August 28, 2021

Milestones

 Today, August 28th of 2021 marks 15 years into my professional career. In the summer of 2006, a lot of things happened in my life. I was about to graduate from my Bachelors in Computer Science and had started interviewing for "on-campus" interviews organized by my college. Looking at old emails now, I had landed a job offer in a company by then and was slated to join in the fall of 2006.

At that age, I was just learning how to be an adult when life taught me about its twists and turns having to unexpectedly deal with grief with the loss of my mom. While we coped as a family, the start date of my new job got delayed due to the company rescheduling it for recent college grads to the end of the year. 

It is at this time that I decided to apply to what was then one of the most massive off-campus recruitment drives in India. 

Infosys hiring 25,000 people news article from "The Hindu" - May 2006



After an aptitude test at a local high school and an in-person interview with a diverse panel of senior leadership, I was selected as one of those thousands of young recent college grads who chased the Software Engineering dream.

Now, 15 years later I look back and reminisce at those times. The experience of being in Mysore along with thousands of other young Engineers building relationships, learning new technologies, working in a team and starting their professional careers is still very vivid in my memory. Although my memory fails me in recalling the names of many of my peers and incidents that happened in my short 2.5 year stint in Infosys, some friendships still remain and I'm so happy to have met them. I took up blogging again and joined an amazing bunch of amateur bloggers in InfyBlogs. I went back on stage to sing during an event in front of a couple of thousand people. I also learnt that living away from home is hard for a person who had not been away from family. And so many more little things like that when progressing from being a young adult to a "grown up" adult.

So here's to everyone who has gone through a long journey in their professional lives. You go through ups and downs. You get to meet amazing people. You hit unexpected issues in something you work on. You stumble through days. You feel the high of meeting your goals. Sometimes you exceed expectations. You get a raise. You get yelled at for not being the best version of you. You get promoted. Your demo is a hit. You mess up your explanation in a critical meeting and everything went south. You learn to take the hits and move on. You love what you do. You live for another day to go through all of this again :-)