Appreciating the one who makes you

"When the going gets tougher, the tough get going!"

As true as this quote is, it remains to be incomplete! Being capable of handling challenges can be a nature of the tough, but facing those situations without guidance often leads to a downfall. Experience counts and a hand to hold you when all seems to fall apart is essential. A mentor's importance can never be challenged and one who knows success acknowledges what the right guidance can do to a person. On the day when SAP celebrates Appreciation Day, here is a small piece highlighting the importance of mentors in our lives and a small token from my own life.

Joining as a fresher can be a daunting task and joining the likes of a giant like SAP, was even bigger. You slowly realize that in a place as welcoming as SAP, there was nothing to be afraid of. The heart of this place starts with its people and beyond doubt, I was lucky enough to be with such amazing mentors. As a techie, we have our nuances and thought processes that may be far away from reality. The importance of looking at an architecture or product offering from the bird's eye view is often not the first that comes to us. We dive deeper into a language and never understand what the individual components are up to. The subjects learned in academics go down the drain and we are left with nothing but a mechanical process of doing what comes to us.

It wasn't different for me and there comes a man with a bright smile saying, "Suman, look at the bigger picture. Let's understand how our software components look like. Let's understand the architecture." 5 years on from that moment, I still look back and wonder how vital these words would become in my own life. An entire approach trying to relate a typical industry architecture to what we had learned in college. Moving on during my MTech days, I was still comparing the application I was working on with the newly learned Design patterns based on the same advice. Makeshift a role as a Solution Architect with Startup Studio, the first thought is to understand the bigger picture. The same piece of advice that came when I started and still continues to define how I approach things.

SAP is a place where you are surrounded by some great minds who are always there to extend their support in every step of your journey. I too had my fair share of getting some brilliant words of wisdom over the last few years from my colleagues. If a normal day at SAP was not enough, a pandemic has shown a superior level to how an organization can turn into one big family when the going really gets tougher. The pandemic certainly hasn't been forgiving and has had an adverse effect on all of us. This post is a tribute to one of those great minds whom we lost and the person who changed the way I look at a product. It is still tough to accept that the bigger picture doesn't hold that joyful smile anymore. The tough ones around him found a mentor in him and their going got easier. All thanks to this man. We all miss him and will always be grateful for all that he passed on to us, and continue to look at the bigger picture...

In memory of our amazing mentor, Anil Kumar R (rightmost)