Friday, June 15, 2007

Bye-bye Infy - Hello Manchester!!

Just winding up my last few days with Infosys. It has been quite an eventful 4 years.Joined on 9th June 2003 in a batch of 140 freshers in Bangalore for training. The 3 months of training was the first time in a long time (read as 4 years) that I actually took the pains to study seriously!! From the jovial, fun-loving, noisy back-bencher in college, I had changed to become a studious, serious second/third bencher. What had come over me? Why the sudden change?
It was nothing but the psyched feeling in me that I am no good at programming. In college, I had barely managed to pass my "C" programming exam - thanks largely to few of my friends who taught me few fundas and ofcourse God's grace. Post that, there was never any programming in my curriculum and I never bothered putting in efforts. I was sure of getting into a core communications technical job and determined not to sit for software engineering. But call it fate - I ended up being picked up by Infosys and the brand name kinda pulled me to it and that was it. I knew for a fact that if I remained the way I was in college, there was a possibility of me being chucked out! I decided to play the slog overs in a smart way and lo!!I had become a first-class geek. Add to that the fact that we were getting trained in COBOL/CICS gave me the undue advantage of starting fresh with all the other programming wiz's!!!
From there my stay at Infy was pretty good..Fortunately for me, there was very little coding that I had to do in my period here. Following my first project, I went to UK for production support. After that I was into the client testing team followed by the role of an Onsite co-ordinator. Next up was the technical lead role which I played out to perfection at Bangalore and then again back to UK as Onsite co-ordinator. My main activities till date @ Infy comprised of: understanding functionality, managing people - colleagues & clients, resolving functionality issues, solution designing and discussions - Therez been no (rather very less) developer coding phase in my period here and I thank God for taking me through 4 years in absolute success.
During this period I also got promoted from a software engineer to a Programmer Analyst. This didnt change any of my responsibilities much - I had mostly performed the role of an analyst rather than a developer.
Also this period saw my promotion from a bachelor to a husband - In contrast to the previous promotion, this however did change a lot of my responsibilities. I became the matured, family guy (no cross-checking allowed with wifey;))!
All said and done, my stint with Infy is coming near an end. Another 14 days and I am done. Its back to student life at Manchester Business School for an MBA, beginning in Sept.I got my student visa stamped for 2 years, blocked my tickets and now looking forward to the break before the gruelling starts!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

All the best Vin! I am sure this is one the biigest turn in ur life for u and ur wifey! :)

Vithal said...

friendey (following the naming convention used above)said...

this is good change da..... i am sure u will like it as hell...

Aslan said...

hehe gruelling is not a gerund, bugger! n' nice post i say! cheers to vin n' wifey! :) will read this n other posts in detail now- nice to get back in touch! byeee