Why did you leave DRDO?

“Subhransu, why did you leave DRDO?”, a much younger colleague once asked me in 2021. For a person 20 years younger, it was of course a question of curiosity. The value of government jobs has once again spiraled up, particularly after the 2008 economic crisis and subsequent high volatility and uncertainty in private sector jobs. Situation is again becoming like my parents’ generation where government jobs were considered prestigious and private sector jobs were looked down upon.

I joined workforce in 1998 after my postgraduation in mechanical engineering from the prestigious Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore. Out of a class of 50 students in our batch of mechanical engineering, only 2 of us joined core mechanical companies. The rest 48 joined private software companies which were the rage during those days with Y2K (year 2000 related software issues) being the dominant theme giving almost everyone the chance to join software companies, go abroad and earn money in dollars. Being from an idealist teachers’ family with more emphasis on knowledge and scant respect for money, I wasn’t particularly interested to do something unrelated to my area of study just to earn more money. I joined the Defense Research and Development Organization (DRDO)’s missile lab at Hyderabad. It was called the Defense Research and Development Laboratory (DRDL), the biggest and the flagship lab of DRDO in the country. It was a cushy government job with all the perks of a typical government job plus the benefits of being with defense ministry such as subsidized products at defense canteens. I got a nice quarter in the scientists’ hostel which was inside a very clean, well developed DRDO township with many facilities for us at nominal or no cost. The township had wide clean roads with a central school for almost free education of the employees’ children, two good marketplaces with all necessary items for a comfortable living. It had good sports facilities including indoor (badminton, volleyball, table tennis, basketball, etc.) and outdoor (lawn tennis, football, etc.) sports facilities which were available at almost zero cost (10 rupees per month). The entry to the township was being manned by central paramilitary forces and it was a safe secluded place. Regular town bus services at frequent intervals were available in plenty to commute to different parts of the bustling Hyderabad-Secunderabad metro city areas. Outside the township boundaries, local markets catered to more needs, such as furniture and electronic items, which were not directly available in the township market places.

To leave such a cushy, comfortable, and most importantly secure job in the government sector and come to a volatile private sector with no job security was a puzzle not only for my younger colleague in question, but also a lot of other people who had joined the workforce after the 2008 recession. But when I left my DRDO job, I was very clear in my head. The work culture at DRDO was not attractive enough for me and I wasn’t really excited by that.

To be clear, DRDO had some of the best minds as scientists with only people from an IIT or IISc background being selected as scientists in those days (Later this criterion was removed, and open recruitment was introduced with anyone with relevant degrees from any recognized institute was eligible to apply. Government had to resort to this when many scientists left DRDO jobs after entry of foreign MNCs to India and new recruits from IITs/IISc were hard to come by for the backfilling and new openings.)

It was not about the quality of the scientists that contributed to the low work culture at DRDO. It was the overall atmosphere of a government job that was hindering a performance-oriented work culture. Most of the support staff of technicians, clerks and peons were enjoying their jobs as typical Indian government employees, working for a very less duration of the day and passing the rest of the time reading newspaper, chatting with colleagues, having tea/coffee/lunch breaks, or simply sitting around not doing anything. The whole atmosphere was such that we needed to have many contract employees doing what the permanent employees were supposed to do as their regular work just to keep the projects running. It was very normal to see contract draughtsman doing engineering drawings while the regular draughtsman will be roaming around in the canteen or the wife of a sweeper sweeping the floor as a contract sweeper while the regular sweeper will be not seen in the department. The peons will typically not do photocopy of a few pages that you would give them to do and waste the full day roaming around and chit-chatting with others but would wait till after 5PM to do those 10mins of work to get paid for the overtime salary. The whole atmosphere was not conducive to a good work culture.

I tried my best to work as sincerely and hard as I could in those two and half years. I used to fight against the system to allow me to work for long hours which was not a regular stuff there. We scientists, as gazetted officers, had no fixed office timings and were free to come to office and leave as and when we wished. But the non-officers (clerks, peons, lab technicians, etc.) had fixed office timings and they had to report in and out times in the time office. But it was very common to see them lining up at the exit gate an hour before the formal office closing time. Lunch breaks of hours were regular.

I used to stay back in office after 5PM to continue learning new stuff such as AutoCAD, Ansys, aerospace design calculations and apply those in my project work. Working live for a strategic missile project of national importance was a big attraction for me and being a bachelor with no other responsibilities, I didn’t see a need to go back to my quarters at regular official closing time. But the problem was the large number of mosquitoes which used to surround and bite me when the evening used to set in. As a scientist, I was given a large room on the ground floor as office which I used to share with another scientist. It was a much more spacious office than the small cubicles that I have been working in since I left that job in 2000, but the windows in that office were so rusted that I was not able to close those before the mosquitoes used to invade the place in the evening. I asked my director if we could get the windows repaired, but as the system in government offices go, it was never a simple thing. Since no one used to stay back after office hours, it was not an important thing to accomplish, and I had to fight with mosquitoes daily. The large open spaces outside our department building with overgrown bushes and untidy surroundings were very conducive for mosquito breeding. DRDO campus occupied a very large area with wide open and large spaces separating different department buildings.

