Straight from the mind

Now with two years into professional life, things have been really awesome, thanks to my 1st company that I was working with till late last month. I have now moved on to see how a change would make a difference to my career and life. Change is difficult(and this change was indeed difficult), but it is  said that if you look back at life, the most rewarding experiences were when you were open to change. So as I look forward to my future rewards, I thought of doing some retrospection and putting down the lessons I learnt till date in my professional life. These are the lessons I learnt from my colleagues, by making mistakes and by watching others make mistakes.

Small Company vs Big Company…
The above comparison shouldn’t bother you, what should bother you is the WORK you get at the company. It could happen that you get the best and most challenging job at an small-mid size company while a mere documentation or QC job at an big company.

Stay Hungry…
Set targets not limits to the work that your doing. Be restless to learn what your colleague knows and you do not. Having and doing loads of work is good as it helps keep the fire burning within us.

Be on the right side of the rotten apple…
You may have that arrogant creative guy or lethargic technical lead in your team, but remember that they hold that position because they  have some talent. Isolating yourself from them is a loss to your growth. Be on the right side of the rotten apple, learn what makes that other guy a good tech. lead or creative person and try to become a non-lethargic non-arrogant creative tech. lead.

Get into complexity before your pushed into it…
I have seen a lot of this happening, when a team is asked to pick up their own tasks there a major set of people that pick the simpler one’s first and leave the complex tasks to that small set of people who always do it and love to do it. If you belong to that major set, its high time that you move to the smaller set. Coz the day when you do not have that small set of people around you and your manager assigns the task to you, that complex task may seem to be an impossible task.

Don’t Expect Training…
I have seen a lot of freshers ask this question as they join their first company  ’Do we get training here?’ referring to 3-6 months of training that most of the Indian IT companies provide to freshers. My question to them has always been, What have you done in the past 3-4 years? Isn’t 4 years enough of time to train yourself? If you couldn’t train yourself in 4years, are you expecting some kind of miracle in the 3 months of training. I am not against training but there is a different kind of a joy in molding yourself than being molded by others, coz in the former you get to choose what you like, which mostly is not possible in the later. I have always looked at my career as one big training class and that has helped me big time.

Give back…
Remember it is your seniors who helped you when you were a junior and now its your responsibility to help your  juniors. And this would help you too to revise your basics. I realized that I had forgot the basics and history of PHP when I was preparing slides for a PHP talk to be given at a college Techfest.

Measure of Success…
Before you party on your weekend, look back at the week gone by and see have learned enough?  Was your week fruitful? Are you tired? If you have a positive answer to all these questions then go ahead party/relax else, get back to work. The best way to measure your success at the end of the year is not by checking the CTC you draw, but by counting the number of weekends you partied/relaxed and your achievements for the year. Your CTC will always be proportional to your professional achievements, so strive to achieve more.

Network…
One of  the biggest mistake in the first 2 years of my career was to be an introvert and confining my network to just friends and office colleagues. If you go beyond this, you will find that there are a hell lot of amazing and like minded people out there to connect with and learn from.  Facebook, LinkedIn and other forums were mainly built to facilitate this connect( not play silly games) and these channels have truly helped me meet and connect with some really good people in the past 6 months. Infact, some of the job offers that I got were via LinkedIn

These are some of the lessons that I have learnt from my professional life  so far. Some people may differ from my thoughts and without doubt they have every right to do so.

What lessons have you learnt? Share it with me in the comments :)