Borrowed from SAMPADA old editions – for the 10th Anniversary Special Issue – Interviews section. This one is of Venkatesh, 1991 CSE.
Team Sampada: Could you give us a brief introduction about yourself and about your career journey?
Venkatesh Sir: I completed my computer science engineering in 1991 and have been working mostly with software products. Started with Sonata Software where I spent 4 years, but my longest stint was with Finacle at Infosys, a core banking product suite. I currently head the Banking and Financial Services Vertical at ITC Infotech. My primary area of interest and expertise is large program planning and execution, with my heart always in software engineering best practices.
Team Sampada: What are the most memorable memories from your college days that you reminisce even today?
Venkatesh Sir: All the computer science subjects were of great interest to me. Outside of the class room, the cricket we used to play and the time we spent at our canteen still remind me of the good old days. The newsletter than Shankar Vedantam ran was indeed remarkable for the content and effort.
Team Sampada: How was the faculty who taught you? Did you have any favorites?
Venkatesh Sir: I enjoyed the lectures from HNS, ARV and Venugopal Raju Sir very much. They had an ability to not only talk about the subject but relate it to a lot of other topics, which helped us recall better.
Team Sampada: How was your journey as an engineer when compared to the times now where there are more industry opportunities and technological advancements?
Venkatesh Sir: The entire industry started picking up around the time I graduated, thanks to our late Prime Minister Narasimha Rao and Dr. Manmonhan Singh who was then the finance minister. The opportunities came in the way of a few products developed in India and services delivered to global organizations out of India. While this gave a good exposure to enterprise systems and tightly controlled software development processes, the quality of work outsourced was not very high initially. These days, with a lot of global organizations opening up their own offices in India, a lot of mainstream work happens in India in advanced technologies in automation, AI/ML and IOTs. This gives opportunities for our engineers to stay on top of the emerging trends and master the latest technologies.
Team Sampada: What role did UVCE play in your life? If you get an opportunity to address the current students about what are the things they should not miss during the college days which will help them in the future, what would you tell them?
Venkatesh Sir: UVCE provided the right platform to pick up the fundamentals of computer science upon which, I could easily build upon later in my career. This helped me understand what it takes to deliver pristine quality software with high productivity. My advice to the students would be to focus on learning the fundamentals of software engineering very well during the 4 years and not so much worry about the number of languages they learn etc, which will always keep changing anyway. While having fun is very important during the college days, putting in the required hard work to master the fundamentals is equally important for a long successful career.
– Venkatesh, Sampada-119
