Why Should You Not Join TCS ?

#-Link-Snipped-# - there are few things one must understand before forming an opinion. Boredom or frustration at job arises when there's a mismatch between your expectations from the job and the actual job offered to you. Having spent some time in the IT industry, I've experienced a few things which might be relevant to this discussions.

Indian IT industry is a services oriented industry: People usually think services oriented companies don't do any 'interesting' work. I used to think the same; but that's *not* entirely true. The nature of services industry is such that you're expected to execute the work assigned to you by your client. From what I've seen, it's mostly the 'coding / testing / maintenance' work that is sent to India - because we get it done cheap (55x cheap!). Now this outsourced work can be interesting and few of my friends have worked on / are working on really interesting outsourced projects. But the overall percentage of such projects is low (based on a general observation of the industry through friends, and friends of friends).

Innovation isn't the focus, execution of allotted tasks is: In most of the projects, engineers are assigned deadlines to execute tasks allotted to them. That makes them follow tight schedules and I believe that leaves no time to put in creativity/innovation.

Engineers Vs. Coders : One must understand the difference. A coder would be a person who can write code - Java, PHP, C, C++, JS, Ruby and so on. An engineer would be the person who 'engineers' the whole system, sets up architecture, advances technology etc.

A coder would be excellent at writing code; but an engineer has a much more responsibility for the overall product and writing code would just be a part of it. In most of the projects, the 'engineering' stuff is done by the engineers at client's side and coding job is outsourced.

Not many companies work on advancement of technology: Unfortunately, no many Indian IT companies are working on the advancement of technology itself and are focusing on implementing the technology.

Product Companies: For whatever reasons, there haven't been many software product companies that emerged from India. Some say it's the absence of strong local markets like in the US, but that is changing rapidly. There are few companies in India that are developing their own technology to suit their needs. I see a very positive picture in coming days.

My Opinion: Whether one should join TCS, IBM, Wipro, Infosys or other company is a personal decision which should be based on individual's interests. It's true that there are people who had to go without any project for several months ('on bench') which wasn't good to their career. It's also true that engineers are many times assigned for the non-engineering jobs. It's also true that there are engineers who were made to work what one'd call 'data-entry' job.

I personally found myself unfit for the IT industry and decided to mind my own ways. So, as a rule of thumb - figure out where your interests lie and walk on that path.