Is it really necessary to taste failure before success ?

Never believed in words like "failure is first step to success" .
and often questioned myself ---Is it really necessary to taste failure before success ?

During campus placements , friends of mine were too busy preparing their cv's for interview filling up with their strengths ,weaknesses & objectives . For the sake of impressing the interviewee , I have written big stories but couldn't figure out my real strengths and weaknesses. Things went fine and I got placement in a reputed company or I can say an important phase of my life has begun .

Year(2007-2008) was full of trauma and professional setbacks because of various reasons , I was in very bad shape and sailing in troubled waters . Messed up everything and couldn't pull back things. people around me criticised my attitude for my shortfall . I became more introspective and resilient. I shared my feelings with a close pal and he told me "calm seas can never make a skillful sailor" . I understood that criticism is as inevitable as our breathe, I have learnt to accept constructive criticism .
I felt that when we are in hostile environment , our strength & weakness are exposed . I realized my strengths, it's adversity/failure that has taught me a lesson rather than success.
All these days I was thinking Failure as an enemy to success but in my opinion FAILURE is a friend on road to success.

p.s. The close pal, I refered to in this post is myself ;-) . I have a sequel for this post "is success dangerous ?"

Faith is lost

July 1st was a big day for me, my confirmation day in XXX company . I kept my fingers crossed to know my appraisals and new package. My project manager pinged me to have an informal chat regarding my appraisal . Decent rating was given to me but the package was worst and worser was , for all ratings package was more or less same.Juniors ,who have joined after us were getting same perks as we got. I was upset and tried to analyze , what the f**k ? happend to this company.

Mean-while I could observe my manager was not in his usual gay mood and rumours were spread that project is gonna debacle and resources would be ramped down due to lack of budget and so were other projects especially projects related to finance,this started happening with other companies too.

Interestingly ,in economic times an article caught my attention about the US economic recession . I was intrigued whether US recession has got something to do with decline in IT services sector in India.I started tracking the projects which were being ramped down in various companies . All these were fortune 500 companies in finance sector. since they have lost their market ,these companies were not interested to put their money on their IT division. Bad news is no more lucrative onsite opportunities :-(

Reason why these companies lost their market is more interesting than my pathetic pay package!!!! I would tell the reason, we find few idiots working long hours to impress their horrible managers. one such an idiot stayed even after office hours for completieng his work ,hmmm but he was neither an idiot nor wanted to impress his manager;-) . He was working in IT division of a reputed bank in US . what's more , this prank created fake saving accounts and took loans even with out securities by tweaking the back-end of companies database ,looted more than 3 billion dollars over night. This has surfaced after a year when company needed to show its profit/loss sheet to stakeholders. All of a sudden investors lost faith in the banks because they have gone haywired when this hacking stuff came in to light , which was done by an internal employee of the bank. Since investors lost faith in banks , much business was not recorded to reap profits. So I have lost faith in my previous employer becoz of his poor package.