I attended a Town Hall meeting yesterday of Genpact from who I currently contract with. It was very interesting meeting with about 70 odd people attending it. One of the things that pleasantly surprised me is the strength of non-Indian representation. Genpact is one of the mid-tier IT firms based out of in India and having worked for such consultancy firms before I expected large Indian diaspora with occasional Aussies.

This was the very case in the first company that I worked here in Australia and contracting for LINK Group, as a MindTree employee. In the annual parties that we had back then, I could count with my fingers on number of Aussies in the whole pact. So it was quite a sight to see a change.

The one difference I can see right away is whereas in MindTree there was predominant presence of developers, here I could see the opposite. This would only mean , at least to me, expansion is yet to happen for the company. There were two main speakers who gave an update of the company’s outlook, how it fared from last year, exciting new clients that they bagged this year. The company looks to be heading very strong with really good performance outlook.

Right at the end, the meeting then veered into employee feedback they obtained and what it meant to them, how they are going to address it etc. It was it this point, I was kind of zoned out.

It reminded me of all the times that I have been a salaried full-time employee, for whom talks like this used to invigorate a sense of belonging in me. Ever since I have been contracting, events like this put a different perspective on thinking.

Post the meeting, I stayed on for a while just to have a casual chat with any of the folks there. It was during that time I got asked – so who do you really work for?

That’s when for the first time, I got a sense of liberation. Being on contract, is in a way being on your own. In truest sense the answer would be I work for the client as that is my primary responsibility. The question, though, is much broader than that. In absence of allegiance, for whom am I really working?

Ever since the day I have started working, my first and foremost dedication is to the quality of work I deliver. It has to be flawless, easily scalable, extensible and most importantly well-documented. It is the work that gives me the utmost satisfaction. The one thing I have consciously decided to focus on now is to improve my technical knowledge and gain inroads into big data engineering space.