How is Life @ Infosys-A must read for all..

Posted to infyrecruits group-by Abhinav Viswambharan

Its been a long since I sent mail to this group. In fact I didnt send mail to this group after new members from the 2007 batch joined it.
 
Let me introduce myself to all of you. I am Abhinav Viswambharan, a native of Cochin. I got placed into my dream company, Infosys, through Marian College, Kuttikanam. I studied in Rajagiri Engineering College. I missed out Infy when it came to our college, I then got into Satyam. It was Marian  College,Kuttikkanam that gave me the opportunity of my life on 23rd April,2006.
 
I will be always greatful to Brijesh Sir & his team, for having invited us for the recruitment.
 
Right now I am at Infosys Bangalore, working on a project for a US Telecom major.
I just thought of sharing my experience at Infy, till now, with those who are gonna join Infy in the coming months.
 
I joined Infosys Bangalore on 31st July,2006. Our batch had training at Bangalore. We were given accomodation facility by Infy for the initial one week. On the day we joined we had lot of presentations about Infy and various policies that it followed. The entire induction program spanned for 2 days.
 
We were made to submit all relevant documents. They gave us a booklet, which had many documents in it, on which we had to sign. I still remember, during the first two days, I signed on around 25-30 documents!!! That was something new for a guy like me, whose signature used to change from quite frequently.
 
We were a batch of about 320 students. Majority were North Indians. We had a test on the first day itself to determine our training duration. At Infosys, training for freshers happen, based on the outcome of the test that you give on the first (or second) day.

The test is pretty simple for student from IT/CS background. Its an online, objective test with 4 options for each question, and if I remember correct, there were around 50 questions. There were negative marks for wrong answers. The questions were just the fundamentals of C, Operating System, Database, Object Oriented Concepts, Computer Networks. Nobody in our batch had prepared anything for it. Still, almost half of the batch cleared the test.
 
Those who cleared the test were put into the Fast Track batch, whose training spans for 6 weeks. Those who didnt clear the test were put into Long Cycle batch, whose training duration is 16 weeks.Not clearing the first test, doesnt impact the trainees TPI-Training Performance Incentive. In fact training for Long Cycle(LC) people is bit relaxed when compared to Fast Track. But being in Fast Track (FT) batch also has its own advantages. Since in FT the training duration is less, the trainee gets 10 weeks or 2 months of project experience more than his LC counterpart.
 
Luckily, I cleared the test and was put into FT batch alongwith around 170 people. Our technical training started the very next day after the 2 day induction program. By the way, we were given our temporary ID cards on the first day itself. The card which has an RFID built inside, is used to 'swipe in' and 'swipe out', to mark attendance every day. Our salary accounts were also opened on the same day. Infy has its salary accounts with ICICI Bank. We got our ICICI Bank debit cards by evening!!!
 
The training consisted of Generic & Stream Specific Training.
 
Initially, all the 170 people in FT had Generic Training together in Programming Fundamentals(6 Days) & RDBMS(4 Days).
 
After that we were split into 3 different technological streams. - Open Systems, J2EE and Dot Net. Mainframe stream was not there for our entire batch.
 
The allocation to the streams is purely random, its based on your employee number.
 
I was put into Open Systems batch. We had the following courses in our Stream Specific Training:- Oracle(4 Days), Unix(2 Days), C++(4 Days) & VB(5 Days).
 
After every course we used to have Online objective test. There were no negative markings in these tests. It was kind of easy for us, since all were from CS/IT background.
 

After all the course we had the final test, which is called Compre. Its the most dreaded thing for every trainee. Its like this. Out of the total training score that a trainees scores, 50% is composed of the results of the test followed by each course. The rest 50% is determined by the outcome of the Comprehensive exam a.k.a COMPRE !!!!
 
Compre comprises of Hands On & Online Test.
 
Hands On
They will give a mini project that you will have to complete in 3 hours. It would be a complete application with GUI in the front end & database in the backend. Its an Open Book exam, i.e., you can refer any material, that you have saved on your desktop before the start of the exam. For my Hands On, I had 300MB of material saved in my desktop, mostly code snippets & other useful stuffs. You can copy paste code from anywhere. But, I can guarantee you that, you will find it extremely difficult to complete it within the stipulated time of 3 hours.
 
Online Test
 
Its an objective test, covering the entire stuff that you learned in your training. It has got negative marking.
 
My Compre was fine. We got our results after a couple of days. Those who couldnt clear it, had a retest (Re-Compre). If they didnt clear it, they were supposed to join the next Long Cycle batch, no matter where it is(Mysore/Bangalore/Chennai.....)
 
This was the case of Fast Track people like me.
 
For LC-Long Cycle people they had more courses in Generic Training like Operating Systems, Client Server Computing...etc. They also had personality building sessions (ILI Sessions) that we didnt have.
 
The had a compre after their Generic Training. After that they have Stream Specific Training for which they have another Compre. Hence they have 2 Compres unlike FT people who have just 1. If a long cycle guy fails in Generic Compre, he has to pass to the Generic Re-Compre & Stream Specific Compre at any cost, else he will have to leave the company.
 
Now dont get scared with this. If you put in some sincere effort you can clear the Compres very easily.
 
My training got over on 11th September. After completion of training, they give us our place of posting & our IBU-Integrated Business Unit. IBU represents a industry vertical like Banking, Telecom, Insurance, Retail etc.
 
In our case our entire batch got posted to Bangalore itself. I was assigned to the IBU CSP - Communication Service Providers. All our clients are telecom service providers like AT&T, Verizon, Sprint-Nextel, British Telecom, Vodafone......
 
Our project is 3 years old, we have 32 people in our team out of which 13 people are at onsite now,i.e. at various US locations of our client - a 'US telecom service provider'. We maintain the billing software of our client. In fact every day we connect to our client's network at US through VPN-Virtual Private Network. One unique thing is that Infy works for its client almost 24hours a day, 5 days a week. Thats because when its 9am here, its 930pm at onsite, so when we enter office our Onsite friends leave, and when we move out at night, they start working. So, Indian IT companies have a big advantage on that front. Sounds cool na.....
 
All seniors in our project are very cool, we are not supposed to call anyone Sir or Madam at Infy, its against the company culture. Work wise life is not very hectic. I just do some scripting in Unix & run some PL/SQL queries, thats it. Not much work, as of now, dont know about the future.
 
Regarding Infy Bangalore campus, its just awesome. 48 buildings, with over 19 thousand people working at one singel campus, and as of now its the single largest IT campus in the entire world, in terms the number of people working out of it.
 
Well, I guess I have written too much....Hope you guys didnt take a small nap in between....
 
I just thought of sharing my experience with you all.
 
All the best for the future, whether its at Infy or some other company.
 
Brijesh Sir, thanks alot once again for giving me the opportunity of my life.