Enough has already been said about 9 to 5 MNC job life of a Software Engineer.

You start by 8 am in the morning, commute for an hour or longer to reach the high tech office gate – go through security checks – both hands up with ID badge visibly worn around the neck.

Get inside the campus building – drive around 2 km track here and there in the parking area to find a free slot and park your Activa.

Finally make it to your cubicle, where you open your last ‘late night’ sleep mode laptop. As soon as you fire it up – there you have 10+ IMs window already opened and yellow marked to let you know people are desperate for your replies and then there your inbox running out of storage with emails from build server reports, bug tracker, your managers concern about roles in community initiatives, last nights meeting email thread and then HR emails on how you can have a great life and benefits of this MNC.

You catch up with all that and realize oh its time for daily scrum meeting for 15 minutes. That means some gym time, which is good. You walk into a conference room and do a stand-up meeting. Yes, there are fancy chairs and sleek round tables with 120+ inch screens for remote working peoples but you do standup. I told you it was gym time except it doesn’t end in within 15 minutes. There you update everyone about what you did yesterday and will you do today.

Everybody applauds – meetings/gym ends. Get back to your cubicle. Start coding. You pass another hour or so and then lunch time. After lunch – walk around the campus so that your food is better digested. Experience some beautiful scenery while walking in jogging tracks (yes, many MNCs has jogging track).

Get back to the cubicle after a small walk. Resume the coding + IM answers. This blah blah continues till evening when you (almost all the time) get an email stating a P1 bug has been logged and you have to fix it anyhow today. Whenever there is a P1 bug – it automatically gets followed by insisting that “tomorrow we have a demo so you need to fix this anyhow”.

What would you do – fire the bug tracker, copy the bug title and StackOverflow about it? Open the damn all first search result page link with CTRL + click and make all chrome tab size full of sh#@ like below:

Bug search on StackOverflow

You work till late at night, at last, you make a patch and check-in. Mark the bug resolved – tomorrow does the loop.

Are you still awake?

If yes then let’s talk about why this MNC life of mine is at the verge of extinct.

• Imagine – you never have to spend your morning in the traffic – instead – enjoy the good coffee and read the newspaper.
• Then, when you start your work – you work with the most amazing products on the internet, solve the real problem along with the talented team from around the world.
• Don’t just fix the bug of a legacy software built two decades ago.
• Get paid handsomely while you enjoy the healthy food cooked at the home.
• Have the freedom of a set of tools you use, contribute and use open source. Use the most advance modern technologies for development.
• Keep learning because you gotta stay modern and things change pretty quickly so you have to.
• Don’t ever have to race through the parking lot in 20km/ph for 2 feet of spare space

Fancy thought, isn’t it?