EQ Blog

Category: Careers

  • On the verge of MNC life

    Enough has already been said about 9 to 5 MNC job life of a Software Engineer.

    You start by 8 am in the morning, commute for an hour or longer to reach the high tech office gate – go through security checks – both hands up with ID badge visibly worn around the neck.

    Get inside the campus building – drive around 2 km track here and there in the parking area to find a free slot and park your Activa.

    Finally make it to your cubicle, where you open your last ‘late night’ sleep mode laptop. As soon as you fire it up – there you have 10+ IMs window already opened and yellow marked to let you know people are desperate for your replies and then there your inbox running out of storage with emails from build server reports, bug tracker, your managers concern about roles in community initiatives, last nights meeting email thread and then HR emails on how you can have a great life and benefits of this MNC.

    You catch up with all that and realize oh its time for daily scrum meeting for 15 minutes. That means some gym time, which is good. You walk into a conference room and do a stand-up meeting. Yes, there are fancy chairs and sleek round tables with 120+ inch screens for remote working peoples but you do standup. I told you it was gym time except it doesn’t end in within 15 minutes. There you update everyone about what you did yesterday and will you do today.

    Everybody applauds – meetings/gym ends. Get back to your cubicle. Start coding. You pass another hour or so and then lunch time. After lunch – walk around the campus so that your food is better digested. Experience some beautiful scenery while walking in jogging tracks (yes, many MNCs has jogging track).

    Get back to the cubicle after a small walk. Resume the coding + IM answers. This blah blah continues till evening when you (almost all the time) get an email stating a P1 bug has been logged and you have to fix it anyhow today. Whenever there is a P1 bug – it automatically gets followed by insisting that “tomorrow we have a demo so you need to fix this anyhow”.

    What would you do – fire the bug tracker, copy the bug title and StackOverflow about it? Open the damn all first search result page link with CTRL + click and make all chrome tab size full of sh#@ like below:

    Bug search on stackoverflow

    Bug search on StackOverflow

    You work till late at night, at last, you make a patch and check-in. Mark the bug resolved – tomorrow does the loop.

    Are you still awake?

    If yes then let’s talk about why this MNC life of mine is at the verge of extinct.

    • Imagine – you never have to spend your morning in the traffic – instead – enjoy the good coffee and read the newspaper.
    • Then, when you start your work – you work with the most amazing products on the internet, solve the real problem along with the talented team from around the world.
    • Don’t just fix the bug of a legacy software built two decades ago.
    • Get paid handsomely while you enjoy the healthy food cooked at the home.
    • Have the freedom of a set of tools you use, contribute and use open source. Use the most advance modern technologies for development.
    • Keep learning because you gotta stay modern and things change pretty quickly so you have to.
    • Don’t ever have to race through the parking lot in 20km/ph for 2 feet of spare space

    Fancy thought, isn’t it?

  • Resources to write better resume and cover letter

    Resources to write better resume and cover letter

    First a good Cover letter, and second a better resume – the main weapons for all candidates who are seeking for a good job. This is where you’ve got a chance to prove yourself that you’re the best fit for required position among others. It makes sense, having a good resume, but having better resumes makes more sense and helps you better stand out from the crowd.

    Update: March 2019,  this post is revisited with valid links and removed obsolete resources.

    How are you doing on creating an effective resume? Here I have listed some of the best & proven to work resources that is definitely going to help you get most of it. Write a better resume, you got to read these guidelines.

    Oxford Career Guide

    “A CV (curriculum vitae, or résumé in the US) is a summary of your academic, extra-curricular and work experience. It should be a brief document that illustrates your skills, achievements and interests.”

    Google Guidelines for preparing resumes

    “To make it easier for us to determine where you might best fit within our organization, you can take a few simple steps to help us understand your qualifications.”

    Target Jobs Career Advice

    “Graduate CVs and job applications: they can take as much planning and preparation as an essay or project write up. Here we cover the basics of how to tackle online applications, structure a graduate CV and put together a covering letter.”

    Harvard Business School’s Career Development

    “The resume is an opportunity to market yourself to a prospective employer. It should be succinct, target an employer’s needs, and distinguish you from your competitors.”

    Monster.com’s Career advice

    “In a competitive job market, we have to do everything we can to make our resumes more attractive to hiring managers. This can be difficult for older workers, who fear that even if there’s no bias (subconscious or conscious) against job seekers on the mature side of 40, a resume may make them look overqualified for the positions they want.”

    BusinessBalls Guidelines

    “While the basic rules of a good CV remain constant, the world of work and business changes quickly. This especially impacts on how managers and graduates can best show themselves to be outstanding candidates.”

    Smashing Magazines’s Tips

    “Ah, the dreaded cover letter. Boring to write, difficult to get right, and you’re usually preoccupied with other things (such as the portfolio and resume, which are also really important). Unfortunately, your cover letter is a company’s first exposure to you, and it determines whether your application is trashed or fast-tracked to the company’s to-hire list.”