Truth about : Product vs Service based

When I reached my pre-final year of engineering at MIT, I witnessed my T-Senior’s placement struggles as all others. In MIT we have this tradition of calling one as “Technocrat Senior” – the senior guy with the same register number, who is technically the guide for everything.  I was interested to know how he managed to clear his interviews and other things. My T-Senior was an interesting guy, you can never see him studying much but still he scores. One of the best choreographers, and right now a director as well !

I didn’t ask much about his interviews, Frankly speaking I was little afraid that his friends might rag me  (even though I was in my pre-final year ), but still he shared his experience with a certain MNC where he cleared all the rounds. Prior to this MNC which comes in the dream category, we were allowed to have an offer from a non-dream category as well. And yes, he had an offer from a service company (non-dream quota) with that in hand, he entered the final rounds of the product company (dream quota).

He said that he was questioned as why would he chose this company to the one for which he had an offer already. He told them an analogy which is, if a kid is given a new toy to play with, he/she always likes to play with them for a longer time than the older one. And immediately they asked him what if another new toy comes in ?!! Actually he didn’t expect that, Clever guy .. he managed to come up with an answer to overshadow the mistake he made in the analogy quoted above. He then said, that’s a service company and this is a product company. I would like to contribute to a product and be recognized among the few rather than being a part of a crowd, where the probability of me & my work going unnoticed is pretty high. Taking into consideration :  work load, work-life balance and the package compensation, he said I’d rather choose this one.  

Well, that was his answer and yea I know that everyone has their own version for this. Some might agree with this, while some might argue about the onsite opportunities etc. But the truth is, almost all the things are same. What I hear from most of my friends working across different product companies is that, the kind of work taken over by them (ie., in India) is almost similar to that of the service side. I mean, none of the product companies do own the core technology projects here except for few, and all others own projects that needs maintenance, support, UI  plumbing and documentation. (trust me )

And if you take into consideration about the work load, work-life balance and the *package compensation*, it might look like its skewed to one side (product side) but its not ! .. It’s the same, except for the dress code and the work timings. The above mentioned answer was attractive only during  our final year, when we had a product company’s offer letter in our hands, but the truth  :-/ nobody told us. We had it figured out ourselves. No no, Im not going to tell you that the far off land is always green Noo…  After two and a half years, I’m telling you that its :” Same Shit  “.. !