I worked in a small company right after college, worked with TCS for 7+ years after that and with Cognizant (another services firm) for close to 2 years.

Now, I have founded my own startup with friends and looking forward to building some kick-ass solutions.

EDIT: Clarification - My advice to freshers is also the same - Do not pass up an opportunity to work in a startup or good engineering companies.

Its a long comment, but I have to narrate my experience to convey what it means for someone like me to have worked in TCS or Cognizant.

I graduated from college in 2001 at a time when every IT company was firing employees and most of my batch mates took jobs in call centers (to work in night shifts). I was one of the fortunate few to get job in a startup and I worked there for a year. The way I grew up in remote village & my background, I never had any financial backup (I was pretty much broke) nor the knowledge that I could start a company on my own - I just did not know then. Call me stupid. But it is just that - I did not have any exposure to such a thing.

Alas, I lacked the perspective to really appreciate what a blessing it was to stumble upon an opportunity to work in startup and looked for a better paying job in a year. I come from a lower middle class background who had to work my way through and I had an obligation to earn money to start supporting my parents when my father had retired by that time and felt obligated to support my brother's education.

For people not familiar with this - in India it is perfectly normal for grown ups to stay with parents even after marriage, support them through their retired life and brother or sister's extended family is also considered part of your family. That is how it is in a joint family setup, in places I have grown-up. It is just part of the culture, though it is changing rapidly.

When the big services companies started recruiting later, I took up job with TCS and worked my way through learning product implementations, integrating purchasing apps with different ERPs. These may not be supremely engineering problems, but definitely problems my customers had and worth solving. And I did it really well to the extent my customers still vouch for my ability to solve problems for them.

I do not for a single day regret what I did there. In fact I learnt a lot about business, understanding that throwing technical knowledge at every solution is NOT necessarily the best way and there are ways to tackle and provide best value to businesses.

I credit my functional knowledge to the experience in TCS and Cognizant where I had the opportunity to work on some of the support projects as well as best of implementation projects.

How did I gain knowledge of Price Management domain again? I volunteered to take up Quality Assurance of the existing SAP solution, learnt it really well and took up the implementation pieces so we could 'reengineer' the existing solution.

Now I am fortunate to get an opportunity and having the necessary financial stability (thanks to my 10 years work experience so far) and the perspective that I am working on my own startup.

I think we have to keep in mind that we all take one baby step at a time - as a person, as a bunch of folks as well as a nation.

I have lot of respect for the vision of Mr. Ratan Tata (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratan_Naval_Tata) and the TATA group (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tata_Group) to invest in something like this way back in 1968. Mind you this was at a time when India was not perceived to have any skills and they trusted individuals to build something substantial.

This blog makes me feel sad in some way that some of the folks lack the perspective to really appreciate what something really is.

I would rather encourage you folks to do one better than what they have done. Start your own company. Give some good advise to youngsters to join startups & make a conscious choice. No harm done. But do not try to discredit it all with such spiteful blogs.