About colleagues and camaraderie

I have often observed that most of the youngsters and new recruits in the Information Technology industry spend really long hours at the office working, sometimes working for 60-70 hrs in a week. The very fact that a vast majority of them are away from their hometown and do not really bother to socialize or visit new places makes them spend a lot of time at the office. While some of them work on their projects, some are interested in keeping themselves updated on the latest technology in their area of work, while  most of them are hooked on to music download sites, cricketing sites and social networking sites and in the process use a large part of the bandwidth which is meant for productive work.

Not surprising is the fact that most of them tend to form groups with people either from their hometown or home state. While some of them remain colleagues very few become your friends. Things today have not only changed but also left us wondering what camaraderie is all about.

We now hear about how the big IT firms want to hire 20,000 in year one and then 30,000 in year two and so on and so forth. All of them talk in terms of only thousands. Looking at the pace at which employees are added I feel we will reach a day when a board outside a fortune 500 IT services firm in India will read ‘ Trespassers will be recruited ‘.

Offices have now become campuses and employees have now become resources. Gone are the days when we used to have our induction in a posh star hotel. Due to paucity of resources inductions today are held in virtual classrooms and via web conferences. The knowledge industry as we call it is slowly heading to work as a factory model barring the long sirens that we used to hear from the old PSU factories or the textile mills.

Our colleagues change as we change our projects and jobs. I once had  one  Srikanth Palepu from Hyderabad sitting in the cubicle next to me and a few days later it was the turn of Ravidran Pallaniappan from Madurai . When I came back from my vacation it was Sunil Singh from Lucknow occupying the same seat. When I asked Sunil he told that he had just joined last week and he was using this as a temporary seat until he got his US visa. Apparently, the Human Resources team had promised him a long-term onsite posting with family.

Unfortunately, I really could not check if Sunil got his Visa and went to the US as it was now my turn to move to a new project in a new location and meet some more new colleagues.