I thought I failed my career before it even started.
2024 Computer Science Engineering graduate.
8.7 CGPA. No backlogs.
Still couldn’t get placed.
COVID destroyed our placement cycle and while everyone around me was posting “Joined XYZ Company ” on LinkedIn, I was sitting at home wondering if 4 years of engineering was useless.
Then my father’s friend gave me a chance in his manufacturing company.
Not a tech startup.
Not an IT company.
A hardcore automobile metal sheet manufacturing business.
I joined at ₹20k/month as a software developer.
At first I honestly thought:
“What software engineering am I even going to learn in a factory?”
Turns out… a lot.
The company has around 22 units and already had an internal ERP system. There are basically only 2 software developers handling everything.
Because the team is tiny, I got thrown directly into real engineering work:
One of the craziest things I built was a cloud-based blood donation management platform for the company’s yearly donation drives across 5 locations.
It handled:
We also use tools like Claude, ChatGPT, Codex, Notion AI, etc. heavily in development and automation.
And honestly?
I learned more practical engineering here than many of my friends in big service companies doing repetitive ticket work.
The company trusts me now.
Current salary is ₹20k/month and growing.
But here’s the problem:
The environment is very traditional manufacturing culture:
I genuinely love building products, automation, AI systems, dashboards, and solving business problems…
…but I don’t want my entire life to become only work.
Now I feel stuck between two choices:
Sometimes I feel insecure because I didn’t start in a famous IT company.
But sometimes I also feel like this unconventional path gave me more real ownership than a normal fresher role ever would have.
Curious what experienced developers or founders think.
Would you stay longer in this situation or move on?