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We often get very interesting questions from students about various career prospects. Some of the these questions are as follows.

• What are the top technology companies?
• What are differences between a service company and a product company?
• What are typical salaries in different companies for freshers?
• What are the skills needed to crack a job in a top technology company?
• How important is my degree to get a good job?
• What is the role of first job in career growth?

We will be answering all the above questions in this blog. The opinion presented below is personal based on several years of experience in the industry and academics. The idea is to share experience as it is and not to judge whether a particular organization is good or not.

What are the Top Technology Companies

I would put a company in the category of top technology companies which has made lives of millions of people better through its technology and products. Google, IBM, Nokia, Microsoft, Samsung, Intel, ARM, Amazon, Facebook, Flipkart etc. are examples of such companies. Working on a product or service which has potential to have positive impact on lives of millions of people is very satisfying and also potentially very rewarding.

What are Differences Between a Service Company and a Product Company

This point is often overlooked by the fresh graduates, but it can have significant impact on the career growth. A product company relies on innovation. Typically the product is designed in-house by a small number of engineers (at most in hundreds) and sold in the market. If the product becomes successful, profit of the company grows and also per employee revenue. Part of this profit comes back to R&D. The most important asset of these companies is the people and hence they are typically valued very highly within the company (which also reflects in their salary numbers).

Service based model is another way in which companies operate. In this model, one company provides services to another company and gets paid for it. This model has existed for years. Dominant form of service is outsourcing which is as follows. A big company say A has to get some work get done from outside which could be very labor intensive and it wants to optimize cost. Company A announces this work as project in the market. Many service companies will bid for this project. Suppose company B wins the project. Then company B will be providing services to company A and hence B will be termed as service company. Typically B will put many people on the project and each one will be billed to A. That is how company B will earn money. Part of this payment will go to employees of B and part will remain with the company. Profit of B in this case is Number of employee on the project * (billing amount per employee - amount paid to employee). For obvious reasons, B will try to increase the difference. Many business units of companies such as TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Cognizant etc. fall in the category of B. Typically copyright or IP of the project is owned by A and B only provides people with the right set of skills to execute the project.

Note that a big company may be doing both the product and services based work. For example companies such as IBM, HP etc. do both. As explained above, since the service based model is very people centric, service companies hire more people, but due to obvious reasons to keep decent profit margins, they cannot pay very high salaries to their individual employees. This by no way means that one cannot have good growth in the service company, however, it is very important to understand the business model of your work to have a stronger career growth trajectory.

What are the Typical Salaries in Different Companies for Freshers

Let us pick up a product say a smartphone and try to identify various industry segments associated with it. After all, smartphone is a hardware. We can touch and feel it. So in rolling out this product, there is significant effort in designing hardware. On this, an operating system such as Android, iOS etc runs. On top of it, there are several applications such as messaging service, phone service, games etc. are running. So there is significant software also involved. The phone must be manufactured and assembled. This leads to manufacturing industry and finally if there is a problem, you might want to call the company to get some help. This will fall into IT enabled services such as call center etc. All these are shown pictorially in the figure below.

Let us take a look at the typical entry level salaries in the above segments. All numbers in the table below are INR Lacs. Further these figures are only indicative and can vary from company to company. One thing to note is that a job profile which involves routine work will pay you much less compared to a profile which involves more creativity and development.

Software	2-4L : Services companies 3-7L : Group 2 MNC 7-10L : Group 1 MNC
Hardware design	3-4L : Services companies 5-9L : MNCs
IT enabled services	1-2L : BPOs 2-4L : KPOs 1-3L : IT services
Manufacturing	1-2L : Small organized sector 2-3L : Mid size to large firms

In the table above, MNC refers to the Multi National Corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Intel etc. The grouping system as above is based on how well the employer pays, not based on the size of operations.

What are the Skills Needed to Crack a Top Technology Company Job

These skills can be enumerated as follows.

• Problem solving and effective communication
• Generic Programming Skills
• Domain knowledge

In product development, we encounter several engineering problems to be solved in new ways. That is why any technology company will pay a lot of attention to your problem solving skills. They will test it out either through some aptitude test or by giving you problems (puzzles or some other problem scenario) during interviews.

Another very important aspect is your communication skills. If you can’t communicate effectively your thoughts and idea to others, chances are very less that you would get hired. In the industry, everyone works in a team. Hence proper communication skills are must.

If you are aspiring to take a software job, companies will also will test your generic programming skills. A couple of such important skills are as follows.

1. Whether you know a popular operating system such as Linux from user perspective
2. C programming
3. Data structures
4. How you go about solving a programming problems

Apart from the above, top technology companies may also test how familiar are you with object oriented design and common algorithms.

Finally your domain knowledge comes into picture. After all, each company is developing products/services in particular domain, and you will be working on those area only when you have basic knowledge of those domains. Let us take a look at a few domains from software and hardware design and figure out what domain knowledge companies are looking for.

Domain	Example companies	Domain knowledge needed for entry level job
Generic software	Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Adobe	Requirement varies from company to company. Good programming knowledge is a must, additional knowledge like database management, image processing etc. are value add.
Networking and system software	Cisco, NetApps, Cavium, Microsoft, Veritas	Operating systems, network protocols, Systems programming experience
VLSI and Electronic design automation	Intel, nVIDIA, AMD, TI, Synopsys, Cadence	Digital systems design, computer architecture
Embedded systems	All consumer electronics companies and their vendors; Samsung, Bosch, Freescale, TI	Digital systems design, computer architecture, assembly level programming

How Important is My Degree to Get a Good Job

We get 3-4 years during BTech/MTech/MCA programs. This is a lot of time to build some critical domain knowledge. For example, if you are studying Electronics and Communication Engg., you would get plenty of time to make yourself strong in Digital Design, Microcontrollers, Networking etc. This will give you an advantage if you want to build career in VLSI, Embedded Systems or Networking. Other branches will also help build similar skills. Your degree program also helps you to improve problem solving skills through problems and projects in different courses. Further, if you get good grades, it at least shows that you are sincere which is very important in professional life. Hence don’t ignore your degree program and do well there.

What is the Role of First Job in the Career Growth

Once you would start a job, you would get very little time outside your work. For some reason, if you don’t want to continue at your organization, it becomes quite hard to move out across domains. This is simply because you have little time to learn outside your work. Because of this most of the people get stuck in the area of their first job and are left with little options for career growth. Hence do the following.

• Find out what your potential employer works on and what their business model is.
• Ask in which group you will be put once you start in the company. Typically big service companies may not be able to answer this due to many variables on project requirements.
• Find out what kind of salaries people get in the company after say 10 years down the line and whether people grow in technical ladder or have to move into management ladder. This doesn’t apply to startups due to lack of visibility.

How can VirtuQ Help

We can help you in the following ways.

• We offer various skill enhancement courses, join them.
• Discuss with us in our forums. We would love to share our experiences with you.

If you enjoyed reading the above article and gained new insights, sign-up at VirtuQ and connect with us at facebook http://www.facebook.com/virtuq.