4 years!

Owing to the western hegemony, the modern world understands one centralised meaning of the 4th of July - the American Independence Day. Personally, the fourth of July is the day I began my professional career as a software engineer and remains a day that I remember and look back to with a lot of positivity and nostalgia. Prior to this, I had worked as a research intern at IIT Kharagpur where I spent six weeks and as a software developer intern at Ishi Systems - a small sized IT firm at Ahmedabad - where I spent about six months.

On Friday, the first of July 2016, I had travelled to Hyderabad for the first time via a long connecting flight from Guwahati. It took me almost the entire day to travel - which included the actual fly time of about 3 hours and a hold time of about 2 hours at Kolkata. It was about 11 at night when I reached my hotel - the accommodation booked by my office for the initial 2 week period. Over the weekend, I strolled around the area surrounding my hotel, tried my hand at authentic south indian dosa and met a school friend after almost half a decade! I spent the weekend resting, relaxing and in high anticipation of what was ahead of me - the next chapter of my life.

The day started with meeting a few colleagues at the reception of the hotel - all of who were to join on the same day as me. We started off together for office in shared vehicles. The office building - a thirteen storied one - was covered with glass on all visible sides and shined blue and grey with occur yellow edges. As a matter of fact, all the buildings in this campus looked similar. On the top of the building on the left corner was written the name of my organisation in bold - Arcesium. It gave an impression as though the entire building belonged to this organisation while it was far from true. Back then, it just had the ownership of the top floor, until few months later when it expanded its office space to some portion of the 12th floor and a beautifully designed terrace with an open cafeteria, a multi purpose court and an indoor space with table top games, a gym and a sleeping room.

Arcesium, an entity of the D E Shaw group was only an year old on paper. While the reasons for it being a separate entity were more from a sales and compliance perspective, the culture of both the organisation was more or less the same at that point in time. The office was not a typical cubicle based tech office that one sees in the movies but rather a very well spaced one - one need not get up from their chairs to even talk to one's second neighbours. The on-boarding process continued for two weeks and included plenty of fun activities that let us have a slow and gradual transformation from campus to corporate. Additionally, even though the office followed a flexible-time culture, most work started at around noon, making it further easy for the fresh college graduates to adapt.

My basics of technology and work environment were laid strong because of the talented people that I met at Arcesium. While my senior colleagues and managers ensured that I learnt the financial aspects of the business well so as to be able to translate the knowledge into tech, my friends from different colleges with who I shared my joining date ensured that I was never complacent in what I was doing - they inspired me to keep asking for more. Over my 32 months stint at Arcesium, my most fundamental learning was to make good contacts with folks at work place, for that keeps one motivated to go to work each day even if the work gets mundane at times. Fortunately the administration and HR of the firm understood the same and ensured that it provided effective means for people to achieve this - including but not limited to group fun activities, an annual sports tournament and frequent parties at the best places in the city.

By the end of 2018, I had decided to make a move. This was important so as to know what lies outside a business-to-business fin-tech firm and to understand what working for a smaller firm with a much larger consumer base meant. I thereby moved to an Inmobi entity called Glance which currently has almost 100 million daily active users. While I hope to write about my stint here some day in future, I don't think any company is as special as the one right after college. That is probably the reason I cherish not just the milestone of having completed four years in the industry but also the fact that my career had a solid start.