Engineer: Chapter 1

Hello, I’m a passionate engineer from Pune, India. I’m posting my experience in career. I’m a engineer I have proven it to myself through out my struggles and learnings in my career. This post is first chapter of my career.

Brief history of my engineering education

I graduated from my bachelor’s program in 2011, 2 year later than I supposed to. It didn’t bother me then and it still doesn’t bother me now. Lot of my friends and colleagues are surprised when learned about this. I never felt to explain this, but perhaps it is important to explain why. Maybe then you can understand me better and why it doesn’t bother me.

I was mediocre student throughout my education, not because I didn’t study enough or it was difficult for me to learn. Because I never felt the need to educate myself enough as the world that I saw seem to never ran on merit.

It still doesn’t 100% run on it but for the most part it does which I’m understanding now, this is of course my opinion. And this why also I’m writing this post, tho show my merit.

I left my engineering in 2nd year of bachelor’s program to do computer related work, back then assembling computers and installing pirated windows licenses was a one of ways to make money. Of course piracy helped business owners of windows more than people like me who were just making pennies for smoke and beer. Not that I hold any grudge against them, but this was when I realised that writing software could be more fun than doing assembly of computers, but no one was gonna give me work if I didn’t have any basis for it.

It was difficult choice for me to go back and complete engineering to start in IT. I tried but failed to clear basic test for technical support person, so decided to go back and finish my engineering, I didn’t had any plans after that but I knew after graduation I could get a job in IT. I was not sure if I will be able to continue study after such a care free 2 years. I was only able to due to my friends and peers who kept me motivated, drunk and high all at same time. This may seem sad reality to you but those definitely were the best days of education.

I left my bachelor’s program for 2 years and found my passion for software engineering. This is why I don’t regret it.

Couple of my friends then always wondered why I bunked 2 years, perhaps I will get chance to have a drink with them and explain them why.

After the graduation reality again kicks in no one offer you a job in cross domain specially if you are 2 years down (yes that is what it was called, maybe still is) in education.

I was working with my Father since I don’t remember when in our family business, he is the first engineer I saw in my life even though on the paper it says he is just a diplomat. He was always inspiration for me to be technical person. I was less interested in our family business and more interested in computers. He was always supportive of me, but sadden with my career choices. I always learned from him, still do. Apart from few teachers in life no one had patience or dedication to teach me anything.

He didn’t taught me this but I learned from him,

“Be loyal to your work, everything is else secondary”.

Sometimes I extend this too much that I push my family, friends even colleagues away to finish my work.

I was graduate but zero knowledge of software engineering. So decided to take a formal training with cost more than 1 month fullstack engineer salary today. I had basic training of Java, SQL, HTML etc. Honestly a part from getting the first job I didn’t get anything from that course, as most of things were just focusing on syntax of languages but not the reasoning of it or why you should bother to learn it. Software engineering was not even a term I heard there, still grateful to them as I was able to start my career.

The startup

I started my IT career as fullstack developer working on Java, jQuery and managing production deployment for client on Linux server in July 2012, all of this within first few months. The term fullstack developer was for me new but I understood what it meant. Now it might be something else but for me it was a person responsible from start of code to supporting it in production for client.

At the startup I was not the only new recruit, so it was fun place. And then that campany as a startup did produce value for the clients, which now days for many1 of the startup is just a game of venturing and funding, scale your sail and then sale and bail; on to the next.

Almost all the technologies, recommended practices that I worked with in the startup I learned by CopyPasta 🍝, sometimes by a senior developer review, sometimes while helping the colleagues, sometimes from Internet or most of the times trial and error approach.

I think trial and error or troubleshooting whatever you call it is natural way for engineer if he doesn’t have proper engineering guide.

Man pages were just oblivious to me, I was not even aware people writing programs also wrote documentation for it. This was the most fascinating thing I learned try to in cooperate in my daily work. And I got familiar with unit testing, I still love junit which of course introduced me to TDD, BDD but those are just frameworks you still need person using it with discipline and rigor to make it work.

Overall I was doing good job, however it was still not engineering just monkey wrenching at best, even though I’m an engineering graduate 🤦‍♂️.

I did quite stupid mistakes, one of them was rm -rf /* not because I copy pasted, because I was doing rm -rf ./* subtle difference of missing . was huge, but learning was not about being careful all the time, it was to be a engineer. It was engineering mistake don’t complicate solution, follow simpler steps, rm -rf directory then create directory again is enough.

So far in my career I have received lot of comments that something is over engineering, some of them were justified remarks. But most of times no one cared explained why or how it was over-engineering.

This is my 2 cents to anyone using over-engineering as a term, please explain it to other person else you’re either lack complete understanding of the problem, the solution or just simply rejecting the solution because you want to prove you’re is the better.

To my current and former colleagues, if you remember any of such mistakes please help me better my engineering. You can reach me by any of the contact details above.

At the startup the projects I was working on were becoming mundane, I retrospect I was missing the novelty of learning new technology not the engineering. Now I think the solution on those projects could have been much much better, any how… I eventually moved to different organisation, of course money was one of the reasons but I felt I was steering my own boat in water without any direction. I hope this also the founders of the organisation felt.

The finance job

This was no startup, the founder of the organisation were in serious financial business. You can feel that when a pee break is also considered outside of working hours.

The project I was part of was old rusty java code floating with tomcat with JDK several version behind latest. The process and time logging was more important than 10 lines code that could improved maintainability of the code.

The only thing I could learn there was to be patient. Which I didn’t had and definitely didn’t learned there. But I did learn to religiously fill the timesheet, which I never did after this job. Technology wise I just got touched on Angular a frontend framework, I don’t think I leanred it at work but I remember I did it at home.

As obvious I didn’t last there more than 1 year, in fact now I’m bit surprised how I survive there so long. The whole credit of that should to my colleagues and friends that kept me sane and comforted. I’m thankful to you all, I hope I can return the favour.

I was so desperate to leave that place I simply resigned without any future prospects. I was young no responsibilities of family, no loans, no nothing stopping me doing irrational things.

One thing I learned from that job is you really need to know people to move ahead. And technology is last frontier in such domains (may be not anymore but) that is my experience.

The telecom job

This was huge leap for me, financially, career wise and personal life wise. Since I was already on notice period and the interviews with new employer in my opinion I cleared pretty well, so they doubled my salary 🤑 to immediately join them.

I got married while working there. Partially thanks to the organisation’s name and salary cause initial process of arrange marriages is no different that recruiters screening candidate’s resume.

My mentor there was a great person, he was exceptional Manager. I think his approach and patience is what I wish I could replicate in me, I’m really thankful to him for lot of things.

I was working on initially just the backend development in Java, but seeing my interest and front end development skills I was moved to a project where I was leading two juniors. They did seem to aspire to me but I was not sure if I was right person to aspire to be. Perhaps they were just warming up to me, I was not sure. But I did make sure the work we did was al least to my satisfaction. I think this was my mistake, in retrospect I was perhaps pursuing quality over quantity. Which I think was clients subtly required.

I was still horizontally growing my fullstack skills, now mentoring few juniors. But I felt I was not growing vertically or in direction I wanted to grow. To be a Software Engineer. I felt my skills were not 100% utilised, I wrote and publish jenkins plugin there. Sadly jenkins was for under major version migration. The plugin is still in public domain just search jenkins JobFanIn. This also was one of the reasons I got new opportunity.

This is a first chapter of my career, second chapter here.