Pitfalls of placements
The first pitfall is that most students don’t think they can choose. Students think that once they’re placed, they can’t apply for other jobs. College placements have “one student one job” policies that prohibit students with job offers to apply for new jobs. If you want to do what’s right for you, you should only use college placements as a backup and apply offline for the jobs that matter the most to you. It should be noted that there’s nothing wrong with the placement efforts that colleges make. Infact, most colleges go out of their way to ensure their students get good placements. From the college’s perspective, they have to do right by all their students. You should leverage the placement opportunity to secure a job and then make your own efforts to explore better opportunities on your own. Most colleges require companies to offer waitlists, so that if you find a better job off-campus, someone else in your college will get your offer. This way, you get a better role and you also ease the load on your college’s placement team.
Not all jobs have the same future potential. Imagine you get a job in a large MNC. You will probably be working on some of their proprietary technology and codebase. To be effective at any job, you’ll have to gain a decent mastery of the technologies used. But, in a couple of years, if you choose to shift to a new job, most of your “learning” will be irrelavent because the technology may be proprietary or legacy. This issue is even more pronounced with consultation roles where you don’t even master the technology, but the client. So, think about what technology or stack you’ll be working on and what kind of future the skills you acquire will have.
Most students don’t realise that job selection is also a field selection. Placement divisions usually only care about getting you into one job or the other. But, for you that’s a huge decision. If you get placed in a networking company, your entire career will get pushed into that domain. If not networking, may be banking or data analytics etc. There is nothing wrong with any domain. But it has to be a conscious choice based on your interest. You’ll never be able to reach your full potential in a domain that you’re not interested in. It is better to choose a job with a much smaller package in a domain that you have a natural liking towards than a bigger package in a domain that you’re not very interested in. If you don’t have any particular preference, you should explore a more generic domain like app development or product development that will give you maximum exposure so that you can decide on a domain at a later date.
Everybody thinks a large compensation package means a good job. Often, this is not the case. If you’re being compensated a lot, it means you’re giving up a lot. Big companies typically pay high salaries to talented people to get them to do mediocre jobs. If you get tempted by the brand or the pay, you may end up working on some insignificant project that may just be abandoned by the big company. Always insist on knowing what you’ll be working on. If you can’t get a clear answer, it means you are just a resource and the company will make you work on whatever is most profitable for the company at that time. Avoid such roles.
What kind of team you will be part of also matters a lot. If you join a company where everyone is in their late forties and are looking to have a peaceful work environment where they can go home to their kids at 5pm, it will be very hard for you to sustain your drive. If you join a team with a culture of politics, you’ll end up wasting a lot of your heart on ugly issues and never get the headspace and the opportunities to pursue excellence. If you join a large team where everything is process oriented, you’ll feel like a robot and not find inspiration and ownership. So, insist on knowing your team and see if you find anyone inspiring. A great mentor who can inspire you can change your career completely.
A lot of people get placed on campus, get comfortable at their job and stay there forever. Don’t stick with one job for more than 3 years. Learning at any place saturates after a period and you’ll start having diminishing returns. You will start becoming comfortable at your job. It is very hard to reset your career if you fall into a comfort zone. It is easy when you begin, but the later you get into your career, the harder it becomes. So, keep moving every 2-3 years.
That said, know that you can have a 30 year career. So, don’t worry about making the wrong decisions. Every decision will give you some experience. You should embrace it, adapt and evolve. You have a lot of time to course correct if necessary. You’ll only lose by becoming complacent. Remember, days are long but decades are short.