How good is my job ?

"Your job is very good, just have to go to office, sit in AC rooms and get salary, that too better salary every year. Our life is very tough, we need to struggle daily. " - my friend commented on me, he is into construction business.

His comments made me ponder a bit on my job. Is my job very good? Is my job a smooth one without struggle? Whatever little I have achieved in my career, is it really worth compared to the things I have sacrificed in life?

In childhood, many of my enjoyments were curtailed due to studies. I liked cultural programs, drama, theater etc. but never attended any of those completely, as it impaired my studies. But my friend enjoyed every bit of those till the end.
During my higher secondary studies, often I used to get up very early for studies. I was allergic to cold and frequently suffer from cold-cough-fever, but still used to study in chilled nights.

After completing engineering, I had difficulty getting a good job. Even after getting job, changed couple of times as I did not like them, they involved traveling a lot in NE states which caused severe stomach issues.
I worked in a company that supplied machines mostly to army / air force units. So, I had to travel for around 15 to 20 days in a month, visiting various army and air force camps, most of them located at remote places.
I have plenty of vivid memories of that time. Friendly behaviour of defense personnel (officers and jawans alike), sleeping in barracks with army jawans with loaded guns on both of my sides, trapped in firing between army and terrorist while travelling with an army unit in Churachandpur, caught by army patrolling jawans while moving inside their camp at night in Mokokchung, getting trapped in landslides and spending days in the bus while going to Lunglei in Mizoram, the stunning natural beauty of north eastern states, ice as big as cricket balls in rain of Meghalaya, bus journeys in freezing cold winter nights with people smoking all over the bus, spending winter nights in Shillong hotels, enjoying yummy fish in Silchar hotels, spending few nights in a haunted kind of PWD guest house in Naharkatia, struggle to get a hotel room in Tinsukia to spend the night - finally the rickshawala took pity on me and searched a hotel room for me, poor road conditions in hilly areas - one side of the roads had no support at all for vehicles and can see the foot of the hill from bus ... the list goes on.
Eating outside food daily at various places of 7 sister NE States (some of them were not clean at all) caused stomach issues, which compelled me to make my next career move, to software.

Switching to software industry was not an easy task, it took me around 4 years of preparation, hard work and studies to find a decent job of my choice.
Initially I learnt software part time along with my job. After quitting job, I landed up in Bangalore.
I still remember those jobless days (or years ???) in Bangalore. Sleeping in a hall with other job seeker friends of various ages, visiting companies with CVs in hand (email was very new then; many of our CVs probably never reached the HR office, the security guard who used to collect them probably had used the CVs to wrap some of his personal stuff), endlessly waiting for the phone to ring to receive an interview call, checking emails daily on cyber cafe in the hope that an interview mail is waiting (we used to visit a particular cyber cafe daily, finally the owner decided to give us monthly pass; pay once and use for the month, it turned out to be little cheaper), calculating the remaining money and decide how long can survive (I saved money from my previous jobs and sustained the whole struggle period on my own. Many others were dependent on their parents, they had a tough time answering their parents on how long to wait for the job :( , we had no answer, the job market was down. Few friends could not sustain and returned home. Those who remained and struggled are all happily well settled now), studying and learning new things, friends helping each other to crack an interview ... and so on.
It was a very tough period but provided me with lots of new learning experiences.

Even after getting a job of my choice, my life was not very smooth.
In software field, the technologies change dramatically. I had to keep myself updated all the time by learning new technologies and getting myself certified. I started with Visual Basic and then I had to learn many new things (ASP, VB script, JavaScript, C, Java, J2EE, html, CSS, xml, json, struts, spring, Oracle, jQuery, hibernate, typescript, ant, maven, angular js, project management tools ... the list goes on). We need to keep ourselves updated on latest technologies, till the day we retire from job.

I never paid too much attention to salary, my main concentration was on the kind of work and the work life balance. Luckily, I was earning a decent salary too.
Work life balance is always a problem, not only for me but for everyone in software industry. We have deadline before which we need to complete our work, so, often we need to spend late hours in office, in order to complete our work. At some point of time, I always used to return home from office at around 12 at night, that too just after marriage.

Working for long hours by sitting continuously in front of computer in AC rooms, causes us varieties of health issues, mainly various body pains. I have back, shoulder, neck, knee pain, migraine. Many of my friends have developed serious neurological issues.

Yearly Increment in salary is also a concern. In one of my earlier company, increment was very less, I was concerned. In my current company, I received a very good increment last year, highest in my career. That's also a concern. In fact, one of my friends and I had a discussion with manager about it and even told that less increment is fine with us. High increment on a high salary may lead to a situation where the company can no longer afford us and may tell us to leave the company, in case of job cut. Getting a new job at high salary may be difficult - may need to learn many new things, may need to obtain certifications - involves a lot of effort, time, money.

Also, software industry is quite volatile and frequent job cuts are very common. So, at any moment, we may lose our jobs, due to any reason such as project or company not doing well, acquisition, merger etc. We just get 2 months’ notice period.
I have experienced closure of 2 companies that I worked in, till now. Probably I need to look out for another job in few months from now, the client US company our team worked for is acquired by another company which decided not to continue with the product that we work on, rendering our whole team redundant.

Perhaps my friend does not know about all these kinds of concerns in my job and hence his remark, but with so many things happening in the background, I don't know what to say about my job. Is it really smooth? Is it really good? I don't know.
But whatever it is, I enjoy my job. I know it has many challenges and uncertainties but facing them and overcoming them gives me a sense of accomplishment. Every struggle period is actually a golden period - of learning new things, of enhancing one's capabilities. A person who never struggled in life probably has not achieved much.

Every job has its own advantages and challenges. Rather than nagging about the difficult things, we should try to do something about it and make our life beautiful.