Remembering Infosys

Ten years ago on this day I received one of the most antic­i­pat­ed emails of my life: the job offer let­ter from my first employ­er, Infos­ys [NASDAQ:INFY].

I was wait­ing for the out­come of the inter­view and I knew they’d email me the out­come. I was very keen so I could not wait more for their email. But I had no way to instant­ly know if I received any email.

At that time the inter­net was not preva­lent and was only avail­able at cyber­cafes. Yahoo was cool. So I was using Yahoo Mail. My mobile phone was a Motoro­la Talk­a­bout I loaned from my uncle. It has no sil­i­con that could hook it up to data net­works. Mobile noti­fi­ca­tions were lit­er­al­ly unheard of.

But thank­ful­ly Yahoo used to offer a ser­vice called Yahoo SMS Alerts. Yahoo will send an SMS with the sub­ject of the email to the reg­is­tered mobile num­ber when­ev­er a new email arrives in the inbox. So in 2004, on this same day, I received a text that con­veyed the good news.

I became an Infos­cion (scion of Infos­ys fam­i­ly) and remained so for lit­tle over 6 years. This expe­ri­ence changed me in few inter­est­ing ways. Because Infos­ys is not like any oth­er com­pa­ny in its class. I say this not just because I worked there or peo­ple are world class or cam­pus­es are mag­nif­i­cent. I can nev­er for­get my train­ing expe­ri­ence at the then unfin­ished Infos­ys Mysore GEC. [Yes, what’s seen in this video is the train­ing facil­i­ty of an IT ser­vices com­pa­ny].

Visions diverge and things change so I even­tu­al­ly moved on. Now I am an Exfos­cion (ex-Infos­cion) and a minor­i­ty investor. I miss a few things but if I have to pick one sin­gle thing I miss about Infos­ys, it would be the Infy­BLOGS, a Live­Jour­nal based inter­nal blog­ging plat­form. I will write more about this lat­er.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, once the dar­ling of the Dalal Street is now going through the chal­leng­ing times but I am con­fi­dent that Infos­ys will reclaim its lead­er­ship under the guid­ance of Dr. Vishal Sik­ka.

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