Great Experience!

General Electric is a 100+ years old multi-national company, where I worked as an Engineer for 23 months of my youth life. This article is like a quick (or short) highlights of my stay in GE.

Aviation systems was a newly formed team in Hyderabad Technology Center (HTC) that had five electronics engineers and I was one amongst them. Our team was fairly isolated from rest of 400 and odd employees in the facility as they were working for Energy Engineering business. In order to mingle with them, it had to be through non technical activities. I was very keen in becoming friends with them. After we finished developing our first avionics card, I wasn't loaded with much work; hence my manager let me take up some responsibilities for the "HTC FAMILY DAY '09". Well, Family day is similar to annual day celebration that we had in schools days.

Being a Family Day volunteer gave me license to jump into all those folks who were directly or indirectly connected to organizing team. The organizing team was sub-divided into various functions. I choose to work for the communication function. The communication function involved spreading news, information and awareness pertaining to family day. In this way I got more opportunities to connect with people of other functions like transport, cultural's, event management etc. It was amazing fun to making posters, videos and also working on anchoring script. In those 3 weeks, I become friends with at least one member from each team in our office. Apart from taking up communication related responsibility, I had this crazy thing in my mind. And that was to perform in a group dance.

If you do follow my blog, then you would have read about how I went about trying dance (if you haven't do read my article called 'Lust'). Performing in that group dance turned out to be the greatest fun thing I ever did in my entire life and most importantly I made great friendship with my three other group members. Post Family Day, every day seemed less boring and more vibrant because of these three friends. Jumping into each others desk, leg pulling and chit chat became convenient ways of killing time. Every alternate weekend we came up with some or the other plan for outing. Although at start we four weren't keen in having our other friends part of our fun but it wasn't too late we realized that it was little lame to be exclusive.

I started loving the company after the family day. The Family Day opened up avenues for doing more creative activities. GE Day, which is a national level exhibition and conference of GE India products, was going to happen in Hyderabad. I was very excited to be part of the volunteering team for GE Day. This volunteering team was addressed as GE Scribe team AKA internal journalists for GE Day. By then I had become the in-house specialist in audio mixing and video making. To take my newly developed hobby to next level, I made quite many promotional videos for GE Day involving my colleagues from office. Some video were interviewing a GE leader while some were about employee taking about the event. I must say that a lady from GE Capital, who was heading the social media project for GE Day, gave me great support in doing all those videos. We broadcasted those promotional videos in YouTube to create vibe amongst general public and also to create virtual presence. Besides these promotional videos, I was given an opportunity to make a video on GE Women's Network for GE Day exhibition. The video was to show case various women network activities carried out that particular year. In doing this video I interacted with almost all the top women leaders of this 12,000 employee organization (GE India) while seeking for their inputs. Well, GE Day gave me a new identity in GE.

GE Day was one helluva an experience but I was missing out on engineering. My manager always wanted to engage me in a neat engineering assignment to do justice for my educational qualification. So he let me go on a rotation for a different business in GE. To be precise the rotation was was to work as an electronics engineer for Hardware team of Energy Transmission and Distribution (T&D) group for few months. At that time T&D was developing their first Energy meter completely on their own (in Hyderabad) and I was a novice in that field. I had to put extra hours to gain competency in that domain. My working rate increased from 10 to 16 hrs/day. The work involved various things in product development like designing, simulating, testing, troubleshooting, validating etc. I guess during those 5 months I gained some amazing engineering skills. For this rotation I was reporting to a comparatively young manager. After working with him I feel young managers tend to give more freedom in trying out new ideas.

While doing some performance testing of the Energy meters, I came up with an idea to make the whole testing quick. The idea was making a Mechanical jig instead of doing manual board interconnects check. If I start talking about the jig it would be violation of terms and condition with the company and also will bore you. It was a jig that could save the testing time by a factor of 6. It wasn't easy to make the jig either considering the time constraint as a critical parameter for project execution. However this young manger let go ahead with a condition that work pertaining to the jig had to be done in my time. I was super happy to do it during the weekends and nights. It involved lots of mechanical engineering efforts like developing drawings, cutting, drilling, screwing, mounting connectors and also lots of soldering. I enjoyed doing all but ultimately when I did the testing with the meters it didn't work. I hadn't slept for 3 consecutive nights as I was troubleshooting for the flaw in connections. The time was running out and I was forced to do the testing in the conventional way but this young manager didn't want me to give up. He let me go back and so did I. I could finally crack the thing up and made it functioning. I must say that was one moment of great satisfaction, which I cherished for long.

While working with T&D Hardware team, I made some really good friends and also interacted with many people from various other teams like software, validation, quality control etc. When I returned back to Aviation systems, I felt like a winner.

