My work "Experience" at Cognizant tech.....

It all started on 7/7/7 for the first time when I entered the Cognizant's Orion building in Hyderabad. I felt the same way a child goes to a play school for the first time, having thousands of apprehensions in mind, confused, shy, excited, curious,Waiting to make new friends. Every one was new (including Bunny my college mate). First day was mostly fun, We were asked to sign on a bunch of papers, played couple of games and finally went to medical examination at care hospital srinagar colony still remeber it was a cloudy day.


For the next one week we were in Pioneer building, outstanding from outside but.... Soft skills by Babu Gogineni was fun, still the skillguru.com stuff pops up in my mind once in a while, especially the skit part where in we saw many great actors in our batch :). My skit along with a girl was hilarious to the core. I still recall the portrayal my funny innocent face before exploding to laughter in the skit. Then we were required to report in E-Park for the rest of training( I never imagined that my life in Cognizant would come to end in E-Park!!!).


Training was awesome. Enjoyed most of it. I was a "corner most back bencher" the most distant student from the instructor through out the training period with varma beside me :). By the time we finished the first part of training (SQL Server by Baba RamDev - I wished that my Engg. classes were like that :)) I had many good friends from the batch. Further classes by Madhavi on C# were noteworthy. She gave enough gyan to be rebels when ever possible and play out in the corporate world to work our way up:). Later ASP.NET, C#, ADO.NET and VB by Anand were so sleepy, though he was an amazing talent.UML classes by Aparna were fun while Health care CCP classes by Ali were exciting and boring (back benchers might know why they are exciting ;-)).

First B'day treat by Dr. is a day to remember :). Dutch treat at Barista was awesome full of youthful energy.Everybody pulling each others legs. By this time most of my batch mates were really close friends to me. Teased lot of ppl for lot of things;-). Writing exit tests and managing to clear all of them with 'lot of difficulty':P. In mean time our I had to encounter an ordeal in the form of "My First Real Project" as the name indicates it was first time my brain began functioning about something useful after all those crappy engineering projects :(.


MFRP: Teams were divided based on students from various colleges :P so Bunny, Praveen, Nikhil and varma planned to be in a single team so that they could have a blast.... but things never happened according to plan :( ...

That was the plight of ppl delaying decisions abt deciding their teammates. I dealt it in a different way.My teammates being Rao garu(Venkat)-The coder,Sandy, divya n me. Everybody knew how it went even including my manager. I would never interfere when somebody wants to learn.I kept myself as distant as possible from the coding and learning process. Thus 90% of the burden was carried by Rao garu n divya.But I gave a good final presentation in front of other managers and it seemed like I pulled all my team mates from front rather i stayed back all time pushing from rear.

MFRP was exciting. worked hardly and got chance to meet our future teammates and leads :). Some were cool :) while some were unexciting :(. Some how managed to finished training and then we were hand picked into various teams by various managers.


Training was like honeymoon period:)..wid lots of money at disposal(by those standards) n very few responsibilities everythng seemed rosy.. . had lot of work to do but lacked motivation:). Post training were the most significant days of my life as I, Nikhil, Hari n the DR.(dhoolraj) were picked by karim for an exciting project. Though project seemd exciting I was never mentally ready till then as I dozed off the whole time during training and MFRP project.Suddenly into project, we had a small breifing from karim. Though generic in nature I still remember his golden words n keep recollecting them once in a while as he seemed a mentor more than a manager.

All new beeies with experienced Hari as our lead, the journey of PMG metrics project began. We started right from the scratch and for the first time in life i felt burden of coding all by myself. Till then I either had spoonfeeding frm faculty/trainers or managed stealing someones code since my engineering days. Somehow there too luckily our module was relatively an easy one(for the reason we could google out the code). Majority of our project was carried out by all other 3 mates.By this time I postponed my fanciful idea of preparing for CAT entrance by one year. Finally it gave satisfaction that we could develop something ppl could recognize n an useful tool for client saving lot of money. Even here my learning was the minimal compared to other teammates(I dunno whether they agree..). Problem was that I was accustomed to understanding everything and follow rather than create and code it.But still I feel this is the only project in my life I felt I was involved significantly. The status of "working hardly" in training slowly trantitioned to "work hard".

I still remember my 1st interview to get into new project. Only me and Harikrishna was interviwed by sunanda(teamlead). I and everybody in our batch knew the secret that 75% of our 1st project was done by this guy called harikrishna. Fortunately or unfortunately my "would be" teamlead n manager dint know it. I rated myself 4/5 in ASP.NET when asked for self assessment in the interview without even knowing how to open a project in visual studio whereas the other guy who had decent coding skills and ASP.NET knowledge rated himself with 2.5/5. May be my persuasive skills got me into a that project outpowering harikrishna.

A new saga begins with TRS-OM, Planview, Prompt projects. Made lot of new friends all senior to me in terms of experience. though most of them were cool, always had that age gap as a barrier to move close to them.one guy frm chennai,one frm minneapolis, one frm hartford and team lead n I from hyd. Daily had calls with clients and keeping track of different timezones in itself was a herculean task.

By this time some of my batch mates were getting married and some went ahead to pursue their higher education. Meanwhile I made some very good friends in the office. Had good time organizing various fun events :):P.


Taking Longest possible breaks, heavy lunch with batch mates,Long chain of timepass e-mails TT games with lot of combinations:P) ,trip to pragathi resorts, visiting batchmates homes on weekends, gulli cricket, birthday bashes,independence day celebrations,bay decoration contests, CAT fun competition, trips to temples, mass bunking office to watch "Happy days" movie with 8 members in small swift car, avoiding a movie disaster called "Athidhi" .donno how time passed by...it just flew by :).




I would be missing a lot..... teasing many friends for many things...especially the girls who were getting ready to marriage n stufff...it was a awesome time...

Fun apart time comes to think seriously about my lyf and I had to choose the path of MBA preparation and wholeheartedly quit the company for my future goals

As rightly said by my friend "The pain is not on the day of missing your loved ones... The real pain is when u live each day with out them but with their presence in mind and heart..."


Sorry to my friends whom I have hurt knowingly or unknowingly :(. I miss u guys!!! I miss u a lot :(.

This is not an end but a new beginning... I will miss my friends in Cogni but will definitely take time to keep in touch with all of them... :)