Originally written on Svbtle on Nov 23, 2020.


On November 22nd, 2020, Jaana Dogan wrote an article about why she left Google. This line from her article summarizes it best:

I kinda know what she’s saying.

You can feel disconnected from the world outside your current job, if you stay long enough at a company, and sense that there is a world more exciting out there. A world that you might be missing out on. Even though my reasons aren’t directly related to the feeling of being disconnected. This post is an attempt at finding my own.

I am someone who switched companies every two years on an average. For specifics, here’s a rundown:

When I was at HCL, the expectation was to write code. HCL runs a training program where they teach you how to code. I was supposed to join a team that was working on the Linux kernel and writing code in C/C++. I excelled in the training as one of the few who could write code, but sucked at my job after joining a team. I could barely understand what was going on. I’d look at the code and not understand anything at all. I have no idea what did it. It was some kind of a thing where I lacked motivation to learn and grow. Maybe if I did try hard enough then, I’d not have to do it today. Manual testing was easy, so I picked that…I wasn’t great there either. Being called out on a mail chain as being irresponsible, well…that was no good. I hated every single day in office, often scrambling to get work done. Those days sucked real time. Through an absolute accident I learnt about a job title called Technical Writing. My cousin did it once. I always liked to write…so anything with the word writer in the title seemed attractive. Went on a job portal, searched for jobs with the title of Technical Writing, and applied on each of them. Landed my first job at Symantec, and the world would be an entirely different place going forward.

From getting your work hours counted and wearing formals to work, and then going to work in Ts and denims, the world changed. The requirement of being in office for 8 hours was no longer a requirement. Writing documentation is far, far easy in comparison to writing code. It’s far easy to look at a product’s documentation and see where incoming features fit in, in comparison to look at product’s code and analyze where an incoming feature’s code would fit in. If you ask someone like me, I might practice hard enough to crack a data structures and algorithms coding interview, but totally bite the dust when it comes to writing code and make it fit in a product.

And so, the journey of being ultra comfortable started. I got comfortable in a month. In a couple of months, what I wrote was live for the world to see and use. And that’s where this feeling crept in: this work, makes sense. I carried on at Symantec for a pretty lengthy period. Eventually, I got tired of the city. I love Chennai, and I’d easily go back today. But I got tired of living there. And I got tired of waking up each and every day, and going to the same office. But I loved technical writing. I still do. It’s the best job I could do. But I got tired. So I moved to Adobe.

Somewhere in between, while I was at Symantec, I started to get more fascinated by coding and the software engineering job. So, I thought maybe I should start studying again. Luckily, for people like me, BITS Pilani offers a master’s degree. I grabbed it and started studying. Half-way through the course, I moved to Adobe. I got married and a bunch of personal things happened that exposed the shortcomings in my character as an individual, but I moved. Stayed there for a year, and the same feeling of being tired crept in. The enthusiasm of working and crushing it at work was lost. Waking up in the morning and going to work was lost. Interest in solving problems was lost. Again, a bunch of things outside of work had happened…but I did feel tired. So I quit…And, did I mention that I completed my masters in the year that I worked at Adobe? Yes. So I was more and more attracted towards the software development role. Something that I pushed out of my life early on in the career.

So, I left.

By the time I left Adobe, I had completed my last semester of the masters degree I was pursuing. The work that I did at Adobe taught me a lot about web (‘cause of the product I was working on). And I created a document summarizer that would take in a URL and return the most relevant piece of content from the webpage. The document summarizer itself wasn’t the thing that brought all the joy in the world. But to use the summarizer, I built a basic front end using Flask, HTML, and CSS. Once you’d start the server, you could access a web interface on localhost:3000, paste a URL in a text box and click get summary. It would call the summarizer API and return a paragraph from the page that contained the most relevant keywords. It wasn’t easy. The code wasn’t clean. It was dirty. But it worked. And I passed the final semester.

And then I joined Druva. It was a young company of 300-400 people. I joined in November of 2016, and in January of 2017, they conducted a company wide hackathon. The energy was infectious. People hacking away on their laptops all night long…felt pretty much like the time I spent the last 6 months hacking away my master’s final project. Building something that worked almost like magic. I was too new to participate, but I kinda spent an entire year waiting for the hackathon. The next year (2018) I participated. Ofcourse, I couldn’t code, but I did create mock-ups of a UI that depicted a new way of designing the UI. In January of 2019, I participated again. This time, I built something. Coded it up, again using Python and flask. Didn’t win this time either. But that infectious enthusiasm that that company had, kept me going. And then, we hit later 2019. Something changed that year. One of those things was changes in leadership and approach towards work. It was no longer interesting to wake up in the morning and going to work. There was little to look forward to, and very little new to grab at work. The same feeling of being tired, of being bored and uninspired crept in. And so, I left again.

But by then, I had participated enough and written enough code to be inspired again. I was also interested in software development. Even though I still love technical writing, I think I love development again. Maybe I took the longest route back to the very starting point.

And then, it happened. Opportunity at Blueshift crossed my path, and I grabbed it. When I joined Blueshift, we were barely 15 people in India, and 80 people worldwide. We aren’t 100, still. And I started work with maximum enthusiasm and energy. Soon enough, it was 2020, and in early 2020 I was working with full energy and enthusiasm. And then, it happened again. This time, there was no trigger. I have no idea what happened. And this is despite the fact that I told folks at Blueshift that I’m willing to take up software development, and they all agreed, happily.

Maybe, it was the lockdown that happened in March, and continuous work from home since, or maybe something else. Maybe, maybe, maybe…there could be a dozen reasons, but I started losing energy considerably. And I started losing interest. Which is when, it happens again. I start looking for jobs outside. To regain enthusiasm for work. And Google reached out for an opportunity. And I even interviewed with them. But honestly, I had lost all energy. And I’ve been scrambling to complete all my work.

And then, I flunked the Google interview. So now, here’s the deal…I’m dealing absolute lack of energy and motivation to do my job. But here’s the good news, change has happened, but in a different direction. I’m now starting to get work as a software developer. And that’s, slowly, helping me regain my enthusiasm back. So if not a company switch, I’m getting a role switch. But change is happening. And change, is good.

And I look back at each of the switches from the past. One thing is common each and every time I left one company for another. And that’s largely boredom. There’s a tipping point in your job when you lose all inspiration to do things you love. The strange feeling of being stale. And, some sort of boredom that seeps in.

When you join a company, it’s important to wake up in the morning and look forward to what office has to offer. When you have a clear picture of what office has to offer and you like it…and so you continue doing it. A lot of times, you have a clear picture of what office has to offer and you no longer like it. And some times, you have no clear picture of what office has to offer.

Then there are other things. Like plans. Like a retirement strategy. Some times, you have things in sight. And if a company/business can help you get those, you continue in the same company. But then, life has its own way of doing things to you. Things in sight when you’re say 25 are different from those when you’re, say, 32. You’d have so many decisions, seen so many things in life that your priorities are much different. Companies and jobs, they can do only so much. Rest, everything depends on you and your needs. And plans.

That brings us back to our original topic at hand. And that’s change. Why’d I change my jobs so often. Why’d Jaana, or any other person pursue it. Everyone has their own reason and there’s no simple answer except saying “I was looking for a change.” Which isn’t a simple answer at all. It’s just a cop-out, but there’s a feeling that you get…and you know that you need to take up some other project.

Change is the only constant, and it isn’t trite. Or maybe it is, like all of us and we need something that evolves along with it to communicate what it means. But it’s far more complex to say why one would choose to do something else, or some thing similar but somewhere else.

--
salil