Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Five Years Industry

Immediately after Engineering I dreamed of going to US. I never wanted to work in India. But god has something else in store for me. March 8th 2004, I joined Goldstone Technologies as a fresher. Its been an eventful journey of 5 years (2004-2009) in this IT industry. Last 5 years, I have worked in 3 different companies (GTL, CA and CS) under 3 different managers (Srinivas Reddy, Dhananjay Pershad and Nagaraj) in 2 different countries (India and Singapore) in just 1 single technology (Business Objects). Today when I look back, I am happy to see that I have worked with some good people and have learned a lot not only professionally but also in personal life.

Learning Curve During these years

Today I have come a long way from who and where I was years ago. But I didn’t really change who I am at the core. In my professional life I am where I imagined I would be, if not farther than that. May be I did not really had my priorities set to focus on my career, but still could manage all these years. One thing people might have learned from me (Goldstone guys would definitely accept this) is Work smart rather than working hard. I have never struggled or hooked up for something which I could not do. I always had the information of who can do what. So it was never tough for me to get the things start working.

My learning curve has not be so acute but still have learned a lot of things and now I am in a comfortable position to crack all kinds of technical interviews. Coming to what I should be in next 5 years, hmmm frankly speaking I have never thought so far. But definitely I would not like to be in a technical role. I would try moving into a pre-sales or managerial role by that time.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is nice. Very few people analyse their growth, and set new goals.

Pre sales is cool, will groom you on a 360 degree basis. The exposure will really help. The brief phase I was contributing part of my time to pre sales did change my perspective on a few important facets of work life.

Management is cool too. But management means different things at different shops. At some places it is just a designation, to hike your billing rate etc, so I guess it is important to understand our understanding of 'management' versus the outside world.

There is an obsession towards management with off-shore resources, primarily because in these markets, after the initial phase of a career, the only way one can get a major hike in financial remuneration seems to be, to take on a "managerial" role.

One thing which I feel is missing in your self evaluation is, you are not posing yourself the following question;

'Business objects is a business intelligence tool, and being involved with that tool for so many years for a financial client, HOW MUCH BUSINESS or DOMAIN KNOWLEDGE did I grasp?'

The value of technical skills is suject to the effect of 'Law of diminishing marginal utility', unless you are in system administration, or pure technical ERP jobs.

The fallout of relying just on application development technologies like Java, C# or BI tools like Cognos etc is there to see. Keep an eye on the category of IT employees being let go By one company after the other in the first few phases of firing.

A combination of business, pre-sales, technical skills( in the order of value), in the long run, can turn us into a product, which can sell in all kinds of market conditions.

Just my 2 cents.

Ramya said...

Way to go babs!!!