How to Persist
I was the youngest amongst our cousins and siblings. They all excelled in studies. My mom would point to their academic achievements and I would rebel.
I hardly studied and when I passed out of 12th I had my marks to show for it.
Chemistry was my nemesis and I took up B.Sc. Physics in Chennai, as the best of available options. Mom pushed me to write competitive exams. I hated doing that too.
I completed my B.Sc. This was 1994.
I found an opportunity to train as a radiologist with the cancer institute but after mom found out about possible dangers to me, from radiation, we were back to fighting battles on the dining table.
My brother played peace-maker and urged me to try programming as a career. He footed the 20K fees for Brilliant Tutorials.
People were learning dbase programming in droves those days. Others came to Brilliant to duck the Chennai summer. AC rooms and all that.
I joined. I found C Programming. I was hooked.
I finished the certificate. It was 1995 now. There were no C jobs out in the open market for non-engineers.
I was adamant. I only wanted to work in C. Some looking around later, I found an opportunity.
A company that did not want to buy tally accounting software asked me if I could cook a Tally clone in C. I said Yes!
Working 16 hours daily, I was in heaven. The program worked, but they did not like the user interface. I was back to looking for opportunities to program in C.
By now it was mid 1996. I would go around; my resume went around too - it was a struggle period for both me and my Resume. Not much luck, finding opportunities to write code in C.
I wrote the national level certification exam for C (Yes! there was such a thing, back then).
I must have done well. Someone in Sanmar Engineering saw the exam results and reached out to me.
This was my amazing break. My resolve to stick to C had paid off.
Sannar was an instrumentation company. Soon enough, my code was measuring truckload weights of diesel and petrol on a weigh bridge. I learnt to drop assembly code in the middle of my C Program and do magic.
Sanmar is still around, but this division had to shut down. So, I found my way to NEC in Japan, as an onsite engineer, to work on a file transfer protocol. Again C Programming.
I had, by now, crossed the threshold at which they check for your engineering credentials. What mattered is that I delivered.
Then, Digital Equipment Corporation in the US happened for me. New at this job, I was assigned a memory leak bug to fix. Like the proverbial needle in the haystack, this lead lay buried in a million lines of code. I had to familiarise myself with the code while on the job and do what it takes to fix.
Our team in DEC had an interesting pressure cooker that speed teaches things to programmers. A whiteboard carries your name, the bug’s name and how many days you have been at it. Most bugs resolve in 2 to 5 days.
Everyone sees the whiteboard - coming in and going out.
Mine was bad. On the 100th day, the whiteboard read, “Kanthi Vedaraman | CDSD Crash | 100 days”
It put a lot of pressure on me but somehow there was a certainty inside me, that I am close to a breakthrough. This will resolve soon. I had met this intuitive certainty earlier also, when I had stuck to my C search, before the Sanmar days.
On Day 101, while my colleagues were out for a celebratory lunch - which I had skipped because I wanted to work on the memory leak - the bug surrendered.
I did win an award for catching this bug, but the real prize was in now knowing that I loved debugging code as much as programming.
My faith in my programming intuition - the certainty that comes from simply knowing that this is now sorted out - when actually the breakthrough is yet to happen - grew by leaps and bounds.
It also taught me that breakthroughs actually happen twice. Once inside. Then later, outside
I spent the next 18 years at HP. For the first 5, I practically lived in the office.
Amongst friends, I learnt to give and take and succeed as a team. There were 2 side effects to this. One - I made friends for life. This has been my continuing support system. Two - We made so much noise together as a team, that we were branded as the biggest racket in town. Grateful for ISEC team @HPE.
I owe my persistent ways to my teams too.
From time to time, they would label me, “Opinionated”, "Daring", "Impatient", "Over commits" , "Go-getter" - but we always stood together as one - Thank you DataProtector team @HPE.
I grew into an architect's role, then lead architect and then beyond tech - into tech marketing and presales roles also.
If I look back - apart from my passion for the work and support of friends and bosses, I like myself for my authenticity,
What you see is what you get. Bosses may not like it all the time, but they can be sure of one thing. I would never discriminate against anyone in my team. If you remain fair, it beats popularity in the long run.
My ride to this sweet place has been based on persisting with it.
These worked for me -
Find something you love, stay with it. You can never persist with what you don’t love.
You will have ups and downs no matter what. Friends are a support system. An insurance. Keep them close.
You can only persist with who you really are. Stay authentic. Stay Fair.
Try them out, if you want to Persist too.