What's with the title?

It's an international best-seller by Thomas Erikson. It talks about how people you are around makes up what you think about, your personality and attributes. Recently read and got inspired by the ideology that the protagonist follows. Hence the title. Read through and you'll know-

What is this going to be about?

Very random, but I wish to share a personal experience within corporate scope as a starter:

I had started my internship at some electronics startup based out of Bengaluru, and mind you that was the best offer I could secure on-campus, from a very limited companies that visited. I blame the pandamic followed by bad economy and layoffs and stagnation of industry. But I was still happy to have an offer ~6L, where there were people who would take up any job for the sake of getting into the market.

And the offer gave a relief to my mind, as I was sure that this was the minimum I'm getting when I leave college. Worked on a few off-domain things like DCRUSTODC and personal projects, relationships, family, health, for the rest of my time left in college.

The organization is a service-based electronics company. They will teach you a relatively new technology (Virtual Prototyping) which is specific to a particular company (or a group of companies), like Synopsys, Samsung, Cadence, some Indian ESL company, etc., and this is where the interns will later on work when they have a full time offer, but as an external employee. Every employee from this company was below average in academics, and I felt as if I had been lowballed during my campus recruitment and as a result, I had been surrounded by a bunch of idiots.

Externals are not at all valued by native employees (sitting at 20L TC) and are made to do demeaning jobs, writing unnecessary scripts, debugging small parts of code, etc. The company is led by only one person, was a tough, money-minded guy who is an emotional freak, but he's also the HR, the attendance marker, the inventory guy, the CEO, the team lead, the mentor, the manager, one man army (let's call him 'A'). It felt cheap to work here. The company has occupied a coworking space shared with some call center company which sells online courses. They shout at your face day through evening, and you will not be able to concentrate at what you're doing.

There were incidents which I'm ashamed of writing but here are a few of them:

• Once during festival, I asked 'A', a day before, if I could leave for home a bit early. I didn't ask this ever before as I knew it would be a straight no, but way back home was more than 2 hour journey and during festivals, metro and public transport was overcrowded. His response: Look, when you're working in industry, it's all about deliverables and not time. You can leave for home as soon as you complete your task. Now, the task I was assigned was not something that could've been done within a few hours but rather days. I felt helpless.
• In another event where we, a team of 10, went on an outing on the company's one year completion. It was an adventure park kind of place. This guy, A, did not even bother to ask if anyone wish to have something to drink as it was scorching hot. Later on, the interns decided to pay on their own, from which he also took a glass. I was like c'mon man, you pay your interns minimum wage and ask them to relocate to a metro city which forces them to spend it all, and then drink their stipend off?
• I've seen every full-time employee being asked to work after office hours, without getting overtime. They have a 2-year bond, or 3Lac repayment policy if you decide to leave before the bond period.
• Timings are very strict, even a delay of 5 minutes is not acceptable and you will be poked for the same.
• Every evening, during the tea break, 'A' will take a packet of biscuits, maybe a 30 Rupee packet, and will distribute it one by one, to a team of 10. Everyone gets one or two biscuits each, that's their snack policy lol.

Through some sources, I got to know that now the policy has been changed without notice and every intern will have to sign a 2-year contract if they wish to continue, giving them no time to make a switch.

The best part?

Among the batch of 6 recruits, three of the 4 guys who left got hike to their income and/or better work-life balance, the one who didn't opt for a job applied for masters in the US. 'A' phoned a few of us later on demanding money back for what he had invested in training, probably so that we don't ask him for our remaining stipend.

This was a bittersweet story of my first corporate experience.

What am I up to?

So okay, while I was going through everything stated above, I started constantly looking for job opportunities so that I could rebound and get back to track and have a stable income and mental health, who paid more or less the same, but have a better WLB (on priority). Thanks to an offer I accepted recently, got a little hike and best of WLB here. And the best thing, I'm back in my domain, backend technologies, cloud and stuff, it's a remote role, and people are really helpful so you're not stranded in the middle of your work.

When you have experienced the rock bottom, everything above it seems to be great.

What's next?

Well, I don't know. I wish to stick around and get some experience, maybe followed by a promotion. I don't know. I have started investing in IPOs and MFs, in order to understand finance, and I plan to build a home setup first now that I'm working from home.