The Curious Case of Millennial Work Life

I finished my graduation in 2016 and as of today, I have worked with 5 different types of entities with 5 different visions.

C1: I joined a mobile tech MNC first straight out of college which taught me how corporates work. After roughly about 10 months being with that company, I realized this is good for long-term complacency but hardly would I get any challenging work.

C2: So I left the company and joined one of my friend who was working on his music startup which had promising revenue streams as it was tapping an untapped market and the scope was well defined. What the problem here was the guy who was leading it. He had plans to use this startup experience to leverage to a good consulting role at the fab four or go for MBA in reputed foreign universities. He lost interest, shut shop and joined one of the big four.

C3: Back to the drawing board, I tried to give a local government college a shot at pursuing masters in AI/ML. Despite people nudging me to drop that thought as the quality of education in India is a beast of a problem on its own, eventually, I gave up on hopeless autocratic teachers who took it on their ego and made me feel like shit for their shortcomings.

C4: I met a person who would guide me to work at his company because he saw the lack of talent in the landscape and found me his best bet to offload some critical work. The pay was low, the work was haphazard and their low quality of work was rubbing off on my quick and dedicated work. (I still haven't received the stipend for an internship I did last December. You can gauge the lethargy and unprofessionalism)

C5: I joined a lean data science startup which primarily worked on the statistical analysis. The pay is good, the flexibility or work gives me the freedom to work on other things. The work is challenging in parts for startups usually have sudden bouts of interesting work with prolonged waiting for them to come to fruition. Sometimes work gets scraped, sometimes people at the top of the ladder notice it.

It is fun to be in the driver's seat after haggling for 2 years.

I start training young students in a week independently for another 3rd party firm.

I look forward to deploy working ML products for another early stage startup.

Finally, I would get some time to work on a book. Or would I?

The book may write itself over the years with experiences and tales of my own.

Maybe this drives me every day to wake up despite heartbreaks, burnouts, frustrations. Someday, that book might get published after all!

Some data to ponder:

Employee strength:

C1: 200k worldwide, 2000 where I was.

C2: 3, 1 intern

C3: 3 Teachers for 5 subjects with future teachers yet to be found for the course

C4: 200 employees, 50 onsite

C5: 25, 4 in Data Science team, rest all web/game devs

Vision:

C1: Pass a competency test, do network testing.

C2: CEO wanted startup experience to pitch oneself

C3: One of the oldest university of the state, still printing codes on a dot matrix printer for submissions

C4: Throw around big words, give below-par work, pay even less to employees doing the heavy lifting

C5: Micromanaging, self-initiative culture

What I learned:

C1: The wheels turn only when you apply some grease

C2: Trust your friends, but invest your time and resources after knowing their vision

C3: If the teacher says trust us and goes on a 1-month vacation to USA, RUN!

C4: Know your value, never compromise for anyone.

C5: Sometimes your best work may not be enough to bring in business. Keep learning and building new things.

PS: As it is wrong to call spade a spade in industry, no names have been taken and its totally legal to do some hunting on social media if the government is already doing it.