My Half-A-Decade As A Tech Professional

5 years ago, 23rd January, 2014 I started my professional life and when I look back now, I have grown a lot in so many ways. Today I want to pause and reflect. It’s not that I have achieved every milestones or dream but I do want to pat the younger version of me who was anxious, nervous and scared but full of dreams and held the ground for good.

Even before this I did try another job, I along with my friend Rahul started to work in company of one of our professor and bailed out of the job in just 2 days as things did not work out. The pay was supposed to be 4k/month.

When campus placements started, I was not allowed to sit in most of the companies for having less marks in 12th and PCM (Apparently they can judge your coding and logical skills by knowing how much you enjoyed Physics and Chemistry).

Professional Life

Exponential Interactive, Noida

January 2014- June 2015

I finally managed to crack through all rounds of Exponential Interactive, and started my professional world while still being in college. I wont trade that moment of calling my parents and telling them that I got a job, with anything. I still can’t forget how my friends enjoyed my success and made me feel good. Though the work was not of a software engineer and I started working for Ad Operations as Ad Operations Associate. No disrespect to the operations team but I realised it very early in the job that this was not for me. I wanted to create systems rather than clicking on it and following pre-defined steps but neither I had enough knowledge/confidence to get a new job nor financial freedom to quit, learn and then look for a coding profile. I followed the other way, I started learning after office hours. My friends Roshan and Rahul did help me big time in many ways. My friend Sankalp also joined the company as a designer and we had good time working and laughing together on so many things. Soon I was moved to night shift, and I did experience a different world of professionals. It has many perks but in the long run it comes with many side effects, by altering your natural sleep cycle you are ruining your health. I had a permanent headache because of it and seemed it will never get better. Our personal kiddish experiments in the startup world were also not working out, I had loans to pay. I started spending more time on my learning and after a lot of push from Sankalp I got my portfolio up and running (Thank You!). I extended my efforts of learning and finally I got in touch with a startup called Musejam.

Of so many things that working at exponential made possible for me, I will surely remember buying my first bike

Musejam, New Delhi

July 2015- November 2016

After few meetings and my efforts of learning the front end tech, I landed a job in Musejam. It was a small team, precisely a team of 5 with 3 developers(including me).I started working as a Full Stack Web Developer .The job was paying me twice of my previous income, BUT I was scared to hell. This was start of the next phase of my life and like everything beautiful the start was hard in the beginning. Everything changed, from living in a well maintained flat with 6 of my friends, I had to move to a garage makeshift room in Delhi, ALONE. But the real problems started with technology, I had never used anything apart from a windows system, and I had to switch to linux, I knew nothing apart from basic(very basic) HTML/CSS and I had to work on AngularJS. I knew nothing of the backend and had to pick up PHP Laravel, I had never worked on databases and had to pick up MySQL. The list was endless, I was not sure if I would make it through. For the first three months I could not afford Delhi, so I used to travel 40kms one side to office on my bike, everyday scared of it being my last working day. I literally cried with so many problems to solve and no one to help. Soon other developers left the company, I could have either quit or grabbed the opportunity. I chose the later, burnt all my midnight oil and learnt everything inside out about the system and the technologies I had to. I will always be proud of the warrior I chose to be during those days. Finally when I had proved my part I decided to take a move and while interviewing for companies, I came across a random interview for CyberGroup.

Of the many things that working at Musejam made possible for me, I will surely remember buying my first Macbook Pro (My best investment)

CyberGroup, Noida

November 2016- Present

To be honest I chose this company because of the two people who interviewed me Kumar Navneet and Rocky Garg. I anticipated I will get to learn a lot working with these two and being alone in the startup for last 18 months I was looking for mentors to help me grow. I joined the company as a Senior Software Engineer, and gave in my everything. I worked on multiple projects and technologies at the same time. To my surprise I saw a different version of me, all of a sudden I decided to get over with the introvert I was and I was never the same. Even today, I am one of the most outspoken people in the office. Suddenly I was over all my fear of speaking, or fear of audience. I made a point of mentoring everyone who wants to learn and be the mentor I always wished I had when I started, I am proud of the young brigade of folks. Soon I got promoted to a Team Lead. Apart from my technical knowledge I learnt a lot many things about people management here. I love coming to office every day because of the friends and group I have here and now its over two years that I have been working here, the longest I have ever worked in any place till date. I feel inspired by the man behind this company, Bhopi Dhall, who has shown so much faith in me and gave me everything I wanted and needed. In fact everyone from the management have helped me realise the potential have always helped me on all the fronts. Truth be told, change is the only constant, and sometime in the future I will look for something, but for now there is nothing here that makes me uncomfortable to leave and no matter where I go, I will always be attached to Cyber and the friends I made here.

Botsupply, CPH, Denmark

February 2017- October 2018

Of all the freelancing/consulting work I have done till date, this was something that helped me in lot many ways. While being in Cyber, I got the work life balance I wanted and I started to utilise my after office hours and weekends to extend my learning with real time implementations in many open source initiatives. We started with a very small team and grew as large as about 15 people from 10 different countries at one time. I made new friends across the globe and learnt a lot many new things. I finally bid adieu to it but I feel proud to be associated to it once, now the company has been bought by Oracle and is doing wonders. I wrote a blog about my days at Botsupply on its first anniversary.

Jatana, CPH, Denmark

November 2018- January 2019

Jatana started as a child product of Botsupply but soon was established as a company in itself, we started small again and after burning many mid night oils by some amazing folks, Jatana has made it big too. It’s still at an early stage of startup but the potential attached to the product is huge and I have no doubt that it will be huge one day. I am proud to be associated with Jatana and I have learnt a lot while making this happen. This is where I finally moved to AI and ML away from my comfort of web development. I still have lot to learn and I am looking forward to the challenges that await.

Failed Startups

Apart from these companies , I did try my own startups with friends in parallel, none of them worked. Mostly because of lack of knowledge and experience. My friend Aditya kept his word and came all the way to Delhi to work on the childhood dream of starting a company together(I will always thank you for that). All of us tried our best, but apparently we realised may be the time was not right for us, we all had different priorities to attend to, and moreover may be we did not have the required expertise back then. I will always love the days we spent together, enjoying small successes and working together. Someday in the near future, I will surely come back to working on my own thing, something that gives me the motivation to carry on.

Personal Life

I moved 9 places across Delhi NCR in the last 5 years, made some wonderful friends, travelled many new places and got to know more of myself.

Reaching the first quarter of my life I feel content enough to be happy and motivated enough to carry on. After office I am chasing my passion of music full time and feel happy to play 🎸 for an awesome band, Raagveda. I have travelled 🛫 quite a lot of places, made many life long friends. I have a perfect work life balance and the next thing now I want to focus on is health and mental awareness. (Thanks Shaleen for introducing me to the book, The Untethered Soul)

When I look back at this blog 5–10 years from now, I want to have more memories, more friends and learnings to share this with.

To conclude, I will use one of the favorite lines of mine

Woods are lovely, dark and deep.

But I have promises to keep and miles to go.

Before I sleep