Take the feedback. The feedback I got was to become more organized. To show more confidence. And to not ask the same things again.
I started documenting everything in One Note and my notepads.
I started watching lots of Shah Rukh Khan interviews for the confidence. And focused on learning development to come out of the sewer that is support.
I started making processes which make sure that I deliver on time. Like Reminder apps. Like scheduling events on calendars. Like writing things down. Like actually raising questions if I did not understand something.
I tried to become more authentic and found out that I am a better English teacher than a support Systems Analyst.
I quit TCS. Made sure to lie to my manager about my plan of an MBA which was required for my marriage and not tell the actual reason that the culture was full of blame and my throat burns the moment I enter the ODC full of anxiety. This way , I did not, alas, improve them but at least not hurt their confidence like they did to me.
The interesting part , my lead informed to the HR who was responsible for my clearance that - I was not worth retaining. HR said this on my face.
What hurt more was they cut short my resignation period because I had planned my life with the salary that was going to come from those months.
And the most brutal - They shredded my ID card Infront of my eyes. It was like a trophy for my father at some point of my life when I joined. I was emotionally attached to it.
Told my mother after a week of quitting. She cried profusely and I had nothing better to say and blurted out that “I promise mumma whatever I earn in TCS in 1 month, I will earn from next month.”
Covid came. I got a call from a Bangalore based education startup called My Captain - a Part of IIM B seed investment called Climber. They wanted me to teach C++ to 200 students through zoom.
God made my promise to my maa true . I earned by spending 2 hours in a week what I used to earn in a month of toiling at my 12 hours job in TCS.
I was also learning Full stack development from my mentor Arnav Gupta on the side. And opened an account on Instagram called “englishkatution” . I put out summaries of lessons of CBSE 11 and 12 English on it and interestingly it blew up in Assam !
I used to teach English to students from Assam in the morning. Afternoon was my learning classes of Web D with Arnav bhaiya and in the night 7pm I used to teach 200 students about C++.
That was essentially my covid.
Then came the biggest blow. My father lost his job and he asked me to take up a job as soon as possible. I was not in a position to say no because the whole family’s future was at risk. Good things were happening to me but still with my father’s job gone and my teaching income around 20k to 30k a month was not enough. My brother was in Amity University doing BBA LLB. Now I had to pay for everything ,which I did , happily :()
All that authenticity shit goes out of the window when bad times come. It was more emotionally bad than it was financially bad. My father was at that position from 1999. He loved it. He setup the office teams in Chennai when he was 40. And now when he was 50. The company was letting him go !
I had no experience of Development but only one certificate of this course. I got a promise of hire from Nagarro as a Java developer. Which they never fulfilled . The job opening got cancelled due to covid.
Finally I had to take up a night shift job as Technical Support Engineer at a Bangalore based consultancy called Access Automation Ltd which deployed me to Informatica Bangalore BUT as a night shift CONTINGENT WORKER.
Informatica was the answer to my prayers. The culture completely blameless. My boss used to sit in Texas . I was treated with respect and given enough time to learn things and apply them. My peers were from Germany and Bangalore and were amazing and all were RCB fanatics somehow. We used to work till 3am and then play together some games like Mini Militia or PubG . Those were crazy times. Now all of them are married and asleep by 10 pm !!!!
I got to know there is something called 1 on 1s where you can tell how you feel about working in the company. My manager once remarked that “you write emails in such a professional way that I would never want to be against you”.
After an year of working, they asked me to join them full time as an FTE. But in the same night shift. I was getting severe acidity and felt like there was something stuck in my throat. This is a medical condition called GERD. Unfortunately I had to leave. But this time I was treated really nicely.
On my last day at Informatica, my manager told me that he would be happy to have me back anytime if I wanted. This is the sign of a great company !
Now I waned a pure developer job which somehow at that time I thought was better than any kind of support job . Which I know now is not true. People you work with make a job better or worse. Not tiles. And I wanted day shift to avoid that acidity thing.
This time again, fortune favored me. I got an offer from NatWest Group Bangalore where they promised me that they will give me an opportunity to work on development tasks (25% of my bandwidth) and rest of my task will be Change Management.
I was put in time where people were from Edenborough (Scotland) , Chennai and one from Bangalore. Here I worked for sometime and then got an Internal Job Position opportunity on to a pure development role at NatWest Group Gurgaon.
Only one condition - there was no salary hike and had to join as a junior software developer. I literally thanked Kuldeep (sir) to give me this opportunity and told him - I am on , where do I sign.
I worked there for the next 2 years and learned what is application development for an enterprise.
NatWest Group was a Great experience on all fronts - work, people , shift, food at RBS aka NatWest Group. I got someplace to get hands-on experience which is the MOST VALUABLE THING FOR A DEVELOPER. Not Certificates. Not AWS credits. Not even salary.
Next I read a tweet from Amul Badjatiya - who told if you don’t earn this much salary as a this much experienced developer - you are severely underpaid.
And next I got a phone call from Hyderabad DBS Hiring team . They wanted me to join their tech team as a Full Stack developer for their product called Paylah! (! is in the name) .
I quoted the figure from Amul’s tweet. And the HR declined immediately.
Finally she agreed for a little lesser but which was like an 60% hike for me at that time and I for the first time in my life went to Hyderabad.
There is a particular incident in DBS (2023) Cafeteria where I was sitting on a table and having breakfast when a girl looked at me and commented - “Ye to shakal se hi developer lagta hai” .
LOL . I know it is not the best comment a man can get. Haha. But for 2019 Aadhar who only aim was to transition from support to development, this was the best compliment. 2023 Aadhar could only take this as a complement.
In Hyderabad, I met few people like my two managers at DBS Bank and few at Experian whom literally changed the course of my whole life. I cant give you numbers because that is not polite but going to Hyderabad was significant for my net worth and self worth.
And now I am a Software Engineer 2 in Gurgaon and I like what I do. My father owns a hardware store and he is happy too. My mother is happy that for the most of the day we both are out of the house. I still strive to be useful, learn as well as teach and sing the song as I preach.
