It’s been an year since you graduated and got your bachelors’ degree in an engineering field from some reputed college in your nation. Well, save the applause. What’s more, you got into one of the ‘best companies that one can get into’, with one of the highest paychecks. What more could you want ? And why do the clouds of impending doom loom large upon this post so far ? Here’s why :
All the top companies that come to the colleges of smaller nations are actually baiting you. They come to your colleges with presentations detailing how they do this and they do that using ‘cutting-edge’ technology, they prey on your ego with stuff like – ‘hey, you made it through ! You’re Awesome! We need you !” – well, you’re a dumbass. That’s what you are. If you’re not in an American college, and you got hired as a bachelor, or a masters’ graduate for an American MNC, you were duped. You’ll soon be working in what can be best described as a sweatshop factory of the software industry.
Here’s the great American MNC ploy :
1. Setup a sweatshop factory ( a branch of the MNC ) in the smaller nation. Call it fancy names – “The biggest centre outside the US”, “A major undertaking”, etc.
2. Lure the local bright minds, so that you can pay them peanuts in their own currency, as opposed to the higher salary you’d have to pay them if they came to the US.
3. Make them grow comfortable with the amenities you provide, and all the while condition them and their minds to do mediocre work over a span of years so that they no longer have either the readily available skill or the drive to gain that skill. – Their only option – continue to do this dreadful work.
4. Make all the research and intellectually stimulating work happen in the US, and discard the residual garbage, mundane work to the smaller nation. At a fraction of the price.
If you believe me not, be my guest – give it a try. Pat yourself on the back to have gotten into the industry leaders, the pioneers, the bigwigs. Just as an experiment.
I weep for the future of the smaller nations where people give up their prime to serve smaller causes and doing mundane, sweatshop work. It’s never too late to quit. Quit your sweatshop, IT job. Think. Have some self-esteem. What do you effectively do when you join an MNC ? You subconsciously tell yourself : “Hey, I’m not bright enough to make money on my own, so let’s do someone else’s bidding and work for an idea that belongs to someone else. “
Come on, do justice to the stochastic calculus, the genetic algorithms, the computational biology, the chemistry, the design, the fluid mechanics that you were taught. Or would you rather write a script to upload data in an XML file to a database ( or something that requires even lesser intellectual capacity ) , when intriguing problems in almost all scientific areas exist ?
Here’s what 99% of the smaller nation hires are doing at top companies :
- Fixing bugs in code written by other people. More often than not, the ‘bug’ is a wrong error message that you have to correct. At best, it’s a 2 line fix, and the fix is already told to you. You just have to ‘type’ it out.
- Adding redundant functionality to already existing code that serves nothing more than the whims of – well, whoever .
- Writing small programs/scripts to do chores that are more company convention than, well, work.
- Preparing reports or plain old wasting time going through company jargon or conventions that won’t serve ANY purpose outside of the company in particular or in life in general.
- At best, writing code for a piece of software almost entirely designed to the finest detail in the US by the bigwigs – and having little to NO say in it, that will live out its utility in less than 2 months.
Now, consider doing 20 years of doing that, and then one day, looking back at your life and saying – ‘Holy fuck. What DID I do my entire life ? ‘ . You won’t have an answer. Now come back to the present day, and look at the myriad challenges that lie in front of you -
Moore’s law, nanotechnology, space travel, time travel, the origins of the universe, food shortage, population explosion, social issues, national issues, international issue – and these don’t even skim the topmost layer of the top of my head. Imagine devoting your life to the solution of even one of these. ‘What if I fail ?’ – Well, compare that failure to the success of having a workaday, mundane life in which you do effectively ‘nothing’. It’s a choice you have to make.
The choice is yours. I am but a cowherd.
eMuks said
Fuck Yeah !