7 years ago on this very day, I had ventured into an unknown uncharted territory. I started my career in the IT industry not knowing what future lay in store for me. A year earlier, in my 3rd of year engineering, I remember practicing interview questions with my friends. "What do you want to be 5 years down the road, 10 years down the road 15 years down the road?" I must acknowledge these questions have no meaning in today's world, where we are governed by Moor's law and where facebook did not exist 5years ago and google was just a project 10years ago and yet today they have become part of our lives.. A 3 year horizon is at best the smartest bet today. So, back to the question, I am almost half way down the 15yr journey today, and I am sure I am nothing of what I could have ever imagined back then. It is not often that I look back at such a long period of time. I hope to use this blog to recollect and reflect.
7 years ago, I had no clue of what the "Software" industry was all about. Being a mechanical engineer, I always believed that companies made and sold products. Little did I realize that there was an industry that was many times bigger called the "services" industry. I had no clue what a software "product" meant and looked like.
I would love to look back and think about my learning, achievements and failures. So let me first talk about the learnings.
Year 1 - First few months went into learning the building blocks of software programming. I still was not able to visualize it all together. It was only somewhere down the end of 6-9 months did I first realize that software was all about 3 things, a UI, a database and a logic engine that tied them together. I hadn't spotted the generic misunderstanding I had and only realized it later that I was dealing with Software "Application" programming. It always rankled my mind when my friends who had studied computer engineering were so enamored by operating systems, networks, device drivers and digital signal processors. I had no clue what all these were, and maybe I still don't, and felt as if I was a dimwit in spite of teaching myself how to write a program.
Year 2 - I was part of a software "product" team. It was the first time I understood how a software product is developed and what went behind creating it. In typical 'IT speak', it was my first experience of a complete SDLC (software development life cycle). I learned some basics of quality, configuration management, software architecture etc.
Year 3 - For the first time in my life, I was in a foreign country and I spent my first few months at a client location. More than the work environment, I learned a lot about the cultural aspect of work. I learned how to carry myself in a client environment. It was also the first time I was seeing software programs in actual end use. The year was an eye-opener for me both personally and professionally.
Year 4 - Of all the years on the job, this was perhaps the year I must have worked my hardest. It was a pleasure executing my first implementation project and a go-live. It was also a year where I learned a lot about real team-work and leadership. I still rate my client manager as one of the best bosses I have had and needless to say, I learned a whole lot from him.
Year 5 - This was the first year I did a consulting assignment and interacted with the business more than the IT staff. It was an eye opener for me. I realized how useless our code was going to be if it did not solve the problem it was intended to solve in the first place. I spent countless hours raking my brain about the efficacy of software applications for end use. It also led to a disillusionment about the software industry in general. Nevertheless, I realized how important it was to keep in mind who the end customer was and what his needs were.
Year 6 - This was the last year in my job before my MBA and it was a transition from being a business analyst to being a complete solution provider. It also brought me closer to the business of "software services" in its entirety. Now that I look back, my journey had perhaps reached a full circle.
Year 7 - Enrolled for my MBA and joined XL. Learned the background and fundamentals of my 6 previous years of work-ex. I suddenly started finding meaning in many events that had baffled me during my years at work. Had it not been for my work-experience, those lessons would have seemed very much like null variables without context.
If I leave aside the learning from each year and try to think back at the the single biggest aggregate learning experience so far from my job, it has to be team work. All throughout my life I have tread the path as an individual. Whether it is scraping through tough exams or cracking the easy ones, all the risks and rewards were individual. Suddenly, when you are in a job environment, you are part of a team. Even though there are plenty of group projects during school, it is nowhere close to the "On the Job" experience. I passionately feel that we must have more of group projects to prepare young minds for what they encounter in their job lives and beyond, because we are in an industrial era post Adam Smith where division of labor is a reality.
One of my friends, Debasis with whom I did not work directly on projects but became good friends with at office, once said, it was good that we were not working on projects together, else there would to be friction between us affecting our friendship. I thought for a while about it and realized that it was quite true. When two friends come together for a project, their destiny in some ways becomes a shared destiny, their success intertwined. Both are affected even if one of them screws up. When they were just friends, they sought advice from each other and wished the other well, but their destinies weren't tied to the others performance. It is when they start working together that they hit a roadblock. Therefore, I sometimes feel that people with whom one has had a great experience working together, make better teammates to look out for partnerships in future work than just your old friends from school with whom you spent a good time. It appears counter intuitive, but is something I have started believing in. Having said that, it does not mean that you will not have a good working relationship with a good old friend you played marbles with, either.
