Post by Sai Charan L

7:42 AM Saturday last week. A 2024 CSE grad from Pune messaged me. "Charan, I have been on bench at TCS for 8 months. My batchmates are getting onboarded to projects. Mine has been postponed thrice. I am scared to even ask my RM anymore." Skip this if you are billing on a client project right now. Here is what I told him. The bench is not your problem. Your bench LinkedIn is your problem. Right now if your manager opens your profile he sees "Software Engineer at TCS" and nothing else. He sees a name. Not a person who is moving while waiting. This weekend, pick the most boring report your team's project lead complains about. Build a Claude project that does it. Make a 1-minute Loom showing it work. Post it on LinkedIn tagging your manager. Subject: "Weekend build for our project, would love your feedback." By Monday his message app pings. Your name moves from "bench guy" to "the guy who built that thing." I run a Weekend Mentor program for IT folks in exactly this spot. Saturdays 11 AM IST. One small build per week, one Slack to your manager Monday morning. Comment your role and current company. I will reply with the one project to ship this weekend that fits your stack. #Careers #ITServices #AI