I started to work in IT industry almost 3 years and 2 months ago. At first I worked for a start up and now working for India's biggest IT company. 14 months back when I joined in my current organization except for Lotus Notes every thing else looked different. The way in which I/we worked/ how things happened in the previous organization was totally different from how it is happening here.
My first surprise was the head count. In my previous organization the biggest team size was 4. And most of the time I worked as one man army. The total organization strength was around 25. When I came here, I was surprised to see a team of 40 programmers. I never expected a Lotus notes team of 40 developers. Further around 1500+ developers/testers/support personals are also seated in the same campus.
Dress code: While working in previous organization, I never follow the dress code. During weekday I wore Jeans pant, I will not tuck in my shirt , Never wear shoes to the office. Few of my friends were also in the same league. Even the management did not mind it. For them the work has to be done. Or I think its the freedom that I/we had there. Here, every thing is in reverse. Even on weekend I see people coming in formals. During weekday I'm following or try to follow the dress code. When I don't follow, I look odd in the team.
Process:
ஆங்கிலத்துல எனக்கு பிடிக்காத ஒரே வார்த்தை Process.
In my previous organization the only process that I followed regularly was filling Time sheet :). In projects that I worked, I had access to production environment. When ever the user asks for changes/enhancements, at times directly I had worked on the production database. At times we worked based on customer oral request too. I the beginning we didn't track the changes that we made. Latter we had some thing called Change request and Release notes (Word document) to track the changes. From the management perspective to have CR and RN as word document might be use full but from the developer point of view its not use full. In one of the project that I worked, after the main release we had more than 25 CRs. I'm the only person who have fairly good (Complete) knowledge of the application (Since I designed the application). When we started to get more and more CR, I couldn't remember what I did in each module. No module have proper documentation.
In my current project, ever request is properly tracked and stored. Every release has its corresponding documentation. Further all the CR's are tacked in notes application, which make them more searchable. We don't have designer access to UAT and production server. Only for the development server we have designer access. For every deployment we need to have 2 approval from management team and admin team will do the deployment. The documentation work may be painstaking, but it protect us.
Technology: I would say any one who starts his/her career with a start up organization is lucky. He/she can learn a lot in start ups. At times we worked for more than 18 hours a day. In 2 years of time we learned a lot. I feel in big organization at the entry level we cannot learn as we learn in a start up.
Soft skills : Any one who starts his career with Big companies can develop their soft skills very quickly. In my current assignment, I need to interact with the my client on daily basis. Either through instant messenger or phone calls. Where as in my previous organization only my manger used to have daily interaction with the customer and I interact with him the customer very rarely.
