Thread: Share a Story from your First Job/ Internship...

Funny story: I got my first job in 2015(aviation related company, on a core team) With in 6 months of my joining my team had to work over night on a Thursday for a critical bug fix.. I have never stayed late in my life.. Even during my btech i used to sleep around 10.30pm..it was new experience for me.. I was excited.. We worked till 3-4 am and got compoff on the friday. Weekend was as usual.. Going to movies with friends and trying new restaurants in BLR. It was on monday morning i realised my laptop was not in the bag. I was worried. Didn't even took bath and immediately ran to office(yes literally ran.. Office is very close to PG). There i checked on my team desks and conf rooms everything i thought of.. No laptop. I was scared and somehow told my manager.. He was not angry to my surprise but raised a high important ticket with security team to check CC cameras.. This needs approval from site leader... By 10am we got approvals and security team checked cctv cameras.. There I was walking like a zombie and kept my laptop in a locker and locked it. I didnt even remember that i have a locker.. Security guys pissed that i wasted their time and sent a report to their team leads and all.. Became a big issue but my manager and his manager both supported me and helped me go thru the situation.. Now 9 years later they still make fun of me whenever we meet..

I got into a small consulting Infra engg startup as an intern. I had no prior skills or experience in this domain. I couldn't answer 9 out of 10 questions in the technical round. I remember the last question, it was - are you willing to learn? I said yes unaware of the struggles ahead!
In my 1st week of the job, I was asked to complete some courses. The content was so advanced for me to understand, hence felt overwhelming. By mid week, I was ready to call it quits.
I got into a call with my CEO, told him I don't think I can complete the courses within the target. I remember his words - Right now you are in the valley of disappointment (Atomic habits ofc!), I know it sucks to be here, but if you persist this, there are exciting times ahead!
He showed me the graph and all, I was convinced that this is the truth. Since then, I fucking clocked 13hrs average everyday to learn things, complete projects on my own, gained confidence of my fellow teammates and seniors. I got Full time offer. Internship salary - 15k/m. Full time offer - 25k/m. Once in full time, didn't stop, worked on projects, delivering outcomes, gained 2 hikes in 8 months to salary bump of 50k/m. It wasn't easy, everyday was a struggle. Every once a while I thought I should quit! But wanting to prove myself(having put this much effort already) and having no other backup pushed me!
With time, things that were difficult started to make sense. I got more responsibilities, got into calls with clients, I could explain stuff, people would listen to me. I with < 1.5yr experience would talk about things and leads in the call would be like, you talk like 5yr experience person. I felt amazing, recognized. Quit it once I reached my inflection point to join where you are @GrumpyIce with a pretty massive 5x base hike . Worked there for sometime until I quit it to pursue another stream.

Lesson learnt - Everything is daunting until it starts to make sense. Relentlessly keeping at it is way to go!

I hated coding. The plan was to get into testing role and study for CAT. But I got pushed into development. I was mentored by exceptional developer and I delivered my first feature in 6 months time. I saw the impact it created to client and fell in love with coding. In very next release I caused 65million dollars revenue leakage. Thankfully, I had great manager and she backed me during postmortem of the issue

Bas ye shinchan k reference k liye bahut grapes milenge terko

I used to travel by metro for 1.5 hours for an internship that paid me 30k. I really enjoyed the experience but I got my first start up ideas while travelling in the metro.

I realised that I was in a meditative state while commuting. So I started to meditate and now I daily meditate for 30 minutes