Wolfish, Owlish, Devilish

Our Satyam Days, part III

Long gone are the nostalgic, golden days when I used to go to work at Satyam on Raj Bhavan Road. 

Mornings were so fresh and unhurried, work was interesting, and in the evenings, friends awaited me for tea or sometimes nothing. Lounging on velvet sofas or gravitating upwards onto the still-hot terrace one floor up or occasionally sitting on the compound wall outside in animated proximity under the inky blue starlit sky...

There will never be another era like that, and those friends will never return to the way it was because no one can. That time has passed. The terraces are empty, the compound walls remain abandoned, and the divan has become redundant furniture as friends have parted ways with silent tears. There's no breath of fresh air anymore anywhere. It'll never be the same again for anyone, ever.

Times have changed. Twenty-six years into the new millennium, those days will never return. Let me reminisce about the good old days once again and bask in the splendour of the former Satyam days. That's all I can think about these days. Life will take its toll. Time is unforgiving.

Last two years at Satyam, and exit

Things weren't so easy-going during my last two years at Satyam's STC, and after, I grudgingly relocated to the "fish market branch" in Vikrampuri.

Everybody here clamoured for work; umbrage-taking superiors were the prime delinquents, not to mention their stand-in hoagies or subordinates who liked tunnelling like pack rats under people's credible positions and reputations for their day-to-day survival in their jobs. Much to my terrible surprise, I could find very little reason to like working at the Vikrampuri branch; eventually, it made sense to me, oh God, why it was called the "fish market branch" and why I had to shift here.

While working at STC was not to my liking, the so-called strategic business unit I worked in caused me more emotional as well as physical distress than any positive impact I could have had on the career advancement that I was making on my manager. Besides that, I didn’t immediately know where my instinctive priorities lay regarding my professional progress — within the company before recognizing, much to my astonishment, that there wasn't any left I could contend with. That happened slowly, though. Reporting to a chronically indecisive super-manager, a slightly tipsy at that, was as embarrassing as it could be considering how enormously stagnated I felt in the year I was at STC and after. Devi and Suresh shifted to STC too and were on the same floor as me; that had an effect of salvation on me, as if nudging me to take some chill pill and go about my work, or else my ability to be an IT professional was, believe it or not, diminishing drastically and stupidly I was still none the wiser about the stark ludicrousness of it all. In such a woeful situation, what do people do? For heaven's sake, they offered resignation and looked for work elsewhere, but shamelessly, I didn’t. I came super close to doing it, but I didn’t.

Since Satyam was my first employer and I enjoyed working there, I hesitated to quit, deciding to hold off on resigning for another year. I thought, let's see what happens next.

In the meantime, I relocated to the Vikrampuri branch of Satyam, leaving Devi and Suresh and our joyful lunch, post-lunch walks, and coffee breaks at STC, not before realizing that I might have made a wrong judgment by moving here. I wanted a shift, and thus it followed; I can't possibly repent now. After I stopped taking the company shuttle to STC, I resumed using my private vehicle to get to work every day. The Vikrampuri branch was up ahead. Nonetheless, I instantly hoped that things would be facilitative at this branch so that I could work on the kinds of projects I could handle: that my new workspace, office branch, and assignment would allow me to work on the tasks I wanted to take on while keeping me relevant in an inherently tough, but also the increasingly unattractive, cut-throat world of IT software solutions and services.

Ironically, after having one of the most amazing experiences at the Raj Bhavan Road and STC office branches, I had the grungiest experience of my life at the Satyam branch in Vikrampuri. Even more than two decades afterward, I still regret why I made that unnecessary switch that I shouldn't have. Although it might seem unreasonable not to mention it here, regardless of that, I can't stop talking about it because this blog is about that wretched mistake I made. So there.

(Mandeep and Shiv had to leave our precious Raj Bhavan Road branch before clocking in nearly three years and two years of experience, respectively. Kavitha was the first to renounce her presumably first job. She decided that the U.S. was her calling; subordinating under a manager like GG would not provide her with any learning opportunities, but possibly gaining general Satyam experience might help her obtain a visa to that nation. She had worked that out well. She was walking, talking, breathing U.S., and rightly so. When you gotta go you gotta go. Why not!

Personally speaking, you must learn how to work or collaborate with others as well in order to grow in your career. While I was learning how to do that, I became aware that I was beginning to really miss my friends who had left Satyam, namely Mandeep, Shiv, Devi, Suresh, Revathy, Rafi, and, to some extent, Kavitha because she had moved on quite some time ago, and whose departure was too distant in the past, the first one to jump ship, before one's feelings for a co-worker would mean something to another colleague.)

+*+*+*+

Telling it like it is: At the Vikrampuri office branch — It was a veritable hellhole of hypersensitive egos and a cesspool of opportunistic cynics united in the godforsaken alienating cause of the be-all and end-all of program/project management and analytical computing, where hotdog intimidation and grandstanding behaviour primed up to outdo the cock and bull duels of toxic conflicts, schisms, cold wars, and hostile death-stares of the Upper Lot (read: top-tier executives) and the Lower Lot (read: subordinates) seething day after day, from sunrise to sunset, unabated. A constant shroud of darkness hovered over the business unit. I survived, God knows how, for a little more than a year here.

Egomaniacal, swelled heads were the swaggering show-offs that held the fort there. The GG of the Raj Bhavan Road branch was a pauper compared to the vicious pack that overran the Vikrampuri branch.

Even though it wasn't easy for me to put in my papers, I did it because I didn't want to overthink bitterly about quitting Satyam at that point in my life and live, in retrospect, to regret my decision if it comes to that end. Happily, it didn't come to that.

Most of the staff members at this branch, where I had the misfortune of working for a whole year before ultimately departing, were just plain irritating and obnoxious; they had a zilch sense of professional kinship or relatability and tended to be disagreeable and negative from the get-go, making you feel distressed and overly anxious about completing your daily tasks, let alone learning new things or getting new insights into technologies and processes.

In this mockumentary sitcom of an office, these managers (junior, senior, and everyone in between) openly promoted in-group cronyism and had the sharpest knives in their drawers. All they were steadfastly accountable for was making it possible for themselves to jump ship should the need arise. Like Aliens, as they show in Hollywood flicks, they exploit the company resources and relocate to greener pastures of IT positions, leaving a trail of broken promises in their wake. Such was the lot of your average cabal (of managers) in attendance at this aptly named 'fish market' office branch.

An apt slang phrase to describe these poor chaps is "jerks" — sad to say, that's just how they were. To put it mildly, the people I encountered here were utterly repulsive.

(To be continued…)

By Arindam Moulick

Postscript: Despite my aversion for the group of zombie managers I had to work with, I'm not looking to assign blame or minimize their already tattered reputations; by writing this article, I'm just trying to fairly and impartially present the facts as they were at the Vikrampuri branch.

Also published on Medium

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