Once in the summer of 1999, I wanted to work in the computer center on a weekend afternoon and went to the office. Those days, we didn’t have personal computers and we had to go to the computer center to work on the Computer Aided Engineering (CAD) and Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) tools such as AutoCAD, SolidWorks and Ansys. However, the duty officer on that day won’t allow me to open the computer center and work there. Nobody ever worked in the weekend and who will be responsible if the computers developed snags, was his argument. Duty officers are scientists or scientific officers who are given charge of the establishment on a rotating basis to take care during after-office hours or on the weekends when the office staff are not present. So, every day after evening hours and on the weekends, one of us officers will don the hat of the duty officer who will have the authority to take care of the establishment during his/her charge period. He/she will have a central para-military force jeep with a driver to roam around the campus and make sure all the sentries are doing their job from different watch towers protecting this vital national establishment of strategic importance. I also donned this role a couple of times during my stay there.

On that day in the summer of 1999, the assigned duty officer was very reluctant to open the lock of the computer center for me to work. I had to plead and fight with him to open the center and finally he budged, and I could do my Ansys runs on that day. I am a responsible gazetted officer of government of India, and I would personally bear any loss of equipment, I argued with him. I am not sure that was the clincher for him to open the center, or just my stubbornness to work that clicked with him.

Unfortunately, even though I got permission to work with the computers, the drinking water cooler was locked and in the height of the 1999 summer afternoon, I had to run around between different departments situated wide apart to finally get to a place where I can have a glass of water to drink when I felt very thirsty in between the work. The year 1999 summer was particularly brutal with very high temperatures killing many people on the east coast particularly in the state of Andhra Pradesh via sunstrokes. I still wonder how I survived the high heat and running around for a glass of water on that day and not falling senseless somewhere! For those of us who don’t understand what does locking a water cooler mean, in India, the water coolers used to be a valuable commodity and guarded with a steel mesh. One steel glass used to be available for drinking water from the cooler and in that era, this glass was also considered valuable and chained to the cooler in case someone thinks of stealing it. During non-working hours, this glass used to be locked close to the tap by the corresponding department peon with the electrical connection to the cooler switched off!!!

I have had similar fights with many other people to get my things done. Fight with the printing department to print my internal reports (I used to be very fond of documenting each of my project work as documents) used to be very frequent. I used to go and sit with the aerodynamics department folks till I get the aerodynamic loads from them in my floppy disk to do my structural calculations! The whole system seemed to be tilted towards working slowly or not working at all, and I had to fight against the system to get things moving at the speed I wanted.

So, it was no wonder I accepted the job offer from one of my DRDO seniors when he offered me a job at Infosys. My senior had left DRDO a little over a year back to join Infosys when they started their engineering division. He was a brilliant engineer who had passed out from IISc many years before me and had seen me working for some time before he left DRDO. I really had no resume that time when I attended the interview for Infosys. My senior took my technical round and I had to only answer a few questions from the HR regarding my expectations around salary and compensation. The fact that they gave me compensation twice of what I was getting at DRDO was only a very small draw for me to leave DRDO. I never calculated and compared hard the true compensation and benefits between the true workplaces. In fact, much later after joining Infosys, when I added the unmentioned benefits at DRDO such as the nice housing, township facilities, PF, gratuity, pension, etc. which were never mentioned in their pay slips, I realized that I didn’t make much higher money at Infosys. But I never regretted my decision to leave DRDO. The work culture was never for me.

It was not only me, but many other scientists and engineers during that time also left cushy government and public sector undertaking (PSU) jobs from eminent establishments such as DRDO, ISRO (Indian Space Research Establishment), BARC (Bhabha Atomic Research Centre), and HAL (Hindustan Aeronautics Limited). Many IAS officers including the current rail and information technology minister, Mr. Ashwin Vaishnav, had also left powerful government jobs to work in private sector as well. At this point, it may seem counter intuitive to leave secure and well-paying government jobs and come to a volatile private job market. But it was a normal and natural thing for many to do at that time. In fact, the mass movements from government jobs to private sector jobs during that period nudged the government to raise the salary and compensation of government employees substantially during the sixth pay commission after this phase which have now made the government sector compensation also quite attractive.

So, things keep changing with time with corrections and counter corrections happening all the time. The government sector jobs which had lost sheen is again back on prestige and demand. Do I regret leaving DRDO now? I don’t think I do. I enjoy the dynamism, the accountability, the exposure, and the performance-oriented work culture in the private sector. The retirement pension is the only thing maybe I wish and miss from my government job 😊.

(Disclaimer: The experiences and views expressed here are purely my personal experiences and views and in no way, represent the overall environment at DRDO labs, either in late 1990’s or at any other point in time. I do respect the brilliant scientists, engineers, technicians, and all other support staff working in various DRDO labs and the great innovations coming out from there for the national security.)