It was my first job interview. I was
anxious, not because of the interviewee who was perusing my rushly printed
transcript, but because I was thinking of the event my college publication was hosting
in another part of the school. The past three days had been rigorous and I felt
guilty to leave the other staff in wrapping up the closing ceremony.
After the recruiter enumerated the different
programming languages where I might be assigned to learn, I hesitantly asked
her something I’ve been itching to know.
Me: “Just in any case, is there a chance
that I can choose to work on the business side instead of the technical side?”
Recruiter: “Well, you’ve got to work on the
technical side before you can be on the business side of the company.”
Me: “Ow…” (and on my mind, I silently said “@!#&”)
A few months after the interview, I left
Benguet for Manila and started working for that company.
In
the world of techie people
I don’t have a satisfactory reason why I
took up Information Technology. I do know that when I realized Nursing wasn’t
for me (on the enrollment day itself and after passing all those medical
examinations and after filling-up the Nursing enrollment form), I just thought
IT would be a suitable replacement. Yes, IT and not Masscom or Journalism,
which most people would expect me to take. It was a peculiar choice which left
me dumbfounded for some time, but I’m now beginning to realize the reason
behind God’s temporarily rerouting (but that’s another blog post).
Unfortunately, my first taste of programming
became the precursor for the rest. I sweated and my nose bled at figuring those
lines of code. It was an alien language to me. There were many times when I
felt so dumb I wanted to shift my course.
Four years passed, and one of the greatest
mysteries of my life came to pass. I graduated…as a Cum Laude (I know
that’s not a big deal for the Magna and Summa out there…but it’s still a
Bermuda Triangle type of thing to me).
Nevertheless, in all those years I worked
my butt off, I didn’t manage to fall in love with coding. But surprisingly, I
found myself interested in the business side of technology. I sometimes get
drowsy when my instructors discuss bubble sort and APIs, but I perk up during
discussions on Sara Baase’s A Gift of Fire and Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat. I like studying
these analysis and business-themed subjects especially because they give me a
wider and deeper understanding of how IT is interwoven into our lives. Through them,
I get to see the big picture of what those codes represent.
Thus, it makes perfect sense that I asked
my HR representative if I can skip the technical side and just jump to being a
business side folk. And was distraught when she said no.
Baptism
of fire
Call me lazy or crazy, but I still accepted
the job even though I have been forewarned that I’ll face some hardcore coding.
That interview was my only job interview before my first job.
Hardcore coding it really was. On our
bootcamp, I sweated and my nose bled just like in college. I also wanted to
quit (I’m now painting myself as an illusory quitter). But God had gifted me a
tad more perseverance than coding skills, and I somehow survived our training.
He also gave me some cool and helpful folks who helped me when my codes would
not reach maxcc=0 (yep, after learning Javascript at school, I was trained and assigned to
Cobol work). Thus, I finished bootcamp gifted with more confidence and friends.
Ekkk…but being deployed to a project was a
different experience. Fortunately, even if I had to work on a graveyard shift,
the workload was not heavy and I was able to breathe.
But of course, it didn’t keep me from
dreaming that perhaps there was a more suitable place for me. Don’t get
me wrong, the team I was deployed to was awesome, but I just felt like a square
peg trying to fit into a circular hole. And to be honest, I know I was not
contributing to the best of my abilities.
Fortunately, God’s hand was becoming more
visible in the picture, after a lot of tears and pleading on my part.
First, he allowed me to be assigned to
tasks which made me squirm and made me decide that I finally had enough of
coding. If he had not done that, I might still be balking to take that leap. As
a note of mine said in those turbulent moments: I had enough of fooling myself. I want to be finally true to myself.”
Second, he gave me the right opportunity.
Like an answered prayer, I was given the chance to jump into the business side
of technology – as a proposal writer.
My
second job in the same company
It wasn’t easy. I had to wait months. I had
to pester a lot of people. I had to have
one-on-one talks with my lead/career counselor (who, after I said the square
on a circle thing, laughingly offered me a fistbump. Told ya, the folks in
my team are awesome). And when I was transferred to what I thought was a dream
role, I again thought of quitting because of the pressure and expectations (I
do am an illusory quitter).
But flower-wearing Ms. Perseverance gripped
me again and I managed to stabilize my frayed nerves. And I’m now celebrating my
half-year anniversary with the team.
So, what can I tell you about my job that wouldn’t violate our company’s strict confidentiality policies?
As a proposal writer, I am involved in
writing proposals (ok…sorry for the no-brainer explanation) for our prospective
technology clients. It’s a magnified version of the proposals we had to write
in my IT classes back in college, except that these proposals are longer, much
more complicated, involves more stakeholders, and are the real thing. Where
before, a mistake can cost you a few points shaved off your grades, this time,
you’ll have to deal with thousands and millions worth of lost opportunities. No
wonder I nearly folded up on my first weeks in my new team.
Now that I’m saner and less trigger-happy,
I am more fully appreciative of my shift to the business-oriented side of
things. When before I’m only focused on my making my codes run correctly,
I am now back to appreciating the bigger picture of technology. Our college
lessons on theories and best practice of these and that are now making more
sense when I see them applied to real-life situations.
I’m no longer limited to learning about Mainframe. I have
the chance to understand core technologies like SAP, Oracle (which I thought
was just database-related before), including emerging technologies like the
cloud and digital apps, among others. I get a glimpse of the intricacies of IT
deals, and the often frenemy competition between companies. For example, I can relate in a deeper level to Calen Legaspi's blog about the botched Jollibee systems implementation. (But probably, if his topic is about source codes, my mind would drift.)
Before I end, I would like to emphasize
that I’m not hitting on hardcore programmers here. In fact, I admire them and
their technical chops. I would also like to believe that my almost one and a
half years as a software developer made me a better proposal writer, since it
helped me better connect the technical to the functional.
It’s just that I prefer to be on the
business-side more than the technical side of things, as I had revealed to that HR rep. two years ago.
Your
take away
If you have been patient enough to read
through all that babble, then here are lessons and tips which I can share from
that experience.
First, you have to do something you love,
or at least do something that is related to something you love. Else, misery
would be your company.
Next, sometimes, before doing something you
love, you have to be patient at doing something that you don’t really love.
Maybe, it’s a preparation for the future and there are lessons that you still
have to learn before you can jump to the next level.
And lastly, while patient is a virtue, time
is also gold. Know when to stop waiting and start acting. I love this quote: “Sometimes
we are afraid to let go because we don’t trust that God will give us something
better.” God gave me a kick to the butt, and I was better for it.
So, that’s (part of) my story. How about
you, what leap of faith do you think must you take to be happier? Or you can
also tell your own leap of faith story and how you were glad you did it at the
comment section below.
Labels: Musings and Opinions
