Where is the software engineering yaar?

Seen the movie “Where's the Party Yaar? It’s ok if you haven’t, but catch it the next time they show it on TV. It’s an Indian English movie and worth watching, its fun. Now let’s move over to my problems.

I joined one of India’s top rated software companies to become a big shot coder…ok let’s scale it down to an above average programmer. My posting into the ERP division dashed all those hopes. Most of my work was to be limited to working on ERP packages and java. No working on a particular platform, no systems programming, no cutting edge technologies, no more heated Windows-Linux arguments that we had while at collages.

Just working on “software that manages information flow in enterprises” as my cute HR lady claims. Didn’t sound interesting at first, slowly the realization hit me that I was with an IT company that delivers IT solutions, we make what customers want us to make.

AAHHHHH!! No longer can I work on what I want to work on. If the client and business managers want something done this way, using this and that, all I can do I swallow my pride, learn how to do it that way and finally do it that way. And right now businesses and my company love java and cross-platform softwares, I love vc++ and windows. No prizes for guessing who the winner is.

ERP is currently hot. Western corporations are minting money making ERP packages and South Asian IT companies are making millions using these packages to deliver solutions to other western corporations.

This week was fun. ERP is about knowing business and making solutions for running business. So my company decided that I must know a lot more about business than any average Joe programmer. So began our sessions of business related classes. We had sessions on almost every aspect of business in any big business. Presentations after presentations on Finance & Accounting, Sales & Marketing, Manufacturing and Shop Floor Planning (don’t ask me what it is, I have no idea), Supply Chain management, Materials management, Human Capital management and HR.

We had people with MBAs unloading their B school wisdom into our brains that was already kind of full with the stuff that was pushed in by our computer science department at collages. Many people survived through the sessions napping through most of it. Some others played with their mobiles, passed around sms and mms, and the very brave ones dared to bunk the sessions altogether. You aren’t supposed to bunk classes that the company is paying for, it’s very different from bunking classes at collage. But luckily no one in the administration missed those adventurous guys- I take immense pride in being one of them.

Anyway I and my batch mates survived the interaction with the MBA suits. Business managers and software engineers seem like 2 different sub species of homo-sapiens. The trouble is I have to take exams related to all this business stuff sometime next week and no they won’t give me an MBA when I pass the exams, but they will surely kick me out of the company if I don’t.

The road ahead is green with all the money to make and onsite opportunities (ERP is in its adolescence, 40-50% of the work is still onsite). The question is will the computer engineer in me survive to become the big shot coder that I have dreamt of since joining collage or will the IT professional take over entirely?