It has been an exciting journey so far. I hope I can write about more exciting stuff about my job post M.B.A. This time my horizon is going to be a more appropriate 3 yrs.
7 years ago, I had no clue of what the "Software" industry was all about. Being a mechanical engineer, I always believed that companies made and sold products. Little did I realize that there was an industry that was many times bigger called the "services" industry. I had no clue what a software "product" meant and looked like.
I would love to look back and think about my learning, achievements and failures. So let me first talk about the learnings.
Year 1 - First few months went into learning the building blocks of software programming. I still was not able to visualize it all together. It was only somewhere down the end of 6-9 months did I first realize that software was all about 3 things, a UI, a database and a logic engine that tied them together. I hadn't spotted the generic misunderstanding I had and only realized it later that I was dealing with Software "Application" programming. It always rankled my mind when my friends who had studied computer engineering were so enamored by operating systems, networks, device drivers and digital signal processors. I had no clue what all these were, and maybe I still don't, and felt as if I was a dimwit in spite of teaching myself how to write a program.
Year 2 - I was part of a software "product" team. It was the first time I understood how a software product is developed and what went behind creating it. In typical 'IT speak', it was my first experience of a complete SDLC (software development life cycle). I learned some basics of quality, configuration management, software architecture etc.
Year 3 - For the first time in my life, I was in a foreign country and I spent my first few months at a client location. More than the work environment, I learned a lot about the cultural aspect of work. I learned how to carry myself in a client environment. It was also the first time I was seeing software programs in actual end use. The year was an eye-opener for me both personally and professionally.
Year 4 - Of all the years on the job, this was perhaps the year I must have worked my hardest. It was a pleasure executing my first implementation project and a go-live. It was also a year where I learned a lot about real team-work and leadership. I still rate my client manager as one of the best bosses I have had and needless to say, I learned a whole lot from him.
Year 5 - This was the first year I did a consulting assignment and interacted with the business more than the IT staff. It was an eye opener for me. I realized how useless our code was going to be if it did not solve the problem it was intended to solve in the first place. I spent countless hours raking my brain about the efficacy of software applications for end use. It also led to a disillusionment about the software industry in general. Nevertheless, I realized how important it was to keep in mind who the end customer was and what his needs were.
Year 6 - This was the last year in my job before my MBA and it was a transition from being a business analyst to being a complete solution provider. It also brought me closer to the business of "software services" in its entirety. Now that I look back, my journey had perhaps reached a full circle.
Year 7 - Enrolled for my MBA and joined XL. Learned the background and fundamentals of my 6 previous years of work-ex. I suddenly started finding meaning in many events that had baffled me during my years at work. Had it not been for my work-experience, those lessons would have seemed very much like null variables without context.
If I leave aside the learning from each year and try to think back at the the single biggest aggregate learning experience so far from my job, it has to be team work. All throughout my life I have tread the path as an individual. Whether it is scraping through tough exams or cracking the easy ones, all the risks and rewards were individual. Suddenly, when you are in a job environment, you are part of a team. Even though there are plenty of group projects during school, it is nowhere close to the "On the Job" experience. I passionately feel that we must have more of group projects to prepare young minds for what they encounter in their job lives and beyond, because we are in an industrial era post Adam Smith where division of labor is a reality.
One of my friends, Debasis with whom I did not work directly on projects but became good friends with at office, once said, it was good that we were not working on projects together, else there would to be friction between us affecting our friendship. I thought for a while about it and realized that it was quite true. When two friends come together for a project, their destiny in some ways becomes a shared destiny, their success intertwined. Both are affected even if one of them screws up. When they were just friends, they sought advice from each other and wished the other well, but their destinies weren't tied to the others performance. It is when they start working together that they hit a roadblock. Therefore, I sometimes feel that people with whom one has had a great experience working together, make better teammates to look out for partnerships in future work than just your old friends from school with whom you spent a good time. It appears counter intuitive, but is something I have started believing in. Having said that, it does not mean that you will not have a good working relationship with a good old friend you played marbles with, either.
It has been an exciting journey so far. I hope I can write about more exciting stuff about my job post M.B.A. This time my horizon is going to be a more appropriate 3 yrs.
