The Absurdity of Placement

WARNING: High Content of sarcasm, skepticism, narcissism (I just added that so that it would rhyme) and any other x-sm's you can think of. Read only if you want the illusions about engineering to be shattered. Comments and criticism will be subjected to further comments and criticism. Written by a frustrated computer science student who will insult, well pretty much everybody.   

"If you stand on a road and throw a stone it will either hit a dog or an engineer."

-My college teacher

The quote pretty much sums up the current position and value of a degree which says "Engineer". According to statistics there are 600,000+ engineers who graduate every year in India alone. Based on the number of colleges which can be termed as decent, you can say that about 15% of these graduates are "hire-able". Luckily for the top 15%, there is no dearth of jobs. Thanks to the "mass" recruiters. 

What are "mass" recruiters?

"Trespassers will be recruited"

This is a joke about what the motto of these companies should be rather what the notice on their campus says.

Mass recruiters in simple words are those companies who have more people leaving their company than the number of people joining them in spite of the thousands of employees who are hired each year.

If you prefer a more formal definition these are companies which offer IT services without having any product of their own (or in other words you have to work on code which has been written by someone, debugged by someone after that, modified by someone, debugged again, tested by yet another one, checked if it is up to the mark and then sent to you. It would have been serviced at least a  couple of times before being sent to you, so the job in the purest form is what people in the olden days used to call "The Odd Man Job"). These companies require large number of employees, since there are a lot of international companies who want them to "repair" the programs for them that only means that these companies are scraping the bottom for all "hire-able" engineers (irrespective of what they have studied) into their organization.

According to recent reports, the appetite of the mass recruiters is particularly large this year, with the count exceeding 100,000. That is more or less the whole batch of 2011's employable pass-outs. So yay us!

When you put it into perspective, its not just these companies who have the Indians doing the dirty work. All international companies who outsource to India make us do second string jobs which is very expensive when done on shore. So don't be fooled when a company representative says "We work on cutting edge technology". They probably mean cutting edge a decade ago.

WARNING: If you are a student of Electronics and Communication do not read the next paragraph unless you want to be thoroughly insulted

What the placement process taught me?

 To get placed you need to have little skill, a whole lot of luck and the uncanny ability to lie (convincingly) through your teeth.

Placement is the worst place to be a student of Electronics student, these people get very few jobs which are in their domain, even if they do the pay is not very good. So eventually they write for companies of our domain, where they are not preferred over students of CS or IS (unless they are extraordinary). Sadly they had to work harder since their subjects are harder, they had to do better in their 12th standard, exams and get a better ranking and after all this they have to still learn subjects what we learnt in college AFTER they start working and whatever they learnt in their four years was a complete waste of time. I seriously don't see any reason to take EC, I know even after all this they say I am "passionate" about EC, where does this passion come from? I have never heard the biggest nerd from computer science tell "I am "passionate" about CS".

A moron should not be in charge of inviting companies and looking after the whole process, from personal experience that is always a bit of a snag. I would like to tell the story of one such moron, lets call him "Dr. Bozo" (Unfair characterization I agree, my due apologies to Bozo the clown) is a very engaging (Haha!) character.

Dr. Bozo is the Alan Harper (for those of you who aren't familiar with Two and a Half Men, Google him and read his character profile) of the placement world. Dr. Bozo gets a straight no from the "good" companies. The "decent" ones are hard to come by, in case one of them agree due to some misconception Dr Bozo gets stood up (the most recent being on Feb 25th). And the desperate ones come to him because they have no where else to go,  and these companies boost his ego far more than it should and he thinks he is blessed if everyone gets into the "desperate" ones.

Most companies which visit campuses are too lazy to set their own test paper for the written test and evaluate them, hence they hire people from an agency whose "specialty" is creating and evaluating written tests. I would like to talk about one such agency, I shall refer to them as MT which is a surprisingly apt name for them since, you know all of their employees heads' are "m-t".

So the guys from MT have mastered three sentences in the English language perfectly over the years (Sadly that beats Dr Bozo's knowledge. Ouch!). And they manage their entire job with these sentences. The MT people (Pun intended) have a notorious reputation of not correcting all (sometimes even half) of the papers which are submitted to them. I personally have a theory as to why they do it. 

Amongst the troop of guys who march over to the college every time a company visits the college, there should be a guy in charge, the "manager". It is my belief that the paper "correctors" are given a remuneration based on the no. of papers they correct. So what the manager does is, he counts the no of students in the room, after collecting the papers he manages to give his boys half or less than half of the bundle. Since most of the papers are uncorrected the remaining money goes into his pocket. Ingenious! (and fictitious. Lol!)

Law of Placement

"The happiness quotient achieved after getting placed is directly proportional to the pay and the reputation of the company and inversely proportional to the number of people who are hired by the company" 

Well it is not a law per se, but you could term it as an observation which holds good most of the time. Given that enough time passes and you are frustrated a new corollary can be formed out of this "Once sufficient time has elapsed and you have attended more interviews than you can remember, the priority of profile, company and getting placed itself reduces".

The Aftermath (Highly Pessimistic!) 

So what next after placement? Training for a brief period of time, then you get involved in your work, you lose track of time, you are middle aged, your waist line is as big as your pay packet, your hair line is receding and you probably have a few people who actually like you because of the tremendous stress you have been under. So at the end all you have is a morbidly obese guy with a correspondingly large amount of money with him who's battling Diabetes Type II and Hypertension at once and his best friend is his workstation. If you knew me you'd probably understand my skepticism. Or not..

I mean everyone won't end up that way but I thought writing this would be way more fun than writing a success story, which according to me is a cliche. I am not a believer of the phrase "Happily Ever After". But I guess we will do alright.

We seem to have a bright future ahead! Good luck!

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