Ratnesh Pathak

Highlights:

• Jobs Applied for: Allied Digital Services Ltd & General Electric (GE) (on-campus); Cap Gemini (CG) (off-campus)
• Jobs offered: All
• Job accepted: Initially Allied Digital (for 10 months), then switched to CapGemini
• Pay Package: INR 450,000/year
• Posted in: Mumbai
• Nature of Recruitment: Off-campus

Interview Experience:

A peculiar aspect of the walk-in interview of CG was that from over 1000 candidates present, the HRs shortlisted the candidates based only on Resumes. Those who had nice and detailed Resumes went through to further rounds. And to my shock they eliminated 750 People just by looking at their Resumes. This Highlights the Importance of Having an Impressive Resume.

This was followed by a Tech cum HR Round:
General Questions were asked about previous company and why did I leave it in 10 months, Family background, Familiarity with Technologies etc.

It was further followed by a Total Tech Interview Round:
This was taken by the technically Expert Tier 3 team of CG who drilled us with their Technical Questions. Most of them were beyond the scope of most of us but what differentiated the selected candidates was the ability to tackle the questions confidently, providing them with a logical answer in case the exact was not known. It highly focused on the Decision making and thinking skills.

I was one of around 25 people that finally cleared all the rounds and got selected. Based on my Final Tech Interview with the Manager after getting in CG, I was assigned to work on Project for British Airport Authority (BAA). This Interview was a general tech Interview where my Manager just wanted to check my skills so he gave me few scenarios which I implemented successfully. 

Job Description:

Background:

Initially I accepted the offer from Allied Digitals (pay-2.4 LPA) over GE (pay-4 LPA). GE was offering me a profile of a Associate Software Developer. Although I cleared all technical Rounds (that included a tech Apti + A Tech GD and then 2 rounds of Tech Interview all focussing on C++ and JAVA Concepts, I still went for Allied Digitals because I never wanted to be a software developer, I was an EXTC Engineer and had studied C++ and JAVA only in 1st two sems of Engg. I was more keen on Server and Networking Domains and so sacrificed a High Paying job for something I liked, Worked for a while in Allied (for 10 months) completed a Microsoft Certification, gathered skills and knowledge of Active Directory (AD) and Exchange (discussed further) and then switched to CapGemini India Ltd where I am working currently.

Profile:

I am here a part of L2 Microsoft Team. There are various Microsoft Teams present out here but my team works on the project of British Airport Authority (BAA), UK's Largest Airlines Authority. We manage Microsoft Servers of our client BAA which includes handling 5 different technologies viz; Windows Server, Active Directory, Microsoft Exchange, VMWare and Citrix. We are a team of 10 that handles all these technologies.

Work Responsibilities:

1. Handling Microsoft Servers which includes installing patches and performing actions to maintain a stable environment.
2. Handling Entire organizations Access Control by creating Groups in Active Directory (AD) and then deciding which groups needs access to what all things. An AD Object has to be defined for all Physical equipments present in the Organization which includes all employees, their workstations, Laptops, Printers, etc. All this in controlled via Active Directory (AD)
3. Managing Mail-flow (most crucial task) of an Organization by Microsoft Exchange Technology.
4. Virtualizing the Environment by using VMWare. This reduces the number of physical servers present and is a fastly growing technology of future.
5. Citrix: A central way of accessing all the work related apps/utilities. This is done to ensure all the data is protected from external environment. Each employee has a separate Citrix Login credentials and a set of apps/utilities that he/she can access for the designated work (for eg: MSExcel. MSWord, Autocad etc.)

All are technologies from here on and so the exact kind of work can't be explained without making it too long.

Experience at Work:

The working Environment is Very relaxed out here. Each Team has a dedicated task and hence no over burdening. The SLAs are followed rigorously. SLA is Service Level Agreement which means that any service outage on any of the above mentioned technologies will be resolved in the documented time-frame.

The Peers out here are generally supportive and happy to help you when they are not busy. Since I am working on few of the most used technologies in the world, It does give me a lot of satisfaction.

The Working hours are 8.5 (5 days a week).

Advice to the juniors:

•  It's never too early to decide your career and start focusing towards achieving it. Never chose High Package over something you like but gives you less package. Money can be earned a 1000 ways but to earn satisfaction there are very limited options. Aim for these limited ones, as they are rare. Your criteria of selecting a job should be in the following order (decreasing order of priority with 1st being Highest priority and last being Lowest priority):
  1. Job Profile
  2. Company Status
  3. Location
  4. Travelling
  5. The Package offered
  
  Usually we go backwards, which can only land us in trouble or extreme work pressure in the Long run.
   
•  For Non IT/Comps Students who find it extremely difficult to get a JOB in their Domain i.e Electronics/embedded, I suggest taking up the IT Services Industry. The IT Services Industry focuses on 3 important divisions:
  
  1. Servers (Where I am working currently):
  For pursuing a Career in Servers, there are various Microsoft Certifications with most famous being MCITP. MCTS and MCSE (I've done all of them)
  
  2. Networks:
  For getting into Networking domain , the certifications available are Cisco standardized i.e CCNA, CCNP and CCIE.
  
  3. Database:
  For getting into database, Oracle provides a range of certifications like OCP. There are other vendors as well like SAP and Microsoft' in this field. Currently Oracle's SQL is the most established and SAP is the fastest growing.
   
•  Finally, I request you all to not over burden your precious mind with too much thinking, be quick to decide what you like and follow it with all your heart. Be keen to learn anything that's new as it can only help you grow.