Sunday, December 16, 2018

As I complete 27 years in Industry

This is an edit on top of the blog post that I wrote five years ago when I completed 25 years. The original post is here.
Today I complete 27 years in the workforce. I started working for Bharat Electronics exactly 27 years on today's date, i.e. 16-December-1991. It is an important personal landmark so I thought I would summarize the last 27 years of my life through this post.
Joining BEL
I completed my graduation in June-1991 and was asked to join BEL on 16th December 1991 in Bangalore unit. We had three months of training and we were called probationary engineers till our training was completed. Once we completed our training, we were designated Deputy Engineer and posted to our units which in my case was BEL Kotdwara in the foothills of Garhwal mountain ranges.
BEL Kotdwara
I, along with the group of other 5 engineers from the batch, joined BEL Kotdwara on 11th March 1992. I still remember it was one day before the festival of Holi. BEL Kotdwara was fun, regular visits to Siddhabali, Lansdowne. We even drove our bikes to Dehradun, Mussoorie once. On 28th of September, 1994, I left BEL to join Motorola India Electronics Ltd. in Bangalore.
Motorola India Electronics Ltd., Bangalore
I joined MIEL on 3rd of October, 1994 in Bangalore at their office on St. Marks Road. The building was called "The Presidency". Since the building was full, after joining and training I was sent to work at a rented facility at Manipal Center at the junction of Dickenson Road and Cubbon Road. In a few months the new facility of Motorola, called The Senate, was ready at Ulsoor Road. We moved there and I worked out of that facility for next almost 10 years. Eventually, Motorola built another facility in C. V. Raman Nagar in Bagmane Tech Park. We moved to that facility on 27th February 2004. I worked out of that facility till 2010.
Leaving Motorola
In June 2010, Motorola decided to close the group (Enterprise Applications Research Labs, Applied Research Center, Bangalore) in which I was working and I was one of the causalities of that decision. Anyway, it was time to leave the place.
Entrepreneurship
In July 2010, I joined the startup with a few of my friends, to build a product in the telecommunication infrastructure space. We built a prototype, demonstrated to few tier-1 operators across the world and then we were acquired by Movik Networks in October 2010.
Movik Networks
I joined Movik Networks as part of that acquisition, did some interesting work for the next few months and finally left them on 31st March 2011.
In April 2011,   I joined Hewlett-Packard in Bangalore.
Hewlett Packard
I worked at HP in the storage group. We built a scale-out file system for large storage systems. The work in place was reasonably good but the politics of the place just got to me. I left in October 2014 after little more than three years in the place.
Oracle
I joined Oracle's cloud group and worked on Application PaaS. I found the company very suffocating for technical people. Even architecture documents were approved by managers there. So finally left the place after little more than one year.
Hubble Connected India Private Limited
Joined the company because they were running a cloud service that required a refresh and needed to be rearchitected to run at a much higher scale.  We built a brand new service, scaled it from a little over 100,000 subscribers to close to one million subscribers. Finally had a disagreement with the management and left the place.
Tesco
Joined Tesco in January 2018.

To summarize, it has been an interesting ride for the last 27 years. What is the most disappointing is the level of technology ownership in most of the Industry? I had expected that we would see more technology and product ownership with Indian industry, which does not seem to be the case. Hope things would improve in the next few years.

When I started working 27 years ago, I was of the view that I will not work as an employee for more than 25 years. That is one milestone that I have unfortunately missed. I have not been able to transition from a salaried job to either freelance consulting or build a company of my own. That is probably the biggest regret that I have as I complete 27 years.