Everything that glitters is not gold. And for a software engineer working as a cheap labour in an MNC in India, the gold is just a slab of ice floating on water in a stranded lonely island which could be located on either of the poles. The helpless software engineer has to struggle in the freezing water against hundreds of fellow software engineers and find himself a large and stable slab of ice. Little does he have an idea that the slabs of ice visible in water are almost friction-less on the top. Unless he knows the trick, he cannot stand on any of them. The day he manages to balance, the next moment the sun shines brightly and before he realises the ice melts into water. He is back to where he began from except only with an additional ability to stand firmly on ice. But to his dismay, there are no slabs of ice remaining! The damned waves lash the shore and his house of sand that he had built on the island starts to collapse - grain by grain. He is left with no option but to go on a different island.
With challenging and competitive work atmosphere to hone our skills, shining salary packages and lucrative benefits to shoot up our bank balance, MNCs are voluntarily one of our preferred employers. But situations go adverse when the market giants lose business, The project that was hot until now loses its strategic value to the company and is scraped off. Human 'resources' are shovelled and we find ourselves in a state of disbelief. Tough times befall and we step back to revisiting the fundamentals of all the software design patterns, the data structures, the concepts of object-oriented programming and the innumerable algorithms. But other than the definition and hypothetical examples that are replicated on all the web pages on internet, we hardly are able to think and write a complete correct program in one go. Because it is mainly the bug fixing and maintenance work of the existing code that we are expected to be the best at. Sooner or later, we find our next potential employer and again winter arrives faster than the spring ends.
Events repeat but nevertheless, slowly and gradually we get used to such shaking incidents and they become an add-ons to our already malware infected lives. Optimistically, we look towards a silver lining in the cloud and eagerly await spring to end this winter but damn this human behaviour! We end up getting blinded by the glittering gold!
