Its all bout EXPERIENCE baby

Experience is like a midas touch in IT industry and in almost all walk of life. If you have it ; everyone acknowledges you , listens to you and is awed by you . If on the other side you are new , fresh or layman you really have to make your way in this big world.

This article is no critical discrimination amongst 'Experienced professionals' to
'Inexperienced folks' , but its just my point of view of the whole set up.

There is no denying fact that there are still people who will welcome the fresh lot , but majority still judges you by the experience you have in your kitty. I have a personal experience to back my story. I was a usual Project Engineer sometime back. Doing the usual coding , testing , support work in a project. After a long stint in that project i was bored of my job. I craved for change and even asked for a release to my manager , who assured me that he would let me free after sometime. While i was on my lookout for something interesting a got an invite by this Innovative and Challenging group within my company. Initially i was surprised by the luncheon invite , but later thought of giving it a try. The luncheon turned out to be interesting and i was told that the group was searching for fresh and young people for expanding their business. The group was already a good revenue generator for the Organisation and they were expanding. I was mesmerised by their words and thought that 'this was the change'.

I told my manager that i would like to be released asap to join this group. He too kept his word and soon i was a part of this innovative group. I was anxiously waiting for assignments (although i knew i had to hone myself a lot to be in sync with the other members and i googled a lot for self development too) . Initially i was offered few proposals , but somehow nothing materialised (the reasons are still unknown to me ). But i was quite spirited about my decison and thought that the wait was worth all the work that i would be getting soon.

Days went by and now the feeling of anxiety sank within me . I had very few acquaitances in the group , most of whom were in onsite. I started sending weekly reminders to my manager who was in US. He would assured me that they are hunting for a fitment for me , but nothing positive really happened.

To my surprise the group underwent a huge re-organisation and all the hierarchies were restructured. By now i had spent 4 long workless months on Bench. I was shattered but still had a little hope . I was told that i would be reporting to a new supervisor after the re-org.I was least aware that soon hell will broke loose on me. When i spoke to the new supervisor, i was made aware of the fact that i stood nowhere in the group , since they required a whole lot of experience . I was told upfront to seek some other oppurtunity in the company outside this group,and after spending an entire workless quarter i was asked to start from scratch.

Its true that Bench is not a curse in our industry and many people have spent even more time on bench than me.Its also true that there are areas which demand experience and can't bargain their job with less experienced talent .But during this whole episode i ask myself and to every reader of the blog "What was my fault?" Was my blind trust on my initial manager the culprit? Is switching fields within organisation like ours is not that easy , coz you will be striked off on the grounds of experience ? All these questions keep coming back to me , and i hope i would get the answer to them sooner or later.

This article is not intended to offend anyone and i hope that would be taken in the right spirit.



Just wanna end this on a lighter note : Before saying no to anyone less experienced think about once "Kyunki aap bhi kabhi inexperienced the" :)