Let me start by wishing everyone a very happy and prosperous new year. May God bestow upon you all you ever wanted and more.
I was wondering what to write after such a long time. I felt I should look back at the years I have spent so far and then as I was reminiscing, my life at Kgp started dominating my thoughts. I realized how much I had learnt there even though I hardly attended classes and how much those 4 years have changed me. Some of you might be aware that I had recently gone back there as a recruiter. I was super excited to be back in Kgp.
We took a cab from Dum Dum Airport to Kgp. On our way, we stopped at Sher-e-Punjab for brunch. We sat on the table right next to the one where I had given my last treat before leaving Kgp as a student. [ The 1st piece of nostalgia that struck me when I sat on that table was the "fight" between Sushil and Shomrita about something to do with the differences between boys and girls ] We put up at the Technology Guest House (this is the 1st time I stepped in and I am impressed.) and we were scheduled to have our PPT and written test in the evening. I managed to make a short visit to LLR Hall before the PPT and planned to visit my department the next day, but the plan never materialized. I went to my room which was locked, looked around the wing ... everything was so quiet and there was only a 3rd yr student in the whole wing. The solitude and quietness seemed alien. However, I chatted with him for a while before leaving. I also happened to meet up a junior from my dept and we chatted for a while.
As soon as I entered V3, the placement coordinator greeted me and said :: "aapne mera OP liya tha." The sleepy eyes and the disinterested looks during the PPT reminded me of my days as a student. Wish, these guys understood that the "package slide" is not the only important slide in the PPT. Wish, I had known this back then. Next day, during the GD and PI rounds as well, I saw my juniors repeating the same mistakes that I had made and it was ironical that I was rejecting candidates for doing the same things I had done during my years at Kgp.
I can understand that the temptation is always to get into a finance company which will pay you much more than most standard software companies (except the exclusive ones like Google, FB , Microsoft, Amazon etc). And hence, we do not expect you to prepare anything just to get a job in Ericsson / IBM / Deloitte or the like. But the minimum we expect is that you remember some of the stuff that you have read in your 4 years at Kgp. Basic data structures, algorithms (just the simple ones - sorting etc) and some basic concepts of C -- this is the minimum we expect from candidates. But unfortunately, only a handful of students remembered these concepts and we ended up recruiting much lesser numbers than we had targeted.
I hope that all those people who have been looking for a job, have already got one. But still, if you happen to read this and know people who are not placed yet and are willing to sit for software companies, do ask them to revise little bit of DS, algo and C. That should be more than sufficient.
Best of luck to everyone everywhere.
NJOY !!
P.S : Next blog will not be so boring!!!
