Day One at OpenText

Bengaluru, 18th August

First day of a six month internship, and I reached the office half an hour early, because that is what nervous people do. It is near EGL, Embassy Golf Links, and the first thing that hits you is the scale. Glass buildings, cabs pulling up one after another, people stepping out with laptop bags and that specific corporate walk, the one that says I have a 9:30 standup.

I was also scared. I was the only Nepali guy in the batch, walking into a room where I did not know a single person.

We went to the Centrum building first, where HR and the talent acquisition team were waiting with our ID cards, the same faces from campus hiring. Holding an ID card with a company logo and your own name on it does something to you. Then they told us to go have breakfast. The mess was enormous, and the food was actually good, which I had not expected.

The session, and the laptop

Induction came after breakfast. What to expect over six months, how fast the environment moves, how experienced the seniors are. Then the line: you were selected from a pool of thousands. Standard HR line, said in every company in every city, but it lands differently when you are sitting in a conference room on your first day.

They also mentioned that a lot of full time employees have come out of this internship program, which is the polite way of saying work well and there may be a job at the end of it.

The most useful thing they said was the most humbling. Enterprise code is a different animal, with processes and reviews and standards, and the college projects you are proud of may not count for much here. Fair enough.

Then IT handed out our stacks: laptop, charger, mouse. The laptop was used, so I was expecting something tired. It has 64 GB of RAM and a 1 TB SSD. My personal machine is an M1 Mac with 8 GB and a 256 GB SSD that has carried me through four years of engineering. We also set up the internal apps for food and cabs. The company provides cabs for travel, and I have taken enough crowded buses to know that is not a small thing.

Next we met our buddies, the senior software engineers who mentor you through the internship and answer the questions you feel stupid asking. I shook hands with mine and asked what we were supposed to do now. He said he had no idea either. Nothing builds trust faster than two people being equally clueless in the same room.

It turned out to be an icebreaker. One person from each team goes to the front, draws something, the others guess. It was good fun.

Then lunch. I spent four years at JAIN College of Engineering, where the campus food was strictly vegetarian. We ate outside constantly and cooked in the hostel like a group of men who had each watched exactly one YouTube video. OpenText has a non-veg counter in the cafeteria. That plate meant something to me.

The ragging room

After lunch we met our engineering managers. An engineering manager assigns your work, guides you, reviews your performance, and quietly decides whether you are full time material while asking how it is going.

Mine said we should go meet the team, then added, completely deadpan, that nobody had done any work all day because they were waiting to dump it on the interns.

We walked over to the OpenText Infinity building, five floors, our team on the fourth. First we met a senior gentleman whose designation I did not catch, because my brain had stopped recording by then, and he was warm about it, talking to us about the work culture. Then my manager called his entire team into a meeting room, all twenty-five of them, just to meet us. And then he grinned and said they were going to rag us.

For three years I had been the senior. Now I was standing at the front of a room being ragged by people who write production code for a living. They said they would make us dance, or sing. I can do neither. In the end nothing happened. We introduced ourselves, they said their names, and I forgot all twenty-five within four seconds. Other interns actually did have to sing and dance. Some walked into their cabin, sat down, and nothing happened at all.

Then we got our seats, and the floor was silent. Twenty-five people locked into their screens, typing. In college, silence means an exam. Here it just means Tuesday.

We started setting up our laptops, which on corporate machines means VPNs and security tools and configuration screens.

My manager came by and we asked what work we should start with. He said our job for the day was to find the gym and the table tennis court. So we went hunting, and on the way we saw the other teams and the size of the place. The gym is on our own floor. No free weights, which hurt, mostly cardio machines, one small lat pulldown, a basic cable machine, and for reasons I still do not understand, a foosball table inside the gym. The table tennis court is on the top floor and was packed. We came back, compared notes with the other interns, everyone deep in the same setup ritual, and found the free hot beverage machines. Hot chocolate and coffee, free.

5:40 PM

We got back to our desks and found them empty. Everyone had left. It was 5:40. I called my manager, who had also gone home, and still asked if we could leave, because some part of my brain thinks permission is mandatory.

He laughed and said of course. We took a few photos, the kind you send your parents with no caption, and went home.

Day one: one massive office explored, a laptop , a fake ragging survived, good food, and a gym located. Not a single line of code.

Six months to go.