What Has Kept Me Engaged for Three Years?

It was around 10 o’clock and I was about to finish the final round of behavioral interview at my current organization. One of the interviewers asked me whether I would like to have a coffee. I said yes as it would have given me an opportunity to meet a few other people in the organization. My flight to Pondicherry was scheduled at half past 12 so I still had ample time, one and half hours to be precise. The interviewer ordered coffee for us but it took some time as it was freshly prepared by the canteen staff. I was constantly looking at my watch as I had only half an hour left to reach the airport. I wasn’t sure whether it would be worth missing the flight and eventually my first trip to Pondicherry. My friends were already on the way to Pondicherry by car. As it was a planned vacation for all of us, I didn’t want to disappoint them at any cost. At around 11 AM, finally the meeting got over. I came out of the office building, got an airport bus and reached the airport. Somehow I managed check-in and reached Pondicherry ahead of my friends. Fortunately, I didn’t miss the flight but whether I would miss the job or not, was still uncertain. After a few weeks, when I was in Salem, preparing to attend a marriage, I got a call from the HR. And in a few days I was about to work for one of the top ten best workplaces in the world.

After joining my current organization, first thing I noticed that almost everyone was married, had kid(s), and owned a house and a car. That was a kind of a hint that people who worked there were happy and prosperous. What else do you need in life (traditionally)? (Un)fortunately, I was single, ‘obviously’ had no kids, and didn’t own any house and car. There were many employees for whom it was their first and the last job. They had been working there for years, some for more than 15 years. I used to wonder how you could work for 15 years in the same company. Won’t you get bored? I had never worked for more than 3 years in any organization and before joining this organization I could never ever think of working for the same company for so many years. After finishing 3 years I feel like as if it was yesterday and now I understand how people are able to work for many years in the same company. Last week, I decided to look back and think what those things were that kept me engaged for so long.

Safety

Let me start with safety as we start every group meeting with safety. On the first day of joining when one of the ESH members started showing me emergency gates etc., the first thing that came to my mind was whether this place catches fire quite often. In our country, safety is the least bothered thing whether inside your house or on road. Your life is the least important thing or if you consider everything in the world, human life is the least important thing cared about. You will read jokes about safety that to preserve our mobile’s screen we use screen guard but we don’t use helmet to preserve our head. I see sometimes an advertisement near a traffic signal where a car driver uses her mobile while driving; she meets an accident and becomes ‘a little bit dead’. There is nothing called a little bit dead. If your mobile’s screen is damaged you could surely replace it but still our medical science hasn’t advanced enough to replace your head. I see people in the current organization taking safety quite seriously whether on-site or off-site and feeling proud while talking about it. It’s not only employees; even their families have learned to apply it in their daily life. Earlier when I talked about safety, everybody felt that I was weird (yes, talking about safety in India is considered weird). People thought since I had lived in Europe for many years therefore I talk about all those ‘sophisticated’ things. But now when I see more than 20,000 employees talking about safety almost everyday I feel that I would prefer to be called weird than not talking about safety.

Sustainability

One of the most important words in life I learned in my current organization is ‘sustainability’. I can’t express how incomplete I was before I came to know this word. I had different words for sustainability but nothing could do justice to what I wanted to say or what I was feeling all the time. Sustainability is a very important thing whether for a system, a culture or a relationship. I understand that change is the only constant thing but can we plan for something which would be more sustainable. Can we think of a sustainable process or a solution or a relationship? Organizations like these don’t last for more than a century just like that. It’s because they have something which is more sustainable than others.

One more thing I learned that some things in life take time, you may be able to reduce time a little bit but you need to wait. For example, plants – they have their own timelines. You may be able to reduce time to flower a bit to have an early harvest but still it takes time. You need to have patience. Plants know how to grow, whatever condition, whatever situation they know how to give, how to take care, how to provide shade. This organization has gone through so many changes, transformations, and tough times and every time it has emerged as a winner. That is because they kept on building more sustainable solutions every time they had problems.

