Tag Archives: career

General

How your attitude impacts your career growth?

Pratibha Devegowda, who was my colleague at iGATE, asked in LinkedIn, the relation between one’s attitude and career growth. With a decade and a half of working experience, I can say that, its one’s attitude that drives their professional growth either up or down, more than their qualifications. As I was commenting in LinkedIn, I took a step back and thought what drives that attitude. This blog post is the answer of that question.

I believe, your attitude manifests your world view. In this post I elaborate on my world view, how it shapes my attitude and its effect on my professional growth.

My mental model of life can be summarised as ‘its a non-zero sum game‘.

Without going into the details of the game theory (of which I don’t know much), this world view translates as:
1. It is a game, so prepare hard but play smarter. Days of preparation, which no one sees, precedes hours of play which everyone witness. Your preparation, or its absence, comes out in the open sooner or later.
2. Since it is a game, you will loose few to win others. Loosing is okay as long as you prepared well and played well. Your enjoyment shouldn’t just depend on the outcome.
3. Though it is a game, it is also a non-zero sum game. The world and life is large enough for you to win without being nasty. You can win playing as a gentleman.

This mental model and beliefs form core of my living. So my attitude in life, I don’t split life into professional and personal, reflects this. Of course there may be aberrations every now and then, but these are few.

With that said, let me now describe how this impacts my professonal career, which was the question by Pratibha.

  1. Because the world is big enough, opportunities abound; they are not limited within a company, geography or domain. In these sixteen years, I have lived in Chennai, Brussels, Bangalore and now in Delhi (and travelled on short term to few other cities). None is similar to other – in language spoken, climate, infrastructure and tendency of people. I have worked as an employee as well as a consultant. Mostly I’ve worked with executives. I was able get all of these variety of experience because ‘the world is my playground’; and the enriching experience reinforces the open minded attitude.
  2. Moving around with this attitude aid me in building long-term relationships from people from different background. Relationships are important for success. Some opened new doors for me, some took the liberty to tap me on the head when pride gets there, some lend me their ears to vent my feelings. Overall, they have provided a balanced perspective.
  3. It also means sometimes others took credit for my work or grabbed opportunities that belonged to me. I don’t stand by silently when that happens, and it hurts when these happen. It’s also emotionally draining to deal with such nasty people. But because of the world-view that I have, I quickly come to grounds and concentrate on the next opportunity.
  4. Often times, it also leads me to risky projects. Though I have failed in few occasions, grand success in others compensate such embarrassments.

In conclusion, my world-view and the attitude have lead me through a path of rich professional experience and from where I am standing, I can say, it has been a joyful journey.

Standard
General

How The Damn Google Spoiled My Career

Usually I’m not an egotist. So please bear with me as you read the next para. There is a reason for it.

My math score was consistently above 95% through school. I even scored 100% in Engineering Mathematics in undergraduate Engineering. In the final year of Engineering college, I wrote computer programs, both in C & Basic, for seven projects, including mine. When I started my career, I knew most of the API commands of Visual Basic by heart that I could program without referring to a manual. When I moved to Windows Programming, I had to refer to manuals but the instances were minimal. Even as late as 2003, I could program without referring to manuals.

Then Google came in1.

There were, of course, search engines before Google. But search results weren’t precise. Add to it, the Internet wasn’t ubiquitous. But by 2003, Internet was available everywhere, all the time, even in India. And Google was God’s gift! It gave you the exact answer for the question in your mind. Amidst zillions of web-pages, the possibility that you could locate the page that had your answer, was nothing less than a miracle. That miracle was the beginning of rotting of my career.

I was advised by my friends that remembering all the commands is a waste of memory. The prevailing idea, then, was that you knew it or you knew who knew it. That ‘who-knew-it’ was Google. She2 knew everything. In the beginning, I searched even those commands and algorithms I knew well, just to test Google’s capabilities. As confidence in Google’s results grew, I chose to forget inessentials.

Seven year later, I’m shocked by the consequence of that choice. I can’t commit to memory even the simple programming concepts like list comprehension in Python. It is as if my memory is rejecting it saying, ‘I’ll not store it; go google it.”

The effect got aggravated by ever increasing computing power in handheld devices. As a kid, I used to go along with my father for grocery shopping. I was not as good as my father in doing fractions but I could do it. Even as adult I was good at math(I already boasted about that, didn’t I?). As more and more computing power was cramped into mobile devices, I used them in the beginning for calculations that involved multiple steps, remembering intermediate results. Slowly, similar to how my brain got complacent towards programming skills, it showed the same signs towards math. It continually said, ‘go use your mobile, leave me alone.” The metamorphosis was gradual, but after seven years the impact is telling.

Recently, I have become an independent consultant. One of the tasks expected of me is to evaluate proposals and other estimates. The IT parts are piece of cake, but I just simply can’t bring my mind to evaluate estimations and quotes. I am not able to do even simple math (like fractions and sum of large numbers). Since I can’t evaluate the important part of the proposal – financials, I become mute spectator at the crucial part of the business strategies.

On one side, my programming productivity is down because I have to look-up most of the commands, for which I have to be connected to Internet. Combining that with the fact that I’m loosing my ability to do math, the future is scary.

So my advice to the next generation is, don’t sacrifice your memory at the alter of computing devices and internet. I’m trying to take back from the altar-fire whatever I could.

  1. I mean Google came into my frame of reference only by 2003. ↩

  2. Don’t ask me why Google is female. That is a story for another day. ↩

Standard