The Aviation systems group wasn't doing well. The team size hadn't grown rather it had shrunk. It was depressing as we were expecting it to expand rapidly. I was put in a design project where I was a team member of a group sitting in Cheltenham, UK. The project was suppose to be executed by a Digital design engineer where as I was hired as an analog design engineer. I had an option of going back to T&D or work with this project. I decided to work with Aviation systems as I wanted some exposure working with people from other cultural background. I also had the desire to go to UK, though that never happened. Unlike T&D, the work in Aviation systems involved hell lot of documentation. I use to hate documentation but then I got attracted looking at some documents sent by those UK people. I figured out that doing a neat document can help people work with out dependency and project execution happens in a more organized way. Developing concept design and detailed design documents gave me great clarity of project execution. Participating in those reviews gave nice confidence in taking up more complex projects. Who ever said that “if it’s not fun then you are not doing right" is so right!

After going back to Aviation, I re-connected to one of my close friend in that (aviation) team. He had this fetish for physics. I remember discussing hours together with him on classical mechanics, electromagnetic and relativity. I was mostly in the receiving end though. Inspired by those discussion I wanted to have a quiz section called "Back to Basic" in our office News letter. I was an active contributor for two newsletters in GE, one in our site and other for Aviation systems, Grand Rapids, Michigan. A lady, who was the communication leader of our site also the editor of the newsletter, gave complete support in launching the quiz section. I had great fun in setting those quiz questions, which involved physics, engineering and mathematics; but was painful to select the winner as differentiation from the winner to the rest was very difficult. Many times I handed over the responsibility to other members of the newsletters whom I thought could do better judgment. After being part of it for 3 editions, I transferred my responsibility to a smart IITKgp guy. This guy had become a great friend after family day; I must have had some umpteen numbers of discussions with him on various topics. At this point of time I had the feeling that I wouldn't leave GE for long, long time.

Apart from work and other activities, my close friends with whom I had lunch daily had become some of the most lovely people on this earth. The lunch discussions were never calm as it had some controversies, disputes (I created in most cases), leg pulling or cribbing about something or the other. All in all it was fun while few times scary. The walk that we went after having lunch was nothing different from lunch discussions. Some of these friends became closer after attending one of our very close friend's wedding in Indore (check previous post). That trip to Indore is easily one of the high point of my life.

Things were steady until I got a call from this lady with whom I worked for GE Day as part of social media project. She thought I was capable of getting into a very ambitious role in GE corporate though I lacked prerequisite in all dimensions. I must say I had almost forgotten to dream big until that call. I decided to go for it as I was fairly convinced about my candidature. I prepared supporting documents and mailed those to concerned people. I took one of my best friends help to make my profile look super cool. Well, after doing every thing at my disposal, I wasn't considered as a candidate for the selection process. That was like a wake up call midst of my comfortable life in corporate world. After that event, I could figure that if I had to graduate up in life it had to be on my own. Numerous discussions with this best friend of my mine, who helped me prepare those supporting documents, made my thinking clearly towards taking up entrepreneurship. Starting my own business was my college days dream for all four years. However, I decided to wait for some more time until I discussed the same with few of my mentors and advisors.

As the decision of leaving the company became more and more concrete I spent great deal of my time with these close friends in the office. Another significant activity I was indulged in the office hours was playing table tennis. Every day after 6pm my time was mostly dedicated to TT. Around the same time frame the HTC Family Day '10 was also scheduled. This time I wanted to be involved mainly as a participant not as an organizer. The whole 2 weeks of family day preparation and the final event was absolutely amazing. We took part in various competitions like Antakshari, mad-ads, best proposal etc. We even had this contest of wearing particular colour of dress on specific day. During this family day I took up anchoring and also fashion show, which gave me a chance to face the crowd once again. The axiom is Family day will always be fantastic fun.

I informed my friends about leaving the company just after the Family Day. From their expressions I assumed that they were little shocked. I did inform my manager few days after the family day and also filed my resignation. The last week in my office I could meet as many people as possible but yet missed some. My friends arranged an awesome fair-well near Husain sagar lake, which I would never forget. After spending nearly two years in the company I could realize that the most valuable asset, which I gained are well wishers. Here is my thanks to them in a humble way, my last official mail

Hello people,

Today is my last day at work. Like anyone else, I did learn all those things we could possibly learn being in a world-class organization. I wouldn’t want to mention those quite obvious professional skills that I gained but would like to say,”I worked here because of which I could make my living but most importantly didn’t miss out on having fun at any point”. It was fun partially because people with whom I worked always wanted me to do well. With that sense always in their mind, I was always encouraged to do things that I was very keen in doing. These are the people who made big difference in gaining my confidence. Thank you very much for all the support, I respect you just like my teachers. The other factor that ensured I didn’t miss out on having fun was because of these people who became my friends. Some days in office were tough, some days were just boring while other days were quite balanced but during any of these days I always wanted talk to someone or the other, express my thoughts or even get pampered. These are the people who enabled me to be relaxed, happy and energetic all through out my stay here. My dearest friends, today I thank you for being there, you guys rock!

Have a smile on your face, always!

Best wishes,

Ganesh

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