CHENNAI: The latest bug to hit the software industry is the boredom associated with the job itself. "It is quite bugging to stare at the computer all day," K. Ashish, a programmer with a leading software company says. "I don't feel excited looking into code. I'm just here because I wanted exposure to the industry, and get an edge over my competition, before I apply to premier institutions," he adds.

About 25,000 students pass out every year from computing, electronics and Information Technology related branches. The best of these, before the last day of their college, have a choice of job offers apart from post graduation options, thanks to the placement rush.

"In their excitement to get the best students, companies fight tooth and nail on Day One, and even Day Zero sometimes and soon brand the students as Infosys boys or TCS boys," a professor lamented at the recent NASSCOM HR Summit.

Students end up with jobs with starting salaries of Rs. 3 lakh and above.

But, with boredom of the monotony of tasks and lack of job satisfaction, many students are just using these jobs in software companies as waiting rooms to foreign universities and management degrees from the top business schools.

"Beyond a point, it stifles your career," says 21-year-old Aarthi Pillai, who passed out of SSN College of Engineering, only to be placed as a software trainee. "I connect well with people. I am looking at doing HR," she says.

Programmers, the war-horses of the software giants, are getting increasingly tired of the desk routines. "It's a desk job. I don't get to learn at all," says Vineet Shekhar, a top ranker from IIT-Rourkee. Vineet who left his home in Patna cannot wait to get back to study further and go beyond his assistant systems engineer task profile.

Apoorva Parikh arrived at a software job after an eight-month stint as a research assistant in one of the Indian top-most B-schools. Now, after 15 months in a programming job, all he wants to do is change his job profile. It is frustrating, he adds.

"A career choice has to do with what you are good at and where you grow," says Arun Jonas, a 24-year-old systems engineer.

The differential pay scales only make it that much more tougher for them to stay.

Most software companies themselves pay their top management professionals three times what they pay their top technical staff.

Hence, the younger crop of professionals is in no hurry to settle down into a career. They realise that work experience backed up by a postgraduate management or communication degree serve as escalators to the top levels of the top companies in the country.

"Most students use software jobs to bide time till they get into B-schools," says Ramanujam of Career Launcher India. "They write the examinations again and again till they get into one of the top B-schools. At least 40-50 per cent of those who take up our tests have work experience in software and the services sector," he adds.

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