Just joined your first job! My experience of a year working in the software world :)

I am sharing my journey of how I learned the essence of software engineering and got my first job as a software professional. By sharing my journey I hope people get some strength to not give up on their dreams.

My progress throughout engineering was very slow and some of the folks around me were exceptionally sharp!

But, not giving up at that time, hustling hard made me a better person overall today.

I am a Solution Consultant at Sahaj Software Solutions today after a lot of hard work. Today I get to work with some of the most amazing people in the IT Industry.

This has become the profession where I am not sad when the weekend is over and it’s Monday again!

Let me share a small story from my life…

When I was a kid, my aunt was pursuing engineering and after completion, they got great jobs.

They started traveling abroad for work. I was grown enough to understand that they are doing something that is generating curiosity in my parents and in me.

When my parents and I used to see their travel photos and work life, we began dreaming about my career in the same domain and hence my parents decided “My daughter will become a software engineer”. The innocent child in me thought that engineering is all about making computer games :).

When the same innocent child made it into the engineering college, I started to realize that it’s not only about making computer games.

First time in my life, in college I got introduced to the world of programming. Slowly as years passed by in college, I started to understand the difference between software programming and software development and competitive programming. And by the time I came to the fourth year, I started liking the world of computer science that does not limit itself to only software programming and development but goes way beyond.

I realize now while working on production-ready software that the projects we did in engineering were too basic. In college, while working on projects the things used to get very complicated and we used to wander all-around for help. Stack Overflow was our savior! As it did the magic every single time… I can still remember the feeling of being stuck and thinking will I be able to do this for my entire life? And I was very afraid about fitting in this world of endless technologies.

It used to constantly think, when will all this end? And when will I become an expert in everything? And for a very long time, I did not see any ray of hope. As far as competitive coding goes, I was never good at that. Folks around me were ACM ICPC rankers, Codechef 5 star, Hackerrank badges Bla Bla Bla. The best thing about me at that was, I never gave up. I worked on improving my skills slowly and gradually not losing hope and I became a decent programmer gradually, I am still learning and evolving constantly and I think this is a journey that has no end. I am still far away from being an awesome programmer. I continue to improve my skills with a dream of being an awesome developer one day and I am sure with patience, perseverance, determination and hard work I will achieve my dream.

Time flies when you’re having fun and even before we realized we were attending interviews during our placement season and Hurrah! I got a job. Thanks to our seniors who guided us and showed us a path to study for the placements effectively and according to me, this is the biggest unique quality of our college and it’s students, seniors are always ready to help the juniors. I had an internship in the last semester of Engineering. Once the placement was done I was constantly excited with the thought of being introduced to the corporate world and getting another step close to the dream that I and my parents saw when I was young. Finally the moment came when my childhood dream became a reality for me. My joy had no limitation and the happiness in my parents’ eyes was priceless.

The day which I have been dreaming for so many years arrives, It all started with a grand welcome for us into the organization, a party only for us and this was an exciting start of a new chapter in my life.

Work started, learning new technologies, talking to new people, their setups, raising tickets, attending meetings… and voila the corporate life started. All this while somewhere at the back of my mind, I was wondering, working on something from scratch itself was extremely difficult and challenging in college days and here we have to work on an ongoing project. It was overwhelming at first to understand the context, it took a lot of time before I could get my head around it… The rules, the conditions and ways to code for the project were way different than what we did during engineering. It was taking a lot of time for me to get the context of things happening around me, in the background though slowly things were changing, life has unique ways of teaching us lessons when needed. It took a lot of days sometimes to figure out what I was doing and why? The positive changes have started to happen internally in me while I was completely unaware at that time. In the internship, I had very few responsibilities and that helped me to cope up with what was happening around me.

The internship ended, final exams got over and after finishing the college I joined as a full-time employee, the responsibilities increased. Things changed yet again, my project changed, technologies changed, teams changed. These conditions were teaching me to become flexible for any change. And guess what after 7–8 months I changed my company itself :P. The experience with the first one was great, an awesome introduction to the corporate world.

When I joined Sahaj, I observed there were a lot of differences between the way of coding, compared to my previous organisation. In Sahaj code quality is of utmost importance. The practice of TDD and clean code took time and assured quality. That was difficult for me initially. Thanks to the onboarding program “Gurukul” in Sahaj, it made me quite comfortable with practices here. And I love the way of coding here. I have captured my experiences of Gurukul in a separate blog. I also learnt not to copy-paste code from stack overflow, instead first, understand it from the documentation and the journey continues.

Looking back from the first year of engineering to almost one year of being a software professional I have learnt a lot of things and realised a few, here is summary of the same:

• Things take time and it’s okay, Everyone’s pace to learn is different.
• Learn to have patience.
• Technologies will keep on changing and you must not get stuck with only one.
• Ask the right questions to get the right answers and develop steadily.
• Never underestimate yourself.
• Thinking like a user before building anything makes things simple.
• Talk to people, there is no point being shy.
• Nobody is ever perfect, there is always a scope of improvement… and many more.

During this last year and even for some time in the final year of engineering at times I did feel if I have chosen the right career path for myself, should I do MBA and move into something else. Now I have started to enjoy this journey and there is much more to be explored and much more to look forward to, the possibilities are endless as long as you have belief in oneself.

It’s been just a year and the time has again started to fly. I guess it always happens. What looks like sacrifices, in the beginning, turns out to be investments when you look at them in hindsight. You give away something upfront, but the reward you get is worth much more than what you gave up in the first place when one starts to enjoy what they do when one gets satisfaction and content in what they do and when ultimately one gets a peaceful sleep in the night without worries even if there is a mountain to climb.