My Mumbai Saga - A new job

The various experiences we have in life, shape us and let us grow. Major source of these are the changes that occur or we create in our lives. Adulthood with its responsibilities becomes a burden to enforce change too often but in the early 20s when you are just being learning to be a mature person, you can go ahead experiment and make some probably risky transitions. So even though my life was quite stable with a healthy mix of work and play, I decided it was time to move forward and switch jobs.
In today’s fast changing world a job switch is not a major phenomenon. Not a lot of people in the IT industry stick around too long in the same company. Even the most mediocre of talent have a pool of options. But your first job change is a feat like no other. When you sit at a lunch table and hear about how a peer has so many offers, you tend to think, it must be piece of cake. You are all fired up and you decide to take the plunge. When that happened the first thing I did was start on my resume. Writing a resume was an utterly disheartening event for me. I was unable to find anything in my work to put on display. Most of my work and achievements looked petty and uninteresting. I questioned my worth and what I had been doing for the last 2 years. Everything seemed pointless. The ease at which a few others (mostly men) were able to list to the smallest detail their “work”, amazed me. A lot of which I wouldn’t list either because they were too minuscule or I thought I was not good enough. When going through this excruciating deed, I read a Harvard Business Review article which said, that most men were confident enough to apply for a job, for which their skills matched just 60% while women did not apply for it unless they were a 100% qualified. This article (and a few others), with some good encouragement from my friends and colleagues enabled me to write out a decent resume and begin the job hunt. If you do this long enough it becomes a part of your schedule and you are constantly checking your mails to find an interview invitation. You are always, constantly, preparing for some probable interview. You receive a huge number of calls while only a small percentage of them produce any result. You end up with a couple of random interviews, a couple of well scheduled ones but with the same jitters and anxiety. After the first few you know the game and slowly you are acing interviews and you have a couple of offers. Then what? The demon of choice comes to play. Pros, cons- cons, pros, you go over and over and you settle for one offer hoping you will not regret it.
I made such a choice too. This choice, again lead to me continuing in Mumbai and working with a small company after a giant MNC. Today after a year, I think I made the right decision. This place has been such a rich source of learning and growth. The journey started and was studded by a pleasant coincidence. I started on the same day with one of the most charming and wonderful women I have met. We both had worked for the same MNC before joining here and had very similar timelines there and not to mention similar social outlook and interests. We became fast friends and I couldn’t have asked for a better start or for a better person to share the office space with. If that was not good enough my first project took me across the country’s borders for the first time; with a team mate whose knowledge, guidance and dedication taught me more about work than I had learnt anywhere else. From just being just a senior I looked up to he also became a dear friend and a confidant. It is hard to come across genuine people and a place where your abilities are greatly appreciated. This office gave me both and a good number of them too. With this I also had a strong and talented woman at the top of the organisation to look up to which added to the pleasure of working here.
I explored a new environment, a new country, a new work culture and a new outlook in this place. If Mumbai has been a place I enjoyed, apart from all the fun things I did, it is because I have worked in the organisations that I did. We did not break into a song or start dancing at work. We slogged on miserly deadlines and ever changing requirements. But real life doesn’t have playback music it only has the sound of keyboard taps and mouse clicks. For this, is a very normal #myMumbaiSaga

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