Agility

I find this organization the most agile I have even seen or heard of. I haven’t worked on the same project for more than a year. I have lot of freedom to choose what I want to do, how I want to shape my career. There is so much freedom to explore various domains whether R&D, IT, Sales, Finance, Regulatory or IP. Nothing stops you. If you are passionate about something you can grab any opportunity. It’s such a big organization that you will surely get something of your interest. Now being agile doesn’t mean that you keep switching from one responsibility to another. There are proper checks and guidance on whether you are growing or not and most importantly whether you are happy or not. Of course, in a seed company if you say your career aspiration is to become a pilot and fly an airplane, it may not be feasible. But you never know you could still get an opportunity to fly drones to collect field/weather data. It’s not only the organization which is agile; our processes are also quite agile. For example, we use multiple software development frameworks. Depending on the requirements and team settings we have used Scrum, Kanban and XP. There is so much agility in choosing and experimenting frameworks too such as Scrumban.

Culture

One thing which I never understand is - why people don’t understand that their success depends on their peers and their team. You would never be successful if your peers are not successful or your team is not doing well. In my current organization I feel my leads want me to lead, they want me to grow. My peers want me to succeed and they help me in whatever possible way. That’s again one of the rarest thing you will find in a corporate world. One of the most touching moments I had was when one of my colleagues who had a lot more experience than me and had been working in this organization for more than a decade said that he/she would be very happy if I led him/her. I still wonder somebody who has been working in the same company for many years and is so experienced how he would be able to report to me. Won’t he/she have ego? That’s the beauty of this organization. People leave their ego outside the building. If you look at it closely, in a flat hierarchy or matrix organization you are never working for a boss. You are matrix reporting multiple aspects to multiple people in the organization and there is no boss as such. You feel more like collaborators working together for one product, one vision and one mission. You want to grow together taking your peers, your team-mates along the journey. It’s a perfect example of orchestration i.e. harmonious automation.

In one of the collaborative projects, there was an instance where many senior managers were reporting to me, some were my manager’s managers or their peers. I was bit nervous in the beginning how to track what they are doing, how to get the status of their work. One of the things I observed that they never had any ego or superiority complex while providing status of any task to me. In fact, when they were going to miss any standup meeting they personally informed me in advance, which is quite rare with youngsters.

Recognitions

There are so many ways to recognize whether it’s thank you notes, focused recognition, walk the extra mile, rapid recognition, technology recognition, platform award or program award or what not. For any significant contribution however small it is, there is a way to recognize. One of the things I like about these recognitions is that they have monetary benefits along with of course beautiful certificates. I personally don’t like awards and I normally feel neutral when I receive any recognition or reward. But I am sure it helps many people in the organization. We all are humans and when you see that your work has been noticed or you have made a significant contribution to an organization’s growth, you feel motivated. The irony of awards in general is that many times when somebody gets an award you feel that he/she didn’t deserve it or you will wonder why he/she got it. In the last three years, I didn’t have even a single instance where I had to wonder or I felt that the person who got an award didn’t deserve it. The latest example is where a pure biologist built a data science product and he got software carpentry award for following the principles of software development. It was heartwarming to see a biologist using version control religiously to enable continuous integration and deployment. Man!, you don’t see such instances even with hardcore software development teams until and unless you have adopted some automated practices like DevOps.

Now let’s imagine a world, where you keep getting a new challenge, a new role or a new opportunity every few years, would you still get bored? What if you keep getting recognition for your work at regular intervals? And what if an organization itself keeps evolving from being a chemical company to a biotechnology company to a data science company? Why would you think of changing job? If you keep getting a challenging and fresh environment which you may probably get in a new company, wouldn’t it be worth staying in the same company? On top of everything, it is extremely satisfying that I code everyday to help my organization feed the world. Last month, when I thought I was about to start getting settled (bored), we decided to move to a new site - Manyata Embassy Business Park, one of the biggest IT parks (~2,00,000 people) in India. Now we will be working more closely with our IT team-mates opening another plethora of opportunities, another journey, another destination and another set of milestones.

In such big organizations with so much process in place and so much focus on employees, you may be able to survive of mediocrity for one year, two years or may be three years but ultimately only meritocracy will sustain. Similarly, hard work will never get unnoticed for long. You just need to have patience and wait, and everything will happen at the right time. I read somewhere that you can win any battle alone in life but you will appreciate your win more if you have some people along with you in your journey. Keeping all that in mind and seeing so many happy faces everyday, recently I got married. I still don’t have kids, no house and no car but I am sure everything will happen at the right time. I still don’t know whether it would be my last company but I have started feeling that the way it is going, I may stop counting number of years after a while.

Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my current or previous employers.

PS: Thanks to everyone who have made the last three years amazing. I wish everyone all the best and hope that we would keep creating wonders in the future.

Edits (24th July, 2017): Now, I own a car too.