When Balachandran Sreekandath returned to India after working eight years for Synopsys, adjusting to the work environment here appeared as hard as his transition from a left to right-hander. Still a lefthander, Sreekandath believes it is his optimism that makes challenges acceptable and keeps his spirits high. Although the differences were initially in terms of work culture, he soon adjusted and introduced an attitudinal shift in his team. “I order my team to come to work like you go for an outing and enjoy it,” he says.

Sreekandath, a technical application manager, follows his own orders everyday. “I’ve been enjoying Synopsys since day one and every day has been a learning experience,” he says. Currently sitting in his Bangalore office, he is dealing with a team of 25 application consultants-training and learning application engineering. He also helped Synopsys set up office in Delhi and plant (Market Capitaliza-tion) $2.7 billion EDA Company on India’s technology map. “Though my interest lay in technical side of the company, I did hold a managing portfolio for sometime in Mountain View, California,” he explains.

This portfolio is the only anomaly in his resume satiated with designations and now technical manager designation. For his own resume, perhaps a synonym for career, Sreekandath has come a far from his hometown Kerala. Today at Synopsys’ Bangalore office, he is faring with team management. “Hiring and retention is one of my major concerns. You don’t know who would be the right candidate to hire, and after hiring how to retain the right candidate,” he says. Sreekandath believes in giving 100 percent to his work no matter the task, while also creating a good relationship among his work force by utilizing a happy and positive environment.

This is the same environment his father created after his engineering graduation from CET, Trivandrum, encouraging him to venture and discover the rest of the world. At the same time, his academic superiority placed him in CMC Ltd in Bangalore. CMC was then concentrating on the mainframes and Sreekandath was granted the opportunity to unleash his desire for technology to understand computer architecture. But in just ten months time, he realized that the place was not his teacup. “It was not that career oriented and I also got an offer from CDAC so I choose to leave,” he says.

Sreekandath was not only a part of major hardware projects in CDAC like the PARAM computer building, but was also immersed in the new world of the open-culture, bubbly environment of tufosi engineers. After almost five years at CDAC, Sreekandath had another turning point in his life. Comit system, a CA based software company, was keen on setting up a hardware lab—a domain that Sreekandath had some expertise with from CDAC. Soon he procured the opportunity to and helped Comit to set up a hardware facility. But this position demanded dedication from its employees which Sreekandath, now a family man, could not give. “So, I had to move a step backwards in profession to move front in life,” he says. He left Comit to join View Logic—a semiconductor company acquired by Synopsys— in a much lower rank and worked there for a year.

In the summer of 2002, he relocated to India to spend time with his family, and work at a place closer to his heart. By now Sreekandath also theorized a policy of unifying his professional and personal goal to live an optimized life. “One should steer his personal goal towards professional goal and see to that his goals are oriented for a better life,” he says.

After seventeen years, four different jobs, two time zones, three different places and of course a balancing act between family and work, Sreekandath claims he is enjoying everything. But enjoying alone is not life, he furthers. One should strive hard and more importantly have an optimistic attitude towards life. He believes that the budding Indian engineers don’t have much industry understanding, and are too focused in their domain with little world knowledge and the verticals outside their own. The key is to understand and learn the industry before you actually start working and then learning. And this, he says, can be achieved only with reading good journals and industry magazines.