The latter, being more driven and a touch desperate, often comes up with a better performance as fear makes one go the extra mile. Another thing that is small, yet has the capacity to top all these factors - Our ego. With all those around us getting offers, the mere expression of fleeting joy in their faces will exponentially impel us to get ourselves an offer too.

Now, the students have become employees, and they begin their career with a lot of anticipation and excitement, only to find that those two emotions are short lived. A sizeable chunk of the people joining software companies start hating their jobs within the first few months. A few even dare to drop out of their jobs. Ever changing technologies and the services that come with them require one to be constantly updated with skills. If not, one becomes irrelevant in that field and is ready to be replaced by younger and cheaper employees. This takes a toll even on a person from a computer background. Factors such as low performing employees’ lay-offs during an economic slowdown make conditions wretched for this group. Our ex second tier students feel the heat much more strongly, and factors like depression, work related stress and frequent overtimes make them mere money making machines, with their personal lives meaning nothing.

I believe money is the most overrated thing, but unfortunately, it is arguably a crucial decisive factor in many things. We have been made to believe that success is directly related to the amount of material wealth that we make. Think again, because come the twilight of our lives, it’s the things we missed to do that will haunt us more than those we did. Apart from all the myths and parables, all we’ve got is one life and what is the use of it if we can’t find peace and tranquillity and do the things we like? So, it will be wise to find the place where we are meant to be in, some place where we will be ourselves.

Swasthika Sang

Edited by

Janani Hariharan